“Mr. Squiggly?”
“Evidence: She’s finished with her boyfriend of six years right after meeting me.”
Nick was silent.
“And she went on a date with me.”
“Where you didn’t so much as cop a feel. No pun intended.”
“She was still someone’s girlfriend then,” explained Gerry. “She’s a loyal lass; I like that in a girl.”
Nick was silent.
“I’m telling you,” said Gerry, “there’s a chemistry there. She’s the one who went all, ‘Oh, I’m a stranger in a strange land,’” he mimicked. “‘Look after me, you big burly policeman.’”
Nick smiled. “That was an uncanny impersonation, Gerrard. Sounded just like Julie Andrews.”
“Nicholas. I am on her tail. And what a tail, if I may say so.”
“You may.”
“And, let’s not forget, my good friend, that if it wasn’t for her ‘Ooh, and your friends can meet my friends blah blah blah’ you wouldn’t have even met Pippa. So aside from the fact that you owe me big-time, the least you could do is support me on this.”
They sat in silence for a while.
Gerry was the first to notice the atrocious smell, but he didn’t want to mention it. When it got unbearable, he turned to see where it was coming from.
“Jesus Christ,” he whispered.
Nick followed his gaze.
“Not quite,” he muttered. “Hello, Sebastian James.”
Later that day, Pippa phoned Jo. “You’ll never guess who I met at nursery today,” she said.
“Josh?”
“Bloody hell! How did you do that?”
“I just said what came into my head first.”
“That is frightening,” said Pippa.
“What the hell was he doing there?”
“He’s looking after the kids while you’re away. And get this! He took time off work to do it. And, get this! He did it because otherwise Vanessa might have got another nanny in!”
“You’re kidding?” gasped Jo.
“He asked me for a coffee, so I couldn’t get any more than that, but I’ll try and get some more tomorrow. I had to go suddenly because I realized I’d lost Sebastian James.”
“He asked you for coffee? Maybe he fancies you. Oh my God, of course—”
“Shut up! Considering that he’d just asked me how you were, and I’d just told him that you were upset because of Shaun, I think it was more likely that he wanted to find out the real story about you.”
“He asked about me?”
“Instantly. The minute he saw me.”
Jo felt giddy with excitement.
“Unfortunately,” continued Pippa, “so is Gerry. And it doesn’t look like he is going to take no for an answer.”
“Well he’ll have to.”
“Nick told me he once took a whole year to get a girl to go out with him.”
Jo swore under her breath. “Just tell him I’m obsessed with Josh,” she muttered.
“Oh yeah, right, tell a trained fighter exactly who his rival is when he knows where he lives. Do you want Josh beaten up again? I think once is enough for your conscience, don’t you?”
“Bloody hell. Gerry sounds like a nightmare. That’ll teach me to flirt.”
“Aha!” cried Pippa. “So you admit, you did flirt with Gerry?”
“Well,” said Jo, “Maybe I was trying to make Josh a little jealous. Nudge him into actually making a move. How was I to know Gerry was a freak?”
“Hmm.”
“Why can’t Josh be that determined to get me? And why can’t Josh want more than a shag from me? And why can’t Josh just be a nice bloke with no sides to him? And why can’t I think of anything else?”
“Because that would be far too simple.”
“Well, you got what you wanted.”
“Are you calling my boyfriend simple?”
“No, I’m saying I’m jealous. You both liked each other, you both did something about it. The End.”
“Ah,” said Pippa. “But that’s after years of complications. You’ve had it all too simple for the past six years. It’s your turn for the fun and games now. Those are the rules.”
Jo sighed.
“Anyway!” said Pippa. “I noticed your sharp nannying eye hasn’t left you.”
“Eh?”
“Do you want to know where I lost Sebastian James? And why I had to go to the local police station to pick him up? And what I had to tell my boss?”
Jo did want to know. She listened keenly and that night in bed, dreamed of Josh asking questions about her while picking up Tallulah from nursery.
Chapter 21
It was another few days before Sheila finally returned her call. They arranged to meet for lunch that day, in their usual café.
As they sat looking at the tablecloth, Jo realized she didn’t know where to jump in on their conversational loop. The usual subjects of Shaun and her parents were too raw for her to broach. The only impartial subject she could think of talking about was Pippa. Before the silence got too agonizing, she told Sheila all about Pippa and how Pippa was probably the only reason she was staying in London and how much Sheila would adore her. When Sheila didn’t respond, it hit Jo that Pippa was probably not the most tactful of subjects to have started on. Why couldn’t she talk to her best friend anymore?
“How’s work?” she asked Sheila finally.
Sheila looked up briefly from her food. “It’s a job,” said Sheila. “Certainly nothing to write home about.”
Jo started eating. “How’s James? I’ve missed him.”
Sheila raised her eyebrows. “I haven’t.”
Jo frowned. “Where’s he gone?”
“We finished a fortnight ago.”
Jo gawped. “What? What happened?”
“We finished,” repeated Sheila. “A fortnight ago.”
“I thought you two were going to get married.”
