by Karen Swan
They turned left off Newton Lane and right into Egypt Lane. She had only a few minutes more with them now, minutes that insisted upon racing past her, though she tried to catch them with desperate fingers.
She turned back to look at Ella and Finn, both dozing in their seats in the back, worn out from another day that had started at 6 a.m. – before Ted and she had even tried to sleep. They’d gone for a walk through the woods (Ted pinning her behind trees every time the children briefly ran ahead), had lunch at a farm and spent the afternoon on the boat, sailing round the coastline and showing Ro their favourite bays. She’d photographed it all, but for once, she didn’t need the camera to make it real. Every memory had made an impression in her heart.
They rolled up outside the house, so slowly the engine could scarcely turn over, and she knew he didn’t want to be here yet either. She looked down at their hands, intertwined since the children had fallen asleep. She felt his eyes on her again and she looked up at him, her heart contracting with pain that he was leaving her, leaving here and driving ninety miles away for another week . . . when she only had three left.
He kissed her, crushing her lips against his with the same desperation she felt, making the tears fall from her eyes till the saltiness touched his tongue. He pulled back, gazing at her, and she didn’t care if Hump could see them from the window, or Bobbi, or anyone.
‘I should go,’ she whispered, her hands over his on her cheek, her eyes refilling with the words she couldn’t quite say.
He nodded reluctantly, Ella stirring lightly in the back as the car’s new stillness lightened her sleep. She got out, retrieving her camera bag from the boot as quietly as she could.
‘Ro,’ Ted said, jumping out without even opening the door, pushing a piece of paper into her hand. ‘My number. Look, I’m talking to Julianne as soon as I get back. There’s no turning back, not for me.’ He squeezed her hand in his. ‘But I know it’s not as straightforward for you.’ He swallowed as he looked at her. ‘It’s your decision.’
She nodded, knowing what he was saying. She had to decide this, choose their future.
He dropped her hand from his gently, and she watched as he walked back round the car. He turned to her. ‘Ro? For what it’s worth, we’re serious about you too . . . Exceptionally so.’
‘Hello, stranger!’ Hump called, leaping up the studio steps in one bound and landing like a gymnast – arms outstretched – just inside the doorway.
‘Morning, Hump.’ Ro raised an unimpressed eyebrow, her hands wrapped round her favourite red KitKat mug, trying (and failing) to get her day started. ‘Why are you here so early?’
‘Thought I’d better just check you actually were alive, given that none of us saw you all weekend. Figured if you weren’t here, I’d better call the authorities.’ He winked.
‘I got my facts wrong. It was a weekend trip.’
‘You don’t say,’ Hump drawled, eyes shining delightedly.
Ro gave nothing back. After Ted had driven away, she had walked through the door, through the empty house (everyone still clearly at the beach) and had fallen straight into bed, where she had slept solidly for fourteen hours.
‘Bobbi’s pissed she hardly saw you.’
‘Yeah?’ She sighed. ‘I’ll make it up to her next weekend.’
Would she, though? When Ted had said he was serious, what had he meant? Did he expect her to break up with Matt? How could they make such massive life decisions on the strength of one night?
Hump stared at her for a moment, taking in her lacklustre demeanour and lack of eye contact. She wasn’t in the mood for teasing. He walked over, putting a hand on her shoulder. ‘You OK, Ro?’
‘Yup.’ She slurped her tea noisily, trying to make him back off. She couldn’t cope with kindness right now – didn’t deserve it. ‘Tell me about your weekend. What did you and Bobbi get up to?’
He jumped up on the counter, resting his feet on the wall behind her. ‘Just the usual – bumming on the beach, drinks at the Surf Lodge.’
‘Anyone good playing?’
He shrugged. ‘Don’t really remember.’
‘How did Bobbi seem?’
‘Bit better. Brighter.’
‘I don’t suppose Greg showed?’
‘No, although he’s down next weekend apparently. Competing in the Classic – why am I not surprised?’
‘The classic what?’ Ro noticed one of the portraits on the wall was hanging at a slight angle. She got up and slapped his legs down so that she could walk round the counter to straighten it.
