It’s Not Me, It’s You

A look passed across Paul’s face, and Delia tensed her stomach muscles and refused to let the disappointment in.

Maybe he noticed, because he pulled her up towards him, kissed the top of her head and said into her hair: ‘We can go somewhere that serves champagne and has central heating. That’s my proposal.’

Delia paused. You can’t try to run the whole show. Let him have his way. She took his hand and followed him back down the bridge, arm once more through his, their pace now quicker, thoughts buzzing. Engaged.

Paul had once said to her, about the loss of his parents: you can still choose whether you’re going to be unhappy or not. Even in the face of something so awful, he said he’d started to recover when he realised it was a choice.

‘But what if so many bad things have happened to you, you’re unhappy and it’s not your fault?’ she said.

Paul replied: ‘How many people do you know where that’s the case? They’ve chosen gloom, that’s all. Every day, you get to choose.’

Delia realised two things during that conversation. 1) Part of the reason she loved Paul was his positivity. 2) From then on, she could spot Gloom Choosers. Her office had one or two.

So tonight, Delia thought, she could either dwell on the fact she’d never got a proposal, and that her offer to him instead had been met with some reluctance. That Paul was simply never going to be the kind of man to gaze into her eyes and tell her she set his world alight.

Or she could concentrate on the fact that she was walking hand-in-hand with her new fiancé to a pub in their wonderful home city to drink champagne and chatter about wedding plans, on a stomach full of coconutty curry.

She chose to be happy.

Four (#udff5c29e-e922-584c-8f69-fe467fa04cf8)

‘They only do champagne by the bottle,’ Paul said, after they burst in to the warmth of the Crown Posada. Paul didn’t drink in places that hadn’t won CAMRA awards. They rubbed their hands and studied the laminated drinks menu as if they were at The Ritz.

‘Shall we bother with the fizz? Booze is booze is booze,’ Paul said.

Delia realised the evening as she’d imagined it wasn’t quite going to happen, but don’t force it, she thought to herself. You have your wedding day planning for all this stuff. (Wedding day planning! It was possible that Delia had a secret Pinterest board, covered with long-sleeved lace dresses and quirky licensed venues in the Newcastle area, and hand-tied bouquets of peonies, paperwhites and roses in ice-cream colours. At last, she could now go legit.)

She acquiesced cheerfully and Paul readied sharp elbows among the crowd to get their usual order, a bottle of Brooklyn Lager for him and a Liefmans raspberry beer for her. Paul sometimes worried they were ageing hipsters.

He motioned for Delia to grab a table and she retreated across the room to watch him waiting his turn at the bar, one eye on the action, the other playing with his phone. Nat King Cole’s ‘These Foolish Things (Remind Me of You)’ was crackling on the Posada’s ancient gramophone, competing with a roomful of lively inebriated conversation.

Paul’s scruffy good looks were even better when offset by something smarter, she thought, like tonight’s fisherman’s coat. She had an idea for a Paul Smith suit, tie and brogue combination for the wedding (the Pinterest board was busy), but she’d have to broach it carefully so Paul didn’t feel emasculated. She wanted him to be completely involved.

She knew the right way to pull him in – interest Paul in the drinks, then the music, and finally, the food.

Think of it as dinner at theirs, writ large, she’d say. Paul and Delia were big on having people to dinner. When Delia had moved into the house in Heaton, she’d been free to indulge all her nesting urges. Paul had invested in the house as a blank canvas, but with no particular idea of what to do with it. He liked that she liked decorating, and a perfect deal was struck.

When other people her age were spending on clothes, clubs and recreational drugs, Delia was saving for a fruit-picker’s ladder she could paint the perfect sailboat blue, or trawling auctions for mirrored armoires that locked with keys that had tassels. She knew she was an old-before-her-time square but when you’re happy, you don’t care.

Delia was also an enthusiastic home cook, and Paul always had wholesaler-size piles of drink from the bar. Thus they were the first among their peers with a welcoming, grown-up house.

Many a Saturday night ended in a loud, messy singalong with their best friends Aled and Gina, with Paul acting as DJ.

