The Switch

by Beth O'Leary

  This is irritating. As much as Arnold and I have always been at each other’s throats, I’ve always thought … I’ve always had the impression … Well, I never invited him for tea, but I knew that if I did, he’d come. Let’s put it that way.

  Only now it seems something’s changed.

  I narrow my eyes at his house. It’s clear that whatever is wrong, Arnold’s not going to talk to me about it any time soon.

  Sometimes, with obstinate people like Arnold, you have no choice but to force their hand.

  * * *

  “What have you done?” Arnold roars through the kitchen window.

  I put my book down, carefully popping my bookmark in the right place.

  “Eileen Cotton! Get in here now!”

  “In where?” I ask innocently, stepping into the kitchen. “For you to ask me in anywhere, Arnold, you’d have to be in there too, and you seem to be outside, to my eye.”

  Arnold’s cheeks are flushed with rage. His glasses are a little askew; I have a strange desire to open the window, reach through, and straighten them up again.

  “The hedge. Is gone.”

  “Oh, the hedge between your garden and mine?” I say airily, reaching for the cloth by the sink and giving the sideboard a wipe. “Yes. I had Basil’s nephew chop it down.”

  “When?” Arnold asks. “It was there yesterday!”

  “Overnight,” I say. “He says he works best by torchlight.”

  “He says no such thing,” Arnold says, nose almost pressed to the glass. “You got him to do it at nighttime so I wouldn’t know! What were you thinking, Eileen? There’s no boundary! There’s just … one big garden!”

  “Isn’t it nice?” I say. I’m being terribly nonchalant and wiping down all the surfaces, but I can’t help sneaking little glances at his ruby-red face. “So much more light.”

  “What on earth did you do it for?” Arnold asks, exasperated. “You fought tooth and nail to keep that hedge back when I wanted it replaced with a fence.”

  “Yes, well, times change,” I say, rinsing out the cloth and smiling out at Arnold. “I decided, since you were so reluctant to come around, I’d make it easier for you.”

  Arnold stares at me through the glass. We’re only a couple of feet apart; I can see how wide the pupils are in his hazel eyes.

  “My God,” he says, stepping backward. “My God, you did this just to brass me off, didn’t you?” He starts to laugh. “You know, Eileen Cotton, you are no better than a teenage boy with a crush. What next? Pulling my hair?”

  I bristle. “I beg your pardon!” Then, because I can’t resist: “And I wouldn’t like to risk what’s left of it by giving it a tug.”

  “You are a ridiculous woman!”

  “And you are a ridiculous man. Coming in here, telling me you missed me, then marching off and not talking to me for days on end? What’s the matter with you?”

  “What’s the matter with me?” His breath is misting the glass. “I’m not the one who just hacked down a perfectly serviceable hedge in the middle of the night!”

  “Do you really want to know why I did it, Arnold?”

  “Yes. I really do.”

  I chuck the wet cloth down. “I thought it would be funny.”

  He narrows his eyes. “Funny?”

  “Yes. You and me, we’ve spent decades fighting over who owns what, whose trees are shading whose flowerbeds, who’s responsible for pruning which bush. You’ve got grumpier and grumpier and I’ve got snarkier and snarkier. And do you know what we’ve really been talking about all that time, Arnold? We’ve been talking about what happened the very first time we met.”

  Arnold opens and closes his mouth.

  “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten. I know you haven’t.”

  His mouth closes, a firm line. “I’ve not forgotten.”

  Arnold was married to Regina, Jackson’s mother. A strange woman, blocky-shouldered like she was most at home in the eighties, her hair tightly curled and her fists usually clenched. And I was married to Wade.

  “Nothing happened,” Arnold reminds me.

  My hands are spread, leaning on the worktop on either side of the sink. Arnold is framed in a pane of glass, cut off at the shoulder like a portrait.

  “No,” I say. “That’s what I’ve always told myself too. No point dwelling on it. Certainly no use talking about it. Since nothing happened.”

  “Quite right,” Arnold says.

  “Only it almost did, didn’t it, Arnold?” My heart is beating a little too fast.

