Harry switched on the radio, hoping for some old classics on Radio Two or Heart FM, but didn’t recognize anything they were playing, so switched to Classic FM instead. It was never long before they played something he knew, and the stuff he’d never heard before was always bearable as background noise. Soon after Jo, he’d started seeing a New Zealander called Tanya. She was almost very beautiful, but something about the end of her nose and her slightly crooked teeth spoilt things. And he also had a suspicion that her eyes were just slightly too wide apart. He kept hoping that somehow these minor flaws would iron themselves out as he grew more and more fond of her. It was Ben who put him straight. Tanya’s flaws weren’t her nose or teeth. It was simply that they weren’t really suited. Harry knew his friend was right, but carried on going out with her until, fortunately, she decided to go back to New Zealand. As he waved her off at Heathrow, Harry felt an enormous sense of relief and liberation sweep over him.
There was only one other person he’d slept with before Julia. Christ, he couldn’t even remember her name. That was terrible. He stopped painting and stood back, rubbing his chin. A man’s name, shortened for a girl. Sam, or Marty. Toni? What was it? Clary. That was it. Not a man’s name at all. She’d been voracious though, pulling off his clothes the moment they were in her room, then leading him to the shower and getting straight down to business. He remembered thinking her sexual confidence must stem from experience, and then becoming terrified she might give him some dreadful sexually transmitted disease. Still, she was feisty and attractive, and Harry was slightly drunk and his fears quickly subsided. But after making love for a second time back in her room, she pulled out a cigarette and started to smoke. He hadn’t touched a cigarette himself for a couple of years and the smell, at that time in the early hours of the morning, seemed particularly repugnant. The lights were off, but the room was still suffused by a faint orange glow from the streetlights outside, and Harry watched in horror as the burning red tip glowed brighter every time she inhaled. Then, her fix of nicotine complete, she leant across him, her left nipple brushing against his chest, and stubbed it out on a plate on the bedside cabinet.
‘Hmm,’ she breathed over him, and thrust her tongue in his mouth once more. The taste was vile, like kissing an ash-tray, and completely unerotic. The next morning he left as soon as he could, appalled at his own cheapness.
That had been nearly two years ago. Until Julia, he’d forsaken casual sex and any relationship vowing that unless he met someone he could fall in love with, he would rather stay both single and chaste. Harry smiled to himself. He hadn’t thought about his former girlfriends for ages. But it was sad that with the exception of Jenny, he’d slept with five people and only really liked one of them. That was Jo, and she’d been a friend anyway. If he’d known what he knew now, he wondered, would he have discarded Jenny so casually? But at the time, in his youthful imagination, he’d pictured a future full of wild love affairs and nights of passion with a string of beautiful women, until someone swept him off his feet so completely he’d never want for anything again. He stopped painting again, and went upstairs and out onto the road, clutching his phone.
‘Ben, hi, it’s me,’ he said into the phone.
‘Oh, Harry, hi. Listen, I can’t speak now. I’ll call you later, OK?’
‘Yeah, yeah, all right.’
He tried Flin, but got his voicemail. He nearly left a message, but decided against it. Perhaps Lucie was around. She wasn’t, only her assistant, who said she was terribly sorry, but Lucie was in a meeting. Could she help at all? No, thought Harry, no one can. He didn’t really want to talk to any of his other friends. There was a simpler remedy: stop thinking about what might have been with Jenny. Things had worked out differently. Now he had Julia, and if he wasn’t in love with her just at that moment, then perhaps he would be in time. She was certainly more fun and better looking than anyone in between. And he was very fond of her. Or maybe he was in love with her, but just didn’t realize it. Maybe memory was shrouding his relationship with Jenny in a rosetinted frame, and it had never been half as good as he remembered.
Stomping back downstairs, he heard the hourly news. More misery in Chechnya. Mass killings in Sierra Leone. Harry picked up his brush, humbled. It was easy to distance oneself from horrors in a far-off land, to feel sorry for the people involved, but then to shrug and put them to one side. But really, if all he had to worry about was whether he was in love or not, he couldn’t be doing too badly. And at least he didn’t have to go to meetings. He didn’t have to call back later because someone was hovering over him. He could do what he liked, and, at the end of the day, if he so wished, he could go back to his flat and do whatever he wished there too, without anyone to get in his way.
But when he arrived back home later that evening, he padded upstairs and, in a move that had been secretly premeditated since before lunch, dug out his photo albums. He soon found the picture he was after, his favourite photo of her, the one he’d once kept in a frame by his bed. The colours were fading, but every line and curve of her face still looked, even after eleven years, heart-breakingly familiar.
CHAPTER THREE Flin receives a shock
When Harry asked Tiffany about Flin’s great plans to move out, she admitted they had come to very little.
Harry laughed. ‘I had a feeling they wouldn’t.’
‘I’ve worked out a very simple way of dealing with Flin’s sudden impulses and new crazes,’ Tiffany told him. ‘I go along with it initially, then throw in a word of caution and wait for his enthusiasm to trail off.’
‘And that always works?’
‘So far,’ she grinned.
Flin returned with more drinks. ‘What are you lot laughing about?’ he asked suspiciously.
‘Nothing,’ said Harry. ‘So when are you moving out to the country then?’ Sniggers from around the table.
‘You may laugh,’ Flin told them, ‘but it will happen.’
‘You’ve only mentioned it twice this week though, honey. That’s an eighty per cent drop on last week. And that was a fifty per cent drop on the week before,’ said Tiffany. The others laughed outright.
‘The Flin enthusiasm barometer is definitely dropping,’ added Harry.
Flin looked sheepish. Perhaps the sense of urgency had waned somewhat, but, as he pointed out to them, the idea had far from gone away. He did still think about all the wonderful things they would do once they moved to the country; and he did still gaze wistfully at passing Land-Rovers. He’d even reread all his H. E. Bates novels and bought Country Living.
‘But you haven’t actually done anything about it though, have you, baby?’ said Tiffany. Well, no, that was true. But he would, and soon.
Privately though, Flin found there always seemed to be something holding him back. It was a very busy time of year at work. There were big films coming out, with PR he was already committed to. Furthermore, his assistant had left too, and he considered it a bit churlish to leave before he’d found a new person and helped him or her settle in. Then there were the big summer blockbusters to prepare for, as well as all the normal day-to-day work to be done. And anyway, moving out wasn’t something they needed to rush. Waiting a few months for everything to quieten down at work wouldn’t make any difference in the long run.
Then one evening something happened to Flin which was to change this attitude irrevocably.
The day started brightly, with clear early April skies and the promise of warm, mild weather to come, and Flin set off for work feeling cheerful and fairly content with his life. There