Nancy is the one I’m more furious with. I want to kill her for betraying Nick and her children.
‘Shh, he’s coming,’ Guy says, hunched low in his seat like me. We see Jack leaving the house with his bag of laundry and suitcase. He zaps a button to unlock his convertible, tosses the luggage into the boot and revs the engine. Guy and I turn to one another conspiratorially. I nod. ‘OK, Agent Brown,’ he says, turning the key in the ignition.
Guy’s dilapidated white van struggles to keep up with Jack’s fast BMW. I continue to tell him this is an insane idea, that we are no doubt heading for Bath and all we’ll see is Jack entering his flat and then we’ll have to drive all the way home again and what a waste of petrol! Besides, I question whether his old van will make it both ways.
‘Looks are deceptive. This baby can go quite fast when she wants to.’
‘We’ll see.’
‘You need to have more faith,’ Guy says, before asking me to open the packet of snack-a-jacks and ramming his foot on the accelerator.
As we’re driving down the M4, with only one car between Jack’s and ours, I tell Guy that I’ve had a lovely day. ‘Thank you for looking after me.’
‘Any time,’ he replies.
‘The thing is,’ I start apprehensively, ‘when Flora comes back we won’t be able to do this. I won’t be able to turn up at your door like some mad woman in the middle of the night.’ I smile. ‘I’ll have to find someone else.’ Right now I can’t stop thinking about how much I value being with Guy, alone, and how I can talk to him in a way that I could never talk to Jack, and not even Ed.
‘I know,’ he says quietly, as if he’s been thinking about it too.
‘Are you looking forward to seeing Flora?’ I ask, dreading the answer.
‘Yes,’ he says in a tone that encourages me to say, ‘But?’
‘Well, just between us, there’s this part of me that’s also loved being on my own. I can order takeaways and watch episode after episode of The Wire with a curry on my lap. I can do exactly what I want at weekends, I’m not being dragged to some wedding where I don’t even know the bride. I even enjoy the park now.’
‘I love the park.’
‘I love Trouble. In the past few months, she’s become . . . well she’s become my dog. I won’t like Flora taking over again, being her mistress.’ Guy glances over to me. ‘And then there’s you.’
‘Me?’ I shiver as I pull my cardigan sleeve over my hand.
‘What you said earlier . . . you’re right. We won’t be able to do this.’ He looks ahead, runs a hand through his hair. ‘I’ll miss it. I’ll miss you.’ He hits the steering wheel. ‘What is it about cars? They’re always a good place to chat, to tell people our secrets, aren’t they? Stick two people in a car and send them off to Scotland and they’re going to know each other pretty well by the end of the journey. Is it because there’s no escape? You’ve got a captive audience?’
I nod. ‘Partly, but I think cars are good places to talk because you’re looking at the road. You’re avoiding eye contact. It’s the same with dog walking.’
‘Dog walking?’
‘Yes. Think about it. You can say whatever you like, true or false, and the person walking by your side will never know the difference because you’re always looking ahead.’ I turn away. ‘Because the truth is in our eyes.’
‘You don’t talk much about Ed,’ Guy says, as I unpack the sandwiches and glance at the map. We have one more junction to go.
‘There’s nothing to say.’
‘Does it still hurt?’
‘Yes, but if I’m honest, I think it was more the way he did it.’ I reflect. ‘It was a shock. It’s hard to start over again, after a long relationship, but I know I’m not the only one. Maybe it was brave of him to pull out,’ I say. ‘Susie and Anna . . .’
‘I really liked them by the way,’ he cuts in.
‘Good. Anyway, they said he was a coward, but it takes guts, just as it takes guts to walk out on a marriage. To leave behind children must be heartbreaking.’ I look out of the window, thinking about Mum and how she could have done it to us. ‘Sometimes the easy thing is to do nothing, like I did with Ed.’ I confide to Guy that I think Ed and I became too comfortable, that perhaps our relationship had run its course. ‘We went on holiday,’ I tell him, ‘and all Ed wanted to do was sleep by the pool and read his book.’ We lost something, I know that now, I just didn’t want to acknowledge it was over. When I think about it, Ed had to deal with the wrath of my family and friends for months. He’ll always be blamed because he was the one that ended it, but Ed must have believed that we wouldn’t make each other happy in the long run. Now I think he was right, and I am to blame too. I only wish both of us had figured it out sooner.
