EPILOGUE

A short piece to include some recent developments.

My friend Yolande is getting married. When she said she wanted to spend a weekend away with her women friends I was all for it. When she told us where she wanted to go I joined in the general enthusiasm. When I was left alone to think about it, it was Proust's madelaines, a deluge of memories and sensation and sadness.

Chicago.

Don't get me wrong. I haven't spent three years pining. There have been men, a few, and I'd be lying if I said it was all bad or that I sobbed myself to sleep beside them, I didn't, I had fun with them.

Me and Luka, fun isn't how I remember it. It would be a lot easier to say it was, but I'm not stupid, I know it for what it was, what I let myself become. Didn't make losing it hurt any less, doesn't mean I haven't compared those others to it. Not to him – you can't compare one person to another without making them both nothing. But how I felt then and how I've felt since, I can't help but compare that.

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness. Well, not quite but a warm, clear early autumn Sunday and I'm alone in the park. The others are still in bed and I don't expect then to surface before the middle of the afternoon. I don't know how much we drank last night but I kind of lost interest when they started on the cocktails with pornographic names. I stuck to the vodka and I'm glad I did. The colour of what Yolande threw up into the toilet when we got in isn't something a grown woman should be responsible for. Maybe I'm growing up. Or growing old, I don't know. I think maybe my liver will be glad of whatever it is.

There's a café by the pond and the coffee smells good. There is a little table by the window with a view over a playground and sandpit, a few moms and kids, a handful of weekend dads pushing their weekend kids on the swings.

That's not all. There's a face I know. She's sitting on steps near the sandpit, her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms out behind, leaning back on her hands, eyes closed, smiling a little in the sun.

She looks different, softer somehow. I think at first that she's gained a little weight but that's not it. She looks . . . happy. A child squeals and she straightens up, looking to see what happened, a little tense maybe, but she relaxes as a toddler is scooped up by his mom, tears dried, calm restored. She smiles like she understands.

I can't explain why I can't take my eyes off her, why I don't do the obvious thing and go and say hello. It isn't that I'm wondering why she's there, I mean it's a nice little spot, it's nice to see kids playing in the sun, although she's not a woman I'd have imagined indulging in that particular pastime, but the next moment it all falls into place. There's a stroller the other side of her, and I don't know, I'd just thought it was empty, the little occupant off with its mom. But she turns and gets up and then she bends over the stroller and lifts a baby out, a baby maybe four months old, a boy. He's grizzling and she jiggles him a little, smiling at him, kisses his face and then settles down, arranging her jacket for discretion's sake, unfastens the bottom buttons of her shirt, puts him to her breast. Her face takes on the universal look of contentment.

Abby has a baby. A pretty baby with a fuzz of dark hair.

I can't explain my surprise. People have babies all the time and in the time since I last saw her a lot can happen. But surprised I am and unaccountably uneasy too. It isn't anything to do with John, I know that. He got married, I know that, some woman he met in Africa. Last I heard from Debbie he was in Darfur, though his wife wasn't there with him, I don't know what was going on there. Long distance relationships, well . . .

Still, Chicago is a big place, and it seems she's found someone, someone's found her. I find myself smiling. I'm pleased for her and decide that I should go and say hello, give her my congratulations. And who knows, maybe I can ask a discreet question or two about what's going on at the hospital, see how he's doing with the little nurse, maybe even manage that without embarrassing myself. I fix my smile.

I'm putting my bag over my shoulder and getting ready to head over to her when I see him and the strength goes out of my legs. The chair scrapes noisily as I sit heavily and the guy at the next table looks at me, eyebrows raised, wondering if I'm OK. I smile at him, shake my head, I'm fine, and he goes back to his sports pages.

It could be a coincidence, he could just happen to be taking a walk, but it's not, because he's heading straight for her, smiling as she looks up at him, and she's smiling back, not a smile you give a colleague, and now he's stooping over them, kissing her, kissing the top of the baby's head and settling himself beside them, leaning back on his hands just like she had earlier, but he's not closing his eyes and taking in the autumn sunshine, he's watching them, smiling a little. He needs to shave, looks a little weary. Just come off his shift then. She says something to him and he laughs and shakes his head before leaning in and whispering something in her ear, and she laughs back at him. He moves then, sitting on the step above her so that she can settle herself between his legs, lean back against his thigh and he can look down and watch as the baby – their baby – feeds, and run his hand lazily over her hair.

It's so intimate, it's so right that I can't breathe. I've seen the distant cousin of this look he has on his face – with the kids in Matenda, with Chance, the little guy with pertussis; but this, this is so totally pure, so completely the look he was born to wear, so right, that my eyes sting. This is the look on the face of the man who took that battered black and white snap of a pretty little girl with her mother; this is the look of a man who will always have a treat for a good boy in his coat pocket, who will magically produce a coin from behind an ear, who will allow himself to be scaled like a mountain, who will eventually hoist this little boy onto his shoulders, almost too high, top of the world, king of all he surveys. This is what Luka looks like.

I'm embarrassed, realizing that the stinging in my eyes has turned to tears. I'm trying to work out who I'm feeling sorry for but then I laugh a little, understanding that it's happiness – for him, for her, for everyone who ever found everything they thought they'd never have right there in the palm of their hand. I don't wonder about the little blonde because it doesn't matter. Whatever Abby and Luka had before that didn't fit right they've put it back together, and when she looks up at him I can't even feel envy, because I know that however often I might have looked at him like that he'd never return like he is now and I want that for him, wanted it back then, want him to have it for ever.

Is that what love is? Wanting so much for those gaps at the heart of someone to be filled and not caring so much who fills them? Wanting someone to be happy more than you want them to be with you? If it is then I guess I can be proud to say I know what it is to love someone.

And then he looks up, looks right at me. For a second it seems it doesn't register, like he doesn't see past the reflections in the window, but then he sees me, I can see him take a breath, not know what to do. He's waiting, wondering whether he should nudge Abby and point me out, whether they should make their way over, whether he should hug me awkwardly, ask me why I'm here, let Abby tell me all about the baby and for a minute I want that, want so badly to hear his voice, get close enough to have the scent of him, feel his hands on me, press a kiss to his face. But instead I shake my head with a little smile. He looks away and then back at me and nods briefly. I raise my coffee cup to him and mouth "Congratulations". A second – and then he smiles, a real smile of such brilliance that I can't help but grin back at him.

The moment is broken, as it must be, by Abby. She hands him his son and gets to her feet, straightening her clothes, before taking the baby back and settling him in the stroller and then holding out a hand to Luka to help haul him to his feet. She sets off, and he follows but a second later he turns back, looks past the reflections again and gives me a little salute, one veteran survivor to another and forms the words "Thank you". And then he goes after them, his arm settling across her shoulders, stooping a little to compensate for his height, sun on his hair. And then I can't see them at all.

The guy with the sports pages is looking at me again and I smile at him a bit sheepishly, shrug. He looks at me a second longer and then passes me his napkin to wipe my eyes.

"Everything OK?"

I smile again. "Fine. Everything is fine".

And it is.