Love Life

by Nancy Peach

  Her leg was now resting up against his and she was gradually acclimatising to the physical closeness of him without having a minor heart attack every time he brushed against her.

  “No. I don’t need to be a hero. I just don’t want to feel that life has passed me by. I want to enjoy it, to feel content, rather than this constant, restless dissatisfaction. I haven’t been properly satisfied for a long time.”

  There was a pause.

  “Well, maybe that’s not strictly true.” He didn’t look at her, but his tone had changed, “There was an extremely satisfying episode a few weeks back…”

  Tess studied her knees, squeezing them together. She could feel a trickle of sweat at the nape of her neck and her face was hot. She leaned back, feeling his arm still behind her.

  “That must have been nice.”

  “That would be something of an understatement.” He cleared his throat. “But, um, I realise that, as nice as it was for me, it precipitated a fairly difficult turn of events for you?”

  He turned to face her, serious now, the trace of naughtiness gone. “Tess, if I’d had any inkling of what Clara would do, I would have been so much more careful about how and what I told her.”

  “I know. Don’t worry.”

  “I realised as soon as I got back here that night, I knew I needed to be honest with her, and I knew I couldn’t be with her anymore, so I told her that I had feelings for you, and that we’d kissed.”

  “Uh-huh.” Her face was getting hotter and hotter. Having thought that she wanted a deep and meaningful conversation with him, now she wasn’t so sure. The Clara aspect of things just made her feel hideously guilty.

  “I didn’t share any more of the detail,” he said. “I mean, there’s candid and then there’s unnecessarily cruel. I didn’t want to do that to her; she’s not a bad person.”

  “No. I know she’s not.”

  “She told me I was a fool, and accused you of various things. She knew about me taking Morris to the vet’s and she asked me directly how much it had cost.”

  “You should have told me, you know. I knew it would be expensive but—”

  “I know. And I’m so sorry. I was trying to be, I don’t know, chivalrous?”

  “Well, I guess it was, in a way. Certainly, the whole ‘pet rescue’ was pretty heroic.”

  “I told her you were paying me back, but she didn’t want to hear it. She was angry. I guess I underestimated quite how angry… I should have been clearer with her.”

  “It’s easy in hindsight though, isn’t it?” Tess smiled at him. “Don’t worry.”

  His expression was earnest. “You must believe me, I would never do anything to undermine you or cause difficulties for you at work.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really. What’s so funny?”

  “You’d do nothing to undermine me?”

  “No. Of course not. Honestly, I’d never want to—”

  “So, bringing in private specialists, for example, and making it clear that you value their opinion far more than mine, or shouting at me in front of patients and other staff, questioning my professional integrity, or requesting that I no longer be involved in your mother’s care… you wouldn’t consider that to be in any way undermining?” She was laughing at his expression as her words registered.

  “Oh Christ!” He put a hand over his mouth.

  “Yes. I mean that was all before your girlfriend nearly got me struck off.”

  “Okay, so basically I’ve done nothing but undermine you and cause difficulties… with no insight whatsoever. That’s really quite spectacular arrogance, isn’t it?”

  “It’s certainly impressive.”

  “It is an absolute wonder that you continue to have anything to do with my family – well, with me specifically.” He shook his head in disbelief. “I am just a thorn in your professional side.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself. You’ve certainly made life interesting.”

  Her heart sank as she said it. He really had made everything so much more interesting. Life was going to be boring as hell without him.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  A while later they returned to the house. The vast majority of guests had already left but a few stragglers remained. Amongst them, a vaguely familiar figure was walking towards them as they crossed the lawn.

  “Dan!” Edward threw his arms around his friend. “When did you get here? Thanks for coming, mate. Really good of you.”

  “Oh, no problem. I was hoping to come to the funeral, but I didn’t finish my theatre list until four. We had a bleeder… Anyway. It’s good to see you. Are you managing okay? I imagine it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster?”

  Edward shrugged. “Yeah, it’s not been the greatest few weeks. But I guess we were better prepared for it this time. Better than with Dad anyway.”

