Nick Hornby - High Fidelity

High Fidelity
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Page 25 of 112
6/20/2006
I call Laura first thing. I feel sick, dialing the number, and even sicker when the receptionist puts me
through. She used to know who I am, but now there’s nothing in her voice at all. Laura wants to come
around on Saturday afternoon, when I’m at work, to pick up some more underwear, and that’s fine by
me; we should have stopped there, but I try to have a different sort of conversation, and she doesn’t like
it because she’s at work, but I persist, and she hangs up on me in tears. And I feel like a jerk, but I
couldn’t stop myself. I never can.
I wonder what she’d say, if she knew that I was simultaneously uptight about Marie coming into the
shop Laura and I have just had a phone call in which I suggested that she’d fucked up my life and, for
the duration of the call, I believed it. But now—and I can do this with no trace of bemusement or selfdissatisfaction—I’m
worrying about what to wear, and whether I look better stubbly or clean-shaven,
and about what music I should play in the shop today.
Sometimes it seems as though the only way a man can judge his own niceness, his own decency, is by
looking at his relationships with women, or rather, with prospective or current sexual partners. It’s easy
enough to be nice to your mates. You can buy them a drink, make them a tape, ring them up to see if
they’re OK … there are any number of quick and painless methods of turning yourself into a Good
Bloke. When it comes to girlfriends, though, it’s much trickier to be consistently honorable. One
moment you’re ticking along, cleaning the toilet bowl, and expressing your feelings and doing all the
other things that a modern chap is supposed to do; the next, you’re manipulating and sulking and
double-dealing and fibbing with the best of them. I can’t work it out.
I phone Liz early afternoon. She’s nice to me. She says how sorry she is, what a good couple she
thought we made, that I have done Laura good, given her a center, brought her out of herself, allowed
her to have fun, turned her into a nicer, calmer, more relaxed person, given her an interest in something
other than work. Liz doesn’t use these words, as such, I’m interpreting. But this is what she means, I
think, when she says we made a good couple. She asks how I am, and whether I’m looking after myself;
she tells me that she doesn’t think much of this Ian guy. We arrange to meet for a drink sometime next
week. I hang up.
Which fucking Ian guy
Marie comes into the shop shortly afterward. All three of us are there. I’m playing her tape, and when
I see her walk in I try to turn it off before she notices, but I’m not quick enough, so I end up turning it
off just as she begins to say something about it, and then turning it back on again, then blushing. She
laughs. I go to the stockroom and don’t come out. Barry and Dick sell her seventy quid’s worth of
cassettes.
Which fucking Ian guy
Barry explodes into the stockroom. “We’re only on the guest list for Marie’s gig at the White Lion,
that’s all. All three of us.”
In the last half-hour, I have humiliated myself in front of somebody I’m interested in, and found out, I
think, that my ex was having an affair. I don’t want to know about the guest list at the White Lion.
“That’s really, really great, Barry. The guest list at the White Lion! All we’ve got to do is get to
Putney and back and we’ve saved ourselves a fiver each. What it is to have influential friends, eh”
“We can go in your car.”
“It’s not my car, is it It’s Laura’s. Laura’s got it. So we’re two hours on the tube, or we get a minicab,
which’ll cost us, ooh, a fiver each. Fucking great.”
Barry gives a what-can-you-do-with-this-guy shrug and walks out. I feel bad, but I don’t say anything
to him.
I don’t know anybody called Ian. Laura doesn’t know anybody called Ian. We’ve been together three
years and I’ve never heard her mention an Ian. There’s no Ian at her office. She hasn’t got any friends
called Ian, and she hasn’t got any girlfriends with boyfriends called Ian. I won’t say that she has never
met anyone called Ian in the whole of her life—there must have been one at college, although she went
to an all-girls school—but I am almost certain that since 1989 she has been living in an Ianless universe.
And this certitude, this Ian-atheism, lasts until I get home. On the windowsill where we put the post,