Elizabeth Day - Scissors, Paper, Stone

‘Another wedding?’ Anne said as Charlotte slipped her mobile back into her handbag.

‘Yep,’ she replied, spearing an asparagus stem with her fork. ‘And another bridesmaid’s dress. Lemon-coloured taffeta if I know Susie.’

Anne smiled dryly. ‘It’s a phase. Everyone seems to get married at the same time in their twenties, but it will pass.’ She took a sip from her glass of wine and looked at Charlotte sideways. ‘There’s no rush, you know.’

‘I don’t know if I ever want to get married,’ said Charlotte, not convinced that she meant it. ‘No one can live up to the overblown romance of a wedding.’

She expected her mother to disagree and half-wanted her to tell her not to be so pessimistic but instead Anne stayed silent, twisting the stem of the wine glass in her fingers, her eyes focused on an indistinct point just beyond the bread basket.

‘I don’t think soulmates really exist, do they?’ Charlotte continued. ‘Marriage is a transaction of mutual imperfection.’

‘Oh Charlotte, where on earth did you read that?’

‘Nowhere. I just made it up.’

Anne sighed and raised her eyebrows, the way she always did when she disagreed with something but could not be bothered to say why.

‘So there’s no such thing as true love, then?’

Charlotte pushed her knife and fork together on the plate before answering. She sensed a hidden danger beneath the surface of the conversation but was not quite sure why. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said, cautiously. ‘I think it’s mostly a question of finding a man that you like, who will be good to you, who is trustworthy and with whom you can develop a quiet sort of mutual affection. Love fizzles out. You might as well resign yourself to that from the beginning.’

Anne looked at her and her face was distant and closed-off, like a stranger’s. ‘Well,’ she said, finally. ‘I suppose it’s good that you have more realistic expectations than I did.’ Anne drained her wine. ‘Shall we get the bill?’ she added, brightly.

But then Charlotte had met Gabriel. She remembered having a feeling of something like fatefulness even before she’d seen him. She just knew, somehow, that he would be important in her life. It was a work thing, at first – Gabriel was the head of a small but fashionable literary agency and Charlotte was doing the publicity for a books prize that they were part-sponsoring – but it had evolved from one post-work drink into a long evening of conversation and mutual teasing. Both of them were meant to be going on to parties. Both of them cancelled. Charlotte was immediately taken with his air of confidence and charm, the way he strode rather than walked, the way he wore an extremely well-cut navy suit over his thin cashmere green V-neck and knitted tie, as if he wasn’t quite sure whether to dress like an academic or an advertising executive. She found herself wanting to reach out and touch the velveteen tuft of hair that stuck out at the nape of his neck like a feathery chicken’s tail.

As he talked, he had a nervous habit of pushing his tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose more often than he needed to. His eyes were green-brown and his lips were slightly too full, like a girl’s, but the combined effect somehow worked. He was the kind of person you would look at as he passed you in the street – tall and broad and filled with a dynamic energy that made you feel invigorated just to be near him.

Charlotte had been with someone at the time, a boyfriend of several months’ standing – a thoroughly decent man whom she loved but didn’t feel remotely passionate about. Gabriel offered the possibility of otherness. Nothing physical occurred between them, but there was always an unspoken sense of shared infatuation that made her uncomfortable.

In spite of herself, Charlotte was drawn to him – to the idea that, finally, this might be it – and yet she was simultaneously horrified at herself for her perceived betrayal, reminded of the question posed by her secondary school English teacher about Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence: what was the difference between physical and emotional infidelity? And which of them, ultimately, was the more potent?

After that first meeting, Gabriel and Charlotte would see each other every few weeks, a snatched couple of hours spent in a small pub with a dark wooden interior around the back of Sloane Square Tube station. The walls were covered with a murky green-and-yellow flock wallpaper, its garishness faded by years of nicotine. Framed prints of country hunting scenes hung from the picture rail. In one corner, an old wheelbarrow had improbably been hoisted up and attached to the ceiling as rustic decor.

The pub became a sort of joke between them. It was in the middle of a wealthy residential street of neat little cottages with well-trimmed box hedges and seemed an absurd location for an old man’s drinking den. It was the sort of place that, even though they both knew it was there, would take them by surprise every time they turned the corner. The pub seemed to have sprouted up from the ground just for them, illuminated like a surreal bauble for a few hours while they drank inside. There were never any other customers apart from a mustachioed Chelsea Pensioner in full uniform who sat on a high stool at the bar, drinking from his own pewter beer tankard.

‘What do you think his name is?’ Gabriel had asked her one night when they were carefully not sitting too close to each other, yet just close enough to feel the crackle of tension between them.

‘Mmm, I think maybe . . . Richard, no, Geoffrey.’

‘Geoffrey. Yes, that’s a good one. I imagine he used to have a wife who complained when he forgot to shave and that’s why he now takes such pride in his moustache.’

‘I’m not sure he was ever married.’

‘A confirmed bachelor, perhaps?’

‘Or the love of his life fell for his best friend instead of him and he comes here, each evening, to forget.’

They would make up endless nonsense stories like this, to fill the space in between talking about what they both secretly wanted to confess. Once, Gabriel had taken her hand in his beneath the table and it had felt so illicit, so thrilling and so entirely how it should be that she almost couldn’t breathe.

Gradually, Charlotte began to believe that he meant what he said; that he loved her in a way he had never loved before. He seemed to want her exactly as she was. She realised then that, for the first time, she was utterly, unthinkingly in love with someone and that she couldn’t rationalise it or shape it to fit round her. She simply had to take the leap. Yet this terrified her because she had no faith in herself, no real belief that she was worthy enough. She found that she did not feel Gabriel’s love with any inner conviction, but rather drew her conclusions logically from snippets of available evidence.

There was, deep within the folds of her own consciousness, a dark, jagged cave where Charlotte stored all her most awful thoughts. She kept it hidden away, scared of her own twisted imaginings, and, in a strange sort of way, this gave her a sense of power. If she kept it concealed, Charlotte realised that no one else could ever truly know her. And this meant that she was in control. She felt intensely vulnerable under Gabriel’s scrutiny but she still had secrets from him. There was a blackness nestling within her, a poisonous seepage of self-inflicted pain that she would never expose to the light.

The art gallery was a single white room, dotted with rectangular plinths that rose up from the white floor like sawn-off tree trunks. To access it, you had to walk down a rickety metal fire-escape staircase and it was difficult to negotiate in heels. Just as she reached the last step, Charlotte tripped up and had to grasp hold of Gabriel’s arm to steady herself, so that they ended up spilling drunkenly into the room, almost teetering off balance, and everyone appeared to stop talking at precisely the same moment. Charlotte instantly felt out of her depth. They were late – Charlotte’s fault, naturally – and now she could imagine all his glamorous female friends looking at her high heels with the disapprobation mature women reserved for trivial young things like her who wore unsuitable, cheap shoes.