Esme looked back at him. Around the square a few people were
looking, albeit trying not to; the sort of public spectacle that was
impossible to ignore. She sat down on the bench and motioned for
him to sit next to her.
‘I want to know what it is that’s happened to us which means we
can’t be honest with each other anymore,’ Esme said.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why couldn’t you say something?’
‘Because I—’ Tom began. For a moment he was about to say that
he didn’t want to make things worse. ‘I knew you’d be upset. And I
knew we would argue. And I didn’t want that.’
She stood up again, as if to leave.
‘Please,’ he said, desperately and she sat down again.
‘We’ve lost sight of each other, haven’t we?’
‘You mean the proposal again.’
‘I mean everything. The proposal, the lying, your relapse. And I’m
not saying I’m innocent here, either. Maybe when you kept telling
me you were fine I should’ve asked more questions.’
‘No. Don’t blame yourself.’
‘How the fuck am I supposed to do that?’ she snapped, turning
away from him for a moment. ‘I keep thinking that it would’ve been
better if you had slept with her.’
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‘How come?’
‘It would make things easier, wouldn’t it?’
‘And as it is?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. At which Tom got up and sat in
front of her, taking her hands as he crouched down.
‘Esme. We can sort things out.’
They had been in the Cotswolds for just under an hour, but it
had felt to Tom like a whole day. As a relationship grows and ages
it becomes easier to guess what a person might be thinking just by
looking at their face. That was the case for Tom and Esme. They
knew each other’s tics, traits and tells; the minute changes in facial expressions that indicated stress or worry or hurt.
But in that moment on a bench on a green patch in a town
square, Tom could not read Esme at all – she was a closed book. It
terrified him.
‘Can I ask a question?’ he said suddenly. Esme nodded, shuffled
a little, uncomfortable on a chair that wasn’t meant to be sat on for
more than five minutes.
‘What do you see when you look at me? Do you see your partner
and your friend? The person you love, and the person you want to
wake up next to tomorrow and the day after that, and the day after
that. Or do you see something else?’
‘Tom,’ Esme said, a little hesitant, a little desperate.
‘This is important, Es. You must know.’
‘I do.’
‘And?’ Tom said.
Esme went to answer. Before she could, the loud church clock
sounded. And one hour turned to the next.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
5 – 6 pm
MOVING DAY
August 2017 – West Hampstead, London
Tom:
Empty freezer
Pack CDs
Bins
Kitchen
Keys
New furniture
Esme:
Cat
Fridge
Books
Bathroom
Bedroom
Living room
Cupboard
The list was pinned to the fridge door, written on a piece of lined
A5 paper torn from a notebook, held up by a magnet depicting
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Vermeer’s The Milkmaid they’d bought on a 2013 trip to Amsterdam.
Beside most of the listed chores were ticks to signify what had been
done. Their flat was a little closer to being emptied, a restoration
to factory settings, like clearing out a computer before it’s junked
or sold. He hated the process of transforming a home back into a
house, devoiding it of the meaning it once held.
Wiping surfaces clean rarely does the same for slates.
Esme had left a couple of hours ago. With a gentle kiss on the
cheek and a quiet ‘goodbye’ she had walked away from their shared
front door in Islay Gardens, carrying the cat in a box and into their
little car, leaving Tom with her key. They had agreed to rent the place out for a year or so, until they could decide what they wanted to do
with it in the long term.
There was something odd in the idea of strangers – perhaps
a new couple – living in their rooms, placing new things on old
bookshelves, sleeping in their bed. He didn’t want to think about
who might call this place home next. But it was impossible not to.
Now he was alone in the kitchen, with a few more boxes to carry
to the white Transit van he had rented for the day, parked badly half
on the kerb outside. By his feet were four bin bags of stuff they had
agreed could both serve no earthly purpose to either of them, and
which would be an insult to even the most sparsely stocked charity
shop. Poking out of one was the top of a small, metal sign that bore
the legend LIVE LOVE LAUGH in a flowing, cursive type, and
decorated awfully with butterflies and, apparently, flying champagne
corks. It had been bought for Esme by Laura – one in a series of
genuinely awful gifts which, for obvious reasons, never made it onto
the wall of their home.
Tom remembered the night they brought it home, after dinner
with Laura and Aman at the Oxo Tower, overlooking the Thames
and St Paul’s.
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‘Go on, open it,’ Laura had said, enthusiastically. ‘It’s absolutely you.’
