by Nick Hornby
* * *
—
His next strategic decision was, he knew, sensible, fair, and appropriate. He would tell Hanna about Lucy before they left. And, when that didn’t happen for various reasons, all of them involving his discomfort, he saw that he had no choice but to tell her on the train down. And on the train down, he saw that easily the best thing would have been to tell her before they got on the train, because the train was packed. Many people, it would appear, had hit upon the idea of escaping London for the seaside during a hot August. They found two empty seats opposite each other, but they were both sitting next to people, a mother and her teenage daughter. The girl was wearing headphones, but the mother was doing a word search in a magazine, and could hear them if they chose to talk, which they didn’t. Joseph got out his phone and started scrolling. Hanna was reading one of Michael Marwood’s books. (She had made him text Lucy to ask for Michael’s surname. Hanna claimed to have heard of him, but Joseph was doubtful. How could you have heard of someone who turns up in the kitchens of houses belonging to normal people?)
“Didn’t you bring anything to read?” said Hanna after a few minutes.
The mother looked at him.
“My phone.”
“You’re not going to read when we’re there?”
“I dunno.”
He wanted to close the conversation down. Neither of their traveling companions was reading. Joseph didn’t want Hanna to embarrass them. He played Candy Crush for a while, had a look at Instagram, then read a couple of the stories on the BBC Football website. He was finding it hard to concentrate. Would Lucy say anything? She wasn’t that sort, although he’d never seen her drunk. Would Hanna guess? That seemed more likely. There was probably body language and all sorts that he wouldn’t necessarily be aware of. He went through his texts, deleting the boring ones from his mother about dinner, replying to a couple of coaching-related messages he’d forgotten about. The most recent text was from Hanna, this morning, asking where to meet at Waterloo. He replied to it, and then, before he could think again about the non-Waterloo-related information the new text contained, he sent it.
She ignored the ping for a while. She was good like that. Once Joseph had received a text, he had to look at it straight away. He tried not to watch her closely, and went back to Instagram. He became deeply absorbed in photographs of Iceland posted by an Icelandic Premiership footballer who had liked a picture of another Premiership player he followed, and he forgot to feel nervous about what he’d sent. Then he received a sharp kick on the shin. The mother looked up when he reacted, so he went back to the texting.
That actually hurt.
YOU HAD A THING WITH LUCY?
Yes.
AND YOU’RE TELLING ME NOW?
Sorry.
Hanna didn’t make eye contact. She just bashed away with her thumbs, staring down into her lap.
When was this thing?
Before.
They were both typing so urgently that it must have seemed perfectly obvious they were arguing with each other. He turned his pinger off.
Before what?
You. And then, Maybe turn your pinger off?
She ignored him, but at least he’d halved the number of pings.
I’m now, as far as I know. So couldn’t have been after.
No. And then, Hide your phone. She’s trying to see.
Like I give 1 fuck.
It’s over.
YES I SHOULD HOPE SO
Emotionally as well. Friends.
This seemed to be true. He had never managed it before, but Lucy made things easy. They had left it for a couple of weeks, and then she’d invited him round for Sunday dinner with the boys, and he’d played Xbox, and gone home. And the week after that he’d babysat for her while she went out for dinner with Michael Marwood. She had come back alone, made Joseph a cup of tea, and they’d talked about how things were going for them. He’d touched very briefly on the subject of Hanna, and she didn’t start wrecking her own living room. She just nodded encouragingly. And now here he was, on a train to visit her with his new girlfriend, unless his new girlfriend got off at the next stop.
You’re reading her new boyfriend’s book, if that helps.
He didn’t know whether this was a strictly accurate description of Michael’s status, but there was a chance that it was, and it was helpful to him to share the possibly accurate information at that moment.
I hope he’s more fun than his book.
Joseph replied with tears of laughter, although she was sitting opposite him and could see that there were no such tears, or even much amusement. He realized that when he got the LOL emoji, he frequently imagined that the other party was quite literally weeping helplessly, but this conversation had taught him that it was just a thing you did, stony-faced, to acknowledge someone’s weak attempt at humor. There was no reply, and he hoped that might have been the end of the matter. He went back to Iceland, to an amazing waterfall called Gulfoss. He put in a search for Iceland and started following Iceland photography. It was incredible. He wanted to go there. His phone pinged.
Who is better in bed?
He sent her the rolling-eyes emoji.
What is that?
Rolling eyes.
Not an answer.
Out of you and me? Me.
Ha ha. ??
You of course.
Why of course?
The honest answer would have been, Because I’d be off my fucking head to say anything different, but it wouldn’t have ended the conversation.
Because . . . you know.
What do I know?
He typed the word embarrassed in the hope that there would be a red-faced emoji. It offered him some peculiar-looking faces, and he chose one at random.
What is that?
Embarrassment.
Looks like a sex face. And then, What’s the point of emojis if you have to explain them all? And then, Why embarrassment?
