by Kate Field
My head drooped back on to Owen’s arm, as if it couldn’t support the dead weight of these thoughts any longer. Owen reached forward, took the almost empty mug from my hand, and put it down on the coffee table next to his. Hooking his arm around my shoulders, he pulled me towards him and kissed me.
This wasn’t the sort of kiss he had given me before. Even I, with all my inexperience to draw on, recognised that this was a good kiss: that he was painting a passionate invitation with his lips. Like a fledgling bird, still not confident its wings would work, I put my arms around Owen, and it was fine: somewhere between the squishiness of Leo and the muscle of Ethan; comfortable and solid. I could cope with this.
But then, as I was busy thinking that this wasn’t too bad – was, in fact, quite pleasant – I realised that Owen had moved his hands to the front and he was unbuttoning my blouse. Cool air grazed my skin as he pushed the two halves aside, pulled down my bra, and dipped his head to my breasts.
His hair tickled my chin as I looked down. Panic flooded my brain. Was my muffin top too obvious? Was my bra too plain? Could he see my stretch marks from there? Had I eradicated every bit of body hair? I sucked in my stomach. How could I kiss him and hold my breath at the same time? Should I be making an appreciative noise? Was I rubbish at this already? Oh God, I was too old for this.
‘Mary?’
‘Yes?’ I hadn’t realised that Owen had stopped until he spoke.
‘Just checking that you’re still awake. You’re very … still.’
Still? Did he mean stiff? Unresponsive? Frigid? Generally terrible at this? Why had Leo never told me? I wished I hadn’t drunk so much, so my head would stop whirring. Or better still, I wished I had drunk more, so all these mortifying thoughts would drown and leave my mind full of lovely, peaceful nothingness.
‘I …’ I didn’t know what to say, or do. Should I shove his head back down and try to be less still? Before I could decide, Owen pulled my bra back up, tucking my breasts in tenderly as if they were children going to bed for the night. He fastened my blouse, and once my stomach was safely covered, I let out a big breath.
‘Owen, I’m sorry …’
‘No need to be. Tell me – is it me or the timing?’
‘Me.’ He was looking at me with such kindness, such concern, that I couldn’t bear to say anything else. ‘I’d been with Leo since I was fifteen. I thought he was forever. I’ve no idea what I’m doing now.’
‘You’re doing fine, Mary.’ He kissed me – a kiss on the lips, but quite different than before, tender not passionate. ‘There’s no hurry. Do you want another coffee?’
I shook my head. All I wanted was to be at home, muffled under six jumpers, smothered by two duvets, and as far from naked as it was possible to be. How did you look someone in the face – someone you didn’t know all that well – when they had seen and tasted your breasts? Especially when it hadn’t been a mutual unveiling: the humiliation of this aborted seduction was all mine. I was pretty good at ignoring reality, and a master in denying my feelings, but just at this moment embarrassment stained my skin like a whole-body tattoo, and I couldn’t see beyond it.
‘I think I’d better go,’ I said.
‘There’s no need to rush off.’
‘I don’t want to keep my mum up late.’ I glanced at my watch: it was barely ten. My shoes had fallen off, and I shoved my feet in them, my head spinning as it readjusted to the altitude.
‘I’ll walk you home.’
My attempt to protest was lost as I stumbled and crashed into the doorpost. Owen took my arm and steered me back to my house; the weather had turned since I had left, and the rain lashed us as we hurried along the road as fast as my heels would allow. Owen didn’t hang about; as soon as we reached the top of my drive he kissed me and walked quickly away, shoulders hunched against the rain.
The blue Ford was parked outside, and a light shone through the curtains at Mum’s garage, as her friend presumably waited for her to return. I unlocked my front door, slipped out of my heels, and crept around the downstairs, ready to tell Mum that she could go home – but she wasn’t there.
