by Kate Hewitt
She rang Chantal, trying not to let her teeth chatter, and as always, her friend answered almost immediately.
“So what’s the latest? Meet any non-snooty mums at the school gate?”
“No, but…” Laura let out a gusty sigh, and then tried for a laugh. It sounded more like a huff. “I made a complete and utter fool of myself, Chantal. Properly, I mean.”
“Oh, this sounds good,” Chantal replied. “Let me get a cuppa and settle in for the full story.”
Laughing properly this time, feeling better already, Laura waited while her friend did just that, and then proceeded to regale her with all the salient details.
“Insanely gorgeous,” Chantal chortled. “Insanely. And he read that? Oh, I love it. I really do.”
“I haven’t texted him back yet,” Laura said a bit glumly. “I know I need to, otherwise I look like I’ve taken it all too seriously, but…what on earth do I say?”
“Own it,” Chantal replied simply. “And laugh it off. There’s no other choice, really. Although…it almost sounds like he’s flirting with you, at least a little, which I have to say, is brilliant. Just what you need.”
“He isn’t,” Laura declared firmly. “No way. He’s about thirty, Chantal—a mere child.”
“Thirty is not a child.”
“Thirty is young and anyway—no. Just no.”
Chantal was quiet for a moment, and then, her laughing manner cast completely aside, she asked quietly, “Why not?”
“Why…” Laura spluttered, surprised by the seriousness of the question. She’d been anticipating Chantal’s composing of a light and not-so-flirty text for her, not a question aimed straight at the heart. “Why not?” she repeated dumbly.
“Yes, why not. It’s been a year, Laura, and you’re only forty-one. You need to get back up in the saddle, or at least within fifty metres of a horse, if you know what I’m saying.”
“A year isn’t very long.”
“But it’s been more than that, really, hasn’t it?” Chantal said, her tone so gentle that Laura had to close her eyes.
“Chantal…”
“I know we don’t normally talk about this stuff, even though we talk about some pretty deep stuff. But this is your no-go area, and I’ve respected that. I’ve known you weren’t ready, Laur, to face whatever demons it is you’re facing. Because there are some, aren’t there? Between you and Tim.”
The silence between them felt suffocating, unbearably heavy. Laura opened her mouth but no words came out.
“You can just absorb that for a few moments,” Chantal said with a small, sad laugh. “But think about what I’m saying, because you’re young, Laura, and you can’t give up on life just because you suffered a setback. A big one, yes, a bloody great huge one, but still. Tim is—”
“Don’t,” Laura said quickly. “Please don’t. You’re right, there will be a time for me to—to consider all that, but it’s not yet. Not now. Maggie and Sam aren’t even settled here, and anyway James is Sam’s teacher—”
“James, is it?” Chantal interjected, her voice full of humour once more.
“Mr Hill,” Laura corrected quickly. “Now, come on. Enough with the deep stuff.” She couldn’t even begin to process what Chantal had said, how excruciatingly perceptive she’d been. “Please help me compose a text that does not reveal how horribly embarrassed I am.”
“Okay…let’s think. How about ‘Insanely might have been an exaggeration, and I’m guessing you realised that text was not meant for you. As for the stiletto…why not?’”
Laura ran the words over in her mind, relieved that Chantal had dropped the more serious subject of conversation. “That sounds too flirty.”
“Well, he was flirty.”
“He wasn’t.”
“Oh-kay. Whatever. Just text ‘Oops’ then and call it a day.”
“That sounds flirty, too—”
“Oh, Laura.” Chantal let out a groan of laughter. “You’ve got to make light of it, otherwise he’ll think you’re a nutter, and you’ll just embarrass yourself even more. I mean, what are you thinking of texting? ‘I apologise for my inappropriate comment, which clearly wasn’t meant for you’? You’ll sound properly stuck-up, then.”
“I know, but…” Laura nibbled her lip. “This is so far out of my comfort zone already. When Tim and I were dating, people weren’t even really texting that much. At least, we weren’t.”
