by Jojo Moyes
Her hair had glinted blue-black in the afternoon sun. Her aquamarine eyes, when she had looked up at him, had been angry, as if she was scolding him for some previous transgression. He could still feel her skin against his, the cool translucency of it like dew.
'You can hardly stand up, you poor thing.' Jessie placed her arm on his. 'Look at him, Ems. Asleep on his feet. Why don't you go home?'
'Your chin is all bristly.' The child swung herself round a pillar, her legs kicking up with the restless exuberance of youth, straining towards the brightly coloured equipment of the playpark, just visible beyond the trees.
I have never met her before, he thought. I know I can never have met her before. So, then, why . . . ?
'What babies came out today?'
Jess stroked her daughter's hair. 'Leave him, Ems. He's too tired to talk babies today. Go on, Ale. Go home. Get some sleep.'
'I don't know . . .' he muttered under his breath, so quiet that, as she later told her mother, she wasn't sure till afterwards what it was he had said. And even then she was not sure of his meaning. 'I don't think I know where home is.'
She got home long after Neil, just as the shadows started to lengthen, the light summer evening having stretched almost indecently late. The cottage, despite her lack of effort, looked idyllic, clematis tumbling in bursts over the beamed porch, the burnt sunlight tipping the perennials that had persisted in forcing their way out of the flower-beds, pulsatilla, alchemilla, digitalis, bright purple, pink and blue, unchastened by lack of weeding or fertiliser.
She saw none of it. She let herself in, found him, feet resting on the coffee-table, eyes fixed on the television.
'I was about to ring you,' he said, lifting the remote control. 'Are you (a) stuck in traffic, (b) having an early Christmas sale that you haven't told me about, or (c) stuck under a heavy piece of furniture and unable to reach your phone?' He tore his eyes from the television and grinned at her, blowing a kiss. 'There's some dinner in the oven. I thought you might be hungry. Sorry, I ate mine earlier.'
'What is it?'
'Nothing exciting. Spagbol from a jar. I wasn't feeling very inspired.'
'Actually, I'm not terribly hungry.' She began to pull off her shoes, wondering what it said about her that the sight of him sitting there so contentedly could irritate her, even when he had prepared her a meal. 'Isn't he good?' she could hear her parents exclaiming to each other. 'He cooks for her as well. I don't think she realises how lucky she is.' She stood in the kitchen for a moment or two, leaning on the sideboard, willing herself to be nice, scolding herself for noticing, as she always did, the crumbs from breakfast, the flowered curtains she hated yet could not bring herself to replace (because that would mean making an emotional investment in the place), the smeared and splattered pans and surfaces that told of Neil's culinary adventures. Am I always going to be this awful? she asked herself. Am I always going to be so dissatisfied?
'If you want to get yourself a glass,' he called, from the other room, 'there's a bottle of wine open.'
She opened a cupboard, pulled one out by the stem, and walked into the sitting room. She sat next to him on the sofa, and he patted her thigh. 'Good day?' he said, his eyes still on the television.
'All right.'
'What was the weather like here? It was gorgeous in London. In the hour I was able to go out, anyway.'
'Fine. Pretty hot.'
'Beautiful here when I got back. Look at this guy. He's hysterical.' Neil laughed. He had caught the sun, she realised. His freckles had emerged.
She sat, impervious to the comedian on the screen, sipping the wine he had poured for her. 'Neil,' she said, eventually, 'do you ever worry about us?'
He turned his face from the screen after the faintest of delay, as if understanding reluctantly that they were about to have One of Those Conversations, and secretly wishing that he didn't have to be part of it. 'Not any more. Why? Should I?'
'No.'
'Not about to run off with the farmer from down the road?'
'I meant this. Don't you ever wonder . . . if this is it? If this is as much as we get?'
'As much what?'
'I don't know. Happiness? Adventure? Passion?' She said the last word conscious that he might read into it some kind of invitation.
She could see him fighting to suppress a sigh. Or perhaps it was a yawn. His eyes kept sneaking back to the television. 'I'm not sure I follow you.'
