‘Okay. I will,’ I said, although I wasn’t sure whether – or how, or when – I was going to be able to keep my promise.
Heather threw her coat over her shoulders – it was new, I noticed, a glorious calf-length swishy slate-blue trench that gave me a pang of regret that my finances might prevent me owning anything that gorgeous, ever – gave me a brief hug and ran lightly down the stairs.
As I walked through the rain to the station, I found myself pondering my friend’s revelation that she’d never been in love. Never felt that sickening rollercoaster lurch of excitement when a text arrived, nor the thud of disappointment when it wasn’t from the right person. Never gazed into someone’s eyes, blurry with closeness, and thought, I could do this forever. Never spent far too much time composing WhatsApp messages that encapsulated all the feels, then waited longingly for a response that was just as heartfelt.
I felt, with a pang of fear for her, that when she did eventually fall for someone, she’d fall hard. I only hoped that when it happened, it would be with someone who felt the same and was a totally Ick-free zone.
And I thought about me and Joe. I remembered how I’d felt when we met – that heady, soaring sense of possibility and rightness, coupled with a feeling of security that was quite new to me. I remembered the first time we slept together. He’d made me dinner at his flat – smoked salmon and fillet steak and chocolate mousse, which I’d thought was the most perfect, sophisticated menu ever – and served it at a table set with a white sheet instead of a cloth, candles and a rosebud in an empty Amstel bottle, because he didn’t have a vase.
Afterwards, we’d moved from the table to the sofa to his bed as if it was the most natural thing in the world – which, of course, I suppose it was – and there was no awkwardness, no self-consciousness about my body, just straight-up delight in how we could make each other feel.
And then the next day at work, at around eleven o’clock, when he hadn’t texted and the first niggling doubt had begun to send its toxic tentacles into my head suggesting that maybe he wasn’t going to, a parcel had arrived for me in the internal mail, and it had been those silly slippers with their smiling sheep’s faces.
I’d been so sure, then, that everything would be all right, that I’d found a person who’d always keep me safe. And he had. We’d kept each other safe. Until now: now I felt that everything we’d built up together was in danger of being swept away like a sandcastle by a high tide.
Nineteen
‘Would you like a coffee, Joe?’
‘What?’ Joe glanced up from his phone. ‘Oh, yeah, thanks Alice.’
Relieved, I switched on the machine, its hum filling the awkward silence that had been there between us. Things must be pretty grim, I thought sadly, if my boyfriend agreeing to be made a hot drink felt like some kind of breakthrough. But the weirdness I’d told Heather about had shown no signs of resolving itself. Although Joe was perfectly polite and pleasant to me, and texted me as usual to tell me when he was going to be home (generally late at night), and although he still kissed me goodbye in the mornings, I couldn’t shake the feeling that things between us weren’t right. Any more than I could shake the little thrill of happiness I got whenever a message from Archie popped up on the Scrabble app on my phone.
Although I wasn’t actually doing anything wrong, I knew that what I was feeling was wrong. But Joe’s… I couldn’t even think of it as coldness, because he wasn’t cold. He still wrapped his arms around me in bed at night, although by the time we were in bed we were both so tired that was all that happened. I sometimes sneaked a glance at his dick when he got up in the morning, just to check it was still there. It was, but for all the action I was getting he might as well have left it at the office by mistake.
It was more a sense of distance; a feeling of a chasm opening between us, growing gradually wider and wider. I longed to bridge it, but I wasn’t sure how.
‘I’ve got the evening off tonight,’ I said. ‘I could come into town and meet you. We could go for some food, or whatever.’
‘That would be great,’ Joe replied. ‘But I’m not sure what time I’ll finish tonight. I’m in court tomorrow.’
‘Oh.’ I felt hurt, and rebuffed, even though he was being perfectly reasonable. ‘Why don’t you text me when you know what time you’re finishing, and we can see if we’re both up for meeting?’
‘Sure,’ Joe said. ‘Let’s play it by ear.’
Wounded and frustrated, I chalked that one up as not going to happen.
