One Minute to Midnight (9 page)

‘We’re closed,’ he snaps, virtually pushing me out of the door. The porters always were miserable old bastards. As I walk slowly around the college, back towards St Giles, I have another flashback, of Alex and I getting a bollocking from the head porter for making a racket when we came back to college one night, and of her, hoiking up her skirt, bending over and showing him her arse in reply. I start to giggle again. With everything that’s happened over the past couple of years, sometimes I forget how happy we were. Back then, it was impossible to be miserable when Alex was around.

There’s a coffee cart on the corner of Keble Road and St Giles – a new innovation, that certainly hadn’t been there in my day. I buy myself a large latte and find myself a quiet spot to drink it on a bench in the graveyard of St Giles Church. Protected from the wind by a line of firs, and with the sun on my face, it feels quite warm. I lean back on the bench, close my eyes and try not to think about the day ahead. After a while, I couldn’t really say how long, a shadow looms over me. I open my eyes.

‘Are you all right there?’ It’s the vicar.

‘Sorry,’ I say getting to my feet. ‘I suppose you don’t encourage loitering.’

He laughs. He has a broad, open face and dreadful teeth, yellow and gapped. ‘Not at all. Loiter all you like.’ He gestures for me to sit back down on the bench and takes a seat beside me. ‘Bit warmer today, isn’t it?’

‘Mmm-hmm.’

‘Are you visiting?’

‘Just here for the day.’

‘Have you seen the sights? It’s quite a climb, but I’d recommend you try the top of St Mary’s tower. There’s a marvellous view.’

‘Oh, I’ve been before. I actually studied here. A long, long time ago.’

He smiles at me. ‘It can’t have been that long ago. You have good memories of the place?’

‘Wonderful,’ I say, and I can feel tears pricking my eyes. Ridiculous. I must be pre-menstrual. I grab a tissue from my bag. ‘Sorry,’ I say, embarrassed, ‘for some reason coming back to Oxford always makes me nostalgic – you know, lost youth, missed opportunities, all that.’

‘Lost youth?’ he laughs out loud. ‘I’m sixty-three.’

‘You know what I mean. It’s just … when you come here, when you’re that age – eighteen, nineteen, you know – you’re so convinced that you can do
anything
, that you will do something amazing, that you’re invincible. It’s ridiculous, obviously, but I just miss the way that felt.’

‘The way you feel before you learn to compromise,’ the vicar says with a wry smile. ‘Before real life gets you.’

‘Exactly. And I miss the friends I made here.’

‘You don’t see them any more?’

‘Some of them. Not all.’

‘Well, you should do something about that. You should never be careless about friendship. You will find, the older you get, that new friendships do not come around quite as often as they once did. You should treasure those you have, protect them fiercely.’ He nods sagely to himself. ‘Plus, these days you have all those social networking sites, don’t you? Spacebook, Myface, all that sort of thing. Makes it much easier to track people down.’

We sit in silence for a moment, and then he gets up to leave.

‘My father has cancer,’ I blurt out all of a sudden, and he sits back down right away.

‘Oh my dear,’ he says, placing his hand on my arm, ‘I’m so very sorry. What’s his prognosis?’

‘I think it’s okay,’ I say. ‘I’m not really sure. We don’t talk. I haven’t seen him for years.’

By the time I get to the restaurant, Annie Gardner is already there. A small, slight woman with a rather severe dark bob, she rises to her feet as I approach and holds out her hand for me to shake.

‘I’m sorry about this morning,’ she says, her voice so soft I can barely hear it, ‘it was unavoidable.’ She looks nervous and uncomfortable; she doesn’t quite meet my eye.

‘Not at all,’ I reply, beaming at her, ‘gave me a chance to wander around a bit. I haven’t been here for ages, so it was great to have the opportunity to see the sights again.’ Already, I’m a little too jovial, a little too eager to make her like me.

We order lunch – a salad for her, fish and chips for me.

‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ I ask her.