‘Do you think it’s just as easy to fall out of love with someone as it is to fall in love with them?’ I ask Guy.
‘Possibly. Love is a weird thing. It has no rules, no logic or reason. You can’t explain it.’
‘So back to the dating game,’ I say with false cheer. ‘Tell me your worst date.’
‘My worst date . . . Christ, I’ve had quite a few. Oh, I remember! It was with this woman who was pushy and overbearing, to put it mildly.’ Guy indicates to move into the fast lane, only one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding his cold beef sandwich.
‘Careful! Car . . .’ I squeal.
‘I know. I can see it.’ He gestures to his rear-view mirror.
‘OK. Sorry.’
Guy successfully manoeuvres his van into the fast lane.
‘Watch your speed. Camera coming up.’
‘I’ve got to keep up with him, Gilly.’
‘Sorry. Back to your date.’
‘She dragged me round all these nightclubs until finally I said I needed to get home. I had to pretend I had an early breakfast meeting, and do you know what she said?’
‘Go on, tell me.’
‘What time shall I set the alarm clock for?’
I laugh.
‘Talk about presumptuous. I jumped into a cab and escaped. How about yours?’ he asks me.
I slam a foot onto an imaginary brake and Guy looks at me crossly.
‘Sorry.’
I tell Guy how I’d once gone out with a man who had talked about nothing but his Porsche. ‘When I went to the loo I had this idea. As interested as I was on the subject of Porsches, I opened the window, climbed through and never went back into the restaurant.’
‘Gilly, the poor man! You probably scarred him for life.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘What was Ed like by the way?’
‘Nothing like you,’ I reveal.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Quick!’ I suddenly shout. ‘He’s going left. This is our junction!’
We follow Jack off the M4.
We turn left, swing right, sweep around another corner. ‘GO!’ I screech, and we fly through a red light. I’m impressed. I didn’t think the old van had it in her.
We’re at a junction, right behind Jack’s car. I cower in my seat, convinced he’s going to see us. ‘Will you act cool?’ Guy snaps.
‘I’ve never acted cool in my entire life, Guy, so I’m hardly going to start now.’
‘We’re not doing anything wrong, you know,’ he states.
‘Yeah, right,’ I say dismissively. ‘We’re just out on an evening drive.’
Jack’s BMW ploughs up a steep hill and then finally parks outside a line of terraced houses.
Casually we drive past Jack’s car and take the first right into a dead-end road. ‘What now?’ I whisper.
‘We count to ten, go back and park on the opposite side.’
As we turn back into Jack’s street, Jack is closing the boot to his car. We park on the opposite side and I daren’t look over to him, just in case . . . Guy shakes my shoulder and I turn to see Jack standing with a woman in her sixties. She’s fair like Jack, slender in build, wearing a striped apron. She hugs him. ‘What’s s
he saying?’ I ask Guy.
‘He lives at home,’ Guy murmurs. ‘He lives at home with his mum.’
I shake my head. ‘He can’t. He doesn’t.’ Jack had told me she lived in Eastbourne.
Carefully Guy winds down the window. ‘Your dinner’s in the oven,’ we overhear her say. ‘I’ve made your favourite shepherd’s pie. How was your journey, dear?’
‘No wonder he didn’t want me to go home with him,’ I say in shock.
‘I always knew something was odd,’ whispers Guy.
‘But why would he still live at home? It doesn’t make sense. He told me he . . .’
‘Shush!’
We watch as a little girl in spotty pyjamas and pink slippers runs towards Jack. ‘Daddy!’ she cries out and he lifts her into his arms, strokes her hair and smothers her in kisses.
Guy and I turn to one another, and for the first time neither of us knows what to say.
Guy turns on the engine and Jack, sensing the noise, glances around the street, before stopping at our van. He stands on the edge of the pavement, looking at us, unsure at first, until we lock eyes. I stare at him and immediately he turns away. Jack’s mother takes his suitcase and Jack carries his daughter back inside without as much as a brief glance over his shoulder.
