Dan had no comeback but to stare blankly, and she slammed the door. They pulled out of the drive and into the evening traffic.
“We’ll be at the Royal in no time,” Jamie said, “How’s he doing back there?” Claire had reached the tearful stage and merely whimpered.
“Hey, hey,” Jamie soothed. “This is a few stitches and good as new. It’s frightening to see blood, that’s all.”
Claire nodded. Phil was a sickly beige color and not fully with it, which Laurie judged maybe a good thing. She wouldn’t want to be there when they unwound the tea towel.
At the ER he got rushed straight through and Laurie and Jamie were left in their party clothes, under bright lights, surrounded by people with sections of their anatomy leaking or bandaged, a baby crying on the other side of the room.
“Fresh air?” Jamie said, and Laurie nodded. “Let me wash this off and I’ll meet you out front.”
“Well, that was the most dramatic way to get out of cooking fifty burgers I’ve ever seen,” Jamie said, joining her five minutes later, a few rusty specks on his sleeves and a massive Nike swoosh across the front as trophy of the evening’s unexpected turn.
“Your shirt,” Laurie said, gesturing at its ruin.
“T.M.Lewin”—Jamie inspected it, pulling it away from his abdomen—“RIP.”
Laurie had a split second of imagining unbuttoning it before a shower, and wondered if there was something in the adrenaline of emergency that made you randy, because she really wanted to.
Minutes later, Claire found them, looking considerably more composed.
“They’re giving him a transfusion and they might keep him in overnight for observation, but he’s going to be fine.”
“See, told you. Let us know how he gets on, won’t you,” Jamie said kindly.
“I can’t thank you enough,” Claire said to the Hammer Horror–splattered Jamie.
“No thanks necessary,” he said, returning her car keys.
“You were an uncompromising man of action and a general hero tonight,” Laurie said as they waited for their taxis.
It was only when Laurie hugged him goodbye, she felt how hard he was trembling. He drew back and could see in her expression, she’d felt it.
“You OK?”
“I . . . I find stuff like this difficult, after my brother.”
Of course. Laurie hadn’t thought of that until this moment, how was that possible? Of course Jamie might have learned what to do, that he’d want some basic skills.
“But you helped anyway?” she said. “There were tons of people who knew Phil there; one of them would have stepped in eventually.”
Jamie looked slightly baffled. “My dad always says if you can help someone, you should help someone.”
“I love your dad,” Laurie said, on reflex.
“Thank you,” Jamie said.
“Can I . . . will you let me write to them, when we go our separate ways? To tell them how much it meant to me, meeting them? I couldn’t bear for them to think I flitted in and flitted out without a backward glance.”
“Yes,” Jamie said, looking drawn. “Sorry I’ve put you in that position.”
“I would rather be in that position than have not met them. That’s the truth.”
Jamie stared at her heavily for a second. “There’s something I said. That weekend away. I think I suggested that . . .”
A car horn interrupted them and a cabdriver waved at Laurie.
“Suggested what?”
“Ah. It’ll keep,” Jamie said.
36
As Christmas drew ever closer, Laurie was back on form at work, and it highlighted how unfair it had been to accuse her of falling standards. She’d known this, but it was reassuring to have it confirmed.
She saw Colm McClaverty on the court steps, after her Disturbance of the Peace client had got off with a mere knuckle rap.
“Thanks for the hatchet job reviews you’ve been giving me,” she said.
“It’s just Chinatown, Jake!”
“Idiot.”
“Oh God, if one of Arsenal’s strikers is off form, Man U don’t let them win to be nice.”
“Yeah, but winning or losing happens in court, there’s no need to garbage talk me outside afterward.”
“All I said was you didn’t seem like yourself, and that—Malcolm is it?—Michael, yeah, took it and ran with it. Like you had other things going on.” He raised his eyebrows.
Laurie wasn’t going to bite.
“Next time, can you not?”
“You have my word.”
Colm ducked down, grabbed her hand, and kissed the back of it, while Laurie said: “UGH, GERROFF.”
Men in her profession, honestly.
