Distinctions
1
For some months, he had been going to the same cafe almost every day and, about two months after first going there, he noticed another person had become one of its most regular customers. They would both occupy the cafe around the same time - between 3 and 5 in the afternoon. Ian started to visit the place because he had changed his shifts at the city’s main public library, working from 9-3 instead of 10- 5. He lost an hour a day on his wages, but believed he didn’t need the money as much as he needed the time to read at least some of the books he was often asked over, by people who came in and thought he ought to be the one who knew what he was talking about when it came to novels, biographies, histories and other books on philosophy and psychology. His interests weren’t so broad, but he used to read many novels, and also works of philosophy and aesthetics. He noticed since he started in the library he read less than he used to, and reckoned it rested on finding no time in his schedule to read books. He went to work, walked the three miles back to his flat, ate dinner, then often watched a film at home or in the cinema, or met up with friends in the pub. Finishing at 3 would give him this time, as if he wanted to prove erroneous a remark a philosopher had once offered: that three o’clock was too early or too late to do anything.
I worked near the cafe and, when I finished, I sometimes passed by. If Ian was still there and we had planned to meet, I would join him; or we would go for a walk through the Meadows and up around Bruntsfield Links. It was the only time we seemed to have for meeting up without others around; usually, as a group, we would go to the pub or the cinema once, sometimes twice a week.
Ian wasn’t an unhappy person, but he lived as though he were waiting for bliss. Since leaving university three years earlier, most of us found career jobs we wanted to do, girlfriends we liked or continued to like, and prepared ourselves for the children we might have by earning enough money to have them, or getting pets that would compensate for the emotional loss our parents said would await us if we decided not to have kids. I exaggerate and simplify, but of all of us, Ian was the one who resisted most the normalisation of our lives. We were lucky to get jobs that paid a proper salary, and some would say no less so in finding partners who would tolerate us, and on some occasions even love us. But Ian’s notion of work and love appeared different, and while he never said he wanted to become a writer, I felt sure that if anybody I knew was working on stories, a novel, or at least keeping a diary, it was Ian.
2
This other person was around his age, and the way he described her, I suspected she was attractive in a manner similar to Ian. He said she was slim but wore items that were baggy, seemed to have a taste in clothes without spending money on them, as he reckoned much of what she bought probably came from a charity shop, and she had thick, auburn hair that was well looked after by a dietician’s standards, but neglected from the perspective of a stylist. She looked as if she half-attended to her appearance and half-ignored it, and he wasn’t sure whether this was a consequence of occasional neglect or moments where her self-confidence was missing. When he first talked about her, he may not have been aware that he was talking, too, about himself, as much of what he said sounded like a self-diagnosis. What he didn’t say was that he was personally attracted to her, but then I wouldn’t have expected Ian to do so. Throughout university, I knew of only two encounters Ian had, and on both occasions he was drunk and the women were insistent. It would be too strong to say that he was bullied into bed, but the assignations wouldn’t have happened if the women hadn’t been proactive. I don’t think he ever saw either woman again, and perhaps they became aware very quickly either that he wasn’t much interested, or such interest as they could arouse out of him wasn’t worth the effort.
I believed this woman might have interested him far more, but I wouldn’t have thought until more recently that Ian didn’t wish to engage with those two women because they weren’t part of the habits of his life; more, momentary exceptions on a night out. I couldn’t have initially said how fascinated with this woman he seemed to be, but I did assume that he was at least curious, as if curiosity is an accumulative feeling developed out of habit; desire an instant one to counter the habitual. When he initially spoke to me about it while taking one of our walks around the park, I jokingly asked when he was going to see her again. He said he hoped very soon, adding this was the thing with contingency: it relies on hope rather than expectation.
As we walked, I asked him further about this, and he added that maybe what he liked more than anything was hope meeting expectation, but hope which had in mind what that expectation might be. He said going to a nightclub and finding a woman was based on hope and expectation as well, but they were in his eyes too predictable and too vague. The intention was clear (to have sex) and the subject – the person he would have sex with – random. As he spoke, I couldn’t help wondering if he had in mind those two women at university, but I didn’t ask. He said that hope with expectation might be where our regular habits meet with an odd hope that needn’t change our habits, but would confirm them. We wouldn’t be doing anything to seek something out; we would be doing what we generally did with the hope that, within it, another positive experience would come out of it. While he didn’t think it was a fair analogy, and perhaps a troublesome one, the best he could do for the moment was to say it was closer to angling, rather than trawler fishing or hunting. He sometimes thought that what anglers loved most was the habit of going to a place each day, each week, each month, and waiting to see if a fish will catch their bait. The fish might or might not, but he believed the person’s purpose was to angle rather than to fish, and one reason why it was such a different task from trawler fishing. There, the fishermen would go out on a boat and catch in their nets as many fish as the law allows or the boat can contain. In a different way, the hunter goes out into the woods or onto the savanna and, while there might be some waiting involved, it seemed far more proactively involved in trying to take a creature’s life. As he said this, a squirrel scurried down a tree and into a bush. He said with a smile, this proved his point and showed how suspect it was. Imagine how difficult it would be to catch that squirrel, how much energy would one need to exert to capture or kill it? And yes, his whole argument contained a problematic analogy. There they were talking about a young woman in a cafe, and here he was speaking of hunting animals and catching fish. All he wanted to make clear was that there was a quiet pleasure he supposed in habitual actions yielding occasional pleasures. It might be no more than sitting in a cafe and nodding at a semi-regular who comes in, or a few comments with the waiter or waitress about the book he was reading, as they would speak about one they had been reading also.
