I have to agree with him there. Mack never once slobbered overmelike that. We had our fair share of decent enough intimate moments, but thinking about them now, there was never any time to luxuriate in each other like they do in romance novels, and no snuggling up and sleeping in each other’s arms afterwards either.
‘I thought that maybe our love was so deep it remained unspoken, you know? Like it was buried very,verydeep under those lovely waistcoats and Savile Row shirts I used to lug back and forth to the dry cleaners for him.’
‘I didn’t know you were doing that. You kept that quiet,’ Daniel says.
I know he’s peering down at me but I can’t meet his eyes for some reason. I squirm a bit, almost on the verge of making excuses for Mack, wanting to say he was so dreadfully busy and important, and I didn’t mind helping him, really. But he’s right, I kept it secret.
Subconsciously I must have known I was being taken advantage of, and Daniel would have spotted it a mile off if I’d said anything. I try to gloss over the little ashamed feelings that ignite in me and I think of all the good stuff that distracted me from the red flags; the flirty texts inviting me round his place, the way he’d fan out the takeaway menus and let me order for us while he uncorked another fancy bottle and lit the candles, and how deflated he’d be when he realised he couldn’t make yet another of the opportunities I’d set up to meet Mum and Dad or to join me alone for a romantic lunch off campus. ‘Judith, I’m so sorry, another meeting’s come up,’ he’d say, looking stricken and guilty. ‘You know what the Dean’s like. Look here, I got you this,’ and he’d slip me a box of the chocolate truffles I once said I liked or a lovely new edition of the book he was currently reading so I could share the experience with him, and we’d talk about it late into the evenings round his flat when he was finally free, and he’d get a wolfish look in his eyes and take the book from my hands and lead me to his bedroom.Hmm, looking back, there were plenty of red flags – like the texts he was always getting.
Glumly, I tell Daniel about them. ‘He always was a bit secretive, looking back. I’d put it down to him having a lot on, what with him angling for a professorship and everything… but the texts would arrive at all hours and he’d slink away to read them and I’d hear him furtively texting back. I always assumed it was other night-owl academics asking searching intellectual questions or wondering what time the morning meeting was supposed to start.’
I was so determined this was it. The One. The kind of True Love heroines in novels find before they hit their thirties. The kind that lasts a lifetime. I was so busy kidding myself, I let myself get played.
I glance warily up at Daniel’s face, but he’s still not judging. He’s nodding and crumpling his lips sympathetically. He’s no stranger to this kind of thing. His last girlfriend cheated on him with Deltoid Dave, the town’s sports centre manager with the deliciously thick thighs who always smells of chlorine. I squeeze Daniel a little tighter, take a breath and go on.
‘Some nights when I arrived at Mack’s place, he’d tell me there were members of the faculty unexpectedly round for drinks or he was working on a big research bid so I couldn’t come in, and he’d promise to make it up to me the next day, which he always did – dinner at his, flowers maybe – and so I’d just accept it and get the bus home again in the dark.’
It’s only now my brain choses to replay a scene I’d packed away in a memory box marked ‘Nothing To See Here: Only Perfectly Innocent Boyfriend Behaviour’. It’s from the night I turned up at Mack’s door with a spare toothbrush, some knickers and PJs and I asked him if I could have some drawer space to keep them in since I was staying over so often.
Mack had looked at the toothbrush still in its plastic packet in my hand and said, as cool as you like, ‘Judith, it’s not as if youlivehere now, is it?’ He’d arched a lovely blond brow and smiled like I was a naughty girl and he was humouring me with his light disapproval, but it worked. I shoved my stuff back in my bag and carted it all back here again.
I’ll keep that memory to myself. Daniel already knows this is a new low for me, no need to overdo it. But now the lid’s off that memory box there are humiliations bursting forth from it and parading across my vision, all gaudy and grotesque now I’m finally grasping the fact that Mack well and truly took advantage of me.
He certainly got more out of me than he ever put in to our… well, was it even a relationship? In return I got the illusion of a lovely life: the expensive wine, the wonderful old leather-bound tomes piled everywhere in his artfully shabby home. It looked a lot like the bookish, cerebral existence I used to dream of as a skint baker’s daughter growing up in Nowhere-in-the-Sticks, and the conversations and the grown-up sophistication really hooked me, convincing me I’d found my place in life.
I could kick myself now. There was me, thinking we were daring bohemians, living a life of ideas and discussion, hiding our love from uncaring, authoritarian university governors; but it turns out I was just one in what is probably a long line of clueless students he shagged. But I’ll bet there were none more willing and docile than me.
