The Woman Next Door

by Natasha Boydell

  She sometimes felt like she didn’t deserve him.

  ‘Mum, can we go to the park?’ Tom’s question brought her back to reality and she realised that she was still staring out of the window, long after the family next door had disappeared.

  ‘It’s scorching hot out there, Tom. Perhaps we should go later, when it’s cooled down.’

  ‘What can we do then? I’m bored.’

  Alan came in then and took in his children’s fed-up faces. ‘Fancy going down to the lido for a dip?’ he asked.

  ‘Yessss!’ Tom and Katie jumped up in unison. ‘Can we, Mum, please?’

  ‘It’ll be rammed,’ Sophie warned Alan. ‘You’ll probably have to queue to get in.’

  He shrugged. ‘We don’t mind do we, kids? We’re not in a rush. Why don’t you stay here and chill out, Soph? I’ll take Tom and Katie.’

  She looked at Alan, and then at the children, and made her decision. ‘Nah, I’m coming with you. It’s got to be better than ironing. I’ll close my eyes and pretend I’m in Mallorca!’

  And she went off to dig out their swimming costumes.

  3

  Angie looked at her calendar. She had about half an hour before her next client meeting. Picking up the phone, she called Jack.

  ‘What’s up?’ he answered.

  ‘How did it go this morning?’ she asked.

  ‘Yeah fine, no dramas.’

  Benji had started at secondary school a couple of days ago but it was the first day of primary school for the others. Jack had offered to take them as Angie had an early client meeting. There had been a few tantrums from the children that morning as they were packing their bags, which she knew was first day nerves, and she’d been eager to find out how it went.

  ‘Thanks, Jack. I can pick them up from school later, I’ll be done in time, but we do need to sort out breakfast and after-school club ASAP. Have the builders been round yet?’

  ‘Yeah, they’re here measuring now so I’d better go.’

  They’d been living in Pemberton Road for two months, although sometimes it felt like they’d only moved in five minutes ago. They’d barely had time to unpack before they had left again for their summer holiday in Italy. After the disruption of moving, the break had been just what they all needed. She’d been glad of the time away from staring hopelessly at the peeling wallpaper and dusty carpets. They’d returned home after a blissful three weeks away, sun-kissed, refreshed and, she hoped, ready to embrace their new life.

  The following weekend some of their Greenwich friends, Simon, Alex and their three children had come round for a barbecue. While the younger children had water fights in the garden and the older ones watched TV inside, Angie had showed Simon and Alex round the house. Alex had oohed and ahhed in the right places, making Angie feel a bit more positive.

  ‘It’s got so much potential, Angie,’ Alex said enthusiastically. ‘When you do the extension and the loft, it’ll be amazing. And you and Jack have such good taste, I just know it’ll look like something from Grand Designs. What’s the area like?’

  ‘It’s nice,’ Angie said. ‘It’s changed a lot since I was a child. There’s a little strip of cafés and restaurants that look promising. And a decent park. But it’s not Greenwich.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  ‘Terribly. I’ve been fretting about whether we made the right decision. But it’s done now, so I have to crack on with it. I’m sure it’ll be fine once the children are settled into school and the work is done on the house. But heavens knows when that will be and I forgot how much I hate living in chaos. I need order in my life.’

  ‘What are the neighbours like?’

  ‘One side is a family with two young children. They seem okay. The other side is a young couple; she’s pregnant. We haven’t seen much of them, to be honest.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s a real find. You’d never have been able to afford anything this size in Greenwich. And you’re close to your mum now, which is what you wanted.’

  Angie had nodded and looked away. She had told all of their friends that was the reason why they had moved to Finchley but it was only one of the reasons. There was another one which no one but she and Jack knew about. A decision – more of a demand really – she had made and Jack had had no choice but to agree to. At the time it had seemed like the perfect idea, an opportunity to put the past behind them and start afresh but now, in the cold, harsh reality of it all, she wasn’t so sure. Recently she had been wondering if she had overreacted. She had made a rash decision which was not appropriate to the situation and now she was paying the price.

  When Alex and Simon left to go home later that day, promising to visit again soon, she had almost pleaded with them to let her come too, away from this crumbling, old, smelly house and back to her previous life. She felt abandoned, like a child whose parents were going off somewhere exciting without her. Jack and the children had waved them off and headed straight back inside without a second thought but she’d lingered on the doorstep, watching the empty street long after they had gone. She looked up and down Pemberton Road and wondered if it would ever feel like home and then scolded herself for being so negative. I’m just tired after a long week, she told herself. I need a good night’s sleep and it will all seem so much better in the morning.

  Since then she had been determined to be more positive, especially now that she knew the children had gone off happily to their new school. She turned to her computer and tried to concentrate on preparing for her next meeting but her mind kept drifting. She thought about Jack at home, chatting away to the builders like they were old friends, making them a cup of tea, probably dishing out the expensive biscuits she’d bought from Harrods for her mother, and felt a familiar pull in her heart. She loved that man, sometimes so much that it frightened her.

