Falling to Earth

by Deirdre Palmer

  ‘How about tomorrow for lunch?’ Jonno barely gave her the chance to say hello.

  ‘No, I can’t. Look...’ - she took the phone over to the window so as to be as far away from the kitchen as possible whilst keeping an eye on the door – ‘... you shouldn’t be ringing and you definitely shouldn’t be asking me out, so please don’t do it any more.’ Her voice had dwindled to hardly more than a whisper at this point. Gray had ears like a bat.

  Jonno obviously hadn’t missed a thing either. He laughed. ‘I’m not “asking you out”, not in the proper sense, anyway.’

  ‘Yes I realise that, of course I do. Even so...’ Juliet felt the heat flood to her face. This was stupid. He could even make her blush from the end of a phone line, and she wasn’t given to blushing, not usually, anyway.

  ‘Oh good, so we’re agreed then. Lunch. As friends.’

  ‘No, we are not agreed and anyway we aren’t friends, we’re virtually strangers!’

  Why was she bothering to argue with him? Why didn’t she just cut him off? She was about to do just that when he spoke again. ‘That’s easily fixed. Go on, say you’ll come out with me. I’m bored witless not being able to run with this ankle. I need someone to talk to.’

  Honestly, he’d be telling her his wife didn’t understand him in a minute. Hang on...

  ‘Jonno, are you married?’

  More laughter. ‘No. You?’

  ‘No...’ This was getting her nowhere fast. ‘I am with someone.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘How? How do you know? Are you a clairvoyant in your spare time?’

  He certainly had plenty of that. She hadn’t meant to snap but she couldn’t let him get away with such a presumptuous statement.

  ‘The size eleven Timberlands in your hall were a bit of a clue.’

  Juliet bristled. ‘For all you know I might keep them there to deter intruders.’

  ‘You don’t, though, do you? I was right the first time, wasn’t I?’

  ‘Yes, yes, all right. His name’s Gray and he happens to be in the next room so if you don’t mind...’

  ‘I am too, with someone, that is. At least I was last time I looked. Not that any of that matters. Have you made up your mind about lunch yet?’

  Juliet glanced towards the sitting room door. She’d moved further into the window bay and her face was right up against the curtain. ‘I have, and the answer’s still no,’ she hissed into the folds of material. Sounds of movement came from the kitchen. ‘I’ve got to go. Please don’t call again.’ Then she added: ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Take down this number. Call me when you’ve had time to think about it properly.’

  He really was just about the most annoyingly persistent person Juliet had ever met. All the same, some kind of automatic reaction kicked in and, extricating herself from the curtain, she grabbed a biro and scribbled the number on the back of a magazine.

  Clicking off the phone, she ran upstairs and spent five minutes in the bathroom to regain her composure and have a little think. Not that there was anything to think about where Jonno was concerned. Gray? A different matter entirely. He should be put in the picture. He may be keeping secrets from her – at least, it had begun to feel that way – but that didn’t make it right for her to do the same, did it? She splashed cold water on her face, took a deep breath and went downstairs.

  The iron was cooling on its stand and Gray was nowhere to be seen. The door to the dining room was closed. She opened it and stuck her head round.

  ‘Ah, so that’s where you’re hiding.’

  Gray turned from his computer and let out an elaborate sigh. ‘I’m not hiding. I’m just trying to get some work finished.’

  She had to bite back a retort. It wasn’t easy. She hadn’t behaved well last night, she was acutely aware of that, but she had apologised this morning, Gray had seemed to accept it, and if that wasn’t enough then it should have been.

  ‘I was only going to tell you...’ – what was she going to tell him? – ‘... Someone wanted me to go out to lunch, someone I met the other day, I forgot to say. Anyway, I said no. That’s who was on the phone just now. You might have heard me talking...’ She stopped, aware that she’d been rambling, and in any case Gray’s attention was already back on the screen.

  ‘What?’ he said, absently, not looking at her.

  ‘I was telling you who was on the phone...oh, never mind.’

  She closed the door and left him to it.