'Look at us, Neil, it's like we're middle-aged, and I don't feel like we got to do the exciting bit first.' She waited, monitoring his reaction, daring him to look again at the television.
'Are you saying you're unhappy?'
'I'm not saying anything. I just - I just wondered what you thought about this. About us. Whether you were happy.'
He lifted up the remote control and turned off the television. 'Am I happy? I dunno. I'm happier than I was.'
'Is that good enough?'
He shook his head slightly, a movement born of exasperation. 'I don't think I know what kind of answer you're after.'
She grimaced, unsure herself.
'Do you not think, ever, Suze, that you can make yourself happy? Or unhappy?'
'What?'
'All this questioning. All this analysing yourself. Am I happy? Am I sad? Is this enough? Don't you think you can worry it all to death? It's like . . . you're always looking for things to worry about, always judging yourself by everyone else's standards.'
'I am not.'
'Is this about Nadine and Alistair?'
'No.'
'They've been an accident waiting to happen for years. You can't say you didn't notice whenever we went round. At one point they were only communicating through the au pair.'
'It's not about them.'
'Can't we just enjoy the moment? The fact that, for the first time in ages, we're solvent, we're both employed, we have somewhere nice to live? I mean, no one's ill, Suzanna. There's nothing bad on the horizon, just good stuff, your shop, the baby, our future. I think we should be counting our blessings.'
'I do.'
'Then can't we focus on that and stop looking for problems? Just for once?'
Suzanna gazed steadily at her husband, until, reassured, he turned back towards the television and flicked it into life with the remote control.
'Sure,' she said, stood up and walked softly into the kitchen.
Seventeen
Summer had descended fully on the little town, easing Dere Hampton gently into its sweltering embrace by a last few degrees. Its narrow streets sweated and baked, cars drove lazily around the market square, their tyres sticky on the molten Tarmac. American tourists in sore-footed clusters stopped and stared at pargeted frontages, exclaiming into their guidebooks. On the square, market traders sat under canopies, gulping at canned drinks, while elderly dogs lay in the middle of pavements, their tongues hanging pink and rude against the dust.
The shop was quiet: the better-heeled had taken off for summer holidays in other quiet towns, others spent their time shepherding children half crazed with liberation for six weeks from intensive schooling. Suzanna and Jessie, moving at a leisurely pace, cleaned shelves and windows, rearranged displays, chatted to tourists, and made jugs of iced tea, which became increasingly diluted with melted ice cubes as the afternoons wore on.
Increasingly, Suzanna had felt dissatisfied with the layout of the shop, and furious with herself that she could not work out what was wrong. One morning they stuck up the 'closed' sign, moved all the tables and chairs to the other end, and employed a handyman known to Father Lenny to move the shelving units to the opposite side. It had not looked as Suzanna had envisaged, and she paid the man the same amount - to Neil's despair, as he went through the books - to move it all back again. She had decided not to do jewellery any more (one piece too many had 'gone missing', small enough to slip into a pocket when she was busy making coffee) and put the display downstairs in the cellar. As soon as she had done this, no less than three women cam
e in separately asking for vintage necklaces. She papered over the wills, and replaced them with coloured maps of north Africa. Then she painted the back wall a pale turquoise and immediately regretted the colour. Through all this, Athene had sat in her frame on the cellar steps, her smile as enigmatic as the Mona Lisa's, suitable neither for the shop wall nor to be taken home, a constant reminder of Suzanna's inability to shape her world in a way that could be considered satisfactory.
Eventually, infected by a kind of madness, she took one Saturday off to go to London. She had originally meant to meet Nadine but, on a whim, pleaded a family emergency and went to Bond Street where, diving in and out of shops at a speed unusual in those temperatures, she bought two pairs of summer sandals, only one of which could truly be said to fit, a short-sleeved grey shirt, some earrings, a new pair of designer sunglasses and a pale blue linen suit that might come in handy should she have to go to a wedding. She also bought a bottle of her favourite scent, some painfully expensive moisturiser and a new lipstick in a colour she had seen in some celebrity magazine. She put all but the shirt on the credit card that Neil thought she had cut up. She would pay for it gradually, she rationalised, and had to stop herself crying on the train home.
