She filled up the bowl with hot water and a squirt of washing-up liquid. Jack went to the drawer filled with tea towels. All different designs, age-old presents to the landlord probably: Souvenir of Blackpool; a long poem: ‘The Italian Who Went to Malta’; the commemoration of Prince Charles’s wedding to Lady Di.
The profile of his back made Mary’s heart beat almost as fast as his front profile did. Her involuntary reactions were truly starting to annoy her.
Mary dunked the first glass, rubbed at it with a sponge, checked that the stubborn gluey wine had gone, gave it a quick rinse under the tap with fresh water before placing it on the draining board.
‘You even do the washing up properly, don’t you?’ said Jack, curious grin quirking up one side of his mouth.
‘I try and do everything properly,’ replied Mary. ‘It only takes a little extra effort to do a good job rather than a mediocre one. That’s what my dad taught us.’
Jack lifted up the glass, began to dry it.
‘Do you still miss him? Even after… two years is it now?’
‘Yes,’ said Mary, dipping another glass. ‘I’ve got past the floppy, crying all the time stage but that doesn’t mean he’s not in my thoughts. I still think “I must tell Dad” when something happens that I know he’d like to hear about or when I want to run something past him. And I still feel sad that I can’t ring, but I talk to him, and if he’s around, he’ll hear me, and maybe he’ll guide me. Dad wouldn’t want me to mope and be miserable, he’d tell me off. If I had children and I… left them, I wouldn’t want them to miss me so much that they didn’t enjoy things any more.’
‘Do you think you’ll have children one day?’ asked Jack.
The question surprised her; he’d never asked her anything as personal before, but she tried not to let that show as she answered him.
‘If I found someone nice to have them with.’
Admittedly her thoughts, on occasion, had strayed to pictures of herself and a nice man walking through a park: she pushing a buggy, he holding the lead of a collie they’d taken in from a rescue centre, like the sort of dog her family had when she was growing up. But she would never attract someone who was truly interested in her as long as Jack was occupying her thoughts, because she wouldn’t flag up on the dating radar as available. Presently, she was like a nun, married to the Church. And tomorrow she would be twenty-five years old. Time to make things happen, not dream stupid dreams any more that would never come to anything.
‘What about you? Do you ever think about having children?’ she threw the question back at him.
Yes he did, imagined him kicking a ball over the vast lawn at the back of his house or holding a little girl’s hand as she prattled on and he tried not to chuckle at her. But he wouldn’t have children if it meant he didn’t have enough time to read a story to them, or worked so long and hard that he had to send them away to boarding school. He wouldn’t have them if his marriage wasn’t rock-solid and if, by any chance, it broke down afterwards, he would do his damnedest to make sure his child wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire or be dragged into the poisoned lake that stood between warring factions. He knew his father hadn’t meant for that to happen, but still it had. No, better not to have them at all than risk he might replicate his mistakes.
‘I’m not sure I will,’ said Jack, setting the dried glasses on a tray to take back through to the bar.
‘Why not?’ said Mary.
‘I’d be worried I wouldn’t be a good enough father.’
‘Well that’s just rubbish, if you don’t mind me saying, Jack. All parents make mistakes.’ Ooh, was that a bit rude, said a voice inside her. She jumped in quickly to pat her dissidence down. ‘I mean, my parents made loads. They were only human. My dad never went to any of the plays my older siblings did at school, which he regretted, he said, because he came to the ones I did and he realised then what he’d been missing. And my mum always said she was a bit soft on us. For instance, my older brother made a mess of his GCSEs and Mum was really cross at herself for not coming down harder on him for playing truant at school. But then again, maybe if he hadn’t cocked up he wouldn’t have tried so hard to make up lost ground. He’s a chartered surveyor now and lives in a massive house. Maybe his wrong path turned out to be the right one in disguise.’
She shut up, not even sure if that made sense.
‘I don’t know if I have a healthy family template to copy,’ said Jack. ‘I don’t want others to suffer because of things I get wrong.’
He meant Reg of course, Mary knew. Reg was a hard man, totally work-focused. He was gruff and rough, his manner brusque and he’d been warped and damaged by being rejected for another man, but he never missed an opportunity to boast about his son. ‘Oh that lad of mine has got us into Waitrose, I knew he would’; ‘I told him, I said, our Jack’s the man to talk to about that, he’d know’; ‘Jack’ll take this place to heights I’m not clever enough to do’.
Mary took in a fortifying breath. She was about to overstep the mark and, again, she’d probably get shot down for it, but what did she really have to lose now?
‘I can tell you without any doubt, Jack, that your dad loved you very much and he was so proud of you. And just in case you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because he told me he did.’
Jack’s hand stilled on the glass he was drying. ‘Did he? When?’
‘Loads of times. He’d put the phone down after talking to you and sort of smile as he said, “That was my lad on the phone.” ’
She could go further, decided she should.
‘He once said to me: “I’m proud of our Jack, Mary. You mark my words, he’ll take this company to new heights,” and he was pleased as punch when you got the Waitrose order. He once told me he’d sent you away to school because he wanted you to have the best education he could afford, as there was no point in having money if you couldn’t spend it on those you loved.’