  On Tuesday evening, Juliet was watching television alone, Gray not being due back from his business trip until tomorrow, Andrea at play rehearsal and Rachel upstairs, supposedly revising for a biology test. Holby City was only ten minutes in when her thoughts turned to chocolate and refused to be budged. A quick scour of the cupboards confirmed what she already knew – there wasn’t any. The mini-mart would still be open – it didn’t close until nine – and she had noticed there was only a scraping of Marmite left so she could get a jar of that at the same time. The trip now fully justified, she stuck Holby on pause and nipped up the street, leaving the front door on the latch.

  The shop was empty as she took her purchases to the counter and exchanged the usual pleasantries with Denny, the owner. Behind her, the door clicked. Another customer, obviously, yet as she stood waiting for her change, the strangest sensation overcame her, a feeling of being watched that was so strong it was almost a physical pressure. She didn’t turn round to look - she didn’t know why, except that for some reason it seemed impossible.

  The door clicked again. Denny glanced over Juliet’s shoulder and shrugged as he counted coins into her hand.

  There seemed to be no-one about as she left the shop. Even so, she pounded back down the street as fast as her ballerina slippers would allow and as she closed the front door behind her and dropped the latch she felt an inexplicable but overwhelming sense of relief.

  5

  Juliet reached over the side of the bed and retrieved her pillow from the floor. Gray lay flat on his back, eyes closed, wheat-blonde hair, glossed by the morning sun, flopping across his forehead. The white duvet was angled across his body like a toga, the smooth, gentle swell of muscle it hid even more enticing than the section it revealed. If only it was just about this. For one perfect, locked-in moment, Juliet could almost convince herself that it was.

  She got out of bed and unhooked her dressing gown from the door. Gray was watching her now, a satisfied smile on his lips.

  ‘Are you doing anything today?’ she said, dragging her hairbrush through the tangles. ‘Only I thought I might spend some time with Andrea, take her out for coffee or something. We seem to be missing each other lately, like ships that pass in the night.’

  ‘Fine with me. I’ve got some work to finish, then I thought I’d mow the lawn – providing the blades are sharp enough.’

  Juliet flinched inwardly. That could have been a dig. She was supposed to have arranged for the mower to be sharpened and Gray had waited in all yesterday morning for it to be collected, while she was out shopping, only to discover that she had forgotten to contact the man. Gray had not been best pleased. On the other hand, he might not have meant it like that. She decided to give him the benefit of the doubt.

  ‘Rachel’s going to Sarah’s again, so she says. It would be nice if she spent a Saturday at home once in a while. I did say Sarah could come here for a change but apparently that’s not acceptable. She has to go there. Goodness knows what they do all the time.’

  ‘Have you asked her?’

  ‘Sort of. It didn’t get me very far. She just said something about hanging out, then when I questioned her a bit further she told me I was giving her the third degree and I shouldn’t be so nosy.’ Juliet gave a little laugh. ‘Well, not in so many words but that was the gist of it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t worry,’ Gray said. ‘I’m sure whatever they do is pretty harmless.’

  ‘I didn’t say I was worried. I was curious, that’s all.’

  She fished
in the drawer and brought out cropped jeans and a navy and white spotted top. When she turned round, Gray had gone back to sleep.

  The phone was ringing as she went downstairs. As usual, the handset was missing from its cradle. She scouted round and found it on the kitchen windowsill, half concealed beneath a sleeping Sidney’s front paws.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Didn’t get you up, did I?’

  No, please, not him again! Juliet sank into a chair and propped her head up on one elbow.

  ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ Jonno continued, without waiting for her to reply. ‘How about getting some fresh air? I could pick you up or we could meet somewhere. What about the park near you, St Anne’s Well Gardens, isn’t it? There’s a cafe. They do excellent coffee.’

  Juliet went to the door, listened for any signs of movement upstairs, then closed the door and sat down again.

  ‘Jonno, did the fact that I didn’t call you back suggest anything to you, like, for instance, I wasn’t going to? Or even that I’d forgotten all about you entirely?’

