‘I’m glad.’ She beamed. ‘What’s your first treasured thing?’ she asked buoyantly, changing the pace and tone of their conversation.
‘Agh, I never tell that on a first date.’ He lifted the sheet over the bottom of his face and batted his eyelashes, feigning coy.
Meg swung her legs from the side of the bed, taking in the spacious room. It was dominated by the grey metal window frame and its metal blinds, which had been raised to reveal the sprawl of New York below. The bed was a large wooden frame on the floor. There was very little furniture, bar a tall, slightly battered red metal locker unit standing against an exposed brick wall, with cubbyholes and numbered cupboard doors. It looked like it would be more at home in a stinky changing room. And there was a clear Perspex console table on which someone had neatly lined up bottles of aftershave and hair oil. Above the unit on the wall hung a huge flatscreen TV.
She wandered to the window in a bit of a daze. Closing her eyes, she exhaled, hating this morning-after feeling. She wasn’t used to it. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor. She gave a long, loud, open-mouthed yawn and jabbed with her index finger as she mined the corner of her eye to remove the sleepy dust, coloured black with eyeliner. She was fastidious about removing her make-up before falling asleep and wasn’t used to the sticky feeling of her lashes. She was certain she looked like Chi Chi the panda.
Leaning against the wall, she peered through the window as she ran her fingers through her thick, wavy hair, twisting it into a bun, from which it instantly unwound to hang down her back in a shiny blonde curtain. The view was semi-industrial. Immediately opposite sat a square red-brick warehouse with worn writing on the side in a three-dimensional font: ‘Mortimer Inc., Import and Export’. Meg was drawn to the bottle-green fire escapes that criss-crossed the building like laces. To the left was a more modern block, obviously converted from the original warehouse into apartments as many of the windows boasted window boxes and all manner of curtains, blinds and shades. Meg turned her head left and right: in every direction she could see nothing but rooftops and reflections, with a small bend of blue water in the distance between two buildings, and the city skyline stretching all the way to the horizon. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.
‘We’re on East 12th, Greenwich Village.’
‘Oh, sounds interesting!’ She smiled.
‘It’s very upscale.’ He raised his eyebrows.
‘Blimey. Better be on my best behaviour then.’ She stood upright and gripped the window frame. Any position other than horizontal when your blood was still one-third alcohol was not a good idea. The last thing she wanted was to be sick in this gorgeous man’s apartment.
‘Can I get you some coffee?’ The proximity of his voice made her jump. Edd leant on the doorframe in his tartan PJ bottoms and slipped his arms into a top with a black and white image of a smiling young man on the front. Meg stared at his T-shirt. Edd looked down and smiled, pointing at the toothy grinning face. ‘This is Yogi Berra.’
‘Let me guess, he played baseball?’ She folded her arms.
Edd shook his head. ‘No. He is baseball.’
Meg smiled. ‘I see. Coffee would be great, thank you.’
She watched as he padded out of the room. Even at this early hour and after a night of drinking and little sleep, he still looked wonderful. His thick hair flopped and curled effortlessly in a way that imitators would take hours to perfect. His skin was tawny and blemish-free and his twenty-four-hour stubble only highlighted his white teeth and full, pouty lips. She felt her muscles tense as she looked at her own flat chest, bony feet and mottled legs, which today had taken on a rather bluish tinge. Without the benefit of her wine goggles, she realised that she had been punching above her weight the day before. Sucking in her slightly pouchy mummy tummy and trying to curb her embarrassment, she ventured from the bedroom.
The rest of the apartment was surprisingly small, tiny in fact. The bedroom was by far the biggest space. Edd’s taste and style were also apparent in the open-plan sitting cum dining room: more exposed brick walls, wacky industrial lighting and a slick grey glossy kitchen area in the corner. Meg glanced at the oversized chrome clock. It was 7 a.m.
‘Is this going to be weird today, working together after…?’ She ran out of words, as she wasn’t sure quite what ‘this’ was. What she did know was that she was heading back to London tomorrow and this was just a little fling, a diversion.
Edd was at the sink, inserting a stainless steel tube of water into a complicated, industrial-looking coffee machine, the only appliance on the work surface in the immaculate kitchen.
