by Lucy Gordon
‘I’m fine-’
‘Why does nobody ever protect you?’ he asked wildly. ‘Why is it always you doing the caring? Your husband should have protected you, but we all know about him, don’t we?’
‘I don’t think anybody really knew about him,’ Kelly said gently.
‘A jerk. He let you down all the time. Now he’s letting you down again.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I’ll show you.’
He hauled himself up and made his way back to the bedroom, returning with a paper which he put into her hand. It was a bank statement showing that his money was fast vanishing.
‘Not just a jerk, but a stupid jerk,’ Jake said morosely. ‘He never bothered to save when times were good. He spent it all on enjoying life.’
‘He spent it on his wife too,’ Kelly remembered. ‘All those presents-’
‘Which weren’t what she wanted. When trouble came he didn’t have any savings. After I was shot the firm’s insurance company made a pay-out, although they used a technicality to make it as little as possible. That’s what we’ve been living on. I thought I’d be back at work long before now, because I was “Jake Lindley” who could cope with anything. But look at me. A mess.’
Kelly was staring at the bank statement and a resolution was forming in her head.
‘Say something, please,’ he begged.
‘All right.’ She put her hands on his shoulders and looked into his face. She was about to take a huge risk, and she called all her love to help her judge the size of the gamble.
Vaguely she knew that she’d misjudged once before, driving him into Olympia’s arms, helping to bring this nightmare down on him. If she misread him again she might condemn him to disaster, but if her courage failed he might languish in his present misery forever.
‘I’ll say this,’ she told him. ‘I think it’s about time you started work again.’
He stared. ‘You think anyone’s going to give me work as I am?’
‘You’re not going to wait for people to give you work. You can make your own. It’s time you started on that book you always talked about. Heaven knows you’ve got the material. All your experiences in so many countries, and then getting shot. That book will sell, if you write it quickly. Leave it too long and the moment will pass. You’ve got all this time at home. Use it.’
In the silence she saw the dawning of interest in his eyes. ‘Do you-really think I could?’
‘I know you could. Jake Lindley can do anything.’
‘No-no,’ he shook his head in agitation. ‘This isn’t “Jake Lindley”. I’m not sure he’ll ever be around again. It’s just Jake.’
She understood.
‘It was always Jake for me,’ she said. ‘I never much cared for “Jake Lindley”.’
‘But a book-I haven’t done a long project in ages- I work in soundbites now-’
‘Then stop working in soundbites and start having long, joined-up, thought-out opinions again,’ she said urgently. ‘Jake, you still have all that. You haven’t lost it, just mislaid it a little.’
She was gripping his hands, looking eagerly into his eyes, and at that moment she looked closer to the seventeen-year-old who’d first adored him than he’d seen for a long time. It was the haunting echo of that memory that made him say, ‘I’ll do it-if you think I can-even though my head’s full of cotton wool, so that I can’t think how to put two words together.’
‘You don’t have to write it yet. Just do a bit of research and work out the outline. You can sell that to a publisher first.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ he said with a touch of admiration. ‘You’ll be wanting commission as my agent next.’
‘You bet I will!’
He almost laughed, and for a moment she thought she’d revived the spark in him, but then his face became drained again.
‘Kelly, this is crazy. I can’t embark on the long haul when it’s as much as I can do to struggle up out of the pit every morning.’
‘Forget the long haul,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way.’
‘Am I?’ He was watching her closely, as if waiting for her to produce the key that would open the vital door.
‘Just think about the first step. When you’ve done that we’ll worry about the second step, but never more than one at a time. So you must decide what the first step actually is.’
She was looking at him, waiting for a decision, and he fought to clear his mind, which had become cotton wool again. The first step…the first step…
‘My notes,’ he said at last. ‘I need to go back over them-and tapes-things from the last few years-to refresh my memory-’
‘Good. Where are they?’
‘In my flat. I’ll have to go there-’
‘First thing tomorrow.’
It was barely dawn when she called a cab and they went to his flat together. But when they reached the front door she hesitated.
‘Would you rather I waited out here?’
‘Why should I want that?’ he said, puzzled.
‘You wouldn’t let me come here before, to fetch your clothes. You sent Olympia.’
‘Olympia’s never been here. A social worker attached to the hospital did it for me. I guess I just didn’t want you to see it.’
She began to understand when he opened the door. This was no home, but a soulless cage. One room to live in, one to sleep in, and nothing that spoke of the man who lived there. It was as though his real self had gone somewhere else on the day he moved in. He’d kept her away before because this place revealed too much of what had happened to him without her.
She looked up to find him watching her closely, asking if she understood the things that were beyond words. She smiled and squeezed his hand. As he began going through his shelves she passed on into his bedroom.
Here there was more bleakness. A plain bed, a wardrobe, a bureau. No ornaments, photos, mementoes. Nothing to remind him of anyone he’d ever known. Not even herself, she realised with a pang of disappointment.
Suddenly she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. She began pulling open drawers, seeking something, anything, to reveal his inner life.
And she found it.
