The Pieces of You and Me

by Rachel Burton

  ‘God, I’m such an idiot. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And I’m sorry I went to see him without telling you too. I just needed to make my peace with the past.’

  ‘I know,’ he said quietly.

  ‘I’m also sorry about the whole trying to pack a suitcase,’ she said, sounding embarrassed.

  He laughed then, remembering her sitting amongst her underwear. ‘It’s OK,’ he replied, running his fingers through her hair. ‘I probably needed the wake-up call to make me realise what a prat I was being.’

  ‘Do you think we rushed into living together?’ she asked. ‘Do you think your mum was right, that we should have given ourselves more time?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, resting his forehead against hers. ‘No, I don’t. I feel like we waited far too long for this. But we both need to stop hiding things from each other, even if the intentions are good. We’re both adults. I think we can cope with taking on each other’s worries.’

  ‘I promise to tell you when I’m feeling ill again,’ she said.

  ‘And I promise to always talk to you, to not bottle everything up,’ he replied. ‘No more secrets.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘I’m going to let you sleep while I go and make us something to eat,’ he said. ‘I’ll leave Captain to look after you.’ He kissed the top of her head as she settled back on to the bed. She was asleep before he’d left the room.

  As he closed the door behind him, he thought of the other thing he’d vowed to do as soon as she got better. The secret he’d been keeping, even though he’d promised he didn’t have any more secrets.

  39

  JESS

  Gemma put herself in sole charge of my recovery, sending Rupert back to work, telling him he was fussing too much. She was right – he was. I can’t stand fuss.

  I was surprised by how quickly I started to feel better. I’d convinced myself it was going to be a long slow process, months and months of recovery like last time. But by the weekend I’d started to feel as though I was going stir crazy in the house and wanted to go for a walk, even though it was still really cold.

  ‘You want to go for a walk or you’re pushing yourself to go for one because you think you should?’ Gemma asked.

  ‘I want to,’ I replied. ‘Not far.’

  We joined Rupert and Captain, walking to the river with them before turning back.

  ‘I’m going to go and see Dan,’ he said, out of the blue.

  ‘OK,’ I replied slowly as Gemma wandered off a little way to give us some privacy.

  ‘I …’ He hesitated, looking away from me towards the river for a moment. ‘I’ve been such an idiot about all of this. I owe Dan a proper apology.’

  ‘Thank him for looking after me, will you?’ I asked.

  Rupert nodded. ‘I was so scared last weekend, Jessie. I didn’t know what was wrong with you. Life’s too short to hold grudges, to be angry about the past and about things you can’t control.’

  I smiled at him. ‘It is,’ I said. ‘You’re finally learning!’

  ‘You are sure you’re all right, aren’t you?’ He reached towards me, gently stroking my hair. ‘Don’t do too much.’

  ‘Stop fussing,’ I replied. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  I walked back to Gemma, pushing my hands into my coat pockets to keep out the cold.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I said.

  ‘Does it feel like home yet?’

  ‘York?’

  ‘I was thinking more of Rupert’s tiny house, but yes, York in general I guess.’

  I sighed. ‘No, not really and his house definitely feels like his house still. I’m hoping when I feel better we can find somewhere else to live.’

  She smiled, a glint in her eye. ‘OK,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I asked. ‘Are you hiding something from me?’ I’d had a feeling there had been something strange going on all week: hints dropped, looks exchanged. I had a memory from the previous evening, as I was falling asleep. Gemma and Rupert having a furtive, whispered conversation on the landing.

  ‘As if I’d dare to hide anything from you,’ she replied.

  I wasn’t convinced. ‘What are you still doing here anyway?’ I asked. ‘Have you been fired or something?’

  ‘Of course not. I was owed some leave and I told them it was an emergency.’

  ‘So you lied?’

  She stopped suddenly and turned to look at me. ‘No, I didn’t lie. I was worried sick. I thought you were going to get really ill again. And I’m staying until I’m sure that you really have recovered and you’re not just stubbornly pretending like last time.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to worry anyone. I just thought if I ignored it, if I didn’t talk about it, then it might go away.’