  The first bit was true. The second bit, unfortunately, wasn’t. She hadn’t forgotten him. Oh, she’d tried all right, but he’d been popping up all week, disrupting her train of thought, making her stop what she was doing... she had a thought. It couldn’t have been him the other evening, watching her when she went to the shop, could it?

  ‘Jonno, you weren’t anywhere near here on Tuesday evening, were you?’

  ‘Nope. Not guilty. Why?’

  No, of course it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his style, creeping about, missing the opportunity to torment her in person.

  She sighed. ‘It doesn’t matter. Anyway I’m busy this morning, and before you suggest some other day, please understand, it isn’t going to happen, ever, and whatever you say about us being just friends, then in the first place I have no idea why you’d want to be friends with someone...’ – she was going to say someone of her age, then thought better of it – ‘well, with me, and in the second place, Gray would not be happy about it. Not at all.’

  ‘Well, he’s a very lucky fella. Lou, on the other hand, wouldn’t mind in the slightest. She probably wouldn’t even notice.’

  Juliet’s natural curiosity snapped apart from the commonsense part of her brain and jumped up and down, waving its arms. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that. All relationships have their rocky patches – not that I know anything about yours, of course,’ she said, suddenly rather wishing that she did.

  ‘It’s been going on too long to be a rocky patch.’ Jonno’s voice bounced over the airwaves, unencumbered by any signs of distress. ‘I’m not sure Lou still wants to be with me. It’s just a feeling I get now and then, you know?’

  Juliet nodded, forgetting for a moment that he couldn’t see her. She knew only too well. ‘Do you still want to be with her?’

  ‘I’ve got used to having her around. I’d miss her if she went.’

  Juliet laughed. ‘And they say romance isn’t dead! Honestly, Jonno, if you’re that luke-warm about it no wonder you aren’t feeling all loved up!’

  ‘All loved up? What kind of an expression is that?’

  ‘One of Andrea’s, my friend - she’s staying with me at the moment. She’s a very contagious kind of person.’

  ‘Would I like Andrea?’

  ‘I expect so. Most people do.’

  ‘I don’t suppose I’d like her as much as I like you.’

  Juliet went hot all over. He needn’t start all that. Before she could retaliate, he was off again.

  ‘Don’t take that the wrong way. It is allowed to like people of the opposite sex without wanting to…’

  ‘Yes, yes, I get the picture. Look, I hope it works out with you and Lou. Is she a free-runner too?’

  Juliet had a mental image of the two of them, hand-in-hand, leaping through space in slow motion.

  Jonno laughed. ‘Christ no. Her body’s too precious to take any risks with it.’ And you can take that any way you like, Juliet thought, smirking to herself as Jonno continued. ‘She’s on the books of a modelling agency in London. She does a bit of part-time work down here, in between jobs, to pay for the travel and all the gear.’

  ‘Modelling? Wow. Would I know her?’

  ‘Probably not, unless you’ve seen the ad for tights where the girl runs across a field and you only see her legs, not the rest of her. That’s Lou.’

  ‘Well, she must have something, otherwise she wouldn’t have got that far,’ Juliet said, remembering the endless legs tripping through the daisies and shifting her own, somewhat shorter ones, beneath the table.

  The stairs above reverberated as Rachel bounded down them, two at a time. Juliet ended the phone call with surprising speed, reminding Jonno, yet again, that she wasn’t available for lunches or trips to the park or anything else. His too-easily elicited promise not to phone again had a distinctly hollow ring to it, but there was no point worrying about that now.

  ‘I’m glad you suggested this,’ Andrea said, when they’d made camp on a shelf of pebbles a few yards from the sea, having collected cardboard beakers of coffee on the way down. ‘We haven’t had a proper chat for ages.’

  ‘No, and who’s fault’s that? You’re never in!’

  ‘I don’t want to be in the way, Ju. I feel bad about taking up so much space in the house as it is. Gray was very good about shifting his office to the dining room. I don’t want to rub it in by being under everyone’s feet all the time.’

