at the bar, drinking from his own pewter beer tankard.
‘What do you think his name is?’ Gabriel had asked her one night when they were carefully not sitting too close to each other, yet just close enough to feel the crackle of tension between them.
‘Mmm, I think maybe . . . Richard, no, Geoffrey.’
‘Geoffrey. Yes, that’s a good one. I imagine he used to have a wife who complained when he forgot to shave and that’s why he now takes such pride in his moustache.’
‘I’m not sure he was ever married.’
‘A confirmed bachelor, perhaps?’
‘Or the love of his life fell for his best friend instead of him and he comes here, each evening, to forget.’
They would make up endless nonsense stories like this, to fill the space in between talking about what they both secretly wanted to confess. Once, Gabriel had taken her hand in his beneath the table and it had felt so illicit, so thrilling and so entirely how it should be that she almost couldn’t breathe.
Gradually, Charlotte began to believe that he meant what he said; that he loved her in a way he had never loved before. He seemed to want her exactly as she was. She realised then that, for the first time, she was utterly, unthinkingly in love with someone and that she couldn’t rationalise it or shape it to fit round her. She simply had to take the leap. Yet this terrified her because she had no faith in herself, no real belief that she was worthy enough. She found that she did not feel Gabriel’s love with any inner conviction, but rather drew her conclusions logically from snippets of available evidence.
There was, deep within the folds of her own consciousness, a dark, jagged cave where Charlotte stored all her most awful thoughts. She kept it hidden away, scared of her own twisted imaginings, and, in a strange sort of way, this gave her a sense of power. If she kept it concealed, Charlotte realised that no one else could ever truly know her. And this meant that she was in control. She felt intensely vulnerable under Gabriel’s scrutiny but she still had secrets from him. There was a blackness nestling within her, a poisonous seepage of self-inflicted pain that she would never expose to the light.
The art gallery was a single white room, dotted with rectangular plinths that rose up from the white floor like sawn-off tree trunks. To access it, you had to walk down a rickety metal fire-escape staircase and it was difficult to negotiate in heels. Just as she reached the last step, Charlotte tripped up and had to grasp hold of Gabriel’s arm to steady herself, so that they ended up spilling drunkenly into the room, almost teetering off balance, and everyone appeared to stop talking at precisely the same moment. Charlotte instantly felt out of her depth. They were late – Charlotte’s fault, naturally – and now she could imagine all his glamorous female friends looking at her high heels with the disapprobation mature women reserved for trivial young things like her who wore unsuitable, cheap shoes.
‘Gabe!’ came a screeching voice from across the room. ‘Over here.’
They looked over. It was Florence, a pained-looking woman in her late thirties with a powdered face and a deep wrinkle between her plucked eyebrows. She was, as she never seemed to tire of reminding Charlotte, one of Gabriel’s oldest and closest female friends. They had met when both were starting out as trainees at one of London’s biggest PR firms in the early nineties and, for a brief while, had shared a flat together. It was a period of time that both of them repeatedly referred to with winks and wistful shakes of the head that signified some boring private joke.
Charlotte had once spent an entire evening with both of them during which the sight of an ashtray on a hotel mantelpiece had triggered a long-ago memory of Gabriel accidentally setting alight a curtain. The two of them were in hysterical fits of giggles even though nothing about the story was particularly funny. Charlotte had found herself laughing uneasily along with the joke, aware that Florence was deliberately pressing home her advantage: this is something I know about Gabriel that you don’t, she seemed to be saying, because you will never rival me in this man’s affections.
It was Charlotte’s contention that Florence was secretly in love with Gabriel – a belief that he dismissed as ‘absurd’ any time she raised it. ‘Besides,’ he would say. ‘Who would want to sleep with Florence? It would be like shagging a man.’
Charlotte looked at her now. She was a woman who had spent her whole life maintaining a fiction of her own appearance; a woman who cultivated extreme skinniness because it would make other women jealous rather than because it suited her. Her body was straight up and down, usually clothed in black dresses accessorised with a mad bohemian twist – belts made from Caribbean calabash gourds or necklaces woven together with bright Peruvian threads – and neat flat-soled ballet pumps tipped with velvet. Tonight, she had done something odd with her hair so that it was swept back off her high forehead and tucked behind her ears, kept in place with copious hairspray so that the blonde strands looked brittle to the touch. Two veins stood out thickly from the fleshy scrag of her neck.
‘Hi, darling,’ she said, kissing Gabriel on the lips. ‘So what do you think of the photographs? Pretty grim, no?’
‘We’ve only just arrived,’ he replied, scanning the walls quickly, ‘but they don’t look too bad. I like that one.’ Gabriel pointed at an overblown black-and-white study of a series of corrugated-iron shacks.
‘Hmmm. Very misery chic.’ Florence, who had intertwined her arm with Gabriel’s during this brief exchange, smiled brightly at Charlotte as if she’d only just spotted her. ‘Hi, Charlotte. How are you?’
‘Good, thanks, good. Although I did almost fall on my face on the way in,’ she said, giggling and simultaneously kicking herself for trying to break the ice by making herself look foolish.
‘I noticed.’ Florence turned away from her and towards Gabriel. ‘How’s tricks, Gabe? Any more news on the divorce?’
Gabriel looked taken aback. ‘Oh, you know, just hammering things out.’
‘Yeah, I spoke to Maya the other day and she said it was taking a while.’
‘I didn’t know you two were in touch,’ Gabriel said, and Charlotte could see the place where his jaw twitched when he was tense.
‘Listen, I’m not just going to drop her because you have. She needs support, Gabe. She hasn’t found anyone new,’ Florence looked at Charlotte pointedly. ‘Unlike you.’
The whole evening was played out in a similar vein of extreme discomfort. The photos were dull. The company was acerbic. Every single one of Gabriel’s friends, apart from the curator, who was uncomplicatedly friendly because he was drunk, had looked at Charlotte with a guardedness that was inescapable. She felt awkward and unlikeable and far too young. She had worn thick tights and the gallery was so hot that she felt herself sweating underneath the lights, her hair frizzing up and her cheeks acquiring a slippery surface sheen. She drank too many glasses of free champagne. She felt as if her forehead were tattooed with the label ‘Other Woman’ and sensed the unspoken accusation that she was a walking cliché: a younger model, a mid-life crisis mistress. She wanted to shake everyone by the shoulders and scream at them that it wasn’t like this; it was different; something else; something more; something they could never understand.
It was a familiar resurgence: the sensation of not being good enough. Suddenly, without knowing where the image came from, Charlotte saw her father lying comatose in his hospital bed, pale and impotent, like a skinned rabbit. She shivered and then pushed the thought of him away. She did not want to think about him
