I bite my lip. ‘It’s good she’s got back on her feet after what happened between her and Michael.’
‘Oh, it’s all water under the bridge now. She did have a tough time of it at one time, though, that’s for sure,’ Suzy replies, glancing up. ‘I don’t remember telling you about that.’
‘You didn’t – Sarah did at school. She said Diana had a nervous breakdown after Michael left.’
Suzy rolls her eyes. ‘Diana would be distraught to know that people were gossiping about it. She says now that it was her guilty conscience punishing her.’
I frown. ‘What do you mean?’
Suzy hesitates. ‘Don’t mention this to your mum chums, but Diana was having an affair for ages before she and Michael split up. Well before Cameron was born.’
‘Did Michael know about it?’
‘He did. I get the feeling the relationship had been dead for a while, but he wanted to try and hold it together for the sake of the kids. Diana was having none of it. She was “in love”.’ She says the final two words as if she doesn’t believe them.
‘I . . . I had no idea – I thought it was the other way around.’
‘What – that he had the affair?’ she asks.
‘Well . . . that he was the one to leave.’
She shakes her head. ‘He might have moved out of the marital home, but it was Diana who did the dirty. And called time on the relationship. I don’t think the poor guy had much choice.’
I pick James up from Manchester Airport on Monday morning. He walks through Arrivals looking entirely unlike someone who’s been on a long-haul flight, without a trace of the sweaty dishevelment that afflicts me on an aeroplane.
He’s always managed this, as I discovered the first time we went on holiday together, to the Greek Islands. I left the airport crumpled, dehydrated and still discovering bits of flaky pastry down my cleavage from the baklava I’d scoffed on board. James on the other hand looked so fresh-faced and smart, you’d think he was on his way to a cocktail party.
‘Hello, beautiful,’ he murmurs, opening his arms for me to slide into them. He kisses me on the head. ‘Gosh, I’ve missed you.’
I pull back, guilt sizzling up in me at seeing him in the flesh for the first time after my night with Michael. ‘I’ve missed you, too,’ I manage.
We start off in the direction of the car park, weaving our way through the hordes that have just spilled out of several charter flights and seem to consist solely of hen parties, stag parties and people in a state of general rowdiness and inebriation.
‘Is it any wonder I haven’t missed the UK?’ he hisses under his breath, gazing upon them as if they collectively represented something sticky and unpleasant discovered on the sole of his shoe. ‘It would be raining, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes, that is a shame – especially when the weather’s been pretty good lately,’ I reply, pressing the button on the lift to the car park.
‘It hardly compares with Dubai, Hannah. None of it does. You’ll never want to return to this shithole again.’
I let out a blurt of laughter. ‘Since when did home become a shithole?’
‘Since I saw how we should be living. Seriously, Hannah – the sooner you get out of this place the better.’
The conversation between James and me continues in this vein the entire way home, and I try hard to suppress my nagging irritation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad he’s happy in Dubai, I’m glad he’s settled. But this goes beyond enthusiasm for his new home. He is just plain insulting about everything British, from the roads, to the weather, to ‘the people’ – as if he and I somehow didn’t fall into that category ourselves.
And, although I’ve never considered myself to be excessively patriotic – I know the place is no utopian dream – by the time we’re at Suzy’s house I’m on the verge of digging out a bowler hat, waving a Union Jack and singing ‘Rule, Britannia’ at the top of my voice.
Still, James has brought a haul of presents back for the kids, including dozens of sweets boasting foreign writing on the pack, which elicits more excitement than anything else. And, typically, Suzy and Justin are both treating him as if he were their long-lost little brother within half an hour of his arrival.
Over the course of the day, between packing and saying a tearful goodbye to my mum and dad, I refamiliarise myself with everything about James, the things I knew about him from the very beginning. His obsession with his body. His obsession with work. And the way he kisses me: hard and uncompromising, as if he’s read Fifty Shades of Grey and wants to prove he’s every bit the gorgeous weirdo Christian Grey is (but he hasn’t read it, at least to my knowledge).
