Faces

1

A friend told me that he might have spent four years of his life waiting without realising it. He said his new partner was more aware of that realisation as she lived with a boyfriend she knew she never quite loved.  He asked me when we met up for the first time in several months, in a place he liked, one that had a view of the castle and purchased wholesale tea from a supplier which he, too, had bought from when he co-owned a cafe. It was of only a few in town that had good loose-leaf tea, and he wasn’t afraid to remind me — one of the few now he was no longer a cafe owner. When he would say this, I sometimes wondered if he was talking about the tea, was expressing nostalgia for the cafe, or regret at breaking up with the partner who was the fellow owner. But as he sipped on the tea and remarked on the quality of the leaves, he seemed to be tasting it with no hint of bitterness added to the flavour.

He asked me if I remembered him talking about a person he saw in this very cafe several years ago, and I said that I did. He looked surprised, expecting that I would have to offer more details, but this was the only person I recall him mentioning with any interest since he had stopped seeing Maria. In that time, it hasn’t always been easy to separate the parting from the business, from the relationship breaking down and the business closing down. He now told me that the venture was, he believed, their way of making a go of it, an idiomatic phrase they often used in the context of the cafe, but one that he came increasingly to realise was more importantly a way of making a go of their relationship. They had set it up after eighteen months together and, since neither Jason nor Maria wanted children, as neither believed in marriage, what better project to work on together than their love for caffeine? Neither was much given to alcohol, and they differed chiefly in their choice of hot beverages: he was of course a tea person (though he drank coffee often enough); she a coffee lover. This potentially fundamental disagreement allowed for the best of both worlds to come together in the form of a cafe.

For several years, it was one of the best in the city, competitively priced and with its ingredients carefully sourced, warm enough in the winter for the windows to be steamed up from the outside, and always busy enough for a modicum of that heat to come from paying customers. It was positioned up near Bruntsfield, next to the Links, and I always enjoyed sitting outside during the summer mid-to-late morning, usually reading a book and chatting with Maria or Jason when they would have a moment, and be drinking a coffee or tea themselves. When friends break up, it is usually sad, but it needn’t be very habit-breaking for anybody apart from the couple. Yet for a while I felt the gravity of the split in struggling to find a new place to read, write and drink a coffee in the morning, a tea in the afternoon. I wasn’t a drinker either, and most of my spare money went on hot brews. I cared about how they were both doing after the break-up, of course, but suspected I would have felt it less if they hadn’t closed the cafe at the same time.

2

That afternoon he asked me what I remembered of this woman he mentioned seeing in a cafe, and I told him that he was sitting at a table when someone came in looking all around the room for a person who didn’t seem to be there, and yet she also appeared to wonder if the person she should have been looking for was him. Jason had never seen the woman before. As she sat down, three or four tables away from him but facing in his direction, she would occasionally fix her eye upon him as if looking for a response that acknowledged they did know each other. He was sure he didn’t, but tried to recall, aware that during the five years he had the cafe, so many people came in and he would often talk to the customers. Was she one of them, he wondered; if so, why didn’t he recognise her? It is perhaps one of the paradoxes of attraction, he said: when we are so drawn to someone we feel we know them from the past, but if they were so instantly besotted by them how could we have forgotten them or failed to be attracted to them before? The answer is that we haven’t; we just sense we have. After all, he said, when he did see her again, years later, he remembered her perfectly.

In the cafe she looked bewildered and confused, and it wasn’t alleviated entirely when the man she was waiting to meet arrived fifteen minutes after she did. Jason hadn’t looked up when he came in, and he was sitting with his back to him as he noticed she was no longer alone; all Jason could see was a little of his face in profile. Over the next hour, as he drank his tea and ordered another pot while scrolling down his tablet looking for flats in Glasgow, Jason would sometimes glance across and worked out that this was a first date and almost certainly one arranged online. He supposed that the woman arrived looking for someone and thought it was him. Jason suspected he and the man sitting with her didn’t look much alike, but Jason probably resembled him enough in age and hair colour for her to wonder if he was the man she was supposed to meet. He left the cafe before they did, though he made a note to use the bathroom so, on returning to his table, he would be able to see the man in full. He saw what he supposed was a passing resemblance, but the body language was very different, the hair colour on the man lighter, and the skin paler.