‘Joe,’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking – I’ve been feeling – are you okay? Are we okay?’
‘What do you mean? As far as I know, we are. How about you?’
‘It’s just…’ But then Zoë came into the kitchen, Frazzle following on her heels, and Joe finished his coffee, gave me one of those kisses that felt more like a ‘yours sincerely’ on an email than a gesture of affection, and left for work.
At first, it seemed like that morning would be like any other at the Nag’s Head. We opened the doors at nine thirty. Soon after, the first of the laptop-carrying coffee-drinkers arrived, shortly followed by the mums with their toddlers, eager for babyccinos and Zoë’s linseed and goji berry muffins.
At eleven on the dot, Ray arrived, ordered his pint of bitter and sat down at the usual table in the corner. I already had Sadiq’s orange juice open, waiting on the bar for him, when he walked in two minutes later and, as usual, Terry arrived just before ten past and I poured him his brandy and Coke.
‘Maurice running late?’ I asked.
Terry frowned. ‘Didn’t turn up yesterday, did he?’
‘Didn’t he? I wasn’t here.’
‘Nope. Sadiq tried ringing, but he didn’t pick up.’
I realised I knew absolutely nothing about Maurice’s life, apart from the few hours of every day he spent at that table, sipping his Guinness, playing his bones and chatting to his mates. He’d always seemed in pretty good health to me, but what would I know? He wasn’t young. All sorts of health emergencies could befall an elderly man.
‘Is he okay, do you think?’
He’d never mentioned a wife, but perhaps there was a Mrs Maurice, even now bustling round her husband’s bedside bringing him hot lemon and honey for a heavy cold. It was that time of year; maybe he had flu. The last time I’d visited my GP for a smear test, there’d been posters up all over the surgery reminding over-sixties that they were eligible for a free vaccination on the NHS.
‘I expect he’d let someone know if he wasn’t. Or Wesley would.’
I hesitated for a second. Should I ask if Terry knew Maurice’s address and pop round to check on him? But they were his friends; they weren’t worried. I was just the woman who served his half of Guinness every day. I had no right to interfere.
‘Right. Well… let me know if you need anything else.’
I pushed Terry’s drink across the bar to him, and he ambled off to join the group – a group of only three now, though. I watched them set up their game, sipping their drinks, talking sporadically as usual. I wondered what it was like for these men to share one another’s company each day yet know relatively little about each other’s lives.
And I knew even less. Sadiq and Ray were married; I remembered Sadiq’s joke about his wife’s cooking, and Archie had mentioned an Auntie Hilary, who used to help Ray run his plumbing business but was retired now, too. As for Terry? I hadn’t a clue. They were just there, every day, as much a part of the pub as the faded carpet or the stains on the ceiling or Princess Diana, watching aloofly from her frame above the fireplace. But, somehow, it was Maurice I felt was the most important of the four. It was he who’d looked after me when I was in desperate need of kindness, who’d given me his hanky to mop up my tears and bought me a sherry that had made me feel far better than it had tasted.
If it hadn’t been for Maurice, I wouldn’t even be here, part of this new community I’d discovered through the Nag’s Head.
As if summ
oned by the power of my thoughts, Maurice pushed open the door and walked in. He was dressed immaculately, as always, in his suit and tie, a handkerchief folded neatly in his breast pocket and a trilby hat perched on his greying hair. But he wasn’t smiling as usual. He looked tired, older – somehow smaller.
He walked over to the corner table and greeted his friends, clapping each of them briefly on the shoulder. But he didn’t sit down, even though I would have brought his usual half of Guinness to him without him needing to order it. Instead, he came straight over to the bar.
‘Morning, Maurice. Same as usual?’
‘Not right now, thank you, Alice. As a matter of fact I was hoping for a word with you.’
‘With me? Sure.’
I waited expectantly, wondering what on earth he could want. Some complaint about the service, or the state of the pub? But it was the same as it had always been, barring the new menu and the shelf of games.
‘In private, if you don’t mind, Alice.’