The living room ceiling creaked, and laughter and mumbled conversation floated down. Was Mum with Jonas? It seemed unlikely – but so did the fact that not so many minutes ago I’d been flashing my boobs at a man who wasn’t Leo. I padded up the stairs in my bare feet, and pushed open Jonas’ door. He was sitting on his desk chair, games controller in his hand, and Ethan was beside him, sprawled on Ava’s fluffy pink beanbag, his entire focus on a bloody shoot-out on the TV screen.
It was a minute before either of them noticed me, a minute in which I saw Jonas smile more than he often did during a whole day. Then Ethan groaned, tossed down his controller, glanced towards Jonas and saw me. He smiled, and that smile loosened my taut nerves so that I relaxed for the first time all day.
‘Just in time to witness my annihilation,’ he said. He stood up from the beanbag, in an athletic move that didn’t involve my usual technique of falling onto hands and knees first. ‘I’ll beat you next time, Joe.’
‘No chance.’ Jonas grinned, and raised a hand in my direction. ‘Hi, Mum. Don’t drip on my stuff, will you?’
I backed out of his room and Ethan followed me downstairs. He grabbed the towel from the cloakroom and threw it towards me, but I was a hopeless catcher when sober and had no chance now, when I seemed to have at least four hands, all going in different directions. Ethan laughed, picked up the towel, and moved behind me to dry my hair, stroking the towel down from the crown of my head to where the damp ends clung to my shoulders. Standing in the hall, shivering as the tiles chilled my bare feet, it still felt weirdly more intimate than anything Owen had done that night. I snatched the towel off Ethan and stepped away.
‘You’re in London,’ I said.
‘Nope, I’m right here. I came back this afternoon.’
‘What have you done with Mum?’
‘Buried her under the patio. Did you want her somewhere else?’
Wide eyed, I stared through the kitchen door and towards the back of the house.
‘She went home. She had company.’ Ethan smiled. ‘Are you drunk, Mary Black?’
‘No. Yes. A little. Why do you always call me Mary Black?’
‘It’s your name.’
‘Is it?’ Why hadn’t I thought about this before? I had only become a Black when I married Leo. Should I have stopped being a Black when he divorced me? Only yesterday I had bought something online, and automatically selected the dropdown option ‘Mrs’. But I wasn’t, was I? And I wasn’t Miss Black – that was Ava. No one warned you that the side effects of divorce would be making themselves felt so long after the event. ‘Should I not change it now?’
‘No, keep it. It suits you. You should always stay as Mary Black.’
With his hands on my upper arms, two patches of warmth seeping through the flimsy fabric of my sleeves, he manoeuvred me into the living room and down onto the sofa.
‘Water or coffee?’ he asked.
‘Water.’ I shuddered, remembering the taste of coffee on Owen’s tongue. I shut my eyes, but the embarrassment was too deeply ingrained to go away that easily. The next thing I knew, something fluffy tickled my foot and my leg jerked up.
‘Watch out, Cinderella, you almost knocked my teeth out.’ Ethan was kneeling in front of me, my slippers in his hands. He grabbed my foot. ‘Your feet are like ice. I presume these are yours. Too small for Jonas, and far too uncool for Ava.’
‘Thank you.’ I mustered as much dignity as I could, but there was precious little left at this point in the evening. Where had the calm, unflappable version of me gone? Had Leo taken her away with him, and left this idiot in her place?
‘Your mum said you were out with your teacher friend tonight.’ I suspected Ethan was translating what she had actually said. ‘Go anywhere nice?’
‘His house. He made dinner.’
‘Did he?’ There was something off about Ethan’s
tone, but I couldn’t figure out what. ‘Good cook?’
‘Yes.’ I patted my stomach, which felt like a balloon hanging around my waist. ‘I’ll need extra dog walks to get rid of this.’
I reached for my glass of water, and looked up to find Ethan had joined me on the sofa and was staring at my stomach. Perhaps I shouldn’t have drawn attention to how large it was. In his glamorous New York circle, anyone over size six was probably considered obese.
‘Did you go out like that?’
‘Yes.’ Was I now obese and badly dressed? Okay, I had on fluffy slippers that an eighty-year-old might think old-fashioned, but from the ankle up I was presentable, wasn’t I? ‘It’s not beige,’ I added defensively.
