Laurie had brought a trusty favorite with her to wear, a cream dress with bracelet-length sleeves and a full skirt that Dan used to say she looked “proper swit swoo” in. It was nicely modest for a family do, she thought, dressy but not loud, and no excess tits or leg.
Laurie could hear Jamie bumping around downstairs and risked changing without warning him. She was holding it against her front, pulling her arms through the sleeves, when Jamie walked into the bedroom and said, “Shit, sorry!” backing out fast.
“No, it’s fine! I’m decent! Could you zip me up?”
She knew this dress to be a proper fiddle, it was one that Dan always did for her, putting down the console for Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 on request, as long as the game wasn’t at a critical juncture.
“Er . . . sure.”
She sensed Jamie’s reluctance. Odd, she thought, that someone whose principal hobby involved removing clothes of people he didn’t know very well, would get discomposed by a woman he didn’t fancy, almost wholly wearing an L.K. Bennett prom dress. Maybe it was the not fancying that made it tricky.
Laurie turned her back and held her hair clear, and Jamie fumbled with the zipper. It snagged at bra level and he said: “Oh . . . arse it. No, wait, I’ll undo it and redo it again, some of the fabric’s got caught.”
Was she imagining his jitters? Was he already antsy about his dad’s speech?
He pulled it back down to the base of her spine and suddenly Laurie felt a frisson at the physical contact, the warmth of Jamie’s hands on her skin and the air on her exposed back. He pulled again and this time it sailed past her bra, up to the back of her neck. She let go of her hair.
“Do I look OK?” Laurie said, upon turning around, an automatic reflex in a relationship. Jamie looked awkward once more and said: “More than OK. Lovely. What’s the famous Eric Clapton song?”
“‘Layla’?”
Jamie laughed.
“Not the one about diddling George Harrison’s wife, no. I meant, ‘Wonderful Tonight.’”
She’d forever be a big-city rather than a town or village person, and Lincoln wasn’t a city-city by Laurie’s reckoning, but she was thoroughly charmed by it. The Adam & Eve was a gable-roofed, white-bricked eighteenth-century tavern with low, exposed beams and that whiff of characterful mustiness that elderly ale houses always had.
In the lounge bar, a banner hung across a buffet table of sausage rolls, Scotch eggs, and crisps, declared HAPPY 65TH, ERIC!!!!
Jamie was immediately claimed by the mostly pensionable-age throng, people declaring “Last time I saw you, you were that high!”—gesturing a diminutive height with an open palm—discussing bike rides, the whereabouts of long-lost friends, asking where he worked now.
Nevertheless, Jamie barely left her side, his hand often lightly on her lower back, fetching her a drink as soon as her glass was empty, making introductions. Laurie felt looked after. She was being better looked after by a pretend boyfriend than she had been by her real one. The dynamic with Dan at parties was that he was loud, drunk, and funny and she scooped him up at the end, when he’d be slurring how much he lubbed her.
As Laurie sipped her wine, she realized this was what had slipped away in the last few years with Dan—his seeing her. She became scenery, a prop. In the grim ordeal that was Tom and Pri’s wedding, perhaps what he hated about dancing to “Someone Like You” was that for three minutes, Laurie had a full claim on his attention.
Laurie wished she had this sort of family, she thought, as she saw Jamie’s dad call him over, dragging him to his side in a rough embrace in front of ruddy-faced men of a similar age, talking animatedly. Her soul ached somewhat. You could miss so much and not notice or mind, until the “here’s what you could’ve won” comparison was right in front of you.
Imagine a proud dad, who was there for you. The solidity of it.
“Hello! You must be Laurie? I’m Hattie!”
Laurie turned. A pale, plump girl with enormous eyes, in a low-cut 1950s-style dress with fruit on it, smiled at her.
“Oh, you’re Jamie’s best friend!” Laurie shook her hand. She’d said the right thing, as Hattie lit up.
“Do you mind if I hang with you; virtually everyone here is someone who last saw me naked as a kid, apart from red wellies, playing in the sprinkler in Jamie’s garden.”
“Not at all. I don’t know anyone either. But thankfully absolutely no one here has seen me naked.”