I recalled Jason’s description of the man, and though he didn’t say so, it was clear to me that he would have been rather less attractive than Jason, and I could imagine a woman arriving in a cafe and feeling momentarily that this was the man she was supposed to meet because this is the one she would have liked to have met. Jason was handsome, but it was more that he emanated both the convivial and the aloof, contrary qualities that worked very well together in the cafe, as he engaged quickly with customers but never became beholden to their custom, or needy of their recognition. They were qualities I think Maria always found confusing; she never quite knew whether he wanted her to leave him alone or be in her company. She said to me once that he liked being around everybody; then he didn’t have to be alone with anyone. She said it too harshly for it to pass for an insight: it carried the bitterness of a low-key constant rejection. It didn’t really say anything about Jason’s character, though it was revealing of their dynamic. I often found Jason was happy being alone with me, and sometimes with others, and while I never doubted he cared for Maria, and Maria for him, it was as though they never loved each other enough to be too long alone in each other’s company.

This might sound like an absurd claim; how could a couple be together for years without enjoying the company of their loved one? I might wish to answer with a distinction and an observation. Company and companionship aren’t the same: Jason enjoyed other people’s company, sometimes more, I suppose, than Maria’s, but he didn’t wish for anybody else’s companionship. I had been to plenty of parties where a couple went off and talked for most of the evening to almost anybody over their partner, but it was very rare that I would see them going off with someone else at the end of the night. Jason and Maria were one such couple, and as far as I knew, they never cheated on each other, and yet I wasn’t surprised when they parted; more surprised that the cafe would close.

3

I asked Jason more about this person he’d now started seeing and assumed it was through online dating. He had joked to me a year ago when he started using online sites that when he worked in the cafe, he was meeting people all the time and that working as a buyer for a coffee company in Glasgow he felt he hardly met anyone at all. He went out briefly with a colleague from work and had a fling with a woman he met at a coffee conference, but had otherwise been single since parting with Maria. So there he was, arranging things online, and meeting up every month or so with a new woman, and looking for someone with whom he could build a future without assuming he would have to build a business within which to contain it. He met women whose company he briefly enjoyed, and others he could see would be almost certainly agreeable longterm companions. However, those with whom he felt initial desire he couldn’t see as long-term partners. He reckoned it rested on their enthusiasm, and no doubt his — the sense they were both feeding off each other’s narcissism, and finding everything the other one said funny, while exaggerating the pleasure of touch that would probably quickly fade. He admitted he was sounding terrible when he sometimes told me these things. All he was trying to do was be honest with some messed up feelings. Maybe he was still in love with Maria; a churlish thought, now Maria was married to someone else and living in Bristol. He would get her news mainly through me, and I was often wary of how much to tell him, determined to keep him informed without hurting his feelings, no matter if, as Maria told me often enough, it was his decision.

Gillian wasn’t an online date, but they saw each other while they were both on one. He was having a weekend lunch with a person he had never met before, yet whom he had managed to build a frisson with while chatting online and through texts, when Gillian walked in and, as she stood at the door with her partner waiting for a table, it took him only the briefest of moments to recall her face from several years earlier. She didn’t seem to remember him, and she and her partner were shown to their seats diagonally across from Jason and his date’s table. She sat facing his direction, and in time she did appear to recognise who he was. He tried to focus on the person in front of him, but his peripheral vision was always attentive to Gillian, as if trying to work out whether she was with a long-term partner, a recent lover or on a first-time date. He felt sure that this man wasn’t merely a friend, and apologised to me for the use of merely in the context of friendship. Jason laughed and said the word was context-specific.

Jason and his date finished lunch, while Gillian and her partner were still seated, and he didn’t want to leave before she did. He said to the person with whom he just had eaten that he would cover it, but he wanted to stay on a bit longer and get some work done. Half an hour earlier, when he’d made this decision to stay, he’d dropped into the conversation that he was very busy and didn’t even have much time at the weekends. He knew it would give him a decent excuse to say he would have to work, and so he did, leaving the person perhaps a little bemused, though not completely rejected. She thanked him for lunch and hoped they could meet up again when he was less busy, as if to say perhaps it was odd that he chose to go to lunch with her at all given his work schedule.

