They’re in the car, discussing dogwood. It is a plant Sophie doesn’t believe can be found in West Cumbria. When she tells Christopher this – who is driving – his eyes drift from the road a moment, and he turns to give her an exasperated look, meaning his left eyebrow rises to just below his hairline. It’s a look that seems to signify familiarity and distance both at once. She is used to this look, seeing it mostly when they’re out for coffee and she’s cradling a flat white, saying something like: ‘I’ve got a serious addiction; this stuff will be the death of me, I swear.’ That’s when he’ll bring out the look, often before retorting with: ‘Well, why do you keep on drinking it then?’ There’s a playfulness to this response, but behind the casual jest, Sophie can always sense a deeper, unnamed frustration. 

But Christopher does not really believe she has an addiction to caffeine. It is classic Sophie to attribute characteristics to herself that she does not actually possess, simply because she thinks they will add to the perception of her as someone (and he recoils at the thought) quirky. He doesn’t understand, but like most things he doesn’t understand about her, he puts it down to the age gap. She is twenty-nine, just over two decades younger than him, and part of a generation that elects to live off coffee and avocados, as if the choice to do so added somehow to one’s personality. She cultivates her own personality, he has observed, as though it were a garden of flowers. Some days she opts for a cheery rosiness, others a more macabre, philosophic aura, like a lily. Never dogwood though; apparently, you don’t get that around here. He rolls his eyes.

‘I don’t know how you come up with half of the stuff that passes your lips. There’s dogwood everywhere, Sophie. Common as daisies.’

‘I haven’t seen any,’ she mutters. She takes some of her hair, which she’s diligently curled, from behind her back so it can hang down her front instead. She pulls the passenger-seat mirror down and checks for lipstick marks on her teeth, but they are clean.

Christopher pulls into the car-park of the pub where they’ve arranged to meet friends for drinks. Sophie has said she will just have one glass of wine and then diet coke for the rest of the evening. Designated driver. This felt like a good idea when she suggested it yesterday, but now, in the car-park, she’s forgotten her initial reasoning. They’re not even inside yet and already she can feel the night elongate before her, seconds swelling and minutes bloating. She can’t tell why; it’s her friends they’re meeting, after all. Though, she guesses, Terry and George would probably class as his friends now, too. 

She had grown up here, in Cockermouth, then moved away to London for university, spending the majority of her twenties there. Two years ago, she moved back here, and Christopher – a native Londoner – moved along with her: to a place he had never even set foot in before. 

The pub they arrive at is called ‘The Graceful Plume’, which is low and squat like a cottage, with an artificial thatched roof covering a slate one. The chimney is real at least, and functional, pulsing out fat slugs of smoke. The lights from the windows shine ghostly yellow squares on the gravel next to their car, now parked. It’s nearly dark. Blue and black fight each other in the sky, and though blue is still winning, it won’t last for long – the dark is ready to swell. Sophie tells Christopher that he never had the headlights on, and that he probably should have.

‘Don’t start.’ He sighs. She tells him she wasn’t starting.

The CD player switches off by itself as he pulls the keys out of the ignition. They had been listening to Leonard Cohen sing about tea and oranges coming all the way from China. 

They once had sex with that exact song playing in the background. It happened after the cinema one night. They had been to see something with Anthony Hopkins in, something she enjoyed but he didn’t, because it was apparently nothing like his old stuff, and when they were back in her flat, with a bag of take-away food going cool on the table, they had sex on her sofa. One of them had switched the television on and Cohen was singing. This was in London, when Christopher was still going through the final stages of his divorce, and she was still half-certain that he was lying about everything he said they would become. She wonders if he remembers that night, too.

He does, in fact, remember. Though he did not make that association just then, while the song had been playing. It’s more like the kind of memory that has a lot of clutter piled on top of it. 

What he does remember, unequivocally, is how strange their sex was in the beginning. The first time they did it, she told him in a breathy, faux-desperate voice that he could do to her whatever he wanted. Whatever fantasy he had harboured his entire adult life, now was the time to see it come to life. He didn’t know what to say to that. To him, sex had always been something fixed and simple. He enjoyed it, very much, but it didn’t seem to elicit in him what it elicited in others: this primality void of sensibility, this consciousness slightly elevated above everyday waking life, one that burned with need and wonder like some kind of dreamworld. He wanted it to mean more to him, but it just felt good. It was something physical, like scratching an itch, that was all. So, when she had asked him about his fantasies, he had panicked slightly, embarrassed to appear dull and ordinary, and so he blurted out the first thing that came into his head: ‘Well, maybe you could pretend to be Irish?’ 

