Page 4

“One point eight seven,” she said. “And I’m so sorry, but Elspeth—my best friend at school—was already very tall by the time we saw Pride and Prejudice . So we checked it very thoroughly.”

“To see if he was suitable for her?”

Coralie nodded.

“Actually, I’m half an inch taller than the average British male,” the man said. “And I’ve got a really nice table upstairs.” Coralie laughed. “If your friend from school would like to join me.” She laughed again. “No, of course I mean—if you’d like to join me.”

She did.

···

It was almost comical, being plucked from her cramped bench near the toilets and set down at a coveted table near the fire.

Adam was his name; she’d found that out already.

With the Walthamstow agronomist, she’d felt like a robot programed to conduct a polite conversation in a language she hardly knew. With Adam, it was fun .

“So, why did you leave Australia to come here?”

“Oh!” She gave an enormous shrug.

“Are you mad?”

“Probably!”

“Okay, you don’t have to say why, but when?”

“When did I move? Just after the Olympics.”

“I see. You waited until London was good again. Some of us were forced to be here the whole time. And what do you do? Is that…”

“Boring!”

“Boring! Sorry! You’re right. It’s too boring to ask.”

“It’s fine to ask, but it’s boring to say. Basically, I’m a copywriter.”

He cupped his chin and said, mock-fascinated, “Go on.” They laughed. “But don’t you miss home? Where did you grow up?”

“I mainly grew up in Canberra. Which is…” The capital city , she was going to helpfully add.

But Adam knew it, had been there, was enthusing about it. “It was ages ago now—nine years? I was doing a profile of the Australian Labor leader at the time, Mark Latham. We thought he was a sort of heir to Blair, the Third Way, all that.”

“No way, wow…” Coralie did remember Mark Latham—vaguely. “I can’t believe you’ve been there!”

Did she miss home? She would let that one go. She didn’t know the answer.

It was her turn to ask questions. Adam was thirty-seven. He was a journalist. “Just a sec,” she said. “When you tell me who you write for—please don’t be offended if I don’t know it. I might! I just might not. I’ve only been here a few months.”

“You won’t know it,” he said. “You know the New Statesman ?”

“Oh, I do!”

“Well, it’s not it!” They laughed; they seemed to be laughing nonstop.

That was what had been missing from her life: jokes!

Hearing them, making them. “No, I write for a modern pretender, Young Country . Never heard of it—okay! It was set up in 1996, just before I left university, by a multi-multimillionaire with a packaging fortune. Charlie Tuck? Charles, Lord Tuck? None of this means anything to you. It was right before the Blair landslide—Blair? Tony Blair? No?”

They laughed again, because of course she’d heard of Tony Blair, Cool Britannia or whatever, and Iraq.

“The title actually comes from a Blair speech.” Suddenly Adam dropped into character, his shining eyes fixed on a point behind her, his voice vibrating with passion.

“I want us to be a young country again, with a common purpose, ideals we cherish and live up to, not resting on past glories, fighting old battles and sitting back, hand on mouth, concealing a yawn of cynicism, but ready for the day’s challenge.

Ambitious! Idealistic! United! Not saying, ‘This was a great country….’?” He held out two fists.

“But ‘Britain can and will be. A great country! Again!’?”

“Extremely intense, wow! Tony, is that you?”

He wasn’t coasting on his floppy hair and knitwear. Adam was performing—for her.

“Probably my best impression,” he said. “I can’t do accents, which limits me.

Yes, I’d missed out on all the good traineeships, like The Times , and I was rejected by the civil service fast-track scheme, and obviously I couldn’t take the slow track.

” He made an appalled face. “So I was very lucky to be hired at YC . Not as a writer then, as a general dogsbody.”

“Like Bridget Jones,” Coralie said appreciatively. “Fannying about with press releases.”

“In my little skirt. Bridget Jones came out that year! The book. Everyone was talking like her: v.g. Very good. Those were the days. Now I write for Young Country , and I host their award-winning podcast, also called Young Country , regularly in the top twelve, or fifteen, in the News bit of UK iTunes, and I freelance at other places, and I also do a bit of…” He coughed modestly. “Broadcast.”

“Wow!” Coralie gave him the reply he clearly craved: “v.g.”

It was nice he liked his job. She wouldn’t be able to conjure a single anecdote from hers. Except maybe the time she’d asked how many people worked there. Stefan had said—so dryly she hadn’t at first realized it was funny—“About half.”

“Same again? Do you fancy a bowl of chips?”

Strictly, it was her round, but although she wouldn’t dream of complaining, her crap new secondhand iPhone had cost ￡300. “I’d love the same again,” she said. “Thanks!”

When he sat back down, she asked about Zora.

He leaned forward: She was perfect, he said.

Hilarious, maybe a poet—definitely a genius.

They once had a power line go out on the street, and Zora said something amazing about the torch Adam used: It “moved the dark out of your way.” She was three at the time.

Wasn’t that amazing? Coralie agreed sincerely that it was.

She was aged nearly five and had just started preschool.

