Hygge and Kisses

by Clara Christensen

  Bo took a deep breath. ‘So, anyway, I was made redundant this week.’

  In the pause that followed, Bo was aware of the ticking of the gold-plated carriage clock on the mantelpiece, and a distant shriek from one of the children in the garden beyond the French doors. Her mother, who was perched on the edge of the sofa cushion with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth, took a deep breath which verged on a gasp. Bo knew what was coming.

  ‘Redundant?’ her mother repeated, returning her coffee cup with slow precision to its saucer. ‘But . . . You’ve worked there for five years. Surely they can’t do that?’ Barbara worked as an administrator at a primary school. In her mind, if you worked hard, were punctual and polite, there was no reason to think that your services might no longer be required.

  ‘Yes, they can, Mum,’ Bo demurred, feeling the first knot of discomfort in the pit of her stomach. ‘They haven’t fired me,’ she clarified, aware that her voice was becoming brittle. ‘They’re not saying I’ve done anything wrong. They’re just . . . restructuring the organisation, that’s all.’

  ‘But, why would they . . . ’ her mother trailed off helplessly. Although Barbara had always professed pride in Bo for being what she termed a career girl, Bo had always sensed her unspoken anxiety that the pressures of living and working in London might prove to be too much for her daughter. There had always been an anxious tone to her questions about work, or the flat, as if she was convinced that, sooner or later, something was bound to go wrong. For five years, Bo had been able to reassure her mother that everything was fine and that she was still gainfully employed. But the look of panic in Barbara’s eyes said, as clearly as if she had spoken the words out loud, I knew this would happen.

  ‘Clive?’ she bleated, shooting her husband a look which communicated that paternal intervention was required to help deal with this crisis. Bo’s father placed his coffee on the occasional table beside his chair with careful deliberation.

  ‘Don’t panic, Barbara,’ he said quietly, before turning towards Bo with an expression of benign concern. ‘If you like, Boughay,’ he began solicitously, ‘I’ll put out feelers at work on Monday. One of the PA’s is retiring soon. I could put in a good word for you.’ Bo’s heart sank. The thought of being the personal assistant to one of her dad’s cardigan-wearing colleagues made her want to crawl under her duvet and never come out.

  ‘Thanks, Dad, but I’m not that desperate,’ she replied, but the hurt look on her father’s face immediately made her regret her snarky tone. ‘I mean, thank you but – I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I only finished at Aspect yesterday. There’s plenty of time to find something else.’ Another silence, during which Barbara continued to stare urgently at Clive in a way that conveyed her conviction that Bo had failed to grasp the seriousness of her situation and needed to have it spelled out to her.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum, really. I should be in line for a decent pay-off. I’ll be okay,’ Bo said defensively. Her mother’s thinly veiled panic, although not unexpected, was beginning to rile her. ‘Actually, I’m thinking of going travelling,’ Bo heard herself say. She knew it was a peevish, provocative comment – travelling was not something that had even crossed her mind before now – but she was beginning to resent the way she was having to reassure her mother, and her tongue had been loosened by her father’s Rioja.

  Barbara’s eyes widened and her mouth dropped open. ‘Travelling? Where? For how long?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ Bo replied airily.

  At that moment, the French doors swung open and a gust of chilly air heralded the return of Lauren and the twins. As they noisily set about unzipping their coats and peeling off their gloves, Barbara jumped up to help remove the children’s shoes before they could tread mud and dirt all over the carpet, giving Bo a welcome respite from her concerned scrutiny. Once the twins were disrobed of their outerwear and occupied with juice cartons and electronic devices, Barbara returned to her seat.

  ‘Bo’s been made redundant,’ she said in a stage whisper as Lauren dropped onto the sofa beside her. Bo glowered into her coffee and braced herself for her sister’s pity. Given Lauren’s comfortable, cossetted lifestyle, Bo could not expect any genuine empathy or understanding for her situation.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Lauren murmured, leaning sideways to rescue a half-full juice carton which was about to topple off the sofa arm.

