Page 63

SIXTY-ONE THREE MONTHS AGO

I take Nina Swann out for our first date roughly a year after Paddy’s death.

We had been messaging back and forth for weeks beforehand.

There were times when I thought she would never take the bait, that she would keep me at arm’s length forevermore.

But then I said something profound about the nature of loss, or at least I didn’t think it was profound, but Nina said it was and I could tell that I had somehow gone up in her estimation, and when I mentioned that I had business on the coast and was spending a night in Folkestone, she finally caved.

“We should meet up,” she said. “I can take you out for dinner. If you’d like?”

It is strange being face-to-face with Nina Swann after all those months watching her from a distance or on the screen of my laptop.

I find a new appreciation of her face when I’m close up to it and not distracted by her slightly outlandish, masculine style of dressing.

Her face has symmetry, and her skin is very smooth for a woman of her age.

Her eyes are a very rich shade of coffee-bean brown, and she has a slender neck.

She is also, it turns out, utterly charming.

I hadn’t, for some reason, imagined her to be charming.

Seeing her on that seedy night out with her younger lover when she had looked distracted and unhappy, washed-out in the shadows of the tacky dive bar, I had assumed that she would be a faded light.

But the woman who meets me at a lively beachfront pizza restaurant on an unseasonably warm late October evening is glowing, effervescent almost, and the first thought that hits me is… Is she glad her husband’s dead?

I watch her face for her reaction to mine. I’d sent her a selfie at her request and told her that I’m tall, so she would know what to expect. But still, I want to see her take me in. I am not disappointed.

“Wow,” she says, as I walk toward her. “You’re gorgeous!

” She bursts into a billow of infectious laughter and then leans in and kisses me on my cheek.

“Sorry,” she says, “that was a bit forward of me. I have no filter. Tend to speak as I think. But seriously, you are very good-looking. Objectively.”

I smile at her, beguiled and flattered, and say, “Gosh, well, thank you. You’re—objectively—very good-looking too. If I might say.”

“You might!” she echoes, and then she leads me into the restaurant, which is modern and open-plan, glass on all sides, decking leading from the frontage out onto the pebbled beach.

The couple seated next to us have a small dog with them; they tell us it is a shih tzu mixed with something else and I spend some time fussing over it before turning back to Nina, who is smiling at me warmly.

“Dog lover?” she asks.

“Yeah. Better than people. All of them. How about you?”

She shrugs. “I do like dogs, yes. Had them as a kid. But Paddy didn’t like them.

Thought they were dirty. Didn’t let them in his restaurants either.

I’ve already changed that policy.” She emits a tiny and very telling tut.

“So, we never had one. Kids begged for one for over a decade and then eventually gave up.”

“You could get one now?”

“Well, the irony, of course, is that now I’m too busy to have a dog.”

“The restaurants?” I ask.

“Yes.” She sighs. “The restaurants.”

“A lot of work?”

“Unreal. And of course Paddy thrived on it. He loved the stress, the long hours, the high-octane atmosphere, the young people. He loved all the young people. He loved being in his restaurants for as many hours a day as he possibly could.”

I wince empathetically. “That must have been tough for you?”

She nods, and I sense her effervescence fading a little.

“Yup. It was basically as if I didn’t have a husband.

TBH. And now it’s all on me and I’m trying my best, I really am, but it’s so hard.

I don’t know why anyone would choose to go into the restaurant industry, I really don’t.

” She glances up at me and says, “I suppose it’s a vocation, isn’t it? ”

I nod. Of course, Nina thinks that I am a seasoned restaurateur, that the same blood that ran though Paddy’s veins runs through mine, and I blow out my cheeks and say, “It is. And frankly, no, I didn’t have it.

That’s why I’m more of a sidelines guy these days—throw my money at them and run.

Let them do all the hard work. Because, Jesus, it really is hard work. ”

And here I do sound authentic because I have actually worked in the restaurant industry.

I mean, Christ, I’ve done most things. You tend to have when you get to my age without having had a solid career.

