chapter fifteen
There it was again. Inappropriately loud for this soft-carpeted place.
Clementine swung her head to watch three men making their way through the restaurant. They all bore a superficial resemblance to Vid: the big, bullet heads, giant shoulders, proud stomachs and that European way of walking, not quite a swagger.
But none of them was Vid.
Clementine exhaled. The man laughed again, but it didn’t have the particular tone or depth of Vid’s laugh at all.
She turned back to Sam. He had closed his menu and let it fall back against his chest.
‘I thought it was Vid,’ he said. ‘It sounded exactly like him.’
‘I know,’ said Clementine. ‘I thought it was him too.’
‘Jesus. I just didn’t want to see him.’ He took the menu and placed it back on the table. He pressed his hand to his collarbone. ‘I thought I was going to have a heart attack.’
‘I know,’ said Clementine again. ‘Me too.’
Sam leaned forward, his elbows on the table. ‘It just brought it all back.’ He sounded close to tears. ‘Just seeing his face would –’
‘The Margaret River shiraz!’
Their young waiter triumphantly presented the bottle like a prize.
It was the wrong wine but Clementine couldn’t bear to see his face crumple. ‘That’s it!’ she said in a ‘well done you!’ tone.
The waiter poured them overly generous glasses of wine, one hand behind his back. Red droplets stained the crisp white tablecloth. It might have been safer for him to use two hands.
‘Are you ready to order?’ the waiter beamed at them, flushed with success.
‘Just a few more minutes,’ said Clementine.
‘Of course! Too easy!’ The waiter backed away.
Sam lifted his glass. His hand shook.
‘I thought I saw Vid in the audience at the symphony the other night,’ said Clementine. ‘It gave me such a shock, I forgot to come in. It’s lucky Ainsley was my stand partner.’
Sam gulped a large mouthful of wine. He wiped the back of his hand across his lips. ‘So you didn’t want to see him?’ he said roughly.
‘Well of course I didn’t want to see him. It would have been …’ Clementine couldn’t come up with the right word. She lifted her own glass. There was no tremor in her hand. She’d learned to control a shaking bow arm without beta-blockers, even while her heart thumped with excruciating stage fright.
Sam grunted. He re-opened his menu but she could tell he wasn’t reading it. He was busy reassembling himself, smoothing out his face, becoming bland again.
She couldn’t bear it. She wanted him to crack again.
‘Although, actually, Erika mentioned the other day that Vid is keen to see us,’ said Clementine. She didn’t want yet another generic conversation about the view and the menu and the weather. A conversation like elevator music.
Sam glanced up at her, but his face was blank, his eyes were closed windows. She waited. There was that strange little pause before he answered. It was like a mechanical glitch. Nobody but her seemed to have noticed that Sam’s timing was off when he spoke these days.
‘Well, I’m sure we probably will run into him some time,’ he said. His eyes returned to the menu. ‘I think I’ll have the chicken risotto.’
She couldn’t bear it.
‘Actually, “desperate” was the word Erika used,’ she said.
His mouth twisted. ‘Yeah, well, he’s probably desperate to see you.’
‘I mean it’s inevitable that we’ll run into them again, isn’t it?’
‘I don’t see why,’ said Sam.
‘When we’re visiting Erika and Oliver? We can’t avoid driving down their street again.’
Although perhaps that’s exactly what Sam intended. Maybe it was what she intended too. They could still see Erika and Oliver without going anywhere near their house. It would just be a matter of making the right excuse, deftly side-stepping Erika’s invitations. They were never that keen on them in the first place.
She remembered the first time she’d seen Erika and Oliver’s new house. ‘We’re kind of dwarfed by our neighbours,’ Erika had said with a doubtful grimace at the castle-like mansion with its tizzy curls and curlicues. It looked especially over the top compared to Erika and Oliver’s benign, beige bungalow: a safe, personality-less house that was so very them. Oh, but they couldn’t laugh at Erika and Oliver like that anymore, could they? Their relationship had changed forever that day. The power balance had shifted. Clementine and Sam could never again make their superior ‘we’re so easygoing, they’re so uptight’ digs.
Sam placed his menu carefully on the edge of the table. He readjusted the placement of his mobile phone.
‘Let’s talk about something more pleasant,’ he said with the social smile of a stranger.
‘I mean, it wasn’t their fault,’ she said. Her voice was thick with inappropriate emotion. She saw him flinch. His colour rose.
‘Let’s talk about something else,’ repeated Sam. ‘What are you having?’
‘I’m not actually that hungry,’ said Clementine.
‘Good,’ said Sam. ‘Neither am I.’ He looked businesslike. ‘Shall we just go?’
Clementine put her menu on top of his and squared up the corners. ‘Fine.’
She lifted her glass. ‘So much for date night.’
‘So much for date night,’ agreed Sam contemptuously.
Clementine watched him swirl his wine in his glass. Did he hate her? Did he actually hate her?
She looked away from him to their expensive rainy view. She let her eye follow the choppy water to the horizon. You couldn’t hear the rain from in here. Lights sparkled and winked on the skyscrapers. Romantic. If she’d just made the right joke. If that damned man hadn’t laughed like Vid.
‘Do you ever think,’ she said carefully, without looking at Sam, her eyes on a keeling solitary yacht, the wind tugging angrily at its sail. Who would choose to sail in this weather? ‘What if we just hadn’t gone? What if one of the girls had got sick, or I’d had to work, or you’d had to work, or whatever, what if we just hadn’t gone to the barbeque? Do you ever think about that?’
She kept her eyes on the maniac in the yacht.
The too-long pause.
She wanted him to say: Of course I think about it. I think about it every day.
‘But we did go,’ said Sam. His voice was heavy and cold. He wasn’t going to consider any other possibilities for their life than the one they were leading. ‘We went, didn’t we?’