Is mainly full of sofa.
An L-shaped pile of lavish squishiness that takes up most of two walls, indulgently big for two, far too big for one.
He remembers their housewarming: friends piled on there, laughing and talking. And the occasional evening when Marius was home, hands warm on his ankles, the evening drawing in around them.
That night was rain-struck, uncountable heartbeats thudding all around me. And I flooded the next morning. I came downstairs, and there was water creeping under my door, soaking into the carpet and lapping at the skirting boards, bringing with it the clinging stench of wet and dirt.
My door was swollen and sticky. It made a sound like a sob as I pulled it open. Coat over my pyjamas and Adam’s wellies on my feet, I stepped over my hunched and sodden sandbags, and into the drowned street.
It took Mrs. P. a little longer than usual to come to the door, but she was in rubber boots too, eating Crunchy Nut cornflakes direct from the packet, and seemed to be in good spirits. In all honesty, she was probably better off than I was. I had talked to Marius about flood prevention measures, but he had always seemed distracted. I don’t think either of us, at the time, had realised what it meant, but I probably should have known something was deeply wrong when the man I loved and lived with was reluctant to discuss the protection of our recently purchased home. But Mrs. P. had stone floors and a sump with a submersible electric pump in the kitchen. She’d wanted the house, and Mr. P. had said, “Well, if this is the one, we’ll make it work.” So the floods had come and gone, and they’d moved the furniture, and mopped the floors, and stayed.
Forever had been the plan.
“The thing is,” Mrs. P. told me once, “you never really believe you’re going to die. Even when you’re as old as I am. I don’t believe in God and heaven and all that malarkey—it’s the sort of thing that gets lost when you’ve lived through a war—so I don’t think I’ll ever be with him again, but it’ll be nice, in a way, when it’s all over, not to miss him anymore.”
I had missed Marius at first. But what were ten years to fifty? The violence of loss had become an ache which had faded into something else entirely: simply an awareness of absence, not even necessarily of a person, but of a life I thought I’d had.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, hovering uselessly on Mrs. P.’s doorstep. “Do you need anything?”
She helped herself to another handful of cereal. “Get along with you, Edwin. Everything’s fine. I don’t need you fussing over me.”
“I’m not fussing. I’m after your cornflakes.”
She held out the packet. “How’s your place doing?”
“Not . . . not as well as I’d like. I f-feel the water should be on the outside.”
“You need to get those carpets up.”
“I know.” I just hadn’t quite managed to . . . face doing it. I didn’t want my house—my things—to be damaged, but what was I protecting them for? When it mattered only to me?
I said good-bye to Mrs. P., extracting a promise that she would call me or, at the very least, bang on the wall if anything happened, and sploshed back.
So far it was only the hallway. I toed at the edges of the carpet, half-heartedly trying to ease it up, uncertain whether I was trying to understand what I was feeling or keep it at bay. After a moment or two, I wandered into the living room and stared at the sofa.
I realised how long it had been since I’d spent any time here.
My own house, and I’d quarantined myself from part of it. There was dust on the top of the television and on the mantelpiece. Spaces on the walls and on the DVD shelves. All that was left of Marius: the places he used to be.
The sofa was modular. It was our . . . my—it’d always been my, even when I’d believed otherwise—most extravagant purchase, and I had no intention of letting an investment of that magnitude get wrecked in a flood. I began to pull the cushions off, carrying them upstairs and out of harm’s way one by one. Then I detached the various pieces and stood looking at the unwieldy jigsaw that was left. When I’d bought the damn thing, I’d assumed there would be two people to do this.
That I wouldn’t be alone. With my life in unmanageable pieces.
I was sweating by the time I pushed and rolled and heaved and bullied and coaxed part of my sofa into the hall. And then I was crying, and I didn’t really know why. Despair and frustration and longing and churned-up grief. Things that should have long grown stale but came upon me now as fresh as the first days of spring. Too bright, too cold, this possibility of hope when my instinct was to be glancing over my shoulder at shadows I knew of old. Oh, why was it so easy to believe Marius didn’t want me, and so impossible to accept that Adam might?