‘Oh no, I have to go back to work this afternoon, and I’m useless if I’ve had a drink at lunchtime.’

‘Oh go on,’ I say, cajoling, ‘just one?’ The more relaxed she is, the more likely I am to be able to talk her into this. Reluctantly, she agrees, and I launch into my pitch. I tell her how helpful the programme will be, how it will give her the opportunity to talk to qualified counsellors who can really help her to heal her family.

She shakes her head sadly. ‘I just don’t know,’ she says, ‘I don’t know if it’s the right thing. You don’t understand …’

‘The thing is Annie,’ I jump in, interrupting her, ‘I
do
understand. I know how you feel.’

She chuckles. She’s very pretty when she smiles. ‘I doubt that.’

‘No, I mean, I haven’t been in exactly your situation. But … my husband was unfaithful to me.’

She looks up at me, quizzically. I can tell she isn’t quite sure whether to believe me or not. This was it, the critical point in my plan: the way to get Annie onside was to show her that she wasn’t alone.
I
knew what she was going through. I’d been there myself, and I’d survived.
I
knew how she could come out of it the other side, her marriage and dignity intact.

‘A couple of years ago. Okay, it wasn’t quite your situation, but he had an affair. With a friend of mine. A close friend. My best friend, in fact.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She looks stricken. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘It was horrible. It was very painful.’

‘You left him?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I take a slug of my wine and set the glass back on the table, ‘but I thought about it. I thought long and hard about it, in fact. We were separated for a while. But I love him very much, and I know he loves me, and I know that he made a bad mistake, a terrible mistake, and that he regrets it enormously. We had counselling, for several months, and we worked through everything. And, eventually, we were able to live together again, to be close again …’

I tail off. She’s looking at me intently. ‘And you forgave him? You really forgave him?’

‘I did.’

‘I’m afraid,’ Annie says, gazing a little mournfully into her wine glass, ‘that every time we argue, every time something goes wrong …’

‘You’ll throw this in his face? His affair, his betrayal?’

‘Exactly. I’m afraid we’ll never get past it. Or that I’ll never get past it, anyway.’

This was the moment. The big sell. ‘That’s why I think you should do the programme, Annie.’

She shakes her head again.

‘No, I mean it. That’s where the counselling will be invaluable. We won’t be asking you sordid, tawdry questions, we’ll be getting you – and your husband, and your sister – to really talk through your emotions, to deal with issues of guilt and recrimination. You can tell them how you feel, how they’ve
made
you feel. And I hope you’ll find a way, just as my husband and I did, to move past this and get on with your life.’ She’s listening carefully, I can tell she’s weakening, I have her on the ropes. I go for the jugular. ‘I
know
betrayal, Annie. I know how it feels, and I feel sure that working with us on this programme can help you, and help others in similar situations, too.’

She looks down at the tablecloth and back up at me. There’s hope in her eyes. In that moment I hate myself.

We finish our coffees, I pay the bill and we leave the restaurant.

‘Thanks for meeting me, Annie,’ I say, as we walk out into the watery afternoon sunshine. ‘I really appreciate you taking the time.’

I want to ask her whether she’ll reconsider doing the interview for the programme right there and then, but I feel it’s best not to push. Instead, I shake her hand, give her my warmest, most reassuring smile, and head off along St Giles towards the city centre. I’ve only walked a few yards when she calls after me.

‘Nicole,’ she says, ‘What about your friend?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Your friend? You said that your husband had an affair with your best friend?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Alex.’

‘And did you forgive her, too?’

‘Yes, I did. It took a while. For some reason, her betrayal seemed even worse than his. I mean, you expect men to play around, don’t you? You don’t expect it from your mates.’

‘Or your sister.’

‘No, quite.’

‘But you’re okay now, you and her?’

‘We’re fine,’ I lie. ‘We’re good.’

She smiles at me warmly and, quite unexpectedly, gives me a hug. ‘Thanks for talking to me, Nicole. I’ll email your assistant with some times for an interview tomorrow.’

