You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) Read online

  But I didn’t.

  I tipped the mug of tea – tepid now, thank God – over the floor so it splashed up on to her face and said, “Clean that up. You’ve started, you may as well finish.”

  Then I slammed out of the flat, blinded by tears, and went and found Felix and Roddy in the pub. Through my distress, I was conscious that I needed to get my story of what had happened in first, before Mel could tell hers. I was bitterly ashamed, and said so, but I desperately wanted them to be on my side, to have my back when we eventually returned home to the inevitable fallout.

  But in the event, there wasn’t any. Not that night, anyway. When we got back, many hours and many drinks later, Mel was gone and so were all her things.

  And the next morning, when the cast list appeared and I learned that the impossible had happened and I’d been cast as Princess Aurora, with Felix opposite me as the male lead, it didn’t feel like a dream come true. It felt like a nightmare that was about to begin.

  Chapter 14

  Felix’s response came just a few seconds later.

  “There’s a stranger in your bed. But there’s something waiting for you in the bed outside.”

  For a moment I felt totally creeped out, then I realised what he meant. The old flat, where he’d fallen asleep in my bed that first mad, drunken night. And the flowerbeds outside the building… He had no way of knowing that I was just a few minutes away from Covent Garden, not at my kitchen table in Battersea. I could play him at his own game, I realised, try and catch him as he laid his clues.

  I hurried down Oxford Street, my ‘impress the salesladies in Selfridges’ high heels impeding my progress as much as the crowds of shoppers who thronged the pavements, even before ten on a Monday morning. Impatient to avoid the throng, I cut down through Soho, zigzagging my way along the narrow streets, regretting my shoes and my decision as I slipped and stumbled over damp cobblestones.

  I found the street where we’d lived unerringly – I could have found it blindfolded. Actually, it would almost have been easier if I’d been unable to see, because the block of flats had changed beyond all recognition. What had been a bit bohemian and louche (and cheap as chips, and considerably grubbier) was now gentrified beyond recognition, the brick planters that had bloomed with empty crisp packets, discarded cans of extra-strength lager and the occasional syringe were now filled with bright summer flowers. Flowers – flower beds – of course!

  But with gentrification had come security. The courtyard that had been free for anyone to access back then was now barricaded behind eight foot-high wrought-iron gates, with a telephone entry system. I’d have to climb. Then I looked at my impractical shoes and my skinny jeans and thought, don’t be ridiculous, Laura. If I tried climbing those railings, the only doubt about the outcome was whether I’d be impaled, arrested or sectioned first.

  I was going to have to blag it. I rang a bell at random. There was no response. I tried another. A woman’s voice, in a strong Eastern European accent, said, “Yes?”

  “Delivery,” I muttered.

  “Get lost, chancer,” came the reply.

  Blushing so deeply I felt even my toes must be red, I tried another bell. A drawling, actory voice responded, “Hello, Masterson.”

  “Darling, it’s me,” I said, attempting a breathy, distressed voice. “Please let me in.”

  Amazingly, there was a buzz and the gate sprang open. I paused for a moment, wondering whether Mr Masterson might be watching from an overhead window, would realise that I wasn’t the acquaintance he thought was calling on him in her time of need, and ring the police. I had no time to lose.

  I pushed through the gate and glanced around the familiar, yet unfamiliar courtyard. The brick planters were brimmed with pansies and petunias in shades of pink, lilac and deepest purple, with the occasional flash of gold. But one splash of colour stood out: a vivid scarlet. I hurried over, all my qualms about the stupidity and recklessness of the enterprise overcome, because, God help me, I was having real, actual fun.

  Lying in the flowerbed was a bouquet of half a dozen long-stemmed red roses. It was the sort of thing I’d been given by the hundred when I was dancing – they were literally strewn at my feet after a first night or a last one, and even on middle nights they weren’t exactly thin on the ground, either. But this one gave me a glow of pleasure I had never felt when I’d asked the stage managers back then to bundle them up and send them to Great Ormond Street or the local women’s refuge. This one had a note attached in Felix’s handwriting.

