The House We Grew Up In

by Lisa Jewell

  ‘Are you sure I can’t get you a real drink?’ he’d said, half-raised from his seat.

  And she’d shaken her head and said, ‘No, honestly, I’m fine.’ And then she’d watched him heading for the bar, looked at his strong, wide back and his good hair, his well-chosen clothes and pleasant feet in nice open sandals and thought, This could be it, this could be my chance to be normal. And as she’d thought that she’d called after him, ‘Actually, Jason, yes, a small glass of white wine. Please.’ And he’d smiled and looked like he’d scored a small victory. Another small victory. He’d been chasing her for months, ever since he’d started at her company in January. He was Australian. He was only twenty-five. It had taken her very much by surprise. After all these years and years working at the same place, sitting next to the same people, putting money in the same envelopes for the weddings gifts and birthday presents of the same colleagues, having the same conversations about the same things, eating the same sandwiches at the same desk, suddenly everything began to change. Suddenly the succession of predictable moments that constituted every day at work was punctured by new and unexpected ones. Unnecessary visits to her desk to ask for things that could easily have been requested via email or an instant message. Suggestions for lunchtime drinks. Compliments. Endless compliments. About her hair, her clothes, her smell, her handwriting, her shoes, her parallel parking, her taste in biscuits. A walk along a corridor now bore with it the frequent possibility of being stopped for a chat. Questions usually that would begin along the lines of, ‘So, you’re a local, where would you recommend for good-quality meat?’ Or, ‘Is it possible to get a decent curry round here or do I have to go to Birmingham?’

  She had been doggedly ignoring his advances for months. The whole thing was ridiculous. She was thirty, for God’s sake. Thirty and still conducting an insanely dangerous affair with her sister’s partner. Thirty and still living at home. Thirty and nowhere near as pretty as she’d been in her youth. Past her prime. And she wasn’t being disingenuous to think such a thing. Even Bill had stopped telling her she was pretty.

  She’d agreed to a date with Jason because Bill had phoned to tell her that they were going on a last-minute Easter break. All five of them. Off to Mallorca to stay in some fancy villa with two swimming pools: one for the adults, one for the children. They were going with ‘some friends’. Beth had shuddered and brought the conversation to a close. Too much there to digest in one sitting. Family. Holiday. Friends. Last-minute. Beth had not done anything last-minute in her life.

  And then Jason had appeared at her desk the next day, all fresh skin and thick hair and wide eyes and tangible lust, and he’d asked her what she was up to at the weekend and she’d said, ‘Nothing much,’ and he’d said, ‘Fancy a drink?’ And she’d said, ‘Sure.’

  She’d arrived prepared to have a horrible evening. Vicky had asked her where she was off to and she’d said, ‘The Black-faced Lamb.’ And Vicky had said, ‘Oh, really, who are you going with, friends from work?’ And she’d said, ‘Sort of.’ And then Vicky had smiled and said, ‘Is it a date?’ And Beth had grimaced and said, ‘Sort of.’ She had put on a dress, though. One of Bill’s favourites: pale pink with wide shoulder straps and a full skirt and a white trim around the hem. She’d pulled her dark hair back into a ponytail and was wearing her black Converse and a denim jacket.

  ‘You look adorable,’ Jason had said when she’d walked into the pub half an hour ago. ‘Totally.’

  She’d squirmed and said thank you and he’d said, ‘What is it with you?’ And she’d said, ‘What?’ And he’d smiled and said, ‘Oh, nothing.’

  He returned with their drinks and placed them on the table.

  ‘I got you a Chardonnay? Hope that’s OK?’

  She shrugged and smiled and said, ‘I’m not exactly an expert.’

  His phone fizzed against the tabletop and he picked it up and turned it off without looking at it.

  ‘Don’t you want to know who that was?’ she asked.

  He looked at her curiously. ‘Not really. If it’s important they’ll call back. If it’s not important, why would I answer when I’m sitting here with you?’

  She thought of Bill, who treated his phone like a special-needs child, fussing over it and caring for it, meeting its every need and demand. She smiled and said, ‘Oh. Right.’