  ‘It’s okay, really,’ Bo said, with a tight smile. ‘They’ve got to make efficiencies across the company; it’s not just me they’re letting go. And I’ll get a decent redundancy package.’ The stock phrases of reassurance rolled easily off her tongue.

  ‘She’s thinking of going travelling!’ her mother continued, unwilling to let the subject drop.

  ‘Who with, Bo?’ Lauren asked, turning to face her sister with an expression of curiosity.

  ‘On my own, probably,’ she replied lightly.

  Lauren continued to look at her sister shrewdly, prompting Bo self-consciously to raise her cup to her lips even though the dregs of coffee lying at the bottom were now stone cold. It was a fair question, but it rankled that her sister had assumed that she would have to go travelling with somebody. Was Lauren so entrenched in the married-with-kids mindset that she couldn’t contemplate the thought of a woman travelling alone? Bo was disappointed but not surprised, thinking peevishly that there was only so much solidarity she could expect from someone who didn’t work, and whose husband earned enough to pay for a fortnight in Florida plus a week’s skiing every year.

  She wondered whether the question had, in fact, been Lauren’s way of trying to flush out her romantic status. Bo had never mentioned Ben to her family. It wasn’t that she didn’t think they would like him – in fact, she knew her parents would be charmed by his social poise and well-spoken confidence – but Ben had never expressed any interest in her family or desire to be introduced to them. And, given the semi-secret nature of their relationship, it had never felt appropriate to suggest a meeting. She had decided early on that the simplest thing was simply not to mention Ben’s existence to her family at all.

  Feeling that whatever she said was probably going to make the situation worse, Bo sank into a sullen silence, so her parents had no choice but to let the subject of her redundancy and travel plans drop. She submitted to another hour or so of small-talk before getting up to leave at five o’clock, insisting that she had a train to catch.

  ‘You know, you could always stay the night,’ Barbara said with a meaningful look as Bo pulled on her coat. Bo smiled through gritted teeth and submitted to the hug which accompanied the offer.

  ‘Thanks, Mum, but I’ve got stuff to do tomorrow,’ she replied. In fact, there was nowhere she needed to be, but were Bo to agree to spend the night, in light of her recent announcement, she would feel obscurely as if she was admitting defeat, and that somehow this was the thin end of the wedge. Bo might not have any clear sense of what she was going to do next, but she was certain that she was not ready to give up on her London life yet.

  Chapter 8

  Although the afternoon spent with her family had been tense, it had motivated her to prove them wrong, and to show that she was able to cope with the adversity that life had thrown at her.

  ‘What are you doing up?’ Kirsten asked through a mouthful of Cheerios, as Bo walked past the sitting room at a quarter to eight on Monday morning.

  ‘Lots to do today,’ Bo trilled, not stopping on her way to the bathroom.

  Showered and dressed, Bo sat down with tea and toast at the glass dining table which pretty much filled one side of the living-cum-dining room. As she chewed, her eyes wandered across the dusty surfaces around her, and resolved that her first job of the day would be to clean the flat from top to bottom. Once breakfast was cleared away, she delved underneath the kitchen sink for the various sponges, cloths and sprays she needed, then pulled on the musty pair of Marigold gloves she found lurking at the back beneath the water pipes.

  The furniture in the flat had
been provided by the landlord and looked, Bo thought, as if it had been purchased in a hurry at a jumble sale. The bulky tartan sofa filled one wall of the living area and, on the other side of the handsome cast-iron fireplace, stood a rattan armchair which looked as if it belonged in a conservatory and an old-fashioned pine sideboard complete with grooved shelves for displaying plates. When they first moved in, the girls had done their best to personalise the place with accessories purchased during a trip to Ikea in Kirsten’s parents’ Volvo estate. But the addition of their brightly coloured rugs, prints and soft furnishings merely added to the flat’s bizarre, mismatched appearance (or ‘eclectic aesthetic’, as Kirsten somewhat optimistically described it). After a few months, however, Bo had ceased to care about the decor. What with work and her social life, she was rarely in the flat long enough to let it bother her.