 

Sophie has known her friend Terry for years, since they were teenagers. They both moved to London to study at undergraduate level, though for different courses. Sophie: English, Terry: Graphic Design, and he had moved back immediately after graduating. George, his boyfriend, she hasn’t known for a long. They were already sitting down at a table, one directly by the fireplace, when Sophie and Christopher looked around for empty seats. 

She has always adored these homely bars, with their big blazing heaths and friendly ‘Dogs are Welcome’ signs. Not that they have a dog, but still, it signals a kind of intimacy that she relishes. The walls, like the artificial thatch outside, appear to be red-brick when they are in fact just covered with distressed wallpaper – but it looks real enough to her.

When she was a child, she would come to bars like this all of the time with her family. She had never really understood the idea that an only child misses out on playing around and having fun. Her parents always made sure her weekends were busy; she can’t remember ever being bored. 

When Christopher talks about his childhood, it’s similar to the way he talks about his marriage. A lot of standing in doorways while telling someone he’s going to bed, or a lot of sitting down flicking through the television channels, while someone else is standing in a doorway, telling Christopher that they’re going to bed. 

Sophie’s childhood was the opposite. They only ever watched television as a unit, apart from her mother’s soap operas, and while they were on, she and her father would play on the trampoline outside. Her favourite memory remains the long family walks they took on Saturdays. They’d drive to Keswick, and walk the entire length of Derwent water. Afterwards, they’d stop off at a bar like this one, and spend hours talking together and laughing, eating high mountains of roast lamb and potatoes. 

Bars like this, Sophie often tells Christopher, can only be found in Cumbria. Of course, there are presumably such bars in every rural county across Britain. But Christopher is from London and Sophie likes to lay claim to certain things by categorising them as exclusively Cumbrian, and thus, beyond his true appreciation – something they cannot share. She knows she shouldn’t do this, since he moved up here for her, but she’s never been very good at controlling bitterness once it’s taken root. What bitterness, though? She’ll sometimes have to pause and ask herself this, and most of the time she doesn’t even know the answer.

‘We’ve bought a bottle of cava for the table,’ Terry says, pulling two seats out for them.

Sophie doesn’t see Christopher’s face when the cava is mentioned, but she can guess his expression. He hates it, calls it a poor man’s prosecco, which in itself he calls a poor man’s champagne. Sophie actually likes cava, and smiles up at him mischievously. They still have these kinds of moments.

Christopher rolls his eyes and mutters TCP. That’s what he always says cava tastes like. While she does often find herself wishing he were less of a snob, and would just start enjoying things for what they were, his comment makes her laugh regardless. She puts her hand up to her mouth to hide it. She always does this whenever she laughs. It’s a gesture that Christopher enjoys. It makes her seem nicer than she really is. 

At the table, he begins to recall the dogwood debate from the car. He wants the boys’ opinions, what are their thoughts, haven’t they seen dogwood around, isn’t Sophie ridiculous to say otherwise? He’s not looking at her while he speaks, and she cartoonishly moves her mouth in a way that imitates him. He notices after a few minutes; she hadn’t tried particularly well to hide it. She isn’t wearing a cruel or mocking expression, more a desperate-for-attention-by-cruel-and-mocking-means one. He has observed this trait about her before but never commented, the way she rejects the conversational spotlight focusing on anyone but herself. He resolves to bring this up later, back home. Or yam, as she always says instead of ‘home’, after she’s been around Terry. 

Terry speaks in a broad West Cumbrian accent, with a fair amount of dialect thrown in. Sophie speaks like this too, but more so when she’s been around him. Together they will say words that Christopher is not even sure are English. He mentioned this jokingly the last time they all went out together. He anticipated they would laugh, realising he wasn’t being serious, but Sophie immediately turned sour and offended.

Terry had ventured some diplomacy. ‘It’s all right, marra,’ – (West Cumbrian, Christopher has learned, for mate) – ‘I get where you’re coming fray.’ (From).

‘No,’ Sophie had countered. ‘He’s just stuck-up.’