‘It’s not fastened properly. Your buttons are done up wrong.’
I checked, and he was right – it would, I suppose, have been an odd thing for him to lie about.
‘Have you just had sex with him?’
The baldness of the question, flung into what had been a comfortable silence, slapped me back to a degree of sobriety.
‘What if I have? We’re both single.’
‘Only just. You weren’t meant to leap into bed with the first man you met.’
‘What was I meant to do? Meet in the presence of a chaperone and let him occasionally kiss my fingers? Times have moved on.’
‘You’ve not. This isn’t the way you behave.’
‘What do you know about me? You’re my ex-husband’s brother, not my diary.’
‘This has nothing to do with my relationship with Leo, only with you. I’ve known you as long as he has.’
One week less, but it was true; if Leo had been my rock growing up, Ethan had been my oxygen. His return to Lancashire had made me realise how much I had missed his friendship when he left for New York. He was watching me now, leaning forward so his arms rested on his knees, tension in his shoulders and disappointment in his face.
‘Of course I didn’t sleep with him,’ I said. My head dropped onto the back of the sofa and I covered my face with my hands. ‘It was probably the most excruciating experience of my life. We didn’t get past unbuttoning my blouse. I can’t do it. It’s too terrifying, and too embarrassing. No one has seen me naked apart from Leo.’
‘Not true.’ He spoke quietly, but I didn’t mistake what he said. I removed my hands, and looked at Ethan. He was leaning back against the sofa now, a teasing smile on his lips, dazzling blue eyes shining right into mine.
‘What’s not true?’
‘I’ve seen you naked.’
I must have been much, much drunker than I thought. I stared at him, trying to understand.
‘What? When? You haven’t … we didn’t …’
‘You were the first fully naked girl I ever saw.’ Ethan stretched out his long legs, and crossed them at the ankle. ‘We were sixteen. Leo was away, and all the parents were out. You were sunbathing in the garden naked, and then you suddenly stood up and cartwheeled down to the end of the lawn and back again.’
I didn’t remember, but I didn’t doubt that I had done it. I had felt different that summer, the summer I turned sixteen. I was confident, excited. Exams were over, and I thought I’d done well; Leo was mine, properly mine since my birthday; the future looked glorious. What had happened? Where had the cartwheeling girl gone? She wasn’t beige; she wasn’t mortified at the idea of being seen naked. I longed to be that girl again.
‘Where were you?’ I asked.
‘At my bedroom window.’
‘And you watched? That’s disgusting. I was your brother’s girlfriend.’
‘I was sixteen. You were naked. It was utterly not disgusting.’
I should have been embarrassed. I should have been mortified for the second time tonight, desperate to hide under those six jumpers and two duvets. So why wasn’t I? Why did I feel … alive? As if electricity was flowing around the room, and had just shocked me back to life?
‘I’m surprised it didn’t scar you forever,’ I said.
Ethan smiled. It was my smile, the smile he saved for me.
‘I think perhaps it did.’
Chapter 14
I was in the back garden, playing tug-of-war with a lawnmower twice my age, when Leo brought the children back on Sunday evening.
‘What are you doing?’
Hot, sweaty, and knackered, I was in no mood for daft questions.
‘Ballroom dancing. I’ve picked a bloody awful partner.’
‘Where’s the gardener? Is he ill?’
‘No, he’s expensive.’ Too expensive to afford now that Leo’s income was divided between two households. He acknowledged that with a sigh.
‘Can’t Jonas do it?’
‘He’s probably more expensive.’ That was unfair. I didn’t always have to bribe him to do chores, unlike Ava, who wouldn’t budge for anything less than paper money, but I’d been at pains not to make Jonas feel he was the man of the house and obliged to look after us. My CV was expanding daily with all the new skills I was learning. It would have been so much more efficient if Leo had given six months’ notice of his intention to leave, so we could have paid to have some jobs done while we had the money.
