One Day

by David Nicholls

The trick of it, she told herself, is to be courageous and bold and make a difference. Not change the world exactly, just the bit around you. Go out there with your double-first, your passion and your new Smith Corona electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Write beautifully. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved if at all possible. Eat sensibly. Stuff like that.

The attraction of a life devoted to sensation, pleasure and self would probably wear thin one day, but there was still plenty of time for that yet.

Didn’t he know what this was doing to her,

As the possibility of a relationship had faded, Emma had endeavoured to harden herself to Dexter’s indifference and these days a remark like this caused no more pain than, say, a tennis ball thrown sharply at the back of her head. These days she barely even flinched.

‘You know what I can’t understand? You have all these people telling you all the time how great you are, smart and funny and talented and all that, I mean endlessly, I’ve been telling you for years. So why don’t you believe it?

eating oranges, quietly reading, quietly burning, entirely happy in each other’s silence.

Everything was fine, and she had the rare, new sensation of being exactly where she wanted to be.

‘It means the perfect union of opposites.’

And you stupid, stupid woman, stupid for caring, stupid for thinking that he cared—

Irrationally, unreasonably, he has become – what? Jealous? No, not jealous, but resentful perhaps. He has always expected Emma to be there, a resource he can call upon at any time like the emergency services. Since the cataclysm of his mother’s death last Christmas he has found himself more and more reliant on her at exactly the point that she has become less available to him.

Emma is his talisman, his lucky charm, and now she won’t be there and his mother won’t be there and he will wonder why he’s doing it at all.

‘Sometimes you are aware when your great moments are happening, and sometimes they rise from the past. Perhaps it’s the same with people.’ James Salter, Burning the Days

but still she feels uneasy and anxious. Isn’t there meant to be some sort of afterglow, some sense of communion or well-being?

‘I’m not the consolation prize, Dex. I’m not something you resort to. I happen to think I’m worth more than that.’

He had thought that he had the answer, that they could rescue each other, when in truth Emma had been fine for years. If anyone needed rescuing, it was him.

‘Nothing. Oh, nothing. Just…’ She looked up at him. ‘I thought I’d finally got rid of you.’ ‘I don’t think you can,’ he said.

and when he gets home tonight Emma will be there. For the first time in many years he is more or less where he wants to be. He has a partner whom he loves and desires and who is also his best friend. He has a beautiful, intelligent daughter. He does alright. Everything will be fine, just as long as nothing ever changes.

But so much effort is required to pretend that they don’t want to be together that it has recently seemed inevitable that one of them will crack.

All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.

There was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other’s permanent presence for granted.

Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity.

Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not over happy.

Then she thinks of Dexter, sheltering from the rain on the steps of the new house, looking at his watch, impatient; he’ll wonder where I am, she thinks. He’ll worry. Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.

privately mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates, to be replaced by small talk. Last night they had said and done all those things, and now they were like strangers in a bus queue. The mistake she had made was to fall asleep and break the spell. If they had stayed awake, they might still have been kissing now, but instead it was all over and she found herself saying; ‘How long will that take then? To Oxfordshire?’

Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame.

These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through.

‘Let’s not say anything. Let’s just smile, look natural. Look young and full of high ideals and hope or something. Ready?’

‘Beautiful day,’ he mumbles, ‘No rain today. Not yet,’

‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if it rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at … something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.

it was the sweetest kiss that either of them would ever know.

This is where it all begins. Everything starts here, today.