I laughed. ‘Am I married? No.’
‘Do you have a partner?’
‘I do,’ I said, and I thought of Joe, of Leo, of Carenza. I wondered what name would come out of my mouth, and was glad that Connie moved on.
‘Children?’
‘No.’
‘Want them?’
I said nothing. ‘I see,’ said Connie.
‘You see what?’ I said.
She didn’t say anything to that.
We carried on walking. I felt bruised and prodded and wanted to go back to the house, where it felt safer than being outside with her. Outside, the ludicrousness of my behaviour – the lying, the fact I was now her companion of sorts – felt magnified. I felt that at any moment I might be arrested. ‘When I was twenty,’ Connie said, breaking my thoughts, ‘I wrote a set of poems for a girlfriend’s birthday.’
‘That was kind of you.’
Connie snorted. ‘I was broke, that’s why I wrote them. Couldn’t afford a proper present. It’s not because I thought I was a poet.’ She stopped by a bench and lowered herself down. ‘Although perhaps I did? After all, I wrote them. I don’t remember any embarrassment in giving them to her.’
‘What were they about?’
‘I don’t remember. Love, probably. My approximation of it. Of her, of myself. They weren’t “twenty-one poems for a twenty-first birthday”, nothing like that. But they were an effort, I do remember.’
‘You didn’t publish them?’
‘God, no. No. Then we broke up, again. She left them in the boot of her car. An old jalopy that she wanted to be nicked, rather than have to deal with it. But it was nicked, and the poems were still in the boot, so they went too.’
‘That’s a bit shit of her.’
Connie shrugged. ‘They were hers. She could do what she wanted with them. She wanted no reminder of me, so my poetry could be stolen too. But then, she decided she regretted this decision. When we were talking again, she asked if I could rewrite them, because despite the fact she’d deliberately left them in the boot, she wanted them back.’
‘Did you rewrite them?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘Good.’
‘Her car was named after Sirius, the constellation,’ Connie said, burying her chin in the top of her scarf. ‘A few years after all this, I wrote another poem about it. Sirius, you know – the starry name, the idea of fate.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘So clever. It was about the theft of the first poems. Her quite frankly arrogant request to have them re-written.’
‘What did you do with the new poem?’ I asked.
‘Nothing. It wasn’t very good. But here’s the thing. My new girlfriend found it, and was upset that I was writing a poem about former lovers.’
I thought of my father’s words: For a time, they were inseparable. ‘She was the jealous type, the new one?’ I asked, my heart thumping a little harder.
Connie looked away. Say her name, I thought. Tell me her name. ‘You could say that,’ she said. ‘Bit of a firework. I threw the poem in the bin. I should have been more careful.’
‘You were entitled to write the poem.’
Connie carried on idly observing the passers-by. ‘I played out old mistakes on new people. Don’t ever do that, Laura. I say that as someone who’s been there.’
‘Right,’ I said, uneasily.
‘Although it’s what we all do,’ Connie went on. ‘You only get your heart broken for the first time once. But the pain always makes itself known in subsequent encounters, even if you don’t realize it. Have you ever been heartbroken?’
I thought about this question for such a long time that Connie ended up turning round fully to me. ‘Yes,’ I said, but I was not thinking of lovers.
Perhaps there was something true in my voice, or heartfelt at least. ‘It hurts, doesn’t it?’ she said gently.
‘Yes.’
‘This new novel is about responsibility,’ she said suddenly, and it felt as if she was offering me a gift. ‘It’s called The Mercurial.’
‘The Mercurial?’
‘What I wanted to explain to that girlfriend of mine—’
‘The one who was a firework?’
Connie smiled. ‘Yes, the firework – or perhaps to myself – was that I was tracing a scar that never vanishes. Old lines under new skin. But the writing of it gives it a reconfigured present. What I would call art, as we experience it. It also helps us imagine our ideal futures.’
‘Are you sure that’s wise?’
Connie laughed. ‘No. I’m twisting it all, but it’s what I do. And being a person with no faith except in artistic culture – in fiction, say – doesn’t make you better than someone who doesn’t read books. In some ways, it makes you terrifying. Or terrified. Depends on the day. Isn’t it an abnegation of reality? A person who needs to see an actor crying crocodile tears to understand the depths of grief, a person who needs a love poem to circle closer to the feeling – she might find it hard to live in the real world. She’s arguably deficient.’
Connie was surprising me. She was getting emotional. ‘Aren’t we all a bit like that?’ I said. ‘The real world . . . can be too much.’
She batted the air with a claw-like hand. ‘I’m not criticizing. I’m sure I’m in the majority. I need those actors. I need those love poems. I’ve found it hard, I’ve needed stories. Which I assume is patently obvious.’
‘Except you haven’t written for so long.’
Connie didn’t like that. She sniffed and looked away. ‘When you came to my house the first time, you said you’d read Green Rabbit.’
‘I have.’
‘And did you think I was Rabbit?’
‘No. I thought she was a fiction.’
This wasn’t strictly true.
Connie smiled. ‘Good. Because that’s the point. It’s never reality. That’s the aim. But the problem is, no one can really say what reality actually is. It’s just so slippery.’
‘I know.’
She stood up. ‘I’m ready. Let’s go back. I need a cup of tea.’
19
A few days after this conversation, I was making pizza at Connie’s kitchen table when she appeared at the door. ‘Laura,’ she said. ‘Can you stay late? I’ve invited a guest and I was wondering whether you’d cook.’
‘A guest?’
My voice was perceptibly tight. Imagine, I thought. My mother, walking through that front door.
‘That’s allowed, isn’t it?’ said Connie, raising an eyebrow.
‘I’m sorry. Of course.’
‘It’s my agent. Deborah.’
‘Your agent,’ I repeated, feeling something inside me shrivel. I turned away to the kitchen counter. I was going mad – why did I think my mother would be coming round for dinner?
‘Laura, is something wrong?’
‘Not at all.’ I gestured to the ball of pizza dough I’d been kneading. ‘But I was just planning on leaving you a pizza.’
‘Pizza will be lovely, thank you. And do you want to invite your partner?’ Connie said.