It wasn’t often she snapped at him like that, especially in front of their friends, but she’d drank a lot of vodka that night. She always complained he didn’t like her drinking vodka because it made her cheery and fun and he was jealous he couldn’t loosen up in that way. In truth, he didn’t like her drinking vodka because it made her nasty, and inevitably she’d end the night crying with guilt. He preferred avoiding that, was all.

‘To be fair, I can’t take a side. I don’t think I know what dogwood is,’ Terry says now, shrugging his shoulders.

George nods. ‘Me neither.’

‘That’s partly my point,’ Christopher continues. ‘There’s lots of different variations of the dogwood plant; they’re so common. Sophie here thinks they’re all extinct from Cumbria. All of them. As if this place is somehow different to the rest of Europe.’

Christopher thinks he sees a change in Sophie’s expression, a hardening or a bristle, at the mention of ‘this place’. She is of the belief that he holds contempt for this place, this place being their home in Cockermouth. He doesn’t know when she started believing this, but now it is one of their main sources of contention.

Perhaps, he surmises, it’s her way of projecting guilt. He moved his entire life up here for her, when she found out about her mother’s tumour. They’d only been seeing each other for about eight months then. At the time she told him it was the biggest sacrifice anyone had ever made for her and she was unsure how she could ever repay him. Perhaps that’s what makes her lash out sometimes – that imagined feeling of debt still gnawing at her.

‘I never said that. I only said I didn’t think you got dogwood here. That’s all,’ Sophie says. ‘It was just one random, irrelevant, fly-away statement that you’re now weirdly fixated on. God knows why.’

‘Because you get dogwood everywhere, is why. Because you’re wrong, is why.’

‘Eh, did you two watch the debate last night?’ George interrupts, pouring some more cava into Christopher’s glass. 

When George does this, Sophie notices the side-glance he gives Terry and she feels suddenly awkward, self-conscious. She and Christopher bicker so often, that it’s not really momentous anymore. It feels as casual as friendliness, maybe even more so. She decides not to push it any further; she resents the idea that Terry and George might talk about them later. It’s only a stupid plant anyway. She never knew what dogwood even was until Christopher mentioned it this morning. He had written about it in one of his poems. He wrote something about there being blankets of dogwood in the graveyard by their house, and she had said she didn’t think so. She had said it with no great conviction, but the more he told her she was wrong, the more her conviction grew.

‘Aye, you bet we watched it,’ she exclaims and leans back in her chair. ‘A disgrace!’

She bangs her hand flat on the table, only half in jest, for this is politics now and she could speak for hours. Christopher finds himself leaning back a little too. She is the only person he’s ever met who actually seems to know what she’s talking about when it comes to politics, and it’s never that she’s trying to argue a bias or change others’ opinions either. She treats current events like specimens in a lab that should be vivisected and analysed from a myriad of different angles. She talks fervently, her hands moving in time with her mouth. Watching her now, anyone would think if her mouth stopped, her hands would too. Christopher smiles.

It’s been a while since he has heard her passionate like this. Once over, it was all she did and he loved every second. They’d eat their supper on the sofa together, watching the six o’clock news, and she would have everything to say about everything. In those days, they only ever met at her flat, since he still shared a house with his wife, Julie, who had asked him for a divorce long before he met Sophie. (They are both always keen to assert this fact to others.) He thought it would be terrible form to bring a young woman back, to share the pull-out sofa he slept on. Besides, Sophie’s flat was spacious enough, next to a lot of good restaurants and pubs, and it smelled like her.

He’d never seen himself as an overtly political man. He had always thought it self-preservational not to spread himself too thin, learning about topics he didn’t much care for, like politics, but the breadth of her knowledge and her tendency to share it seemed to bring out something unexpected. He found himself espousing ideas he hadn’t known he possessed. Around her, they fell out of his mouth as though they’d lived inside of him for years. Like the time they were discussing the commercialisation of climate change activism, and he came over suddenly quite passionate, hot-faced and eventually, indignant.

‘The party’s idea of optics is misguided, that’s the problem,’ she says now, of last night’s election debate. ‘They have a target audience in mind, but it’s the wrong one.’

Terry nods, though Christopher is sure he isn’t following.

‘And,’ she continues. ‘Did anybody notice his hesitation on the division question? Had absolutely no idea how to tackle it. Idiot.’

Terry nods again, goes to say something, but she talks over him. She never had this much to say last night, Christopher thinks.