Alejandro stayed away for three days, then came every day. Sometimes she would emerge from the cellar and find him seated, his dark, aquiline face expectant as if he had been waiting, and she would blush and cover her confusion under some too-loud remark about the weather, the level of coffee in the machines, the mess of everything in here! Then she would become self-consciously silent, furiously rerunning her inappropriate responses in her imagination, making herself sound ever more foolish.
If Jessie was around, Suzanna said little, content to listen to their exchanges, to store the snippets of information Jessie was able to prise out of him: that his father had written, that he had cooked an English meal, that in the maternity ward a 'mother' had been admitted the previous evening with nothing more gestational than a pillow under her nightdress. Sometimes Suzanna felt that, through Jessie, he was telling her things about himself, laying himself out in front of her in little pieces. Sometimes she found herself doing the same, being unusually forthcoming, simply because there were parts of her that she wanted him to see: the better parts, someone more attractive, more together, than the person she felt he usually saw.
Several times now he had arrived when Jessie was out at lunch and Suzanna had found herself almost incapacitated by awkwardness. Even if other customers were present, she felt peculiarly alone with him, and she would stammer and find things to busy herself with so that she could hardly find time to talk to him, then curse abjectly when he left. Occasionally, perhaps when he appeared engrossed in a newspaper or book, she was able to compose herself and then, gradually, they would begin to talk. Sometimes for the whole hour until Jessie came back.
Once he had told her he wanted to visit the town's museum, a series of overcrowded rooms that detailed Dere's rather grisly medieval history, and she had gone with him, had closed the shop for a whole hour while they dawdled round the dusty exhibits, and he had told her about his own history, and that of Buenos Aires. It was probably not the best business practice, but it was good to get a fresh perspective from someone. To remind yourself that there were other ways of being, other places to be.
When he smiled, his whole face changed.
Yes, it was good to have a new friend. She was pretty sure someone had once told her you couldn't have too many.
Jessie was in the window, pinning Chinese lanterns round a display, occasionally waving at passers-by when she called out: 'Your old man's coming up the road.'
'My dad?'
'No. Your husband. Sorry.' She backed out, grinning, her mouth full of drawing-pins. 'I forget you're from the moneyed classes.'
'What does he want?' Suzanna stepped forward to the door, saw Neil wave as he drew closer.
'Cancelled meeting. I don't need to be in the office till lunchtime,' he said, kissing her cheek. He had taken off his suit jacket, slung it over his shoulder. He glanced over at the tables of chatting customers, then at the wall space by the counter. 'Shop looks nice. Where's the portrait gone?'
'You wouldn't believe it if I told you.' She herself wasn't sure what to think. Her mother and father had come in two days previously. The portrait, they had decided, needed attention. 'Thirty years' mouldering away in the attic, and now all of a sudden it needs 'urgent' restoration. They had been odd with her. Her father had kissed her and told her the shop looked grand. Her mother, unusually, had said almost nothing, but stood back, beaming, as if this were something she had somehow engineered. She had confided that her father had agreed to let them have a vacuum-cleaner. 'I don't understand why it's taken you so long,' Suzanna had said. They hadn't mentioned it, but she had had to fight the suspicion that they were using the painting as a way of trying to fob her off about the will.
'So, what are you doing here, anyway?' she asked Neil now.
'Do I need an excuse? Thought I might come and have a coffee with my wife before I head off.'
'How romantic,' said Jessie straightening some ribbon. 'It'll be flowers next.'
'Suzanna doesn't like flowers,' said Neil, sitting down at the counter. 'It means she has to wash up a vase.'
'Whereas jewellery . . .'
'Oh, no. She has to earn jewellery. There's a whole points system involved.'
'I won't ask what she had to do for that diamond ring then.'
'Hah! If that was on a points system, she would be wearing ring-pulls.'
'You're both hilarious,' said Suzanna, filling the coffee machine. 'You'd think feminism had never been invented.'
