LITMIR.BIZ

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were honourable, who had worthy goals, whose deeds and dealings were principled. However, at the age of thirty, Mark Sinclair understood that he would need to modify his belief, revise his dream and compromise. He intended to do this without turning into a cynic or allowing his ethics to suffer. He’d just have to let his dream of twenty years fade. It wasn’t going to be easy. But there again, the dream wasn’t going to come true, no matter how virtuous he was.

      Mark Sinclair’s dream was Alice Heggarty. But she had gone and fallen in love with someone who wasn’t him. Again. Just as she had at the age of twenty-five. And at twenty-three. And before that, annually at university. And before that, with the captain of the first XV at his school. The girl Mark had loved for so long had gone and fallen in love again but this time Alice was nearly twenty-nine. Mark knew she’d have made a calculated decision that this love ought to take her into her thirties and onwards, into matrimony and children and a house in NWsomewhere. The time was right for her own happy-ever-after. ‘So dream on,’ Mark told himself sternly, ‘dream on.’

      In the two decades he’d known Alice, Mark had always had hope because he’d always had the dream because, being a man of patience and principles, he’d taken a philosophical view on waiting. He theorized that Alice had never broken his dream because he’d never brought it out into the open. Besides, she’d been so busy, permanently falling madly in love and despairingly out of love with all those other men. At the time, Mark felt this to be a positive thing and he did not regret keeping his own feelings secret. After all, it meant that Alice had never made a decision against him, she’d never turned him down, never ditched him in favour of another, never suggested they revert to being ‘just good friends’.

      As lovers charged in and stormed out of her life, and as girlfriends breezed into his and left quietly, their friendship had remained unscathed. Alice was never possessive of Mark and Mark accepted her periodic disappearance into the fast eddies of new love-lust. Indeed, Mark had always found it encouraging that Alice went for a type – and that the type she went for was the antithesis of him. It meant she’d never fallen for someone like Mark; she’d always gone for men who were diametrically opposed to all that he was. Tall, loud, movie-blond beefy blokes with heartbreaker reputations or ice-beautiful arrogance Alice was convinced she could conquer and melt. Consequently, Mark could not feel jealous of the men in Alice’s life though he envied them Alice. Rather, he was irked that they were delaying his personal happy-ever-after.

      Very very privately, he was also relieved that invariably it was they who left her. Looking after Alice with her heart all hurt was actually even more rewarding than being in her company when she was hyper-effervescent with the distractions of love. Though it scorched Mark’s soul to see her distraught, he knew he could make her feel better. It was a job he could do brilliantly. And it augmented his hope. Because when his dream came true, he’d never leave her. Of that she could be as sure as he was.

      Whereas Alice rushed headlong into love affairs, Mark merely dabbled in what he believed to be just an interim after all. Now, with Alice in love once more, yet again not with Mark, and given their respective ages, he acknowledged, sensibly, that an interim was a period between two points and that there really was no point in holding out for Alice. Because he loved her, and because he’d been privy to her teenage turmoil and twenties torment, he wanted only peace and fulfilment for her in her thirties and beyond. Even if her joy and contentment meant he’d never have her cry on his shoulder again.

      Mark was happy for Alice, but he was not so altruistic not to be sad for himself. He had believed, mistakenly, that if he lived well and worked hard, if he was honourable in his thoughts and actions, his reward would be all he had dreamt of. Reluctantly, he had to accept that good behaviour and a belief in the potential of one’s wishes ultimately might not win the prize. Neither Alice, nor the Man Who Will Marry Her, were at fault or to blame. And, just because he now no longer believed in happy-ever-after didn’t mean the future need be misery-for-evermore.

      He was going to moderate his desire without seeing compromise as a tragedy. He’d have to stop letting down gently all those lovely girls after the fourth or fifth date. He’d need to see the wider picture and take a view. There had been two or three he had liked enormously. Previously, when he’d reached the stage of thinking of them fondly, planning holidays, masturbating in their honour, browsing Liberty for trinkets of his affection, an image of Alice glancing at her watch had always sprung to mind. As if she was waiting for him. And though the lovely girls were let down gently, all wished to remain friends. Mark, as Alice once told a girlfriend who was single, was one of life’s great good guys.

      Mark was a good person because for twenty years he had always believed that if you are a good boy, all your dreams come true.

      Saul Mundy stumbled on his Road to Damascus at roughly the same time that Mark Sinclair stepped resignedly onto his. Saul had been with Emma for three years when he met a pretty and friendly blonde in a bar. They chatted and smiled and flirted lightly. Saul had no true desire for her, no intention of asking for her number or grabbing a furtive snog. Until that night, he had quite enjoyed the occasional, harmless, forgettable flirt because his affection for Emma and monogamy had remained unsullied. That night, however, it wasn’t that he wanted the blonde, it was that he didn’t want Emma.

      He blanked the blonde, made hasty excuses to his friends and stumbled out in a daze onto Tottenham Court Road. The sudden clarity of the situation was ugly but he knew he mustn’t look away. If he did, complacency would wheedle in soon enough and honesty would be replaced by betrayal. Saul wouldn’t let that happen. He believed in doing the right thing and he was going home directly to do so. He had to, he was committed. It would be far easier to stay than split, far easier to act fine than confess, to hide than confide, but Saul’s belief in his relationship had gone and the only honourable thing he could do was go too. Waiting for a taxi, he shivered and sheltered in a shop doorway, gazing at the rain-sluiced pavement. It looked polished to perfection, like a meticulously varnished floor. Actually, it was just grey concrete that was wet and grimy. The truth was it was dull, no matter what tried to cover it. Surface details were worthless if the integrity of structure was lacking. Saul couldn’t believe that the last three years of his life amounted to a comparison with London pavement.

      That morning, he had left the house to go to work. Now he was returning only to leave home. Had he kissed Emma that morning? He couldn’t remember. Would the offer of just good friendship be a possibility or a cowardly digression? Would she believe him when he said that he was so sorry, that he did love her and felt wretched for hurting her? That it wasn’t her, it was him? Would she believe him that he truly felt she deserved more than he could give? That he didn’t mean to sound exactly like all those articles in the women’s mags she pored over in her long bubble baths and that he browsed through when he’d forgotten to buy an Evening Standard? He doubted it.

      He had the taxi drop him off on Upper Street and he walked, reluctant but resigned, towards the house, to Emma blissfully unaware, sitting beside the home-fire she’d kept burning.

      ‘I don’t burn for you any more,’ Saul whispered, eyes closed, forehead resting against the door frame, ‘and I should. It’s a prerequisite. I can’t compromise.’ He couldn’t even summon a spark of it from the deepest recess of his soul. His heart might be warm for her, and would continue to be, but he was absolutely sure that it wasn’t enough. He wished there was a kinder way of being so seemingly cruel. But to use a cool head to decipher his heart would give the cleanest cut, though he knew that all Emma would read written all over his face was Heartless. Saul put his key in the front door for the last time.

      A decade before Mark and Saul had their epiphanies, Thea Luckmore had hers when Joshua Brown ditched her at Alice Heggarty’s eighteenth birthday party. It was irrelevant that he proceeded to snog Rachel Hutton in the kitchen. It didn’t matter that Alice, incensed, had poured Woodpecker cider over his head and told him he was a wanker who should fucking fuck off. It wasn’t even that Joshua no longer wanted her, it was that Thea was still in love with him. She didn’t ask

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