‘You’ll do it then?’ I ask her, slightly incredulous.

‘I’ll do it.’ As I watch her walking off down Little Clarendon Street, I feel a peculiar mix of emotions. There is the satisfaction of a task completed, of course, that mission-accomplished sense of jubilation, but there’s certainly no pride. Quite the contrary. I feel ashamed of the lies I’ve told.

* * *

I check my watch. It’s just after three: lunch went on longer than expected. What I should do, I know, is to go straight back to the car and drive back to London. Instead, I cross the road and enter the gloom of the Lamb and Flag, scene of many a good night back in my student days. I sit there, nursing a gin and tonic (for old time’s sake), counting the lies I’ve just told a perfectly nice and obviously vulnerable woman.

One. Dominic did not have an affair. He had a one-night stand. Different thing entirely.

Two. We never went to counselling. Dom wanted to, he begged me to after we separated, but I refused. I didn’t want to talk about it.

Three. And this follows from two: as a result, I haven’t really forgiven him. And I haven’t forgiven Alex, either.

I switch on my phone, which was turned off during lunch, and listen to my messages. One from the office, just checking how I’m getting on with Annie Gardner, one from my mum, who sounds like she’s having a great time in Costa Rica, although to be honest the line’s so bad she could be saying almost anything, and one from Dom.

‘Hi love, we’ve got a table booked for eight. Matt and Liz are going to come round a bit earlier for drinks. Ummm … it’s just after two now … give me a call when you get this. Hope all’s well. Love you.’

On my phone, I Google B&Bs in Ledbury. I ring the Ashton Guest House, ‘a family friendly B&B standing on the hill slopes, overlooking the market town of Ledbury’, and book a room before I can give myself the chance to back out. Then I ring Dom. Relief floods over me when the phone goes straight to voicemail. Cringing at my own cowardice, I leave a message.

‘Dom, hi. You’re not going to be very pleased with me. I can’t make it back for dinner tonight. I’ve decided to go and see my dad. I know this is a bit out of the blue, but there is a reason, and I’ll explain it all when I get back. Tomorrow. I’m going to stay in Ledbury. I’ll ring you later, okay? Hope dinner’s fun. Love to Matt and Liz.’

I end the call and turn off my phone straight away. I don’t want to face his wrath just yet, and he’s going to be furious. Not so much that I’ve cancelled dinner or that I’m not coming home right away, but that I’ve been secretive about something. He hates it when I sneak around.

Chapter Six

New Year’s Eve, 1996

Cape Town

Resolutions:

1. Get a first in Prelims

2. Lose half a stone

3. Apply for internship with production house

4. Plan Julian’s twenty-first. It has to be major!

5. Go rowing. Or hunt-sabbing.

ALEX MET ME at the airport. Typically, effortlessly gorgeous in denim cut-offs and a white vest, Ray-Bans and flip-flops, her skin was already tanned a deep golden brown after ten days in South Africa
en famille
. I, on the other hand, looked like hell: dressed in black jeans and a grey polo neck, sweltering in thirty-degree heat, I was sweaty, smelly and bedraggled after a marathon, three-leg journey from London. Eight and a half hours to Nairobi, a three hour stop-over at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, a four-hour flight to Johannesburg, another two hour stop-over, and finally, two hours to Cape Town – for a girl whose previous longest flight was a couple of hours to Rome, it felt like I’d travelled halfway to the moon.

And as Alex drove me through the outskirts and then the heart of Cape Town towards her parents’ home in Camps Bay, the moon might just as well have been where I’d landed, so alien did all this seem to me. I don’t know what I’d been expecting, but it hadn’t been this: the traffic-choked city, the high rises, the tangle of highways; and then, all of a sudden, a glimpse of the ocean, or a view of Table Mountain rising above us. I felt disoriented, almost panicky, my nerves not helped by Alex’s erratic, high-speed driving. I clutched the door handle and ghost-braked all the way from the airport through the grimy, poverty-stricken district of Athlone, as we headed towards Camps Bay.