“She does! She did.”
“Yeah, well, you set me up for a fall, Mimi. I’m pissed off. I think you owe me those tickets anyway.”
“Oh, have them. I hate the fucking Kaiser Chiefs anyway. They were free from an advertiser.”
“Seriously?” Liam’s voice, which had been mopey and downbeat, suddenly brightened in tone.
“What you do tonight is the least of my worries, McGlynn.”
“Do you really hate them? I was thinking you might want to come with me.”
“I think not. I get the feeling I’m going to be Needed tonight. With a capital N.” She sighed heavily. “Right. Thanks for trying. Bye.”
Mimi blew out a long breath, looking at her plum brown fingernails on the receiver, looking at her rings sparkling in the shards of sunlight, looking at the thing she didn’t want to do but felt she had to. It was an upward glance at her monitor that gave her the galvanising impulse. She picked up the phone again and punched in the four-digit number.
“Sweetie?”
“Oh, hi. You’ll never guess what just happened. It’s completely the worst timing of all time—”
“Anna, could you pop up here for five minutes?” Mimi cut off the tale of Liam’s abortive invitation. “Wouldn’t ask, but it’s quite important. Sorry to be boring.”
“Oh! Are you okay?” She sounded so young. Mimi screwed her face up, bile rising in her throat. Damn it, she couldn’t just pretend not to have seen it. The thing had to be brought out into the open.
“I’m fine. Just come up. See you in a minute.”
Anna rarely entered the rarefied environs of Editorial, but she always enjoyed a visit. The furniture was more expensive and there was air conditioning. People barked importantly into phones, and there were screens in the corners of the office on which news tickers ran without cease. The urgent ambience seeped into her bloodstream before she was three steps in and she began to feel that things had to be done, now. She rushed past the chaos of the Foreign Desk, onward to Mimi’s less frenetic outpost in what she called the Ministry of Trivia.
Her face was…sombre. Even funereal. Anna felt like a relative called into hospital to attend the deathbed of a loved one. Her heart folded in on itself and her blood thinned.
“What’s happened?” she asked, tiny-voiced.
“Anna, I’m sorry. I didn’t want to find this…but when I did…you know, I had to show you.”
Anna edged carefully around to a position where she could see Mimi’s computer screen. “Oh! John!” She swooped down, wanting to touch his face on the screen, to kiss it. But he was not the only person in the picture. He was standing next to a woman in a wedding dress. That could only mean…
“Oh God, no.”
“He’s married, Anna. And not long ago either. This was taken last summer. Big society wedding—she’s the daughter of an earl. I’m so sorry. Look, sit down before you fall down. I’ll get you some tea, shall I? Sugary to the max?”
Anna could not speak. She sat, staring at her dream lover in his morning suit and proudest face, vision in white on his arm, reading over and over again the few lines of fawning copy beside the picture. When Mimi arrived with the tea, she said lots of things, things that were supposed to be reassuring or peppy or kind, but Anna didn’t hear a single word.
“Come and stay with me for the weekend,” said Mimi. This was the first line to pass the barrier. “I don’t want to think of you all alone in that pit you call a flat. Come and stay and I’ll cook for you and make you the best G&Ts in town and we’ll watch weepies and curse men until Monday. And then everything will be better—you’ll see, love. It really will.”
“Thanks.” But Anna knew it couldn’t ever be better now, not really.
She switched her phone off, switched her life off, and went home with Mimi, to her comfortable, beautiful flat in St. Johns Wood. Friday night was bad. She could think of nothing but John, on the steps of the Royal Opera House, in a dinner suit, perhaps carrying a bouquet for her, waiting, watching, dialling her number, getting no reply. And then Mimi would constantly remind her of his wife, waiting, watching, getting no husband home for dinner because he was “working late.”
“You know, I really think you’d settle for being his mistress,” she said after the third gin and tonic, and the nth attempt to stop Anna from switching on her phone. “And I don’t think that makes you a terrible person, by the way. I wouldn’t have anything against being a kept woman. But you would be a terrible mistress. You would love him too much. You wouldn’t just take the gifts and the holidays and the sex and make the most of those—you would suffer. And you would feel awful about his wife. She could be pregnant, Anna. She could be anything. Just let him go. And give me the phone before I have to knock you unconscious.”
“I just can’t help thinking about last night. It was so special. It had to mean something, Mimi. I can’t bear for it to be meaningless. I can’t.” Anna’s tears, ever present on this grim evening, fell once more.
“Special. I’m sure it was. I’m sure he…has feelings for you. But he doesn’t have the right to have them. Perhaps if he leaves her… But then you’ll always know he’s the type of man that will leave his wife. So would that be any better?”
“No. No. Nothing can make it better.”
The dreams only made it worse. They came constantly, thick with emotion and desire, chasing through those snatched half hours of sleep like a pack of wolves, fixed on their prey. John was there, or just out of view, just out of reach, telling her she had to come back, telling her that it was too late to leave now. She woke sobbing every time. By Monday morning, she was exhausted, looking as lank and lifeless as she ever had. But there was nothing for it—she had to go in to work.
“I have to switch my phone on now,” she said to Mimi over breakfast. “I can’t escape from life forever.”