Driving home, Guy and I attempt to work out the mystery behind Jack’s daughter. Guy suspects Jack kept her a secret because he wanted to be Jack Baker in London, a producer, single and out to have a good time. However, at home in Bath, he was living with his mother and was either a single father or his daughter came to stay at weekends. Guy thinks Jack wanted to be black and white about the situation; there was no need for one life to overlap the other, no need to confuse the two, especially when he was only going to be living in London until Christmas. I was a distraction, a very pretty one, but after our few months together he would have brutally cut me out of his life and moved on to the next opportunity that arose.
‘I think he manipulated last night,’ I say, thinking out loud. ‘He reckoned I was becoming too much of a nuisance butting into his private life, so he made sure to invite me to this awful party that he knew I’d hate and, just to make sure I got the message, he’d kiss Nancy too. That would get rid of me and my questions.’
Guy tells me I’m probably right.
We talk about the mother of his child. Where is she? ‘Maybe this has something to do with what the brother said?’ Guy suggests.
‘All those lies he told me,’ I say in disbelief, ‘making out he was single and carefree and how he found the whole family thing boring. I don’t understand. Why didn’t Jack just tell me he had a daughter? Why keep her a secret?’
‘Would you have fancied him quite as much if you had known that he’d lived at home, with his mother cooking him shepherd’s pie, and that he had a child?’
I weigh this up. ‘Probably. If he’d been honest right from the start.’
‘Yeah, but would you have jumped into bed with him quite so quickly?’
‘No. Oh, I don’t know. I don’t think we know the full story. He could still be married or separated . . .’
‘He wanted to be Jack with no baggage . . .’
‘We all have baggage.’
‘Some worse than others.’
‘If Jack had just told me,’ I say again. ‘I wonder why he didn’t. The older we get, the more likely we are to meet people who’ve maybe been married or have children. So Jack has a child. So what! I still can’t believe he lied about her. I admire people who raise children on their own. My father did.’
I go on to tell Guy about how my mother had walked out on our family when we were thirteen. Dad raised us and I have more respect and love for him than for any other man. He never remarried, but I think deep down he had loved our mother; I saw that love when Megan was born.
I tell Guy that I understand now that Mum had a breakdown. I believe her when she said she couldn’t be our mother, that she had stopped functioning. She was like a car that had lost its engine. Nick hated her, couldn’t forgive what she’d done, but with hindsight sometimes I wonder if Dad could have helped her more in those months following Megan’s death. Instead he became increasingly irritated by her lack of direction. Dad wasn’t able to give Mum reassurance, give her love and unconditional support, or help her seek medical help when she needed it most. Guy listens patiently.
‘We did see Mum occasionally, but Dad sent us to boarding school at sixteen – it was easier for him to manage his work if we were away – then I went to university, so I hardly saw her. Each time I did, I found it harder and harder to talk to her. Then she moved to Australia when Nick’s first child was born, over seven years ago.’ A well of sadness overcomes me. ‘I didn’t tell Jack any of this,’ I reflect. ‘We never talked about anything, not properly anyway.’
‘Of course you didn’t. That would have been his goal, keep things light and simple. Easier to walk away from that.’
‘I almost feel sorry for him,’ I find myself saying. ‘I know he behaved like an idiot, but having a daughter? It can’t be easy for him.’
Guy parks outside No. 21. He turns off the engine and I unbuckle my belt.
‘Let’s face it, Gilly, he was just out to have a good time, wanted some freedom, time out from his domestic situation at home. I don’t blame him either, though he should have told you the truth.’ Guy turns to me. ‘I just wish,’ he takes my hand, ‘that of all people he hadn’t hurt you.’
I nod.
‘Are you all right?’
I shrug.
‘Come here,’ he says, pulling me towards him. He holds me in his arms, and strokes my hair tenderly. When we part, I look into his eyes and before I have a chance to thank him for being my friend again today, he takes my face in both his hands and kisses me. I kiss him back, no questions running through my mind about whether it’s right or wrong.
‘Gilly,’ he murmurs, ‘I’ve wanted to do this for so long.’
Nothing tells me to stop . . . until Guy’s mobile telephone rings.