  They had met at university in Durham. He was captain of the football team, the one who all the girls swooned after and then wept over when he lost interest. The sort of boy you’d heard of before you’d even met him. They were on the same law course and after sitting next to her in a lecture one day, he seemed to take a shine to her. Not in a romantic sense back then, more in a kindred spirit kind of way. Jack was intelligent but everyone assumed that he was a bit of a jock and he didn’t do himself any favours by acting like one. But with Angie, he told her over coffee a few months after they met, he felt different. He liked talking with her about the meaty stuff, as he called it – politics, history and religion. He seemed to seek her out, appearing alongside her as she walked to lectures or sitting next to her when she was studying in the library.

  After a while they got into a habit of having lunch together every Thursday in between classes. It became her favourite part of the week. Soon she was looking for him every day, breathing a subconscious sigh of relief when she spotted him coming towards her through the crowds or making a beeline for her in the lecture theatre. In the evenings, whenever they saw each other out in a student bar or club, he always gave her a nod or a wave – he was never rude to her – but they rarely spoke. They had two completely separate lives, sets of friends and university experiences, that only converged at certain times of the week.

  She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t attracted to Jack from the start. Everyone was attracted to Jack and they definitely sparked off each other. So perhaps she had a tiny crush on him. But Angie knew that she wasn’t Jack’s type. This became more obvious with each new girl she saw him with, and there was no point in fantasising that she was. Pining after him would only cause her a heartbreak that she didn’t need in her life. She was at university for one reason only, and that was to gain a first-class degree and get a job in a top law firm.

  She was driven even at eighteen, after years of her mother drilling it into her that women had to work harder than men to be a success. Patricia had raised Angie on her own and had worked hard to make sure that Angie had all the opportunities in life that she hadn’t, and Angie didn’t take that for granted. She didn’t want the dist
raction of a stomped-on heart or the awkwardness of her friendship with Jack being ruined over a drunken fumble on a night out. So, she made the decision to enjoy their friendship for what it was and stop daydreaming about anything more. After a while she started going out with another, more straightforward boy, and her coffees and lunches with Jack eventually petered out. When they graduated, they lost touch completely.

  She assumed that she would never see Jack again and had almost forgotten all about him when she bumped into him by chance, several years later. She was working as a trainee solicitor at a firm in central London. One morning she was ordering her usual black coffee on the way into the office, her mind preoccupied with the many things she had to do, when she heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Is that you, Ange?’

  Her stomach lurched. She turned around and there he was, Jack the jock, as she used to call him teasingly, looking every inch as devastatingly handsome as he had always done.

  ‘Christ, do you not age at all?’ she replied in delight, hugging him warmly before moving aside to let the other people in the queue get to the counter. She waited while Jack ordered his own coffee and then he stepped aside too and observed her with a look of relief.

  ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to see a familiar face, Ange. I’ve only just moved to London and I’ve got to say, I’m not sure how I feel about it yet.’

  Jack was originally from Manchester and as they waited for their drinks, he explained that he’d moved back in with his parents after university, given up on law, and got a job as a runner for a TV production company. He had quickly worked his way up the ladder and into a city centre flat with a friend, before being offered a new job in London.

  ‘It was too good an opportunity to turn down but apart from a handful of people from university who I haven’t spoken to in ages, I don’t really know anyone in London,’ he said.

  Angie doubted it would take Jack very long to make new friends but she could imagine how overwhelming it must feel to move to a new place. And as a loyal Londoner born and bred, she had wanted to make him fall in love with her city. If he happened to fall in love with her too, she had reflected later, perhaps that wouldn’t be a terrible thing. But she convinced herself that she was only joking because she had always assumed that Jack the jock wasn’t hers for the taking.

  ‘I’ll take you out,’ she had informed him as she collected her coffee. ‘Show you all the places to be, introduce you to some of my friends. How about this weekend?’

  ‘Perfect,’ Jack said, reaching for his phone so that he could take her number. ‘I’m looking forward to it already.’

  Then his coffee arrived and they parted ways. As she dashed to the office, clutching her hot drink, she could feel herself grinning from ear to ear.

  They arranged to meet at a bar in Islington the following Saturday. He turned up twenty minutes late and scanned the crowded room with an easy confidence before spotting her sitting in a booth with her friends. As he waved and headed towards them, her friend Carly hissed into her ear, ‘Blimey, Angie, you didn’t tell me your old mate was hot. What’s his story?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Angie hissed back. ‘I haven’t seen him for years.’

  ‘Well, I get first dibs if he’s single and straight,’ Carly replied, smoothing her hair with both hands and sitting up in her seat as she beamed at the incoming Jack.

  After introductions and a trip to the bar, Jack squeezed himself in between Angie and Carly, who tried valiantly to monopolise his attention. But when it was established that Jack had a girlfriend back in Manchester, Carly rapidly lost interest and turned away, leaving Angie and Jack free to catch up on old times.

  ‘I’m not surprised you got a contract at such a prestigious law firm,’ he told her. ‘You were always top of the class. Everyone wanted to sit next to you so they could steal your notes.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s why you hung around me like a little puppy!’ Angie said, laughing in mock outrage. ‘Well you could have just said, it would have saved you a lot of coffee money.’