It was all there together in the bottom drawer, starting with their wedding pictures. They were excellent, a gift from a photographer friend. There was the absurdly young-looking eighteen-year-old girl and the scrawny young man. She frowned at the sight of Jake. Where was the confident young god of her memory? Had he really been this slightly loutish-looking individual with the unfinished air? And his expression, full of adoration for the girl beside him? Why hadn’t she noticed that at the time? Perhaps because her own adoration had filled her horizons.
Over the years he’d taken his own pictures of her, and there was one where everything had come together perfectly. Focus, colour, pose were all brilliant, and in the centre was a girl, laughing with joy because the man she loved was giving her all his attention. Her head was thrown back and happiness seemed to pour from her. Jake had blown this one up and framed it to keep. And then he’d hidden it away in secret.
Now, she thought, she knew everything. But she was wrong. The drawer had two final secrets to yield. First was a pair of baby bootees, one larger than the other. Kelly stared at them a long time, wondering about this man whose heart was so much deeper than she’d suspected.
But it was the last item of all that made her cry: a blue furry elephant, his trunk knocked permanently out of shape on the day she’d thumped Jake with him.
Now she remembered him, that night in the park, saying, ‘It was definitely Dolph the elephant. I know because I-because his trunk was always wonky after that.’
He knew because he’d kept him all these years, grieving for the child they’d lost as deeply as herself, but unable to say so. And perhaps grieving also for those early happy days that had gone. She bent her head and her tears fell on Dolph’s fur.
She felt J
ake’s presence as he sat on the bed beside her, and his arms went around her.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘You can give him to your baby. He won’t mind about the trunk.’
‘It’s not that,’ she wept. ‘It’s everything-we had so much and we lost it.’
He drew her close and she sobbed freely on his shoulder. Now it was his turn to comfort her, and he did his unpractised best.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ he told her. ‘I never really did. Perhaps we never could have kept what we had. We were both so young, and I was clumsy. You had all those exam passes and all I had was “front” and “attitude”. I made them do a good job for me, but in the end they’re not enough. When you got pregnant I was so relieved. It gave me the chance to tie you to me so that you couldn’t escape. Not very nice behaviour, but I wasn’t a very nice character. Look at me-’ He’d taken up the wedding picture. ‘I was a bit of an oaf in those days. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, so I grabbed with both hands.’
‘I was-the best thing-you loved me?’
‘I’ve never loved anyone in my life as much as I’ve loved you. And I never will. All I wanted was for you to love me, and somehow I could never quite believe that you did.’
‘Love you?’ she echoed, astonished. ‘But Jake, I adored you. You must have known that. I positively hero-worshipped you.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew you hero-worshipped me, but that’s not quite the same as love. It was quite scary. I kept waiting for you to discover that I had feet of clay. I reckoned you’d dump me when that happened. In the end you did, but I can’t complain. We had eight years, and that was more than I hoped for.’
At first she was too shocked to speak.
‘But-but it wasn’t like that,’ she stammered at last. ‘It was always me scurrying around in your shadow, afraid I was boring you. You achieved so much-’
‘Only because you told me I could. I was a bum. I had a big mouth and I could talk my way into jobs, but I usually talked my way out again because I annoyed people by being too clever by half. Then I met you, and you actually admired me, which nobody had ever done before. If my name was mentioned people used to say, “Oh, him!”’
‘Jake, that’s not true-’
‘It is true, but you never knew. You made me see myself through your eyes, believe that I could be what you thought me. And then when-when we broke up, you made me see myself through your eyes again, someone who’d taken everything and given back nothing. That’s really why I agreed to the divorce. I reckoned you deserved to be free of me.’ He gave a snort of self-condemning laughter. ‘Even so, I convinced myself that you’d back off at the last minute. I never thought of your flying straight into the arms of another man.’
‘I didn’t, Jake, honestly I didn’t.’
‘What about Carl?’
‘What about him? He’s not my baby’s father.’
He grew still, searching her face. ‘Is that true?’
‘It’s true. Jake, you know who this child’s father is. You do. You’ve always known, really.’
He shook his head helplessly. ‘I don’t know anything any more. It’s no use asking me to work things out. It’s all gone. Everything I used to have or be, it’s all gone.’
‘No, it hasn’t. You’ve still got me, you’ve still got our baby, and you’ve still got your talents.’
He barely seemed to hear her. He laid his hand over her swelling stomach, only just touching it.
‘Our baby,’ he whispered. ‘Ours?’
‘Yours,’ she said softly.
She wished she could see his face, but his head was bent. Gradually he slipped to the floor, resting his head against the swell, and beneath her hands she could feel the violent shaking of his shoulders. She tried to speak, but the effort died. No words would be adequate. No words were needed. She put her arms as far around him as she could and held him quietly while he sobbed.
This might have been despair at an added burden, but her instincts told her that he was weeping for joy. Once she would have found that hard to believe, but they’d travelled far together in the last few months. He was clinging on desperately to anything that would keep him sane in the middle of chaos, and now he had new hope.
