A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [81]
Largely as a way of tapping me for industry rumour before his condition gets out of hand, Fortner starts talking shop for the next fifteen minutes. He tells me what he and Katharine have been up to, and about Andromeda’s plans for the short-term future. In return, Fortner expects information, much of which he knows I should not be telling him. What are Abnex planning to do about X? What’s the company line on Y? Is there any truth in the rumours about a merger with Z? My answers are carefully evasive.
‘That was damn good,’ he says, tipping his head back and letting the last half-mouthful of his Bloody Mary seep through a mess of ice and lemon. ‘I like ‘em spicy. You like ‘em like that, Milius?’
‘Kate did.’
This just comes out. I hadn’t planned to say it.
‘You never talk about her much,’ he says, after a brief silence in which sincerity has suddenly swamped his mood.
‘No. I don’t.’
‘You feel like talkin’ about her now?’
And the curious thing is that I do. To talk about Kate to this weathered Yank in a pub swirling with noise and bluster.
‘How long has it been now since you broke up?’
‘Over a year. More.’
‘D’you think you’re over her?’
‘There’s always this pilot light of grief.’
‘Nice way of putting it,’ Fortner says. He is doing a good job of suppressing any instinct for flippancy.
‘You were together what, six or seven years?’
‘From school, yes.’
‘Long time. You ever see her?’
‘Now and again,’ I tell him, just to see what happens. ‘You know how it is with couples who’ve been together a long time. They can’t ever really break up. So we meet once in a while and spend these incredible nights together. But we can never seem to get it going again.’
I like the idea of Fortner thinking she still can’t get over me.
‘How often?’
‘Every five or six weeks. I still confide in her. She’s still the best friend I have.’
‘Really?’ Fortner looks suitably intrigued, admiring even. ‘She got another boyfriend?’
‘Don’t know. She’s never said anything to me.’
‘So how come you broke up? What happened?’
‘Same thing that happens to a lot of couples after university. Suddenly they find they have to go out and work for a living and things aren’t as much fun any more. Priorities change, you have more responsibilities. You have to grow up so fast, and unless you can find a way of doing that together, the cracks are bound to show.’
‘And that’s what happened with you and Kate?’
‘That’s what happened with me and Kate. We were living together, but for some reason that made things worse. We were trying to be our parents before our time.’
This last remark doesn’t appear to have made any sense to Fortner. He says:
‘What d’you mean?’
‘Playing host and hostess to our friends. Dinner parties. Going to the Prado during the Easter holidays and renting villas in Tuscany. All of a sudden we were dressing smarter, choosing furniture, buying fucking cookbooks. And we were barely twenty-one, twenty-two. We took everything so fucking seriously.’
‘That’s not like you,’ he says, arching his eyebrows and grinning.
‘Funny,’ I reply.
‘And Kate was getting a lot of work? She was finding success as an actress and you weren’t?’
‘Partly. I was fucked up after college. I didn’t want to commit myself to any one thing in case something better came along. I was afraid of hard work, afraid that my youth was prematurely over. And I was jealous of her success, yes. It was pretty pathetic.’
‘And she didn’t help?’
‘No, Christ, she was wonderful. She was sympathetic and understanding, but I pushed her away. She got tired of me. Simple as that.’
‘You think she was in love with you?’
I feel as though everyone sitting around us in the pub is listening in to our conversation, waiting for my response to this question. I falter, looking down at the worn brown carpet, then say: ‘I’ll tell you a story.’
‘OK,’ he says. ‘But first let me buy us a drink.’
When Fortner returns he is clutching two whiskies, mine a Scotch and dry, his a double