The Other Side of the Story (55 page)
Lily
Anton's phone rang once. It rang twice. My heart was pounding, my hands were slippery, I was mouthing, 'Please God.' It rang three times. Four times. Five times. Six times.
Shit…
On the seventh ring, there was a click, a burst of pub-like chatter and laughter, then someone - Anton - said, 'Lily?'
Joy rendered me light-headed. (Though I must admit, I had called him on his mobile. I had not taken any chances.) And before I had uttered a word he had known it was me! Another sign! (Or else he had caller display.)
'Anton? Can I see you?'
'When? Now?'
Yes. Where are you?'
'Wardour Street.'
'Meet me at St John's Wood tube station.'
'I'll leave now. I'll be with you in fifteen, twenty minutes at the latest.'
Infused with wild energy, I ran to the mirror and pulled a brush through my hair. I rummaged through my make-up bag but I didn't need any, I already looked transformed. Nevertheless, I quickly rubbed on blusher and lipgloss, because it couldn't hurt. And mascara. And some weird brow-bone highlighter stuff that Irina had forced upon me. Then I made myself stop — I was starting to obsess — and went to ask Irina to watch Ema. 'I'm popping out for a while.'
She asked, 'Why?'
'I'm going to do something rash.'
'Vit Anton? Good. But you kennot go looking like that. You need pore-minimizer.' She reached for her crate of cosmetics but I fled.
I had to leave the apartment. Although Anton would not yet have arrived at the station, I had far too much nervous energy to be contained within walls.
Dusk was falling, the light was navy blue and at the speed I was walking, it took me less than five minutes to walk to the station.
The vision of my future I had had when I was in the numb stage of grieving for Anton returned with force; I had been convinced that a new life was waiting for me, full of feelings and laughter and colour and with an entirely new cast of people to its current one. I had not stopped believing in that vision, but some of the cast were the same. Anton was still the leading man, he had made the part his own.
I rounded the corner to do the last stretch and, through the gloom, fixed my eyes on the station entrance, the magical portal that would deliver him to me.
Then I noticed that a rangy figure outside the station was watching me. Although it was too dark to see properly and very soon for Anton to have arrived already from central London, I knew instantly that it was him. I knew it was
him
.
I did not physically stumble but I felt as if I had. It was like seeing him for the first time.
My footsteps slowed; I knew what was going to happen. Once I was beside him, that would be it. There would be no talking; we would be fixed, fused, forever.
I could have stopped. I could have turned back and erased the future, but I continued putting one foot in front of the other, as if an invisible thread led me directly to him.
Each breath I took echoed loud and slow as if I was scuba diving and as I got closer, I had to stop looking at him. So I focused on the pavement — a Fortnum and Mason carrier bag, a champagne cork, posh rubbish, after all this was St John's Wood — until I was next to him.
His first words to me were, 'I saw you from miles away.' He picked up a strand of my hair.
I moved closer to his height, his beauty, his Anton-ness and into the light of his presence. 'I saw you too.'
While people hurried in and out of the station like characters in a speeded-up movie, Anton and I remained motionless as statues, his eyes on mine, his hands on my arms, completing the magic circle. And I said what I had always known, 'As soon as I saw you I knew it was you.'
Epilogue
Almost nine months to the day that Owen broke it off with me, he and Lorna had a little girl and called her — wait for it! — Agnes Lana May. Nothing that could remotely be construed as 'Gemma'. They didn't ask me to be her godmother. Currently, there are no plans to go to the Dordogne together.
My book came out in the middle of May and it bombed. They blamed the cover, the title and the atrocious reviews. The general tone was, '… escapist pap. The abandoned wife undergoes a serious make-over, picks up a much younger man and within six months she's running her own business. This makes a mockery of the situation of real women who've been abandoned after years of loyal service. Naturally, the husband returns at the end of the book, worn out from demands for sex from his mistress and finds his wife won't have him…'
It was horrifically humiliating. The only nice reviews were in crappy magazines that print a lot of 'I stole my daughter's husband' type stories. One of them called it Revenge Literature and clearly this was something they approved of.
But even that wasn't enough to sell any books and I must admit I didn't help: just before the book came out, Dad asked me not to do publicity where I told the real story behind the book, and something must have softened in me because I took pity on him and agreed. (It didn't make me very popular with Dalkin Emery's publicity department. They'd all kinds of things lined up where me and Mam would go on daytime telly and trash Dad. But Mam had backed out of it as soon as Dad came home.)
There won't be a second book; I have no imagination and nothing bad has happened to me - apart from my first book getting horrible reviews and not being able to write a second book, but that's all a little post-modern. The fact is my life is too nice and there are worse complaints.
At the moment I limit my artistic endeavours to making up stories for abandoned women about their runaway boyfriends. I'm very good at it and, within my circle, I have quite a reputation. It'll do me. I still have most of the advance money (they didn't make me give it back even though the book sold almost nothing) and maybe one day in the misty future I'll set up on my own. Not as easy as it sounds, we're not all Jojo Harvey, who now has fabulous coloured-glass offices in Soho and four people working for her, including her old assistant Manoj. Not only am I a cringing coward by comparison but I'm under contract not to take any clients with me.
Lily's career goes from strength to strength. She wrote a new book called
A Charmed Life
, which was like another
Mimi's Remedies
and sold in its millions. Then
Crystal Clear
, the book that nearly broke Dalkin Emery, surprised everyone by getting short-listed for the Orange Prize and
that
also sold in its millions. Apparently she's writing something new, they're all very excited.
I actually met Anton and Lily at a publishing do, shortly after
Chasing Rainbows
came out and my publishers were still talking to me. I was moving through the throng, trying to find the ladies' and suddenly me and Lily ended up standing before each other.
'Gemma?' Lily croaked. She looked absolutely terrified.
And after all the fantasies I'd entertained over the years - splashing a glass of red wine in her face, zapping her with death stares, shouting out to the roomful of her peers about what an evil bitch she was - I watched myself take her hand, hold it and say with a certain amount of sincerity, 'I enjoyed
Mimi's Remedies
, and so did my mother.'
'Thank you, thank you so much, Gemma. And I loved
Chasing Rainbows'
She did her sweet-girl smile, then Anton appeared and that was fine too. We made a few moments of innocuous chitchat, and as they left Anton tried to hold Lily's hand, but she wouldn't and I heard her say, 'Have some consideration.' Meaning, I think, for me.
And yes, I felt sad then. That sort of gesture was Lily all over; she was very mindful of other people's feelings. It was a pity we couldn't be friends because (apart from that one boyfriend-stealing incident) she was a lovely person. I'd been so fond of her.
But onwards and upwards.
When Mam met Johnny the Scrip for the first time, she took in his broad shoulders, his air of kindness and the twinkle in his eye that is a permanent feature now that he's no longer working around the clock, and she leant over to me and murmured, 'Looks like the professionals have arrived.'
She likes him. Shite.
But even that wasn't enough to put me off him.
Colette wasn't on her own for long. She met someone else - a friend of a friend of Trevor's brother's brother-in-law — and because of Dublin being so small, I found out. From what I gather the new bloke is a much better bet than Dad. (At least he doesn't wear a vest.)
As for Mam and Dad… well, he does the crossword and plays golf, she buys clothes and makes him guess the price, they watch murder-mysteries and go for drives. Apart from the fact that I've had a book published and we have access to all the surgical gauze we can eat, you'd swear he'd never been away…