I knew Jason wouldn’t have been lying to the online date that he had a lot of work to do; it probably was one of his hectic periods, and while Jason would often over the years find excuses, he wasn’t given to dishonesty. He tended instead to exaggerate a crisis all the better to create time for himself around it. Maybe it is true of most of us: that we are never that busy, but sometimes need to pretend we are to generate time for ourselves. In this case, though, Jason admitted he was hoping to create a bit of time for someone else.

Gillian’s lunch lingered for another forty-five minutes, and he wondered whether it did so because the date was going well, that she didn’t quite know how to end it, that she too wanted to stay in the cafe knowing he was still there, or that she and her partner really did want coffee and cake. The idea that she was staying because he was there would of course have seemed like a projected fantasy: all the other scenarios were much more probable, and at no stage did she offer Jason more than a very occasional glimpse, the sort of glance one offers when looking up and around the cafe. Yet he believed he had done the same — he wasn’t going to stare at Gillian when he was expressly there to meet another woman. Now that the woman had gone, he did allow himself the occasional lengthy look across.

When Gillian and the partner paid the bill — looking like they’d split it — the man went to the bathroom, wearing his jacket and carrying his bag, and when exiting the toilet, also continued exiting the cafe. Gillian stayed, sent someone a text, and after a few minutes took out a book. Jason didn’t quite take this as a clear sign of interest, but he couldn’t pretend that he found the moment tense with possibility, even if that tension was dissipated a little when, fifteen minutes after her lunch partner had left, she was joined by someone else; what seemed like a good friend, evident in the warmth of the hug, while suggesting this was a person she would meet often. It somehow seemed absurd for Jason to stay, he said, yet stay he did, and he was relieved that at least he had a decent prop to justify his extended time there: his computer. Its battery life wasn’t so great, though, and he’d used half of it up earlier when he worked for much of the morning in another cafe. He had about an hour and a half of battery left as long as he kept the Wi-Fi off, turning it on briefly to check his emails and download a spreadsheet. He too ended up having a coffee and a piece of cake, and reckoned that since he’d had lunch, and now was ordering more, he wouldn’t quite have been a customer he would have hated. He smiled, well aware that he never minded people staying for hours in his cafe, and was only annoyed if people hogged tables when there was space to share, and knew too that if anybody was a cafe malingerer it would not have been him, but me.

By now he had been in the cafe more than three hours; the last time that had happened, it was in one he owned.  

4

While talking with her friend, Jason noted that she did occasionally glance in his direction; maybe had mentioned him to her. He thought it with a feeling somewhere between aggrandisement and paranoia, between believing he was worth her attention, but also wondering if he might be a cause for derision, and that she knew he was still sitting there for no other reason than to find a way to talk to her. He was a grown man and felt like an adolescent, but this is perhaps how we should feel when desire mingles with vulnerability.

Saying this, he looked at me as though wondering whether I had ever felt like an adolescent, aware that I married young, had no children, divorced after five years, and had been alone ever since. Jason and I met after my wife and I had parted, and so our talk about feelings was more about his than mine, and yet, when we had discussed Maria, there was no suggestion that he wanted me to say anything about my marriage, or any other affairs he might have assumed I would have had. In that look, he wished to see the world as loving, and I looked back with no more than curiosity. I asked him if he spoke to her at all that day. He replied he hadn’t, and maybe I would have expressed exasperation, for what amounted to a non-story, if he hadn’t predicated it on telling me he had a new girlfriend. I realised that as he told the story he wanted to linger over the details, over the likelihood, as he told it, of him once again losing this woman he didn’t realise he had waited several years to meet.

She and her friend talked for another hour, and not long before they left, he heard gentle sobbing come from their table. Gillian looked at her friend with concern, gave her a hug across the table. About ten minutes after that, Gillian went up to the counter to pay. As she passed Jason, they looked at each other. What in other circumstances might have been a look indicating attraction was one that contained what he believed was, simultaneously, sadness towards her friend and disappointment that she and Jason would not have the chance to become acquainted. As both women left, they passed the window and, as he looked out, Gillian gave a small wave. He waved back.