“So you admit there is something between you,” Chantal crowed triumphantly. “Something flirty.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake…” Laura let out another gusty sigh. Chantal was right. She did feel a spark, even if she was terrified to admit it. Even if James most assuredly didn’t. He probably flirted by text with everyone. He was at least ten years younger than her, after all. Texting was his means of communication. He probably had Snapchat, the way Maggie did, as well, and left people on read—which had taken Laura ages to figure out what it meant, because she’d always thought it was on red. “Does the message turn red if it’s been seen?” she’d asked Maggie, who had looked at her as if she was incomprehensibly stupid. James was probably down with all the techie, text stuff that she found so bewildering.
“Help me, Chantal,” she begged.
“I’m your only hope?” Chantal filled in wryly. She was, Laura knew, a huge Star Wars fan, and quoted it, much to Laura’s confused ignorance. “Okay. Here we go. How about—‘sorry about that’ with three exclamation points, a facepalm emoji, and another random one to keep the stiletto thing going.”
“I don’t want to keep a thing going, stiletto or otherwise. Especially not stiletto.” There was something sexy about them, after all.
“Shows you’re confident, you can take a joke as well as make one, but there’s nothing suggestive about it. That’s the tone you want, Laura. Trust me. I’m the single one here.”
Laura considered this for a moment as she worried at her lower lip before she gave a decisive nod that no one saw. “Okay. What emoji?” This seemed very important.
“Let me have a look.” Laura waited while Chantal started to scroll. “Panda?”
“No.”
“Dolphin?”
“How about a cougar?” Laura joked, and before Chantal could give that suggestion any credence she said quickly, “No animals. Too cutesy.”
“Avocado? Broccoli? An ice skate?”
“If I send him an ice skate, he might think I’m asking him to go ice skating—”
“For the love of all that is holy, Laura, that is taking things too far. He is a man. He is not going to read meaning into your random emojis.”
“Something else, please,” Laura pleaded.
They finally settled on a plug, which Laura felt was safely innocuous and could not possibly imply anything.
“In all my days I have never seen the need for a plug emoji,” Chantal remarked. “If he starts texting you random emojis the way we do, you know he’s a keeper.”
“Don’t…” Laura’s breath came out in a wobbly rush. What if he did?
“Just saying. So you’ve got it ready?”
“Yes.” Laura let out another shuddery breath as she studied the simple text she’d composed as if it were written in Sanskrit. “‘Sorry about that,’” she read. “And then the two emojis.”
“How many exclamation points?”
“Two. Three looked excessive, the texting equivalent of one of those annoyingly high giggles.”
“Fair enough. Feel good about it?”
“I feel sick,” Laura confessed. “I don’t know why this is freaking me out quite as much as it is. You’d think at my age I could handle replying to a simple text. This should not be such a big deal.”
“It’s because you’re in sight of the horse,” Chantal said simply. “Now get back on that saddle and press send.”
Holding her breath, closing her eyes—but not before checking she was, in fact, sending it to the right person this time—Laura pressed send. She let out her breath in a ru
sh as she waited for—what? James to reply instantly? What was she, fourteen, like Maggie, glued to her phone?
“And now you wait,” Chantal said cheerfully. “And try not to obsess.”
“I’m not obsessing,” Laura exclaimed. “I barely know him. And I told you, Chantal, I’m not—”
“I know, I know,” Chantal soothed. “You’re not ready. But you did say he was insanely gorgeous, and it’s not every day you run into one of those.”
“I’m really wishing I never said those words.”
“Actually, you texted them—” Chantal stopped abruptly as the ping of Laura’s phone sounded down the line. “Well?” she asked, and with her heart beating far harder than it should, Laura opened the text that had just come in from James. As she glanced at it, she let out a wavery laugh. “What does it say?” Chantal demanded.
“It’s just an emoji,” Laura told her. “Of a lizard.”
“I love this man already,” Chantal said.
Chapter Six
“Maggie! Sam!”
Slowly Laura climbed out of the car as her in-laws rushed towards her children and swept them up into exuberant hugs. She smiled at the sight, determined to be positive. This was, after all, why they’d moved from Woodbridge to Wychwood…to be closer to Pamela and Steve, who clearly adored their grandchildren.