Even though the fireplace is close, a draught manages to bother him. He notices then how the heath looks suddenly so far away, the flames appearing smaller than they should. They look less like flames now, more like small, melting leaves. He glances over at Sophie; she too appears further away than she really is. Something about this moment feels entirely unreal. He stands quickly, and just like that, just with standing, all proportions return to normal again. Everything is as it should be. He looks at the flames; they are the right and ordinary size. Unmistakably. 

Once Sophie has stopped talking and Terry begins, he excuses himself for a smoke. Terry’s political disseminations are not in the same category. Concise, excessively ironic, possibly around the mark of 140 characters, leading Christopher to the conclusion that the ‘sources’ and ‘papers’ he refers to are in fact just Twitter.

 

The smoking area is crowded with people. They are all pressed against each other, trying to make a space for themselves but failing, each of them ignoring the rule about not bringing glasses outside. Christopher, too, has ignored that and sips from his third glass of merlot, having moved on from the cava. The area is half under the shelter of a wooden awning, with ivy, cherry-blossom and an unidentifiable red flower growing over it like a blush, or a rash. 

Christopher takes a drag of his cigarette and closes his eyes. It’s too windy, and the wind is cold, but he stays where he is. The taste of smoke in his mouth is uncomfortably acidic. He doesn’t know if that’s correct. If smoke – nicotine, whatever – is actually acidic; it just feels that way right now. And also, the sentence sounded good in his head. The taste of smoke… uncomfortably acidic.

Recently he’s begun to wonder if a life devoted to literature has made him less well-formed as a human being. Would he have turned out more complete somehow, without as many beautiful words filling his head? Would he be more reactive? Instead, he is plagued by an incessant need to archive everything he lives through – the rank taste of a bad cigarette, dogwood in the graveyard. That kind of attentiveness – would he call it attentiveness? – ensures an air of detachment from actual experience itself. He often has to write to come to terms with what he actually feels about something. A sort of half-life. The wine has gone to his head, he thinks. Or maybe it was the cava earlier. He’s always said it’s like drinking piss.

Sophie had been the first person for as long as he could remember, to actually get him feeling the immediacy of moments. When they met, she was a talkative customer in his bookshop, nosing through vintage copies of Don Quixote. Perhaps he was looking for a distraction, being freshly separated from his wife (though still, uncomfortably, sharing a house) and Sophie, an ambitious, bright-eyed PHD student, proved an interesting one.

Their first encounter was odd, to say the least. One moment, there she was, looking through old books, and in the next moment, she had fainted. She collapsed right there in his bookshop. On the ground she looked even prettier than she had while rummaging through the books, but Christopher knew that was a sick vein of thought to be entertaining so he turned his focus away from that. Onto the phone-call instead. He had thought it best to call an ambulance. By the time he was explaining the situation to the operator, she had roused and was trying to sit up. 

It must be human instinct, in situations of medical distress, for the surrounding public to play all-knowing doctors, even if they’re absolutely clueless, because Christopher promptly ushered her into lying back down, explaining that it wasn’t good for her to sit up so quickly. He had no real idea whether or not this was true. It sounded true.

It turned out she did not want or need the ambulance. She said she had been working so much she hadn’t eaten since yesterday lunchtime – and that was why she’d fainted. It was strange to him how anticlimactic that felt. To have her stand up, thank him for his kindness and leave. Not that he wanted her to need a hospital, of course not. It just felt awfully disappointing to have the only momentous thing that had happened to him in a long while end so abruptly, and without much of a conclusion.

But she came back the next day and bought the book. He inquired into how she was feeling, and if she had ever read anything else by Cervantes. This proved to be a wise decision on his part, because she had a lot to say about him and they conversed for nearly forty minutes. What occurred between them then, was that peculiar intimacy between two people who mutually enjoy the same piece of art. A scintillating conversation he has always found a kind of spell. Potent, unidentifiable once it’s over, but brazen and borderline spiritual while it’s happening. (She would laugh, when he later described this sensation, and say ‘Can you not just leave it at scintillating conversation?’) He asked her if she would like to wait a short while – about twenty minutes until he could close up – and then he would take her for a coffee across the road. He said they could talk about Don Quixote. She looked at him for a moment, perhaps weighing him up, and then nodded. They went for coffee and talked about Don Quixote, as well as more than Don Quixote.