  Bo turned the radio on and set to work. There was something surprisingly rewarding about spending a morning cleaning. It was certainly more pleasurable than the Monday team meeting, she told herself with a glimmer of satisfaction. After a morning of dusting, wiping and hoovering, however, Bo’s back ached and her hands reeked of sweaty rubber, and she concluded that she had reached the limit of her domesticity.

  She made herself a sandwich for lunch then opened up her laptop on the glass table and spent a couple of hours updating her CV, playing around with different fonts and layouts until she had produced a resume which made her sound professional, diligent, and eminently employable. She rewarded herself with a cup of tea and an episode of Countdown.

  ‘Bloody hell, you’ve been busy!’ Kirsten exclaimed when she got home from work that evening and saw the gleaming surfaces and track marks of the vacuum cleaner on the rug. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen this place so clean. Unemployment clearly suits you,’ she teased.

  ‘Not for much longer, hopefully,’ Bo replied with a nervous laugh.

  ‘You’ve earned a glass of wine,’ Kirsten said, pulling a bottle out of the plastic carrier emblazoned with the logo of their nearest off licence, but Bo shook her head.

  ‘Nope, not for me. I’m detoxing.’ Kirsten’s eyebrows shot up.

  ‘Since when?’ she asked, incredulously.

  ‘Well, since today,’ Bo replied a little sheepishly. ‘I’ve had too many hangovers recently, and now seems like a good time for a fresh start.’

  ‘Good for you,’ Kirsten said, with an admiring, if dubious, nod.

  In spite of her initial optimism, Bo grew increasingly disheartened as the week went on. On Tuesday, she emailed her CV to numerous recruitment agencies, but her mail-shot yielded nothing more than automated responses saying the agency would be in touch if anything suitable came up. It seemed there was nothing she could do except wait and, with time on her hands, she found herself struggling to fill the days.

  On Thursday night Kirsten got home to find Bo kneeling on the floor in her bedroom, the contents of her bookcase spread across the carpet before her.

  ‘Good day?’ Kirsten enquired with a concerned air. With a manic look in her eye, Bo explained that she couldn’t decide whether to shelve her fiction collection alphabetically or chronologically.

  ‘What do you think?’ she demanded. Kirsten looked at her intently.

  ‘Bo, have you actually left the flat this week?’ she asked. Bo looked nonplussed.

  ‘I put the bins out on Tuesday,’ she replied.

  ‘Right, come on,’ Kirsten said authoritatively. ‘We’re going out.’

  *

  ‘This is a nightmare,’ Bo admitted, as she and Kirsten tucked into a selection of meze at their local Greek restaurant. It was a cheap and cheerful place, with framed prints of the Greek Islands on the walls, and artificial trailing plants in the windows. ‘I’m going out of my mind. There’s nothing I can do except wait.’

  ‘It’s only been a few days,’ Kirsten reassured her, helping herself to a chunk of grilled halloumi, ‘Give it time.’ At that moment, Bo’s phone vibrated on the wooden table. It was a text from Barbara: any news on the job front? Bo rolled her eyes.

  ‘You were saying?’ she said archly, showing the screen to Kirsten.

  The girls continued to eat in silence. ‘Heard anything from Ben?’ Kirsten prompted at last. Bo shook her head. They had not spoken since the conversation on the street on Friday night, and she suspected that he considered himself the aggrieved party and was waiting for her to apologise.

  ‘And you haven’t called him because . . . ?’ Kirsten asked, as if she had read Bo’s mind. ‘Because why should I?’ Bo countered defiantly. ‘I’m the one who’s been made redundant. He’s the one who supposedly made a pass at another colleague. I shouldn’t have to call him! If he was a proper boyfriend he would have called to see how I am. Wouldn’t he?’ It felt good finally to air out loud some of her grievances she had been dwelling on all week.

  ‘Supposedly?’ Kirsten repeated, eyeing Bo over a forkful of grilled fish. Bo returned a puzzled frown, not catching her friend’s meaning. ‘You said he supposedly made a pass at another colleague,’ Kirsten elaborated. That suggests an element of doubt.’

  Bo groaned. ‘You’re such a lawyer, Kirst,’ she complained. She speared a chunk of calamari and popped it in her mouth. ‘He said nothing happened, but . . .’