“Coffee and a Pret at lunch?” Jamie had WhatsApped her. They’d done this a few times, and when Laurie today commended him on attention to detail in keeping up appearances, Jamie said, “To be honest, it’s nice to have a friend at work. Nothing more than that to it.”
“Aw, God! You poor thing,” Laurie said.
“Don’t worry about me, I’m used to it. ‘I’m married to the sea.’”
Laurie snorted, digging a wooden fork into her crayfish and avocado.
“I have a question for you, and you don’t have to answer. When Dan and Michael were having a go, they mentioned a woman in Liverpool who had a nervous breakdown. Was that your ex?”
“Yeah, God. Michael has people everywhere, huh?” Jamie said. “Stephanie had time off work and said she’d had a breakdown, I’m not sure if it was true. Yes, that sounds . . . unkind, but she leaned hard on how it looked unchivalrous of me to contradict her. I was screwed. Stay silent and tacitly accept her version, or speak up and be the bastard adding to her pain. By the end I had no friends, a whack reputation, and I had to leave.”
Laurie had a funny twinge at “Stephanie.” Nothing like the same magnitude as hearing of a “Megan,” but that thud when an abstract concept of a person becomes flesh and blood specific. Names mattered more than you realized.
“What happened?”
“We had a thing, for maybe two months. I broke a rule by getting involved with someone in the same office which I will never, ever . . .” He looked at Laurie and stopped. “Except when it’s deeply civilized, like us.”
Laurie nodded.
“I thought we’d been clear it was casual. She was not happy when I decided it had run its course, felt I’d wronged her and misled her. Tale as old as time.”
“Tale usually told by men, as old as time.” Laurie smiled.
“Yes, all right, no need to go all Emmeline Pankhurst on me.” Jamie smiled. “Anyway, from then on it was warfare: psychological, biochemical. I had to block her on every place online, she dragged my emails from the work server, she said . . .” Jamie grimaced, and brushed a piece of arugula from his jacket sleeve.
“You don’t have to tell me.”
He lowered his voice: “She went ’round saying I’d roughed her up in bed. That there’d been some choking, I’d gone too far and had violent tendencies.”
“Ugh.” Laurie blanched, immediately wondering if he was into choking.
“Yeah, ugh, you have a visceral reaction to that. Afterward, though, the doubt sets in that maybe, maybe, I did do it. Her whispering campaign was pretty effective—they started calling me the Boston Lincolnshire Strangler.”
“Oof.”
“Eventually it wasn’t possible for me to stay, and I started looking for jobs here. So Michael and Dan are right: my name’s mud at that firm. I would point out two things though: one, my work was fine, and two, it all relies on the testimony of one person, who I was forced to conclude isn’t very stable.”
Laurie knew that as much as Michael and Dan were biased as hell in wanting to think the worst of Jamie, she was biased in wanting to believe the best. She’d heard men do the oh her, she’s crazy spiel to discredit women before and she instinctively didn’t like it. But unless she’d been very blessed or Jamie was exceptio
nally cunning, she’d not seen a whisper of this villainy herself.
“Anyway, enough of my grisly past. What’s on my not-girlfriend’s weekend schedule?”
“Oh. Sunday lunch at Albert’s Schloss with my dad. Before he goes back to the Balearics for the winter.”
She told Jamie how his advice to tell her mother had been spot-on. “I thought you were a new soul but you might be an old soul. As my mother says,” Laurie said.
“Being strictly accurate, you thought I was an arsehole,” Jamie said, laughing. He paused and she thought he might be ruminating on her paternal relationship, except he said, “Mind if I copy that venue idea? I’m meant to be organizing something lunch-like myself.”
“Sure.”
As they arrived back at the office, a slender, striking young woman, with slicked-back hair and coordinated belted coat and spike-heeled shoes, reached the door at the same time as them.
“Eve!” Jamie said, more of an exclamation than a greeting.
“Oh, hey you.”
She swung in for a wholly nothing-like-a-former-intern kiss on his cheek. Her eyes flickered to Laurie and back again.
