Coffee For One

I arrive at the café at ten minutes before two. I am early and nervous: my heart beats out a rapid, light rhythm like rain dripping from a tree. I look around the room to see if Eva is there but I do not know what she looks like; our single, brief phone conversation gave me few clues as to her appearance.

Is she the sulky teenager with a nose stud and slate-coloured nail polish, engrossed in her mobile phone? Is she the thirty-something Japanese woman with a bored and noisy child? I decide that Eva cannot be either of these people.

‘Good afternoon, Tanya,’ I say to the girl at the counter. My voice surprises me; it sounds rusty and anxious.

‘Afternoon. A black coffee is it, Mrs. Cooper?’ she smiles.

‘Yes, a black coffee please, Tanya,’ I reply and sit at a table for two in the window.

***

I first spoke to Eva fifteen days after Philip died suddenly at his desk at the University. The hospital said that it was a massive heart attack, and no-one could have done anything to help him.

That first week everyone was so supportive: home-made casseroles in case I didn’t feel like cooking, cards, letters, thoughtful phone calls. The Dean of the University even visited me in person, which was a lovely touch.

But after the funeral the letters, the calls and the flowers stopped coming. I suppose that people feel embarrassed and awkward in such circumstances but I don’t mind admitting that I was terribly lonely: Philip and I had been married for thirty-five years and he was my rock, the centre of my universe. To have that all torn away...I felt unmoored, purposeless.

The hospital had given me Philip’s belongings when he died. I pressed his suit and hung it back in the wardrobe and I put his wallet and mobile phone on the bedside table, as if he’d just popped out to buy a newspaper.

One morning I awoke very early, before dawn; even in my sleep the weight of Philip’s absence was crushing me until I could no longer breathe. I thought I would do anything just to hear his voice one more time. I looked at the phone and the wallet waiting on his side of the bed and I suddenly had an idea that I could listen to his recorded message on the answering service.

‘Sorry, darling,’ I said out loud as I opened his bedside drawer and took out the phone charger: going through his possessions without his knowledge made me feel like a burglar.

I plugged in the charger and connected the phone. It immediately sprang into life with a bar of chirpy music, followed by a series of beeps; the screen informed me that there were twelve unread texts and three voicemails. I ignored the text messages and pressed the voicemail button; following instructions from an electronic voice I pressed various keys and tried to find a way of listening to Philip’s recorded greeting without playing the voicemails first, but the phone wouldn’t let me.

The first message was at seven minutes past eight on the day that he died. It was from a chirpy woman with a slight West Country accent: ‘Hi babe, it’s me, Eva. I’m at the restaurant….did we say 7.30 or eight? Anyway, I’m here, I guess you’re stuck in traffic or something…love you…bye…’

I barely made it to the en-suite bathroom before I was sick.

It was at half past seven that same night when a tired young doctor in the A&E department at the local hospital had come to me in the bright white waiting room and given me the shattering news that Philip was dead and there was nothing more that they could do.

I cleaned my teeth and washed my face I began to feel angry: angry at Philip for dying so suddenly and leaving me alone, angry that he never wanted the children that I craved, angry at his betrayal of our marriage. The anger seethed and boiled up into a sort of hot fury; I snatched up the phone that I had left on the bed and played the remaining messages.

The West Country woman had called again at half past eight: ‘Phil, I’m getting really worried now, I hope everything’s OK…I’m still at the restaurant…see you soon…bye.’

And again at nine o’clock, despairing and worried now: ‘Phil, I hope I haven’t done anything to upset you…but you’re still not here and you haven’t called. I’m going home now, but please let me know you’re OK. Love you…bye.’

Part of me hated Eva but another part of me wanted to reach out and help her, console her: heaven only knows what she must have been going through waiting for Philip to return her call, not knowing that he had died as she waited alone in the restaurant. I went downstairs and made a cup of coffee and watched the inky mauve dawn break gently over the Downs whilst I thought about what to do next.

I phoned her at eight thirty sharp. I had my little speech rehearsed; I was only doing the minimum necessary out of duty as a good Christian. A dozen words and that would be that.
I picked up Philip’s phone and found her listed in the address book. I pressed the call button and it rang three times, then six. I wondered whether she would answer but after seven rings she picked up.

‘Hi Phil! Where have you been, stranger?’ she gabbled. She sounded so young.

‘Eva?’ I said. ‘Eva, this is Maureen Cooper, Philip’s wife…’

She gasped. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, how did you know…I mean did he...?’

‘Eva, I’m very sorry to have to tell you that Philip suffered a heart attack two weeks ago. The hospital did all they could but he didn’t recover.’

Eva made a deep, strangled sound: the painful lowing of an animal in distress.

‘Noooooo,’ she wailed, and was quickly cut short by a tsunami of weeping.

I made soothing noises; I told her how the hospital tried everything to resuscitate him, but how the heart attack was so sudden and so huge that no treatment could have saved him. Eva still wept and I found myself crying for the first time since that evening in the hospital waiting room, little snuffles and sobs that quickly became full-blown tears.

‘Oh listen to me,’ I sniffed. ‘Aren’t I being a silly thing?’

Eva blew her nose. ‘No, forgive me, I’m so sorry for everything…oh God…’ She began to cry again.

As the bearer of bad news I felt strangely responsible for this young woman. It wouldn’t be fair to leave her on her own at a time like this and I wondered for a desperate, frantic moment if I could share my cavernous void of grief with Eva; she might understand my loneliness.

‘I would like to meet you,’ I said.

There was a long silence, punctuated by the sound of crying.

‘OK,’ she finally replied.

We agreed to meet at my local café the following day.

***

I sip at my black coffee, alternately watching the door of the café and the clock on the wall. It’s five to and I wonder if she will come. Perhaps Eva has lost her nerve; perhaps she never intended to come at all.

The door opens and I look up, but these businessmen with their navy suits and silver laptops are not Eva. My index finger begins to tap out an impatient rhythm on the Formica tabletop. At five past two precisely I pick up my handbag and search for my purse, ready to pay Tanya for my coffee and leave.

Somebody coughs; I look up from my handbag to see a woman standing at my table. She is about forty and rather plain with untidy brown hair. She is also very fat, and swaddled into a shapeless long black coat. I notice she is not wearing a wedding ring.

‘Eva?’

‘Maureen Cooper?’

I’m rather startled: she doesn’t look like she sounds on the phone and I had expected someone younger and blonde. I stand up and shake her hand, which is warm and dry.

‘May I?’ she says, indicating the chair opposite me.

‘My pleasure.’

She unbuttons the shapeless black coat and drapes it over the high-backed chair.

That is when I notice that Eva isn’t fat at all. She’s eight months pregnant.