While Jason was pleased by this clear acknowledgement, he also knew that the chances of them meeting again soon were statistically unlikely. They had only seen each other in the cafe twice in five years. If he had been its owner, the chance to meet again would be far greater. But no, he was merely one of its visitors, and an occasional one at that. He was, after all, now living in Glasgow. He also wasn’t a regular Edinburgh café habitué, unlike myself, and neither was she. At one moment Jason even expressed regret to himself that he hadn’t somehow taken a photo of Gillian. He could have shown it to me and upped the statistics by including me in the probability: I could have noticed her, said I had a friend who had seen her in the cafe before, and wondered if I could give her the friend’s number. Madness, Jason admitted, but isn’t love supposed to be a little crazy? I supposed it was, but whatever craziness I possessed probably had little to do with loving.

5

Over the next six weeks, he travelled through to Edinburgh each Saturday or Sunday, and would take in a film that wasn’t showing in Glasgow, go to an exhibition, or a gig, and in between come to this cafe for several hours on the day he was through. He was coming really just for the cafe, but he reckoned it seemed at least a little less unhinged if he also contained this monomaniacal wish with an interest in other things. It gave him an alibi to himself and to others; when someone at work asked him how is weekend happened to be, it was easier to say he watched a band or a film, walked around a gallery, than to say he went through to the Scottish capital to sit for hours in a cafe.

During these six weeks he didn’t see Gillian at all, and of course wondered whether this was a one-sided attraction and couldn’t deny its likelihood. What did he have to go on? Years earlier he saw a woman in a cafe; saw her again years later. She looked at him twice and waved at him once. No words were exchanged, no desire expressed. She was no less a stranger than many others he would have seen, and never spoken to in the last few years. This thought was exacerbated by her absence. If she felt as he did, wouldn’t she have come to the cafe as regularly as he had in recent weeks — more often surely since he assumed she lived in the city? He also, of course, didn’t only look frequently on the website where he arranged a date, and might have assumed she had done so as well; he joined other dating websites too, hoping to find her there. He found her on none of them. Again, he thought, if she was as interested in him as he was interested in her, wouldn’t she be checking them as well?

He was offering all this and knew that what mattered wasn’t leaving me in a state of suspense over whether he managed to find her — he told me initially that they were together — but how he managed to find her. And I suppose, to justify making such an effort with someone who seemed to have no interest in him. It was as though, in telling me he needed to work out a justification for them being together, one that wasn’t only satisfying his own emotionally engaged perspective, but my disinterest too. He could see that this wasn’t the same as indifference, as I didn’t doubt my face showed curiosity, and perhaps for reasons greater than idle curiosity, assuming the idleness of the curious rests on the very disinterest he was seeking.

6

Eight weeks later he saw her, sitting in the cafe on a Saturday early afternoon. Despite that length of time, he wasn’t close to giving up before he saw her that day; it was as though meaning had itself started to develop out of the ritual. For years, he supposed, since parting from Maria and giving up the cafe, he didn’t quite know what to do with his weekends, and there he was every Saturday or Sunday coming through to Edinburgh, going to films, exhibitions and concerts. He stood near the door waiting to be seated and, when she looked up, she smiled, as if she too had been waiting for him, as he had been waiting for her. She seemed alone, even though he could see a jacket on the chair opposite. She had a book in front of her on the table; there was no second cup. The waiter came over and, recognising him as the regular he was, asked if he wanted the usual or the un-usual (an occasional Macchiato or his usual Earl Grey). He asked for the former and wondered to himself if he should sit at a different table or presumptuously propose he sit at Gillian’s. She resolved the dilemma for him by looking up as he moved in the direction of her table, and took her jacket to leave the other seat empty. He took it and saw no reason to ask, as though there had been far more complicity in the silent gesture.

They looked at each other for what seemed like minutes, but it was probably only seconds, and she said she expected him eventually to appear in the cafe. He said he supposed eventually that she would too, as they realised they both came as often as each other, but always on different times, or on different days. The only reason she was here today was that a friend came out of hospital, and she would visit her later at her flat. The visiting hours were always at this time. He asked what was wrong with her friend, and she said she wasn’t sure if she should speak about it, but then added that the friend insisted it was no secret. Gillian added that a secret was an interesting thing. That what matters about it are two aspects: whether the person allows you to share it with certain people, and the sort of person you choose to tell. For a divulgence, these two principles must be met. I asked Jason if she put it quite like that. He said she did: Gillian was trained as a psychologist, and she supposed she spoke like one, though she now taught yoga. Maybe we should all speak a little like them, he reckoned: it might lead to people knowing what they want and what they think. I wasn’t sure about this, and guessed Gillian wasn’t emotionally limited, and could use well psychological practices and tools that others might use more to their advantage.