“Just shows you how wrong you can be.”
“What happened, Shee?” Jo softened her tone.
“Turns out I was just waiting for something better to come along. And it came along.”
“Who the hell came along?” Jo used her gossipy tone. “I have to know!”
“You ‘have’ to know, do you? All of a sudden, you ‘have’ to know?”
Jo sighed. “God, Shee, I’m so sorry if I made you feel—”
“You didn’t make me feel anything,” cut in Sheila.
“Then why are you being so…like this?”
Sheila stared at her food. “Sorry,” she said eventually.
“It’s not as though I’ve been having fun,” said Jo.
“When are you going back?”
“As soon as I can leave my mum.”
“Hmm.”
“Anyway,” said Jo, adopting her gossipy tone, “so who’s the mystery man?”
Sheila gave a secret smile.
“Do I know him?” whispered Jo.
Sheila smiled again.
Jo gasped. “It’s not John Saunders is it? Village idiot? Face like an albino rabbit?”
Sheila laughed. “Piss off!”
Jo laughed and waited for the moment to pass. “So how is James?” she asked.
“Oh absolutely fine,” said Sheila. Jo looked astonished. “Turns out he was just waiting for me to dump him,” explained Sheila.
“Men.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm,” said Jo. “I-I finished with Shaun, actually.”
Sheila raised her eyebrows.
“You don’t seem surprised,” said Jo miserably.
“I’m not. To be honest.”
“Oh,” said Jo. “I was.”
Sheila looked at her.
“Actually,” said Jo, “he sort of helped me do it.”
They finished their lunch. They looked out of the window. They looked round the café. They decided not to have another tea.
“So what do you mean, he helped you do it?” asked Sheil
a, as they paid the bill.
Jo confided to her best friend of ten years about the breakup of her relationship of six as they wandered out of the café.
After their lunch together, Jo and Sheila went their separate ways, and Jo took herself off to the river. She knew that her father would need her back within the hour, so she didn’t have that long, but hopefully it would be long enough.
As she walked away from the High Street toward the bridge, she felt like she’d swallowed a black hole and it was sucking up her insides. She could barely stand up straight. She stepped gingerly onto the bridge where she and Shaun had had their first kiss all those years ago. She watched the water flow underneath and wondered how such a special memory could make her feel so sad. Then she thought about Sheila and the friendship that had been such a large part of her identity. And then she thought about her parents. Had she made her mother ill by leaving?
Staring at the river, her thoughts flowed too fast for her to keep up. Had she taken all the important things in her life for granted? Had she ruined all her memories? Or, even more terrifying, had she been getting it wrong all the time, building memories on such shaky ground that they couldn’t withstand change? Had she been wrong to leave for London, or had it shown her that it had been time to move on? Had she left herself with nothing? Or shown herself that she’d started with nothing?
After what seemed like ages, she walked over the bridge and turned to the right, following the flow of the river. The sound of the gravel crunching underfoot almost made her weep with nostalgia. And then she reached the church graveyard. She forced herself to stop and look at it. Two ghosts appeared. Two fifteen-year-olds with everything to live for, sharing their first voluntary carcinogen behind the gravestone of a fifteen-year-old girl who’d died in a freak factory accident. Had she loved Sheila then? Would she have loved Sheila if she’d met her in London, almost ten years later? Would she even like her if she met her now? The thoughts were starting to make her feel morose.
She turned the corner and stopped to take in her favorite view. Against the bright blue horizon, trees swollen with buds waved gently at her in the breeze. Fields pregnant with potential rushed toward her, and she stared and then stared again, taking it all in like something the doctor had ordered. Slowly but surely, she began to feel hope and a flicker of fire in her belly. She hardly understood the emotions within her. How was that possible—to feel something you couldn’t understand? And so she backtracked to the last time she remembered feeling like this and got such a jolt that she needed to sit down on the ground. After considerable soul-searching, Jo realized what had been wrong in her life. Dorothy discovered that the Wizard wasn’t the one with her answer—it had been inside her all along.
A long way away, Josh Fitzgerald was having a rather different sort of epiphany. Tallulah was being picked up from nursery and taken to play with a friend, so he had taken the opportunity of being home midweek to see his mother for lunch in Fortnum’s after she’d visited the Royal Academy to see their latest exhibition.
He’d got rather more than he’d bargained for. By dessert, he was sitting, slack-jawed in the restaurant, staring at his mother.
“Don’t look at me like that, Joshua,” said Jane. “The chef will poach you.”
“I can’t believe what you just told me,” whispered Josh.
“What? That I don’t blame Dick for leaving?”
“Yes. And the other thing.”
“What? That I engineered his affair with that silly secretary?”
Josh hung his head in his hands. “I don’t get it,” he whispered. “Why are you telling me this now?”
Jane sat back in her chair.
“It’s my therapy. Martin really is marvelous. He’s made me look deep within myself, and I’ve seen that I controlled the whole thing. Your father couldn’t control a TV remote. Why do you think he married Vanessa?”
“But why would you control the breakup of your own marriage?”