  ‘I know but I’m a gentleman. You’ve got to put the effort in if you want to take someone else’s hard work and claim it as your own. Otherwise it’s just rude.’

  They talked all evening, long after her friends left to go on to a club. It wasn’t until the bell rang for last orders that they realised it was time to go home. As they left, he asked her if she was free for lunch the next day.

  They met in a pub for a Sunday roast and then went back to his shared house for a cup of tea. The house was a typical bachelor pad, with a huge widescreen TV and rows of empty beer and wine bottles lining a shelf in the kitchen. She had a vision of him and his all-male housemates holding raucous house parties and bringing girls back after nights out. He’ll have forgotten all about me in a few weeks, she thought.

  But, if anything, the opposite happened. They started meeting up more and more. He texted her most days, even though she knew he was making new friends and building a social life of his own in London. Each time she heard her phone beep with a message, she would grab it hungrily, feeling a thrill if she saw his name on the screen. Deep down she knew that she was heading down a slippery slope but she still refused to acknowledge her feelings to anyone, even herself.

  ‘Oh we’re just friends,’ she would say, whenever any of her pals made a comment about how much time she was spending with him. ‘Anyway, he’s got a girlfriend in Manchester.’

  But that didn’t stop her from enjoying his company or fretting when she hadn’t heard from him in a few days. It didn’t stop her wondering what he was doing. Was his girlfriend visiting for the weekend? Or was he out with his housemates at some club or bar, doing shots? Was he thinking about her too? It was sometimes like torture, not knowing what he really thought of her, if he just saw her as a friend or something more. He had changed since university though, that much was clear. Not in any profound way, he’d just matured a bit, settled down, although he still had an element of Jack the jock about him, that hint of cockiness that was simply a part of who he was and probably always would be.

  One Friday evening he invited her out for a drink with some of his colleagues. She had been looking forward to it all day and had rushed to the bathroom as soon as she finished work to reapply her make-up and fix her hair. But the minute she arrived she could tell that he was in a bad mood. She sat beside him, trying to catch his eye and draw him into conversation, but he barely acknowledged her. Feeling hurt and disappointed by his behaviour, she turned away from him and started talking to one of his workmates instead, a slightly older guy called Harry who seemed lovely. The more she chatted with him, the more she could see Jack scowling and downing beer. Finally, she’d had enough of his cold shoulder and she dragged him off to the bar on the pretext of helping her get a round in so that she could confront him.

  ‘What’s going on Jack? Why are you being so rude?’

  He pulled her aside, out of sight from the rest of the group and leaned into her. She could smell the alcohol on his breath and realised that he was even drunker than she’d thought.

  ‘Harry fancies you,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ she replied. She wasn’t sure if it was a statement or an accusation.

  ‘Do you fancy him?’

  She was confused and irritated by the confrontational tone in his voice.

  ‘What does it matter to you if I do?’ She wondered if he was upset that she’d been flirting with his work colleagues. Perhaps he was worried about his reputation.

  ‘It just matters to me,’ he replied, looking intensely at her with those ridiculous piercing eyes that had ripped many a young woman’s soul into tiny little pieces over the years.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I love you.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, Jack, you’re drunk,’ she said, a lot more dismissively than she felt. Inside she was erupting with shock, joy and disbelief. Could he really mean it?

  ‘I’m not that drunk, Angie, I know how I feel. You
’re the most beautiful, intelligent, ambitious and all together amazing woman I have ever met in my life.’

  He tried to kiss her then, but she put her hand on his chest to stop him. ‘Jack, I don’t want you to do anything that you might regret. Sleep on it, okay, and we’ll talk tomorrow.’

  She kissed him on the cheek, grabbed her bag, said goodbye to his friends and left the bar. Outside she leaned up against a wall to catch her breath. Had that really just happened? She loved him, of course she did, but was it really possible that he felt the same way or was it just the beer and a touch of the green-eyed monster talking? As she walked to the tube station, she felt like she had somehow entered a parallel universe, one where being with Jack was a possibility rather than a fantasy, and she wanted to grasp it with both hands. But she was terrified in case it was all a mistake and life returned to its normal state tomorrow.

  It took her hours to fall asleep. She lay in bed, wondering how she had ended up falling so madly in love with this boy. She had always been so pragmatic, so able to keep people at arm’s length, but now she was completely helpless. The next morning she woke up with the sensation that something monumental had happened and felt a rush of joy when she remembered what it was, followed by a sinking feeling that it was still a dream that wouldn’t come true.

  Two hours later, as she was staring at her phone, he turned up at her flat looking sheepish, handed her a bunch of flowers and asked her to go for a walk with him.

  ‘I was actually just about to go shopping,’ she told him and immediately kicked herself for being churlish. But the truth was that she didn’t want to go for a walk with him. She was too afraid of what he had to say, having already guessed that the flowers were an apology. He was going to tell her that he was a drunk idiot who was talking rubbish and didn’t mean a word he said.

  ‘Where?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean where?’

  ‘Tesco? Sainsbury’s? Asda?’