It’s as if he has his mouth on mine one night, a prelude to some between-sheets action on the sofa bed, that I start to realise something imperceptible and insidious has been happening since he arrived.
I’ve hardly been thinking about James, at least not positively. I’ve been thinking about Michael. My chest clenches at the thought: given that I’m engaged to the former and the latter is in the process of seducing Gill, this is very clearly an unsolvable problem.
Except, that’s not right, is it? It is solvable, if I can just grow up and focus on what’s important: commitment, long-term love, not being distracted by some fly-by-night doctor who’s left me temporarily giddy.
Okay, James isn’t perfect, but nobody is. I read once that it’s impossible to be happy with someone 100 per cent of the time and any expectation that you will be is unrealistic and unachievable. If you’re happy with someone 80 per cent of the time, then you’re probably very well suited; there will always be another 20 per cent when you don’t see eye to eye. What James and I have is surely within the boundaries of these statistics. Or have I just been doing too much Key Stage 2 maths lately?
‘Is everything okay?’ James asks me the following morning as we sit in the Tavern on Smithdown Road, eating a breakfast of kings. I brought him here because he told me when he first moved out here that he missed a full English. And this, unquestionably, does the best full English around: big and hearty, with exquisitely cooked eggs and thick sourdough wedges of toast.
‘Oh . . . yes, of course,’ I look up, almost choking on my organic sausage. ‘Just thinking how much I’ll miss places like this.’
‘I assure you, you won’t,’ he laughs. ‘Wait until you try the food in Dubai. And the service. It’s all amazing – everywhere you go.’
‘The service has been pretty good here, too,’ I say.
‘It took two goes to get my flat white just right.’
I take a sip of tea and decide to change the subject. ‘Did you enjoy your workout this morning?’
Suzy signed him up for a guest pass at the gym where she’s a member. It’s a gorgeous club, with membership fees that’d make your eyes water, and when James lived here he was always desperate to join but could never afford to.
‘It was all right,’ he replies. ‘Nice to get some exercise after sitting on my backside for two days. Place itself was a bit of a shithole, though,’ he adds, as I wonder if there’s anything left at all in this corner of the world that that description doesn’t apply to.
On Thursday afternoon, as I’m flying out tomorrow morning, I ask Brigitte if she’d mind if I picked up the boys from school one last time. I know that in the pecking order of surprises it’s not much, but I am at least intending to take them all for ice cream afterwards.
‘Can’t you stay for one more day, Auntie Hannah?’ asks Leo.
‘One day isn’t going to make a difference,’ I point out as we walk back to the car.
‘It is,’ Noah protests. ‘It’s sports day tomorrow. We wanted you to do the sack race. We thought you’d be the funniest.’
‘Oh, what an accolade. Well, your mum’s taken the afternoon off work so you don’t need me.’
‘We do!’ replies Noah. ‘Auntie Hannah, I don’t want you to go.’ His big brown eyes look up at me and I squeeze his hand, my throat tightening.
‘Neither do I,’ adds Leo. ‘Auntie Hannah?’
‘Yes, Leo?’
‘If you die on the plane, will you leave me your iPad in your will?’
I suppress a smile. ‘How very pragmatic of you, Leo. Of course I will.’
I glance up from this touching conversation as Noah starts berating his brother for suggesting such a thing – and realise that Caroline Rogers is marching towards me like a human tank.
‘Hannah, I can’t stop, I’m running late.’ She glowers at me. I take a step back. ‘Did you get my email?’
‘Um . . . no.’ She narrows her eyes, clearly under the impression that I’m telling porkies. ‘I am completely happy to pay for the damage to the car, though. I mean, that goes without saying.’
‘Fine,’ she says, looking deeply unimpressed with this offer. ‘Sorry, I need to run, I’m late to collect Ceri.’
