Page 4 of The Trouble With Love

‘No.’ To my surprise Megan stood up. ‘There has to be more in this world than we understand, there has to.’ Too late I remembered that Megan’s mother had died when she was six. Meg swore that she’d seen her mum several times since her death, sitting on the end of Meg’s bed and stroking her hair, which had given her a profound belief in all matters paranormal. Personally I’d rather not be watched over by my deceased relations when I was, say, on the toilet or partaking in some kinky shag-work, but I didn’t suppose that you could choose. ‘Science can’t explain everything, and maybe there is something to magic that we don’t get yet.’

The other women were nodding. Isobel’s ironed-smooth hair tossed up and down like a horse’s mane. ‘I believe that too,’ she said.

‘I’m not certain,’ Eve rested her forearms on her comfortably round thighs. ‘But I’d like to believe. I’d love to think that we can make amends for wrongs we’ve committed in this life, in the next.’

‘And what is your wish?’ Vivienne’s eyes were suddenly bright. If she’d had prickable ears, I’d take bets they would have gone up as though she’d smelled dinner.

‘I want to meet the man of my dreams,’ Eve said simply. She gave an apologetic shrug. ‘I’m fifty-seven. I’m lonely. What can I say?’

Isobel raised her hand. Her knitted sleeve rolled back to reveal what looked like cat-scratch marks on her arm. ‘My wish is to be someone’s whole world.’ It was a whisper, as though she was ashamed. ‘That’s all. To have someone unable to live without me.’ She drew down her arm and self-consciously tugged her cardigan down to her wrist again. ‘That’s all,’ she repeated.

‘And what about you, Vivienne?’ Everyone’s new-found confessional status made me twitchy. ‘I’m guessing you’ve already made your wishes come true? How did that work out for you?’

Vivienne moved across to the piano and began stroking the heads of the cats in sequence as though she was trying to get a tune out of them. ‘Ah. Well, I’m . . . my advertisement may have been just a touch misleading . . .’ A general air of incipient disappointment descended over the group and even the cats drooped a bit. ‘Oh, nothing terrible, just that . . . I’m not actually an established practitioner of the Arts. As such. More . . . working on broadening my theoretical knowledge with like-minded souls.’

‘She means she read a book once,’ I hissed at Meg, who was sitting back next to me again, her eyes still frighteningly shiny, but she ignored me.

‘I am perfectly grounded in the conjectural and academic uses of magic.’ Vivienne was obviously avoiding my gaze.

‘She read a thick book,’ I muttered, but was still soundly ignored.

‘And my wish is a little different.’ She turned her back to us. ‘My husband left me last month.’ Her voice wavered a little. ‘Twenty years of marriage, three children, and it all went for nothing.’

All four of us exchanged a look. No one knew what to say.

‘He’s gone to “find himself” apparently. Said that he needed to “question his life”. To find answers.’ There was a momentary savagery in her words, and the cat beneath her hand stretched its eyes in alarm. ‘I suspect that top of the list of questions was “has that girl in accounts had enlargement surgery or are they natural”, but he says there’s no one else. Just him and his questions.’ She almost spat the word. ‘So, my wish.’ Now she turned to face the room and the prominent bones of her face were highlighted by the random beams from the crystal lampshade, making her look slightly evil. ‘It’s that his life becomes full of real questions. None of this poncing about with the “where is my life going?” midlife crisis rubbish, all that “I have to look into my soul and find the eternal answer”. Proper questions. And when he’s been called upon to find those answers, I want him put out of his misery.’

Now we all felt uncomfortable. Vivienne had clearly been working on her wish, carefully phrasing it so that the word ‘death’ never featured, but it backfilled the gaps in her sentences as though her ex’s corpse was already buried there.

‘Not sure I’m joining up for that one.’ I stood up alongside Megan. ‘This is all getting a bit too focussed for me. I mean, I don’t believe that leaping about in some ancient woodland is going to bring me one iota closer to any excitement anyway. Other than that briefly afforded by a visit to hospital suffering from the respiratory illness of my choice.’

Eve looked at me from under her greying fringe. ‘But doesn’t one tiny part of you want to believe that science doesn’t know everything? That we might, just might, be able to influence things, if we want something enough?’

I shrugged again.

Vivienne narrowed her eyes at me. ‘It should be an uneven number. If you drop out, we shall have to find someone else.’ The anxious way she plucked at the cat’s head led me to believe that this might be tricky.

‘And what if it does work?’ That was Isobel. With her feet tucked up under the hem of her librarian-type pinafore and her hands invisible up the sleeves of her knitwear, she looked like a string puppet, waiting to be bounced along the carpet. ‘If it does, you’ve got excitement, if it doesn’t, well, you’ve lost nothing, have you?’

Except entire swathes of my life, I thought. But then I caught sight of Megan’s bright, drawn-in expression. Oh bloody buggery, she’d gone for it, hook, line and sodding great big goldfish, and before we knew it Vivienne might be trying to part her from fifty per cent of her income or whatever con artists thought they could get out of a woman who worked behind the counter in British Home Stores. More crystal lampshades, possibly.

‘Okay. I’ll play.’ And, just for a blink of a second I wished my disbelief would allow itself to be suspended, let me throw myself whole-heartedly into magic and spells and life being transformed beyond recognition . . . And then I thought about Nicholas and the need to persuade him to get his hair cut and have a shave and the absolute, down-to-earth necessities of my life, and I embraced my cynicism with both arms again.

Megan hugged me, Eve patted me on the shoulder and even Isobel smiled at me from under the pony-like forelock. ‘It’ll be fun, the five of us. It’ll be like that knitting group.’

I stared at Meg. Even taking into account Isobel’s wool-based idea of fashion and Vivienne’s obvious addiction to pointy things, I couldn’t see one similarity between us and a knitting group.

‘In that novel,’ she went on, ‘they share their problems and it’s homespun wisdom and friendship that wins the day. That could be us.’

I really had to get her reading more erotic romance.

Chapter Four

It’s been a long time since I wrote to you. Wrote real words, instead of an article about Botox or the pharmaceutical industry or some overambitious starlet on the make. How long? When Imogen finally got the message? That long ago, yeah, probably. Whenever my life changes I feel this need, this . . . I dunno what you call it, an urge to put it down on paper for you to read. So you can know who I am. Know what drives me forward, what makes me the man I am — and this is what makes me crazy, the need to communicate with you. A woman who never knew me, never wanted to know me — and yet, there’s still this soul-deep longing in me for some kind of contact. So. Here I am. Again. Putting it down, scribbling these unconsidered words on scraps of paper in the hope . . . no. Not hope. Not now. In the madness, yes. In the mad belief that one day I’ll get to hand them all over to you, to push them into your face and say, ‘Here. This is what you did. This is the man you made.’ So that you can read about the vicious highs, where I’d run as far as I could to the top of the mountain, to where the air was so thin that I couldn’t breathe it any more. And then the come-down, those abseils into the dark. The pit, the abyss, where you should have been waiting. Bringing the light in.

But you weren’t. Never there. No hand to hold, no comfort. So I found it where I could, and who can blame me? We all need something, we all need something to lean on, and if I pitched my desires wrong, if I made myself into something reckless and wild and put my love in a box that wouldn’t open . . . well, who’s going to blame me?

Been here before. How many times have I written all that — tried to explain why I want . . . why I need these letters? Words I have to write because no one is there to hear me say them.

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