meant to behave with a virtual stranger, seized by an illogical desire to know everything about what makes him tick. Of course I don’t start a full-scale emotional interrogation; instead I submit to his polite questioning about me. He asks if I’ve stayed in Queen’s Park, and I tell him about the bizarre characters that Alice and I have washed up alongside in Islington.
‘God, I’d love to have been a twin,’ he says, laughing at my impression of Mr Simkins. ‘I haven’t got any siblings at all. I can’t tell you how boring it is growing up in solitary.’
‘Oh, it’s got its downside,’ I tell him.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say uselessly. ‘I just didn’t want you to think I was being smug.’ I ponder for a second, trying to imagine what I would’ve gained from not being intertwined with Alice from the very moment of conception.
‘I know I couldn’t live without her,’ I tell him, loving how intently he’s listening, ‘and sometimes that’s too scary for words.’ Losing our mum like we did has made me painfully aware, right from the get go, that no one’s immortal. If I let myself spiral into imagining an Alice-free universe then panic overwhelms me.
‘But surely it has to be better to have had something precious, and miss it fiercely, than never to have had it?’ he counters.
‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I reply, thinking that I’ll need to take his observation away and unpack it. God, he thinks as well as twinkles. I mustn’t get carried away. If by some crazy chance I’ve met someone special, it’s vital I don’t seem like a love-sick desperado; particularly considering my opening gambit was handing him my knickers. I try to steer the conversation into more impersonal territory, asking him about the play he’s just finished in the West End and telling him about me and Zelda’s last couple of gigs. Even so, our eyes keep meeting for a little longer than they should and I find myself having to stare unduly hard at the Vacherin in order to avoid conveying the sheer pleasure that being with him is causing. We could be talking in forensic detail about roadworks on the North Circular and I’d still be having a great time. There’s a bizarre sense of connection that glides above and beyond our harmless chit-chat. I’ve got to remove myself before my feelings become too nakedly obvious. If this is going to happen, then I need him to think he has sought it out.
‘I ought to go,’ I tell him. ‘I’ve got to work on cocked hats for the farmhands this afternoon.’
‘I mustn’t keep you from the cocked hats,’ he says with a flirty smile. ‘I should shoot too. I’ve got to pick up my son from school in an hour.’
And with that, my world caves in. His son?
‘I didn’t know you had kids,’ I croak. I plaster an empty grin across my shocked face. ‘Or is it kid in the singular?’
‘God, no. I couldn’t put another generation through the hell of that,’ he says, his expression unreadable. ‘He’s got a little brother.’
‘Great!’ I say brightly, holding on to the vain hope he’s a divorcee. There’s no ring, for Christ’s sake. But I can’t think of a subtle way to ask and, anyway, I’m feeling way too humiliated by how obvious I’ve been. I never, ever feel this instantaneous chemistry – it’s always a gradual process of self-persuasion, an inching forward into an uncertain alliance. How utterly crushing that it’s over before it began.
Chapter Three
I wander down Gower Street in a state of shock, unable to compute what’s just happened. If I try to explain it to anyone, even Alice, it’ll just sound like I met someone hot and then found out they were married. Boo hoo, move on to the next. But the whole experience felt way more profound than that, and I’m convinced that he felt it too. Please let this be a 24-hour love bug, hellish while it lasts but easily shaken off. If it’s a long-term condition, the next three months are set to be total torture.
Incapable of articulating it, even to myself, I spend the afternoon working in solitary gloom in the British Library. I’m hoping that by the time I get home to Alice it’ll have started to feel like an amusing misunderstanding rather than a terrible twist of fate. Right now it feels like a full-scale tragedy, like if Romeo had joined the graduate trainee scheme at Superdrug and