3
Of all those I knew, of all the people in that group of friends and acquaintances that had expanded since university with new girlfriends and boyfriends, and new friends brought in, Ian was the most singular. One or two found him odd, and I recall one friend who became part of our circle a couple of years ago admitting they found it difficult talking to Ian. I asked if they meant that they had nothing to say to each other, and that the chat was filled with silences, and he said no, it wasn’t like that at all. It was worse. He said it with a laugh, but there was more anxiety than humour in what he said. He reckoned that he often felt lost, rather than lost for words, as though Ian had pulled him into a space he didn’t want to occupy, and while he wasn’t given to the analogies Ian was inclined to use, his description made me think of a dark room with the door locked, a basement or an attic. It was then I realised how Ian could be seen as a claustrophobic figure or its opposite, as the man’s remarks resembled a couple of comments others had made during university. I think I understood what this person was saying, and yet it was antithetical to my own take on Ian. For me, Ian was a person I could speak to because he saw things differently from most, and perhaps why he often found himself using metaphors and analogous examples. It is true he would draw a person in to his own way of looking at things, but I never found this claustrophobic, perhaps because though I lived far more conventionally than Ian did, and saw my life through the prism of a job, a partner and probably children, I needed to believe there were other ways to think. It made the life I would lead stable, without quite making it seem predictable. I knew I could live differently.
It was perhaps why Annie and I had been together since our third year in university. We both sought stability in our lives, and we sometimes joked that what we loved about each other wasn’t our astonishingly agreeable qualities, but the acknowledgement of our insecurities. I recall one conversation, about six weeks after we had started seeing each other, and we admitted that neither of us felt that we were special or unique, neither of us believed the other had remarkable qualities or that we were made for each other. Some might see this as a disillusioning chat to have in the midst of what is usually called the honeymoon period, but I am not so sure if it didn’t protect us from what happens after that initial enthusiasm, when people start to see the reality of the person they are with. Annie and I tried to do so as quickly as we could, and it might be why even after a few months together, others who met us for the first time thought we had been together for years. Again, for some, this might seem a terrible thing – that after so short a period, we had settled into such familiarity and risked losing the tension and electricity of the first year. Perhaps, but it was as though Annie and I wanted to create the maximum amount of security as quickly as possible, and wanted to do so without narcissism overcoming insecurity, without constantly flattering each other to assuage our fears that we weren’t good-looking enough, intelligent enough and so on for the other person. I think we are both attractive people, though not so much that others would look at us on the street. I have never much liked my nose, and my skin can sometimes take on a ruddy complexion, while Annie feels her nose is too small and snubby, and she gets the occasional pimple. If we were looking for perfection, we both agreed, we should have looked elsewhere. But we didn’t, and what we found led, I believed, to great affection, companionship, and yes, on occasion, desire.
I offer all this partly because I reckoned Ian wanted something very different, and I think it could partly be explained by his interest in hope rather than expectation. I believe Annie and I would have said we were together out of expectation more than hope. We expected to find a like-minded person and did so. We didn’t think we were lucky, didn’t even believe we couldn’t have met some other like-minded person, and this again might seem to indicate ours was a relationship without much ardour or enthusiasm. But that hasn’t necessarily been so; it is just that we saw nothing exceptional in our relationship except what we had made of it, and perhaps that has been special, since friends would sometimes tell us we had an enviable one and that they didn’t quite know how we had done it. They were surprised by the absence of backbiting, the ability to agree to do things together or separately without resentment, and that we possessed future prospects that we seemed to be in agreement upon. Of course, I am speaking for Annie here and, given what has been happening lately between us, probably shouldn’t. But anything I have said has come out of numerous conversations between us, and out of situations that have been resolved, without the arguments other friends endure when, as a couple, they cannot decide one thing or another.
I don’t wish to make what Annie and I have had any more than it is; only to say it is what it is, or what it was, and to distinguish between what we have had and what I believed Ian wanted.
4
I asked Ian on one of these walks around the park what would happen if hope didn’t meet expectation, if nobody appeared in the manner he wished. He said, with his usual quiet irony, meeting a paradoxical earnestness, that he would die alone. He offered it with all the awareness of the lovelorn dying in a garret, and yet with the sincerity of a person who would do just that. However, he wouldn’t be so much lovelorn as forlorn, feeling that he had missed something rather than lost someone. He did sometimes worry he had a hope that no reality could manifest itself in, just as I, he insisted, had a reality that no hope need intrude upon. He believed Annie and I were the happiest couple he knew. Ian added that it didn’t mean we were the happiest individuals, but we had created a union of happiness. He admitted that if he were to create a union, it would be based on quite different premises, and all he said that day was that it would be based on the assumption of singularity. He would have to see this person as unique.
As we walked, I asked if he wanted to continue up to Bruntsfield, past the Links, and get a drink in a pub with tables outside. The weather was over twenty degrees, and warm enough as long as the sun was out: we could pretend we were on the continent. We took the one free table just as others were leaving, and the waitress asked us to give her a minute while she wiped it down. The pub was near what was called Holy Corner, an aptly and simultaneously poorly named part of the town that joined Bruntsfield to Morningside. It was apt because there were three churches in close conjunction to each other; perhaps a misnomer since it was also a busy crossroads that left traffic undermining any spiritual peace and quiet. It wasn’t so far from where Annie and I lived, and I liked meeting people there as it caught the sun until it set. No less importantly, you could sit outside in close proximity with others while your conversation remained private, as the whoosh of traffic made eavesdropping difficult.
I wondered what he might have thought of the waitress, a woman, like us, in her late-twenties, who finished a Master’s in ethnography the previous year, and who decided to stay because she liked to study people and hadn’t finished with the Scots yet. She offered this to me a couple of months earlier when I was seated outside, waiting for a friend. She asked if I wanted a drink, and I said I’d hang on for a few minutes and watch the world go by. She replied, saying she did a lot of that, and said a few words about her Master’s and half-jokingly explained why she was still in Scotland almost a year later. It would have been impertinent to ask her if a partner was the real or main reason, and even more so to wonder if she might have been escaping pressures at home: parental expectations, a partner she no longer loved. I’ve often thought that it isn’t that we ask these questions (usually we don’t), but why only some people invoke them in us. She was striking, with black hair and red lips, pale skin and a figure that moved between tables with the grace of someone who combined aspects of both an athlete and an actress. It might explain why many actors and actresses wait tables, as if seeing, in the attentiveness of an audience, and the importance of navigating space, transferable skills.