  Arnold reaches up to adjust his cap, his hands weathered and callused, his glasses still slightly askew. Say something, I think. Say it. Because I am like a teenage boy—I’m painfully self-conscious now, terrified he’ll tell me I was reading something that wasn’t there.

  “It almost did,” he says eventually.

  I close my eyes and breathe out.

  We’d been in this kitchen, not far from where I’m standing. He’d brought around an apple pie Regina had made, with custard in a little milk jug; we’d talked for so long in the hallway my arms had started to ache from holding the plate. He’d been so charming, such a thoughtful, engaging man.

  Wade and I had just bought Clearwater Cottage. The house was barely furnished, half falling to pieces. Arnold and I had walked through into the kitchen—I remember laughing very hard, feeling ever so giddy—and I’d opened the new fridge to pop the custard in there, and when I’d closed it again he’d been very close, just a few steps from where I am now. We’d stayed like that. My heart had raced then too. I’d not felt giddy in so long I’d thought it was gone from my repertoire for good, like touching my toes.

  Nothing happened.

  But it almost did. And it was enough to make me want to keep Arnold as far away from this house as possible. Because I had made a vow. It meant nothing to Wade, it seems, but it had meant something to me.

  “We got into the habit, didn’t we,” Arnold says, as I open my eyes again. He’s smiling slightly. “We got so bloody good at hating one another.”

  I take a deep breath. “Arnold,” I say, “would you like to come in?”

  * * *

  In the end, it’s not a stolen kiss between new neighbors. It’s a slow, lingering one between very old friends, who, as it happens, have only just realized that’s what they’ve been all along.

  It’s an extraordinary feeling, wrapping my arms around Arnold’s shoulders, pressing my cheek to the warm skin of his neck. Breathing in the cut-grass and soap smell of his hair and his collar. It is strange and wonderful. Familiar and new.

  Afterward, when my lips are left tingling, we sit together side by side on the sofa and stare out at the hedge, or what remains of it. Arnold is smiling. He seems energized, almost jolted into life—he holds his spine very straight and the hand that isn’t in mine is flicking and fidgeting in his lap.

  “Bloody hell,” he says, “just think what Betsy and the rest of them will say.” He turns to me and grins, a cheeky, fiendish grin that makes him look like a little boy.

  “You won’t say a word,” I tell him sternly, raising a warning finger. “Not a word, Arnold.”

  He grabs the finger so fast I yelp.

  “That tone of voice won’t work on me anymore,” he says, bringing my hand to his lips for a kiss that doesn’t dislodge his grin for a moment. “Now I know what you’re really saying when you tell me off.”

  “Not all the time,” I protest. “Sometimes you really need telling. Like with the rabbit.”

  “For the last time!” Arnold laughs. “I did not poison your bloody rabbit.”

  “Then how did it die?” I ask, flummoxed.

  “Eileen, it was seven years ago. I imagine it’s too late for an inquest.”

  “Damn. I hate an unsolved mystery.”

  “You really thought I did it?”

  “It didn’t occur to me that it could have happened any other way, quite honestly.”

  He frowns. “You think that little
of me?”

  I smooth my thumb across the back of his hand, tracing lines between the marks age has left on his skin.

  “Perhaps I wanted to,” I say. “It was easier if you were an ogre.” I glance up. “And you did such a good job playing the part.”

  “Well, you made a pretty stellar old harpy too,” he says.

  I lean forward and kiss him. It’s sweet and warm and his lips taste of tea, no sugar. I didn’t even know that’s how he took it until today.

  37

  Leena

  “And you’re sure about this?” I ask, panting.

  Bee and I are on the spin bikes—I’ve realized over the last six weeks that the best way to survive the stress of Selmount life is to exercise daily and aggressively. Sitting in an air-conditioned gym is a bit crap after running through the Dales—kind of like taking vitamin tablets instead of, you know, eating. But it’ll do for now.

  “I’m done with you asking me if I’m sure,” Bee says, glancing across at me. “Never been surer, my friend.”

