She takes out her phone and composes a text.

Bergman slayed me. Thank you, I think.

She puts a kiss. Takes it away. Adds it again. Deletes the text. Writes another.

How did you know?

Deletes it. Puts down her phone.

How did you know? Did you know? Did you know it would make me feel like this? Can I call you? I need to speak.

She picks up her phone again and writes:

Thanks for the Bergman. Loved it. Liss. X

Soulmates

2008–09

THE NIGHT OF HANNAH’S WEDDING CATE HAS SEX WITH THE only other single person at her table, one of Nathan’s cousins, a thirty-eight-year-old banker in the City. They get hammered on cava during the reception and fuck in the toilets at the Pub on the Park. After that she meets him quite often. He calls her sometimes at eleven o’clock at night and she goes over to his house. He owns a whole house to himself, which he lives in alone, on the far reaches of London Fields, over towards Queensbridge Road. He has already flipped a house in Dalston. He has a kitchen with a huge range on which he never seems to cook, as there are always takeout containers filling up the bin.

Mostly they have sex there, in his house, but sometimes, if he is away on business, which he often is, they meet in hotels in Manchester or Birmingham or Newcastle, rooms of featureless luxury. They watch porn together. Having rarely watched porn before, she is surprised by how much she enjoys it. Once, they have sex in front of his computer in front of another couple who are having sex in their room in front of their computer somewhere in the southern states of the USA. It definitely turns her on.

This arrangement continues for several months. They never meet in the daytime. He never asks her to a gallery, or out for dinner. He is her secret. She feels shame when she thinks of him. Sometimes he goes quiet for a few weeks, and she knows he is having sex with someone else. Sometimes she wants to hate him for not being someone else. But he is not a bad man. He is not a wanker. He has many good qualities. He just does not want her to be his girlfriend and, in truth, she does not want him to be her boyfriend either.

One day he stops calling. She tries him a couple of times, then waits for the text that will signal he is ready to resume intimacy. Instead, she receives a short, polite message that tells her he has met someone and is getting engaged.