And then I turned my face and just about swallowed another sob that threatened to spill over the table.
Craig Bennett continued to gaze at me curiously.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, pouring the rest of the glass down my throat. ‘I’m not normally so incontinent.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘Oh, I’ve just been dumped. Last night. She’s not going to have me back.’
‘I’m glad about that.’
‘Pardon?’
‘Don’t get me wrong. We’ll get into that. At least we can talk about that – if you’re not too boring about it. You may even be wrong. I mean, I thought for an awful moment that they’d sent someone whose mother had just died or something.’
‘We wouldn’t put that on you,’ I said, speaking as the company. ‘That’d be awful manners.’
‘A spurned boyfriend is far better than a grief-stricken son.’
‘Yes? You’re probably right. They wouldn’t have sent me if they’d known how miserable I was.’
The waitress came over and showed me the bottle of wine. ‘Just pour it please,’ I said.
‘You’re doing all right,’ said Bennett, like a command.
‘Yes,’ I beamed, as the waitress filled our glasses. ‘A shaky start but I feel much better.’
‘Good man.’
‘My girlfriend would dispute that.’
‘Your ex-girlfriend.’
‘Oh, yes . . .’ My irony wasn’t robust enough to joke about that yet.
‘How old are you anyway?’
‘I’m thirty.’
‘You lucky bastard. So then you better tell me what happened. Be warned: I don’t have infinite sympathy for young lucky bastards.’
I didn’t spend long telling him. It was mundane and predictable. I lied. I made out I was better than I was. And when it was obvious that I was worse than I’d pretended – to myself as well as her, with the poems, surprise gifts, underwear and holidays – I lied harder and was caught out in increments until I was worse than what I had concealed. When I finally told the truth, it was unrealistic.
‘What shall we eat?’ I asked.
‘I’m not really hungry. Why do you people always insist on meeting in restaurants? What’s wrong with pubs?’
‘We’d have to pay for our own meals then. But I’d have been very happy with a pub. I think I’ve given up food. I’ve thrown up everything I’ve tried to eat since Saturday.’
He looked at me steadily. ‘Ah, mate,’ he said, and he reached out and patted me on the arm. ‘So it is serious? You love her? It’s mundane but I know it fucking hurts. I’ve been there too.’
He was talking, I found out later, about Amy Casares, the half-Argentine novelist I had published. It was no coincidence that she would appeal to us both. Regardless of this chance connection a friendship was growing, or more precisely he was trying to rescue me, as I have been rescued by strangers before and since. The most cynical and duplicitous of us are often the kindest. There was no way, I knew, I could persuade Sarah of this. Because, probably, it isn’t true. But that night Craig Bennett and I were convinced it was.
‘Exactly,’ he roared, pouring the last of the third bottle. (We had realised that we did like food, as long as it was food you could consume like drugs: we liked oysters – and had been necking them like tequila shots for the last half hour. We were elated.) ‘Liars understand what people want, what they don’t have. They have imagination! Empathy! They understand complication and contradiction!’
I was lapping it up. Instead of being a self-destructive liar I was now a self-destructive liar – in a good way. In the toilets, almost without thinking, I locked the cubicle door behind me and scraped out onto the cistern half of the remains of the coke that I had left in my wallet from the weekend.
As I walked back into the dining room I felt I had turned the corner into a happier life. I had meant to keep to myself what I had done, but he had been so kind that before I knew it I had passed the wrap across to him and told him to finish it. I’m terrible at doing drugs on my own. They make me so generous-spirited. A flash of concern crossed his face, before he broke into a grin. ‘So,’ he said, ‘it’s like this.’ Then he was gone, leaving me to take in my surroundings properly for the first time: the inch of wine left in each of our glasses, the tall stems drawing the eye upwards, to the high ceiling, the glass chandeliers, and outwards, to the French waitresses and waiters, young people, in their early twenties, undaunted, poorly paid and incorrupt. My hands were shaking and I thought I could feel everyone looking at me.
Is it really possible to fall in love over the space of a few hours, the way I fell in love with Craig Bennett? Easy to want to, to think you have – isn’t that what love is, the opposite of loss? The strength of the feeling is the proof against it having occurred too soon. What I felt that night was that I had found someone to reverse what I had lost. Someone who was pure gain.
My father is ten years older than Bennett, though he looks younger, smoother, like the past has sheared off him in a wet shave. A kind man, his new friends tell me. He wasn’t always that man: there was another man who made decisions which neither he, my sisters nor I knew at the time would so blunt our memory of the father he had been before to us. We don’t bring up the three years in which he disappeared, the years when we only knew he was alive because of phone calls he made every few months to our grandma. He wouldn’t speak to his own father, divorced from grandma, or tell grandma where he was living, what country even – ‘It doesn’t sound like he’s in England,’ she’d say. (It’s been years since he’s sounded like he’s on fucking earth, I would reply.) Something had snapped in him during his second, awful marriage, two years after he left us, and after ‘an incident’ with his new family, an incident we were never told or would ever willingly ask about, an incident that even he, in the height of his madness, recognised as madness, he had simply run, and when all his madness had burnt out he had returned to earth, complete again and a stranger to us. He may have been a stranger to himself too. He certainly wanted to be. In that first year back from the dead we saw him once or twice around the table with his new fiancée, Shelley, who ran a New Age shop in Milton Keynes and on each occasion gave us a gift of a scented candle. Shelley had departed, but we still met with Dad around a table once or twice a year. There was often another woman there. Each time we faced again the absolute impossibility of asking him a serious question. He looked startled when we did, like he was about to run for the hills. We didn’t want to risk that. I was sixteen when he disappeared, my sisters thirteen and eleven. I was the lucky one; it’s normal up on the Blackpool coast to be drinking heavily by that age; my sisters were jolted into a more precocious start. It didn’t do us any superficial harm. All of us are (or have been) well-paid professionals. At the time I didn’t feel the lack of a guide; I could work out how a man behaved from my friends and reading the books I liked about the Rolling Stones and other swaggering outlaws. There are advantages to adopting such role models: a certain charm or roguishness, the sad, warping half-truth that girls (and boys) like you more when you treat them badly; that some people get away with murders while others get broken. Most of all there was the glorious opportunity to blame someone else, someone absent, for my own self-indulgence. I met Craig Bennett on the night my dad, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had all let me down. I came to believe that he had knowledge to impart to me, knowledge that could save me: and I decided to love him.
Chapter 4
Lizzie and Arturo had been letting me speak but now Arturo interrupted. ‘How do you mean, you loved him? Like a woman