Perfect Day

herself, the more she’s melting inside, pouring more and more of herself into the kissing.
    Kissing is allowed. Kissing is only a little bit worse than flirting. Kissing is what you do with a guy you’ve always fancied in the kitchen at a party when you’ve had two glasses of wine too much, and your partner’s dancing to ‘Hi-Ho Silver Lining’ in the other room.
    She’s never kissed nor been kissed like this before. They are not teenagers simulating sex, not yet lovers initiating foreplay. They are grown-ups and this is a silent exploratory conversation at the beginning of a long journey they will make together, the kissing more powerfully communicative than sex because it allows no words. Everything they have to say to one another is in the kissing. Fear, regret, excitement, trust.
    She moves slightly closer to him. His hands drop away from her face. She freezes. Gently, he pulls her hips against his, holding her belly against his hard, straight erection. She closes her eyes, quivering as he kisses her again, knowing that she could come like this. His hands move back to her face. Their hips rest together. Skin against fabric against fabric against skin.
    The phone rings.
    They jump apart. Stare at it. It rings again. She leaps across the room, breathes, swallows, braces herself for bad news, or good news, snatches up the receiver.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘It’s me.’
    ‘Alexander?’
    Nell looks across the room at Chris, who smiles at her, making a big effort to force enthusiasm into his face.
    ‘Are you all right? Where are you?’ she asks.
    ‘I’m at Charing Cross . There aren’t any trains. I’ve been trying to ring you all evening.’
    ‘No, you haven’t,’ she says.
    ‘Where were you?’ he demands.
    This is the wrong way round.
    ‘Where were you? ’ she asks.
    ‘I’ve been wandering around.’
    ‘Wandering around?’ she repeats.
    An hour before, she promised to change everything if he was alive. Now that he is, she’s almost instantly annoyed with him.
    ‘Thinking. Nell, I’ve had lots of thoughts...’ He sounds excited.
    ’Thoughts? We thought you were dead,’ she shouts and bursts into tears.
    ‘Nell?’
    ‘Where the hell have you been?’ she spits through her tears.
    ‘I tried to ring,’ he falters.
    She feels him slipping away again. He sounded so enthusiastic a moment ago, and now she’s chased that away with her impatience. Is this what she does?
    Chris is pretending to look at the spines of books on the shelves by the door. Is he shocked by her behaviour?
    ‘We’ve been with Frances ,’ she says in a more conciliatory way.
    ‘Really? How’s Frances ?’
    ‘It was such a lovely morning, we took the day off.’
    ‘I didn’t feel like going to work, either,’ Alexander says, sympathetically.
    He sounds astonishingly breezy.
    ‘You do know about the crash?’ she asks him.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘When did you know?’
    ‘About six- ish , I suppose. I rang. I even tried to ring your mother. She’s ex-directory.’
    That’s true.
    Is she being completely unfair?
    Nell looks at her watch. ‘It’s nearly ten o’clock,’ she says.
    ‘Is it? I left my watch at school yesterday. I’ve had no sense of time all day.’
    ‘Four hours, Alex.’
    Is that so very long to be wandering around in London ?
    He says nothing.
    ‘You’re alive. That’s what matters,’ she says quietly.
    On the other side of the room, Chris lifts the latch on the front door. She waves at him not to go. Carefully he pulls the door to again, not making a sound. He picks a gardening book from an eye-level shelf and flips through it.
    ‘Thing is, Nell, I don’t know how I’m going to get home,’ Alexander is saying into her ear.
    ‘Shall I come and pick you up?’
    ‘Would you?’
    He has the same sheepish tone as the time he drank far too much and fell asleep on the last train home, ending up in Ramsgate. Then, she had to put Lucy in the car and drive through the middle of the night to the coast with huge goods lorries thundering past her towards the Channel Tunnel.
    ‘I’m not coming all the way to Charing Cross ,’ she warns.
    ‘Where could I get to?’ Alexander asks. ‘How about Greenwich ?’
    ‘ Greenwich ?’
    ‘By the Cutty Sark ? Should be easy enough to park at this time of night.’
    ‘All right, then,’ she agrees. ‘But it’ll be over an hour by the time I’ve dropped Lucy.’
    ‘Midnight at the Cutty Sark ,’ he says.
    He makes it sound like a romantic rendezvous,