I suspect I didn’t choose the pub only because it was a place to sit in the sun, sandwiched in with others, and that allowed conversational privacy. I also wondered what he would make of Anya: whether she passed for unique. I didn’t speak of her that day, and he only made a passing remark, noting that she moved elegantly, with no sense of haste. Instead, we discussed hope and what it meant to him. He described it as a feeling that had no name and a state that had no guarantee of manifestation. He supposed this was the difference between it and expectation: that the latter seemed too readily representable, and also perhaps too commonly agitative. If one expects a certain job, to live in a particular type of house, to marry a type of woman, these are all expectations. If they are not met, irritation and despondency are likely. He believed that wasn’t so with hope. It might seem similar to expectation, but it possessed a calm often absent from people waiting for something. As he said this, he looked across at a table on the other side of the street. He said for a couple of minutes he’d noticed a couple seated who seemed annoyed, and sure enough, just as he pointed across, I noticed them get up, shake their heads, and leave. As they were getting in their car, parked only few yards from that pub, we saw the waiter coming out with drinks and looking around to see where they had gone. Ian assumed that we had just witnessed a couple of impatient people. If they were waiting in line for a takeaway coffee, a takeaway lunch, or were in a supermarket queue, they might have a practical reason to justify their impatience, and it might have been fairer to say they were in a hurry. Hurry indicates a necessary impatience, perhaps as the person doesn’t want to be late for work or an important assignation. Looking across at the two people who left after taking a seat for a beer, Ian couldn’t see anything other than impatience. I concurred and thought briefly about Anya, how she might have seen their impatience before they got up and left, and asked them to wait a moment – their beer was on its way. I also wondered what she might have made of Ian’s distinction between hope and expectation, patience and impatience, and whether she would have seen it of any ethnographic value.
5
I didn’t see Ian for a few weeks. One weekend, Annie and I were away; another, I had work to do that nibbled into too much of my supposed free time, and after that, Annie’s sister and her family visited. When we did catch up, I asked him how things were, and he said, perplexing. He admitted that when going to the cafe, he did so with the hope that this person would be there, but if she wasn’t, that was fine too. He didn’t expect her be. Yet he also knew that when she was, he would glance across at her, and suspected she occasionally glanced across at him, though their glances never quite coincided. He also noted, however, that she looked a little different from one occasion to the next, and credited this to no more than wearing her hair in different ways and clothing that had some variety. Yet he also began to believe that she had two images, one closer to a bohemian look, where she would wear baggier clothing, offer a subdued colour palette and was often reading a book. He also noted she would drink tea. On other occasions, she appeared more dynamic, dressed in brighter clothing, and usually wouldn’t have a book in front of her, but a computer. When she came with the computer, she rarely stayed for more than an hour and left as though there was pressing work to do. He guessed she must be a yoga teacher, a personal trainer or a dancer, even. When she was reading, she seemed to have time to daydream or reminisce, as he sometimes noticed that she would peer out of the window for what may have been minutes, without apparently looking at anything in particular.
He thought about how he himself might appear. How consistent did he seem? I said that of all of us since university, he was the one who held on to his student image and indeed augmented it. While most of the other men in the group entered our late twenties as if we could have been sartorially ten or twenty years older, as though already paying more attention to getting the kids dressed than ourselves, Ian added various touches to his attire that augmented his student look. He started wearing blazers rather than bomber jackets or cagoules, a bag over his shoulder instead of a rucksack, and would also sometimes wear a hat, occasionally a flat cap, sometimes a fedora. He looked like what he was: a bohemian librarian, a reader who seemed as though he also read people and situations. He frequently had on his face a contemplative look, and while this is a common enough phrase to describe someone’s momentary state, with Ian, it was the face he had in repose. Ian had asked about his consistency as a rhetorical question, and I saw no reason to describe what I saw in front of me. His shift from student to bohemian was subtle and had taken place over more than five years. It seemed that what he saw in this person in the cafe changed from one day to the next, and back again.
He said he had by this stage become fascinated by her, a word I might expect Ian to use towards a book or a film, but not towards a person. When I told him this, he shrugged, said he never thought about it, but maybe it was true: most people probably aren’t fascinating. Intriguing, perhaps, but usually after a couple of occasions, people yield their secrets. He didn’t mean by this that they revealed their childhood traumas or their bank details; only that they would seem habitually themselves very quickly. They would go to the cafe around the same time, often order the same drink, wear clothes similar to previous occasions, unless there was a special one, and would stay for around the same amount of time. He supposed all the other regulars fitted into this pattern. Only this one person didn’t. The reason was that she wasn’t one person.
I would often expect from Ian thoughtful conversation, but I didn’t expect to be surprised, and there he was telling me about a young woman whom he’d become interested in, fascinated by, perhaps even besotted over, and she had suddenly become split in two. He said one day the previous week, he was seated near the door of the cafe when he saw, waiting by the threshold, two women who looked remarkably alike, but whose images were indeed distinct. One was wearing a flowing beige skirt, sandals, a brown sleeveless top, and a scarf made of silk, or similar material. She had a tote bag from a health food shop in the city, and poking out of it was a yoga mat. The other wore a pair of jeans, trainers, a T-shirt and a linen blazer. Her bag was from a bookshop in Paris. They took a table on the other side of the room, and Ian could see neither of them fully, but both of them from the side. He sometimes glanced across to see how similar they were in their body language, and noticed distinct differences or some other practical activity. The one with the yoga mat took out her computer and looked as if she was arranging a trip, working on a CV, or some other task. The other took out a book and buried herself in it like she was hiding under a blanket. The yoga sister would sometimes do things with her hair, occasionally flicking it back and then putting it up in a semi-bun, with the aid of her sister’s pencil. Perhaps at some stage, the bookish sister asked for it back because her hair was once again down, and her sister was marking a passage in the book. At one moment, the yoga sister got up, took a bottle of water and a couple of glasses from the counter, and moved through the cafe space as if she were auditioning for a role. Seeing them together, it was clear they were different people, but he wondered how he hadn’t noticed it earlier. He supposed he assumed that people have good days and bad days, and on good ones, some dress more flamboyantly than on others, and exude a confidence that becomes subdued on bad ones.