Anyway, he continued, she told him that the day they had seen each other months before, she had been on a date that went well enough but felt a bit like meeting a decent work colleague. She then saw across the cafe someone she couldn’t quite recall but felt she knew. He was also on a date, it seemed, but his partner left, and he remained, occasionally glancing across in her direction. Her date in turn left, and she stayed; then, after a period, wondering if this man would find a way of introducing himself, she said she received a text.

A friend was nearby, and her boyfriend had announced that very lunchtime he was leaving her. She worked out it was for someone else, and she was distraught. When the friend arrived, Gillian was surprised she managed to look calm, and was happy to sit in the cafe rather than go for a walk or back to her flat. But after a while she became overcome with emotion, and this is when they left. She said she gave Jason a look through the window as if to say their meeting would have to wait for another time. She didn’t expect it to take so long, but her friend became progressively worse, attempted to take her life, and was admitted to the Royal Ed, where Gillian would usually see her at this very hour. Jason asked how the friend was, and Gillian said she thought she was getting better. Initially, the friend couldn’t talk about anything but her ex; now she couldn’t stop talking about herself — she offered it wryly but added that this was an improvement. She knew that her friend needed to return to the self-absorbed self after hardly recognising herself at all. Eventually she would start to be interested in her friends and family too, but that would take a while, and probably offer only a modest interest until she found another boyfriend. Jason said it seemed like she had been devoted to her friend, and Gillian said she was there for her out of a mixture of duty, guilt and professional interest. But she had to admit Petra was never a close friend; they didn’t so much share interests as Petra share her preoccupations with Gillian; Gillian rarely found herself sharing very much with her.  This was the third relationship crisis Petra had gone through in five years, and admittedly by far the worst.

Jason asked about the guilt, and she said it was hard to explain, but after Petra tried to take her life, Gillian took herself off all dating websites and somehow saw dating and flirting as dirty. Yet at the same time she would come to the cafe often hoping to see Jason. She sensed something pure and renunciative about the situation, she supposed, and said that when, after she saw Jason in the cafe with what seemed like a date, while she was on hers, she knew this wasn’t the first time she had seen him. It came to her later that evening. Years earlier, they were in this very cafe; he was alone, and she was on a date with a man who would become her partner for several years, but she remembered that the day she met her partner of several years was also the day she saw Jason, and while it wouldn’t be true that Jason was on her mind during those years, whenever she thought about the first time she met her boyfriend, she would recall that she had hoped that the person she was meeting was the one who was already sitting there when she came into the cafe. There she was again years later, seeing Jason, and not only she, but he also he was with someone. It was absurd that they were using websites that were getting in the way of them meeting each other; even more absurd perhaps that they had been using different websites so that they couldn’t find each other. Jason told her that after seeing her in the cafe again, he joined all he could, hoping to find her online after he saw her that second time in the flesh.

Jason said to me that he and Gillian that day were talking to each other as though they were already intimate, and he didn’t know if this was because they had that instant affinity, or they were determined, having finally made contact, not to create any misunderstandings. Sitting there talking seemed odd and apt, and contrary, they both believed, to the algorithmic demands of a dating app.

I was pleased for Jason and Gillian but concerned for her friend. I knew nothing about her, and saw that Jason offered the story as little more than an obstacle in the conclusion to his. He did this with no cynicism, of course, and I didn’t doubt Gillian was a considerate and caring friend. Yet it was only as he talked I began to understand why I had never told him about the break-up of my marriage, the despair perhaps equal to this person called Petra, and a careful solitude I’ve been protecting since. As Jason talked, I was pleased for him, but if I happened to be jealous, it was less for the relationship he had embarked upon, than in how easily he could talk to me about it. It didn’t seem so different from how he would talk about his break-up, as if feelings were always there to be accessed rather than buried. I wanted to know more about Gillian’s friend. But somehow to ask would have been to make an error of mood: it was though I had been invited along for a romantic comedy, and insisted instead on wishing for a drama of despair.