‘Oh . . . lovely,’ Esme said, gamely feigning glee as she had so many times when opening a Laura present (Tom’s favourite being a signed
hardback copy of one of her own books). Aman meanwhile looked
on in awe and embarrassment – he’d probably given up trying to
advise his headstrong wife on gifting some years ago. Tom remem-
bered how Esme laughed as he jokingly positioned it on various
walls around the house.
He had been through the bags again earlier that day, checking
that Esme was not unwittingly throwing away anything that might
hold some sentimental value, even if that was the very stuff they
should really have been getting rid of. But it was all meaningless tat.
Tom’s phone buzzed along the bare kitchen counter top. His dad
was calling. He tore off the rubber glove he was cleaning with and
answered.
‘Dad?’
‘Hello mate,’ Gordon said. Tom could tell by his tone that this
was the kind of call his dad was a little hesitant about making. Most
of his dad’s phone calls either came in the form of traffic updates
on the way to Lowestoft, or for other, equally practical sentiments.
Emotional conversations were usually reserved for face-to-face meet-
ings, each of them looking awkwardly at the floor until it was over
with.
‘Just checking that you’re okay,’ he cont
inued. ‘That everything’s
gone . . . alright.’
‘Yeah. So far so good, cheers.’
‘And you’re okay?’
‘Fine,’ Tom said. ‘Bit knackered. But you know.’
‘I do,’ he said, though both of them knew that he didn’t.
‘And Esme?’
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‘She’s okay, too. Left about three,’ Tom said, thinking back to the moment that she had handed her key over to him.
‘Good . . . good. Well I’m glad that you’re . . . good,’ he said, his
well of words almost dry.
Such was the obviousness of her presence, Tom could almost hear
his mother there, listening in and nudging his dad to say more, to
keep Tom on the line just a little longer.
‘Well, it’s a big day for you. So your mother and I . . . well, we
just wanted to know that you’re okay.’
‘I am.’
‘Good lad. You’ll send us a text when you get there?’
‘I will.’
They said their goodbyes and he hung up. And as Tom dropped
his phone back into his jeans pocket, the significance of what was
happening magnified suddenly.
So far that day the spectre of their break-up had been concealed
behind admin and process; a list of jobs that pulled a dust sheet over the renovations they were making to their lives. This was (at least
for the time being) the end of his and their London life, and the
start of his new one four hundred miles north and across a border.
Tom hadn’t really thought about how much life would change:
the new roads to get used to, his new address, the cafes and pubs.
The death of his and Esme’s little corner of London.
It was only when Annabel turned up that morning that it struck
him how much the fundamentals of his life were about to alter: the
weeks of planning before he could see an old friend; the knowledge
that he would never again run into a familiar face in one of the
unlikely coincidences that London had a habit of throwing up.
‘You’re finally doing it then?’ Annabel asked, sipping milk-less
tea from one of the two mugs that had yet to be packed away, while
Esme distracted her three-year-old daughter, Mara.
‘What do you mean, finally?’
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‘You always said you were going to do this. “I’m fed up with London,” ’ she aped him. ‘ “I might just move to Edinburgh.” You
threatened it more or less every week throughout your early twenties.
Until you met—’ she said, stopping short.
‘Yeah. I remember.’
‘I always told you it wasn’t an answer. But really I think I was
just trying to keep you in London.’
‘You always were selfish.’
‘Absolutely. But clearly now I have no practical use for you.’
‘Exactly. So, this is goodbye for ever?’
‘Probably.’
‘Well, we managed twenty-odd years,’ Tom said, smiling and
remembering back to when he and Annabel had met at school.
Part of a small group of kids, often bullied for reasons ranging from
ethnicity to an inability to take free kicks in football. ‘You have to come and visit, you realise? All of you?’
‘Of course,’ she said, at which point their conversation was
disrupted by Mara running screaming into the kitchen, with Esme
chasing her and making monster noises. ‘What is it with you, then?’
Annabel said, as Mara hid behind her thigh.
‘Aunt Esme is trying to catch me!’ she shrieked, then screamed
again when Esme bustled towards her waving her arms like tentacles.
Mara then ran back into the living room, leaving the three of them
alone.
Esme and Annabel hugged. Their friendship was a hand-me-
down, but no less important to either of them for it.
‘Give me two minutes,’ Tom said, and left them for a moment
to fetch something from the bedroom.
When he came back they were chatting away about the annoy-
ances of the moving process and the solo drive Esme was about
to make up to Leicester. Esme leant up against the mottled black
counter, as she did almost every evening while watching Tom cook
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dinner (and sort of getting in the way, though he would never mention it).
