The Love Market Read online

  The Love Market

  by Carol Mason

  Website: CarolMasonBooks.com

  Copyright 2012 by Carol Mason. All rights reserved.

  First Kindle Edition: March 2012

  First published in Canada in 2012 by McArthur & Company

  322 King Street West, Suite 402

  Toronto, Ontario, M5V 1J2

  Cover Design: Streetlight Graphics

  LICENSE NOTES

  All rights reserved. This eBook is licensed for the personal enjoyment of the original purchaser only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this eBook and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  DISCLAIMER

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are a work of fiction or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  About the Author

  Prologue

  Someone once told me that there’s no such thing as a coincidence, only a synchronicity. That like-minded people often travel down similar paths that can converge unexpectedly. That’s why you’ll bump into the mother of your daughter’s school friend in the wine shop at six o’clock on a Friday, or your old art history professor while touring the Louvre. But sometimes chance encounters don’t seem to result from any kindred purpose. And you’ll see someone from your past in a place that is so unlikely for either of you to ever be in that you can’t quite explain it. You can’t even read into it, because very often life, just like who we end up loving, is a random thing.

  In my case, I happened to get off the bus at the wrong stop.

  I wasn’t really paying attention to where we were, given that we seemed to spend ninety per cent of the journey proceeding at the snail’s pace of London traffic on a Saturday afternoon. What was far more fascinating at that time than anything outside the window was my left earlobe reflected in the glass; the fiery little diamond twinkling away with each slight movement of my head. I happened to glance at Mike sitting in the seat facing me. He was grinning at me and slowly shaking his head, in affectionate despair.

  ‘It’s too lavish!’ I said to him in the jewelry store the day before, as I reluctantly handed the little diamond studs back to the salesman.

  ‘No it’s not. I want you to have them.’ Mike cocked me a glance that said he was quite enjoying being the big man footing the bill for the expensive anniversary present, just this once. ‘Try them in again,’ he said.

  ‘We can’t, Mike! They’re a thousand pounds.’

  ‘We’re taking them,’ Mike pulled out his credit card with a flourish.

  He knew I’d had wanted little diamond studs for a while. I’d managed to drop them into the conversation just enough times to have the hint tiptoe across his consciousness so that buying them would seem like his idea—a romantic gesture—rather than just him caving in to shut me up.

  ‘But Mike, we could finish our bathroom with that money. Or put it toward a new car. Or Aimee’s education fund...’ I thought please God don’t let me talk him out of his generosity.

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Let’s put them back.’ He pretended to pocket his credit card again, and to try not to see how my face must have fallen. Then he smiled. ‘One thousand pounds, Celine. What’s that work out to over ten years of marriage? You don’t think you’re worth that to me?’

  I rubbed my chin, deviously. ‘When you put it like that… Maybe I should try a bigger pair.’

  Mike snapped his card down on the counter. ‘Done deal.’ I tripped out of there like I was Ginger Rogers. Mike said small things please small-minded people, and he was pleased he wasn’t born a girl. I slept in them, and, this morning, grinned while I was brushing my teeth. Mirrors, windows, backs of spoons have all become irresistible.

  ‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’re getting off.’ He pulls me up out of the seat, spoiling my love-in with my own earlobes.

  ‘But I thought we were staying on until Knightsbridge?’ We’re going to Harrods, because I can’t go home to the North East of England without buying my sister something for Christmas that comes in a green and gold carrier bag. Even if it’s just a box of tea. Which is probably all we can afford now.

  ‘You can stay on if you want, but I’ll hurl if we don’t get off this bus,’ he says, dragging me through the throng of people.

  Mike and his legendary travel sickness. Some people suffer from piles, eye twitches, or gluten allergies; with Mike it’s an overdeveloped gag reflex whenever he’s on anything that gathers speed and turns corners. He jumps off before the doors close, pulling me with him, and for a moment I feel like I’m flying. But not in a good way.

  We’re only down here in the first place because Mike got given tickets to see Van Morrison, through his job as a radio producer for a late night chat show on Newcastle’s Blaze FM. The palm-greasing from the station’s advertisers usually just runs to tickets for a football match, which always makes my upper lip curl because I happen to be the only person in Northern England who doesn’t give a damn about football. So this was quite exciting. Plus Aimee is staying with my sister; Mike and I rarely get away just by ourselves any more.

  The bus belches diesel into the air, and Mike does a wet burp. I stroke the back of his head. His hair is rapidly going grey for someone not quite forty. The style has been the same since the day I met him: collar-length and side-burned; a 1950’s male rockabilly pompadour. I remember when I first laid eyes on him in the coffee shop on Newcastle’s Grey Street thinking he looked remotely like Henry Winkler from Happy Days. While this wasn’t a selling feature in itself, there was something appealing about the way he didn’t conform to the “David Beckham blond highlights” standard that every other bloke did in 1996.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I ask him.