  ‘So, Beth? Bethan? What do you prefer to be called?’

  ‘Beth,’ she said, ‘just call me Beth.’

  He smiled as though there was some inherent joy in her being known as Beth. ‘Great,’ he said, picking up his pint. ‘Thank you for coming out tonight. I really thought you’d say no.’

  She couldn’t respond with any surprise to this declaration given that she had thought she would say no, too, until the precise moment she’d said yes. ‘That’s OK,’ she murmured. ‘It’s nice to be out.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, gazing at her knowingly, ‘I get the impression – and don’t take this the wrong way – that you’re quite a homebody.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A homebody. A person who likes being at home. Staying in. Not going out.’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes,’ she said. I suppose I am. It’s just …’ She closed her mouth against the distinct possibility of saying something mad. ‘Yes. I like being at home.’

  ‘And you live with your mum?’

  ‘Yeah. I know. Terrible, isn’t it? So embarrassing but, you know, I’ve never really earned enough money to get my own place …’

  ‘South Gloucestershire PA of the Year, three times in a decade? And you’re not earning enough money to rent a room?’

  She flushed at his words. Of course she could afford to rent a room. She could probably afford to rent an entire flat, a small one, at least, somewhere unfashionable. ‘Yes, well. It’s more –’ she inhaled – ‘just family problems. Just family … stuff.’ She felt panicky. She wasn’t used to talking about this kind of thing with anyone who didn’t already know about it. ‘I’ll get around to it, one day. And what about you? Where do you … I mean, I know where you live, but who do you …?’

  He laughed at her, gently. She didn’t blame him. ‘I’ve got my own place, near the station in Cirencester,’ he said. ‘Overlooks the tracks, bit noisy, but I quite like the noise. I’d rather that than the noise of flatmates.’

  She nodded emphatically, as though she, too, had known the hell of noisy flatmates. ‘And why did you come to the Cotswolds?’ She was using questions like tennis balls, hurling them at him too fast for him to get one back to her.

  ‘Well, I was in London, of course,’ he smiled, ‘and someone invited me to a house party out this way. Thought it was the prettiest place I’d ever been in my life, so I got straight on to the Internet and applied for every IT job I could find in the area.’

  Beth was barely listening – she was too busy thinking of what to ask him next. ‘And where did you live, in London?’

  ‘Oh, well, you know, everywhere. North, south, west, not east. But pretty much all over.’

  ‘And whereabouts in Australia are you from?’

  ‘Tasmania. Hobart. You know.’

  She did not know. She thought there might have been some connection with yachts. She smiled and said, ‘Oh, right. And how long do you think you’ll be staying here?’

  Jason puffed out his cheeks and then exhaled. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘A few months, at least. My sister’s getting married in December – I’ll head home for that and then take a view on whether or not to come back. I’ll be taking stock of what I’ve achieved here, what I’ve invested in, balance it up with family, home, you know, that kind of thing, make a call.’ He glanced meaningfully at her.

  She flushed and looked into her wine glass. ‘How old’s your sister?’ she asked urgently. She picked up her glass and drank too much, too quickly. This was a mistake. She imagined Meg and Bill sitting by an unlit rippling pool, abandoned inflatable toys floating darkly across its surface, drinking local wine from blue wine glasse
s, laughing together with their ‘friends’, about lovely, normal middle-class things. She felt awash with hate and sadness. She drank the rest of her wine without tasting it and realised that Jason had just answered her banal question about his sister and that she had not heard his reply.

  ‘You’re very different,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘when you’re not at work.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yeah. You seem less … a bit more … just kind of different.’

  She smiled, rather defeatedly.

  ‘Can I get you anther one?’ he asked, eyeing her empty glass.

  She eyed it too, staring into its depths, analysing her options. She could leave. They had had two drinks. It was nearly nine o’clock. She could claim tiredness and leave. Or she could stay. She could have another glass of this average wine and try to squeeze some more conversation out of the evening and go to bed tonight knowing that she had been on a date. That she had been ‘normal’. Or she could stay and drink more than another glass and wring something even more eventful from the night: a moonlit walk, a drunken fumble, held hands, maybe even sex. She looked from her empty wine glass into Jason’s enquiring gaze and he smiled.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he replied.