She saw Jack swallow before he asked her, ‘He said that? Really?’
‘I wouldn’t lie for effect, Jack,’ a nip in her voice. ‘I remember taking tea in for him one time when he’d just come off the phone to someone. He was smiling and he turned to me and said, “If only I’d known I had it in me to have a son like our Jack, I’d not have waited so long and I’d have had a dozen of ’em.” ’ She imitated Reg’s broad Yorkshire accent as she said it. ‘And I said to him, “You should tell him that, Mr Butterly. He’d be chuffed to bits.” ’
She looked up at Jack to see that he was waiting for her to continue, so she did.
‘…And he said, “I’m not that sort of bloke, Mary. He knows anyway without me having to say it.” ’
The expression on Jack’s face as those words sank into him told Mary that Jack hadn’t had the slightest inkling that ‘he knew anyway’. He looked rocked to the core and she had an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him, hoping to transmit somehow by proxy the love Reg had for his son, and which she had witnessed. She didn’t but she told him instead something her own dad had said about the set-up at Butterly’s when she’d spoken to him about it.
‘Some people, especially in that generation, found it hard to say how they felt, as if it was a weakness. I got the feeling that old Bill Butterly wasn’t exactly a loving, hands-on father and maybe your dad never learned from him how to articulate his feelings. Maybe, just maybe he wanted it to get back to you what he was thinking without having to speak the words himself. Maybe that’s why he told me, because he could only manage to say what he felt in an indirect way, because a direct way was just too difficult for him…’
Mary’s words tailed off because Jack looked felled, and that wasn’t the effect she’d hoped to have on him. She went into a momentary panic, cross at herself, expected him to say, ‘Yes, thank you, Mary’, in that same dismissive way he’d used when she’d told him he should be making vegan scones. Then, barely above a whisper, he said, ‘I wish I’d known.’
‘I did try to—’ She
stopped herself, poured the water out of the bowl, silently cursing herself for heading towards a conversation that she didn’t want to stray into.
‘Try to what?’
‘Nothing.’
‘It isn’t nothing.’
‘Okay then, I did try to tell you once but you shut me down.’
Jack looked somewhere between dumbstruck and horrified. ‘When? When did I do that?’
‘When you came back to work after your father had died. I knew what you were going through, I knew that you could never have prepared for the impact and I stopped you in the corridor one day to tell you what your dad said to me about you. I thought it might help you. But you said, “Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait, Mary.” ’
‘Did I? Did I say it like that?’
‘Exactly like that.’
‘Why would I do that?’
His lack of self-awareness made Mary prickle with an annoyance that fuelled her next words.
‘Because I’m just Mary who files your correspondence and makes your coffees. Not someone to take any serious notice of.’
There, she’d let it out; it had been sitting inside her for years.
The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, with long tails of echoes. Jack had never blushed in his life, but he felt heat rise in his cheeks and when he spoke next, his voice was drained of volume.
‘I’m really sorry if I did that, Mary. I can’t remember it, but if I did, then please accept my belated apology.’
‘Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.’ Mary acknowledged the admission, dried her hands while thinking that she wouldn’t have dared say all that to Jack had she been scared of getting on the wrong side of him. It was the first step in letting him go. The realisation triggered a wave of both relief and sadness at the same time.
Chapter 17
‘Well this is very pleasant isn’t it?’ said Luke to Bridge as they sat opposite each other at the table constructing a paper chain. ‘And the most polite we’ve been to each other in years.’
‘Don’t forget we need to sign and swap those documents before we get out of here,’ said Bridge. ‘That would be too ironic, being holed up together for days and then forgetting to do that.’
‘I promise I won’t if you won’t,’ said Luke and licked a strip of paper. ‘Ugh, that awful gluey-glue taste.’
Bridge made a grumbling noise of agreement, tried not to think again about the last time she had made a paper chain with Luke. But the taste of the glue had jogged his memory too.
‘Ooh, déjà vu,’ he said. ‘I had a sudden flash of doing this before with you, making a chain. We can’t have though. We were never the making-paper-chains sort of people, were we?’
‘No, it’s déjà vu,’ she said. He’d forgotten then. Forgotten that day when the chain they’d spent putting together all afternoon ended up as a flattened, unusable, broken pile of scrap paper. So why hadn’t she? Why was the memory half-fluorescent, half-neon lights? She looked forward to some modern technology where you could go to a clinic and have selected memories zapped out of your brain with lasers.
‘Can you remember, that first Christmas we had in the flat?’
‘Not really,’ she said, lip curled like a disgruntled toddler.
Luke grinned.
‘Yes you do. There’s nothing wrong in having memories. We were married, we can’t airbrush ourselves out of each other’s history.’
‘Sadly.’
‘Even if you did once say I was the reason why God gave you a middle finger.’
She couldn’t help but laugh at that.
‘There’s been enough bad blood between us, we can walk away from each other with civility,’ said Luke.