We were walking through the Meadows while he was telling me this, and as we met up earlier than usual (I too had finished work early), I knew he wanted to go and read. I said I would leave him to do so, though I added I would walk him to the cafe, and might even get to see one or other of the twins, or both. As we stood outside, we glanced in, but he said neither was there, and I left him to enter alone.
As I walked back through the park and up to Bruntsfield, I thought about how I would feel discovering Anya happened to be two people rather than one, and while I would have liked to believe my interest in Anya was no more than idle attraction, a pleasing presence in a pub I would sometimes frequent, nevertheless I would have have found it perturbing, at least, possibly even disturbing. But then I also knew Anya. I knew her name, where she was from, of course knew the job she had, even the subject she had studied, and I had exchanged a few words with her over recent months. Iain had no name(s), no occupation, and not a word of conversation. Yet the twins had become a topic of our discussions, while Anya had not. I didn’t doubt that if I had discovered Anya was two people rather than one, she would have become so too. But of course, Ian had been mentioning this person who was now pluralised a few times before this new detail. Usually, when someone proposes that it is possible to be in love with two people at once, the assumption is that one was always aware that these were two distinct individuals. What happens if you only find that out afterwards?
6
Ian hadn’t told me to keep to myself what he had divulged in recent months, and yet I believed to discuss it even with Annie might seem like a breach of trust. However, that evening over dinner, I brought up the idea of twins and if she had ever known any. I recalled two identical twins I knew once telling other boys in the class how they stole from a shop in the town centre. One of them wandered around stealing a few items, and the security guard at one point called out to him, and he managed to escape into the toilets. His twin was waiting at the exit by the men’s room and was assumed to be the boy who had just been stealing and was searched. The guard found nothing on him, even though a few minutes before, he had clearly seen the boy pocketing various items. The poor security man thought he was going mad or was in the company of a magician. He let the boy go, and the lad left the building while his brother remained in the toilets for fifteen minutes, before exiting and leaving as well. I didn’t know if they tried this again, at this shop or others, but it remained a vivid anecdote as I would, for a while afterwards, think of the guard wondering whether he was losing his mind, when all that had happened was that his company had lost a bit of stock.
Immediately feeling sorry for the poor security man, Annie had often wondered about someone doing this job. She thought it must be a form of torture to be on your feet for eight hours and do no more than gaze at a customer’s mundane activities in the expectation that you might occasionally be galvanised into purpose by a shoplifter who makes your job at least seem purposeful. She supposed they were there chiefly as a deterrent, but so were speed bumps, boulders and wire fencing. All inanimate objects; the guard was an animated subject. They must sometimes go half crazy with boredom, and this is maybe exactly what the security man thought had happened to him when he asked a young boy to empty his pockets, to remove his jacket, to roll up his trousers, only to find nothing there.
Annie added she had no such amusing anecdote to offer, but she did have cousins who were twins, and she knew them quite well when she was around nine to twelve, when her parents still owned a cottage in Dorset where various members of the family lived, and where they were originally from. The twins were a few years older than her and might have been eighteen by the time her parents sold the home, and what she remembered about them was how similar they were in their tastes, despite being far from identical in their looks. She believed they may have been the most competitive people she had ever met. This would usually manifest itself in clothes they would wear, in makeup they would apply, getting better grades at school, or being the first to pass their driving test. It was as though they were trying to distinguish themselves in the twin sense of the term: they wanted to do well but also differentiate, feeling that if they didn’t compete with each other, they would sink into oneness, even though she didn’t believe anyone would have taken them for the same person. This was all manageable enough, Annie recalled, and might even have been mutually beneficial as both sisters did well at school, passed their driving test before their eighteenth birthday, and dressed as well as any other kids at the school. Yet Annie remembered that during her last summer in the cottage, a boy came to stay nearby.
7
He was, she supposed, about twenty-one, was working on his uncle’s cottage that had recently been purchased, and was in need of much repair. He worked on it mainly alone, though his uncle helped out at weekends, and she tried to remember his name. It suddenly came to her. Robert was summer-handsome, a person who tanned richly and whose eyes she remembered as vivid against his skin tone, and whose teeth flashed white in a smile or a grimace. He often worked without his top on or wearing a vest, and while she was at an age when such things were impressions that needn’t become desires, this is exactly what happened with the twins. They probably had boyfriends before, but perhaps had never found their compulsive competitiveness entering into their love lives. That summer it did, and Annie said the consequences were devastating. She paused for a few moments, started to clear away the dishes, and said she would put the kettle on.
Annie could rarely sit for long, and I did sometimes wonder if, for all our compatibility, this would be a characteristic that might eventually wear on me, or lead us to drift apart. I liked nothing better than to sit for hours looking at a landscape, reading a newspaper (an old man’s habit she called it), or even supping a pint, and watching traffic and people go by. I sometimes joined her for hill-walking and other outdoor activities, but in the last couple of years she increasingly did so in the company of others – in the various groups she had joined, including a running group, a mountaineering organisation, and a rowing team.
8
Yet when she retreated into the kitchen, and I heard the kettle boiling, I thought I might also have heard a quiet sob. I leaned my head in that direction and, as the boiling kettle got louder, I could no longer hear anything else, and I was unsure whether I should venture through or not. Deciding to do so, I found Annie with her head in the palm of her hands, gently sobbing. I took her in my arms and said I didn’t understand, and she said she couldn’t understand why she was crying either. She wasn’t to blame; she didn’t know them so well. They were distant cousins.
After the sobs receded, and I took over making the tea, we took the pot through as I asked Annie to continue. What had been merely a counter anecdote to my amused account of a couple of identical twins’ shoplifting became her attempt to explore an aspect of her childhood she had clearly left unexamined for years. The light began to fade in the room as the sun was setting, and yet it seemed an abrupt gesture to turn on a light. As she talked, it was as if her features were beginning to disappear in front of me, while her feelings and thoughts became more vivid.