He turned towards her and shook his head. ‘No, not at all. It’s only as weird as we make it. We are just friends, right? New friends, admittedly, who simply had a couple of drinks and fell asleep.’
‘Do you do second base with all your friends?’ she asked from behind lowered lids.
Edd laughed loudly. ‘You don’t “do” second base, you “go to” second base.’
‘Sorry. Do you go to second base with all your friends?’ She twisted her legs together and leant on the counter top.
‘No! No, I don’t. Most of them are too stubbly and have beer bellies.’ He laughed as he collected two plain white china mugs from a cupboard and placed them in front of the coffee machine.
‘Just checking.’ She smiled.
‘God, we drank a lot yesterday, but I think it was probably justified. Things like that don’t happen every day, thank God. It was a shock, right?’
‘Poor Mr Redlitch.’ Meg felt a flush of guilt that she hadn’t thought about him until that point.
‘I know. Poor guy.’ He sighed. ‘I never ever drink during the week, it’s my rule.’ Edd grinned at her over his shoulder.
‘I hardly drink at all, weekday or not. I’m practically teetotal,’ Meg countered as she toyed with her hair. But I like drinking with you… And I did it because I wanted you to like me, wanted to be like every other girl who might have caught your eye. I wanted you to think I was cosmopolitan and outgoing and not scared. Lonely and scared.
‘Teetotal?’ Edd threw his head back and guffawed. ‘That’s funny. For a teetotaller you did pretty good. You must be like those vegetarians who give up meat at sixteen but continue to eat bacon, then eventually progress to chicken so that by the time they hit twenty they are ripping the leg off every cow that passes and slapping it in a bun. They think they’ve been embracing a vegetarian lifestyle when really they’ve simply been denying themselves what they crave.’ His eyes twinkled at her. ‘I think you are like that.’
She laughed. ‘I am so not like that!’
‘You were so like that last night. At one point I held up my hands – no more! And while I was in the bathroom you ordered Flaming Russians, two each!’
‘I don’t even know what a Flaming Russian is!’ Meg covered her eyes with her hands, cringing. ‘You must think I’m terrible.’
‘I do. I really do.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘I think you are one of the most terrible human beings I have ever met.’ He stared at her, his expression suggesting the exact opposite.
The delicious smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted from the machine and filled the apartment. Edd poured generous amounts into the waiting mugs and walked over to the firm, pale silver sofa in the middle of the room. Meg followed him.
‘Nice cushions!’ She pulled one of the mauve pillows from the sofa and admired the floral sequin design. ‘Very fancy-pants!’
‘I hate them. Unnecessary sofa ornaments. They spend more time on the floor when I’m home—’ Edd checked himself and shook his head as he plumped down on the sofa. They sat sideways, facing each other, without any of the awkwardness that might have followed, being that they were new friends who were only half dressed.
‘How long have you worked for Plum’s?’ he asked, cupping his coffee mug under his chin in a way that she found very attractive.
‘Four years.’ Meg sipped the restorative brew. ‘I lived with Milly and her cou
sin Pru first. I was going through a particularly rough patch and they really helped me out. And now I work for them.’
Meg wasn’t sure how much to share. It was hard to explain that as well as being her employers they were the closest thing to family that Meg had – well, reliable family. The only exception being her cousin Liam, who ran a car dealership in Lewisham that only just operated on the right side of the law. Milly had been there for Lucas’s birth and had earned a special place in her son’s heart as well as in her own. Having left school at sixteen without qualifications or a clue as to where her future lay, Meg never, ever took her very good fortune for granted.
She took a deep breath and mentally rehearsed how to tell Edd that her non-working hours were filled with Lucas, her heart, her anchor and her greatest joy.
‘I have a son,’ she blurted, a little louder and more bluntly than she intended, but there it was, out in the open.
‘You do?’ His eyes widened.
Meg nodded, unable to tell from his tone if he was shocked, disapproving or not that fussed.
‘How old?’ He tilted his head as though interested.
‘He’s four. He’s called Lucas.’
