‘But… what?’ Lizzie takes a big slurp of her wine and waves her hand in the direction of mine like she’s telling me that I need to drink too.
I pick up my wine glass, take a long, slow sip and say nothing. I’m not sure what else thereisto say.
‘So.’ Lizzie stands up and turns her oven on. ‘We’re having lasagne and salad. I made them earlier. Could you clarify what you mean by your relationshipsdofinish?’
‘Erm. Just that. All my relationships finish. They just do. It’s something about me. So I don’t want to start one with someone I’d be sad to split up with. And I don’t want to start one with someone I already know I wouldn’t be sad to split up with because obviously why then would I want to have a relationship with them?’
‘So that’s why you only ever go on the occasional date? Because if you really like someone you don’t want to date them seriously and if you don’t really like them you don’t want to either?’ Lizzie takes a big oblong dish out of the oven and removes foil from the top of it.
‘Basically yes?’
‘I’m mind-blown. We’ve been best friends for so many years and you’ve been carrying all this around inside you. Why have we never talked about this before?’ She puts the foil in the bin and sits back down.
‘I’ve always felt that youknowthis. Like it’s so obvious? And I don’t like talking about it, plus there’s nothing much to say.’
‘So that’s why you’ve always been so vague whenever I’ve tried to talk about the end of your relationships? And I suppose also I did have a lot of dating disasters of my own and maybe I’ve only started to think more clearly about dating in general since I met Dan.’
Lizzie shakes her head and then sits for a long moment, clearly thinking. (She has this actual thinking-woman pose: elbows resting on table, hands propping chin, eyes kind of swivelling around the room.)
I just carry on taking little sips of my wine and watching her and waiting for her to finish thinking.
‘Driving tests,’ she pronounces finally.
I look at her, confused. Why has she so thoroughly changed the subject?
‘Remember how I took my driving test seven times.’
I nod. You couldn’t have known Lizzie during her learning-to-drive era andnotremember that. She became like a woman possessed. Shehadto pass. I don’t think she’s driven since.
‘And how you took yours twice,’ she continues.
I nod again.
She looks over at the oven, where the still-heating-up light has just clicked off, and stands up.
As she puts the lasagne in, she says, ‘Until we passed our driving tests, we’d only ever failed them.’ She sets a timer and sits back down. ‘Similarly, until you’ve had a successful relationship, you’ve only ever had failed ones. Failed exams don’t mean you’re never going to pass. Failed relationships don’t mean you’re never going to have a successful one.’
I frown, confused again, this time because on the one hand what she just said sounds as though it makes perfect sense, but on the other I know it doesn’t.
‘Not similar,’ I state.
‘Why, though?’
‘One is an exam and the other is a human relationship?’
‘So what, though?’ She tops up both our glasses.
I just sit and stare at her, while I try to work out how to articulate this.
‘Erm,’ I say after a bit, as a space filler.
She stands up and gets oil, vinegar and mustard and makes salad dressing.
‘Going back to your driving test analogy,’ I say eventually, ‘everyone’s got something they’re never going to manage. Andmost people realise that at some point. Like you might try and try and try to run a four-minute mile but eventually you realise that it’s never going to happen and you give up, be it by choice, or by de facto continued failure. For most people, I think there would be a number of driving tests after which they’d say:do you know what? This is not for me and I’m giving up.Remember you nearly didn’t take your seventh one?’
‘But Ididtake it,’ she says triumphantly. ‘And I passed it.’
‘But if you’d failed it, and then you’d failed say another ten, do you not think at some point you’d have said to yourself that driving wasn’t for you and given up?’