Annie told me that Sarah started flirting with the young man first, and would cycle along the road from their own place to his, wearing short skirts that would blow in a light breeze, and would chat to him in between moments when he was hammering in nails, plastering or sawing wood. He appeared to like the distraction, and perhaps an affair started then; Annie didn’t know. She recalled that, for whatever reason, when the young man first arrived, only Sarah was around, and perhaps her sister, who was a very good swimmer, was competing somewhere else. When Belinda returned, she too started showing up around the dilapidated dwelling, yet usually at different times. While Sarah would go in the early afternoon, often bringing him some cake she made, Belinda went in the early evening, bringing a bottle of wine. Annie didn’t remember how secretive Belinda’s visits were, but she recalled that Sarah’s were out in the open, and knew that the twins’ mother disapproved of these visits, insisting that this was an older man, even though Sarah would have been eighteen, and the man couldn’t have been more than twenty-two or three at most. Annie suspected it was more that their mother would have seen the handyman as of lower social status. This would have been a presumption since, as far as Annie knew, nobody had any idea of his background beyond a vaguely northern accent, and he might just have had summer free while studying. In the village, he became known as the handsome handyman, and no amount of looks would have been enough for the twins’ mother if he didn’t have good prospects. She didn’t educate them at a nearby private school to fraternise with a man who might potentially belong to the lower orders. Annie insisted she wasn’t caricaturing the mother; this is what she would have said. Yet neither of the girls cared: it was a summer of fun, and perhaps what the mother failed to recognise in educating her daughters privately was that they could come away from the place as readily with instilled confidence as snobbery. When her mother would tell Sarah to stay away from this figure nearby, Sarah ignored her. But Sarah couldn’t ignore it when she realised that Belinda was visiting him in the evenings, and when she confronted the man, he said that if he had to choose, he would choose Belinda. Belinda didn’t appear to mind that he was seeing Sarah, perhaps because she saw that she was getting one over Sarah with him, while Sarah was initially oblivious that he was also seeing Belinda. During the rest of the summer, Sarah rarely left her room, while Belinda was rarely in the house, usually telling her mother that she was away on various swimming contests or visiting friends in Bristol. The mother was often away herself, working in London. Their father more or less lived there, owning a flat in Kensington that nobody knew if he shared with his wife when she was in the city. Annie assumed Sarah said nothing to her mother about Belinda now seeing Robert.
From what Annie remembered, the affair between Belinda and the young man didn’t deepen; what it did do was deepen the despair Sarah felt. By the end of the summer, the affair was over. By the end of the summer, so was Sarah’s life. Sarah took herself down to the coast and swam out to sea. She wasn’t a strong swimmer, and no one knew if this was a terrible irony that she died in the very element that her sister made her own, or a deliberate statement to Belinda, indicating this was entirely her sister’s fault. But what Annie did know was that her family had sold the cottage by the next summer and that she heard over the years that Belinda went ‘funny’. She gave up swimming, dropped out of university after a year, and never quite found her place in the world, as if she didn’t deserve one anymore after those years of jostling for distinction while her sister was still alive.
By the time Annie finished speaking, it was so dark that I couldn’t see if there were tears on her face or not, and we sat for a few minutes; to turn on the lights would have appeared violating. When Annie got up and said she would pop into the bathroom, I turned a corner lamp on and waited for her return. She wasn’t crying, but her eyes were red, and we sat next to each other on the couch, looking out at the fireplace that we would often light when the nights began to draw in. If it had been lit, perhaps the moment would have been less odd, but after sitting opposite each other and watching the last of the sunlight disappear, there we were now sitting adjacently, looking into a space that we couldn’t quite call a fire. I took her hand, and she squeezed it in mine, as if two teenagers wondering how to make the first move.
9
After a while, she asked if I was going to go for a walk and a pint. Occasionally, she would join me; usually, she didn’t, and often watched an episode of a favourite show I could never quite engage with. I asked if she wanted to come, preferred I stay, or wished to be alone. She said it might be best if she stayed in herself. I thought of sending a message to Ian, but it would somehow have seemed wrong: either I would remain silent about Annie’s reminiscence and create a needless subtext in the conversation, or tell him about it when somehow it needed to remain an experience Annie had shared with me. To speak about it with Ian, when I hadn’t spoken to Annie about Ian’s predicament, would have seemed an act of disloyalty. Instead, I walked alone in the direction of the canal, carried along a section of it and, returning after an hour as it started to rain, went to my regular pub on Holy Corner.
Did I hope Anya would be there? It was Tuesday evening, quiet, or rather murmorous, with four tables occupied inside, and three people, separately, sitting at the bar. Initially, I saw the young man who worked the occasional shift while studying, but then, after I took a seat at the bar, I witnessed Anya coming out of the kitchen area with a cup of tea. Usually they would make tea or coffee using the machine behind the counter, but it was turned off by eight, and given a clean. She said that she made herself a cuppa, proud of the word, as if she’d invented it herself. She reckoned that learning words in a foreign language strangely seemed more your own than words you learn in your mother tongue. She wondered if this was because the words are words, as they derive from other words, while words in our own language seem to derive from things. I hadn’t thought about it before, perhaps because when learning a little French, I always felt the words escaping me. I hadn’t made them my own; they were playing hide and seek. Maybe that is why she liked languages so much (she spoke German, French, Spanish and English): she enjoyed the game of finding words and was good enough at it to feel that she could win the game. If words in foreign languages don’t belong to things, but exist in contrast to other words, I asked her whether this meant she was insincere in English, for example, and her whole life in the country, a game? She looked at me, tilted her head to the side, and said that was a very good question. We were speaking quietly, and though the bar was far from full, a couple of minutes earlier, the barman had put on some music to enliven the atmosphere. But it was as if to let us talk privately. She didn’t quite know the answer to my question, but a provisional one would be that she felt lighter speaking a language other than her own. She said it was a bit like an actor taking a role very seriously indeed, perhaps more seriously than their life, but knew that it wasn’t quite the same thing as their life.