She went to get Perry out of the boot, and the bag of overly expensive goodies for her in-laws she’d bought at the Waitrose in Witney, before joining everyone at the front of the house. The Neales lived in a five-bedroomed, executive-style house on the outskirts of Burford, which they’d bought as empty nesters, to welcome all the grandchildren they’d been eagerly expecting. Laura had never quite shaken the feeling that she’d disappointed them by only producing two.
“Come in, come in,” Pamela welcomed them all with teary-eyed exuberance. “It’s so wonderful to see you.” She enveloped Sam and Maggie in perfumed hugs before glancing at Laura. “You can put Perry in the utility room.”
The endless cream carpets and Perry didn’t go all that well together, but Laura hadn’t wanted to leave him home alone for most of the day. She traipsed off to the utility room while Pamela shepherded the kids into the sitting room, chatting all the while.
“There you go, Per.” She fondled the old dog’s head as she steeled herself for the afternoon ahead. There was nothing wrong with her in-laws, per se. Really, Laura knew she had no cause to complain, and in point of fact she didn’t complain. But her visits with them over her sixteen years of marriage to Tim had always felt like something to be endured. Slightly. Only slightly.
She left the utility room for the gleaming kitchen, depositing her bag of goodies—a gold-wrapped box of chocolates, a bottle of wine, and some biscuits for cheese—on the worktop.
“Oh, Laura, you shouldn’t have,” Pamela insisted as she swept into the kitchen for the tea tray that she had already set up with china cups, milk and sugar bowl.
“It’s no trouble,” Laura murmured. It was the same every time—Pamela said she shouldn’t have, but Laura knew if she hadn’t, it would have been remarked upon, in a silent, pressed-lips sort of way.
“I’m doing a roast,” Pamela said, almost as an accusation, as if Laura’s gifts could not possibly compare to a beef joint and Yorkshire puddings.
“Lovely,” Laura replied. She was never sure if she was being ridiculously oversensitive when it came to her in-laws, perceiving slights where there were none. Admittedly they hadn’t got off to the best beginning; when she and Tim had started dating, Pamela and Steve had been decidedly put out. They’d been hoping Tim would get back together with Rebecca, the daughter of their best friends whom he’d dated all through university. Laura had started out as second best, and she’d never quite felt as if she’d moved up a place.
“Are you coming in?” Pamela asked as she hefted the tea tray.
“Yes, of course.” As if she’d lurk in the kitchen the whole afternoon. Giving her mother-in-law as genuine a smile as she could muster, she followed her into the sitting room, a room done in about twenty shades of beige and cream, with loads of little porcelain figures, some even on the floor or by the fireplace. When Sam had been little, tripping about in his merry way, Laura had been rigid with tension, springing around the room, desperate to avoid a breakage.
Now, at least, she could relax, or try to.
“So you’ve had your first week of school,” Pamela said to Sam and Maggie as she poured tea. “And it was a success?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” Maggie said, which was more information than she’d ever offered Laura.
“Granny, guess what?” Sam chimed in. “I’m starting a club!”
Laura sat back and sipped her tea, slightly tuning out while Sam regaled his grandparents with all the details of the Minecraft Club that she already knew.
In the three days since James Hill had mentioned the idea to her, Laura had done her best to avoid him. She hadn’t replied to his lizard emoji text, and she’d more or less skulked in the back of the schoolyard during drop-off and pickup, to avoid so much as meeting his eye.
The morning after the whole texting debacle, she’d woken up scorched straight through with embarrassment as she’d recalled the whole lamentable episode. The slight fluttery feeling of excitement she’d had, simply because a man who had made her feel alive again, even in the tiniest way, was actually interacting with her, had morphed into sheer humiliation.
He had to be laughing at her—a forty-something mum, going all giggly over her son’s far younger teacher! It was absurd. Considering Tim had only been gone a little more than a year, it was worse than absurd. It was, she feared, pathetic. She vowed to stop thinking about him, which was easier said than done, although several days of total avoidance had helped, at least a little.