  Another wet burp. ‘Ergh!’ he says. ‘Come on, let’s walk.’ He takes hold of my hand, his hot and clammy fingers lacing between my cold ones. Given he’s not feeling well, I will lift my ban on handholding this one time. The problem is that at five feet nine inches tall, I’m an inch and a half bigger than him in my bare feet. Now there are some men who love the idea of doing a Dudley Moore, and I have a feeling Mike is one of them, but it’s not reciprocated. I will often joke with him that by the time you put me in shoes, I sometimes feel like I’m taking my child for a walk.

  �
��Hang on, I think we’re going the wrong way,’ he says now, when we suddenly arrive at Sloane Square, with its skeletal trees strung with blue and white Christmas lights. ‘Harrods is back there.’

  We’re just turning to go back the way we came, and I’m just registering an uncommonly carefree feeling: no work, no Aimee to get off to school or pick up, the endless round of gym classes, meals to make, shopping, cleaning, work… when something shocking happens.

  There is a man coming out of a building about fifty feet ahead of us. This wouldn’t be odd at all if it weren’t for the fact that I know this man. I know him so well that it makes my world become a surreal sort of still.

  It’s the stature that’s unmistakably him. The height: a not-so-common six feet four. And the physique: muscular enough to save him from looking lanky, yet not so bulky that you’d think he must have to work at it. But it was the way he held himself that made him stand out in a crowd: that difficult-to-strike balance of confidence and graceful masculinity. Patrick would never think to stoop to anyone’s level. Not literally or any other way. And just looking at him you knew that, and you’d be torn between admiring him and assuming he’d be an arrogant bastard.

  My mouth has gone dry. My heart is a strange clash of surprise and sadness.

  I am dragged back to twelve years ago. Me, just twenty-one, on an around-the-world adventure, not knowing that I was about to find out what falling in love is. We met in Sa Pa, the misty mountain village in Vietnam, in the famous Love Market—the place where young lovers find one another, and old ones come to remember. We were the only two Westerners there. Patrick was twenty-eight, a Canadian foreign correspondent working in Asia. He was in the Love Market looking for a story. And I had heard all about this place, and what went on here, and the concept of it had taken hold of me. I remember how he stood across the square and held my eyes, and never once looked away. And in that moment, I knew I was going to have a grand, ground-breaking, heart-crushing romance. He was it. Nobody had to make the first move. It was somehow already made.

  But it can’t be him. Patrick lives in Canada. How could I possibly find myself in London for the weekend and see Patrick, who doesn’t even live in this country?

  But the butterflies in my stomach tell me it’s clearly not impossible, it really is him, even though I can’t see his eyes because he’s wearing sunglasses, along with light jeans and a smart-casual olive-coloured jacket. I would know him anywhere.

  My hand slips away from Mike’s. The blare of horns, a squeal of brakes, a group of Japanese tourists running after a bus, their feet scattering on the ground, then everything is soundless.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I hear Mike’s voice, distantly, from beyond the other side of my shock. Memories rush over me, as though it had all been yesterday. As though nothing had happened since. There never was a since. Never a Mike or an Aimee. Never a life. The man I’m convinced is Patrick is stepping off the curb, raising an arm to flag down a taxi, and in a flash this moment will be gone. Time seems to slow right down, giving me ample chance to do something. But do what? I can’t speak or move. I’m a strange mix of wildly excited and ill.

  I can only see him side-on, and it’s enough for me to doubt again. The face is heavier. The profile isn’t quite... If only he’d take off those glasses.

  Mike takes hold of my arm. ‘What on earth’s wrong with you?’

  Patrick is bending now, talking through a taxi driver’s window. I even recognise the shape of his head.

  ‘Celine?’ Mike says again. I hear the concern in his voice; his fingers grip me tightly.

  Is Mike trembling, or is it me? What I do now is going to be one of those pivotal moments that change everything. I know this, and all my instincts say let it go.

  All but one.

  Patrick—if it’s Patrick—is climbing into the back of a taxi, and I am now in such a heightened state of panic that I start trotting toward the taxi, hearing Mike call after me, bemusement and slight annoyance in his voice. But I’ve taken those few steps; the damage is already done. As the taxi starts pulling away, I find myself, inconceivably, starting to run after it.

  Then two buses hurtle past, and I can’t see the taxi any more but still my legs have a will of their own. When I’m able to see around the buses, there is now more than one taxi, and I don’t know which one he’s in. But on I go. I’m a high-speed train about to wreck itself. All the while, my common sense is telling me this can’t be Patrick, so what on earth am I doing chasing a stranger?

