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Instead I turned the picture to face the wall and went downstairs to see what I could do to save my sofa. I balanced one bit of it on the coffee table, another bit on the stairs (though this made getting to the second floor comically difficult), found some bricks in the garden shed to raise the rest high enough that if the flood water was able to reach it, I’d have problems far beyond whatever it was doing to my furniture.
My house looked like a madman’s Jenga, but it was a solution of a sort. I was surveying my handiwork with a burgeoning sense of mild accomplishment when my phone rang, and I answered instinctively, not even pausing to check the number.
“Edwin, sweetheart—are you all right? I’ve been on the internet. It looks bad up there.”
For a moment my mind was blank. Not for lack of recognition, but too much. Her son had once called mesweethearttoo. “Mrs. Chankseliani…um…yes, well, I’m…I mean…” Why on earth had I picked up? I hated not being able to see who I was talking to. I didn’t exactly enjoy having to watch someone’s eyes glaze with boredom or their mouth tighten with frustration, but at leastthen I had some control, and I could always take refuge in silence. Phones left me helpless, babbling anxiously into an unforgiving void. “I’m f-flooding a bit, but it’s under control, I think.”
“The internet said David Cameron was visiting.”
“W-well, not me personally.”
“He was wearing wellies.”
Something that might almost have been a laugh bubbled out of me unexpectedly. “S-so am I. In my living room.”
“Oh, your poor little house. Do you need anything? I could pop round.”
She couldn’t pop round. She lived north of the centre, which admittedly was closer than my own family—who were in Bath—but I doubted it was safe to travel considering half of Oxfordshire was sufficiently waterlogged to merit a concerned visit from the PM. “Thanks, but…no. It would be…” Weird. Weird as hell. There was an awkward silence, magnified by the fact we were on the phone. “P-probab-ab…p-otentially difficult with the weather.”54
“Yes, but you shouldn’t be on your own.”
I sat down gingerly on the unsofa-ed edge of the coffee table. There were so many things I could have said—there was the fact I was alone because Marius had left me, or the fact I was thirty-one and therefore a legitimate grown-up who could look after himself, or the fact this was a frankly peculiar conversation to be having with your ex-boyfriend’s mother—but none of them would have been helpful. “I’m sure David Cameron will fix it.”
“You will get in touch if you need anything, won’t you?”
“I… It’s not your job to take care of me.”
“I’m aware of that, Edwin, but family is family.”
“Yes, but you’re not my—” I stopped, but it was too late.
Phone silences are the worst silences. They have this endless, untethered quality.
Finally Mrs. Chankseliani said, “Do you really believe that?”
“W-well, I—”
“I love my son, but I know him. He’d never sent me a Mother’s Day card in his life. Never remembered a single birthday. Until he met you.”55
“He…he used to forget mine.” Our anniversary too, remembrance usually catching him the moment he came home.“Shit, shit, I did it again. What’s wrong with me? Let me make it up to you, sweetheart.”And he always did, and I never minded, preferring the passion of his moment to any carefully planned extravaganza. “It wasn’t meant to be hurtful.”
“Of course it wasn’t. He just can’t do dates. He never could. But you remember everything, don’t you?”
Alone, and suddenly so very seen, I was blushing to an empty room. “I…d-don’t remember. I have an app.” But before the app, there’d been a spreadsheet. Before that, a little book bound in dark-red leather. I liked knowing which days were special to people.
“You were good for him, Edwin. You notice things in ways he doesn’t. Or can’t. I’m afraid he wasn’t good for you.”
“No, he was.” It was a little hard to breathe, to keep my voice steady. This wasn’t something I’d thought I would ever really have to talk about, and certainly not with Marius’s mother. “He made me very happy.”
“To be honest, I kept hoping you would work it out.”
“S-so did I. For a while. But then I stopped.” A new thought unfurled, a slightly eerie one. “I’m not…not…w-waiting for him to come back anymore.”
“Well, of course you shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean I want you to stop being part of my family, though.”
“But it was Marius who… He was the c-connection.”
“Yes, at first. Except I’ve known you for ten years, sweetheart. I’m not going to stop caring about you.”