“Apart from Jamie,” Hattie said.
“Ah, yeah.” Nice one, Laurie.
They were distracted by the banging of a fork on a glass and in a moment, Jamie was back by Laurie’s side, pausing to give Hattie a kiss on the cheek and a hug.
Maybe it was the emotion or the sauvignon blanc, but Laurie sensed Jamie had moved back to be near her for the speech, not for appearances’ sake, but as she alone here knew he found it hard.
She slid her arm around Jamie supportively, without pausing to think if this was a trifle gropey. They were somewhat off the map, in terms of what was and wasn’t appropriate contact. She noticed she’d never once feared Jamie taking advantage of that. He might have nihilistic views on monogamy but he was no letch or, so far, opportunist.
Jamie moved her arm away from his body and for a heart-stopping moment, Laurie thought he was rejecting the gesture. Instead, he swung her around to directly in front of him, and linked his arms around her waist, the stance beloved of annoyingly touchy-feely couples at gigs. She put her hands over his.
This felt . . . good. Surprisingly good. Laurie hadn’t realized how much she missed being held close like this.
“Thank you for coming here tonight everyone. Sixty-five, how did that happen! Maurice and Ken here will confirm it when I say that we were at school ten years ago, so there’s been some awful accounting error.” He paused. “I don’t want to drone on self-importantly and this is keeping you from the buffet and the bar, so merely a quick thank-you for being here. You don’t know what it means to me, especially tonight. You get to an age in life where what really matters becomes obvious. And it’s family and friends. Look after each other, be kind to each other. I can’t abide old bore pub philosophers who think age confers wisdom upon them, I’m sure there are twenty-year-olds here who are wiser than me . . .”
“My son isn’t!” shouted a voice, and everyone laughed.
“But there’s something about getting to the final furlong that allows you to see clearly what mattered, and what didn’t.”
Laurie squeezed Jamie’s hands. He gripped hers more tightly in response.
“Money didn’t matter. Promotions didn’t matter. Feuds and competitions and arguments, they didn’t matter. Being soundly beaten at golf . . . OK, that still matters”—loud whoops from the golf contingent—“but I tell you what I know for sure. You all matter, very much. Time with the ones you love. That’s all that matters.”
Applause.
“With the power vested in me as the birthday boy, I now declare the buffet open,” Eric concluded. More applause.
She and Jamie disentangled to join in, and once the clapping subsided, Hattie grabbed a paper plate and announced she was going to hammer the egg sandwiches. The stampede for the de-cling-filmed food pushed Jamie and Laurie into a corner.
They looked at each other expectantly, both waiting for the other to speak, but neither did. Laurie felt her stomach do a slow lazy flop forward as looking at each other turned into Looking at Each Other. Their being tactile, it had affected her. She couldn’t stop staring at Jamie’s mouth. He was gazing at her equally intently and she thought, Are we . . . going to kiss . . . ?
Their heads moved closer. Her hands were on his lower arms and he moved them around her waist. Oh God, this was genuinely on. There was no other reason for them to be entangled, this was explicit.
Laurie didn’t know what this meant, or why she suddenly wanted to do it, she only knew she wanted to kiss him badly. She even felt an anticipatory throb, somewhere in the region of her
groin. She didn’t expect lust to make a surprise reappearance in her life, so soon.
For fuck’s sake, she was meant to be immune to him! She was Penn & Tellering his act, remember? Yeah, yeah, said her libido, emerging from its long winter. Laurie didn’t know what status they would have, on the other side of the kiss.
“Are you Eric’s son?” said a somewhat booze-amplified, mature female voice right by them, causing them to abruptly step back.
“Uhm, yeah?” said Jamie, turning to the short woman who looked like a Tory peer, in the huge pearl choker necklace.
“You must be the new girlfriend.”
“Laurie,” Laurie affirmed.
“You can’t keep your hands off her, can you?” she said to Jamie, nudging him, and both Laurie and Jamie laughed awkwardly, and could no longer meet each other’s eyes at all.
