by Lisa Jewell
Rodney took a step closer to her and shook his head.
“I don’t know what your dad was going through back then. I wasn’t there to know. But I suppose your dad, he just couldn’t deal with it. The little tiny grave. And he didn’t want you to know about it either. Out of sight, out of mind, you know . . .”
Lydia turned back to the grave and felt cold dread run through her. Her father, again, doing the wrong thing. Always doing the wrong thing. Every single time. How could he have left Thomas here, a small boy, alone and away from his mother? How could anyone ever have thought that was the right thing to do?
“I want to move him,” she said, turning again to face Rodney, her face set with sudden resolve. “I want to move Thomas close to our mum.”
Rodney puffed out his cheeks. “Well,” he began, “I’m not sure you’d be able to do that. They’re all prereserved, you know, prebooked decades in advance by the sort of people who don’t want to leave anything to chance. There’s no spare plots up there by your mother. All gone.”
“Well, can’t he go in with her? Share her plot?”
Rodney shrugged apologetically. “I can ask,” he offered.
Lydia nodded. “Good,” she said, “thank you. It’s horrible.” She shuddered. The morning air here in the cemetery was chilled and dewy and her head was heavy with too much wine and a late night. She and Rodney had sat up until three in the morning pulling apart the threads of their shared history. But still she’d awoken early and resolute, ready to come to this place and feel what she needed to feel in order to move on again.
They’d visited her mother first, her grave still scrubbed and tended by Rodney and by her mother’s brother. Then Lydia had stood for a moment over the grave of her father and tried to feel something other than muted rage and vague distaste. She tried to summon pity and compassion from her heart but had found none. Life dealt many people a tough hand and not everyone went on to lead the failure of an existence that her father had. Other people, as the saying went, made lemonade.
She turned to Rodney and she smiled. “I want to go now,” she said. “I need to go home.”
“Of course you do, love. Go home and absorb it all. Go home and work it all out.”
She nodded, grateful for his insight into her thought processes. That was exactly what she wanted to do.
“I’ll take you to the station now. There’ll be a train at twenty past. We should just make it.”
As they passed it, Lydia glanced once more at the gray stone that lay on top of Thomas Pike and she kneeled upon the damp grass and ran her hands over the tablet. She would be back again, she knew that. There was more in this small, proud country for her now than bad memories. For all that she’d lost, she was gaining more and more every day. She put her fingers to her lips and kissed them, afterward pressing them to the stone. I’ll sort this out, she promised Thomas silently. And then she and her uncle walked back to his car in the golden light of a just-risen sun.
∗ ∗ ∗
“Ah!” said Bendiks, standing on the landing at the top of the stairs when she arrived back four hours later. “You’re home! I was just trying to call you.”
Lydia looked up at him in surprise and then at her handbag where her mobile phone was. “I’ve just been on the tube,” she said.
“Ah,” he said, and started to walk down the stairs toward her.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
“Yes! Of course. I was just desperate to know how it went . . . with your brother, in Wales. And, truth be told, I was missing you a bit. It’s a big house when you’re on your own.”
Lydia smiled. She felt gripped by fondness and affection for him. He greeted her at the door with a kiss on each cheek and gently removed her shoulder bag from her grasp. “Here,” he said, “let me.” He smelled of shampoo and soap. But there, underneath it, was that other smell, that smell that always got her, that slightly musky smell of the essence of him.
“You know we have a session this afternoon?” He put her bag down on the stairs and eyed her smilingly. “Three o’clock?”
“Shit, yes, of course. Sorry, I’d completely forgotten.”
“I expected you to. So I’m not going to hold you to it. But if you’d like, we could still go for it.”
Lydia tried to clear some headspace to consider the option. “What time is it now?” she asked.
“It’s nearly one.”
“Okay, then,” she said. “Yes. I think I could do with a workout.”
“Excellent,” said Bendiks. “Cool. I’ll see you here at three then and we can start with a run. And while we run, you can tell me all about it.”