‘It’s a showjumping thing in Bridgehampton. Very smart. About as Gatsby as it gets.’
‘Oh.’ She tilted the portrait and stepped back to appraise it.
‘Up a bit on the bottom left,’ Hump said, squinting.
‘Any idea how Greg’s been doing – apart from working himself to death?’
‘Nup.’
‘It worries me that he’s just holding it all in like this. He was wrecked that night. He seemed so self-destructive.’
‘I know. The old Greg.’
The Skype on her laptop began ringing and she turned, frowning. It couldn’t be Matt – he never called at this time. He was usually on the road by 7 a.m., as the group did most of their trekking early morning and late in the evening to avoid the high temperatures and humidity.
‘Who is it?’ she asked, wandering over.
Hump grinned back at her. ‘Luvvaboy! You know we’ve never met?’ he said, reaching over and pressing ‘connect’.
‘Wai—’
‘Yo, Matt! Good to meet you at last. I’m Hump.’
‘Hey, Hump. Ro’s told me lots about you.’ Matt grinned in surprise. ‘How’s it going over there?’
‘Well, I’ll be honest, I may never give your girlfriend back. That marmalade she makes? I’m hooked! We all are.’
‘It’s the only reason we’re together,’ Matt quipped.
‘And she’s got us all drinking tea with tea in it. Go figure,’ Hump guffawed. ‘So how’s your trip, dude? It sounds pretty rad.’
‘We’re trekking to Angkor Wat now, which is, like, the highlight of the entire expedition. Seriously, you ever been to the Far East? Everyone should come here once in their lives. The things I’ve seen, the people I’ve met . . .’ He gave a whistle. ‘So pleased I did it.’
‘So lucky Ro let you do it! Most chicks I know . . .’ Hump shook his head.
Matt laughed again. ‘Yeah, I know!’
The screen flickered between them. ‘Hey, the connection’s not too hot. You wanna speak to Ro? She’s right h—’ Hump stalled, looking around the empty studio. ‘Oh shit, yeah,’ he said slowly, turning back to the screen. ‘She ran out the door just before you rang. Doing another shoot.’
‘Oh. Right . . . So it sounds like work’s taken off for her there.’
‘Oh, man, yeah.’ Hump nodded. ‘She’s, like . . . swamped.’
‘Well, would you tell her I called?’
‘Sure! Course I will.’
‘Great. Well, listen . . .’ Matt’s voice sounded strained. ‘Good to meet you, Hump.’
‘Yeah, you too, buddy.’
‘And, uh . . . thanks for looking after her for me.’
‘Hey, it’s easy to, man. We all love her.’
‘See ya.’
Hump nodded, smiling inanely until the screen went black, then throwing himself out along the counter and looking down on the other side.
Ro was curled up in a ball on the floor, sobbing.
‘Hey, hey, baby, what’s wrong?’ Hump hushed, jumping down beside her, his arm pulling her into him.
‘You were r-right – about everything,’ she hiccupped. ‘I-I’ve messed up, Hump. Really, really badly.’
His eyes tracked her face slowly, concern written all over his. ‘Ted, right?’
She nodded, grateful he hadn’t called him Long Story – even though it was. The longest.
‘You really didn’t see it coming, huh?’
She blinked up at him, hiccupping wildly, her brown eyes splashy and wide. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘It seems to me the doing is already done. Looks like now you’ve got a decision to make.’
‘But how can I possibly choose? I mean, Matt was the only man I’d ever been with. I hardly remember a time when I wasn’t with him. It never crossed my mind he wouldn’t be the one I’d grow old with.’
‘Life throws curve balls all the time, Ro, and it’s pitched a corker straight at you. You need to look at who you are now – not who you were when you met him. You’ve got to be honest with yourself – is Matt still what you need? Do you make each other happy?’
‘Yes! I mean, I . . . I thought we did! I thought we had everything until this . . . this fucking pause happened.’ She gripped her fingers in her hair, her face scrunched up with pain. ‘Oh God! We’re supposed to be getting engaged within the month. How could I have done this? How could I have endangered everything I know for one . . . one . . .’ Her voice trailed off, the sobs stopping in her throat. Because it hadn’t been just one night, any night. Even if it had all been lies and she never saw him again, it had been the night that changed her life. And it had been worth risking everything.