‘Are the children okay?’ I asked, following Leo as he prowled around the garden, inspecting the flowerbeds. He was sure to find them a disappointment: my fingers were definitely not green, and I didn’t dare pull anything up, as I couldn’t tell between weeds and flowers.
‘Yes, they had a good weekend.’ Leo turned his inspection from the plants to me. ‘Did you?’
‘Yes.’ Apart from the naked boob business with Owen, the naked cartwheel business with Ethan, and the naked terror of seeing either of them that had kept me trapped in the house until now. Dotty was sulking and I would have to take her on a long yomp tomorrow to make friends with her again. ‘What is it? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Ava said that you’ve been seeing a man.’
‘Don’t tell me,’ I said, rolling my eyes very much as Ava might have done. ‘She was grumbling about him being a teacher.’
‘She may have voiced an objection of that nature.’
I laughed, and Leo smiled and took hold of my hand.
‘Are you happy? Is it serious?’ His gaze roamed over my face, as if he were looking for something. ‘Have you …?’
‘Have I what? Are you asking if I’ve had sex with him?’ I snatched my hand back. ‘What is it with you Black men? Why are you so obsessed with my sex life? It was bad enough when Ethan asked.’
‘Ethan? When have you seen him?’
‘He’s living next door. It’s hard to avoid him.’
‘It will be better when he moves out. You’re only like this when he’s around. I’ll have a word with him, and tell him to stop aggravating you.’
Like what? I wanted to ask. Grumpy? Argumentative? Myself? I stopped at the bottom of the garden, and looked back towards our house standing shoulder to shoulder with Audrey’s, only a low fence separating them. I glanced at Ethan’s bedroom window: no movement there today, other than the ghost of a sixteen-year-old, one who could have teased me mercilessly for what he had seen, but instead had kept his secret for over twenty years. Why had he done that?
‘Don’t say anything. It’s not Ethan’s fault. I can be bad-tempered whether he’s here or not. You just never saw it because you were so easy to live with.’ I linked my arm with Leo’s. ‘Have a word with that blasted lawnmower, if anything. It’s easily as old and as irritating as Mum.’ I led Leo over to the bench beside the pond. Hundreds of tiny tadpoles swarmed around in the water, just about visible through the murky water and the strange furry green things that were floating in it. Another job for my endless to-do list. ‘Sit down for a while. I want to tell you about the strange bookshop I went to this week.’
I told him all about my bizarre visits to Archer’s, and how I was convinced there was some connection to Alice Hornby.
‘Family?’ he asked. ‘How did we overlook them? You w
ere meticulous in going over the family tree. You wouldn’t have missed them.’
I squeezed his arm, touched by that vote of confidence.
‘There are definitely no Archers on the family tree, even at a distance. I’ve checked again. But I had the impression that they might be related to the servants. I think the old lady knew the housekeeper’s name. At the time, I thought she’d muttered “crumbs”, but now I wonder if she actually said “Coombs”.’
‘It’s possible,’ Leo agreed. ‘We checked the servants as well, though, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, but it was harder than the family. Mrs Coombs kept a record, but most of the housemaids were only listed by first name. It was impossible to track them down.’
‘So this might be a whole new avenue of enquiry?’ I nodded. Leo grasped my arm. ‘What if they have mementoes of Alice? We mustn’t raise our hopes as high as the missing manuscript – it’s unlikely a servant would have been entrusted with that. But a letter, maybe? A note or a sketch? This is fantastic, Mary.’
It was, and even more fantastic, for me, was to see how excited he was, how enthusiastic about what we might discover. It was what had made living and working with him for so long such a delight; physical passion had always come second to our mutual fascination with Alice Hornby.
‘I miss you,’ I said, and I put my arms round him and hugged him close. ‘I miss this.’
‘I know.’ Leo rested his head against mine, and we sat nestled in each other’s arms as late afternoon sank into early evening, and the sun moved behind our oak tree, casting shadow branches over our heads.
‘I suppose I ought to feed the children,’ I said at last, unfurling from his embrace.
‘And I should go home.’ He tried to soften that blow with a smile, but it was still enough to produce a dull pain in my chest.
