I suggested winter, that way we wouldn’t have to wait so long to go. I told her we could drink coffee close to the Panthéon. I remembered there were a few decent brasseries there. Jenny wanted to know about the booksellers, along the river. I told her that despite all the tourists, they were friendly and you could take your time browsing.

And I told her that it was along the Seine where I had bought my book about African art. She knew the book I was referring to because I kept it on the coffee table in the flat. She had leafed through it but I felt like she hadn’t given it enough attention, less than half the amount I would. That was the beauty of opposites. Not everything had to have a perfect symmetry and I wondered if that was a tautology.

We broke off from enjoying the meal to have sex. We were loving in decadence. Later on, I felt faintly embarrassed. There was something about her vulnerability which seemed to reflect my own, the human body is so personal. I told her that I felt as though my heart was about to explode with happiness but I was wary of getting ahead of myself. I wasn’t a character in Revolutionary Road. I wasn’t Frank Wheeler. Jenny wasn’t April.

You give so much of yourself away in the beginning, so much that at times it doesn’t seem right or fair. You are so close to the human truth and that is the way it was with Jenny. She was my truth. Even her name – I discovered the Celtic meaning of it was white wave and I wondered if that had anything at all to do with the pictures of the sea she had painted that I first saw in Lennox Street.

21. He Is Still Part of Her

October 1996

Jenny was twelve when her mother died and afterwards she withdrew into herself, as though she didn’t need people. Somewhere deep inside herself she became used to her loneliness but when she met Jerome that changed.

She was in art college at the time, taking a coffee break, in a deli somewhere off Thomas Street, and Jerome breezed in and struck up a conversation with her. She wasn’t lonely any more.

She told me how loneliness is such a terrible thing. I couldn’t agree with her more and I described the loneliness that ate into my conscience once Brian had made off with himself out of this earth and left me with an ache that never fully lifted.