Hump gave her a squeeze as he felt her fall still, truth gradually dawning like a sunrise.
She dropped her head slowly on his shoulder. ‘I don’t understand how you . . . you can be so wise. I must be mad to listen to you. It’s like getting knitting advice from Bobbi.’
‘Huh?’ He looked baffled by her usual confused analogy.
‘Oh, you know what I mean! You’re such a dreadful tart, Hump. I mean, really, what do you know about committing to a relationship and the sacrifices you have to make?’
‘More than you might think,’ he said quietly, pulling his knees up and resting his arms on them.
‘Hump, I’m sorry – that was a shitty thing to say.’ She pulled away to look at him. ‘I didn’t mean—’
‘Hey, yeah. I know, I know – you said it with love.’
They both managed a smile, one of the mantras of the summer.
‘We’ve all been living with Bobbi too long,’ she mumbled.
He jogged her body with his and they sat together in silence, both lost in their own heads, something beginning to swirl around in hers, a red petal in white confetti drawing the mind’s eye.
‘Hump,’ she said after a while, her voice quiet and thoughtful.
‘Mmm?’
‘You said “curve balls”.’
He looked down at her. ‘What about ’em?’
She stared back at him, thinking of his enormous capacity to love and heal others. It didn’t make sense, his behaviour – not just the jacking in of medicine but the carousel of women in and out of his bed. He liked women; he didn’t treat them badly or break their hearts. ‘What was your curve ball?’
He blinked and she saw a flash of it then, the sorrow streaking across his eyes like a firework in the November sky, leaving nothing but a sense of the splendour and beauty that had existed there for a few short moments. She shifted position to get a better look at him. She saw the denial rise in his features, but she shook her head, stopping it right there.
‘Greg and I were talking about you quitting medicine and he said to me, “You never can tell how people are going to react to a curve ball like that.” What’s “that”, Hump?’
Hump looked away, his jaw pushed forward like a brake, stopping him from pitching forward. He didn’t say anything for the longest time. And when he did . . .
‘My wife dying.’
Air rushed out of the room, stripping everything of pigment and tone, substance and weight, as she watched his head drop and his face collapse, the words making the fact true all over again.
Ro didn’t try to speak. Silence is the greatest kindness; she knew that herself. How often she’d longed for silence instead of sympathy in the weeks after her parents’ deaths, willing the kind-hearted to let compassion suffice. His were the words that mattered and her silence drew them to her.
‘Her name was Mei, and I knew she was supposed to be mine the second I laid eyes on her. She was teeny, half my size and –’ he rubbed his thumb over the pads of his fingers ‘– like velvet, her skin.’
Ro watched a fleck of dust whirling in a sunbeam past the doorway, gravity pulling it down before a thermal current tossed it high again.
‘We met at med school. She was the high flyer in the year, the one to beat, but I just knew she was the one to catch. God knows how I did it. I don’t know what made her notice me, but we got married at the end of our first-year rotations.’ He stared at the knuckles of his hands. ‘Everyone said we were too young, of course. Her family was freaking, but we just knew. It was no biggie. We knew.’
He was quiet for a long time again and she took his hand and clasped it in hers, warming it as he spoke.
‘And then, one day, she got this bite on the back of her hip. She didn’t notice when it happened, but she just kept rubbing it, and by the time she showed it to me, it was bad. She’d had an anaphylactic reaction to a spider bite. It was nasty but not . . . not dangerous. She was prescribed antibiotics, antihistamines and anti-inflammatories to deal with it. The usual.’
He rested his head in one palm, taking a breather.
‘Thing was, we’d got married just before our exams. We’d been pretty stressed and hadn’t taken a honeymoon, so we decided to go away for a long weekend and do it then. She was taking the contraceptive pill, but . . . you probably know that antibiotics can reduce its efficacy, right? I mean, everyone knows that.’