  Dan exhaled sharply. “God yes, I’d forgotten about your dad. Blimey. Not easy.” He turned his attention to Tess. “Hi, I’m Da— Oh my God! I know you. Wait… it’s Tess, isn’t it? You were on my firm a few years back. Although something’s different… weren’t you blonde then?”

  Tess almost laughed at his evident excitement at having recognised her. “Yes, yes that’s right. I was one of your students. Well, one of the students on the firm anyway. It’s nice to see you.”

  “Oh, so you must be qualified now? Which hospital are you at? Local? Oh, it’s so nice to…” Dan was looking between the two of them, a light dawning in his eyes. “Wait… so you two did get together in the end? Wow! That’s great. I always wondered—”

  Edward cut in, “Oh, no, mate, we’re not together, Tess and I. We’re… She was looking after Mum, at the hospice.”

  Tess had flushed to the roots of her hair. “Yes. I’m, um, doing my GP rotation. I’m in the hospice – at least I was. I’m, well, due to start in practice next week, and Mary was my patient and…”

  Dan’s mouth was a perfect circle. “Oh… God, sorry, right.” He looked at Edward and back to Tess again. “I just thought, you know, after that party…”

  Nobody knew what to say and there was a silence for a few seconds. Dan blundered on. “That party. You know, in my flat. When you both… Hang on, have I got this wrong? It was you, wasn’t it, Tess? You came with that mate of yours, Donna, yes? And Ed, you were staying at mine for the weekend…” He looked at both of them, confusion spreading across his face. “Are you seriously trying to make out that you don’t remember what I’m talking about?”

  “Um…” Edward’s face was impassive. “The party. Yep. When you had that lovely flat with the—”

  “The garden,” said Dan. “Yes, that flat. And yes, that party. In the summer. You were, what? About to start with that legal investment team and you stayed… You both stayed in the sitting room, you were, like, chatting all night?” He shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe I got it wrong. Just seems a massive coincidence, that’s all, both of you being here and you having met already and… I guess it’s not that surprising, really. Bristol’s not that big a place and…”

  Tess recognised the rambling sentences as the type that she used to fill awkward gaps in conversation and she stepped in to help him out, for all their sakes. “I know. Especially for people who were students here. Doesn’t it have one of the highest retention rates for students choosing to stay and work?”

  Dan grasped onto the conversational life-raft. “Yes! Yes, you’re right, it does. And you’re obviously still working here. Me too. I’ll keep an eye out for your referrals when you hit general practice. Don’t send me too many adenoids, for God’s sake. They do my head in. In fact, maybe… if you two aren’t…” He gave Edward a quizzical look. “Maybe we should go out for a drink sometime, Tess? Catch up? Ed’ll give you my number.”

  She nodded slowly. This was just too crazy. “Yeah, great, okay.” She turned to Edward. “I’ll, um, I’d better make a move…”

  He looked panicked for the briefest of seconds and then his face settled. “No, I’ll
tell you what. You go and find Madeleine. I’ll have a quick catch-up with Dan and then I’ll be with you, help you find your coat and whatever.” He slung his arm around his friend’s shoulders and steered him away, turning to mouth over Dan’s shoulder, “Don’t go anywhere. We need to talk.”

  Tess found Madeleine in the kitchen, dishing out sausages and peas to the children. Pauline had evidently finished all the washing-up before she left, and Tess set to work drying glasses and putting them back in the cupboards.

  “They are absolutely shattered,” Madeleine whispered as Harvey wobbled drowsily in his chair, trying and failing to spear a pea with his fork so that it rolled off the table to the waiting dogs beneath. “And I feel wrecked too.”

  She raised her voice slightly to include Edward, who had just walked in through the back door, having seen Dan off. “I’m going to take them up for bath and bed in a moment. And I’ll probably do the same myself – early night, get some rest. You okay to sort things out down here, Eddie, lock up and everything?”

  “Yes, of course. You go up.”

  Madeleine turned to put the grill pan in the sink.

  “So, you’ll be the last ones up then,” she said meaningfully. “Pauline’s gone back home. The kids and I, we’ll be out for the count. It’ll just be the two of you.”

  She dabbed at the pan with a scouring pad in the soapy water.

  “Yes, thank you Madeleine. We get the message.”