‘Of course.’
I felt the same lurch of anxiety I’d felt when I was summoned to the HR department at Billings Pitt Furzedown all those months ago, even though I was as sure as I could be that I’d done nothing wrong. I ducked out through the hinged hatch on the bar and gestured towards the little room next to the kitchen that Shirley used as her office. It contained a rickety computer table, a filing cabinet so full of old brewery catalogues, order books and magazines that the drawers were impossible to open, and an upright wooden chair that had clearly been borrowed from the bar years before and never returned.
There was nowhere else to sit, so I pulled the door closed behind us, and we stood.
‘Is everything all right?’
He took the handkerchief out of his pocket and twisted it, looking down at his hands. I reached out and touched his shoulder.
‘Maurice?’
‘I need your help, Alice.’
‘Of course. Anything I can do, I’ll try.’
My head spun. I hadn’t the faintest idea what he could need from me – or whether I’d be able to provide it. It couldn’t be money, surely? Anyone who’d spent more than a few minutes with me knew I was skint. Something to do with the pub? But then he’d have approached Shirley, not me.
‘Your help as a lawyer,’ he said.
Shit. I looked at his grave, worried face and knew that now wasn’t the time to remind him I wasn’t actually a lawyer – I hadn’t formally qualified, I’d fallen at the last fence. And anyway, what kind of advice might he want? Maurice had always struck me as a total pillar of the community, about as likely to commit a crime as Frazzle the cat. Actually, given Frazzle’s propensity for murdering rodents in cold blood, considerably less likely.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Would you like to tell me what’s happened?’
‘It’s Wesley. He’s been… detained.’
‘Your brother?’
Maurice nodded.
I said, ‘Maurice, I’m so very sorry this has happened. Once you’ve explained it all to me I’ll help if I possibly can. But honestly, I don’t know how much use I’ll be. I’ve never worked in criminal law – I haven’t had anything to do with it since university. I’m almost certainly not the right person to be talking to about this. I’m no more of an expert than any other barmaid.’
‘It’s not criminal. Wesley’s a law-abiding man.’
‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.’
He shook his head. ‘I’m not offended. I’m just not thinking straight; I’m not explaining things right. He’s being held in a detention centre. They’re going to deport him, back to the West Indies. Even though he’s lived here for forty-five years. Even though his whole life’s here – his friends, the church. Me. Even though he’s paid his taxes and never even had so much as a parking ticket.’
‘Maurice,’ I said. ‘If it’s an immigration matter, it’s highly, highly specialised. I can support you as a friend but I can’t offer you any advice at all. I know someone who can, though.’
The rest of that lunchtime service felt like just another day at the Nag’s Head – except it didn’t. Although the usual smattering of regulars came in for their first pint of the day and the usual Tuesday delivery arrived from the brewery and I pulled pints and wiped tables the same as always, I couldn’t shake off my worry about Maurice.
I’d given him all the reassurance I could, but my words had felt hollow and, ultimately, all I’d been able to provide was a phone number. He’d left his friends to their dominoes and headed off into the gloomy afternoon, his head bowed as if someone had replaced his felt trilby hat with one made of lead.
Even Archie’s admiring annoyance when I got FLAPJACK on a triple word score could only make me smile briefly.
Drew arrived to start his shift, and I was about to head off for a much-needed break when my brother nudged me and said, ‘See that bloke over there?’
I glanced over to the corner of the room, where Terry, Sadiq and Ray’s vacated table had been taken by a young guy with a laptop. He looked perfectly ordinary at first – just a bloke, with thick-rimmed glasses and longish dark hair curling over the neckline of his faded red sweatshirt.
Then I looked again, and he didn’t seem quite so ordinary. The shoulders under his jumper were broad and heavily muscled. His face looked strangely immobile, the way Heather’s had gone the one time she had Botox done on a Groupon offer and couldn’t raise her eyebrows for six months. His eyebrows were plucked and trimmed into perfect arches, and the hands on his keyboard looked like they’d been manicured, the nails smooth and glossy.