  I grin and slow down, sitting up to wipe my face with my T-shirt. We wobble our way to the changing rooms together, breathing hard.

  “How’s Jaime feeling about the move?” I ask, heading for my locker.

  “Ridiculously happy. Apparently Yorkshire has loads of dinosaur fossils or something.” Bee rolls her eyes, but she doesn’t fool me.

  “Has she met Mike yet?” I ask.

  “No, no,” Bee says, frowning. “She doesn’t even know there’s such a thing as a Mike.”

  “The man you’re moving up north for? She doesn’t know he exists?”

  She whips me with her towel. I yelp.

  “While I am glad that you have dragged yourself out of the pit of Ethan-related despair enough to start taking the piss out of me again, will you stop with that, please? I am not moving up north for Mike. I mean, I’m basically moving up north for you, actually.”

  I look chastened. “Right. Sorry.”

  We head for the showers.

  “Only it is a happy coincidence that Mike will be there too,” I say very quickly before locking myself in the shower cubicle.

  “You are as bad as your grandmother!” Bee shouts through the wall.

  “Thanks!” I yell back, grinning as I turn the water up to hit me full blast.

  * * *

  When I get back to the flat that night, the place is full of boxes, and the balding cat lady from next door is sitting in front of the television watching gory true crime on Netflix.

  I pause in the doorway. I tilt my head. I swivel to look at Fitz, who is standing in the kitchen, leaning over a pile of boxes to reach the bottle opener.

  “Oh, Letitia?” he says, in response to my perplexed expression. “Yeah, we’re like besties now.”

  “You…” I swivel back to stare at Letitia. “Sorry, hi,” I say, remembering my manners.

  She looks up from the television, gives me a polite smile, and then returns to the story of a young woman’s dismemberment. I look back at Fitz.

  “And the boxes?” I ask him, when he offers no further information. “I thought you hadn’t found anywhere to move to yet?”

  This has been a source of some stress to me these last few weeks. Fitz was showing no signs of actually sorting out getting new flatmates or finding himself somewhere else to live; with Martha gone and me heading up north, there’s absolutely no way he can cover the rent here.

  “Oh, yeah, I chatted to Eileen about it actually,” Fitz says, opening his beer.

  “My grandma Eileen?”

  “Yeah?” Fitz looks at me as though I’m being extremely dim. “Obviously? She suggested I move in with Letitia. Her flat’s amazing, full of antiques and vintage stuff. All the Silver Shoreditchers’ Club furniture comes from there.”

  I got my first glimpse of the Silver Shoreditchers’ Social Club a couple of weeks ago. It was hands down the loveliest thing I have ever witnessed, and I’ve seen Samantha Greenwood dressed as a satsuma. The moody artists in Flat 11 taught painting, the intense woman in Flat 6 gave people lifts, and Fitz coordinated everything with astonishing proficiency. I honestly hadn’t realized how brilliant he could be when he was working on something he actually felt was important. Last week he applied for a job as an event manager for a major charity. When I told Grandma that she let out the most un-Grandma-ish whoop and started dancing.

  “So you’re moving … next door? With … Letitia?” I say, absorbing.

  “I’ve decided old ladies make the best flatmates,” Fitz says. “They can usually cook, because in the fifties women had to do that shit and they’ve still got all the skills. They’re always blunt and will tell me if my outfit isn’t working—or at least the ones I’ve met will. And they’re in all day, which is perfect if you’re getting a parcel delivered!” He lifts his beer bottle in my direction. “Thank you for enlightening me, Ms. Cotton the Younger.”

  “You’re welcome,” I say, still processing.

  “What are you wearing for tonight?” Fitz asks.

  I make a face. “I’d normally just get Martha to pick something for me, but she’s, you know, a bit busy.”

  It’s Martha and Yaz’s engagement party. Having Vanessa seems to have turned Yaz from free-spirited wanderer into full-time relationship committer in a matter of weeks. Yaz proposed to Martha with Vanessa in her lap, and they have already detailed exactly how cute the baby’s flower-girl outfit is going to be.

  “You know Ethan’s going to be there?” Fitz says.