They had met only three times, but Suzanna thought Neil was probably a little in love with Jessie. She didn't mind: nearly all the men she knew were, in varying degrees. Jessie had that cheerful, uncomplicated thing going on. She was pretty in a girlie way, all peachy skin and sweet smiles. She brought out a testosterone quality in them: her size and fragility made the most unlikely men come over all caveman and protective. Most men, anyway. Plus she got Neil's sense of humour, an attribute he probably thought went sorely unappreciated at home.
'I never thought of you as a bra-burner, Suzanna.'
'I wouldn't describe my wife as militant . . . not unless you count the time they forgot to open Harvey Nichols at the correct hour.'
'Some of us,' said Suzanna, handing him a coffee, 'are working for a living as opposed to sitting around drinking coffee.'
'Working?' Neil raised his eyebrows. 'Gossiping in your shop? It's hardly working down a mine.'
Suzanna's j aw clenched involuntarily. 'Whereas selling financial products requires a stunt double, obviously. I don't believe there was any gossiping, darling, until you came in.' The darling could have cut glass.
'Ooh. Talking of gossip, guess what? Our gaucho isn't gay. He had a girlfriend in Argentina. Married, apparently.' Jessie had climbed back into the window, and was rearranging it, her legs folded as neatly into themselves as a cat's.
'What? He was?'
'No, the girlfriend. To some Argentine television star. You'd never guess, would you?'
'Your gaucho?'
'He's a male midwife who comes in here. From Argentina. I know, fab, isn't it?'
Neil grimaced. 'Bloke sounds like a weirdo. What kind of man is going to want to spend his working day doing that?'
'I thought you were the one who was so interested in childbirth.'
'My own wife in childbirth, yes, but I still think I'd rather be up the head end, if you know what I mean.'
'You're pathetic'
'A plain old gynaecologist, now, that's different. I can understand the attraction of that. Although I can't see how you'd ever get any work done.'
Jessie giggled. Suzanna squirmed with embarrassment.
'Bit of a dark horse, isn't he? Alejandro, I mean. Jason always says it's the quiet ones who are the worst.'
'How do you know all this?'
'Oh . . . he was in the park when I took Emma over there on Sunday. I sat on the bench and we got chatting.'
'What was he doing there?'
'Nothing, as far as I could see. Just enjoying the sun. Actually, I won't say enjoying. He looked pretty miserable until I came along.' She looked up at Suzanna. 'He was doing that Latino brooding thing, you know.'
'I thought midwives were meant to be female.' Neil sipped at his coffee. 'I don't think I'd want a male midwife if I was having a baby.'
'If you were having a baby, that would be the least of your worries,' Suzanna snapped, and began to tack Polaroids of customers above the north African maps.
'I don't think I'd like you to have a male midwife, come to think of it.'
'If I was about to go through the hell of pushing a whole human being out of my body, I don't think the decision would be yours, actually.'
'I'm going to look this woman up on the Internet, just to see what she looks like. He told me her name, but he said I wouldn't have heard of her.' Jessie rested the stepladder against the wall.
'Is he still in love with her, then?' Suzanna asked.
'Didn't say. But you know what, Suze, I've got a sneaking suspicion he's the type who likes them married.'
'I thought you said there was no gossiping in here,' Neil scoffed.
'So he doesn't have to get emotionally involved.'
'What do you mean?' Suzanna watched Jessie as she manoeuvred the stepladder towards the stairs.
'Well, he's pretty laid back, isn't he? You can't imagine him chasing after someone, or lost in the throes of passion. Some men like to sleep with women who are already involved with someone else. It's safe for them then. The woman isn't going to make any emotional demands. Am I right, Neil?'
'Not a bad strategy,' said Neil. 'Not one I've ever managed myself.'
Suzanna sniffed, trying to disguise the flush to her cheeks. 'You read too many magazines.'
'You put them here.' Jessie threw her bag on to the hook on the cellar door, and held out a starched white apron. 'Mrs Creek made this. Nice, isn't it? Do you want me to get her to do another one for you?'
'No. Yes. Whatever.'
Jessie tied the strings round her waist, then smoothed the apron over her legs. 'Oh, look, the lady with the children wants serving. I'll go . . . No, he doesn't do it for me. Too . . . I don't know. I just like men with a bit more life in them.'