∗ ∗ ∗
They ran for nearly an hour. They hadn’t meant to but Bendiks didn’t have another client and the sun was out and there was a soft breeze and the pavement just seemed to unroll in front of them, meter after meter, like an endlessly unfurling carpet. They took an easy pace, gentle enough for talking without breathlessness, and Lydia told Bendiks everything. She told him all about meeting Rod, and the baby brother who’d died in a stranger’s house; she told him about the little grave a hundred meters from where it should be, and the sense of letting go of her past while simultaneously embracing it. And Bendiks listened and said all the right things at all the right junctures and it was the closest Lydia had come in a long time to really opening her heart to another human being, to revealing the truth about herself without any caveats or exceptions. She didn’t worry about how she would be perceived, or what he might be thinking, or if she was boring or sweaty or if her mascara had smudged. And it was utterly, exhilaratingly, liberating.
They tumbled through the front door at 4:30 and went straight downstairs to the gym. And as they walked, Lydia looked at the outline of Bendiks’s body through his sweat-drenched clothes, she stared at the tendrils of wet hair that curled against the skin on the back of his neck and she considered the ache in her groin. Before she’d had a second to censor her thoughts she found herself saying, “Shall we have a sauna?”
She stopped breathing as the realization that she had said those words out loud hit her. Shall we have a sauna? It was worthy of a cheesy seventies porn movie. She couldn’t look at Bendiks. A silence of less than a second felt as long as summer. She closed her eyes and waited to see what she had done.
“Cool,” said Bendiks. “I thought you’d never ask.”
She opened her eyes and stared at him. “Right,” she said, “great. I’ll, er, get us some robes.”
She pulled robes from the cupboard that Cait and Tom had left fully stocked with robes and towels (“We’ll just buy new,” Cait had said, with a nonchalant shrug) and brought them back to the sauna. Her heart was hammering under her rib cage and she felt scared and stupid and strangely excited. “I’m just going to get changed,” she said, passing Bendiks a robe. He smiled at her in bemusement. Clearly her state of mind was written all over her face. “Thank you,” he said, taking the robe from her hands. “I’ll see you in there.”
Lydia dashed around the back of the sauna and tried to remember Cait’s instructions on how to operate it. There was a remote-control unit screwed to the wall and she pressed buttons randomly until something sounded as if it had been activated and then she quickly climbed out of her sweaty running clothes and into the robe, tying it tight around her waist, adjusting the collar so that her cleavage would not be on show, staring mournfully at her ugly feet and feeling all the sexual energy that had driven her to make this lunatic suggestion in the first place start to wither and die. But then she walked into the sauna and Bendiks was sitting there, legs splayed open, his robe loosely tied, his chest shining in the muted light, and as she closed the door behind her she felt it: sex. It was alive and breathing in this room and she’d just shut the door and trapped it in here with them. Now surely she would find out, once and for all, if Bendiks was gay. Because if he was straight, and not just pretending to be straight to con her out of multiple £50 notes and a cheap room, th
en there was no way he’d be able to walk out of this room without something having happened between them.
He smiled at her, almost shyly. And then slowly a wall of steam built up between them and Bendiks became a ghostly statue on the opposite bench and for a while they didn’t talk to each other. She saw him peel his arms out of the sleeves of the robe and let them fall onto the bench so that now he was uncovered from the waist up. He rolled his head back on his neck and let it rest against the wall of the sauna and his legs relaxed away from each other so that if there had been less steam in the room Lydia would have been entirely up to speed on the appearance of his genitals. She wondered about his slow and measured unpeeling. Was it deliberate? Or was he just hot?
“I love a sauna,” he said. “I forgot how much I love them.”
“I’ve never been in one before,” said Lydia.
Bendiks laughed. “You are so funny, Lydia. You buy a house with a sauna in it and you don’t use it.”
“I’m Welsh,” she replied. “Welsh people don’t do sauna.”
He laughed again. Lydia sometimes suspected that nobody ever said anything funny in Latvia. “Here,” he said, patting the bench next to where he sat, “let me give you a neck massage.”