  ‘But you don’t believe him?’ Kirsten volunteered.

  ‘I don’t know what I believe any more,’ Bo admitted. ‘I never know where I stand with him. He can’t get enough of me one minute, and doesn’t want to know the next. I think I’m just . . . tired of it all.’ Kirsten gave her a consoling smile.

  ‘Maybe you need to get away, to take your mind off everything,’ Kirsten suggested brightly.

  ‘Funnily enough, I told my parents I was thinking of going travelling. Alone. Mum nearly had a heart attack,’ replied Bo. Kirsten chuckled; she had met Barbara enough times to know how she would have reacted to the idea of Bo setting off on an independent travel adventure. ‘Thing is,’ Bo sighed, ‘I don’t really fancy going anywhere on my own, and I can’t afford it anyway. Not till I know I’ve got a job lined up.’ The truth was that Bo had always found the thought of independent travel slightly scary. The closest she had come to it was a couple of all-inclusive holidays with her friends during their summer breaks at university and she knew that didn’t really count. Bo took a sip of water and, not for the first time that evening, eyed Kirsten’s wine glass enviously.

  ‘Look, here’s an idea,’ Kirsten said, in a resolutely upbeat tone. ‘I’ve got some annual leave left over – we could go and stay in my mum’s summerhouse in Denmark for a few days. We could make a girly trip of it.’ Bo looked dubious. ‘It wouldn’t cost you anything except the flights, and at this time of year they won’t cost much,’ Kirsten went on.

  Bo wavered, torn between yearning to get away, to escape her relentless torturing thoughts about Ben, and worrying that it would be irresponsible to go on holiday when she should be looking for work.

  ‘A change of scene might do you good,’ Kirsten urged. ‘Besides, you said yourself, there’s not much more you can do than wait.’ Bo appreciated the effort Kirsten was making to cheer her up, and did not want to seem ungrateful. But in her despondent mood, she was finding it hard to feel enthusiastic about anything. ‘Thanks, Kirst. That’s really kind of you. But I’m not sure,’ she demurred.

  Their conversation was interrupted by the appearance of the restaurant’s owner, a portly, convivial Greek man, to clear the table. He chattily engaged Bo and Kirsten in conversation, asking whether they lived locally, were they sisters, and so on, in the harmlessly flirtatious way that seemed customary for Mediterranean men of his age. Bo answered his questions as politely as she could, fleetingly wondering how he would respond if she told him the truth: that she had just lost her job, that she suspected her boyfriend of cheating on her, and that she had no idea what she was going to do with her life.

  The restaurant owner finally ambled away, laden with their empty plates, and Kirsten headed
for the Ladies. Alone at the table, Bo picked up her phone, opened her mother’s text message and tapped out Nothing yet byway of a reply. Then, while she waited for Kirsten to return from the loos, she scrolled through her Facebook timeline. Her stomach gave a small jolt when she saw that Ben had been tagged in a photo captioned ‘Team night out’. It was a casual snapshot taken in the wine-bar near the office. Ben was standing at the bar with the half-dozen other account managers from Aspect. They all had the uninhibited body language and glassy-eyed looks which betokened an evening spent drinking. Ben was in the middle of the group, his face animated and his eyes glittering, as if he was in the middle of telling a joke. One hand held a half-empty pint glass, but his other arm was draped casually around the shoulder of a petite woman beside him.

  Feeling her pulse start to race, Bo pinched the image on her screen, zooming in on the female figure next to Ben. Her face was partially obscured by someone’s raised hand in the foreground, but Bo recognised the mouse-coloured ponytail and pale blue cardigan as Charlotte’s. She slid her finger across her screen to look more closely at Ben’s face, trying to read his expression in the grainy pixels of the enlarged image. Ben looked drunk, no question, but would drunkenness alone explain the casual intimacy of his pose, the presumptuously proprietorial way his arm was draped around Charlotte’s shoulder?

  She placed her phone back on the table in a state of shock. By the time Kirsten returned from the Ladies, Bo was staring into the middle distance, pale-faced and impassive.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Kirsten asked, sitting down opposite Bo.