He isn’t thinking about me anymore. He’s simply gone — the person who had been part of my life since 1983, through every high and low. He used to say he wished we had found our way back to each other in 1999, when he was still healthy and I had my glamorous career as a glossy-magazine editor, along with a beautiful home in London. When we reunited in 2014 and began dating, I drove him past that old house — the one I had foolishly and impulsively left behind for Somerset.
‘I would never have let you leave,’ he told me, with the benefit of hindsight.
I still find myself reaching for my phone to message him, only to remember that he is no longer there.
On the day he died, without me beside him, I had sent what might be the most ordinary message imaginable: ‘I’ve learned how to make risotto! I could make yours with cheese.’ I comfort myself by imagining that, if he had been able, he would have texted me to get on a train and come quickly.
There was no response, although that was hardly unusual for David. He died at 6.30pm that evening. His name has gradually slipped down my message inbox and off my home screen, below alerts from the Kennington Tandoori and Wood Finishes Direct. Still, I remember feeling something strange in my stomach that Saturday. On an impulse, I ordered a warm black coat and an oversized scarf from Zara through Klarna — something I had never done before. Was some part of me already aware that I would soon be attending a funeral?
I had never been scared of him dying. David treated nothing with much seriousness, while I have always believed that any problem can be solved if I spend enough money or make a greater effort. Lately, I’ve felt like Carrie Bradshaw after losing Big, wondering why I married someone else and why we had allowed so many years to disappear into distance and arguments. When I began ‘dating’ Neil, I told David myself rather than allowing him to discover it in the newspapers. ‘You’ve broken my heart,’ he said. ‘You had someone intelligent who loved you. You should have stayed with me.’ Perhaps I was making him pay for not choosing me in the 1980s — for leaving me standing with his squash racket and asking me to take it home while he rushed off to dinner with the woman he would eventually marry.
I keep choosing films that leave me in tears, telling myself that eventually I must run out of them. The English Patient was one of them. Not long ago, I took David to the Royal Albert Hall for a special screening, accompanied by a live orchestra and a singer. Its score has always been my favourite. Naturally, I reminded him of the last time we had been inside the Albert Hall, in October 1983, when I dragged him to see Siouxsie and the Banshees.
I had imagined it as a real date, complete with dinner afterwards. Instead, David made me stop my Mini, dashed into a shop and returned with a pie, which he ate in my car before asking me to drive him home.
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‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered as Ralph Fiennes stroked Kristin Scott Thomas’s throat on screen. ‘Why didn’t you just drag me upstairs?’
I reminded him that I had been a twenty-something virgin with acne, while he was a 31-year-old god. ‘You weren’t really my type,’ he replied.
But that was always me: arranging memorable outings and imagining the next adventure. Now David is gone. Whenever I read about a bar decorated with Formula 1 memorabilia or hear that Stevie Wonder is playing the O2, my first thought is still, ‘I wonder if David would come with me?’ I’ve recently been invited to spend New Year’s Eve in St Mawes, Cornwall. I look up the hotel my friends have booked, The Idle Rocks, browse the rooms and menus, and think, ‘Oh, I wonder…’
Then I have to stop myself.
My iCalendar now has another box added to the list: Gracie died, Benji died, Mini died. David died.
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The brakes have failed on my classic Range Rover. I called the dealer and said, ‘It won’t stop!’ The response was: ‘Are you on a hill?’ No! Really, men!
I contacted the AA, and they sent a recovery truck. It took a week to transport the car to the dealer. When it finally arrived, I discovered that the recovery driver had gone beneath a low bridge and torn off the roof.
David would have been the first person I texted in a crisis.