‘Lucas,’ Edd repeated. He sipped his coffee, keeping his eyes on Meg’s face. ‘Where is Lucas’s dad?’
‘His dad was Bill, my fiancé who died.’ Meg wriggled further into the sofa.
Edd lowered his cup. ‘Oh right! Sorry, Megan. That’s unimaginable. You must be a very strong woman to have coped.’
‘I don’t think I’m strong. Life has always just kind of happened to me without too much planning. My childhood wasn’t always easy and I learnt not to think much beyond the next day. And then I met Bill. And everything changed.’ She sighed. ‘Like seahorses, I didn’t know that someone like him could exist. He was Captain William Fellsley, an army officer who didn’t speak or act like anyone I’d ever known. He was smart and ambitious, but the most remarkable thing about Bill was that he loved me. Me! Of all the posh girls he could have picked, he chose me. I figured that if someone like that had picked me, then I must be valuable and special and once I realised that, I began living in the real world and not just existing with my nose pressed up against it.’
‘He sounds like a good guy. Losing him must have been awful.’ Edd raised his hand and let it fall at the understatement.
Meg nodded. ‘It was awful, but not for the reasons you might think. I found out some stuff after he’d gone that changed things.’ Meg toyed with the hem of the Yankees shirt. ‘He was seeing someone else, stringing us both along and, well, who knows what would have happened had he lived.’
Edd reached out and placed his hand on her thigh. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that, Megan. All of it.’
‘No one calls me Megan any more. It’s Meg. If someone calls me Megan, I always think I’m in trouble or am being asked to fill out a form.’
‘Meg,’ he repeated.
‘Bill, that’s Lucas’s dad, had a friend called Piers. I saw him for a while. Couple of years actually.’ She pictured his kindly face. ‘He was lovely in some ways, but not for me. A bit too proper, always worried about what other people might think and a bit too connected to Bill for me to ever feel comfortable. He’s old before his time—’ She bit her lip. ‘That sounds mean and I don’t want it to.’
‘Old how?’ Edd chuckled. ‘Did he talk about the old days and smoke a pipe?’
‘No!’ She laughed. ‘But he did wear an old Barbour that might have belonged to his grandpa.’
‘Ah. Not a young man of fashion like my good self.’ He grinned.
Meg shook her head and thought about Piers’ frequent mentions of Bill and their mutual friends, their shared experiences. How he would continually ask, ‘How are you doing?’, assuming a doleful expression as he did so.
‘He made it hard for me to move on. So I moved on from him instead. I think I used him as a bit of a safety blanket, if I’m being honest. It was more like a habit, without any real emotion.’ She paused. ‘I’m not proud of that.’ This was the first time she had said this out loud to anyone other than Milly. ‘And I only admitted to myself quite recently that he wanted me to be someone that I wasn’t.’
‘Well, hey, we all know that story.’ Edd ran his fingers through his hair and stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossing his feet at the ankles. He rested his mug on his chest. ‘It’s the same for me, with Flavia. We met through a mutual friend and on paper she was brilliant. She’s a great girl, but there was no spark that makes you…’ Edd hesitated. ‘I don’t know how you describe it.’
‘She didn’t knock your socks off?’ Meg offered.
Edd turned to face her, remembering her words at the top of the Empire State Building. ‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘She never did.’
Meg looked at the fine straight line of his nose and mouth and placed her palm over the back of his hand, which still rested on her thigh. She wondered what he saw as he stared at her, feeling the wave of warmth rise within her from their point of contact. She wanted him to see her as a sexy, available partner and not how she often felt on the inside, a knackered working single mum who was trying very hard to have it all.
She pulled the sequined cushion from the side of the sofa and held it into her chest.
‘I’m not very confident, Edd. I’m a bit bruised,’ she whispered.
‘I think we all are in one way or another.’ He looked at the floor. Easier to have this conversation with his eyes averted.
‘Do you think I’m sexy?’ she whispered. ‘I just wondered.’ Instantly she regretted the question; her nerves caused her to ramble. ‘You don’t have to answer. I only ask because sometimes I’m so focused on being a mum and getting things done for Plum’s that I don’t know what I’ve become. I don’t know if anyone will ever find me attractive. I have the chest of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wish I had boobs…’ Meg felt her cheeks flush at the admission.