‘Got something for you,’ Tom said to Annabel, when a break in
their conversation presented itself. ‘Found it yesterday when I was
packing up my office.’
‘Dividing up your estate?’
‘Just look at it,’ he said, ignoring her and handing over a cassette
tape.
‘What’s this? One of those mixes you used to make girls at school?
They always ended with ‘Ooh La La’ by The Faces,’ she said to Esme,
who smiled gamely but didn’t laugh.
‘Shut up,’ Tom said. ‘And no. It’s a tape of me playing your first
dance. I made it when I was rehearsing. Thought you might like it.’
‘Oh Tom. That’s so sweet,’ she said. ‘I mean, I will almost certainly
never play it because it’s not 1989 and we don’t have a tape player.
But, you know, the thought is lovely.’
‘Frame it. I know they do it with records. Maybe you could be
not be a hipster trailblazer?’
‘Because I spend most of my time cleaning Play-Doh out of the
carpet.’
Annabel looked at the tape again, the marker-pen scrawl across
the front that read AW-1. Then dropped it in her bag and looked up
at Tom and Esme, her eyes beginning to fill.
‘Look, I have to get her to a playdate in Cricklewood. So . . .’
‘Oh,’ Esme said. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll give you two a moment.’
‘No. Hang on,’ Annabel said, before Esme could leave them to say
their goodbyes. ‘I’ll miss you,’ she said, taking Esme into her arms.
‘You too,’ Esme said, as she detached herself and left Tom and
his oldest friend together in the empty kitchen.
Annabel picked up her rucksack and threw it onto her back. Then
took Mara’s hand to stop her from running off again and beginning
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another game of chase with Esme. Tom had rarely seen her cry: at her wedding, and one month before, when her parents told her they
wouldn’t be attending it. Not even when she was sitting beside his
hospital bed.
‘Need a tissue?’
‘Sod off,’ she said, clearly altering her language due to the pres-
ence of her child.
‘You know I’ll see you again soon. New Year’s, we said.’
‘I know. But it’s not the same, is it? We moved here at the same
time. You’re more a part of my life than anyone outside of Sam and
Mara. Now you’re just going to f— naff off to Scotland.’
‘Naff?’ he said, with a smile.
‘Don’t.’ She dabbed at her eyes with the hem of her jumper.
‘Listen Tom, there’s something I wanted to say to you before you
go. Given, well, everything that�
�s happened this year.’
‘Is this going to make me well up? Because—’
‘Just shut up, would you? No jokes. Right. Now you remember
whenever you made a stupid joke, or forgot something, or were
inexplicably half an hour late even though you work from home,
I used to say that you didn’t deserve her? That you were both my
oldest friend and most useless.’
‘I do,’ Tom said, nodding, holding back tears himself now.
‘Well I want to say that you did, Tom. You really did.’
Tom nodded and mustered a weak, ‘Thanks,’ as he and Annabel
embraced, Mara joining in by hugging his leg.
‘You know we’d never have met without you, don’t you?’ he said
when they let go.
‘All planned, mate. Every last bit of it.’
Annabel hugged him once more, said her goodbye and left with
her daughter in tow. Tom spied Esme looking on from the alcove
where the kitchen met the lounge but he couldn’t bring himself to
meet her eyes. Instead he looked around the kitchen, all now empty
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except for one cardboard box, into which he placed the kettle and a tin caddy filled with tea bags and sachets of long-life milk that Esme had stolen from a conference centre earlier that year. As he was about to pick it up and take it out to the van, Tom heard a knock at the
still-open door and a young, cheerful voice call, ‘Hello?’
‘Come in,’ Tom said, and watched as a young man, maybe
twenty-two-years-old, wearing a grey pin-stripe suit, white shirt
and pink tie strode confidently into his house, a large leather wallet stowed under his arm.
‘Will Mercer, Alder Estates,’ the man said, holding out a sweaty
palm for Tom to shake. ‘Sorry, a bit early,’ Will said, checking his
watch.
Tom glanced at the screen of his phone. Nearly a quarter to six.
He had been hoping to have a little bit of time in the place.
‘Anyway, suppose you’ll be wanting to get away. Long drive to
Glasgow, isn’t it?’
‘Edinburgh.’
‘Ah,’ Will frowned. ‘They near?’
‘Ish.’
Tom showed Will through to the living room, where a new IKEA
sofa he and Esme had bought for future renters was set up in the
centre, facing a TV unit, bare except for a few mug ring stains. An
empty house is a strange place, he thought, looking up at the picture
hooks and nails sticking from random places on the walls. At the
pure, clean white squares once hidden by their pictures, now framed