He watches people’s faces now as they smoke and envies their simplicity, how they are – or seem to be – easily enjoying their cigarettes. As though right now, to them, cigarettes were all that existed. He wishes he could be like that. Sophie is always telling him off: ‘You don’t feel and suffer more than other people just because you’ve read The Waste Land.’

He takes a long drag. There’s no acidic aftertaste anymore. Maybe he imagined it. A lone magpie lands on the wall across from him. He stares as if to somehow will it away, but it doesn’t move. Sophie has a superstition that one magpie represents sorrow, and then is it two for a baby girl? Or boy? No – maybe it’s two for joy? Whatever the saying, it seems to him that whenever he sees a magpie, it’s only ever alone. 

Then, over by a stone water-feature – a sculpture of a delicate nymph – where a small group of middle-aged women are talking, drinking cava, he notices something. Something that arrests his attention completely. He walks towards it, strangely apprehensive, shaking his head at the coincidence. 

Below the water-feature sits a bed of soil, and from the soil – shrubbery and frail white petals amid infrequent specks of yellow. The petals are long and thin like a woman’s fingers in white gloves. Christopher starts to laugh right there, crouched down by the cracked heels of the chatting women. He realises that’s a strange thing to note, that the women’s heels are cracking, but they are. Anyway, it’s hardly important, because there before him, in the bed of soil, is dogwood. He has found some dogwood.

 

Meanwhile, Sophie is ordering a diet coke at the bar. A group of boisterous young men, probably younger than she is, she guesses, are finishing their pints off in the queue behind her. Their conversation is loud and she tries to block it out. She tucks her hair behind her ears and waits, looking around. Back at the table Terry shows George something on his phone, a video maybe, and they both look at the screen, smiling together. Then they laugh. Sophie turns back to the bar, where the lady is leaning down, searching the low fridges. She pops up and says there’s no diet coke. Sophie responds immediately that it’s fine, a regular coke would be OK, would be perfect.

It is a terrible habit of hers and she knows it: over-apologising, overcompensating, over-paying respect to strangers. Friends, as well. She can’t remember Christopher’s words exactly, but one evening after a row, he had called her out on it. Something along the lines of her expending so much energy on kissing the backsides of everyone who didn’t actually matter, that she never had any energy left to be kind to him. She accused him of trying to possess her, of trying to own her attention and keep it all for himself and instantly that won her the argument. 

She understands that it is perhaps her most troubling tendency: she knows intuitively how to win an argument in a way that not only settles the matter, but also leaves Christopher feeling like he’s done something wrong. She will use words such as ‘possession’, phrases such as ‘power dynamics’. She knows that they awaken a sense of shame inside of him, or even just insecurity, and he will inevitably say no more; he will let her have the last word. 

It has always been, ever since they began seeing each other three years ago (her: 26, him: 50) a source of deep discomfort to Christopher: their age difference. He can mention it casually, but only to make a joke, like when she doesn’t know who Benny Hill is, or when he calls them Marathons instead of Snickers, or Opal Fruits instead of Starbursts. The years don’t seem to be such a monumental issue then. They can laugh about it. But that is only a small fraction of the time.

 He used to fret openly about whether or not his desire for her was inappropriate. Was he abusing his power as an older person, he always asked, all those years ago when he asked her out for coffee? She has grown to loathe how he academizes his shame, or guilt, approaching it with intellectual theories, as though self-awareness of an apparent flaw eradicated the flaw itself. But really, she knows she is not much different. Everybody does that.

She pays for the coke and leans over the bar to pick out a paper straw. As she does this, two things occur at once.

Firstly, Christopher comes in from outside. He calls her name, mentioning something about dogwood, that he’s found it in the smoking area. He asks her to come and see, to let him prove it. She is about to turn around and accuse him of pettiness, but then the second thing happens.

The boisterous men behind her stumble forward to take her place. And one man accidentally knocks into her back. He’s quite a large man, and she is pushed into the bar. It’s not a particularly hard knock, but enough for her to wince at the surprise, the shock of wood hitting her in the stomach.

She is about to tell the stranger that it’s fine, anticipating his apology, but Christopher is suddenly beside her, furious. He gets uncomfortably close to the stranger, and mutters darkly: ‘What was that, pal?’

Christopher doesn’t use words like that, Sophie knows, especially with menace. Pal.