  “I know it’s ancient history, but think you left something somewhere,” it said.

  The words made me feel as if I’d been hit in the stomach. It was true – I had. I’d left a whole world behind, and I had no way of reclaiming it, even if I wanted to. For a second, the sense of loss I’d felt earlier in the morning returned in a huge, debilitating wave. I’d left it all behind – I was leaving my thirties behind, or I would be, in just a few birthdays. But then the excitement of the chase filled me again, overcoming my melancholy. I’d left something behind. What did he mean?

  I racked my brains. Felix was a total scatterbrain – he was always losing, breaking and forgetting things. But I wasn’t. I was meticulous, a control-freak, as Roddy used to say. My laundry was always done on time, my pointe shoes always had their ribbons sewn on if not prettily, at least firmly. I didn’t leave things behind – at least, I hadn’t then.

  Then I remembered. One bank holiday weekend – it must have been August, because it was boiling – there’d been a fire, or a bomb alert, or something. Rehearsals were never, ever cancelled, but that day, they had been. And Felix, being Felix, rather than loafing around the flat wasting our unexpected free time, had announced that we were going to a museum. The V&A. Where I’d checked my bag into the cloakroom along with the cotton scarf I’d draped around my neck when we went out, then taken off because it was too hot. When I retrieved my bag afterwards, the scarf had been missing, and when I realised it was too late to go back, and anyway the scarf was a hideous thing, not worth the couple of quid it would cost to replace, and Felix promised he’d buy me another one sometime.

  That must be what he’d meant by ancient history – the museum. And us, of course. As the memory flooded back, I found myself hurrying north towards the Tube station. I boarded a train and was at South Kensington in just a few minutes. I’d forgotten how long the bloody tunnel was. I dodged through crowds of tourists, clutching my red roses, my shoes beginning to seriously pinch my feet, then at last found the entrance.

  I barely paused to admire the magnificent marble figures that lined the gallery on either side of me – my eyes were only focussed on the signs. Café, Gift Shop, Roman Gallery, Ceramics, Cloakroom… There it was. Lost Property.

  “I left something behind,” I gasped to the taciturn woman at the counter.

  “Yes? When was that?”

  Fuck. I couldn’t really say it had been fourteen years ago.

  “Just the other day. It’s a scarf. My name’s Laura Payne.”

  Immediately, her face softened, breaking into a delighted smile. I didn’t know what Felix had done, but his legendary charm had clearly been put to work on this ogress.

  “Laura! Yes, I think I have what you’re looking for.”

  She turned to the array of cubby-holes behind her, which were filled with an assortment of random carrier bags and items of clothing. There was even a pair of shoes in one of them. How the hell do you lose your shoes in a museum, I wondered.

  “Is this it?”

  She handed me a tissue-wrapped parcel. My hands were shaking so much I fumbled taking it from her, grasping a corner of the wrapping, so the paper tore away and spilled out a square of exquisite silk brocade that ran over my fingers like water. It was the colours of peacock’s tail – all blue and gold and iridescent and wonderful. I gasped with pleasure.

  The scary lady beamed maternally. “Happy birthday, yes? You’re very lucky, your husband is a charming man.”
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  I felt my own smile fade. “Yes. Yes, he is,” I said. “Thank you.”

  I turned away, wondering what to do next.

  The sensible thing, of course, would be to text Felix, thank him for the flowers and the gift, but tell him that this had to stop. It was only a treasure hunt, though. Just a bit of fun for my birthday, a trip down memory lane. And I still had hours before I needed to collect the children, and damn it, I was enjoying myself more than I’d done for ages. And it was my birthday. And I wanted to know where the next clue would take me – if there was one, of course.

  I shook out the beautiful scarf, wondering whether there was any message concealed in its folds, but there wasn’t. I inspected the tissue paper, but that was blank and empty, too. Then I felt my phone vibrate with another text. I snatched it out of my bag, stabbing at the screen. There were just five words.