  ‘You’ve got to stop that, Jess. You have to learn to ask for help, to take things more easily. You have to ask for book deadlines to be moved, talk to your agent, whatever it takes. You need to live a simpler life. You know that.’

  I did know that. In some ways I’d wondered if moving to York, moving out of London where I was always afraid to miss out on things, would help me slow down. Stress can cause as much damage as doing too much. Falling in love can be as stressful as breaking up. But maybe that could change now and we could find the simpler life that we both needed up here. Maybe we could finally start again.

  ‘You can have a simpler life here,’ Gemma went on echoing my own thoughts. ‘You and Rupert can start again. I’m sure as soon as you’ve moved house everything will change, trust me.’

  ‘What do you mean, as soon as we’ve moved?’ I asked. ‘We haven’t even looked at any houses yet – we were talking about it when Dan turned up.’

  ‘Oh, I meant just hypothetically,’ she said, waving her arm at me.

  ‘Gemma, what do you know that I don’t?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, pulling the collar of her coat up. ‘Come on, let’s go. It’s freezing.’

  On the walk back, Gemma announced she was staying until Friday.

  ‘But Friday is Good Friday,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want to be home for the holiday weekend?’

  ‘I’m back at work this weekend, but not until Saturday. It’s fine.’

  ‘Gem, is everything all right?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you want to be with Mike?’

  ‘Everything’s fine, Jess, honestly. Mike and I are fine – we have our pepper pot remember?’ She grinned. ‘Trust me.’

  There was definitely something going on.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Rupert said in bed that night when I confronted him about it. ‘There’s nothing going on except everybody making sure you’re getting better.’

  ‘Which I am.’

  ‘Good,’ he replied, kissing me gently and switching off the light.

  *

  Good Friday saw us sitting around a pot of tea at The Café, eating raspberry and ginger hot cross buns that Pen’s husband had made that morning.

  ‘Any plans for today?’ Pen asked. She and Gemma had been spending a lot of time together while I’d been ill apparently. Rupert had told Gemma about The Café. I suspected, sometimes, he must have just wanted to get her out of the house. Gemma had no time for Pen’s ‘signs from the universe’ but other than that they seemed to be getting on as though they’d known each other for years.

  ‘None,’ Gemma said, almost too quickly. She’d been checking her phone every five minutes all morning, tapping out text messages with her gel nails when she thought I wasn’t looking. ‘Jess needs to have a walk, build her strength up.’

  ‘Stop talking about me like I’m not here,’ I said jokingly. Gemma and Pen were as bad as Gemma and Caitlin. ‘You make me sound like an old woman.’

  Another text message came through and Gemma beamed.

  ‘Ready to go?’ Pen asked, and Gemma nodded. So, Pen was in on this too.

  Gemma and I left Pen behind and walked south out of the city walls towards Fishergate Bar. It was still cold,
but the sun was shining, and I felt a strange sense of excitement, of possibility.

  ‘Where are we going and what’s going on?’ I asked.

  But Gemma just smiled and raised her hand in greeting. I looked up and Rupert was standing there, the sun glinting off his hair, Captain by his side. As I walked nearer I saw Captain was sporting a natty red bow tie, last seen on his birthday in October. It must be a special occasion.

  ‘Can someone please tell me what’s going on?’ I asked as Rupert slung an arm around me.

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Gemma said. ‘I’ll see you later.’

  ‘Are you not coming with us?’

  ‘No, I need to go and pack, but I will see you before I get the train.’ She leant forward and kissed me on the cheek. ‘Enjoy,’ she said.

  We walked out of the city towards Fulford.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Rupert asked.

  ‘Tired,’ I said. ‘And a bit anxious now. I wish you’d tell me what’s going on.’

  ‘Are you OK to walk for about half a mile or shall I call a taxi?’