‘What’re you on about, old man?’ The stranger laughs. 

‘I said, what was that about, pal? I’m sure you heard me.’

‘You might want to step back there.’

Christopher’s turn to laugh now. ‘When I hear an apology to my girlfriend, I’ll step back.’

This is extraordinarily out of character for him, isn’t it? Sophie watches his face, something she now understands she has not done in a while. She has looked at it, obviously, every day, but not watched. There is something in his expression that is oddly alive and flickering. It seems almost new to her, but then again, not quite. New in the way that discovering a mole is, one that has always secretly been there. She realises where this fire is coming from, what is igniting this kind of energy from him: getting to play the saviour. It’s been a while.

‘It was an accident, and I apologised.’ (He hadn’t.) ‘Get off your horse. I’m telling you.’

These clipped declaratives they each deliver have the energy of a kettle rumbling. Sophie’s never actually seen Christopher fight with another man before, but she understands that in these kinds of situations things can escalate rather quickly. The stranger is over six foot, broad-shouldered and by the look on his face, willing to punch in ways Christopher wouldn’t be. Christopher: a poet who thinks UFC is barbaric and should be banned. She takes his arm and tells him to come and sit back down. He is about to acquiesce, when the stranger smiles. It seems as though he knows exactly what he’s doing when he says, slowly, so that every word is drawn out: ‘That’s a good man – you listen to your daughter.’

He immediately takes the younger man’s collar in his hand. He doesn’t hit him; that would be too extreme, even in hot anger, too far-removed from who he really is. He just stands there, holding the collar. He pushes his face closer, but he’s almost frozen, as though now that he has surrendered to his anger, he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He doesn’t let go of the fabric; he just pushes the stranger into the bar a little, and the man laughs.

‘Really? Wow.’

He shrugs Christopher off, turns to Sophie and says, briefly but not rudely, that he is sorry for nudging her, before returning to his group. It’s over, Sophie thinks, the strangest, and most stunted of confrontations. She waits a moment, confused and apprehensive, before following Christopher back to their table.

There’s another bottle of cava. Sophie watches as the three men drink, and she continues sipping her coke. They’re talking about where they’re planning to go on holiday this year. Terry and George say that they’re planning on going to Ibiza. Christopher says something about the old churches there, and the beautiful ruins.

‘Oh, we weren’t looking at that part,’ Terry says.

‘Sophie and I were thinking of Barcelona.’

Were they? Was that a conversation that they’d had? He looks at her and she smiles.

‘You all right?’ he asks quietly. ‘You didn’t hurt yourself back there?’

‘No,’ she replies. She wants to add obviously not, or you knew that, but she doesn’t.

He touches her shoulder then and it is almost a tender moment. She is almost sucked in, lost to that gentleness his hand has, but then she notices the glazed-over quality to his eyes, the same look he had at the bar, with the man, and realises he is not looking at her exactly. And maybe he never really has been. He stares at a different version of Sophie, one that does not actually exist, that never existed except inside his own imagination. 

When they had first started seeing each other, three and a half years ago now – or was it getting closer to four? – their lives had been so much different. He was still living in a house with his soon-to-be ex-wife; Sophie was still studying, was still full of this strange fire called ambition that she now doesn’t remember. It doesn’t exist for her anymore. 

His wife had decided to divorce him because something had died between them, or perhaps it had never really been there. And he told Sophie he agreed with that, but had wanted to try another year because surely companionship was more convenient than loneliness. His wife disagreed and they’d split. She had forgotten he said that bit, about loneliness. It sticks in her head now, as though it had never gone away: surely companionship is more convenient than loneliness.

 Sophie thinks back to his behaviour at the bar, and the only situation she can compare it to is that of their first, highly unusual meeting, when she had fainted right there in his bookshop. He had been particularly enthusiastic about making sure she was well, and in the first few months afterwards, when they were newly dating, he decided she had some kind of eating disorder, and would not accept for a long time that she had only not eaten that day due to working too hard. Work was the problem, she had to convince him. She was too busy. However, he seemed to prefer this idea that she was in some kind of ongoing psychological battle that he could help her with. Perhaps that has always been the way he prefers to see her: in need of something. Someone.