  Then I have a stitch in my side, and a painful airlock in my chest. It crosses my mind that I might be having a heart attack. The buses and taxis are converging at a traffic light, and I have to stop because my body is giving me no other choice.

  I flop forward, my breath coming in gulps, thoughts piling on top of each other: I’ve just seen Patrick. Or was it him? The face wasn’t quite… Maybe this man wasn’t as tall.

  No. It was him. I know it was.

  I picture him in a cab now, somewhere gone. Absolutely no chance of ever coming this close to him again. And I remember how I lost him the last time. I can still visualise him standing there, in the dim morning light of his cabin, with his bag packed. And me thinking, You’ll walk out of this door and I’ll never ever see you again. And as he left, my reproachful tone: ‘Don’t look back at me once you walk out of this door. Please don’t do it. I won’t be able to handle it.’ And he didn’t. I listened to his feet walking away. With his every step, I was thinking go after him, he’s only at the tree, he’s only at the road. Then, he’ll only be on the bus, he’ll still be at the airport. Then, he’s somewhere in Hong Kong, he’s still in Asia…

  Like the way I would write my address, when I was a child. Placing where I lived; positioning my small and insignificant self in the broader context of where everything else was: Celine Walker, 22 Duke Street, Newcastle, England, United Kingdom, Europe, World, Earth.

  Then I remember my behaviour. When I look down the street, Mike is standing exactly where I left him, as though he has cautioned himself from coming any closer. London returns to real time, but I continue to stand there helpless and inoperative. And I should be thinking only of how I can explain myself to him, but I am imagining the interior of a black cab with Patrick in it gazing out of the window, unaware that our lives have just synchronised again.

  Why hadn’t I just called out to him?

  I sit down on somebody’s doorstep. And I want to stop the tears for Mike’s sake, but they come anyway. To think we’d been having such a lovely weekend. The earring-shopping; our really nice dinner out. The way we’d linked arms as we walked back to the hotel along the fairy-light-strung Thames Embankment. We chattered all night. Not the routine stuff about his work, my work, the state of the house, the bills, Aimee, but frivolous things, almost flirtatious: or it felt so; maybe it was the wine. Then in bed, his tender kisses down my throat; his hands gripping my bottom under my nightdress. The way he knows my body better than anyone else, yet fails to ever really excite me. And sometimes I’m able to pretend different, and sometimes I can’t.

  The coldness of the step penetrates my coat and jeans. All the good things about my life that I don’t want to lose by losing Mike line up in my mind, urging me to remember that Mike is the one I’m with and the one I love. Not someone like Patrick who has spent more time in my fantasies than he ever did in my life. But all I am is numb, defeated before I even try.

  Next, I’m staring at Mike’s slightly scuffed brown Clarks as my tears turn cold on my cheeks. When my eyes travel up his body and finally reach his pale face, I can see him waiting for an explanation. Dismay and disappointment gather around him, like a man just realising that there’s something about his wife he doesn’t know. Or maybe he does. Maybe there are things he knows, or suspects, and wishes he didn’t. The weights and measures of a marriage; we know things but we choose not to think about them. We choose to bury our heads in the sand.

  Mike says only one thing. ‘That was him,
wasn’t it?’

  One

  Three Years Later

  The mail rustles through the box and falls softly on the carpet. I leave my morning coffee and the newspaper and walk down our short passageway to the front hall.

  There’s the usual stuff: bills, flyers, the odd shares certificate for Mike that still comes to this address even though he moved out eight months ago. But it’s the letter-sized white envelope with the solicitor’s return address on the front that stops the casual flicking of my hand.

  I walk back into our kitchen, conscious that the rain, which has been spitting on and off all morning, is now lashing on the window like a rushed and eerie whisper through a dream. That stealthy rain that is so common in April, sweeping across the wild and exposed Northumberland moors where we live, in a small rural hamlet, some twenty miles west of Newcastle Upon Tyne, about four hundred miles north of London. The kitchen has suddenly gone dark. I switch on the light and find myself just standing there looking out of the window, at my reflection, as though gazing through a ghost. The letter dangles from my limp hand, its contents on a slow parasail through my mind.

  Beyond our crumbling stone wall, the wispy mauves and taupe and moss green of the rolling moorland are blanketed by a grey slow-swirling mist which is probably in for the day. Our cherry tree has dropped its blossoms all over the grass. They lie there like confetti long after a wedding. I pull out a chair from under the kitchen table and sit there before rereading the letter.

  The words are all there, saying what words on a decree absolute are supposed to say, but I can’t quite believe them. I stare at them for so long that they merge and fuzz, and tears burn in my eyes then drop onto the page. I want, irrationally, for them to have the effect of a magic eraser. But when I look again, the words are still there, telling me the same thing.