We talked for fifteen minutes before a customer ordered another round, and the barman was clearing a table after a couple had just left. I wondered if she would come back to the discussion, or if she was happy that a customer had dragged her away from the pub bore I might have been perceived to be. As if in fear that she wouldn’t return to the conversation, and with my half-pint almost finished, I took one last sup and said, as she was pulling the man’s pint, that I ought to be getting home. It was a lovely chat, she said, and again I wasn’t sure if she was being polite or perhaps expressing mild disappointment that I was suddenly leaving.
I didn’t go directly home, but walked around Bruntsfield Links for a while, absorbing two very different discussions in the one evening, and working through feelings that I realised had become more complicated than I might have wished. Had I fallen in love with Anya? That seemed an exaggeration, but I had to acknowledge to myself that I was drawn to her as I had been to no other woman since I started seeing Annie. As for Annie’s disclosure earlier in the evening, while it was revelatory, of course, it also somehow left us at a distance from each other. I thought about what Anya said about acting a role, and believed that while whatever Annie and I had developed was sincere, her recollections of her cousins seemed as though to break the fourth wall of our relationship.
When I got home, Annie was already in bed, and rather than joining her. I suspected she wished to sleep alone, and so took a sleeping bag from the hall cupboard and slept on the couch. The flat wasn’t big, but it had three sizeable rooms: the bedroom, lounge and kitchen. When I awoke the next morning, Annie had left early for work and had no need to enter the sitting room as she would have breakfasted at the kitchen table.
Over the next few days, I saw little of Annie. She left early, as she sometimes would, going to the gym before work. But she arrived home later than usual, and had a light dinner which she ate in semi-silence. I would go out for a walk, but resisted going again to Anya’s pub. On Friday morning, Annie said she was going away for the weekend to visit her parents. Sometimes I would go with her; sometimes I wouldn’t – but she had always before asked if I wanted to go. No such offer was made.
I didn’t see anyone over the weekend, but on Sunday evening I went to the pub and, seeing that Anya wasn’t working as I sat for an hour, felt coming over me a despondency that I couldn’t quite name, as I began to realise that my feelings over missing Annie were getting mixed up with a vague wish that Anya was present. It would have been an exaggeration to say I no longer loved Annie and was falling in love with Anya, but what was undeniable was a sense of ambivalence towards where my feelings ought to be going. For some years, they went where they were supposed to go, and though, of course, I would find other people attractive, and wouldn’t be averse to observing beauty, it possessed a degree of disinterest that needn’t disturb my equilibrium. Now it was beginning to do so. This was all the more absurd as I was sitting there in the absence of both of them, and with no sense that Anya would have been interested, and a fear that Annie no longer was.
The bar was no busier than the previous occasion, and I looked around at the two customers at the counter who were there last time and appeared to come almost every night. I sensed they weren’t friends, but had become drinking companions, the person they would alleviate their loneliness with or company to escape the domestic. There were three couples, none of whom appeared regulars, as I wondered whether the idea of a regular couple in a bar seemed somehow unusual. Most of the time, when I would go with Annie to a pub, it would be when we were with friends, in another part of the city, or travelling. Something always made it exceptional rather than habitual, and while I didn’t doubt many solitary people (often men; occasionally women) would prop up bars, and knew that I might become one of them, I didn’t know of any couples who would do so. I looked again at the three couples: two were young and perhaps on a date; another looked like they’d been walking and stopped off for a drink, and the third were tourists, I supposed, speaking German to each other, and with a map on the table. I wondered how people might perceive me, sitting neither at the counter as the regulars were, nor in company, as those others seated at a table were. I felt suddenly awkward, finished my half pint and left.
10
Annie sent me a text on Monday morning saying she was taking the week off work and would be staying with her parents longer than she initially expected. I said I hoped things were fine, and she didn’t reply. I later sent a text to Ian, suggested a meeting, and Ian asked if I wanted to walk on Wednesday, late afternoon.
I met him at the bottom of Mid-Meadow Walk, and the annual theatre festival was to start that weekend. People were trundling their suitcases down the path, and all around them were hoardings emblazoned with self-promoting performers, occasionally containing reviews from reputable sources. That is how Ian described them as he liked to have his annual grumble, while at the same time enjoying the festival enough to forego renting his flat for an exorbitant sum, and disappearing somewhere else. I would usually accept the atmosphere it gave to the city, but this year I suspected the liveliness was going to mock my mood, and it might be the first time that I was willing to take Ian’s pejorative remarks straight. I proposed we walk far from the hubbub, and so we moved in the direction of the canal, and kept walking for several miles until we reached Comiston village. We took a seat on a bench in the graveyard, after finding an Italian restaurant willing to serve us takeaway coffee. Along the way, he had started to tell me about the twins, and while only a couple of weeks earlier I’d have been fascinated to hear about the developments, now I was wondering how to tell him about my own.
He said that a fortnight earlier the twins had come together to the cafe, had no difficulty distinguishing them and was surprised he hadn’t been able to do so before. He began to believe they weren’t even twins, but sisters with perhaps a couple of years between them. He was also in no doubt which one he was drawn towards, and this was the book reader over the yoga practitioner. He was sitting at a table where he could see them across from him on the left by the window, and sure enough, one took out her book, and the other had a yoga mat with her. They hardly said a word to each other for the hour they were there, and the yoga sister then got up, looking like she was in a hurry, probably either to attend or teach a class. The other sister stayed, and he looked across as she looked up. He wasn’t used to smiling at strangers, and he wasn’t sure when he did so, if he managed to convey what he wished to register in the smile he offered, which was to say there they were: two people reading in a cafe with time enough on their hands to hold a book within their fingers for hours. All he knew at the time was that she smiled back, softly, shyly, modestly, and he interpreted that smile to convey that she wasn’t as busy as her sister, and liked the idea that there was someone else in the cafe not so busy as well. I was reminded of a writer who once said love was interrogation. But hearing Ian speak, I might have believed it was a projection. I said a smile, it seems, can be like a picture: it can indeed convey a thousand words.
