‘Why?’ he asked. ‘You’re classic-looking, timeless – you don’t need to look fashionable.’
Now, flicking her hand inside the rubbish bag until the wet leaves came off it, she thought about how domesticated she would appear to anyone who saw her at work out here and didn’t know better. It was amazing that, in a matter of months, she’d gone from being a New Yorker with a string of orchid deaths on her conscience, to a Londoner in charge of a whole garden, however small. When she thought about how easily it might not have happened, too, the change seemed particularly startling.
On the Sunday afternoon of the weekend in Montauk, just before they’d left to go back to the city, Mark had carried her bag downstairs and asked if she was free for dinner on Friday. She had said yes and they’d made a plan to meet at a bar in Chelsea. As the days had passed, back in New York, however, she’d begun to dread it. The stomach ache she’d had that night on the beach came back whenever she thought about it, stronger and stronger as the week went on, and finally she’d acknowledged to herself that it was caused by anxiety. She knew she was physically attracted to Mark – she’d found herself thinking several times about the way the soft material of his old T-shirt had stretched between his shoulder blades as he’d crouched to stir up their beach-fire – but that in itself wasn’t alarming: she was in her early thirties in New York, she met men, she wasn’t celibate. The problem was that she liked him – really liked him.
In the end, after a night spent tossing in the air-conditioned chill of her bedroom, she’d emailed him first thing on Friday morning and told him that her biggest client had called a last-minute meeting for that evening, followed by dinner with his boss. I’m so sorry to have to do this, she’d written. Perhaps we’ll bump into each other again up in Montauk at some point over the summer? She knew he would get the unwritten message – don’t suggest another day – and he had. Twenty minutes after she sent her mail, a reply arrived: Not to worry, I completely understand. See you round the campfire some time. As she’d read it, what she’d felt was not relief at being off the hook but a powerful sense of loss.
She’d left the office just after seven that evening and, feeling her low mood starting to deepen, she’d cycled down from Midtown to McNally Jackson books in SoHo. She’d discovered the shop when she first moved to New York years earlier and, knowing almost no one then, she’d got into the habit of going there in the evenings, buying a new book and sitting in the café with a glass of wine, sometimes until the shop closed. It was always busy and the clientele was interesting both to watch and to eavesdrop on; she’d seen blind dates that had flopped and one in particular that had gone spectacularly well; people tapping away at screenplays on laptops; parents up in the city to visit children studying at NYU; people discussing business plans for Internet start-ups and holistic therapy centres. She’d also heard some first-rate gossip. Between the books and the busy café, the loneliness she’d sometimes felt at the beginning, uprooted from London, had evaporated.
As she’d chained up her bike outside that evening, the sky above Prince Street had been turning a pale pearly pink. It was mid-July and the city was baking; around her bare ankles she could feel heat rising from the pavement. Inside the shop, she’d spent fifteen minutes choosing a book – the new Alan Hollinghurst, which she’d meant to wait for in paperback, but what the hell? She needed cheering up – and then she ordered a glass of wine at the counter and took it to a window table that was just coming free. The windows were open to the street and she heard snatches of conversation from passers-by and music from cars cruising up to the traffic lights on Lafayette. At the table opposite, a glamorous black woman in her late twenties, Hannah guessed, wearing a silk dress with a red sash, was talking to a member of staff, preparing to go downstairs and give a reading from her new novel.
The wine was dry and cold, and she was soon absorbed in the Hollinghurst. A light breeze had blown up, cutting the humidity and stirring the short hairs at the base of her neck as she sat with her back to the window. Ripples of applause reached up the stairs from the reading.
She was about halfway down the glass when she looked up from the book. Over towards the shop’s main door, browsing the small table of new non-fiction titles, was a man who, from behind at least, looked just like Mark. He was wearing a suit but he’d taken his jacket and tie off. He was the same height as Mark, the same build, and his hair was the same: dark brown, cut short at the back, left longer on the top, where it just started to curl. The man put down the book in his hand and went round the table to the other side, and Hannah’s heart thumped against the back of her ribs. It was him – it actually was Mark. Shit – shit. She thought about her email, the blatant lie. Oh, shit. It was one thing to make an excuse and bail out on some guy you’d met in a bar, but lying to your friends’ friends, especially Ant and Roisin’s friends, was not on.