Ro nodded mutely, hoping this story wasn’t going where she thought it was.
His voice had become flat and strained. He shrugged at the bald truth of it. ‘She was worried about getting pregnant, so she stopped taking the antibiotics. There were three days left of a seven-day course, but she figured it had cleared up. It was only a spider bite.’
‘And she didn’t tell you she’d stopped the course?’
Hump shook his head. ‘First I knew of it was when she got a fever on the Sunday evening. She collapsed an hour later, went into a coma the next morning. And just never woke up.’ The last words were a rasp, only the husk of his voice left like an emptied honeycomb.
‘Oh, Hump,’ Ro whispered, her arm over his shoulder and holding him close.
‘And the simple fact is, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d just checked. That was all I had to do – check the bottle, check her hip.’
‘Hump, it wasn’t your fault. She was a doctor too. She knew the risks. She wouldn’t have wanted you to give up medicine because of it.’
He shook his head slowly, batting away her absolution. ‘Her death was absolutely preventable. A hundred per cent. She shouldn’t have died – it’s a travesty.’ He almost spat out the words. ‘Doctors hold beating hearts in the palms of their hands every day, but someone can still die from a spider bite?’ His hand clenched into a fist in front of him, his arms stretched out over his bent knees. ‘She was dying in front of me the whole time and I never even knew it.’
Ro remembered his excessive care of her burns a few weeks earlier, how over the top it had seemed at the time. ‘Hump, no,’ she whispered, horrified by the blame he bore. ‘It was not your fault.’
He looked across at her. ‘You know you remind me of her a bit. Not . . . not to look at. Her hair was darker and straight. But your manner, you know, kind of crazy sense of humour, kooky laugh.’
Ro had a kooky laugh? ‘Was she always falling over too?’
‘No, but she was always losing things.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Like, all the time. And, for all her cleverness, she could be totally ditzy. One time she bought this magnet thing that you stuck to the fridge and put your keys on it, so they didn’t get lost.’
‘Yes?’
He shrugged. ‘We had an integrated fridge, so it wasn’t magnetic. She still lost her keys.’
Ro laughed. ‘M
y kind of girl.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, she was a “once in a lifetime”.’
His head dropped again and Ro squeezed the back of his neck. ‘Hump, you’ll never forget her, obviously you won’t, but one day you will meet someone.’
He shook his head quickly. ‘Uh-uh, not me. I had the real deal. The best I’m going to hope for now is fun. Just fun.’
Ro thought she’d never heard ‘fun’ sound so bad. ‘But you’re seeing someone now, aren’t you? You don’t have to tell me about her, but she must be . . . different. You’ve not had any hook-ups for weeks.’
Hump glanced at her, deliberating. He took in her puffy eyes and mottled cheeks, the sadness in her own eyes. ‘Agh, it’s a whole load of crazy. Besides, there’s nothing to say.’ He stared at a knot in the floor. ‘Even if she was different, it can’t go anywhere.’
Still he wouldn’t confide. Ro bit her lip, not wanting to push. ‘I wish you’d told me about Mei sooner.’
‘I thought about it,’ he nodded. ‘Several times. But . . . how do you bring something like that up?’ He shrugged. ‘And anyway, you’ve had your own thing going on.’
Ro cringed. Compared to his, her problems seemed utterly trivial. In fact, compared to everyone, her problems seemed trivial. A pause? That was it? When she thought about what Florence and Greg and Bobbi had been through. And Hump now. And Ted – him most of all, the children . . .
‘He’s a widower too, Hump,’ she said quietly. ‘Marina died.’
Hump whipped round to face her, shocked.
She blinked back at him, her eyes instantly refilling with tears. ‘It’s the . . . it’s the saddest story I ever heard. And those poor babies . . . I couldn’t ever be enough. I couldn’t match up.’
‘That’s obviously not what Ted thinks. It’s plain as day on his face. I saw it the first time I clocked him watching you.’
‘But . . . all of it . . . it’s . . . it’s another woman’s life, her family, her husband. I can’t just step into her shoes and pick it up, like a second-hand dress.’ A fresh sob hiccupped out of her.