“I’m here for lunch with my uncle,” she said.
She was clearly lingering to say more to Jamie, and Laurie muttered polite excuses and left them to it.
Jamie’s relief at her absenting herself was palpable, his nerves crackling and swooping in the dead air, like a radio trying to find a signal.
Suddenly, as much as she wanted to believe that nothing untoward had happened between them, she didn’t. They were birds of a feather: sly, stunning, up to Machiavellian shenanigans that remained mysterious to plodding mortals like Laurie.
Wait, wait: Eve was the woman he’d fallen for? Of course! It was forehead-slap obvious. No wonder Jamie had seemed so discomfited just now, no wonder he’d been edgy in Lincoln. What a quandary! He was going to get his partnership, then figure out how to broach it with Salter? Woo-hoo.
How life surprised you: not so long ago, she’d have thought, Ideal match, those two can sit on thrones side by side in hell together. Now, frankly, it seemed more like heaven.
She’d grown so fond of Jamie, and just like that, he was returned to the magical realm he was from. This would be true even without Eve—Jamie wasn’t going to stay doing his job long. If he didn’t get made partner, as Michael correctly predicted, he’d be off to London, no doubt.
Back at her desk, Laurie had a feeling of missing him before he’d left her life.
37
Laurie liked to go to noisy, busy venues with her father. It plugged any gaps in conversation or understanding between them like insulation foam.
Albert’s Schloss was everything Laurie expected: a barnlike space heaving with people who saw themselves as part of the city’s scene, firepits dotted around the room, a live jazz band on acoustics. The festive season reflected in some additional red-green napery and strings of gold bells.
“Is Nic joining us?” Laurie had texted, when making the booking.
“Nah, she’s got business to do in Liverpool.”
She’d never been asked about her premature exit from the wedding party, which she put down to (1) her dispensability and (2) neither of them being able to remember much the next day.
Laurie was glad she’d gone for a low-key showy-offy Sunday outfit, a floral dress with a biker jacket over the top, as the clientele here were very much sporting the Woke Up Like This look that took an hour to create.
She got seated bang on time at half twelve, asked for a beer. It was soon quarter to one: her dad was late, of course he was. Laurie relaxed into people watching instead. She thought back to doing the same in the Refuge in the summer, spying Jamie on his date with Eve. God, that felt like a lifetime ago.
It was one o’clock now. Her dad wasn’t only going to be late, he was going to be flamboyantly late. Laurie pushed down the rising querulousness inside her, the outrage of: How is thirty minutes late, when we hardly ever see each other, OK? How is it not a massive indication of indifference? Because whenever she got a height up, as Dan liked to call it, her dad would sweep in with bonhomie and fulsome apologies and a stupidly indulgent present of some sort, and in a finger snap, she had to convert her mutinous mood into a welcoming one.
How did you fall out with a parent you barely saw from the end of one year to the next? Arguments needed to be something out of the ordinary from generally getting on. If you had a row, then that was it for another year: the row defined the relationship. At some level her dad knew this, of course. He depended upon it. No wonder her mum hated him.
Laurie asked for another cider (“Did you want to order food?” “No, I’ll wait, thank you.”), then another. The third was a poor decision but it was now quarter to two and Laurie was half drunk and entertaining the possibility she had been stood up. By her own dad.
There should be a clever word, a German word, for that feeling when someone lets you down and it’s not remotely surprising and yet still shocking. She drained her glass. A fourth was probably crazy, though she could really fancy one. Because drunk.
“Excuse me?”
Laurie looked up at the Belfast-accented waitress with the cheekbones, through her slightly cider-fogged gaze.
“I’m really sorry. We need the table back?” She held her slender arm out and twisted the strap on her wristwatch so the clockface was visible to Laurie, to underline her point.
Of course, Laurie had forgotten the harsh table turning in popular places like this. She couldn’t squat here and get smashed even if she wanted to.
The waitress did indeed look really sorry for Laurie and Laurie was aflame with the heat of the room’s firepits for what her father had put her through. She left cash with a big tip for the beers and tore out of Albert’s Schloss without making eye contact with anyone.