The conversation at the table moves from holidays, to work. Terry and George both work at estate agencies, different ones. Sophie works alongside Christopher in his bookshop. She doesn’t have much to add to this conversation. What does she have to say about work that isn’t about him? She reminds herself sometimes, that she is grateful. He moved his entire life up here to follow her, to be with her, when she needed his comfort more than ever. It was a gamble; there was no guarantee that his shop would have been able to transfer to Cumbria so successfully. He had risked that. At the time, she’d told him she would never have imagined she’d meet someone so selfless in their heart.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Christopher leans in and whispers again. ‘You’re not sulking about the dogwood, are you?’ He winks when he says this, to show that the row is over now.

She smiles, as politely as she can manage. ‘I don’t like being sober when everyone else is drunk. That’s all.’ 

‘Oh, I’m not that drunk, are you boys?’ The last part he says with more volume.

George, who is always quiet until he’s had a few, begins a long speech about how particular types of alcohol affect him differently. Christopher leans in to listen. 

Terry, meanwhile, gives her a sympathetic looking smile. He was once someone she told everything to. But these days, it’s like she shares him with Christopher. 

He mouths to her: what’s ‘matter? 

‘I don’t like being sober when everyone else is drunk,’ she says again. ‘That’s all.’

 

At eleven, once the bell has sounded for last orders, Terry and George say their farewells. Both kiss Sophie on the cheek, before leaving hand-in-hand. They pass on the lift; it’s not too far of a walk to George’s flat. She watches them disappear out of sight, their long arms and clasped hands.

‘Not a bad night.’ Christopher exhales theatrically, stretching his arms up above him and yawning. ‘We could have walked back, actually. It’s fair. You could have had a drink.’ 

She doesn’t say anything.

He touches her arm, which is covered in gooseflesh, and says with a small smile: ‘Bit cold without a jacket, though.’

He opens the car door and climbs into the passenger seat. Sophie stays outside for a moment. She wants a few seconds to herself in the cool night breeze. She hears tyres screeching on the road and then a car horn going off in the distance. She breathes in. For him to desire a false version of her is surely not the worst thing. There are times when she too imagines him different to how he really is, for her own pleasure. Neither of them is innocent on that front. For example, Sophie has always desired older men more than those her own age because she likes to project sad backstories onto them. She does that sometimes with Christopher, imagining him sadder than he really is. The first year they were married, his wife had changed her mind and one day decided that she might want kids, but he maintained that he did not. Sophie sometimes twists this narrative in her head when she thinks about it, into one where Christopher either can’t have children and is devastated, or he doesn’t think he would make a good enough father to even try. Really, she knows, he just doesn’t want them, as simple as that. She understands that feeling well; she doesn’t want any either. But she enjoys the warm rush of sympathy her projections bring.

She gets in the car and puts the keys into the ignition. The Leonard Cohen disc plays automatically. This time, a song she doesn’t recognise. 

‘Ah, this one’s my favourite,’ Christopher says. 

She hopes that he doesn’t hear the small, sad noise which she cannot help from making. She glances over at him; he isn’t looking, he hasn’t heard. 

There was a time, she is sure, when they were in synch. She knows three, nearly four, years isn’t a very long time to love somebody, to live beside them. He was married for nine. It feels long though, in some ways. In that time, a lot can happen. In that time, your mother can die and you can completely reprioritise your life, can go from studying a doctorate programme in London with so many possibilities ahead of you, to working in your much older boyfriend’s bookshop, managing matters of day-to-day finance. You can lose so much fire. And she knows what she really means by fire: meaning. In three or four years, you can lose so much meaning.

The night her mother passed away Christopher had been so attentive – no, lovely was the word. She had needed exactly and only him. Not her despondent father, or the fact-talking doctor – only Christopher, and Christopher’s arms, which were not huge but felt it that night, grounding her trembling frame. He said lots of soothing things to her, but what she remembered most of all: ‘Just lean into me. You don’t need to do anything else.’

Christopher sighs now and leans back against the headrest. His eyes are drunk and sleepy, staring out of the window at the pub they’ve just left. He knows all of the words to this song, muttering them quietly under his breath. 

The lights from the windows look stronger now than when they first arrived. The yellow glow is no longer ghostly but startling and alien. It shines in all directions, illuminating the pub’s signage, the white lettering of ‘The Graceful Plume’. Sophie releases the handbrake slowly. She drives on, out of the car-park, down a dip, and then through a stretch of road where the trees are so tall, they bend, and meet above from either side.