After All This Time Coffee Break Tale
What becomes of the broken-hearted when we move on?
Jane and her daughter had enjoyed the hotel terrace to themselves since dinner, the silence broken only by an odd desultory remark and the soft exhalations of the sea. Now a couple emerged from the bar and she turned away quickly.
“Do you know those people?” whispered Rachel.
“His name’s Archie Tait.” The pair had seated themselves some distance away but Jane kept her voice low. “I went out with him in third year at university.”
Rachel frowned. “You recognise him after forty years?”
“I heard him confirm his name and date of birth as the clerk checked his passport.”
She’d been at his twenty-first birthday party. November the eighteenth, 1978. “Was it serious?” “Not really.” The thing had fizzled out in the end because Finals were approaching but there had been no hard feelings. It was the postscript that had stayed with her…
As exams had drawn to a close, Jane’s hall of residence had emptied rapidly until only a handful of people remained.
“My parents can’t collect me till the weekend,” confided one girl when she slipped down to the laundry room to pop some undies in the dryer, “so I’m catching up on my washing and ironing.”
Jane smiled back, slightly pityingly, as you sometimes did when you were young and newly in love. She wasn’t waiting to go home. She had a job and a house-share lined up, but was hanging on until the results came out so she could spend as much time as possible with the guy she’d met at someone’s end-of-Finals party. Mike. Rachel’s dad. That same wet evening, there’d been a knock on her door. Instead of Mike, Archie stood there, curly hair plastered to his forehead, looking for a second chance.
“You mean he just turned up?” Rachel sounded incredulous.
“What was he supposed to do?” said Jane. “Text? Our only means of communication was a public phone two floors down – that, or writing a letter. Anyway, it was no big deal. I explained about your father and he left.”
“Any regrets?” asked Rachel as she rose to fetch them another drink, and Jane smiled and shook her head.
But she’d been surprised by the hurt in Archie’s eyes that night. The possibility that his feelings were deeper than she’d guessed had nagged her a little and she couldn’t deny it felt strange, seeing him now. What was that song that, for ages, reminded her of him whenever she heard it? The one with the saxophone solo. “BakerStreet,” she murmured. She wondered what his wife was like. “You’ve been ages,” she said when her daughter returned. A terrible thought occurred to her. “You haven’t spoken to them, have you?”
“’Course not. I did have a chat with the receptionist, though, said you were sure you’d met this Mr and Mrs Tait before.” “Honestly, Rachel.” “In the end, we concluded it must be some other Taits you were thinking of, not Archie and Cynthia after all.”
“Did you say Cynthia?”
Hadn’t the girl in the laundry room been called Cynthia something? Had she been carrying a pile of freshly ironed blouses back to her room and bumped into Archie on the stairs? Did this mean he’d managed to meet his future life partner before even leaving the building?
It might be the purest coincidence, but there hadn’t been that many Cynthias around, even in those days. So much for the poignant image she’d preserved all these years.
“Typical drama student,” she could hear Mike saying. “You’ve probably pictured him trudging back to his lonely digs, shoulders hunched against the rain, some moody saxophone as background.” She gave a little snort of laughter. “What’s up with you?” hissed Rachel. “I’ll tell you later – come on, let’s leave them in peace. Oh, Rach,” she said as they stood and collected bags, cardigans and unfinished glasses of wine, “I do wish your father could have been here with us.”
“Of course he’s here, Mum. When are you ever not thinking about Dad?”
At the entrance to the bar, Jane glanced back. Mr and Mrs Tait were indistinguishable from the shadows.
“Take good care of each other, you two,” she murmured, and followed her daughter inside.