  He clearly wasn’t going to tell me, so I said I was fine to walk and we carried on together in the watery spring sunshine, Rupert’s arm around my shoulders, Captain leading the way.

  Even though it wasn’t warm, I could already feel these first glimpses of sunshine melting the stress of the last few months away from my body. It had been a long, bleak winter but nothing lasts forever and spring would come in the end. I allowed myself to listen to my breath and the tread of our feet on the pavement. I tried to stay in the moment, training myself once again to live a simpler life, just as I had done in Highgate years ago when I first began to recover.

  Rupert stopped outside a large Victorian house. His hands were on my shoulders as he turned me around to look at it. Captain sat down as though he’d been here before and was quite at home looking down the gravel drive.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘What do you think of the house? Would you like to live here?’

  There was something about it that reminded me of the houses we’d both grown up in, something familiar, comforting.

  ‘I’d love to,’ I said. ‘But there’s no way we can afford it.’

  ‘Actually, we can,’ he replied. ‘But come with me first. I want to show you something.’

  He took my hand and started to pull me up the gravel drive.

  ‘Rupert, we can’t just walk into someone else’s house with a dog,’ I said.

  ‘Trust me,’ he replied. I wished people would stop saying that.

  He led me around to a side gate, which he opened with a key that was kept under a flower pot.

  ‘Are you breaking and entering?’ I asked.

  ‘How can I be breaking and entering when I’m using a key?’

  The gate opened on to a huge back garden. From the road you would never guess that these houses had such big gardens. We started to walk across the grass, led by Captain who was sniffing things with great familiarity and had definitely been here before.

  And then I saw it. It brought me to a halt and my breath caught in my throat.

  ‘Rupert,’ I said quietly.

  He wrapped his arms around me, resting his chin on the top of my head. ‘An apple orchard,’ he said. ‘Just like your mum’s, just like you’ve always wanted.’

  ‘How did you know it was here?’ I asked. ‘There isn’t a For Sale sign or anything.’

  ‘I just had a feeling.’

  He told me then that he had passed this house one evening on a walk with Captain during the winter. There was something about it that caught his attention, as though it had a special energy, a life of its own.

  ‘Houses do have lives of their own,’ I said. ‘They take on the characters of the people who have lived in them over the years.’ The house we currently lived in must have had a series of damp, boring, grey kinds of people living in it over the years.

  ‘There were some clearance guys here with a truck. They seemed to be emptying out the house, so I went to talk to them. They told me that the old lady who’d lived here had gone into a care home and her children were clearing it out ready to put it on the market.’

  In a stroke of luck one of the children was there with the house clearers and Rupert managed to convince him to give him a guided tour.

  ‘When I saw the apple orchard I knew I had to try to buy it,’ he said.

  Rupert had been negotiating this since before I got sick, since before he saw me with Dan on the towpath, two weeks ago.

  ‘It took a bit of doing,’ he said. ‘The house was an absolute tip and I didn’t want you to see it like that and the owners were, understandably, wary of a complete stranger they’d just met in the street coming in to help clear it up for them.’

  ‘So Gemma knew about this?’ I asked.

  ‘I showed her last week while you were asleep,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I kept it a secret but I wanted it to be a surprise.’

  I walked out into the apple orchard, slowly turning around to look back at the house.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I said. ‘And you’re right, it does have an energy all of its own. A good energy, as Pen would say.’

  ‘Do you think it’s destined to be ours?’ Rupert asked, unable to keep a straight face as he asked about a destiny he didn’t believe in.

  I nodded. ‘If we can afford it.’

  He pulled a face. ‘We can afford it, but it needs a bit of work.’

  ‘How much work?’ I asked.

  ‘A lot,’ he admitted. ‘And we’d have to do most of it ourselves.’

