Chapter fifteen: Monday Morning

Monday, 15th July 2002

Belsize Park, London

At seven o’clock in the morning, Dexter Mayhew and Emma Morley were lying awake in bed. They were thinking their own thoughts. They were now living together most of the time. Emma still kept her own flat, but at last they were close friends and lovers as well, and really, life was good for them both.

Emma’s thoughts that morning were about the 15th July the previous year. She thought about that and about what had happened since then. Dexter’s visit to Paris had been difficult at the start. But she had quickly realized that she hadn’t really moved on from him and that probably she wasn’t able to move on from him. So she’d finished her relationship with her French boyfriend. Dexter had stayed with her in Paris for the whole summer and they’d returned to London as a couple. These days, Emma usually slept in Dexter’s flat in Belsize Park and during the daytimes, she went to her own flat, two miles away. She rode there on her bicycle and wrote her books there. Emma’s series of books about Julie Criscoll was selling very well. The television version of them was popular too, so Emma was almost rich now.

During the daytimes, Dexter now ran a successful delicatessen and cafe in Highgate, another fashionable part of north London. Emma knew that he had hated doing menial jobs when he worked for Callum O’Neill. But now he seemed to enjoy doing the same jobs for himself. He enjoyed making the sandwiches and coffee for his customers at the deli.

Most of the time, Emma was confident about their future. She loved Dexter and she loved his daughter Jasmine, who often spent time with them. The three of them were happy together. This was good for Jasmine, because Sylvie and Callum were not getting on well together. But there was one little cloud in Emma’s sky. She was beginning to wish for a child of her own. And she wasn’t getting any younger, of course. Dexter already had a child and he wasn’t so happy with the idea of another one. Sometimes they argued about this.

‘Perhaps I need to find someone else,’ Emma sometimes thought when this happened. But she never thought very seriously about leaving Dexter.

One day, Emma had met Dexter’s father again. She remembered that meeting this morning.

‘Of course I remember you, Emma,’ Stephen Mayhew had said. ‘You called me a bourgeois fascist once. I’m very pleased to meet you again.’ And he’d told her, ‘Dexter is so much better now that he has you with him. Suddenly, I like my own son again. It’s wonderful.’

Now, as Emma stopped remembering things and started to get up, Dexter spoke.

‘Why do you still keep your own flat, Emma?’ he said. ‘You can live here all the time. You know that.’

‘Dexter, are you asking me to be your flatmate?’ Emma replied, pretending to be surprised. ‘It’s taken you a lot of years, hasn’t it?’

‘Yes, I think I am,’ Dexter said. ‘And, yes it has. But that’s what I want.’

‘The flat’s really too small, Dex,’ Emma said after a few moments.

‘Well, let’s buy a house together, Em,’ Dexter said.