Her classroom had a giant behavior chart, and all the students had to “stay on the happy smile.” She was always so beautifully behaved, merely the idea of being “on the sad face” made her cry.

Adam shook his head. “Can you imagine? In the end, Marina and I had to go to the school. Marina is Zora’s mother.

” Coralie had a sudden, vivid flash of him adding “my wife”—she almost gasped.

“My ex,” he said. Coralie soberly inclined her head.

“I think Marina wanted to tear down the charts, sue them for Zora’s distress, take her out of there forever, put her in a forest school.

I was thinking more like—major charm offensive—maybe asking the teacher to tell Zora she was the best girl ever? ”

“What did the teacher say?”

“We were sitting in the little chairs at the back of the classroom. We launched into our speeches; the teacher held up her hand. ‘I know these girls,’ she said. ‘Perfectionists. Get to secondary and it’s top marks, violin, piano, eating disorders, ashamed, anxious, hiding themselves. If Zora ever talks back, or sets a foot wrong, you should throw her a party.’?”

A shiver ran up Coralie’s arm. Until about two years ago, she’d never set a foot wrong either.

“I know ,” Adam said, though surely he couldn’t.

“So where does she live? With both of you?”

“Yes, with both of us—separately, obviously. We used to have the nanny, so she’d have a week at one house and then swap. But now, because of school, she’s at Marina’s, in Camden, during the week.”

“And is that…not as good?”

“It’s equally bad for both of us, Marina and me, in different ways. I hate missing out on bedtime. Marina feels like she doesn’t get to do anything fun. We make it work.”

“What’s Zora doing this weekend, the long weekend?”

“Marina’s boyfriend, Tom, is very family, family, family . They’ve gone for a big Easter with his parents.”

“Are you not very family, family ?” It was the obvious question, but it felt freighted with meaning. Imagine if he said that he wasn’t.

“My mum and her partner don’t get up to London much.” He paused for a second. “And my dad died when I was eighteen.”

She knew, from experience, why he had paused. Death, like terminal illness, was a genuine conversation murderer. “That’s so young, how horrible.” She moved on as naturally as she could. “And do you have siblings?”

Relieved, he said, “No. Do you?”

“I have my brother, Daniel.”

“Older or younger?”

“He’s only twenty-five.” She pictured him at the hospital, picking up Mum, almost trembling with responsibility.

“And you are…”

“Thirty in September.”

“Thirty, okay!” He seemed relieved; this made her like him. “But you and your brother, are you close?”

“In some ways—like, I really love him, as a person. But my dad was in the army, and he was posted to Indonesia when I started Year 7, so I boarded at my school in Canberra, and Daniel went with my parents to Jakarta. I hardly ever saw him. We had two separate childhoods.”

“That’s crazy,” Adam said.

“I know! My own brother!”

“No, it’s crazy because my dad was based in Singapore, and I boarded too! Here, though, in England. From age eleven.”

“Eleven! Same as me!”

“Mine was only weekly boarding—I escaped for the weekend. That’s why I’m more normal and better adjusted than you.”

“But you were boarding a decade before me….”

“A decade!”

“Mental health wasn’t even invented then.”

“Too true. Sadly.”

“Eleven seems so young now.”

“I know,” Adam said. “I still sucked my thumb. I had two tigers, stuffed tigers from the gift shop at Singapore Zoo. They were balding from being in my bed since I was small. And every night I waited till the other boys fell asleep so I could bring out my tigers and sort of sniff them, stroke their bald patches, get some thumb-sucking going.”

“And do you still do it? When you go to bed?”

“I would! I’d love nothing more. But something awful happened.

When my parents split up, my mum moved back here with me.

My dad stayed behind, and I spent one holiday a year with him.

On the last one, just as I was leaving school, the last holiday before he died, he gave me a huge backpack for Christmas.

It had a little, smaller bag that clipped on, sort of like a day pack. I had them in there, the tigers.”

“What were their names?”

“Tigey and Cuddles.”

They both laughed for a long time.

“This is already the worst story I’ve ever heard,” Coralie said. “It’s the saddest, most heartbreaking story ever. I don’t think I even want to know what happened.”

“By the time I got to Heathrow, the small pack had come off—gone. They were gone.”

“Awful, awful. But what about your thumb? You still have that.”

They both gazed down at it. “It’s nothing special on its own, though. Not without stroking the missing bits of fur, giving their ears a sniff, you know. The whole experience.”

So he was half an inch taller than the average British male (and fine with it), divorced (and fine with it), outside the iTunes podcast top ten in an obscure category (and fine with it)—and a thumb-sucker.

Coralie pushed her wineglass to the side.

She rested her palm on the table, close to his.

He stretched his hand forward and touched hers.

Their fingers gently interlaced. Now they gazed at each other.

His pupils were enormous and black. She wished she knew how to draw.

She’d love to draw his face. After a moment, he came round to her side of the table.

They leaned forward, and she felt for a moment like she’d tip over into him and join him—inside him. They kissed.

“Wow,” Adam said.

“Wow!”

“If Tigey and Cuddles could see me now!”