  It didn’t even faze me. If there was even a chance of us being able to afford this house we had to take it. Whatever Rupert might think about fate and destiny, I knew then that it was meant to be. I believed that as the Fates weaved the webs of our lives together that this house was there too. This was the house we were meant to live in, the house in which we could start again, become a family. A family of waifs and strays, of Hungarian Vizslas and old friends back from India.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ I said.

  ‘You haven’t even seen the inside yet.’

  I looked at him, with his too long arms and legs, his collar turned up, his hair that seemed to always need cutting. He looked so beautiful in the spring sunshine, his gorgeous orange dog sitting at his feet. My heart felt as though it would burst with love for him, love that we had built over a lifetime.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said, walking up, wrapping my arms around him and resting my head against him so I could hear his heart beat. He felt so alive. ‘Together we can do anything.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you think that,’ he said softly into my hair. ‘Because there’s something I want to ask you.’

  He stepped away from me to and put his hand in his jacket pocket. When I looked again he was holding something I hadn’t seen for nearly eleven years.

  ‘You kept it,’ I said. My voice was barely audible.

  ‘Of course I kept it. I always hoped that one day I’d have the opportunity to give it back to you. I don’t know why I waited so long really. I didn’t want to rush you so I was waiting for the right time. But with you it’s always the right time.’

  My stomach flipped. I was unable to take my eyes off the ring that was in his hand. The ring that I gave back to him at Heathrow airport all those years ago.

  ‘Jessie, look at me,’ he said, and I raised my eyes, knowing they were full of tears. ‘Will you marry me?’ he asked me then, dropping down on one knee and taking my left hand in his.

  I tried to speak but I couldn’t find the words so I just nodded. I could feel tears on my cheeks now and as he slipped the ring onto my finger I was twenty again, sitting on a bench in Trinity Quad with the sun on my back. It felt so good to be back here that I didn’t even care that I was wearing scruffy old clothes and had no make-up on. Rupert had seen me at my worst now. I had to believe he was going to stick around. I trus
ted him for the rest of my life, in sickness and in health.

  ‘When you’re feeling better,’ he said, ‘we’ll go and buy you something more expensive.’

  ‘I don’t want anything more expensive,’ I replied. ‘This is perfect.’

  SEPTEMBER 2018

  I sit in the apple orchard, the early morning sun dappling the grass as I warm my hands around a cup of coffee. Our offer on the house was accepted and, with no chain on either side, the sale went through easily and quickly. Too easily, you said as you waited for something to go wrong. It never did.

  We married on the last Friday morning in May at Camden Register Office, neither of us wanting to wait any longer than we had to. I wore Mum’s old wedding dress, which we’d modernised for the occasion, and I carried the early roses from her garden. I had no bridesmaids, much to Gemma’s disappointment – although when Caitlin pointed out that as a married woman she was now in fact a Matron of Honour, she did go off the idea – and Mum agreed to walk me down the aisle. It was the hottest day of the year – the beginning of a long, hot and memorable summer and like most clichés there is truth in the saying that your wedding day is the best day of your life.

  You looked more handsome than I’d ever seen you, John standing by your side grinning like a maniac. You had both stayed at a bed and breakfast in Belsize Park the night before and looked hungover when I walked in, blurred around the edges. But as soon as you saw me your blurry edges disappeared, and you smiled that smile that I knew had always been for me.

  We walked out into the midday sun as Madonna sang ‘Crazy for You’ – a song I’d loved since I first saw 13 Going On 30 at the cinema the summer before we went to university – and we hailed taxis back to Mum’s where the reception was being held. As we waited, your mum took me to one side and asked if we could call a truce. I hugged her for the first time in my life and while she didn’t hug me back, it was a step in the right direction. Your dad had declined the invitation – you said it was for the best.

  We danced to Tom Petty under the stars in Mum’s rose garden as the afternoon turned into evening. Mum even managed to get Madeleine dancing after a few gins. Nobody in the street minded the noise because over the course of the evening the whole road had popped over, clutching bottles of wine, to join in the party. We danced even after the temperature dropped and it was too cold to be outside – everyone was too drunk and happy to care.