‘No. You shouldn’t have to apologise either. I suppose it was just a function of us not having the time to get to know each other well enough. No one’s fault. I wanted to explain about my childhood to you. I really wanted to. I was planning to. But we never spent enough time together. It isn’t the kind of conversation you can just have out of nowhere. The day that we split up, I was planning to. We were going to have a lot of time together then. But then you got called away again for work.’
Matt nodded slowly. That actually made sense. He’d been away for work a lot at that time – still was – and she’d been working shifts at the hospital. And, yes, if you had something big to say and you weren’t someone who liked to talk about your feelings, of course you wouldn’t just blurt it out in five snatched minutes alone.
Thinking about what he’d seen of her this week, he said, ‘If you don’t mind me saying, you actually still hold back a fair amount with your friends too, don’t you? Like you’ll “confide” in people that you hate your new hairstyle, but you won’t really tell anyone if you’re hurt that Tess apparently cared more about her wedding photos than your feelings. I should have seen that before. But you’regood; you talk a lot, but not too much, and a lot of people think they know you really well. And we don’t.’
She actually flinched at his words, which really didn’t make him feel good.
‘Yeah, doesn’t sound so nice when you summarise it like that.’ She looked him straight in the eye. ‘That’s me, though. And that’s it. That’s why we couldn’t be together. Because you’re very open, you genuinely do talk through your feelings, I think, and I realised when my granny died and I couldn’t talk to you about how I was feeling that ultimately it wouldn’t work between us. We just didn’t have enough time together to build a strong enough foundation for our relationship. I can’t see anything that could have changed that.’
‘But we’re talking now.’ Even more pathetic. Almost slightly pleading.
‘Well, we talked before. We just didn’ttalktalk. I wouldn’t say we’retalktalking now either. We’re just talking about why we – I – neverdidmanage totalktalk.’
‘Isn’t this the first step towards two people becoming really close, though? Explaining things in their pasts that really affected them? And how they don’t want to talk too much about things that have upset them? And the other person understanding that.’
‘Right now, I’m just giving you some details about my childhood. If I was really hurting about something, I might tell you but I wouldn’t want to spend the whole night talking about it because then I’d feel like I’d flipped straight back into the ill child or the unpopular unable-to-join-in-with-stuff child and that I wouldn’t be the person you fell in love with any more.’
‘You’ll always be the person I fell in love with.’ He didn’t feel at all pathetic now. He felt like he was fighting for Lily. He put his glass down, moved forward and held his hands out to her. ‘I fell in love with your kindness, your humour, your lovely smile. All you.’
She didn’t move to take his hands. ‘If something bad happened to both of us, which does happen to couples in a lifetime together, I don’t think we could deal with it similarly enough. I think it would drive a wedge between us. I think the way my grandmother and mother dealt so differently with my health drove a wedge between them, and they were mother and daughter.’
He looked at his outstretched hands and let them fall. Was she right? He wasn’t sure. He did know that it seemed like he wasn’t going to get through to her right now, like the fight he’d felt he was starting was already lost.
And that was probably for the best. What had he been thinking, actually? It wasn’t like they were going to reignite their relationship eight years on. It would be madness. He didn’t want to get hurt like that again. If he ever met another serious partner, he’d obviously like it to be someone who wouldn’t sleep with the roofer, but probably also someone who’d want to share the important stuff with him rather than dealing with it alone and not split up with him for unspecified reasons, which turned out to be, in many ways, just due to them not having been in the same place at the same time enough.
He nodded. ‘Maybe you’re right.’ It felt like this conversation was over. God. So deeply sad.
They sat in silence for a few moments and then – so suddenly that he almost jumped – Lily said, ‘I have a question for you.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘I really believed that you loved me.’ Not really a question.
‘I did.’ Hestilldid, if he was honest, although it was irrelevant. If there was one thing Lily and Gemma between them had taught him, it was that love was not enough on its own.
‘I never understood how you could meet someone else that you loved enough to marry so soon after splitting up with someone you loved. Or said you did. And I really thought you did. Kind of still think you did. I mean, I know you could totally meet two people you could fall in love with in very quick succession. So we should probably forget I asked. It just seemed odd, that’s all.’
It felt like Lily was almost wanting to talk about her feelings after all.
‘I’m sorry if it hurt you that I met Gemma so soon,’ he said, trying to tread cautiously.
Not cautious enough; her face immediately closed.
‘Oh, okay, yep,’ she said. ‘Right here we have a situation where you’re kind of thinking that I’ll admit to having been hurt and I don’t want to admit it. I mean, yes, of course I was hurt.Reallyhurt. Like, not being able to take pleasure inanything for a while level of hurt. But I didn’t want to dwell on it, beyond saying to my friends that of course I was really upset but that it was momentary and I’d be fine, and I got through it, and I still don’t want to talk about it. I don’t want to be on the receiving end of sympathy. I wouldn’t bemeany more.’
God. He just wanted to scoop her up in his arms and hug her and hug her.
‘Just so you know,’ he said. ‘I realised when my relationship with Gemma ended that I didn’t love her like I love you. I probably leapt into the relationship because I was hurt and confused and bereft, and I was trying to shove you out of my mind. Unconsciously, but I think that’s what I was doing. And after we’d been married for four years I found her in bed with the builder who’d been replacing our kitchen roof. And quite quickly I discovered that the most heartbreaking thing about our divorce was having to share custody of Elmer, our dog. Whereas the most heartbreaking thing about splitting with you was, and remains… losing you.’
It was only when he’d finished speaking that he realised that he’d used the wrong tense. He’d said he still loved Lily. And also, that was the first time he’d articulated any of that out loud about his marriage. Because until now, it had been too hard to talk about it. Oh, okay. Maybe he and Lily weren’t that different. Maybe with more life experience he’d have realised that she needed to cope with her bereavement any way she could, and if that involved not talking to him, he should have accepted that without question. He’d really let her down, actually.
‘I…’ he said, but Lily shook her head and said, ‘Shhh. Please?’
After a long pause, he nodded. It was too late for them.
She looked at him for a long time, and then whispered, ‘Thank you.’
She turned her face away and looked at the wall. When she looked back at him, he saw that she had tears rolling down both cheeks. Yeah, that was about how he felt too.
