She’d followed him home in her mother’s car. He’d kissed her at the security door to the building, then he’d kissed her again in the stairwell, and for quite a long time at the front door, and then once he’d got the key in the door, they were suddenly doing that crazy tear-each-other’s-clothes-off, banging-into-walls thing that you never do once you’re in a long-term relationship, because it seems too theatrical, and not really worth the bother anyway, especially if there’s something good on TV.
‘I’d better get a condom,’ Connor had said in her ear at a crucial point in the proceedings, and Tess had said, ‘I’m on the pill. You seem disease-free, so, just, please, oh, God, please, just go right ahead.’
‘Rightio,’ he’d said and done just that.
Now Tess readjusted her clothes and waited to feel ashamed. She was a married woman. She was not in love with this man. The only reason she was here was because her husband had fallen in love with someone else. Just a few days earlier this scenario would have been laughable, inconceivable. She should be filled with self-loathing. She should feel seedy and slutty and sinful, but actually what she felt right now was . . . cheerful. Really cheerful. Almost absurdly cheerful, in fact. She thought of Will and Felicity and their sad, earnest faces just before she threw cold coffee at them. She recalled that Felicity had been wearing a new white silk blouse. That coffee stain would never come out.
Her eyes adjusted, but Connor was still just a shadowy silhouette lying next to her. She could feel the warmth of his body all along her right side. He was bigger, stronger and in much better shape than Will. She thought of Will’s short, stocky, hairy body – so familiar and dear, the body of a family member, although always sexy to her. She had thought Will was the last bullet point in her sexual history. She had thought she wouldn’t sleep with anyone else for the rest of her life. She remembered the morning after she and Will had got engaged, when that thought had first occurred to her. The glorious sense of relief. No more new, unfamiliar bodies. No more awkward conversations about contraception. Just Will. He was all she needed, all she wanted.
And now here she was lying in an ex-boyfriend’s hallway.
‘Life sure can surprise you,’ her grandmother used to say, mostly about quite unsurprising developments such as a bad cold, the price of bananas and so on.
‘Why did we break up?’ she asked Connor.
‘You and Felicity decided to move to Melbourne,’ said Connor. ‘And you never asked if I wanted to come too. So I thought, Right. Looks like I just got dumped.’
Tess winced. ‘Was I horrible? It sounds like I was horrible.’
‘You broke my heart,’ said Connor pitifully.
‘Really?’
‘Possibly,’ said Connor. ‘Either you did, or this other girl I dated for a while around the same time called Teresa. I always get the two of you mixed up.’
Tess pushed her elbow into his side.
‘You were a good memory,’ said Connor in a more serious voice. ‘I was happy to see you again the other day.’
‘Me too,’ said Tess. ‘I was happy to see you.’
‘Liar. You looked horrified.’
‘I was surprised.’ She changed the subject. ‘Do you still have a waterbed?’
‘Sadly, the waterbed didn’t make it into the new millennium,’ said Connor. ‘I think it made Teresa seasick.’
‘Stop talking about Teresa,’ said Tess.
‘All right. Do you want to move somewhere more comfortable?’
‘I’m okay.’
They lay in companionable silence for a few moments, and then Tess said, ‘Um. What are you doing?’
‘Just seeing if I still know my way around the place.’
‘That’s a bit, I don’t know, rude? Sexist? Oh. Oh, well.’
‘Do you like that, Teresa? Wait, what was your name again?’
‘Stop talking please.’
Chapter thirty
Cecilia sat on the couch next to Esther watching YouTube videos of the cold, clear November night in 1989 when the Berlin Wall came down. She was becoming obsessed with the Wall herself. After John-Paul’s mother had left, she’d stayed sitting at the kitchen table reading one of Esther’s books until it was time to pick the girls up from school. There were so many things she should have been doing – Tupperware deliveries, preparations for Easter Sunday, the pirate party – but reading about the Wall was a good way of pretending she wasn’t thinking about what she was really thinking about.
Esther was drinking warm milk. Cecilia was drinking her third – or fourth? – glass of sauvignon blanc. John-Paul was listening to Polly do her reading. Isabel sat at the computer in the family room downloading music onto her iPod. Their home was a cosy lamplit bubble of domesticity. Cecilia sniffed. The scent of sesame oil seemed to have pervaded the whole house now.
‘Look, Mum,’ Esther elbowed her.
‘I’m watching,’ said Cecilia.
Cecilia’s memories of the news footage she’d seen back in 1989 were rowdier than this. She remembered crowds of people dancing on top of the Wall, fists punching the air. Wasn’t David Hasselhoff singing at some point? But there was a strange, eerie quietness to the clips Esther had found. The people walking out from East Berlin seemed quietly stunned, exhilarated but calm, filing out in such an orderly fashion. (They were Germans after all. Cecilia’s sort of people.) Men and women with eighties hairstyles drank champagne straight from the bottle, tipping their heads back and smiling at the cameras. They hooted and hugged and wept, they tooted the horns of their cars, but they all seemed so well behaved, so very nice about it. Even the people slamming sledge-hammers against the wall seemed to do so with controlled jubilation, not vicious fury. Cecilia watched a woman of about her own age dance in circles with a bearded man in a leather jacket.