7

Within a month after meeting Gillian, Jason had moved back to Edinburgh. He was renting a studio in the Grassmarket, and was often staying at Gillian’s place off Leith Walk. He’d put his flat up for sale in Glasgow, and in time he supposed he and Gillian would buy a place together, and sell or rent our hers also. I started to see him more often, even if he was commuting three days a week to Glasgow, though he wanted a job in the capital. We met every other weekend, and he kept saying I must meet Gillian, but for various reasons it didn’t happen for several months. Her friend was still in a bad place, he said, and I didn’t doubt it. If her collapse resembled mine, I wouldn’t expect her to recover for years, and would merely give a good impression of stability even then. Jason said Gillian would be with her when she wasn’t with him and wasn’t at work, and he wondered if this was good for either her or her friend. Jason didn’t quite say the friend needed to pull herself together, but he might have thought it, without perhaps thinking of what that phrase means when attending to the person who’s fallen apart, rather than the pep-talk optimism of holding someone together. I could see what I always liked was Jason’s ambience, his ability to create around him an atmosphere of conviviality. He may have then no longer owned a café, but when in one he acted like he could have owned it, occupying the space with far more comfort than most, and using his past ownership as a way of acting with confidence in other cafes. He often asked where the tea and coffee were sourced, enquired about the cakes, and if they were home-baked and by whom; whether the oat milk had rapeseed oil in it.

He always seemed a reassuring presence, and that is what I sought in him; but what did he seek in me? I may have thought our friendship was based on our single status. We may have become friends in the cafe, but especially after it, when he parted from Maria. Yet here he was with Gillian, and still keen to meet up and chat. I supposed he saw in me the capacity to listen, and to reflect, but what he may not have noticed was the listening was often deflective, and the reflection often containing a darkness that he would turn into mordant humour. Many a statement I offered straight he would take humorously, and I, in turn, smiled, as though I offered it as more of a joke than I did. This never before bothered me. However, I sensed he had no interest or understanding of Gillian’s friend’s crisis, and this made me aware why I’d never disclosed certain thoughts and feelings to him. What I also gave some thought to was Gillian’s position: how was she with Jason’s apparent lack of interest in her friend’s life, except seeing it as a continuing obstacle to their relationship?

8

That I never found out, but I did meet Gillian a couple of weeks after these thoughts when Jason introduced her to me as we met for brunch at a cafe near to where Gillian taught yoga. Jason and I met first at this Bruntsfield cafe (quite near his old one) with its outside plants and its inside chatter, a former pub that they had turned into a cafe bistro, knocking down the stone facade and replacing it with expanded windows. I hadn’t been in it since it was a pub and admitted that now it looked like the sort of place you could spend time in morning, noon and night, and I wasn’t surprised when Jason said that he would like to buy it. He’d heard rumours that the owners wanted to move back to New York. He added that with Gillian teaching just a couple of doors along, they could work well in conjunction, as he looked around the large space and noted a few people drinking coffee, eating a pastry or having brunch, and with a rolled-up yoga mat beside them. Gillian had been teaching classes at the centre for several years, but was hoping to buy it when the owner and main yoga teacher retired in a year.

After we finished our coffees, Gillian arrived, saying she was so hungry, as she introduced herself to me, and we all agreed we’d stay and order the same brunch dish she said she was sure we’d like. As she sat down, wearing leggings, a sweatshirt she removed, revealing a vest underneath, she looked at me with a vague recognition, one that I met with a clearer comprehension of her. While Jason had waited to see her for a couple of months after that second time they’d noticed each other in the cafe, I would have seen her perhaps on a dozen occasions during that period, and a few times before that, probably over several years. I tried to remember some of these instances and several of the earlier ones, when she would presumably have been with her then-boyfriend, but more recently on her own or with a friend. Was this the friend who tried to take her life, and who drew out my curiosity far more than talk of Gillian had?