As she sprints ahead, I pull out my phone from my bag and scurry to the car, logging on to my email as I walk. There’s nothing at all in either my inbox or spam. I’m absorbed in my panic about how much that one bloody incident – the first time I’ve crashed a car in my life – might end up costing, as the kids and I approach the section of the road where we need to cross.
‘Do you think Norman will give us a sweet today?’ asks Leo.
‘You’ll have to wait and see,’ I reply, but I glance up at the exact, hideous moment when it becomes apparent that sweets are not our lollipop man’s priority right now.
He is instead focused on getting out of the way of a Fiesta driver, who’s clearly unhappy about having to wait fifteen seconds for twelve children to cross, and is beeping at Norman furiously. He glances up anxiously and, ushering the kids over first, he scuttles across the road as fast as it’s feasible for a man who’s seventy-eight years old with a gammy leg to go.
He must’ve stepped onto that pavement thousands of times over the years. But, under pressure from the Fiesta driver’s anger-management issues, he catches his foot on the kerb and tumbles awkwardly to the ground.
Someone screams. ‘OH MY GOD, NORMAN!’
‘Norman’s hit his head!’
I rush towards him with Ollie’s buggy, the twins next to me, and register with a queasy adrenalin that Norman is out cold. The driver of the white Fiesta – a woman in her early twenties in a slick skirt suit – races out of her car.
‘I didn’t touch him, I swear!’ she protests, as I fumble in my bag for my phone, Leo starts crying and others rush forward. I dial 999 on my mobile, frantically explaining that I think our lollipop man must have hit his head, before ending the call with a sinking despair.
‘Is Norman going to die?’ Noah sobs as I realise that, for all the people who’ve raced to his aid, nobody really can help.
‘Does anyone know CPR? Someone? PLEASE!’ the Fiesta driver starts shrieking.
‘What’s going on?’ I look up as Michael pushes past us and marches to Norman.
I usher the boys away to give him some space as he kneels down, and gets to work, trying to get a response and checking his breathing. I have no idea what he does beyond that and by this stage I don’t want to let the twins get close enough to look. All I know is, by the time the ambulance arrives a few minutes later and Norman is on a stretcher, it doesn’t look good. Michael walks towards us, his jaw clenched but generally looking calmer than most of us.
‘Is he going to be all right?’ I ask.
‘I don’t know,’ he replies quietly. ‘He was breathing and responded to me once by the time the ambulance came, so it could just be concussion. But a severe blow to the head can cause cerebral compression. Which is more serious.’ His eyes catch mine and I feel an urgent need to leave. ‘I’m going to speak to the police now, but they’ve also said they want to interview any witnesses, so you might need to hang around,’ he tells me. ‘Would you like me to take the boys home for you?’
In the event, the police interview takes only ten minutes or so and, by the time I’ve told them everything I know, there’s nothing to do except walk back to the car, my head spinning slightly.
And I don’t just mean about the events of this afternoon.
I pull my coat around me and feel my eyes grow hot, feeling unexpectedly lost, confused, desperate for some clarity. So I don’t stop at the car. I just keep walking. As I head towards Sefton Park, I cross the field towards the boating lake, gazing over the water, shimmering with red.
Unlike James, I’ll miss this place, all of it. But, hard as this is to reconcile, it’s not all I’ll miss.
‘Hannah!’ I think I’ve imagined it at first, a voice in the distance, drifting across the grassy curves of the parkland. But then I turn around and see him walking towards me. It’s Michael.
Chapter 15
Lark Lane, on the other side of Sefton Park, is no ordinary suburban street. It’s a bustling, bohemian, vaguely eccentric community where vegetarian restaurants are longstanding neighbours with vintage clothes shops and cubbyholes selling second-hand books. We find a seat by the window of Keith’s Wine Bar and Michael goes to buy two small glasses of red.
‘Were the kids okay when you dropped them off?’ I ask him. Practical matters strike me as by far the only comfortable topic of conversation.
‘Suzy had popped out of surgery for ten minutes to meet me,’ he says, ‘then Brigitte stepped in to look after the kids. So everything’s fine. They won’t be sending out a search party for you. Although . . . I can’t speak for your boyfriend, obviously.’