  “Some boys never grow up.”

  I shook my head, laughing. He’d got that right. Staging silly games like this wasn’t something any of the grown-ups I knew would do, unless they were doing it for their children. There’d always been something irrepressibly silly about Felix. I’d loved that about him, but it could be infuriating, too. It never occurred to him to get to bed early before an important performance – he’d quite happily head out on the lash with Roddy and his other mates, and try to persuade me to come too, and often I’d say yes, even though Mel made a cat’s-bum moue of disapproval. And it never seemed to affect him – however hungover and sleep-deprived he was, he always danced brilliantly, talent and adrenaline making him light up on stage.

  There was one time, I remembered, when we were on tour in Manchester, when Felix hadn’t actually slept in his hotel bedroom for three nights, carousing until the sun came up before coming to my room to wake me up and fuck me until I could barely stand.

  What show had that been again, I wondered, searching the fragments of memory. Of course – Peter Pan. It was one of the few times we’d starred opposite each other, and it had only happened because I’d been understudying Suzanne, who’d torn her meniscus. I’d thought of it at the time as a beginning, the first of many ballets in which our names would top the programme together. In the end, of course, it didn’t work out quite like that.

  But that must be where the clue was leading me. A bookshop? There must be hundreds in London. I tried to remember the name of the street where the Darling family had lived in the original play, but I couldn’t, if indeed I ever knew. Was it somewhere around here, near the museums and the park and Kensington Palace?

  Of course – the statue of Peter Pan was in Kensington Gardens.

  I looped the scarf around my neck and hurried outside into the sunshine.

  Five minutes later I was standing beneath the statue, willing it to give up its secrets. It was a beautiful monument – charming and whimsical. Jonathan and I had brought the children here once, when Owen was a baby, planning a picnic, but it rained and Darcey cried and Jonathan was grumpy, and we ended up eating sandwiches in Pret, dripping and disappointed in the failure of the day.

  I walked around the statue, searching for clues. Then I noticed something out of place – a glint of silver against the verdegrised bronze of Peter’s feet. I looked around. It was high up – I’d have to climb on to the base of the statue to reach it. One got into horrible trouble for that sort of thing – it was probably a crime of some kind. I imagined a posse of park wardens, or whatever they were called, descending on me and arresting me, and Jonathan having to come and bail me out.

  But I couldn’t stop now. Quickly I climbed and reached, and seconds later I was holding a small silver charm in my hand – a pair of ballet shoes, attached to a delicate silver chain. There was a tag of paper attached to it, which must once have held the price, but now it had writing on it, in a tiny, cramped version of Felix’s usual scrawl.

  “Care to join Lawsonski for lunch?”

  I laughed out loud. If there were hundreds of bookshops in London, there must be thousands of restaurants – tens of thousands, even. But I knew exactly where to go.

  Felix and I hadn’t had a first date, exactly. We’d gone from being colleagues, acquaintances really, to spending every night together, just like that. There was no discussion, no consideration – from the moment I walked into Studio Eight to rehearse the dance of the cygnets that Monday morning, we were inseparable.

  It was only on the final night of the show that Felix had said, “Let’s sack off the cast party and go for dinner to celebrate, just the two of us.”

  And he’d swept us off to Knightsbridge in a taxi to a tiny, poky restaurant where everyone spoke Russian, including Felix, and a bottle of iced vodka was plonked on our table without us ordering it. After that, we went back whenever we could afford it – the place was cheap, back then, but we were skint. Still, we celebrated our one-month anniversary there, and our six-month one, and his birthday and mine, and the manager knew us by name and comped us drinks and seemed proud that his obscure little restaurant was the choice of “famous ballet dancers”, as he said in his broken English.

  Back then, I would have been able to find the place with my eyes shut, but would I be able to now? I left the park and wandered into the maze of streets beyond. It all seemed different from how it used to be – there was Harrods, of course, and Harvey Nicks, where I occasionally used to go to gaze at beautiful clothes I couldn’t afford, before we had the children. I could afford them now, I supposed, if I had anywhere to wear them to. Zé managed not to look like a twat turning up for the school run in Moschino, but I was quite sure I wouldn’t be able to pull it off.