As I was thinking this, I realised I must have seemed momentarily rude, lost in my thoughts rather than attending to the company in front of me, and Jason turned to Gillian, saying what he liked about me was that I lived as much in my head as I did in the world; that I was the most reflective person he’d ever known. He offered it as a compliment, but at the same time, as a potential insult: as if he wanted to acknowledge what he saw as a rare quality, but also wished to distance himself from it — to make clear he didn’t get lost in his own head. She said Petra can be a bit like that and added nothing more, but I supposed this was the friend Jason had talked to me about without ever mentioning her name, and the friend I would have seen Gillian with several times in the cafe. As the three of us talked, I could see Gillian was agreeable and recalled her always being pleasant with staff, always apparently cheerful and a better match perhaps for Jason than Maria ever was. I sometimes would notice Maria found Jason’s optimism irritating. I always thought his sanguinity refreshing, but now wondered if I was beginning to find it wounding. Gillian mentioned Petra again, and by name, and looked at Jason with a complex sadness. It was one that suggested when she said she would need to see her later that afternoon, she was sad she wouldn’t spend all day with Jason, yet sadder still that her friend wasn’t doing well. Jason responded with a loud sigh that had no pity in it, and Gillian placated him with an expression indicating disappointment, without foregoing sympathy for her friend.

After brunch and a second tea for Jason and a coffee for me, Gillian said she would need to be going; that she would speak to Jason in the evening, and it was wonderful meeting up, as she gave me a hug. I sat with Jason for another hour, then said I would go, after he mentioned maybe having a word with the owner who had come in ten minutes earlier.

9

I knew that I would make no effort to see Jason again, and though we met up twice more on his instigation, on the second of these meetings he said he was going to buy the Bruntsfield cafe. I congratulated him on doing so, and knew that he would be too involved in the project to notice a friendship was ending. It was both simple and complicated why it seemed to me inevitable, but it rested on the instinct I always had to keep certain feelings to myself, and I could see how right I was when I saw how he reacted to Gillian’s friend’s despair. Yet I knew I would miss Gillian, even though I met her only once, and would recall her as an agreeable presence in what remains my regular cafe. I haven’t seen her in there since, but would be happier to see her there than to come across Jason. I hope in time, he will be able to see, through Gillian’s compassion, that pessimism has its value, and despair a visitation that can come upon us if the circumstances allow it. Nobody is impervious to its possibility.  

Sometimes I would pass by Jason’s cafe, but I never went in, partly because it was a cafe I would never go to before and partly because I didn’t wish to see him, aware I suppose that he didn’t wish to see me. This was less paranoia than realisation: that the person he saw me as wasn’t quite the person I was — he saw quiet reflection, and never showed any interest in what often threatened to be noisy anguish. If I instinctively kept such feelings to myself, that instinct seemed a sound one when witnessing his irritation with someone else whose distress I suspected was similar to my own.

I saw Petra about a year after I last saw Jason. She was in my regular cafe and seated at a table not far from my own. She came in and worked on her laptop, while I was reading a book. I assumed she was well-again but, as I knew, even when it looks to others all is fine, that needn’t mean it is, and sometimes one notices it in the initial moments when someone is seated and preparing to work. When she first sat down and brought out her computer, she also took out a notebook, pen, and a book. She then opened and closed what looked like a novel a couple of times, looked through the notebook as though ready to write in it; then appeared to change her mind. She lifted and closed the laptop at least twice. I saw all this peripherally, but could see someone whose mind was restless, and it was only then that I looked up, seeing it was the friend I’d seen Gillian with on several occasioned, and now assumed this was Petra.

I thought of going over and speaking to her.  But on what premise, as I thought of Jason and Gillian — only chance needed to get in the way of them becoming a couple. For others, it would be far more than that, as I suspected Petra and I would have affinities quite different from those that Jason and Gillian possessed. I could see she might make this her regular cafe just as I have done for years, and equally possible that we would never talk to each other, no matter how many times she came in. I suspect contingency would have to intervene too, but more because of the tortuousness of her personality and mine, people who could never quite smile and say hello no matter how many times we would be there. I supposed there might be a time in the future when she would come in with Gillian. Gillian would introduce us, and Jason would come in after and join us too. The moment would be awkward, and Petra and I would talk. Afterwards, we would become close, and I would never tell her what Jason had thought of her. But we would discuss what we thought about Jason. We would be complicit and laugh about the many times we saw each other in the cafe, without ever saying hello.

© Tony McKibbin