One Day

by David Nicholls

‘Not the whole entire world. Just the little bit around you.’

He wanted to live life in such a way that if a photograph were taken at random, it would be a cool photograph.

‘Your stroke. Everyone who works here has a stroke. Waiter-stroke-artist, waiter-stroke-actor.

there were times when Dexter could sit quietly and watch Emma Morley laughing or telling a story and feel absolutely sure that she was the finest person he knew.

Emma glanced over to check that he was smiling, and smiled too.

Being with Emma demanded a certain level of behaviour, and he was not always up to the mark.

Occasionally, very occasionally, say at four o’clock in the afternoon on a wet Sunday, she feels panic-stricken and almost breathless with loneliness.

‘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

What had changed since then? Not that much. The same lines formed around her mouth when she laughed, they were etched just a little deeper now. She still had the same eyes, bright and shrewd, and she still laughed with her wide mouth tightly shut, as if holding in some secret. In many ways she was far more attractive than her twenty-two-year-old self. She was no longer cutting her own hair for one thing, and she had lost some of that library pallor, that shoe-gazing petulance and surliness. How would he feel, he wondered, if he were seeing that face for the first time now? If he had been allocated table twenty-four, had sat down and introduced himself. Of all the people here today, he thought, he would only want to talk to her.

‘But so, so much, Dexter. There were so many things I wanted to talk to you about, and you weren’t there—’

It’s … when I didn’t see you, I thought about you every day, I mean every day in some way or another—’ ‘Same here—’

once more he has that feeling of intense love tempered with abject terror.

‘Well, um, I was having dinner by myself, reading a book, and this guy was with some friends and he asked me what I was reading …’ Dexter groaned and shook his head, a craftsman deriding another’s handiwork.

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

And this was how they approached the big day: flippant, but privately, discreetly elated too.

Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.

It used to be Emma who made the conciliatory calls and smoothed things over, but in the eight months since their marriage they seemed to have changed places, and he now found himself incapable of doing anything while he knew she was unhappy.

Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.

She very much wanted him to stay, almost as much perhaps as he clearly wanted to leave.

‘Oxfordshire. Very nice,’ she said, privately mortified at the speed with which intimacy evaporates, to be replaced by small talk.

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.