She glanced at him, possibly with an expression of horror on her face, and he laughed again. “You are so scared of me,” he exclaimed. “Really, you must not be.”
“I’m not scared of you,” she replied. “I’m just . . .”
“Come,” he said again, still patting the bench. “I have been wanting to get those knots out of your neck since the first time I saw you.”
She smiled awkwardly and moved next to him on the bench. She turned her back to him and lowered her robe over her back and shoulders. Bendiks placed his hands against her shoulder blades and gently pushed the robe down lower so that she had to grip the front of it together with both hands. He pressed his hand against the back of her skull and slowly pushed her head down toward her chest. “There,” he said, “good.”
And then he took his good, soft hands and he pushed and he kneaded at her damp flesh until all her muscles had turned to sand, and Lydia thought, Now, now would be perfect, and just as she thought that, she felt soft lips against the skin of her back and the sweet heat of his breath against her skin and his hands were on her shoulders and he was drawing her against him and instead of wondering what she should do and how she should respond, Lydia just sat there, compliant and intoxicated, soaking up the sensation of being wanted and being touched by a beautiful man. Not one part of her body remained unaffected by his touch and she felt, building deep within her, a loud animal groan of pure pleasure.
As his lips made their way to the crook of her neck, she opened her mouth and she let it out, and he, taking his cue, slowly turned her head toward his and brought his lips down against hers and there it was . . . finally. Their first kiss. And Lydia thought, Yes, yes, yes, I knew you weren’t gay. I knew we could do this. I knew I could have you. I knew I wasn’t that stupid. And as they kissed, she felt it all fall into place; the big empty house, the blue cat, the lack of friends, the weird family, her childhood. It all fell into place because she suddenly knew without any trace of doubt that she was not weird. A man like Bendiks would not kiss a weird woman. A man like Bendiks would only kiss an appealing woman. A woman with some kind of charm and beauty. A woman in whose company he could feel proud. And as she thought these thoughts he pulled his lips from hers and looked into her eyes and said, “All these weeks and months, I have been dreaming about doing this.”
And she said, “Me too.”
And he looked at her in wonder and said, “Really? You really dreamed of this?”
She nodded and he touched her chin and laughed. “Wow,” he said. “That’s amazing. I thought . . . I thought you thought I was just a big meathead. I thought you thought you were too good for me. And I thought . . .” He paused.
“What?” said Lydia, searching his dark eyes with hers.
“I thought, for a while, and I don’t mean this in a bad way, but I thought that maybe . . . you were gay?”
“You thought I was . . .?” Lydia stopped. And then she laughed.
“What?” said Bendiks, trailing his fingertips up and down her shoulders and upper arms.
“I thought you were gay, too.”
He looked at her in amazement, then put one hand to his chest. “Me?” he said.
“Yes, you!”
“But . . . but, why?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I was just trying to protect myself from you. Or maybe it was the plucked eyebrows.”
He immediately put his hand to his brow and said, “But I do not pluck my eyebrows!”
“You don’t?”
“No! Well, only a little bit. Just in the middle. And the messy ones around here.” He pointed out the arch of his brows. “Oh my God,” he continued, “does that make me look gay?”
“No!” Lydia laughed. “Just, well, groomed, you know.”
“And groomed is gay?”
“No!” she exclaimed again. “You look beautiful. You look perfect. You don’t look gay. Well, at least, not anymore. Not after . . .”
“After what?” he smiled.
“After that,” she said, indicating their two bodies, still pressed close together.
He brought his nose toward hers and held it there, his eyes gazing into hers, his breath against her cheek, and he smiled. “We haven’t even started yet,” he said.
And then they began.
DEAN
Here,” said Rose, handing Dean a small plastic bottle full of pink liquid.
He stared at the bottle blankly. “What is it?” he said.
“It’s for your hands. It’s germ-killer.”
He blinked and read the label.
“It’s the same stuff they had at the hospital, you know, for the preemies,” she explained brusquely.