I was sitting on the floor, weeping with undignified abandon, when I caught the tell-tale glare of yellow through the panels on the front door.
A knock.
And fuck. Fuck. I was sure I was visible from the other side, so while I could have pretended I wasn’t in, or I hadn’t heard, it would have been unbearably obvious that I was, and I had. I scrubbed the moisture from my eyes with the heels of my hands and scrambled to answer.
It was Adam, a little tousled—not in any of the ways I might have, at a better moment, imagined—and a little haggard. I hated to think how I must have looked to him: sweaty and tear-sticky, red-eyed, dressed in pyjama bottoms and Wellington boots, and my rumpled Oxford dodo T-shirt.
Pitiful.
What a lucky escape, he must have been thinking. And he’d be right. Of what possible use could I be to a man like Adam? When I couldn’t even say yes.
“I’m just checking in.” It was the first time he hadn’t met my eyes. Hadn’t come searching for me in my silence. And he was too tall for my doorway, his shoulders hunching awkwardly as he tried not to fill up the whole space. “Look, I know it’s not the time, but I’m sorry about last night. I don’t know what I was thinking. Or probably I wasn’t, because I like to think if my brain had been involved at any point I wouldn’t have answered ‘I recently broke up with my boyfriend’ with ‘Hey, what about me?’”
“It w-w-was—”
“But as I said, I’m just checking in.” And that was the first time he’d cut over me. “The waters are still rising, so you should see to your defences and take precautions if you haven’t already.”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine.” I sounded a little hoarse, but I was proud of the delivery.
His head came up instantly. “Edwin, are you all right?” His gaze skated down my neck and across my collarbone, then past me into the hall. “What are you doing in there?”
“Moving my sofa.”
“By yourself?”
I blinked. I wanted to say something devastatingly sarcastic that would protect me from the mortifying vulnerability of those two little words, but for once the problem was that I simply couldn’t think of anything.
“I mean,” he rushed on, “obviously. Can I help?”
A tight knot of sorrow lodged itself in my throat. For his sweetness, his steadfast compassion. The fact that I craved them like his hands upon me, these gifts from a stranger who had no reason to give them. “I d-don’t need your help.”
“It won’t take a minute between the two of us. It’s what I’m here for.”
“It’s not w-what you’re here for.” Anger now, rushing to my rescue. And shocking me a little with its suddenness, with the fact it was there at all. “Helping me isn’t what you’re h-here for.”
His eyes widened. “That’s not what I—”
“No. I’m n-n-not your f—” no, just no, I wasn’t fucking up fucking, “—fucking charity project. You d-don’t have to be nice to me.”
“Edwin, do you really think that?” He looked so genuinely appalled. Helplessly wounded. “I just . . . like you.”
I closed the door.
Crouched on my ruined carpet, and cried again.
Because Marius had left me. Because my house was flooding. And because the universe had dropped a wonderful man into my lap right when I felt least worthy of having him.
I just wasn’t ready.
Another day, another week, another month. Why now? When everything was still too close and hurt too much, and I was nothing but the pieces of someone Marius had wanted once.
On the other side of the door, Adam’s shadow wobbled, wavered, faded away. I heard the water closing over his footsteps.
He was gone.
Later, oh much later, not really thinking very clearly but weary of tears and watching the flood breach my house, I went up to the attic. It was Marius’s space, empty now but for the one picture he hadn’t taken with him.
On our first viewing, the estate agent had warned us that the stairs didn’t conform to building regulations, but Marius had climbed that rickety spiral and gasped. Until that moment I think perhaps it had only been a house to me, but I remember the way he turned his face into the light, hands held open as if to catch it like rain. He had looked so beautiful that day, so happy, a man of shadow and gold. And I had thought him mine.