‘You are not now and never will be on my Christmas card list,’ said Bridge. She’d been at loggerheads with Luke for so long, she couldn’t think of a sure path out of it. Like Hansel and Gretel, they had strayed deeper into a dark wood of mutual enmity one footstep at a time, getting lost in it, questioning how they could have wandered so far into such a hostile place and carried on fighting long past the point of remembering what they were fighting about.
‘We were young, daft and very much in love once,’ Luke said, softly.
‘Daft being the operative word.’
‘I’ve never met anyone like you, Bridge. Still haven’t,’ said Luke.
Bridge stopped sticking. ‘Go on, say it: “Thank God.” ’
‘I wasn’t going to say that at all. You are an incredible woman. I’ve seen how far your star has risen and I’ve been really glad for you. Okay, I admit that on occasion I was happy it had because I intended to take half your business, and before you open your mouth I bet you were secretly glad Plant Boy was doing well for exactly the same reason.’
Say something nice in return, Bridge, prompted a voice inside her.
‘…I’m glad you’ve done okay too. I was wrong to scoff at the only good idea you had in all the time I knew you.’
He laughed at her barbed compliment.
‘I’m not sure I would have had half the success without the name. Do you remember the day you came up with it?’
‘How could I ever forget?’
‘Ha. Plant Boy was an inspired name for a company. I didn’t lie to the solicitor about the company worth, for the record. I haven’t tried to hide anything.’
‘Yes, well I haven’t lied about Bridge Holdings either.’
‘Never thought you would.’
‘Ha. You’d have been wrong then because I did think about it,’ said Bridge. And she had. Initially she wanted to haunt him for the rest of his life, keep using the Palfreyman name to piss off any future wife, claim a lump of his pension, screw him for every penny she could, even though she didn’t need it. She’d pored over his accounts looking for how much she could claw into her own bank to kick him in his financial bollocks if not his real ones, but then she knew if she did, he’d fight back harder and she didn’t want to hand over the fortune she’d worked so tirelessly for. Sense prevailed in the end. Sense and decency.
‘So, do you still call yourself Mrs Palfreyman?’ he asked.
‘All my documents are now back in my maiden name. I am once again Miss Bridge Beatrice Winterman. I… I didn’t think it was fair on Carmen.’
‘I can imagine Ben’s happier about it too.’
‘Of course,’ she added quickly.
‘What does he do? For a living.’
‘Mind your own business. Bugger.’ She’d ripped one of the strips.
‘Oh, Bridge, put your guns down for goodness sake.’
‘Okay then, he’s in IT,’ said Bridge. ‘People consult him about important things. He’s very clever and he works for himself. That do you?’
‘Does he make you happy?’ Luke’s voice was tender, genuine.
He saw the small swallow in her throat before she gave the single-word answer.
‘Yes.’
‘So what will your new married name be?’
‘I’m not sure I want to take another man’s name. Even Ben’s.’
A picture rose up in Luke’s mind of sitting at the kitchen table with her as she practised her new signature:
Bridge Beatrice Palfreyman
She never used ‘Bridget’ because it reminded her of a life before him that was unhappy and dysfunctional and full of the worst mistakes that would resonate through her whole life. Watching her form the letters carefully, a tongue of concentration sticking out at the edge of her lovely mouth, he’d been totally zapped by the happiness fairy. He was sure they were forever.
‘Why’s that?’ Luke grinned. ‘Has he got a funny name? Would that make you Bridge Bottom, or Bridge Dick, Bridge Overtheriverkwai?’
Despite not wanting to, Bridge smiled.
‘No, none of those,’ she said. ‘I just think that I should keep my own name. It’s stood me in good stead.’
‘It might have stood you in better stead if you’d called the company BBW Holdings.’
; ‘Oh my goodness, imagine,’ said Bridge and they both laughed, easily and openly. The first time they had laughed together like this in a long time. And they used to laugh so much together.
‘When the divorce is all finalised, we should go out – the four of us. Carmen and me, you and Ben,’ said Luke. ‘For dinner.’
‘Er, no,’ said Bridge. ‘Let’s not.’
‘Maybe you’re right.’
Charlie gave a loud snore, woke himself up, settled immediately back to sleep. Bridge and Luke both smiled at him, as if he was an aged uncle they were both fond of.
‘We had some good times, didn’t we Bridge?’ said Luke. ‘I mean, I know we were poor as church mice, but we got a lot of pleasure from the small things, didn’t we?’
‘Did we?’ asked Bridge. She really didn’t want to take a detour down memory lane. There were too many houses on it, where a lot of pain resided behind the shiny doors.
‘That carpet the old lady across the road gave us when she got a new one, do you remember? The brown and orange and yellow one. It was as ugly as a dropped pie but it felt so much better than the bare floor.’
Bridge remembered. It must have been twenty years old, but it looked virtually new. She’d even given them the underlay and when she and Ben had fitted it, in comparison to the cold cement floor, it had felt as bouncy as a trampoline. Then that same day they’d christened the carpet by making love on it and squashing their paper chain.
‘I remember your foster mother giving us her old suite,’ said Bridge. Upholstered in blue corduroy, it didn’t go with the carpet one bit, or the pink armchair that she’d bought from a car boot sale.
I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day Page 13