He squirted a small amount into the palm of his hand and he rubbed it in. It smelled of pears. He passed the bottle to his mum and she followed suit. They’d already been told to remove their shoes at the front door. “No shoes in this house,” Rose had said haughtily, as if this somehow made her a cut above.
Dean had not been to Rose’s house since he’d first started going out with Sky. He felt a chill run through him as he followed Rose up the hallway and into the living room. He had thought that he would never come back here again. The walls were hung with huge blown-up studio portraits of Rose and her children and grandchildren. There was one, above the fake Georgian fireplace, of all of them: Rose, the four girls, Sky nursing a huge bump, her sister Savannah holding her pug-faced toddler on her lap with tattooed arms, all of them wearing white. And there was a new one, above the glass-topped dining table, bigger than the rest, of Sky, just a clean portrait of her face, simply shot in black and white. Beneath it was a vase on a dresser with three stems of Stargazer lilies in it, and a votive candle burning inside a red glass jar. Dean gulped at the portrait, remembering once again how pretty she had been and swallowing, as ever, his unacknowledged feelings of loss and grief.
“Come in,” said Rose, gesturing at the leather sofa, “sit down. I’ll make us some tea.”
Her youngest daughter, Sienna, was curled into a matching leather armchair set in the bay window. She looked up and smiled as Dean and his mum sat down. “Hiya,” she said. Dean nodded and his mother said, “Hello.”
It was warm in Rose’s house. Too warm. It struck Dean that for all her paranoia about germs on hands and on the soles of shoes, she should probably keep her house a bit cooler.
Dean smiled at his mum and she smiled back at him. “Okay?” she whispered.
He nodded. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Just heard her stirring,” Rose shouted through from her kitchen. “You can go up and see her, if you want.”
Dean gulped. A man on the television told a woman on the television to shut up, you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Sienna fidgeted and moved her feet to the other side of her. Dean looked at his mum.
“Come on,” she said. “I know where she is. Shall we go and see her?”
Dean thought of Lydia’s dad. He thought of how she’d seen him for all those years, as nothing more than a creature. And then he thought of his baby daughter wired up in a plastic tank, not quite real, not quite ready to exist. He thought of the moment back in March, that cold bleak day, lying with his head hanging over the grave of his girlfriend, trying to reach the photo of his daughter. And he thought of Thomas, his brother, who’d never stood a chance. He smiled grimly. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah. Okay.”
They took the stairs together, softly and quietly, so as not to take the baby too much by surprise, he assumed. He followed his mum into a room which appeared to be Rose’s. It contained a king-size double bed loaded with furry cushions and velvety throws and was cast in a liverish-red light through claret and gold striped roller-blinds. The room smelled, like the rest of Rose’s house, of plug-in fresheners.
At first Dean felt self-conscious, trespassing into the intimate, womblike environs of Rose’s boudoir. But then he saw her, in a wicker basket on a wooden frame at the side of Rose’s bed. The basket was lined with pink candy stripes and overhung by a large, faintly oppressive mobile of moon-eyed teddy bears.
The baby was awake and staring up at the mobile, curiously, her hands opening and closing like tiny jellyfish. She was wearing a pink and red striped bodysuit with the words CHEEKY MONKEY emblazoned across the front. Dean blinked at her in surprise. She was so big. Her body filled out the soft cotton of her suit, the buttons straining across her rounded belly.
“Hello!” said his mother, rounding the corner of Rose’s bed to reach the basket. “Hello, little one.” The baby turned her gaze from the mobile toward the source of the voice and, when she finally located his mother’s face, her mouth curved into a rapturous smile. “Look at you!” It was said in a saccharine falsetto. “Look at you! So big! Such a big girl!” The baby kicked her legs appreciatively and made a loud chirruping sound. Dean found himself smiling involuntarily. Even though his mum had shown him pictures of the baby on her phone, he had never really managed to override that image of the tiny ice-blue creature in a plastic box. Yet here she was: long, strong, smiling, almost fat.