I think of the new bride in Daphne du Maurier’sRebecca– another of my absolute lifelong favourites, and a book I retreat into when in need of some glamorous, gothic thrills. Maxim’s bride was happy to sit at her handsome, aristocratic husband’s feet and have him absent-mindedly stroke her head like she was one of his dogs, and now that pathetic image has popped into my brain I erupt into tears while Daniel rubs circles on my back.
‘Imagine waiting for so long to get to uni only to be hopelessly distracted by a bad man so it all ended in humiliation,’ I sniff.
‘Uh, it ended in you getting a big, shiny award, don’t forget.’ Daniel points to the star by my bedside. ‘You’re being too hard on yourself. Mack looked legit, like a young Indiana Jones, only more anaemic and homely, you know? Who’d have thought under all that gabardine and paleness there’d beat the heart of a scumbag? And you’re not the only person to fall for his dandified nonsense, are you?’
‘And not the last, I imagine,’ I throw in, cringing at myself. ‘Do you know who I feel like? I’m Jude the Obscure.’ This comes out with a big, self-pitying sob.
‘Never heard of her,’ Daniel shrugs and my jaw rattles off his chest.
‘Thomas Hardy’s last novel?’ I say, sitting up again. ‘Jude’s a man, by the way, and all he wanted was to go to uni. He strived and pined and waited for his chance and one day he finally went for it, but he was fated to be a lowly stonemason, you see? He wasbornto it. He should have accepted his fate but instead he fought against it. And you know, he might have succeeded but he kept getting distracted from his ambitions by his libido and his insecurities. In the end, all he ever succeeded in doing was making himself and everyone around him thoroughly miserable.’
‘That sounds hideous,’ Daniel grimaces. ‘Remind me not to watchthatadaptation. I’m guessing he died of consumption without a china pot to piss in like all the other Victorians you’re obsessed with?’
‘Close enough,’ I say.
Daniel’s not a book-lover as such, not like me. His passions lie elsewhere – in his job which he’s properly brilliant at (he’s on his way to becoming a senior staff nurse in the next few months) and he loves following designer trends, looking for rip-off high-street pieces that he somehow throws together on his lovely, solid frame and looks a million dollars in for just a fraction of the cost of the catwalk originals. He really does look runway ready at all times, even now in his stripy flannels. Having said that, he’s not averse toPride and Prejudicebinges with me when things get tough.
It took us both a while to realise Daniel was as interested in Mr Darcy emerging from the lake in his wet shirt as I was, and even longer for him to articulate that he was definitely interested in both my heroes and heroines. That was around about the time we morphed into the inseparable friends we are today. I remember the night it happened, too.
It was the summer Gran had the first stroke. I was about to turn eighteen, and we’d just got to the bus stop after our school leavers’ ball. I was reaching for him, after downing our eighty-seventh sneaky lemon Hooch of the evening – I don’t know, it may as well have been, we were so inappropriately hammered – but when our lips met there was just… nothing, except maybe awkwardness. We’d both squinted and blinked at each other and had another try just to be extra sure, but still nothing. So we shrugged and laughed, a little abashed by this sudden, strange shift in feeling as it dawned on us that somehow we’d grown out of our status as childhood sweethearts.
It hurt a bit at the time and now I try not to dwell too much on the fact that we’ve seen each other naked and had some actually really sweet and oh-my-goodness-hot moments back in the day.
Whatever it was that suddenly cooled between us, it must have happened at roughly the same time as my bombshell realisation that my parents would need me to look after Gran, who’d just moved in with us, and that we couldn’t really afford for me to go to uni right away.
That summer I accepted that my teenage years were well and truly over, and I packed them away, embracing my fate as a good girl who puts her family first, and gladly too. Daniel left town to start his nurses’ training soon after (three years at Edinburgh Napier – God, I missed him!), and that truly was the end of me and Daniel as an adorable couple.
We were something bigger than that, it turned out. We were soulmates, and even if I can’t say I was a young and reckless Fresher straight out of high school or a gap-year backpacker exploring the bookshops and libraries of the world – my deepest, most secret dream – or anything like that, I will always be able to say I had my lifeline, Daniel, and my lovely family, and I wouldn’t swap any of that for another iota of teenage freedom.
It’s dark, it’s late and we’re both getting sleepy, so I pull the covers up over us and we lay ourselves down for the night.