  Gray had not been good at all about moving his office out of the back bedroom but Andrea didn’t need to know that. To his credit, he had kept fairly quiet on the subject but the resigned sighs, accompanied by much huffing and puffing as he’d struggled downstairs with his computer and then spent ages lying on his stomach running leads back and forth in order to reconnect the thing had said it all.

  There was a tiny fourth bedroom-cum-boxroom next to the main bedroom at the front of the house but that was nowhere near big enough to contain Andrea and all her possessions and it was already full of assorted junk as well as the ironing board, Christmas decorations and a five-minute-wonder exercise bike.

  Quite why Andrea had brought so much stuff with her remained a mystery – it wasn’t as if she had nowhere else to put it. Despite her dramatic doorstep declaration that she was ‘homeless’, this was not technically true. She had a perfectly good home, an elegant stone villa facing a park in one of the best parts of Harrogate, but since Declan had moved out Andrea said she felt like a lone passenger on a double-decker bus and she’d packed the BMW with ‘just the essentials’ and headed for Brighton, but not before she’d had the locks changed.

  One failed marriage and a clutch of broken engagements had not exactly helped Declan’s cause when initially he’d set out to persuade Andrea that she was, and always would be, the only girl for him. Andrea had received this declaration with the scepticism it deserved, then promptly dismissed it and concentrated instead on Declan’s other credentials which held much more appeal, money and ambition being at the top of the list, and she’d married him with these firmly in mind and her fingers crossed metaphorically behind her back against the rest.

  Juliet couldn’t blame Andrea for her pragmatic approach to marrying Declan. Poverty terrified her – a childhood featuring moonlight flits from unsympathetic landlords had seen to that. There was a palpable affection between the two of them, or there had been, and even if it wasn’t the romantic, all-encompassing type of love that convention decreed should be in place before marriage, that was their business, wasn’t it, and it wasn’t for anyone else to judge.

  ‘What I don’t understand,’ Juliet had said to Andrea the day she arrived, ‘is why you stayed with Declan so long if he’d been ...’

  ‘Shagging everything that moved. It’s all right, Ju, you can say it. I thought he was going through a phase and I could just ride it out. There are worse things. We had the business and the house and a decent life-style. I wasn’t going to throw all that away
on a whim.’

  ‘Hardly a whim,’ Juliet had replied.

  ‘I feel almost sorry for him in a way.’

  ‘Why?’ Juliet had been astounded at this pronouncement.

  ‘Because – get this - he says it’s different this time. Head-over-apex in love, apparently, him and Clandestine.’ She tapped her temple. ‘Deluded. Poor sod.’

  ‘Clandestine?’

  ‘It’s Celandine really. She’s not his usual bit of fluff with nothing between the ears. She’s a bright girl and she knows a sucker when she sees one. As soon as she’s got what she wants, she’ll be off, and where does that leave him? Nursing his wounded pride and a darn sight poorer if I have anything to do with it.’

  ‘You’ll get a divorce, then? This is definitely it?’

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll get a divorce and a whacking great settlement. I helped him build that company. I won’t let him forget that.’

  Juliet had wondered whether Andrea’s gung-ho attitude was a cover-up for a broken heart but then she decided it wasn’t. Even marriages like hers had their boundaries and Declan had finally stepped over the line.

  Declan was managing director of Confer, a successful conference organisation, and Andrea ran the recruitment side. They’d met when Declan turned up at the London recruitment agency where Andrea worked, and Andrea had promptly recruited herself. A year later, they were married and soon after that they relocated both Confer and themselves to Harrogate.

  According to Andrea she didn’t miss her job one bit. She’d had enough of working long, exhausting hours and she’d been on the verge of telling Declan she was giving it up even before she found out about Celandine. She had, however, stayed on long enough to sully Declan’s reputation, such as it was, by dropping subtle hints to his colleagues about his carryings-on.

  Juliet was pleased to hear it. She had never liked Declan. A dapper little man with a receding hair-line and the beginnings of a paunch, he stood at around five foot six, half a head shorter than Andrea without her heels, and his manner at times could only be described as bumptious. Juliet could only surmise that he held the same attraction for the women he’d messed around with as he’d held for Andrea.