  I turned left, round a familiar square. If only I could remember the name of the road the restaurant was on, but I couldn’t. I took out my phone and launched Google Maps, watching the little blue dot that was me moving slowly along. I zoomed in, and then I saw it, helpfully marked on the map, just a block away. Babushka’s. Of course – how could I was forgotten? Felix always used to sing the Kate Bush song by way of suggesting that we go there. I smiled at the memory and hurried on, then stopped, combed my hair and put on some lipstick. I didn’t have a mirror so I had to do it by feel – hopefully I wouldn’t end up with scarlet teeth.

  And there it was, the familiar purple door, the familiar plants in their brass urns on either side of it, the familiar collection of rather creepy dolls lined up in the window.

  I pushed the door open and paused. It was the same, but somehow different, wrong. It was the smell, I realised. Back in the day, everyone – but everyone – in Babushka’s smoked. The air used to be thick with it. When we went there the first time I thought that the ceiling had been painted a deep ochre colour, then I realised it was just stained by the tar of thousands of unfiltered Russian fags. It had been cleaned now, of course, or painted over, and the room was lighter as a consequence, although the heavy lace curtains were doing their best to keep out the bright July sun, giving the interior a ghostly glow like a misty morning just before the sun breaks through.

  I barely had a chance to take it in, though, because seconds later I was enveloped in a huge hug and given bristly kisses on both cheeks and then on the lips by a bearded bear of a man.

  “Little Laura! Where have you been all these years? You look just the same, kotyonok.”

  His smell was so familiar – clearly although he’d complied with the smoking ban in his restaurant, he hadn’t imposed it on himself – that, to my relief, his name sprang back into my memory.

  “Dmitri! It’s great to see you. You look just the same, too, and the place. It’s good to be back. How are you? How’s business?” I could feel tears pricking my eyes, and gushed platitudes to keep them away.

  “Oh, it’s bad. So very bad.” Dmitri had always been an incorrigible pessimist – to have stayed trading in this area for all these years, he must be coining it. “But we don’t talk about that! Happy times, yes? And your birthday, and your young man waiting for you just like before. Come this way.”

  He led me
through the warren of rooms to the banquette at the back, which had always been ‘our’ table. The gilt chairs were the same, upholstered in the same turquoise velvet, albeit a little more worn. The starched, snowy tablecloth was just the same, as was the elaborate, slightly tarnished ice bucket in which a bottle of vodka was reposing.

  And Felix was just the same, too, especially in this dim, otherworldly light. The boy who’d never grow old, slouching in his seat, his brilliant eyes watching me as intensely as they ever had.

  Then his face broke into a delighted grin, and I saw again the lines around his eyes and mouth that never used to be there, the new hollows beneath his cheekbones. But still, when he smiled, it was like the sun coming out or the first chords of a favourite song playing on the radio.

  “Here she is!” Dmitri said. “I knew she would come. Didn’t I say she would?” He broke into Russian as he pulled out my chair, and Felix replied, fluent as ever, as far as I could tell, as if he spoke the language every day.

  With a flourish, Dmitri opened the vodka and poured three shots, and we toasted one another and drank. The icy, raw spirit hit my stomach and seemed to teleport immediately to my brain. Simultaneously, I felt a giddy elation and a sense of deep misgiving – what was I doing here? How was I going to pick the kids up from school and nursery reeking of booze? I’d just have the one, I promised myself, and when Dmitri immediately refilled our glasses and said again, “Vashe zrodovye!” I joined in the toast but only wet my lips with my drink.

  “But what am I thinking?” Dmitri said. “You two need to catch up, to celebrate together.”

  He indicated the menu in front of Felix and there was another rapid-fire exchange, of which I understood not a word. Then Dmitri nodded approvingly and disappeared in the direction of the kitchen.