“Because I wanted out. And,” Jane confided, “it turns out I had a classic passive-aggressive attitude to our marriage, so my only way of dealing with it was to force him into the role of abandoner because I wanted to be the angry one. It’s actually very clever, when you think I didn’t even realize I was doing it.”
“So hold on,” said Josh, “let me get this straight so that when I rewrite the past that you ghosted for me, I won’t get it wrong this time.”
“Oh, sweetheart, don’t—”
“You’re telling me that you have made Dad feel guilty for the past eleven years of his life because you weren’t assertive enough to say you wanted to end the marriage?”
“Subconsciously darling,” conceded Jane. “Men didn’t like assertive women then.”
“Oh, so it was all of men’s fault, not just Dad’s?”
“No, I just…”
Josh stared some more.
“How on earth did you ‘make’ him have the affair with his secretary?”
“Oh that was easy,” said Jane. “I just kept telling him how beautiful she was, how sexy, drip, drip, drip, then stopped having sex with him.”
“Aha!” Josh slammed the table with the palm of his hand. “That does not give him permission to have an affair. He was the guilty one there.”
“And then I told him I thought we should have an open marriage, and I might sleep with the grocer. He had very big hands as I recall.”
Josh did another fish impression.
“Josh, please don’t look at me like that. It’s so unattractive, I can’t tell you.”
“You mean you gave Dad permission to have an affair—practically told him to—and then castrated him for it?” he said. “How…how dare you?”
“I know,” gasped Jane. “I feel wretched.”
“He’s been feeling guilty for the past eleven years; I’ve been feeling abandoned for almost half my life, Toby has wrapped a shell around him that’s almost impossible to break through, and both of us have grown up feeling guilty about being men because of what happened to our poor mother!”
“Oh don’t exaggerate, Joshi, you always did exaggerate.”
“I’m not exaggerating!” burst Josh. “When I was fourteen years old—probably my most vulnerable—you convinced me that my father had abandoned me for his fucking secretary—chosen her over me—”
“He didn’t leave you—”
“He did leave me!” cried Josh. “Of course he left me. You think he popped into my room every evening to see how my revision was going? You think he scooted by every morning to wish me good luck for my exams over breakfast? You think he was there for me when my body grew a mind of its own? He left me. My father left me. For some slut in his office.”
Jane turned to the two women at the table next to them who had stopped talking and were now openly staring. She gave them a charming smile and stage-whispered, “He’s just getting off antidepressants.”
The women nodded sympathetically and turned back to their food.
“Mum!”
“What?” Jane was all innocence. “Everyone’s on them nowadays.”
Josh slumped over the table.
Jane stared at her son. “Martin would say it’s time for you to own your own emotions, instead of blaming others.”
“Fuck Martin.”
“Ah well, I was coming to tha—”
“Mum. Please.” Josh held his hand up to her, blocking his face. “One traumatic revelation at a time, thank you.”
“For what it’s worth,” said Jane, “your father didn’t want to leave you. I…well, I sort of forced him to.”
“Oh God.”
“He wanted us to live separate lives but in the same house, so that he wouldn’t miss you both growing up.”
Another fish impression. Jane let it go.
“But I’m afraid I couldn’t allow it.” She took some wine.
Josh hid his face with his hand. After a while, he started mumbling through it, and Jane had difficulty hearing everything.
“I’ve spent the past decade being wary of women,” she heard. “I’ve seen every unattached woman as a threat to family life.”
Jane frowned hard at her son. “Do you think that’s why you have such a problem? With women?” she asked hesitantly.
“Pardon?” Josh looked up.
“Well, you always go for very easy women, darling, and then detest them for being exactly that.”
“That’s a bit harsh.”
“What’s the longest relationship you’ve ever had?”
“Two very long months.”
“The one that ended because you thought she was having an affair?”
“Yes.”
“So you cheated on her?”
“Yes.”
“Twice?”
“Yes.”
“I always wondered where your misogyny came from,” said Jane. “Now I know.” She took another gulp of wine. “Have you ever thought of therapy? Martin’s marvelous. He’s saved my life.”
Josh bent his head down.
“I can’t—I don’t know—I…”
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” urged Jane.
Josh looked at his mother. “Up till now I thought you were the only one who was innocent in the whole mess that is my life,” he said.
“Your life is not a mess.” It was the first time he heard emotion in her voice.
“Mum,” he tried to explain, “to me you were practically the Virgin Mother.”
“Well, perhaps it’s time you realized that’s not possible.”
He paused.
“I was speaking metaphorically.”
“Yes, but, darling, I do think you have a tendency to see women metaphorically. Do you see? Rather than as flawed human beings, like men.”
Josh blinked hard, “Maybe that’s because my mother convinced me she was perfect, and my father was evil personified.”
“Yes, well,” said Jane with some difficulty. “When two people are involved, it’s usually not as simple as that.”
“You mean, you made mistakes too?”
Jane squirmed in her seat. “I am able to confess that…it was not entirely your father’s fault that we divorced.”
She looked down before pouring herself more wine.
The Nanny Page 27