I withdraw first, and reluctantly he answers it, without taking his eyes away from mine, a small smile surfacing on his lips. My heart is beating fast. I want to feel his arms around me again, his touch against my skin.
‘Flora, hi! Right . . .’
I turn away, reality hitting me.
‘Tomorrow?’ Pause. ‘No, of course I’m pleased.’ He listens. ‘No, that’s good. I’m surprised, that’s all.’ I reach for the lock, open the passenger door. ‘I’ll be there,’ he says, trying to wind up the call. ‘We’ll talk about it when you’re home.’
‘Good news?’ I ask, opening the boot to let Ruskin out. I reach for my overnight bag.
‘She’s coming home, flies in tomorrow night.’ He follows me to my front door. I struggle to unlock it, my hand shaking.
‘Tomorrow?’ I repeat. Inside No. 21 I drop my overnight bag on the chair, before numbly picking up my junk mail and flicking through it.
‘Gilly?’
‘That didn’t happen. I won’t say anything.’
‘We need to talk.’
‘You must be excited.’
‘Gilly . . .’
‘What did she say?’
‘Um . . .’
‘Tell me.’
‘She said she wanted to hug Trouble and . . .’ he pauses . . . ‘marry me.’
The thud of disappointment and humiliation I felt when I saw Jack and Nancy together, followed by the revelation that Jack had a child, is nothing compared to what I am feeling now.
I was never in love with Jack; my feelings for him barely scratched the surface. Guy is getting married. What’s the fucking point? I want to scream.
‘Right, I see.’ I make myself busy by drawing the sitting-room curtains and turning on some lights, aware that Guy is watching my every move. I pick up my Playboy costume, strewn across the floor, throw it towards the banisters.
‘Gilly, stop. Look at me.’
I can’t look at him.
&n
bsp; ‘Gilly . . .’
Guy follows me into the kitchen. I talk to Ruskin, let him out.
‘Please. We need to talk.’
‘Oh, Guy,’ I burst out. ‘We don’t! What’s the point? You’re getting married!’ I turn on the kettle, even though I don’t want a drink. I open a few cupboards aimlessly.
He pushes his way in front of me. He stands so close to me, looks into my eyes again. ‘I know we shouldn’t,’ he says calmly, ‘but we need to talk about what just happened.’
I long to kiss him again, but . . . I push him away from me.
‘We can’t pretend that there’s nothing going on between us,’ he claims.
‘We have to,’ I say, my voice trembling. I compose myself. ‘We had a moment, Guy. Flora’s coming home, and you still love her, don’t you?’
He’s quiet. ‘I don’t know. Maybe . . .’
‘You see. We have to forget it.’
‘I can’t. It wasn’t just a kiss, it was more and you know it.’
I turn to face him now. ‘You still love her and she’s coming home. Where does that leave me?’
‘All I know is I have feelings for you. Strong feelings.’
‘It leaves me nowhere, Guy.’ I move away from him, but he follows me.
‘Look at me,’ he’s saying, grabbing my hand. ‘Gilly, look at me!’ Next he’s holding me in his arms again, I let him, but . . . ‘I can’t get hurt again,’ I say, pulling away. ‘I can’t, Guy!’
‘Gilly, I’d never hurt you.’
I press my head into my hands. ‘I think you should go.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Guy.’ I raise my voice. ‘I can’t do this. I can’t. You need to leave me alone.’
‘Gilly . . .’
‘Please go!’ I cry out now.
In the hallway, alone and in the darkness, I hear him drive off into the night.
He’s gone. Tears run down my face.
I don’t want to be upstairs in bed alone tonight. Instead I curl up on the sofa and Ruskin joins me, but it’s hopeless. I can’t sleep. I pick up the phone and call Mum. Please pick up, I plead, desperately needing to hear her voice. The dialling tone clicks into the answer machine. It’s Patrick’s voice saying, ‘Elizabeth and Patrick can’t get to the phone right now.’ I slam the receiver back on its stand, without leaving a message. I daren’t call Nick because Nancy will pick up first. I want to talk to Mum. I can see her cradling me in her arms, rocking me to sleep like a child when Ed left me. I don’t think children ever grow out of needing their mums. I try her again, but still no answer.
Monday to Friday Man Page 21