28
As the party entered its last gasp, Hattie was a port in a storm for Laurie, and possibly vice versa. As Jamie did farewells that involved working the room for an hour, Hattie had pulled chairs together and fetched Laurie a nightcap of a very sticky plum-flavored vodka.
She’d known Jamie since childhood when their parents lived next door to each other. She worked at the university, putting its magazine together. Her husband Padraig was home with their two-year-old, Roger.
“I know—Roger,” she said, though Laurie had hoped her reaction was neutral positive. “I was on the gas and air when Padraig got me to agree to it, it was his favorite uncle’s name, he died eating poisonous mushrooms. I’ve warmed to it. Poor little bastard, hope he’s OK at school. And never goes mushroom foraging.”
She was disarming, unpretentious, and humorous, and Laurie really took to her.
“You’re nothing like I expected,” Hattie said, and Hattie wasn’t like anyone Laurie would have pegged as a Jamie Carter BFF either, expecting someone flashier, more conspicuous. Not someone who’d stayed in their childhood town, content with her lot.
She’d not believed Jamie about not adversely judging other choices to his own, and yet Laurie was forced to admit here was a powerful corroboration.
And it was obvious they were honest-to-goodness best mates, from the sibling-like shorthand between them and Hattie’s casually worn and yet contemporaneous knowledge of the inner workings of Salter’s.
“Oh, why’s that?” Laurie said, thinking, (1) black, (2) too old, (3) not glamorous enough.
Hattie slopped her drink from side to side. “Don’t be offended, as I’m clearly saying you’re not like this, but I expected a trophy girl who’d spend the night studying her gel manicure and messaging her friends about how basic we all were. The sort who posts those Boomerangs of clinking flutes with her Mean Girls.”
Hattie mimed a repetitive backward-and-forward motion with her glass and a strained Miss World full-teeth smile, and Laurie hooted.
“Haha! I’m not a trophy, agreed.” Laurie grinned.
“No, you are. But one with real value. I thought Mrs. Jamie would be a princessy madam, that’s all.”
“Is that because you think Jamie is a princessy madam?” Laurie said, but with a conspiratorial smile to make it clear she wasn’t laying traps.
“Hah! Nooo, well, he has that side to him, for sure,” Hattie said, and Laurie could see by how slow her blinking was and the slight fuzz of the edges of her speech, that she was considerably drunker than Laurie. She would probably cringe at having said this in the morning. “He’s always had this other, much better side to him. More serious, more reserved. Almost fiercely moral, actually. You fit with that.”
“Has he not brought girlfriends home before?”
Hattie looked gobsmacked. “He’s not told you this? No, never. To the point where Eric and Mary were told he must be a comfort to his mother, lifelong bachelor, if you know what I mean. No. That’s why I couldn’t believe my eyes when he was posting photos with you. I mean, that is like posting wedding banns, for Jamie.”
“Wow!” Laurie said fraudulently, thinking Hattie must have heard his views on settling down, but was tactfully skirting around them with his new love.
“He was terrified of commitment,” Hattie said. “But clearly he’s got over it.”
“Ah well. I’m not . . . you know. Putting too much pressure on it.”
“But you’re in love with him, right?”
“Uhm . . . yes.”
“He’s madly in love with you. I can see it in the way he looks at you, the way he’s so affectionate with you. I’ve never seen him like this before. He’s transformed.”
Laurie grit-smiled, frowned, and necked the rest of her vodka in one.
“I fell in love with him when we were twelve, you know,” Hattie said. “Then right through our teenage years.”
Laurie thought, Hoo boy. She’s wrecked. She might not even remember saying this. “Really?!”
“Yeah. Nothing ever happened, I should say”—Hattie waved a hand emphatically—“or we’d not be such good mates now. But, yeah, I was in love, and he let me down gently. He could’ve so easily exploited it, and he didn’t. That is the side of himself he keeps under wraps. When you’re his friend, he will go to the ends of the earth for you, and he won’t tolerate anyone being damaging toward you. Whatsoever.”
“Right.”
“Maybe that’s why he doesn’t make many friends—looking after people that much is a burden.”
Laurie nodded. So, she’d been right, earlier, when she saw worry flit across Jamie’s face. He didn’t want there to be any obligations after this was finished. This was strictly business, not pleasure, however intimate it might feel at times.