Outside, Laurie checked her phone to see if her dad had messaged—lol, of course he hadn’t—and called him. It rang out, unanswered. Hi, this is Austin! I know we all hate talking into these things but speak after the beep if you can bear it. She could leave a stinging rebuke on answerphone but what would be the point?
When she glanced up, she started at Jamie walking toward her, looking like the essence of young gorgeous Manchester wanker in a black sweater, dark jeans, and black trainers. Jacket thrown over the crook of his arm, even though it was minty-fresh cold. Vanity, always.
He was with a heavyset young man in a red jacket and two girls, one with short dark hair and another with a ballet dancer’s bun. They were both, it was evident from a distance, gorgeous.
“Hi!” Laurie and Jamie both said in unison.
They mutually exchanged an alarmed look that said: If we are meant to be dating, then this should be handled a certain way but we’ve not really thought what that might involve.
“You go ahead, I’ll have the house beer,” Jamie said, fixing it hastily, gesturing his friends inside.
When they’d safely trooped through the door, he said, “That’s a mate from my Liverpool days and some other friends. Somehow I didn’t think when you said you were coming here, it’d be Sunday. You waiting for your dad?”
“Well I was.”
Laurie explained to Jamie why she was leaving, and Jamie grimaced and said: “That’s completely shit. And he’s not picking up? Wow.”
“Yep. Also, don’t turn ’round and look, but be aware they’ve given your friends seats in the window, and they have a direct line of sight to us right now.”
“I’ve never felt as guilty in my life as I do, doing absolutely nothing wrong with you.” Jamie grinned and Laurie tried to smile, but she couldn’t manage much of one.
It was good to see him, if in excruciating circumstances. Was he on a double date . . . ?
“Are you OK?” he said.
Being asked if she was OK, a friend seeing her not OK-ness, tipped the balance. Laurie’s eyes stung in the bright winter sunlight and she said, morose with alcohol on an empty stomach: “Was there s
omething in Dan that was like my dad, that I unconsciously homed in on? I feel like I wore a please kick my arse some more sign. Without knowing it. Should I have treated them both differently?”
“No. Listen.” Jamie put his hand on her side and moved Laurie further out of the way of the door, as more customers arrived. “Listen to me on this, I know what I’m talking about. It’s got fuck all to do with you. I’ve let down some great people in my time and it was never, ever anything to do with them. In fact, sometimes the fact they were great sent me spinning off even harder in the opposite direction.”
Laurie gulped. She was on the precipice of tears and this sort of kindness could push her right over.
“They are messing up. This is their inadequacy. Don’t put it on yourself. That your dad can’t be a father and Dan can’t be a not treacherous dickhead are faults in their own stars. You’re over here.” Jamie gestured a circle around Laurie. “Doing you. And you are completely fucking great.”
“Thank you,” Laurie said tightly.
“If you ever believe that, you’ll be completely unstoppable. I kind of hope you don’t.”
He smiled and Laurie smiled back weakly.
“Jamie . . . ?” The ballet-bun-hair girl hung off the door in an insouciant way, like a child playing. Her skinny jeans showed she had a pelvis the size of a banjo. Laurie wondered if Jamie was playing it. She felt a pang of insecurity.
“We need to order food?”
“Get me the roast dinner thing. Do they have that? OK, one of those please.”
The girl lingered, looking to Laurie, then Jamie, then back to Laurie again, disconcerted.
“Can I have a moment with Laurie, please?” Jamie said to her, and her eyes widened.
The door slapped shut as she scuttled off inside. The girl watched them with bug eyes, from beyond a pane of glass, her mouth moving rapidly as she no doubt updated her tablemates.
“Are you seeing her?” Laurie said, blurting, slightly taken aback at the idea. What a tangled web this was: What about his fake girlfriend, and what about Eve?
“No,” Jamie said, frowning. “I thought we agreed we wouldn’t do that, while this was going on. Are you seeing anyone?”
If I Never Met You Page 27