Joe.
I’m at arrivals.
Okay. Fine. Don’t say ‘hello’ or ‘hope you had a good flight’ or ‘looking forward to seeing you again.’ The coldness and brusqueness of the message put me on edge. But what had I expected?
Up until Anna’s death, all I’d heard about my ex-husband were bits and pieces of information that Martha passed on from Cece. For a year or two after I left Joe, Martha kept trying to tell me about his mental health issues and so on, but I wouldn’t listen. In fact, I used to get quite angry with her. ‘Why are you even telling me these things?’ I’d say. ‘I don’t care about Joe. Really, I don’t!’
I knew he was running his own gardening business in North Wales and as far as Martha was aware he didn’t have a new partner: like me, he’d never come anywhere close to marrying again. I assumed he was better now – he’d sounded quite coherent in the emails he’d sent in the past few weeks. Still, this whole situation was ridiculous. It was a stipulation of Anna’s will that Joe and I meet the lawyer together, but we had flown in separately and we should have arranged to make our way separately to the lawyer’s office in the city of Ragusa. It had been a stupid idea to meet at the airport. It had been a stupid plan to share a car. What on earth would we talk about? How could we bear to be together?
I typed a reply.
You go on ahead, I’ll follow in a taxi.
My finger hovered over the ‘send’ button. I didn’t actually know how much a taxi would cost or if Sicilian taxi drivers had the facility to accept card payments and I didn’t speak Italian so I wouldn’t be able to ask. I wouldn’t know if I was being charged a fair price for the journey, I didn’t even know where Ragusa was in relation to the airport. What if it was 200 miles away? Why hadn’t I looked it up beforehand? Why hadn’t I thought this through? Did they even have Ubers in Sicily?
I deleted the text without sending it. My heart was thumping. My breathing was ragged. I heard Fitz’s voice in my head: One foot in front of the other, dear heart. One step at a time.
I was desperate for a delay to give me time to collect my thoughts but was through immigration in record time and my suitcase was one of the first off the carousel. I extended the handle and dragged it towards the Nothing to Declare lane. The bag was a bulky, difficult thing that kept twisting on its wheels. As I approached the exit gate, I lost my nerve and hovered behind the sliding doors. I looked each time they opened, but I couldn’t see Joe in the arrivals hall. Perhaps he was in a different terminal or perhaps I’d got the wrong airport. Such mistakes happened. Fitz knew someone who had once inadvertently bought a ticket for Birmingham, Alabama, when she only meant to go to the West Midlands.
The doors slid open again. The family from the plane went through and a cheer went up from the relatives who had come to meet them. The doors closed. I tightened my fingers around the handle of the suitcase. The doors opened and closed; opened and closed. Each time I leaned forward and looked, each time Joe wasn’t there. I couldn’t stay here forever. Still I hesitated. The doors slid open and this time a man with tanned skin and short, silver hair standing on the far side of the barrier, caught my eye and raised his hand. He waved vigorously. I looked over my shoulder, assuming he was trying to catch the attention of someone behind me, but he wasn’t. He was waving at me.
Was it Joe? No! Oh God, it was! I’d been looking for the young man I used to know, not an older, sensible looking man wearing a dusty blue golfing shirt tucked into a pair of jeans. The shock unfooted me. Had he been watching each time the doors opened? Had he seen my eyes scanning the crowd, slipping over him without any hint of recognition? Embarrassment heated my cheeks. What should I say? Should I apologise? No, no. I’d blame my eyes. I’d say I was tired. Shit.
‘Come on,’ I murmured to the suitcase, and I went forwards.
Joe wasn’t smiling as we walked towards one another. His expression was one I recognised from my work, that of a parent called in to school because their child had misbehaved, a parent who didn’t want to be there, who’d rather be at the dentist’s or unblocking the drains or anything. I was almost sick with nerves myself.
At the last moment, my bag unbalanced me and I stumbled. Joe caught me and there was a moment’s awkwardness. I assured him I was okay, but still I dusted the place where he had touched me and he wiped his hands together. We two, who used to spend whole weekends in bed, who had known every tiny part of each other’s bodies and used to delight in giving one another pleasure, we had become reticent about touching at all. It was painfully awkward and so was the silence that stretched between us so far I could feel the draught as metaphorical tumbleweed rolled sorrowfully by.
It wasn’t a great beginning. I wondered how on earth we would get through the coming days.
4
‘I can’t believe you’re still struggling with that old suitcase,’ were the first words Joe said to me on our reunion. He stared at the case, battered and grubby and covered with stickers. ‘You said you were going to get rid of it after Seville.’
Oh, Seville; yes. At Seville airport, I had inadvertently pulled the case over the toes of an elderly man, causing him to drop the duty-free bag he was holding. The bottle of Laphroaig contained inside broke, spilling its contents firstly into the plastic bag and then, when the old man picked the bag up, over his beige slacks, his sandals, his white socks and the floor.
I was pretty sure now that Joe was remembering the smell of whisky, the redness of the man’s face and his refusal to accept our help or our offer to replace the whisky.
I hadn’t thought of that incident in at least a decade and wished Joe hadn’t reminded me of it; a thinly veiled criticism that carried all kinds of subliminal messages about my clumsiness, my carelessness, my inertia. At a time when I was already wracked with insecurities, it wasn’t a kind thing to do. On the plus side, it was gratifying to find a valid reason to be angry with Joe all over again.
Now my ex-husband was staring at my face. If he said anything about me looking worn out or stressed, I would turn around and walk away. Really, I would.
Instead he asked in a grudging voice: ‘Do you want some?’ and offered me the bottle of water he was holding. He’d obviously been drinking from it while he waited for me because it was half empty.
‘No, thank you,’ I said primly and even before the words had been spoken, I regretted them because I was desperately thirsty.
‘We’ll get going then.’
‘Right.’
Joe tried to take the handle of my bag, but I insisted I could manage and then had to pretend I wasn’t struggling as I followed him through the arrivals hall.
If I hadn’t known it was Joe in front of me, I wouldn’t have recognised him. His whole shape and demeanour were different. It wasn’t just the hair, although his ears were very brown against the silver; his shoulders were broader and his walk was no longer a relaxed lope, but more of a marching gait. He no longer hunched his shoulders. He no longer dragged his feet. I was probably different too. I wondered how other people saw us: a couple clearly not in harmony, the man walking ahead, the woman behind with her recalcitrant suitcase. They probably thought we were the kind of miserable, long married pair who had hen-pecked one another so comprehensively over the years that we’d lost the capacity for humour, or kindness.