“And,” Hattie continued, “of course, you know what happened with his bro—”
Jamie approached them.
“I like her, can we keep her?” Hattie said, grabbing Laurie and planting a sloppy vodka kiss on her cheek.
“Uh-oh. Have you been dropping me in it, as per Hats?”
“Would I.”
He ruffled her hair.
“In a strange inversion, I’m done in and having to drag my parents home,” Jamie said. “Would you be up for heading back together?”
Laurie agreed readily; she didn’t have another drink in her. Jamie had stayed away from her for the last forty-five minutes and Laurie understood why, and was grateful. The previous tension needed to dissipate.
“It was so good to meet you,” Hattie said, encircling her waist, smushing her face into Laurie and kissing Laurie’s left breast, having evidently missed her intended target of “slightly above her left breast.” “I can tell you and I are going to be huge friends. I’m slightly psychic in that respect.”
“You and my hairdresser both.”
“Really? What did she predict that came true?” Hattie said, peering through the one eye she could still open.
“. . . Ah.” Laurie regretted this remark now. “Nothing yet.”
“Hattie is similarly unencumbered by a track record of success,” Jamie interjected.
“I told you, it’s feelings, sensations. Maybe, visions! Like, I can see you and Laurie with a toddler. A boy! Bringing him back here to visit. It’s cold weather, he’s in a coat . . .”
Laurie swallowed hard.
“All right, enough from mystic you,” Jamie said briskly. “I can see a vision of you with a hangover tomorrow, how’s that?”
29
“Your speech was really nice,” Laurie said to Jamie’s dad, as they sat with nightcap whiskies in the overstuffed, homely front room with the wood-burning fire, then winced at the cutesome inadequacy of “nice.”
“Thank you, Laurie. It was from the heart.”
“When are you going to tell them all?” Jamie’s mum asked him. This was the first time the cancer had been directly mentioned in front of Laurie.
“I might not,” Eric said, sinking back into his chair. “Let them read the news in the obit column of the Lincolnshire Echo and say: ‘That sneaky bastard!’”
“That’s not fair
on me—they’ll be pestering me for the story for weeks on end,” Mary said. “It’ll take me an hour to make it across Co-op when I need a loaf of bread.”
“Yeah, you have to think of Mum here,” Jamie said.
“Oh God, even when you’re dying you don’t get out of the to-do list—Laurie, can you believe it!” Eric said. Laurie smiled and wished her heart didn’t feel so waterlogged that she found it difficult to match his lightness and be who they needed. She didn’t want Eric to go. The world could do with more Erics and fewer of other people.
“Ahhhh, it was good to see everyone, though. Mary, can you believe the size of Ronald Turner! Like a sea lion!”
There was some discussion about the unexpected obesity of Eric’s former boss, and then Eric said, “He’s an avid churchgoer, Ron. I wish I had faith. I wish I thought I was going to see Joe again.”
He glanced up at a photo on the cabinets to their right that Laurie hadn’t noticed until now, a barrel-bellied kid Jamie next to an older brother with a broad toothy grin, both in gray V-neck school sweaters and ties.
Eric raised his glass to it in a toast, and Laurie found herself desperately swallowing over and over to stop herself starting to cry. She didn’t look at Jamie or Mary.
A tear rolled down Eric’s cheek and Laurie felt shocked, despite herself, as she thought by now the Carters weren’t going to do conventional sadness. Jamie’s mum poured herself more whisky and Jamie put his hand on his dad’s arm and nobody spoke for a moment, because nobody could.
“Maybe I should join that religion that Tom Cruise is in—what is it, Scientology?”
“I don’t think there’s a Scientology church in Lincoln, Dad,” Jamie said. “You might have a Wagamama, but don’t get ahead of yourself.”
“It was a delight to have you there, tonight, Laurie,” Eric said, turning to her. “We’re very proud our son has convinced such an impressive woman to be by his side. I mean at this point we were so desperate to meet a girlfriend we’d have made our peace with Ann Widdecombe, but you’re really something special.”
If I Never Met You Page 21