Because I’d prefer to talk about it face to face. In our barn.
She did smile then, with her actual face. She sent back an OK and some hearts. The train nearly emptied at Bournemouth, and the mother and daughter got off. He went to sit next to her.
“I am sorry,” he said. “For not saying anything before.”
“Is that why you said I wouldn’t get on with her?”
“Yeah. That was all rubbish.”
“Well, that’s a relief. How did it happen?”
“It just happened. I dunno.”
“Was it weird?”
“Which part?”
“I don’t know. The age gap.”
“Not really. But it felt like . . . something between things. A parenthesis.”
“Oooh. Parenthesis. Calm down, mate.”
“Can you understand that?”
“Yeah. Of course. We’ve all had things between things.”
The trouble was that Hanna felt like a parenthesis too. Their entire relationship had taken place during the summer, while she was on holiday from college; she was waitressing in a steak house, which wasn’t her real life. She hadn’t told him anything about exes, but he got the feeling that she’d split up with someone toward the end of the college year, and he had no doubt that there’d be someone else when she started back again. He was part of her temporary North London life, when she’d been reunited with old friends that she’d lose touch with eventually. Hanna wouldn’t be spending her life in Tottenham. Joseph was new, but he was a throwback too. They wouldn’t last. He wouldn’t last.
And as for the question that he would never answer: the sex was different. A couple of times he had noticed his own theories about why trying to be heard, but he didn’t want to listen to them. There wasn’t any point.
* * *
—
Lucy and the boys met them at Crewker
ne station. Michael Marwood kept an old 2CV at the house and the top was down, and it was warm. Hanna put out her hand to say hello, and Lucy leaned in to kiss her. It was sort of like emotional porn, if there was such a thing: two hot women that he liked very much being nice to each other.
They put their bags in the boot and then looked at the car awkwardly.
“You go in the front,” said Joseph.
“You’ve got longer legs,” said Hanna.
“Yes, but I know these two scoundrels, and you don’t. I don’t mind squashing them.”
The boys laughed, and Joseph sat between them.
“Be warned,” said Lucy. “I’m quite a nervous driver round here. The roads are too narrow, and there are animals, and I keep having to reverse into hedges.”
“Can you drive?” said Joseph to Hanna. “I don’t know.”
“No. You?”
“No. Don’t see the point in London.”
“Wait until you have to start picking up kids from far-flung football pitches,” said Lucy.
“You can do that bit,” said Hanna to Joseph.
Lucy laughed. Joseph sort of barked. It was such a weird thing to say. Hanna had never given any indication of wanting to see him the following week, and now she was suggesting that they had a family together. After that, Lucy and Hanna started chatting, and Joseph couldn’t really hear them, and anyway the boys wanted to play a game they’d invented that was a mixture of Twenty Questions and Hangman, with the answer always being the most obscure footballer in the most obscure European league. Nobody ever got it.
They drove for thirty minutes, and as promised the roads became twisty and narrow, and then Lucy turned down a drive and they were outside a joke country cottage, with ivy growing up the walls and cows on the hill behind, and Joseph was embarrassed that he’d ever thought about not coming. He had been out of London, but not very often, and nowhere like this. And he didn’t think he’d been to a house that was so far away from another house. There were, as far as he could tell, no neighbors. This probably wasn’t what you were supposed to think—you were probably supposed to think about poetry, or God—but Joseph wished he had an amp, a deck, and a 2,000-watt QSC K12.2. That was what the freedom of the countryside meant: the ability to turn the fucker up as loud as it would go.
“I’ll show you where you’re sleeping,” said Lucy.
The barn was part office, part spare bedroom. The double bed was on a raised platform under the roof, and you had to climb a ladder to get to it. On the floor there was a desk, a small kitchen, a couple of armchairs, and a large Bang & Olufsen Bluetooth speaker. Joseph didn’t notice things like rugs, as a rule, but this one was beautiful, bright, in blocky primary colors. Joseph immediately began calculating what work he could move, what lies he could tell, to extend the stay for another couple of nights.
“Is the house as nice as this?” said Hanna.
“It’s nice,” said Lucy. “But I love it in here. The kids won’t let me, though. And there isn’t room for the three of us.”
“We can swap if you want,” said Hanna.
“Oh, that’s kind of you,” said Lucy, and then didn’t say anything. Joseph was sure there’d be a “but.” Where was the “but”? Come on. “BUT.” He looked at her, and she laughed.
“But look at Joseph’s face.”
“Phew,” said Joseph. “I thought you were actually going to take this away from us.”
Hanna punched him on the arm. “You selfish bastard.”
He shrugged.