‘What about him?’
‘That’s Fabian Flatley, my landlord. Well, Lauren’s landlord.’
‘Oh, right? So?’
‘So, he’s trouble.’
‘What, you mean like one of those property tycoons from the 1950s? Like Peter Rachman or someone? Does he menace you for protection money and run a brothel from your apartment block?’
Drew smiled. ‘Nothing like that. But he’s dodgy AF.’
‘Dodgy how?’
‘He’s…’ Drew began, but then a group of junior doctors came in, knackered and starving after their shift in A&E, started inhaling pints of Coke and devouring baguettes, and we didn’t have the chance to discuss the troublesome Fabian Flatley further.
I watched him, though, sitting there focusing intently on his computer screen, pausing occasionally to take a sip of the slimline tonic with lime, no ice, that I’d served him when he came in. Dodgy or not, the man could certainly make a drink last.
The weird thing was, he didn’t actually appear to be working. Over the weeks, I’d got used to those customers who, for whatever reason, had decided that the Nag’s Head made the ideal base from which to run their eBay store or write their screenplay or code their website, or whatever they were doing, and they were all the same. All of them alternated quite long periods of frantic activity – up to an hour, for some of the more diligent or deadline-driven ones – with short breaks, when they’d get up, stretch, go for a wee, order another coffee or mess about on their phones.
Fabian Flatley wasn’t doing that. It wasn’t like he was working at all – it was like he was waiting.
And as I watched, I eventually saw what he’d been waiting for – or rather, who.
Shirley had let me know that she’d be in late after taking Juan to a physiotherapy appointment, so it wasn’t a surprise when she came hurrying through the door just after three. But I was taken aback when, instead of taking her place behind the bar so I could have a late and much-needed break, she went straight over to Fabian Flatley’s table.
I saw her greet him, head on one side, not quite sure whether he was the right person but pretty confident. Like they’d never met before but she’d looked him up on LinkedIn. Or – given Shirley was about as likely to use LinkedIn as order a bowl of seitan chicken wings – had known she was looking for a dark-haired bloke in a red jumper with a laptop.
But clearly
Fabian knew exactly who she was. As soon as she walked in, he snapped his MacBook closed and the expression on his face changed from neutral, almost bored, to alert and brightly smiling. His teeth were just as I expected – blinding-white and dead even.
I saw him say something to Shirley and she gave a pleased little laugh, stroking her faux-leopard skin coat as she shrugged it off and hung it on the back of a chair, and although I couldn’t hear their conversation, I could imagine it just as if I’d been standing right there.
You must be Shirley. What a fabulous jacket!
Oh, thanks, love. It’s only TK Maxx.
She sat down.
Irresistibly curious, I moved to duck out from behind the bar and go over to offer her a drink and him a refill, but Drew was too quick for me. He was there already, hovering solicitously, notepad in hand. Seconds later he was back.
‘Flatley wants another slimline tonic. Slice, no ice.’
‘Gotcha. And for Shirl?’
‘The same.’
We looked at each other, wordlessly understanding. Before lunchtime, Shirley drank strong tea with milk and two sugars. In the afternoons, it was lemonade, and after six o’clock she’d have a Bacardi and Coke, but never more than one. Her routine never varied – you could literally tell what time of day it was by what was in her glass. And it was never, ever slimline tonic water.
‘She’s trying to impress him,’ I observed.
‘Yep.’ Drew flipped the caps off two bottles and I tonged lime slices into two glasses. ‘God only knows what they’re up to, but it’s bad news.’
Twenty
Reluctantly, I put on my coat and left the pub. I was eager to try and overhear what Shirley and Fabian were saying, but it would be impossible from my position behind the bar and loitering around them pretending to clear tables and put out food menus for the evening would be too obvious. And anyway, the way the two of them had been leaning in towards each other, close as lovers, I’d have had to practically stick my head in between them in order to earwig on their conversation.
Just Saying: An absolutely perfect and feel-good romantic comedy Page 18