This twenty-second phone conversation brought an end to the bumbling dialogue of their breakup. If Therese weren’t pregnant, Emily and Michael might have trapped each other in unpleasant conversations for weeks or months or years, once she returned to London. It was a common process of separation—the inconvenient and unwelcome calls, getting in each other’s way, coming at each other with this week’s ideas about what went wrong in the marriage, or how things might be put right again, or, worst of all, how they’d learned to get over each other, how they’d made their peace. Attachments were exceptionally complicated. Now he would have a child, but not hers. He’d plunged into another life.

Isabel, the hotel receptionist, must have seen the look on her face, because she came out from behind the desk and swept across the lobby to ask if Emily was okay. Emily said she was great, thank you. In the room she opened her computer and began a letter to Michael. She was finished with dialogue but she needed the final word. She began a letter to him, a Word document, about Therese and the new pregnancy, about Emily’s thwarted attempt to fall pregnant, about Bion of Smyrna, about the great question mark of her father, about Michael’s lack of passions, his lack of warmth, about the tears she was crying, about the fact she had fucked Liam and the sex made her realise that she didn’t want to live the rest of her life sleeping only with Michael, about the crappy flats they’d rented and the money they failed to save, about the years she wasted on the subeditors’ desk, about her failure to write a book, about the fact she’d never loved anyone but Michael but never felt intense love coming from him, and how she didn’t think she deserved true devotion, and didn’t have the courage to go out and find such feeling.

Emily finished writing at 3 am and, without rereading her words, without reflection, she deleted the document. Destroying the unsent letter also completed it. Her arms hurt below the elbow: a subeditor’s muscles and tendons. She lay on top of the bedcovers, thirsty and hungry, drained of everything but mostly of love. And she began to perceive the future beneath her.

Chapter 24: 1994

1994

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