Instead she’d focused on the rest of her life: registering with a supply agency, meeting her neighbours—Lindy had introduced Emily, a lovely young woman who had been shyly friendly but made Laura feel about a million years old, but in a good way, sort of—and trying to get Maggie to talk to her. The last, unfortunately, had been a failure, as usual.
“So, Laura, what do you think?”
The stridency of Pamela’s voice made Laura realise guiltily that she’d been tuning out a bit more than she’d meant to.
“Sorry, what?”
Irritation flickered across her mother-in-law’s face as she gave her a steely sort of smile. “Steve and I were thinking of taking the children skiing over the February half-term. You know how Tim loved skiing when he was younger.”
But not when he was older, which somehow felt like Laura’s fault, since she didn’t ski, although her husband had never pushed for a skiing holiday. “Too expensive,” he’d always said. “And too much faff. I’d rather be on a beach.”
“Skiing,” Laura repeated now in surprise. “Oh, wow…”
“Can we go, Mum?” Sam asked eagerly. “Please? I’ve never been skiing.”
“We thought you might like a break,” Pamela continued. “You could get some jobs done around the house…”
Laura blinked, realising who this invitation was for. The children, not her. Which was fine, of course, because she didn’t ski and it was understandable that Pamela and Steve would want some time alone with their grandchildren.
And yet…it still stung, somehow. It felt so pointed.
“Wow, well, that’s very generous,” she managed, scrambling to organise her thoughts. “Thank you…”
“We’ve booked a chalet at Les Gets,” Steve interjected. “Right on the slopes.” He smiled at Sam.
“I see.” So her acquiescence had been assumed. But what if she’d had plans with her own children for the half-term? Not that they could afford to go anywhere, but still. “Well, I’m sure they’ll love it.” She glanced at Maggie and Sam; her daughter looked more enthused than Laura had seen her in a long while, and Sam was fist pumping the air.
“Lovely,” Pamela said in satisfaction. “I can har
dly wait.”
Later, as they were all taking a walk through the fields surrounding Burford, Perry lumbering determinedly alongside them while Pamela marched ahead with Sam and Maggie remained glued to her phone, Steve hung back to talk to Laura.
“Everything okay?” he asked with a semi-sheepish smile that Laura took to be an apology for not including her in the skiing holiday. This was often how her in-laws worked; Pamela bulldozed through and Steve did a little half-hearted clean up afterwards.
“Yes, I think so.” She returned his smile easily enough, because she didn’t really have a problem with her father-in-law. “It’s early days, of course, but I think a change was good for all of us. It was hard in Woodbridge, with everyone knowing.” The sudden silences, the awkward condolences the feeling that everyone seemed to have that she couldn’t move past her grief when sometimes it felt like they had more of a problem with it…she was glad to leave that all behind.
“I’m sure.” Steve nodded in a way that closed that avenue of conversation, which was fine. Her father-in-law never did like to probe too deeply into anything, not that Laura had any intention of telling him anything more about life in Woodbridge—certainly not about the money problems she and Tim had had. And what about the marital ones?
No, she certainly wasn’t going to volunteer any information about those. She didn’t even like to think about them herself.
“You’ll get there,” Steve told her with a bracing smile and a clumsy pat on her arm.
Laura smiled in return. “I certainly hope so.” Because what if she didn’t, wherever ‘there’ was, some golden horizon where life felt normal and good? It didn’t, Laura thought, bear thinking about.
*
By the time they got back to Willoughby Close it was dark, and Maggie’s brief flare of enthusiasm for skiing trips and roast dinners had, predictably, morphed back into a grouchy silence punctuated by dramatic remarks on how late it was, and didn’t anyone realise she had homework?
Laura ignored it all as she unlocked the door to number three and they all trooped into the house. Coming home, no matter where they went, always felt a bit of a let-down. It was in moments such as this one that Laura felt Tim’s absence keenly; he would have teased Maggie out of her mood, or asked Sam to play a game of ping-pong—not that they had the ping-pong table anymore. But he would have filled up the emptiness with his energy, his indefatigable good humour—except when he didn’t.