Edd spluttered on his coffee, laughing and choking simultaneously. ‘That’s funny! And for your information, I was once a fourteen-year-old boy and my chest wasn’t anything like that. If it had been, I’d never have left the house.’ Edd looked at her shyly. The bolshie, flirty man from the Greenwich Avenue Deli had disappeared behind his coffee cup. ‘And in answer to your question – of course.’
‘Of course what?’
‘You are very sexy. I love the way you look, and your little cockney voice. Any man that cheated on you would want his head examined.’
They both laughed. She stared at him as her eyes misted slightly. ‘I’ve never thought being a cockney was a sexy thing.’
‘Well it is, trust me.’ Edd placed his coffee cup on the floor and removed hers from her grasp. He threw the cushions to the ground and took her hand in his, pulling her into an upright position.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked, with one eye on the clock.
‘We are going back to bed and we are going to make things a whole lot weirder.’
He kissed her hard on the mouth. Meg knotted her hands behind his neck as they moved towards the bedroom, trying desperately to ignore the nerves that fizzed in her stomach. She hoped she was going to be all Edd wanted and more.
7
Meg looped by the Inn on 11th on her way to work. Having showered, retouched her make-up and changed into her black wool minidress, over-the-knee black boots and thick woolly tights, she felt ready to face the day. She had a spring in her step and a grin on her face.
She’d ignored Elene’s subtle line of questioning – ‘Is that you coming in or going out, Meg?’ – her eyes bright with interest. And she’d resisted the temptation to respond with, ‘Oh, coming in, actually. I got so sloshed last night that I slept in a strange man’s bed and then slept with him this morning. We had a lovely time, went to fifth base, which was great and apparently further than Jennifer Molowski let anyone go, even on Prom night.’ Instead, she managed to deflect the question with a burst of unnatural laughter and by babblin
g about the cold weather and plans for Christmas before smiling sweetly and returning her key to the disinterested Salvatore. He hung it on the rack where it had spent the night.
Meg was pleased to see that Plum Patisserie on Bleecker Street was a hive of activity. Nancy, Mr Redlitch’s daughter, had left a message asking Meg to come up and see her. As she trod the stairs to the apartments above, she felt even more like an intruder than she had the day before. She slowly approached Mr Redlitch’s front door, which she found ajar, knocked on it and entered. Trying not to stare at the spot where his body had lain only twenty-four hours earlier, she stepped around the space, taking in the detail of his apartment.
A pair of ruby-red velvet slippers with the backs trodden down sat neatly aligned by the wall. In the sitting room, thick-lensed spectacles perched on top of a haphazard pile of newspapers and magazines. The papers rested on a stool by the side of an olive green couch, which had a couple of lace antimacassars. A wood-veneer side table was crammed with medicine bottles, blister packs of pills in various colours and pots of ointment. The sight of these personal items that were now ownerless caused a lump to rise in Meg’s throat. She thought how sad it was that, following a death, things of use and value were quickly relegated to thrift-shop fodder.
The heavy, dusty curtains had been pulled back and the windows opened to let in the daylight and the cold December air. A framed black and white photograph sat on a dresser. It was of a young couple beaming into the shutter from a sunny dockside, she was wearing net petticoats, he was in a shoestring tie and Brylcreem. She studied the picture, focusing on the young man’s hand clamped around the tiny belted waist of his girl. She tried not to think about the hand it had become, lying limply on the sticky linoleum in the cold dark room, unnoticed for a fortnight.
Nancy was a heavy-set woman in a neon floral blouse; Meg counted seven rings on her tanned fingers. She had settled herself in the corner of her father’s sitting room and was sniffing into a soggy square of kitchen roll while her big-haired friend made tea, noisily, in the cramped kitchen. She seemed glad to have someone to talk to, even if that someone was a stranger like Meg. Despite her obvious grief, she was gracious and kind, saying immediately that of course the contractors could have access to her dad’s apartment later in the day.
Christmas for One: No Greater Love Page 8