He insisted that while it may have been projection that afternoon, it wasn’t without some validity, as he discovered a week later when he saw again the bookish figure reading as he arrived at his usual cafe. She smiled when she saw him, and he grinned back, as though the word seemed more accurately to reflect his enthusiasm, and while he was tempted to go directly to her table and propose he join her, he instead more prudently took a table in front of her, which left them within easy conversational reach of each other. After ordering a tea and opening his book, he looked across and peered at the novel she was reading, and she, with bashful humour, lowered it as if to suggest it wasn’t for his prying eyes. He laughed a little more loudly than sitting alone usually allowed, and he noticed a couple at a table across the way glancing across at him as though he might be mad. He may well have been, as he started to read his own book upside down, and she turned her head at an angle trying to read the title. This pantomime continued for a few more minutes before he asked if he could join her, and she said she would love that, but her sister was going to arrive any minute. He asked if he could take her number and they could meet just the two of them, and in a venue other than the one they were in, just to prove both of them existed outside this environment. She said that would be a good idea. She knew she existed elsewhere; she just wasn’t sure if he did. As they swapped numbers, she said her name was Stefanie. She added, oddly perhaps, that her sister’s name was Cassandra: Stef and Cassie.
So much information in so short a space of time, I said, and I managed to say it without quite revealing my own unhappiness, even if Ian glanced at me with a questioning look on his face as I said it. He admitted that he had been boring me for weeks with all this speculation, and he understood why I might offer a wry remark. I asked if he stayed in the cafe after getting her number, and he said he did. Perhaps because he had, after all, gone there to read, and had hardly read a word thus far, and partly because he wondered how he would perceive them differently, now he had the sisters’ names and knew also Stefanie’s voice. There he had been for months, observing these two people and had no idea what they sounded like. Stefanie’s accent was Scottish, perhaps from Edinburgh, possibly even the Highlands. It was soft and lilting with a hint of a question in it, and as he sat reading, he realised that the reason he had no idea what they sounded like wasn’t that they never spoke, but that they would do so very quietly. Even a table away, he couldn’t quite hear them, though he did indeed notice that they talked little.
Sitting there, he was still facing Stefanie, though he could see her face only occasionally as her sister’s back blocked his view. But there were a couple of moments when she caught his glance, looked down, and offered a half smile. He felt a moment of complicity with her in an odd frisson that might have been different if she had been simply sitting with a friend. He long believed they were identical twins, not even just twins, yet his reaction was as if somehow he believed they still might be, and it was perhaps this assumption that made the affinity between Ian and Stefanie so resonant.
11
Ian hadn’t yet met up with Stefanie. They had sent messages back and forth and would meet in a couple of days after our conversation. I was intrigued but no longer fascinated, too drawn into my own messiness to show too much interest in Ian’s intricacies. I hadn’t said anything to him about Annie’s disappearance, nor my fondness for a woman that I might have thought a few weeks earlier I had a greater right to claim a connection with than Ian did with the then-unnamed Stefanie. Now that wasn’t a valid assumption, and while Ian had taken an abstraction and a puzzle, and was turning them into something concrete, was I doing the opposite and turning something cemented into sludge?
Over the next few days, I heard nothing from Annie. I assumed that she would be working from home, just not ours. Whether she was working or not seemed to matter: it was the difference I supposed between needing time for herself and a proper crisis. Maybe she sensed I needed time alone too, and, when I thought about recent months, we hadn’t been together very much, and we had talked very little aside from the night when she told me about her cousins. Had she sensed my attraction towards Anya before I did, without ever having met her? I suspect a partner often recognises attraction in distraction: in believing that their partner, in not paying them much attention, is attentive elsewhere.
All I knew was that I missed Annie and yearned a little to see Anya, even though over the last week I’d resisted going into the pub, as if in doing so I’d be disrespecting my partner. Yet when Friday night came, with Annie now away for two weeks, I thought I was entitled to see if Anya was working. Before, I sent Annie a lengthy message and received the tersest of replies. She would be staying with her parents for another week at least. Work was fine; she was working remotely.
So I went to the pub and, as I took a table with a book as a social alibi, Anya saw me, smiled, and asked what I was having as I came towards the bar. I proposed the usual, even though I’d never before offered it in such a manner, and she did indeed remember I would almost always have a half stout. She said it had been a while, and I wasn’t sure if she meant this as a comment indicating I didn’t seem to have anywhere better to go usually, or as one that suggested she missed just a little my presence. Such a remark a month earlier would have been pleasing to hear, but now it carried the air of necessity, as if I needed a little credence while I was hardly receiving replies from Annie. I stayed at the bar for a couple of minutes chatting to Anya, but I could see that the pub wasn’t quiet, and there were only a couple of other members of staff working. I was taking up her time. Yet she seemed happy to chat and only stopped when one of the others called her over.
I would usually stay for only as long as it took to drink my half-pint, which I supped slowly, leaving after around an hour. But this time I ordered a second, reading about fifty pages of my book while the bar became busy, hectic and loud. I would sometimes glance up at Anya, observing her being both efficient and friendly, which might be a form of multitasking. Certain professions, like being a waitress or a nurse, seem to require two traits that, combined, must often be exhausting, but perhaps also energising. I wondered if I might sometimes have more enthusiastically practised my office duties if so many of my actions were accompanied by a smile, a thank you, and even a tip. Yet I also believed that this could make me insincere in doing my job if I were reliant on these elements to make me do it better. Were someone to ask me what just doing my job meant, I could explain it in practical terms with no social dimension at all, no matter the meetings I would often attend and occasionally chair, where pleasantries were expected. However, when moving data from one place to another, no thank yous were in order, except in the odd email exchange. How many times a day and evening did Anya hear please and thank you, witness smiles, and offer her own? How often did she ask a customer how they were doing, and how often did they divulge a few details, and she, in turn, offered a few innocuous ones of her own? Was it common for customers to misconstrue this service sector competence for personal intent, and was I its latest victim?
