Page 52 of A Midlife Marriage

‘It’s not even nice.’

As he filled his lungs, his shoulders rose to his ears. Slowly, he let the air out again. ‘Would you have come,’ he said, ‘if you’d known it was me?’

‘No.’ Kay picked up her glass. She couldn’t look at him. Not because she was angry, but because she was confused. Of course she wouldn’t have come. Of course she wouldn’t have dressed up, washed her hair, got excited for and about, a man who had left her for an affair that had lasted all of three months. The only circumstances under which she would have agreed to meet, were exactly these. Those in which she didn’t know. And yet she couldn’t deny what she was feeling. She was happy she was here, and she wasn’t unhappy to be here, with him. ‘Well,’ she said as she turned back, ‘as you’ve already paid for it.’ And she pulled the second glass of wine towards her.

Martin visibly relaxed. He nodded at her hair. ‘I like it, he said quietly. ‘It suits you shorter.’

‘Thank you.’ She felt her cheeks warm, which was ridiculous given the compliment was coming from a man who had seen her give birth. ‘It grew back like this,’ she said, ‘after the radiotherapy.’ Her hand was at the back of her neck, self-conscious.

‘Well, at least you still have hair to grow back.’ And now it was his turn to colour, to pat the bald spot on the top of his head, his mouth turning up in a wry smile.

‘It’s not too bad.’ But this close, she could see how thin his hair really was. Another couple of years and he would becompletely bald. She felt a pang of sympathy. No wonder he’d stayed in the shadows. The courage it took to put yourself out there. Older and greyer, fatter and balder. Not everyone who stayed anonymous did so for nefarious reasons. Some, she felt sure, were simply hiding. Not from wives or girlfriends either. They were hiding from themselves: from who they had become. All those photos of motorcycles and mountains? They were pleas. Petitions from men who knew time was no longer on their side topleaselook past their age, their grey hair, their no-hair, their jowls, their whiskers. Seeme. See who I am inside. Who I still feel like. And the irony of the fact that the one man in the world who should never have needed to stay in the shadows, had chosen to do so - the man she would always be able to see from the inside out - did not escape her. She could have laughed. She did. She took a sip of wine and shaking her head put the glass down.

‘Something funny?’

Yes, it was funny, and sad that he couldn’t see it. Together, they had the one thing that time could not distort or make ugly. They had a past. ‘Just life,’ she said, then nodding at his receding hairline. ‘I think I prefer it to the style you had the first time we met.’

Martin laughed. ‘You mean the perm? It was 1988, Kay. Everyone had a perm.’

‘I didn’t.’

‘No.’ He lowered his chin and wrapped his hands around his glass. ‘You were never swayed by anything. Do you remember where we met?’

Kay smiled. ‘Of course I do.’

‘Rock Bottom Lounge,’ he started.

‘The Student Union bar,’ she finished.

‘We had some great times there.’

‘We saw some great bands there.’

‘OMD, Human League, Altered Images …’

‘The Jam, Spandau …’

‘Cider and Black for you.’

‘A pint of Fosters for you.’ Kay laughed. ‘We made a good team. My Student Union vice-president, to your president.’

‘We did.’ Crossing his arms, Martin dipped his head as he smiled. He had a generous mouth, with lips that seemed to be perpetually shaped upward. It gave him the appearance of always being happy or at least pleased with life. Of course, she knew that wasn’t the case but as Kay looked at him, she remembered how attractive she had found it. The way he took life easy, the way he shrugged it all off.

She picked up her glass. By the window, the men in the work shirts were still talking, shoulders rounded, and arms crossed as they leaned over the table, talking and talking and talking. ‘We were like that once,’ she murmured. ‘We had so much to say, we were going to change the world.’

Following her eyeline, Martin shook his head. ‘I was never going to change anything, Kay. I couldn’t even get out of bed in time to catch the coach to London for the CND march.’

Kay laughed. ‘It was a very early start. And remember, how cold your place used to be? Getting out of bed wasn’t easy. The curtains used to stick to the window.’

‘That’s because it was next to a funeral parlour.’ As he leaned towards her, Martin’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘You do realise that every time you stayed over, you were sleeping three feet from a corpse.’

Her lips twitched. ‘So romantic.’

‘No.’ He sat back. ‘I was never romantic enough. And as for us changing the world? It was the other way round, wasn’t it? The world changed us.’

‘Did it?’ Tears sprung. Uncomfortable, she looked away. Did Martin mean Alex? Was he talking about the way their world hadbent and shaped itself to accommodate their son? How horizons had shrunk, and walls closed in, as they do, in a perfectly proportionate ratio: the greater the child’s needs, the smaller the world.

‘I failed to adapt,’ he said. ‘That’s what happened. I failed.’

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