We’d slept up here for a few weeks after we moved in, on a mound of pillows and blankets because the bed I’d ordered had arrived in good time but the mattress hadn’t. It had felt strangely magical, ascending to the attic together every night, clinging to Marius’s hand because his night vision was terrible, and I’d been so afraid he’d blunder into something, or fall. Safe in our makeshift bed, I’d lain in Marius’s arms, and we’d watched the stars through the skylight. We’d made love like we hadn’t done for years, slowly, as though we didn’t know exactly how to touch each other. In the mornings I would wake to the softest light, the bluest sky, and the scarlet leaves of the sycamore tree.
The canvas Marius had left was propped against the far wall. It was me. His painting of me.
Unabashedly naked, I look young, languid, and unexpectedly sensual, my eyes dark with recent pleasure, the suggestion of sweat drying on my skin.
My sex life, until then, had been an adolescent business. Blowjobs and handjobs and fumbling frottage. But Marius had claimed me with a skill and a certainty that nothing in my previous experience had prepared me for. And, afterwards, he’d painted me. I was astonished at this vision of myself: a fey creature of unabashed passions and sated appetites. How could I not have loved the man who saw me so?
Until he lost sight of me entirely.
I waited for the pain to come, but my heart was as empty as the room I stood in. I found myself imagining a different scene. One where I attacked the painting in a storm of grief and rage, wood splintering as I tore it apart. But the gesture felt too dramatic, the sort of thing Marius would have done, and would have been able to do without hesitation or self-consciousness. It wasn’t me.
I didn’t want to destroy anything.
Instead I turned the picture to face the wall and went downstairs to see what I could do to save my sofa. I balanced one bit of it on the coffee table, another bit on the stairs (though this made getting to the second floor comically difficult), found some bricks in the garden shed to raise the rest high enough that if the flood water was able to reach it, I’d have problems far beyond whatever it was doing to my furniture.
My house looked like a madman’s Jenga, but it was a solution of a sort. I was surveying my handiwork with a burgeoning sense of mild accomplishment when my phone rang, and I answered instinctively, not even pausing to check the number.
“Edwin, sweetheart—are you all right? I’ve been on the internet. It looks bad up there.”
For a moment my mind was blank. Not for lack of recognition, but too much. Her son had once called me sweetheart, too. “Mrs. Chankseliani . . . um . . . yes, well, I’m . . . I mean . . .” Why on earth had I picked up? I hated not being able to see who I was talking to. I didn’t exactly enjoy having to watch someone’s eyes glaze with boredom or their mouth tighten with frustration, but at least then I had some control, and I could always take refuge in silence. Phones left me helpless, babbling anxiously into an unforgiving void. “I’m f-flooding a bit, but it’s under control I think.”
“The internet said David Cameron was visiting.”
“W-well, not me personally.”
“He was wearing wellies.”
Something that might almost have been a laugh bubbled out of me unexpectedly. “S-so am I. In my living room.”
“Oh, your poor little house. Do you need anything? I could pop round.”
She couldn’t pop round. She lived in London, which admittedly was closer than my own parents—who were in Bath—but there were unlikely to be either trains or buses, considering half of Oxfordshire was sufficiently waterlogged to merit a concerned visit from the PM. “Thanks, but . . . no. It would be . . .” Weird. Weird as hell. There was an awkward silence, magnified by the fact we were on the phone. “. . . P-probab-ab . . . p-otentially difficult with the weather.”
“Yes, but you shouldn’t be on your own.”
I sat down gingerly on the unsofa-ed edge of the coffee table. There were so many things I could have said—there was the fact I was alone because Marius had left me, or the fact I was thirty-one and therefore a legitimate grown-up who could look after himself, or the fact this was a frankly peculiar conversation to be having with your ex-boyfriend’s mother—but none of them would have been helpful. “I’m sure David Cameron will look after me.”
