There was a brief silence, and Abby felt herself soften, not so much from relief as an unwillingness to have another confrontation.
She knew that couples could have the same arguments again and again – sometimes for the entire duration of a marriage – but she didn’t want a rerun of their angry, accusatory confrontation in Hyde Park. Not only was the thought of it exhausting, she wasn’t entirely sure she could continue avoiding the truth about St Petersburg.
‘You’d like Russia,’ she said eventually. ‘I was apprehensive about going, but it was pretty amazing. The architecture is incredible: all these fading baroque facades and peeling gold leaf. I’m not sure it was real gold leaf, but it looked beautiful and shiny and majestic. It’s a city for princesses. And the Metro! Some of the stations even had chandeliers.’
‘They were designed as palaces for the people, so they’re full of marble and glass. They look old and elegant, but the network only opened in the 1950s.’
She looked at him in surprise, though she wasn’t sure why. Nick had always been able to teach her things. His general knowledge was vast, but he was never pompous with his information. She couldn’t help comparing him to Elliot, who sometimes seemed to assume that he was there to educate her.
‘I’ve always wanted to go to St Petersburg. We should have gone,’ said Nick, looking at her.
‘Nick, we never used to go anywhere other than Cornwall.’
‘I thought that was what we both wanted.’
‘Clearly not. I never knew you had this burning desire to go to Russia.’
‘Well, perhaps we stopped communicating a long time before we separated,’ he said, not unkindly.
‘You know I love Cornwall,’ she said, remembering the beach barbecues they used to have: the little metal tins, the Lincolnshire sausages bought from the Co-op, the banana ketchup that made them laugh every time they bought it but which they both found secretly delicious.
She saw him glance down at her ring finger and notice that her wedding band was no longer there. Without thinking, she put her left hand on her knee under the table.
‘We got into a rut, didn’t we?’ she said, feeling a knot of nostalgia. ‘I mean, look at us now. A few weeks ago we’d never have done this, would we?’
‘Done what?’
Abby gestured around the bar.
‘This. Met for a drink by the river. Most of the time you were working in town, and I’m only a couple of tube stops away. Why did we never do this? We could have had lunch, gone to the Tate. I’m a bloody art history graduate and how many times have I been to the Tate?’
‘I bought you membership for your birthday last year.’
‘Yes, you did.’
She looked at him and their eyes locked, and suddenly she wanted to make sense of everything that had happened.
‘When was the last time we came into a bar just to talk? That was all we used to do before we were married.’
‘Things change, Abby. Priorities change.’
‘What do you mean?’
Nick shrugged. ‘Well, you stopped drinking for one thing.’
The comment hung in the air between them. To an outsider, it would have seemed innocuous, but within their private language it said everything.
‘It wasn’t all about getting pregnant, Nick. You changed too.’
He’d become quieter, more serious. The quirky, spontaneous side of him, that had made him jump off a cliff in Turkey or buy that horrible lime-green VW beetle, that part of Nick had silently slipped away. She looked across at the man she had promised to spend her life with and saw a stranger. Perhaps he saw the same thing too.
‘Abby, I’ve worked twelve-hour days for the past six years. Spontaneity tends to go out of the window.’
‘It doesn’t have to. I flew to Russia with forty-eight hours’ notice; I got a fast-tracked visa and everything. And do you know what? It felt brilliant.’
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He looked at her with a chink of hope, like a Monopoly player just handed a get-out-of-jail-free card, and pushed his hand into his pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. Abby recognised the name of the Cornish estate agency immediately, because she’d been on this website a hundred times, dreaming of their little cottage, their business, their shabby-chic hotel.