I worked at a tearoom near where I grew up in West Yorkshire.

Coach parties of senior citizens came in off an A road and I served them nasty sandwiches and tea in pots.

I worked there for just over a year and after that I got a job in town at a posh brasserie-style place (well, as posh and brasserie-like as anywhere in the west of Yorkshire in the eighties could have been), where I served tables in a ridiculous waistcoat and bow tie.

I lasted six months before breaking free.

And then there were a couple of years of temping in London, washing up and sous-cheffing and such.

It was shortly after my interaction with the young Paddy in Mayfair that I met my first client and realized there were more ways of getting through life than chasing stupid careers from the bottom end of the ladder and being spoken to like dirt by small, chippy men with big egos.

“So, tell me about this wine bar of yours.”

“Well, I’d not call it mine .” I’m ramping up the Yorkshire, to create a bond over our shared northern-ness.

“It’s partly mine. I went in with a young entrepreneur a few years ago.

I give him advice. He runs the place. I own shares.

It’s what I’ve ended up doing at this stage.

I’m basically retired now. Well, semi-retired.

But I do like being on the shop floor from time to time, when it gets busy. ”

“Well, lucky, lucky you. I can’t even begin to imagine what that must feel like.”

“It feels wonderful. It feels incredible. I just need to sort out the, er, accommodation side of things. I’ve got this place in South London, belongs to a friend.

He’s letting me stay there until I can free up some cash to buy a new place.

It’s a bit of a shithole, to be honest. But it’s only temporary, and I’ve lived in worse places, I can tell you. ”

We order our pizzas and a bottle of local sparkling wine (have you tried Kentish sparkling wine, by the way?

It really is excellent), then chat for a while about our backgrounds, getting into the more granular stuff—we’d already covered the big stuff in our endless WhatsApp messaging of the past few months.

And then, when the conversation slows and the first glass of wine has loosened us both up a little, I look at Nina and I say, “How are you doing? The kids? How is it all? Are you any closer to healing?”

She blinks slowly and sighs. Then she looks up at me with those madly brown eyes of hers and says, “We’re coping.

Well, at least, I’m coping. And Arlo. I mean, Arlo is basically bulletproof, you know.

But Ash, I don’t know. I’m really worried about her.

She has this overly romanticized, idealized vision of her father. She genuinely thinks he was perfect.”

“And he wasn’t?”

“No,” she says bluntly. “Of course he wasn’t.

Nobody is. But Paddy. My God, he was a difficult man to live with.

A difficult man to be married to. And Ash—she was always such a daddy’s girl.

Actually, more than that, just such a little girl.

Ever since Arlo was born, it’s like she has clung on to the role of being the little one, the one and only, the center of our worlds, not that she was mean to Arlo, they’ve always got on very well, but it’s like she felt it was her role to give us someone to parent.

“And then, last year, just a few months before Paddy died. Oh, Jesus… I probably shouldn’t be telling you, but—hold on.

” She smiles and picks up the wine bottle.

“Wait.” She tops up our glasses, then knocks back a large gulp and readies herself.

“She had a lovely flatshare near Greenwich, two nice flatmates, a great job working for a lifestyle publisher, a fairly OK salary, although it was never really about that because we were happy to keep supporting her here and there. She had an allowance. And it was all going so well. I thought, Finally my girl has grown wings. And then one night, one of her flatmates called me. She said the police were at their flat, questioning Ash about something, and that Ash was totally losing the plot and the police were saying if she didn’t calm down, they’d have to take her in, and could I talk to her.

So, they put me on the phone with her and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying, had to count her down, you know, eight, seven, six, five, etc.

, until she was calm enough to tell me that her boss had made a complaint about her.

Apparently,” she says with a sigh, “she’d been stalking him.

She was convinced that he was in love with her, that he’d sent her love letters, that he was going to leave his wife for her.

She had the letters, but it turned out that they weren’t from him—that they were most likely from her. ”

I throw her a quizzical look.