“You will let me know if you need anything, won’t you?”
“I . . . It’s not your job to take care of me.”
“Well, I know that, Edwin, but family is family.”
“Yes, but you’re not my—” I stopped, but it was too late.
Phone silences are the worst silences. They have this endless, untethered quality.
Finally Mrs. Chankseliani said, “Do you really believe that?”
“W-well, I—”
“I love my son, but I know him. He’d never sent me a Mother’s Day card in his life. Never remembered a single birthday. Until he met you.”
“He . . . he used to forget mine.” Our anniversary too, remembrance usually catching him the moment he came home. “Shit, shit, I did it again. What’s wrong with me? Let me make it up to you, sweetheart.” And he always did, and I never minded, preferring the passion of his moment to any carefully planned extravaganza. “It wasn’t meant to be hurtful.”
“I know that. He can’t do dates. He never could. But you remember everything, don’t you?”
Alone, and suddenly so very seen, I was blushing to an empty room. “I . . . d-don’t remember. I have an app.” But before the app, there’d been a spreadsheet. Before that, a little book bound in dark-red leather. I liked knowing which days were special to people.
“You were good for him, Edwin. You notice things in ways he doesn’t. Or can’t. I’m afraid he wasn’t good for you.”
“No, he was.” It was a little hard to breathe, to keep my voice steady. It wasn’t something I’d thought I would ever really have to talk about, and certainly not with Marius’s mother. “He made me very happy.”
“You know, I kept hoping you would work it out.”
“S-so did I. For a while. But then I stopped.” A new thought unfurled, a slightly eerie one. “I’m not . . . not . . . w-waiting for him to come back anymore.”
“Well, of course you shouldn’t. But that doesn’t mean I want you to stop being part of my family.”
“But it was Marius who . . . He was the c-connection.”
“Yes, at first. But I’ve known you for ten years, sweetheart. I’m not going to stop caring about you.”
I could have said Marius did, but it would have been churlish and also untrue. He hadn’t planned or wanted to hurt me. He’d tried to stay in touch, to become friendly, but I’d been the one to insist on silence. I’d needed it, at the time. “Th-thank you,” I heard myself say, “for c-calling. We should have tea or something, the next time you’re here.”
“I’d like that. And will we see you at Christmas?”
I blinked at the receiver. “You w-want me to come for Christmas? W-without Marius?”
“Andrei’s ex-wives still come to Christmas. The ones who can stand him, anyway. And we miss you. We liked having you.”
“I liked . . .” I managed to stop myself before I accidentally told my ex-boyfriend’s mother that I liked being had. “Um, it was nice. But wouldn’t Marius . . . I mean . . . W-wouldn’t it . . . It doesn’t seem . . . And w-what if there’s . . . W-what if I’m . . . w-w-w-ith . . .” With someone? I was used to that idea being unthinkable, but there it was. Thought.
“Then you could bring him with you.”
I gave an awkward little giggle. It sounded like a romcom waiting to happen. A zany, gooey holiday flick in which I hired a gorgeous out-of-work actor to pretend to be my partner at my ex-boyfriend’s family Christmas. Cue hilarity and, if the premise was anything to go by, me probably being played by Zoe Kazan. “I . . . I’ll think about it.”
“You know, Edwin,” said Mrs. Chankseliani, “family is really just whoever sticks around.”
That night, I dragged a pile of pillows and blankets up to the attic, and made myself a nest. It was still raining, but softly now, shushing against the skylight. It was too cloudy to see much of the sky, but I could watch the little droplets as they broke and gathered upon the glass, glinting silver like bits of fallen star.
For the first time, I allowed myself to think of a body next to mine that wasn’t Marius’s. To ache for plain brown eyes and a crinkly smile and big-knuckled hands to engulf my own. It hurt a little in ways I was—at last—ready to accept.
Because I knew it was the final piece of grief.
Moving on.