  Edward shared an uncertain smile with Tess across the room and then sat to help Harvey scoop up his peas. Tess placed a hand on his shoulder.

  “I think I’ll just go through to the other room,” she said, wanting to give them a bit of space. She got the impression that Madeleine had things she wanted to say to her brother.

  “Goodnight, kids. Night, Madeleine. I’ll probably be heading home in an hour, so I won’t see you. I hope the rest of your stay goes well, and enjoy the zoo tomorrow!”

  Madeleine smiled as she turned from the sink. “Thank you,” she said with genuine warmth.

  Another hour had passed and the sun had set far behind the wooded copse at the end of the south garden, leaving only a pinkish tinge to the gathering twilight. The dogs were settled in the kitchen, and after a short period of noise from upstairs, the splashing, giggling, tearful protestations and nursery rhymes had finished and all was quiet. Tess and Edward had moved from the large drawing room to a smaller snug which faced onto the same south terrace. The rest of the house was locked and shuttered, but the French doors in this room remained open, allowing a view of the remaining sunset and a welcome breeze. The carriage clock on the mantlepiece struck nine and Tess stood, crossing to the open doors to look out across the darkening lawn.

  “I had better be going,” she said. “Kath will wonder where I am.”

  This was a lie. Kath was working tonight and would be none the wiser as to Tess’s whereabouts, but she wanted Edward to understand that she existed for other people outside the bubble that had somehow been created today. He stood and crossed the room to join her by the doors, both looking out over the lawn.

  “Yes. I expect she will.”

  They stood for a few moments in silence, and it was as if a static charge was building between them; the longer they remained motionless, apparently ignoring each other, the fiercer the current between them grew, until it felt like a physical force, pulling them in. They were a few inches apart, but every tiny movement was amplified and seemed to disrupt the air around them. She felt she could almost hear his heart beating, but wasn’t sure if the rush of noise was her own pulse or his.

  Still looking directly forward, Edward began to speak.

  “We need to talk…”

  She nodded.

  “No, I mean really talk. About what Dan said.” He turned to her. “We did meet before. At his party. Like he said. You don’t remember it but—”

  “I do remember it. You were the one who—”

  They both started talking over each other and Tess paused. “Go on,” she said. “You first.”

  Edward took a deep breath. “When I saw you, that day in the hospice, when Mum first arrived, you remember?”

  She nodded.

  “I knew it was you. I’d have recognised you anywhere, even with the different haircut. But I was so… I don’t know. So angry about everything, so bloody furious to be there. And then I see you and all I can think about is you turning me down and it was like, ‘Oh, great, here’s that girl who rejected me and she’s going to be looking after my mother…’ And you were ignoring me. It was clear you had no idea who I was, no recollection of that night, and you were just concentrating on your job, doing the right thing. And you were so good with Mum and I just had to get out of there. It was all too much.”

  “Why didn’t you just say?”

  “Say what? ‘Hi, I’m the bloke you didn’t want to go out with five years ago? Here I am again, ta-dah! Except now I’ve brought a whole lot of extra emotional baggage with me?’ And anyway, why didn’t you say anything? I assumed you’d just forgotten, like I hadn’t made as much of an impression as I’d thought.”

  “But that was what I thought!”

  “Well, you were the one who gave me the brush-off all those years ago. If anyone was likely to forget the other, it would have been you; so unimpressed by me that you ran off as soon as I kissed you! What was I supposed to think? I called Dan a week later, but you’d left his firm and he didn’t know where you’d gone. I tried to search up your details, but I was typing in things like, ‘Tess, Bristol Medical School’, which resulted in about fourteen hundred hits. None of which were you. It was hopeless.”

  “Oh, God! I did that too!”

  “The thing was, even if I had been able to contact you, it wouldn’t have made any difference. You were with Pete or whatever his name was. You’d already made it clear that—”

  “I was scared,” she said. “Scared of taking the risk. I’m not very brave really.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said and looked at her pointedly. “You’ve done some pretty risky things recently; downright reckless, some might say…”

  She blushed. “I know. And look where that got me.”

  He smiled and brushed her cheek with the back of his hand.

