But once Paul was home I gave myself a talking-to. What had I been thinking? I must have been out of my mind. It was nothing but a silly schoolgirl crush, and had to be nipped in the bud before it got out of hand. I sent Tony a short text: ‘I think we need to cool this now.’ He texted back: ‘Okay. If that’s what you want.’
We scarcely saw each other for the next two months. When Tony invited us to Christmas drinks at his house, it felt perfectly safe to say yes. By then I had begun to doubt whether we had ever been in any real danger of allowing mild flirtation to escalate into something more significant. Probably not, I decided. Even if we had, the danger had now passed.
I have often wondered if that would have been the end of the matter, had it not been for three separate events in the following days. The evening after Tony’s Christmas party I was shopping in Hackney when he texted me to say he was in a local bar, and did I fancy popping in for a drink? I found him in dejected spirits. There had been another nuclear-grade argument with his wife; he could not take any more, they had agreed to separate. The house was to be sold, and that summer she would be moving to Spain with their daughter. Their marriage was over. The following morning Paul and I drove down to my father’s house in Wiltshire, where we endured one of those relationship-endingly horrific Christmases with which divorce lawyers in January are so famously familiar. And on Boxing Day the tsunami hit Southeast Asia.
Paul and I were barely speaking when he left for the airport to fly to Indonesia. He would be gone for at least a month, and even telephone contact looked unlikely, for the tsunami had wiped out most mobile-phone reception. It was hard to say which of us was more relieved to see the back of the other. Christmas had tipped a precariously unhappy marriage over the edge into free-fall crisis, and we both knew it.
I waited a few days before calling Tony. I think I was pretending not to know what was about to happen, as if ignorance could somehow absolve me of responsibility. It was late afternoon on his fortieth birthday when I sat in a window at the top of the house and dialled his number. He answered at the first ring. I took a deep breath. ‘About that lunch. I’ve changed my mind.’
We met in a pub on the edge of Victoria Park, a five-minute walk from Ainsworth Road. I told myself it was only lunch, but averted my gaze from passers-by on the way, burning with nerves. Tony was standing at the bar when I arrived. The impulse to touch him took my breath away. The pub was practically empty, and in the hush I thought our hellos sounded artificially tinny.
We didn’t eat. I don’t remember either of us even suggesting it. We sat at a table in the corner and talked, knees and elbows brushing together. Nothing significant was said. It was a bitter January day, and by mid-afternoon the light was already failing when Tony suggested a stroll across the park. He was wearing a beige quilted coat, and as the wind whipped up he drew me into its warmth and wrapped his arm around me. The path was ankle-deep in dry leaves, and scrunched as we walked in silence. When we reached the trees on the far side near the canal, he lowered his head and kissed me.
The first kiss had been the central preoccupation of almost every magazine and novel I read when I was young, and a ceaseless topic for discussion among my friends. The discrepancy between thrilling accounts of fireworks and euphoria, and my personal experience in the clammy arms of boys half my height, was disappointing. But when Tony kissed me in the park, I thought I might actually faint. The intensity of joy was unlike anything I had ever known; I was weightless, delirious. We kissed again before he got in his car, and I floated home in a daze. I lay on the sofa and stared at the ceiling for six hours.
He phoned shortly after ten that night. We had never talked about our feelings for each other, but his voice was suddenly urgent. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘I don’t care how this sounds, and I don’t know what it means for us. But Decca, I love you. That’s all I’ve got to say.’ I was stunned. He couldn’t possibly mean it. We barely knew each other. ‘I love you too,’ I said.
Did I? I couldn’t. It was preposterous, insane. Wasn’t it? When I heard myself say the words again, they didn’t feel like a lie. He said he had to go and see someone in north London, and would I like to come? He picked me up at the bottom of the road. 50 Cent was playing in the car, and as I stepped in a terrible fear seized me. If I could see myself now, would this look like nothing but an adolescent gangsta fantasy? Should I be embarrassed? But as he reached across and kissed me, I didn’t care. I was lost.
All of Tony’s caution had melted away. He held my hand as we drove, and his friend in Tottenham must have been startled to open his door to a pair of giggling sweethearts. While they talked in the kitchen I buried my face in the coat of his gigantic dog, until Tony led me out onto the balcony and his friend pretended not to notice while we kissed. When Tony dropped me home I lay awake until dawn, replaying the day in my head, smiling into the pillow.
What did I think we were doing? I had no idea. As I couldn’t see the question leading anywhere particularly promising, I decided to stop asking. The truth was, I wasn’t really thinking at all. I was already beyond reason, deranged by a chemical longing to be back in Tony’s arms.
If I managed to do any work that month, I do not remember. Every day we would find somewhere to meet – in Tony’s car by the canal, a dingy pub on Bethnal Green Road, his friend’s flat in Hackney – and each assignation grew more unmanageably intense. We met in an ill-advisably chichi wine bar one night, and were quickly asked to leave; the manager said our kissing was making the other customers uncomfortable. We fell out of the door, laughing into the night, semi-hysterical with mortification. Neither of us was surprised; the sexual tension was making us uncomfortable too. Often Tony would be pouring with sweat by the time we parted, and I would walk home shaking.
For as long as we were only kissing, I told myself we still had a choice. We could still pull back from the brink of what looked, in my clearer-headed moments, like incontrovertible lunacy. When I was away from Tony and could think straight, whatever it was that we shared began to seem ludicrously flimsy. Only a fool could expect it to bear the weight of anything as momentous as a decision to be together. He and I were so farcically incompatible in every way, I wondered whether the person each of us was falling for was nothing more than a fantasy of physical infatuation, and existed only in the confines of the other’s fevered mind. At least once a day I resolved to end it. The resolve would last until the next time I saw him.
Before long our meetings assumed a familiar pattern. We would both agree that this had to stop at once. After all, I would point out, he was married. He would remind me that they had decided to separate. It was my understanding, I would say, that married men were notorious for saying that sort of thing. Exasperated by my scepticism, he would get huffy and point out that I was a married woman. ‘I can’t see that remaining the case for much longer,’ I would say. He would protest: ‘But you’ve got a lovely husband, and a great life. Look at me, Dec – I’m a criminal. No one in your world would want you to be with me. If you were my daughter, I wouldn’t want you to be with me either.’ It was, we would agree, hopeless. Then we would kiss until our lips burned and people began to stare. Before parting we would tell each other this was absolutely the last time we would meet. The promise didn’t always last long enough for us to get home. After a particularly anguished farewell I hadn’t got out of second gear before my phone pinged. ‘HC?’ the text read. I turned the car around and was back with him in a bar called Hackney Central in under five minutes.
When Tony’s wife and daughter went away on holiday for a week, our meetings grew longer but no less agitated or inconclusive. The night before their return we spent hours on the phone, revisiting the impossibility of the situation. Surely this had to be the end, once and for all. I hung up, desolate but decisive. A minute later the phone rang again. ‘Tone, we’ve agreed this can’t go on,’ I told him sternly. ‘Dec,’ he said, in a voice I scarcely recognised. ‘My mum’s died. My brother just called. She’s dead. I need to see you.’
I got dressed and drove to his house. Since that day in the park both our homes had been out of bounds; the injunction was unspoken but did not need to be stated,