‘Tell me again,’ he said huskily. ‘Say this is my child.’
‘Darling, of course it’s yours. Who else’s could it be?’
‘But I thought-’
‘There was never anyone but you. How could there be? I divorced you because I thought I’d lost you already. When you turned up at the party I wanted you to see me as the belle of the ball, for the sake of my pride. But the truth was I still loved you, even though I wouldn’t admit it to either of us. Afterwards, how could I tell you what that night meant to me?’
‘Can you tell me now?’ he whispered.
‘I love you, Jake. I always have and I always will. This baby is yours, and I want you to be there, always, to be his father.’
‘I’m not much of a bargain in my present state.’
‘Stop talking about yourself like that,’ she said fiercely. ‘You’re mine, and I’m never letting you go again. Clear everything out of this place. You’re not coming back here. I’m taking you home for good.’
His answer was to lean his head against her breast, spreading his arms to encompass her and their child.
‘I am home,’ he said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
F OR a while practical matters held their attention. Jake put his flat on the market, finding a buyer at once.
‘But I’d like to keep that money aside for a deposit on a proper home,’ he said. ‘This’ll be a bit small when there’s three of us.’
She agreed, but didn’t say more, leaving Jake wondering how their future life was to be organised. For the moment it was enough that they were back together. When he looked into the future he saw several paths, all with turnings that he couldn’t follow. Yet, strangely, the uncertainty didn’t trouble him. Everything was in Kelly’s hands, and there were no hands that he trusted more.
One day Kelly said, ‘You’re feeling a lot better, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, how did you know?’
‘You’ve stopped talking like a robot. When you were at your worst the words came out sounding harsh and mechanical. Those pills the doctor gave you were good.’
‘It wasn’t the pills, it was you.’ But it was true that the clouds were shifting. Now he found he could organise his work into some kind of order, and at last he had a synopsis of his book.
‘We’ll give it to a literary agency,’ Kelly declared. ‘Carl says his own is excellent, unless you’d rather-not Carl?’
‘It’s all right. I’m feeling kindly towards Carl these days.’
The result was an advance large enough to ease Jake’s gloom some more, and enable him to work with an easy mind. Even so he knew that there was a question mark over his television future. His major commissions had come from Olympia, and that source must have dried up. She’d overlooked the first time he’d let her down, that night in Paris, but he supposed she’d wanted to add his scalp to her belt, and wouldn’t easily admit defeat.
But what had happened in her apartment was another matter. He’d rejected her and exposed her to humiliation. He hadn’t meant to. Every one of his actions had been driven by illness, but Olympia wasn’t the woman to understand that.
Yet even this didn’t trouble him. His career seemed to live on the fringe of his consciousness, taking any crumbs of attention he could spare it. The centre was here, where Kelly was growing larger every day.
‘Are you keeping up to schedule on that book?’ Kelly asked once. ‘I know they wanted it fast.’
‘I’m doing my best.’
‘If you need some secretarial help I could-’
‘No!’ His yell was so loud that she almost dropped her cup. ‘Don’t even think of that. You’ve got your own work to do. Give it all your attention.’
‘But I only-’<
br />
‘I said no!’
‘All right, all right,’ she said hurriedly.
There was a silence. His mind had gone dark again, brooding over how close history had come to repeating itself. Once before he’d snatched away her chance of making her own success. Now she’d calmly offered him the opportunity to do it again. Sweat stood out on his brow.
‘Hey, it’s all right,’ she said, giving him a little shake. ‘Don’t take everything so seriously.’
He took her hand. ‘I’ll try.’
‘But get finished soon, because Olympia will be calling you.’
‘Not her! She’s not a forgiving lady.’
‘No, but she’s an ambitious one. Without you her ratings have fallen.’
He stared. ‘How do you know that?’
‘One of the lecturers on the media studies course does freelance work for her company, and he hears things. They’ve tried to find someone to be as popular as you, but they’ve failed. People have been asking her when they can expect you back. You can virtually write your own ticket.’
Kelly’s tone gave no clue to her feelings. She was heavy now, calm and content with her child and her man. Nothing outside seemed to touch her very much.
He only half believed her about Olympia, but a week later the phone rang, and it was her. She was gracious, as always. The evening in her apartment might never have been.
‘And you’re well enough to start work again?’ she enquired.
‘Perfectly well.’
‘I have a job that might interest you. It would mean-’
It was peach of a job, a major assignment that would put him right back at the top. Jake Lindley, the voice of truth, the man who brought you the facts: he could have it all back. Kelly had been right.
‘Sounds interesting,’ he mused in a non-committal voice that should have warned Olympia.
‘Fine. I’ll need you to leave next week-’
‘Wait, I haven’t said I’ll do it yet. There’s some unfinished business between us.’
‘It surprises me that you want to mention it.’
‘It doesn’t surprise me that you want to avoid it, but I thought you might have some explanation for the Forest Glades stunt. It makes me sick that you actually tried to have me locked up to stop me going back to Kelly, but it’s just possible that you thought you were acting for my benefit-’