I didn’t find any answers to these questions that evening, but perhaps did so a few days later. I was walking along Bruntsfield Road, and I saw Anya moving in my direction. I guessed she had recently finished a day shift and, as we stopped for a moment, sure enough, she had. She said she was off to meet a friend but was running early, and wished to be fashionably late. She used English well and wittily, and I flirtatiously proposed she had a few minutes to spare. We did speak for a little while, but any flirtatiousness in my proposal was killed by the nature of the conversation. She explained this was a friend she had never previously met but that she hoped lived up to the online hype: the pictures he offered, the interests he claimed to share, and the intelligence that wasn’t completely absent in their messages to each other. She seemed excited, and this had nothing to do with stopping for a few minutes, talking to me. As we parted, she asked me to wish her luck, and I did so with the enthusiasm she demanded, over the exuberance I wished to deny. It clarified a situation that saved me from making a fool of myself. I should have been grateful, and in time, no doubt I would be.
Over the next couple of hours, I walked around the city, down by the canal and then along by Princes Street, up by the Mound and George the IV Bridge, through the Meadows and back up to the flat, all the while thinking that while I might have given no sign to Anya of a developing infatuation, I may have registered enough recent indifference towards Annie for her to take it as rejection. Was this exacerbated by the story she told me about the twins, a story that so impacted on her when she was young, and so moved her when she related it to me, but was a revelation that she had never before shared? How little had she revealed to me in the years we had known each other, she might have thought, and still might be thinking as she remained, as far as I knew, at her parents.
12
When Ian next contacted me, a few days after the encounter with Anya on the street, I’d had a text from Annie saying she would be in Edinburgh the following weekend and that we needed to talk. It sounded ominous, and I expected this wasn’t to talk about any feelings she might have for me, but to discuss the practicalities of her moving out. I didn’t offer any of this initially to Ian, and instead listened to him tell me how well his latest encounter and first proper date had gone with Stefanie. He couldn’t believe he had initially confused her with her sister; they seemed such different people – or at least Stefanie seemed such a unique one. Ostensibly, they dressed alike, and many wouldn’t really differentiate between a more hippy-oriented look and a bohemian one. She admitted that some people would think they were the same person if they had seen one and then the other and, of course, many people saw them as twins, though there happened to be eighteen months between them, and Stefanie was the older sister. She also added that many believed her sister was the older one, since she conveyed far more confidence. This may have been because while her sister was a yoga teacher, Stef worked as a librarian at the university.
How could I not groan when I heard this? Just as I was discovering I had little in common with the person with whom I’d been living for years, there Ian was finding common ground with a person he only a few weeks earlier thought was an identical twin, and, before that, conflating two people into one? I didn’t doubt Ian saw this love he had found as a cosmic reward for the celibacy he had for so long practised, but this was also my unhappiness manifesting itself as cynicism. Didn’t he deserve to be happy? Yes – but, the timing!
As we discussed the joy he was feeling, I didn’t know if I should tell him about the state my own life was in. My disposition may have been antithetical to his, but it would at least be a disclosure to match his own, And so I told him: I told him about Annie telling me a story about twin cousins that ended tragically, and that came from my unwillingness to tell her about Ian’s divulgences, and that in the telling perhaps revealed to Annie how far away from me she usually felt. She exacerbated this feeling by physically going far away indeed. I said that, as far as I knew, she was still at her parents’ place, and had now been there for more than a fortnight. She would be coming up to discuss things, which I assumed would be the removal of furniture, rather than the return of feelings. And then there was Anya, but I didn’t know whether Anya should be an afterthought to what I’d been saying, or if everything I offered should have been premised on it. Did I find in Anya what I never quite found in Annie, and had Annie discovered somehow this lack and realised she also felt it? All I knew was that I had feelings for two women, neither of whom seemed to have any for me. I was caught in an emotional equivalent of what Ian had been going through perceptually. But there he was successfully turning a confusion over two women into a clear comprehension of what he felt about one of them. I suspected even if they had been identical twins, Ian would have found a way to distinguish them and managed a singular affect. Annie and Anya didn’t even look alike, and there I was conflating them in my heart as if they were a double act in administering sorrow.
As I talked, everything I said was a combination of self-pity and self-loathing, and this wasn’t what Ian needed to hear at a moment of romantic triumph. He wouldn’t, of course, have put it that way, and my cynical disposition nevertheless eschewed offering it. But I knew I was no longer providing a contrary revelation to his own, but drawing him into my unhappiness. As if to protect his mood rather than countering my own, I said maybe Annie would return at the weekend, and all would be well. I might tell her that she needed to talk to me more often about her past and her feelings, and that I should spend less time disappearing to the pub while we could be doing things together. It sounded hollow, but that was the mood I was in. To Ian, it sounded hopeful – but that was the mood he was in.
I knew Ian was soon to meet Stefanie in the cafe, and he asked if I would like to wait until she arrived. I didn’t know whether this was Ian subtly proposing I shouldn’t linger and he wanted to see her alone, or that he did want me to wait and meet her. I said no. Another time. When I was in a better frame of mind. I thought about the phrase after I left, and wondered whether nobody had framed his mind better than Ian, nobody I knew was better able at viewing things through a prism of his own obscure demands and expectations. It was while such thoughts occurred to me that I saw walking in my direction, and about half a mile from the cafe Ian was waiting in, someone who may well have been Stefanie, and I instinctively smiled as if in a recognition I of course hadn’t earned. She smiled back, no doubt more out of politeness than realising I was Ian’s friend, and, as I passed, I wondered if indeed this had been Stefanie, as I wondered if it might instead have been her sister. I had an odd moment of hope that I didn’t doubt wouldn’t last, and that I couldn’t quite understand, but hope it was, and I thought of Ian and how, more than anyone I had ever met, he understood the phrase a glimmer of hope. I thought too of Annie, and how perhaps much of her life had been hiding a flicker of darkness.
© Tony McKibbin