In fact, Delia had wondered whether to throw an engagement party. She had recently ordered some original 1970s cookbooks and was enjoying making retro food: scampi with tartare sauce, Black Forest gateau. She fantasised about a kitsch Abigail’s Party buffet.

Should her family come to that do? Delia would wait to call her parents, leave it until tomorrow. She would love to tell them now, to make it more real. But she couldn’t bear the thought that Paul didn’t have an equivalent call to make. Not even to his brother, what with the time difference.

Her phone rippled with a text. Paul. She looked up in surprise. He was playing it cool, pocketing his phone as he gave their order to the bar man.

Delia grinned an idiotic grin, feeling the joy roll through her. Oh ye of little faith. She had her moment. He’d needed time to get used to it, that’s all. There was a romantic in him. She slid the unlock bar, typed her code (her birthday, Paul’s birthday) and read the words.

C. Something’s happened with D and I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else. She’s proposed. Don’t know what to do. Meet tomorrow? P Xx

Delia sat stock still, the weight of the phone heavy in her palm. Suddenly, nothing made sense. She had to work through the discordant information, line by line, as her stomach swung on monkey bars.

‘Don’t know what to do’ punched her in the heart.

Then there were the kisses at the end of the message. Paul was not an electronic kisser. Delia was privileged to get a small one. And she was his closest family.

But what was so frightening was the intimate tone of the message. A voice coming through it that wasn’t Paul’s, or Paul as she knew him.

She spoke sternly to herself. Delia. Stop being wilfully stupid. Add the sum up to its total. This is clearly meant for another woman. The Other Woman.

‘I don’t want you to hear it from anyone else.’ Some faceless, nameless stranger had this size of a stake in their lives? Delia felt as if she was going to throw up.

Paul put the drinks down on the table and dragged the chair out opposite her.

‘I like the ale in here but they need to step the service up. They’ve no rush in them.’ Paul paused, as Delia stared dully at him. ‘You OK?’

She wanted to say something smart, pithy, wounding. Something that would slice the air in two, the same way Paul’s text had just karate-chopped her life into Before and After.

Instead she said, glancing back down at her phone, ‘Who’s C?’

Paul looked at the mobile, then back at Delia’s expression again. He went both red and white at the same time, the colour of a man Delia had once sat next to on a National Express coach who’d had a coronary in the Peaks.

She’d been the only passenger who knew First Aid, so she ended up kneeling in mud at the roadside doing CPR, trying not to retch at tasting his Tennant’s Extra.

She would not be giving Paul mouth-to-mouth.

‘Delia,’ he said, with an agonised expression. It was a sentence that started and stopped. Her name and his voice didn’t sound the same. From now on, everything was going to be different.

Five (#udff5c29e-e922-584c-8f69-fe467fa04cf8)

Art didn’t prepare you for the smaller moments between the big moments, Delia thought. Life had no editing suite to shape the narrative into something that flowed.

If the arrival of Paul’s text had happened onscreen, after the close-up of Delia’s horrified face there’d have been a jump cut to her bowling away down the street, stumbling on her heels (rom com), slinging plates around their kitchen (soap opera), angrily filling a battered clasp-lock suitcase (music video), or staring out across the blustery Tyne (art house).

Instead, what happened next undercut the momentous awfulness with boring practicality.

It was established in words of few syllables that Paul had sent the message to the person it was about, rather than the person it was for. A fairly common cock-up that usually had less dramatic impact. There was a surreal moment when a wild-eyed Paul rambled about only sending it to Delia the second time when he thought it hadn’t sent, or something. As if that could make it better and it could somehow be un-seen.

It begged a lot of other questions and answers, ones they could no longer exchange in a busy pub.

Delia managed to quell her urge to vomit. Then she had to get home.

While she considered leaving Paul on his own, looking at two full glasses and a swinging pub door, he’d only follow her. If she succeeded in storming solo into a taxi, all she’d do at home was wait to confront him anyway. It seemed a self-defeating gesture of defiance that would achieve nothing more than a double cab fare.

So she had to endure a silent, agonising journey in a Hackney, pressed against the opposite side of the seat from Paul, staring through the smudged window, occasionally catching the curious face of the driver in his rearview mirror.