  She narrowed her eyes at him, accusing.

  ‘Nothing!’ he said again. ‘Nothing. Just thinking how pretty you are. That’s all.’ She saw a pink blush stain his cheeks. It came and went in a moment. She felt her stomach roll gently at his words and at his embarrassment. ‘That’s sweet,’ she said, picturing Meg, so solid, so matronly. ‘Thank you. And yes. I would like another one. Please.’

  He got to his feet. ‘Small? Big?’

  ‘Medium,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  She watched him again, heading for the bar, his body language showing another small victory. She tugged her skirt a little up her legs, showing her shiny kneecaps. She arranged herself into a nice shape.

  She tried not to cry.

  ‘So, how did your date go?’ asked Vicky, mixing muesli from two separate jars into a large bowl and tipping a handful of raisins on top. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. I thought maybe you’d spent the night out?’ She accompanied her words with a big wide smile of vicarious delight.

  ‘No,’ said Beth, flopping down heavily on to the bench and putting her elbows on the tabletop. She pulled the sleeves of her cardigan up her arms and yawned. ‘I slept here.’

  ‘And?’

  Beth sighed. ‘And nothing. We had a drink. We had another drink. We had another drink. We went for a walk.’

  ‘To?’

  ‘To his flat.’

  ‘Oh, where’s that then?’

  ‘By the station.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘We listened to music. We talked. I ordered myself a taxi. I came home.’ She shrugged and yawned again.

  Vicky looked at her curiously. ‘So, a success?’

  Lorelei wafted into the kitchen then, in her antique silk kimono, her grey hair piled on top of her head, kohl smudged beneath her eyes. ‘Morning all,’ she said.

  Beth stared at her as she stood in the doorway, making her entrance, waiting for Vicky to jump up and serve her. But Vicky did not jump up and serve her. Instead she said, ‘Morning, my love,’ took her own bowl of muesli and her mug of black tea and sat down next to Beth. ‘Beth’s just been telling me all about her date last night.’

  ‘It wasn’t a date,’ Beth protested.

  ‘Well, whatever. Your drinks, with a gentleman.’ She brought her arm around Beth’s shoulders and clasped her to her for a moment. Beth pulled away slightly.

  Lorelei stood in the doorway looking a bit lost.

  ‘The kettle’s just boiled, darling,’ said Vicky and Beth could have sworn there was a hint of antagonism in her voice. Lorelei muttered inaudibly under her breath and shuffled across the flagstones in her lambskin slippers. ‘Where’s the green tea?’ she asked distractedly.

  ‘Where it always is, darling, in the blue jar, next to the normal tea. So,’ she turned back to Bethan. ‘Do you think you’ll be seeing him again?’

  ‘No,’ said Beth bluntly.

  ‘Oh. Really?’

  ‘Yes. Really.’ She watched her mother, flapping about hopelessly, the sleeves of her kimono dressing gown dragging through the sugar bowl, tutting under her breath.

  ‘That’s a pity. Why not?’

  Beth sighed. ‘Because,’ she began, ‘he’s way too young. And he’s going back to Australia in December so there’s absolutely no point in me getting close to him.’

  ‘Oh, sweetness, I’m sure you could persuade him to stay, using your feminine wiles.’

  ‘I’m no good at persuading people to do things.’ After four years in love with someone else’s man, this she was very certain of.

  ‘Oh, Beth.’ Vicky ran her hand around the back of her neck and smiled sadly. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

  Lorelei brought her mug of tea to the table and sat down with a ponderous sigh. ‘Where are the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘They’re with Tim.’

  ‘But it’s not his weekend, is it?’

  ‘No, but I thought it might be nice for us to have a quiet weekend together. Just the two of us.’

  Lorelei shrugged and sipped her tea.

  Beth wriggled slightly. There was a strange atmosphere in here. And she was completely in the way. She imagined that Vicky must have been quite disappointed when she’d heard Beth walk into the kitchen this morning, hoping that she’d be in a strange man’s bed instead. She mentally planned a long run and an afternoon movie next door with her dad.