* * *
—
Lucy and the boys went off in the car to get fish and chips for dinner while Hanna and Joseph swam in the pool at the back of the cottage. Hanna swam steady lengths, and to begin with Joseph copied her, when what he really wanted to do was see how many lengths he could manage underwater, and how long he could stand on his hands for. He thought Hanna would think he was immature, so he didn’t, and then he remembered that she wasn’t going to be around for the long term, so he did. When was the next time he’d get a swimming pool nearly to himself? Maybe it would never happen again. That wasn’t the right way to think about the future, though. He tried to focus on a house in Ibiza, with a pool bigger than this one, bought from the proceeds of a career as a producer and D.J., or an inventor of something he hadn’t thought of yet, or a tech entrepreneur. And not a whole career, either, just the early first flush.
“You’re like a kid,” said Hanna predictably, when she stopped for a breather.
“You’re like one of the old ladies who comes in the leisure center,” said Joseph. “Although they don’t usually wear bikinis like that.”
“Is that a compliment?”
It was. She looked great in a bikini.
“No. Just a statement of fact. They wear swimming costumes.”
“Listen. What I said in the car,” said Hanna. “About you picking up kids from football.”
“Oh. Yeah. You think we should take turns?”
He delivered it straight, to make her think that she’d encouraged him to think about their future together, right down to the last micro-detail.
“I don’t want . . .”
“Lots of mums pick up the boys from matches. But they’re quite often the mums who’ve been dumped.”
“I’m not thinking about kids for years.”
“Understood. That’s fine. I’m in no hurry either.”
“You know what I’m saying.”
“Yeah. I’m only messing you around.”
“I want to try and do a doctorate, maybe abroad.”
“Listen, you don’t need to spell it out. Neither do I.”
She looked momentarily affronted, as if it were OK for her not to want kids with him, but not the other way around.
“But I can tell you where it came from.”
“Go on.”
“Well, she’s quite intimidating, isn’t she?”
“Lucy? Is she?”
“Just—I can see why you went for her.”
“So you thought you’d better warn her off quick?”
“It was weird, I admit it. I suddenly went into marking-out-territory mode. Pissing on my boyfriend. I felt insecure.”
“No need.”
“No, I know. But there would be, if this was, you know.”
“It went as far as it could. No going back.”
“Why not? That’s what most things do, when they’ve gone as far as they can. Cars. Trains. People. They go back.”
“Oh, fucking hell. What do you want me to say?”
He did another handstand, demonstrating both that the conversation was over, and that he was an unsuitable partner for grown-up women of any age.
* * *
—
There was no sex in the barn. Joseph was expecting it, and when Hanna got into bed he kissed her in a way that had always previously led to other things. But Hanna stiffened, and Joseph stopped, and there was a sense of relief that took him by surprise.
“It feels weird.”
“Why?”
He was glad she’d said it, not him. It felt weird for him, for obvious reasons. He was staying with Lucy. He used to have sex with Lucy. He was about to have sex with somebody else. But it would have been bad for him to freeze up. He couldn’t have said, “It feels weird,” because Hanna would have said, “I knew it!” and so on. In one way, he wished his body were more responsive to complicated situations. His obvious keenness was sort of embarrassing, oblivious. In another way, he was glad it was business as usual, because he could therefore prove that Hanna was feeling the weirdness, not him, even though above the waist he was feeling it too. Maybe when you got older, your body started listening to the rest of you. Like, no, this is weird. I’m just going to lie here until you sort it out.
“I don’t know. Disrespectful or something
.”
“I’m sure she thought it would happen.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean we have to. It wasn’t part of the deal. At least, I hope it wasn’t.”
“You know what I mean. She’s a grown-up.”
“And I’m not?”
“When did I say that?”
“She’s cool with us making love and I’m not.”
“Oh, come on, Han! I’m cool with anyone making love. Consenting adults and that. But some of them might not want to do it. It’s your body. Jesus. Let’s forget it and have a cuddle.”
“Not with that thing sticking in my leg. That’s not cuddly.”
“Give me a minute.”
She nestled into his chest, and fell asleep. Joseph was awake for a while.
* * *
—
During the fish-and-chip supper, Lucy had discovered that Hanna loved Hardy, and there was an immediate determination to visit Max Gate, the house Hardy built, the very next day.
“And I’m not taking the boys,” said Lucy.
“Why not?” said Al.
“Because you’ll ruin it.”
“No, we won’t.”
“I’m coming,” said Dylan.
“So am I,” said Al. “What is it?”
“You weren’t listening just now?”
“You were talking about some writer’s house.”
“That’s where we’re going.”
“I’m not,” said Dylan. “No way.”
“Neither am I,” said Al.
Joseph took a similar view, so the boys stayed back at the cottage and the book lovers got in the car. In Lucy’s experience, these were the two genders, boys and readers. She wished there was as much gender fluidity as people seemed to think.
Neither of them said anything for a while. Hanna was looking out of the window at the fields and the occasional front gate; Lucy was looking very carefully ahead of her. And then they both spoke at exactly the same time.
