It’s one of those London pubs – the ones with tumbling baskets of summery trailing petunias and ivy with a handsome, well-kept exterior that evokes another time; Victorian coachmen, the aroma of polished mahogany and the soft murmur of stabled horses. Today, the scene is rather different. Men in chino shorts are drinking IPAs on the street out the front. These men have preposterously British names and boat shoes even though they are, in more ways than one, landlocked on the street outside the pub.
Once, when my husband couldn’t remember the name of one of the groomsmen (all of whom were ex public schoolboys) at an English friend’s wedding, we had to improvise to find the answer. “We can figure it out by a process of elimination!” I told him excitedly, and began blurting out English public schoolboy names – “Rupert! James! George! William! Oliver! Henry…” “HENRY!” my husband shouted in triumph. “That’s it! Henry. Thanks.”
Oliver-Rupert-Henrys are the British equivalent of our own Oisín-Fiachra-Ruairís. In London, they congregate outside the pub in cotton polo shirts with the collars popped jauntily in a way that makes you imagine giving them a gentle slap on the back of the head to lend them a bit more cop-on. Sometimes they’ll be sporting a more conservative linen button-down. They loudly discuss their jobs in law and finance, making noises that sound like “yah” and “rah”. If it’s Sunday, they might stay inside the pub and have a roast with everyone else. These sorts of pubs generally do a good one.
It is here, at one such handsome pub in Kensington, that I am reunited with my aforementioned husband after more than three months in different hemispheres. In the spring, I had returned to London from Australia for a job. He remained to continue his own slower-paced Australian life and work under the vast blue while I traversed the meandering, incomparably grubby streets of London, running between meetings and trying to keep the fractious, reactive unfriendliness of the city from climbing under my skin and spreading.
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It’s been a challenging period of separation. He and I found new ways to go about our daily lives outside the routines we had slowly built together over 12 years. A long-distance relationship between the UK and Australia is not sustainable over the long term. The time difference means you can talk on the phone during one person’s morning and the other’s night. Someone is usually weary, discomposed, anxious or at the tail end of a bad day. Someone is snarky, eager for sleep, short on patience or struggling to wake up. Someone has the flu or somewhere to be and sorry – sorry – sorry – has to go. Sorry.
The relationship contracts into a series of administrative conversations about logistics, bills, plans and obligations. There is little craic to be had. The closeness that had previously been maintained by doing things together at the same time and in the same place is suspended; one person’s hand absent-mindedly grazing the other’s back while walking past during dishwashing, or the proximity of sleeping next to one another. You are each a disembodied voice or image on a screen to the other person. A line of text sent while the other person is sleeping. Under these conditions, the relationship gets harder.
Much depended on this dinner at the pub. We look across the table at one another on a temperate July evening in the little garden outside. The cadence of the Henry-George-Williams bounces over from the street – expostulations and exaggerations – while geranium petals windmill from the weeping hanging baskets, landing in my hair as I peruse my menu. We are intimately familiar strangers, glancing shyly at one another across the table, attempting to fall back into a recognisable cadence; a shared rhythm. We are skittish. Uncertain. So much in common and yet now grown used to a level of separateness we had never known since first meeting 12 years ago. We sit, looking at each other, picking our way over the complex psychology of this delicate territory.
“Yaaah. We were together for three years, but he was incredibly ugly.” An unbelievably loud young woman’s tweedy West London voice seems to disturb the geraniums, and my head is peppered with hot pink petals as the very flowers shudder at her obnoxiousness. She sits at a table nearby with a young man. The two are friends. I know this because she is so loud that her conversation would be audible on Jupiter. “So ugly”, she repeats, though it’s pronounced “say”. Say ugly. “And a c**t as well, wasn’t he?” her friend interjects. “Oh yes. Yah. A complete c**t. You’re right there.”
The waitress has brought us some chips cooked in beef dripping. I can taste nothing but the total lack of self-awareness emanating from the girl and her friend at the nearby table. Himself and I look at one another, each wondering whether this young woman knows that if you devote three years of your life to someone you think is ugly and a terrible human being, this reflects quite unavoidably on you as a person.
She keeps going. She speaks like a trained Shakespearean actor – clearly, from the diaphragm and as though she’d be eager for the people sitting way at the back to feel the full force of the performance. She is impossible to filter out, to not hear. This young woman haunts the pub like a poltergeist. Her account of her former boyfriend continues. He lacked ambition. He didn’t have Rupert’s drive (she’s engaged to Rupert now). Rupert is less ugly and less of a c**t. It sounds like a love story for the ages.
Himself and myself look at one another across the table. The distance and unfamiliarity that has stretched between us shimmers in between as the girl bellows about her life nearby, and yet there is respect in that gap. Admiration. Care. There is love. There is love in that gap.