  My stomach drops. “Shit. Really?”

  Fitz offers me a conciliatory beer. “Sorry. Classic Yaz. She had him on the invite list before you guys broke up and then just hit send on the email, and there’s no way that man’s missing a chance to see you.”

  I rub my face hard. “Can I not go?”

  Fitz lets out a positively theatrical gasp. “To Martha and Yaz’s engagement party? Leena Cotton! Even your grandmother is coming! All the way from the wilds of Yorkshire!”

  “I know, I know…” I groan. “Right, come on, you. We need to find me a bloody phenomenal outfit. Bye, Letitia!” I say as we walk past her. “Nice to see you!”

  “Shh,” she says, pointing at the television.

  “Told you,” Fitz says as we head for my wardrobe. “Blunt.”

  38

  Eileen

  I’m off to the party. But I’m taking a little detour, first, to pick somebody up.

  I have learned many surprising things about Arnold in the last two months. He sleeps in purple silk pajamas that look like they belong to a Victorian count. He gets grumpy if he goes too long without a meal, and then gives me a kiss whenever I remind him. And he loves reading Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, but he’d never read any Agatha Christie until he started working his way through my list of favorite books from the dating website. When he told me about that, it was so damn lovely I took him straight to bed.

  But the most interesting fact of all is that Arnold Macintyre is a fountain of Hamleigh gossip. As a result of one of his particularly fascinating tidbits, I am now on Jackson Greenwood’s doorstep, dressed in my London get-up: leather boots, bottle-green culottes, and a soft cream sweater Tod bought me as a goodbye gift.

  “Hello, Eileen,” Jackson says when he answers the door. He doesn’t seem especially surprised to see me standing on his doorstep dressed up to the nines, but then, now I think about it, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Jackson looking surprised about anything.

  “May I come in?” I say. It’s a little blunt, but I’m rather tight for time.

  He steps aside. “Course you can. Would you like a tea?”

  “Yes, please.” I make my way through to his living area, which is surprisingly tidy and well decorated. The wooden coffee table is a new addition since I was last here; there’s a book there, splayed out on its front with the spine up, called Thinking: Fast and Slow. Behind a stairgate, Hank wags ecstatically in the conservatory. I give his ears a fond scratch, carefu
l not to let him anywhere near my lovely cream sweater.

  “Milk, one sugar,” Jackson says, placing my mug down on a coaster as I head for the sofa. I’d never have pinned Jackson as a coaster sort of man, I must say. I run my finger over the wood of the table and reflect on just how little you can know about your neighbors, even when you are extremely nosy.

  “Ethan’s out of the picture,” I say, once I’m sitting down.

  Jackson pauses midway to the armchair. Just a momentary falter, but enough to send a trickle of tea down the side of his mug to the rug under the coffee table.

  He sits down. “Huh,” he says.

  “He was having an affair with Leena’s boss’s assistant.”

  His hands flex convulsively. This time the tea spills in his lap—he swears quietly, getting up again to fetch a cloth from the kitchen. I wait, watching his back, wondering.

  “Leena found out?” he asks eventually from the kitchen, still facing away from me.

  “I found out. I told her. She finished with him right away.” I look down at my tea. “Adultery is one thing Leena will not tolerate.”

  He looks at me then, a sympathetic glance. I don’t acknowledge it. I’m not here to talk about me and Wade.

  “I’m going down to London, to a party, and she’ll be there. I thought you might want to come.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes.”

  Then Jackson sighs. “Arnold told you,” he says.

  “Yes. Though I had to wring it out of the man, so don’t blame him.”

  “S’all right. Half the village knows how I feel about her anyway. But … go to London?” Jackson says, scratching his head. “Isn’t that a bit much?”

  “That depends. Are there things you wish you hadn’t left unsaid?”

  “Actually, I…” He sits down again, those giant hands wrapped around his mug until all I can see is the curl of steam rising from the tea. “I told her at the May Day festival. How I felt.”

  “Did you?” This Arnold did not tell me. “What did she say?”

  “She said she doesn’t look at me that way.”