  “Jesus. What a mess.” Tess shook her head. “I remembered you. Of course I did. But you looked straight through me and I sort of doubted myself, doubted everything, and it just wouldn’t have been appropriate to say anything anyway. Your mum was my patient. And then, as the weeks went on…”

  “It became harder to mention,” he finished for her. “It was like the elephant in the room, wasn’t it? Well, along with all the other elephants in the room, like my raging animosity towards the hospice establishment, and your ill-concealed Socialist Worker agenda.”

  She snorted a laugh. “Socialist Worker, nice one. God, for a pair of intelligent adults, we’ve been a bit bloody ridiculous, haven’t we?”

  They both looked out into the garden, lost in their thoughts until Edward spoke again. “That night at Dan’s. It was great. I felt like I’d met someone really special. But then in the morning, when you just ran off…” He turned to her. “This Pete. Are you still with him? Was he the guy in the bar?”

  “No. That was Simon.”

  “Oh, yes. He introduced himself. Seemed nice.”

  “He is nice.”

  “Good-looking.”

  “Yes.”

  “And is it, you know, serious?”

  She pursed her lips together. “He really helped me for a time. He’s a lovely, kind man, but we’re not… We’re not together anymore,” she said honestly. “Since the, um, incident a few weeks back.”

  “You told him?”

  “No, it’s like you said with Clara, there was no need to be cruel. But it was fairly obvious after what happened that I couldn’t continue going out with him.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “We’re still in touch,” she said. “B
ut just as friends.”

  “Right.” He seemed to have come to a decision. He turned towards her again. “So, with that in mind…”

  “Yeees.”

  “I know my family have caused you endless problems…”

  Tess remained silent, still staring out into the garden.

  “…And I know that I’m not necessarily the most appealing prospect at the moment, being a bit of an emotional wreck and all. I’m clearly still in a mess. Much as I was a few weeks ago, but I am getting there, realising what’s important…”

  She caught a glimpse of him chewing his lower lip out of the corner of her eye.

  “What I really mean,” he said, “is that I think there could be something between us. There’s definitely the potential, isn’t there?”

  She turned to look at him then, and the intensity of his gaze almost threw her off balance. She gave a tiny nod.

  “But I also completely understand if you want nothing more to do with me,” he said, searching her face for clues. “If I’m just one giant headache you can’t wait to get rid of?”

  She felt a knot forming in her stomach at the thought.

  “But I guess,” he said, “in either scenario, if you wanted to stay here tonight? I mean, I’ll be leaving in a couple of days. It wouldn’t have to be… I don’t know. It wouldn’t have to mean anything.” He exhaled quickly. “I’m getting myself tangled up here. All I know is that I really want you to stay. If you want to. We could just see what transpires…”

  There was now a smile twitching at the corner of Tess’s mouth. “See what transpires…?” she said, and he laughed, putting a hand to her cheek and tracing his finger softly down her neck. She remained motionless but took a sharp intake of breath.

  “Yes,” he said, now moving his hand to stroke her shoulder, “Besides, I think it would only be fair to let me get my own back for being seduced so mercilessly last time? Perhaps now I’ll have a turn at being in charge?”

  He leaned in to kiss her, his lips soft against hers, his mouth warm. There was none of the ferocity of the previous encounter; it was almost unbearably gentle, and Tess felt her legs weaken as he bent to kiss the dip beneath her collar bone, running his tongue along it to the tip of her shoulder. He turned her round slowly so that he was behind her, lifting her hair up and kissing the nape of her neck as he slid the zip of her dress down. Tess felt as if her brain had stalled, as if all higher functions had ceased and the rational, sensible part of her had abdicated all responsibility for the rest of her body. Edward spread the fabric of her dress across her shoulders, his mouth hot against her skin. He slid his hand inside the dress and round to her front, cupping one of her breasts through the sheer fabric of her underwear. He then undid the catch of her bra with his other hand and slid the straps over her shoulders, pushing down on the dress so that her top half was exposed to her navel. Tess could feel the light breeze coming in from the garden rippling across her skin as she turned back round to face him and he kissed her softly again on her mouth. Her arms were restricted by her dress as he continued to trail kisses across her throat, down her sternum to her abdomen, kneeling to press his face into the warmth of her body above the folds of fabric bunched at her waist.