Page 72 of The Spark

Eventually, I banish the book into the bottom drawer of my sideboard, where I’ve also stashed the framed photographs of Jamie.

One rainy morning at the start of September, I dive into the loos at work to call Lara.

‘Hi?’ she says, sounding slightly surprised.

‘Hi. Can you talk?’

‘Yeah, just on our way to... Never mind. What’s up?’

‘I don’t think Amsterdam is a good idea.’

I told her, eventually, about calling Ash by the wrong name. She seemed sympathetic, and also relieved we’d made it up, because at her core, Lara is a die-hard romantic. Not everyone knows that about her, but I do. I’ve always known.

‘Oh, why?’ she says now.

‘It just feels wrong.’

‘Okay,’ Lara says. ‘Then here’s what I think you should do. Go to Amsterdam, and just... forget about the Jamie stuff for a bit, so you can go and enjoy this trip. But when you get back, you do need to talk to him.’

‘That doesn’t feel like the right thing to do, though. It doesn’t feel honest.’

‘Isn’t this more about confusion now than it is dishonesty?’

I pinch the bridge of my nose between my fingers, draw a couple of breaths. Get it together, Neve, for God’s sake.

I hear the main toilet door swing open, then Parveen’s voice, tentative. ‘Neve?’

‘Yes?’ I say, quickly. ‘Yes, I’m here.’

She hesitates briefly. ‘Hate to do this, but Mrs Ogilvy’s on the phone, and she’s refusing to hang up until she’s spoken to you. Apparently, I won’t do. She says it’s an emergency.’

‘Oof. She sounds needy,’ Lara says, in my ear.

‘You have no idea,’ I say darkly. Mrs Ogilvy’s last ‘emergency’ was an eleventh-hour panic that the kitchen floor tiles we’d agonised over might clash with the colour of her chihuahua (no joke).

‘Tell her I’m coming,’ I say to Parveen, and then, to Lara, ‘Thank you. Sorry. Better go.’

‘Yeah, go. And by that, I mean to Amsterdam. All the other stuff can wait.’

A week later, Ash and I check in to our hotel on the south side of the Vondelpark. I haven’t a clue if it’s the same place Jamie chose. I’ve long forgotten the name of it, and have no way of finding out.

But I know I shouldn’t care. That I have to try to just enjoy being here, in the moment. I mean, I know I owe Ash more than that – a lot more – but it’s a start, at least. He went to the trouble of organising a secret long weekend via Kelley of all people, who was taking conference calls on her honeymoon and thinks bank holidays should be banned.

So I ignore the occasional spikes of voltage that I know to be my conscience, burying them beneath all the better, more pleasurable feelings.

I don’t doubt that what I feel for Ash is love – I recognise all too well the crushing, stomach-skewering power of it. But whether I am in love with Jamie, or Ash, or a strange entanglement of the two, is becoming harder for me to say.

On our first afternoon, we spend several dreamy hours walking through cobbled streets and beside canals burnished with sunlight, among the jangling rush of bicycles, beneath the dolls’ house façades of the buildings, between passing trams and centuries-old bridges. There is a fairy-tale quality to it all, and I get so caught up that I lose count of how many times Ash has to pull me out of the path of a bike. We talk and talk, about work and our friends and family, about books we’re reading, and politics, and Ash’s nightmare landlord at uni, and the most embarrassing stuff we’ve ever done, and the curse of group chats, and our best ever finds on the Lidl middle aisle. He makes me laugh to the point where I have to plead for breath: I particularly enjoy his killer impression of the woman from the next apartment but one, who’s had so much facial filler she can no longer enunciate.

We neglect to eat, forget time and directions. The city tingles with late-summer heat and high spirits. The pavement cafes are jammed full, the streets flocking with people. As dusk descends, above the jumble of rooftops, a pale rhubarb moon climbs through the sky. Eventually, in the darkened corner of a waterside bar, the heat between us ramps up, and then it is a race to find a taxi, our hotel, our room, our bed.

He tells me he loves me as he moves against me, my legs wrapped tight around him. And as I say it back, through a dark square of window, I see the night sky blaze with a million stars.

After bagels and coffee the next morning, we set off together along the canal. Which is when something peculiar happens. I find myself telling Ash all about the leaning houses, the hoisting hooks and hidden gardens, the family crests on houses flaunting the wealth of seventeenth-century merchants. I describe the design style of the Middles Ages, the Dutch Renaissance, the introduction of French interior design in the eighteenth century. We walk the patchwork of lanes, beneath lines of fleshy trees, to the Amsterdam School and the Rijksmuseum, the Centraal Station, and I talk him through the engineering of the city’s bridges. I do the same at the Nieuwe Kerk, the Gothic Oude Kerk. I’m unable to stop, the words spilling from my mouth like confessions.

I’m no architecture expert. But over the course of seven months, ten years ago, I think I read more about Amsterdam than a single one of my degree course topics. I was so engrossed and excited by the idea of my first holiday with Jamie, that somehow, the information all stuck, the way obsessions often do.

Eventually, opposite the Stedelijk Museum, we stop for coffee. Our window seats have an elevated view of the street crosshatched with tramlines, the turrets of the Rijksmuseum.

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