  She’d get breakfast in the village, she decided. During her run. They did a good granola. Well, actually, it was a very average granola, but it was a good excuse to get her running gear on and get out of here.

  She let her thoughts skirt around the details of the previous night as she jogged along the lane into the village centre. She did not want to dwell for too long on her own bizarre behaviour, the way she had suddenly, after her second glass of wine, started to flirt outrageously with Jason, she who had never flirted with a man before in her life. And, she could see quite clearly this morning, it would have been fairly obvious to Jason that that was the case. She saw herself in the corners of her consciousness, her elbows on the table, her hands cupping her face, her eyelashes going up and down like defective blinds, licking her lips, and then, oh, yes, after her third, or was it her fourth glass of wine, running her toes along his shins. She pounded her feet harder against the tarmac, wanting to shake the memories out on to the ground, like gravel from her shoes.

  She reached the café, ‘the best thing ever to happen to the village’, according to Vicky who loved everything about the place from its piles of fresh newspapers and artfully arranged mountains of banana and oatmeal muffins to the handmade oven gloves for sale by the till and the trendy, apron-clad proprietor from Islington called Morgan, after whom the café was named.

  She ordered her granola and berries and hid in a corner with the magazine from the Guardian. She tried to concentrate on the letters page but her thoughts kept tugging her back to her mouth at Jason’s ear, telling him what she was going to do to him once she’d got him back to his place. She imagined her sour-wine breath all over his fresh young skin. She cringed at the thought of her choice of language. She could not, of course, know what he’d thought. He’d said, ‘Let’s get you a strong coffee.’ Which is what you say to someone who’s unpleasantly drunk. Nobody wants to sober up a fun drunk, do they? She remembered, my God, trying to give him a blow job in the pub car park, tugging at the fly on his jeans.

  The waitress – another Australian – brought her breakfast with a cheery smile and a tiny piece of apricot and vanilla tart they were ‘testing out’. ‘Tell us what you think,’ she solicited. ‘Chef’s keen for feedback.’ Beth smiled tightly and said thank you.

  And Jason laughing and saying, ‘Hey, hey, hey,’ and pulling her up from
her knees and tugging his flies back up and saying, ‘Will you be OK to walk, or shall I call a taxi?’

  She couldn’t remember a taxi, not at that point in the evening. They must have walked. All through those dark country lanes. She spooned thick yogurt on to her granola. It came back to her. She’d felt herself young and girlish. She’d thought herself Bridget fucking Jones. She remembered twirling round and round, letting her skirt fill up, fancying herself a prom princess. She remembered him pulling her back to the kerb, laughing again, saying, ‘You’re going to get yourself killed!’ And there it was, proof, if it were needed, that there was nothing funny about Bridget Jones.

  And then, a lift. Someone had given them a lift. Someone yeasty and woolly with a Gloucester bur. She remembered making off-colour jokes about Fred West. She remembered Jason apologising on her behalf. She could not remember what the driver of the car had looked like. In these awful half-memories, she saw him just as Fred West, even down to the brown jumper.

  And then they were in Jason’s flat and she was trying to open his trousers again, trying to pull him on to the bed. Urgh. God. She tipped the berries on to her granola and angled a spoon towards it all, as though she had any intention of eating it, as though she would ever be able to contemplate eating again. And then she remembered biting his earlobe and him yelping. And all the while she remembered thinking of Bill. Thinking of him in his holiday bed. With his fat wife. And she imagined all the while that he was watching them, that this was all a show, for Bill. That she was a porn star and Jason was her co-star and that they were making porn. For Bill.

  She’d done all that stuff.

  Squeezed her breasts together. Made ludicrous noises. Asked to be fucked.

  Christ.

  But Jason had not gone along with her plans. He had peeled her away from him and held her by her wrists and said, ‘Stop. You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing.’ And she’d said, ‘Oh, but I do. I know exactly what I’m doing.’ And he’d said, ‘Beth. Seriously. Stop it. I’m getting you a coffee.’