I redden slightly. ‘Oh, he’ll still be at work, so he won’t miss me.’
The air between us is thick with unspoken words. ‘Sorry I interrupted your walk. I wasn’t sure if you wanted to be alone or not.’
‘Oh, it’s fine. I just wanted to savour one of my favourite places, before I no longer have the opportunity to do so,’ I say.
He looks down at his drink and I have an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch his face. Not kiss it, just touch it. Though . . . kissing it would be good, too.
Oh, God.
A small earthquake shakes my stomach.
‘You’re still going, then?’ he asks quietly.
‘Yes. Of course.’
He forces a smile and I remind myself what’s happening here.
One of the reasons so many women are smitten with Michael is that he can so convincingly make a girl feel as if she’s the only one in a room. I don’t know how he does this, except that it’s a profusion of little things that add up to something incomparable. The way his face blossoms into a laugh when he likes something you’ve said. The way he looks at you, as if your thoughts are the source of endless fascination. The way his head tilts, his hands move, his eyes shine . . .
‘Why would you care, Michael?’ The words slip out of my mouth before I can stop them.
He looks up at me. ‘I’ve already told you, Hannah. You don’t want me to repeat it and make a total fool of myself, do you?’
‘Oh, yeah. You have feelings for me.’ I glance up and realise he looks hurt. ‘What about Gill?’ I continue. ‘You asked her out literally hours after we slept together. Well, not slept together but . . . you know.’
‘I tried to tell you the other day. She’s been attempting to persuade me to join the PTA for ages. I’d resisted – I never considered it to be my kind of thing. But after a while I started to think, Well, this sort of thing should be a dad’s job as well as a mum’s. My kids’ education is just as important to me. That was what our meeting was for.’
My jaw tightens. ‘You can’t seriously expect me to believe it.’
‘You obviously haven’t seen this week’s newsletter.’
I peer at the dodgy font and blurry pictures – whoever puts these things together would never win any prizes for desktop publishing. And, sure enough, on Page 3 there is a short piece with the headline, SIX PARENTS JOIN PTA.
‘I can’t believe I didn’t even make the front page,’ he says, through a soft smile.
I laugh. A
nd keep laughing. Because if I don’t I might just start crying instead.
Chapter 16
I wake at 6.20 the following morning, four hours before I step onto a plane to Dubai – to find a text from Caroline Rogers. ‘Good morning Hannah – I’ve tried sending you that email again. Can you check your inbox and let me know if it doesn’t arrive? Grrr… technology!’
I rub open my eyes enough to log on to my emails and see a message from her load up at the top. I glance at James next to me, snoring lightly and entirely out for the count, before reading her message.
Dear Hannah
Many thanks for sending me an email last night regarding the incident with my car. It’s very good of you to offer to pay for the damage – it actually didn’t cost much to fix in the end, but I can forward the bill and perhaps you can see if your insurance will deal with it. Whatever is the case though, you sounded worried about it – please don’t be, we will sort things out!
I didn’t bother going into detail about the fact that I was actually driving on Suzy’s insurance so will have to fork out for this myself.
Sorry about our short conversation yesterday: I was in a mad rush and it struck me afterwards that you were probably left a little bewildered by it. But when I mentioned to you that I’d been in touch, it wasn’t about the cars – it was about the job I interviewed you for. I have no idea why my email didn’t get through but it’s below. Hope to hear from you soon. I’m in meetings all morning, but perhaps we could speak on the phone late this afternoon?
Yours
Caroline
I scroll down to find her original email, pasted on to the bottom.
Dear Hannah,
First of all, thank you for your interest in Grape and for coming to see me this week. I was bowled over by the originality, scope and vibrancy of your ideas. Your enthusiasm was second to none and your presentation faultless. After seeing a number of other candidates for this job – including some extremely experienced ones – I can honestly say that I can’t imagine anybody else in this position other than you.
The Little Things Page 9
