The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  ‘He will understand,’ Jack said. ‘It’s the crap weather. It’s not your fault. None of this is your fault.’

  She realised he was looking at her in the semi-darkness.

  ‘This ball was a big deal,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t just any old night out. Rod’s been working towards partnership for a long time, and there’s a promotion up for grabs. If he can pull it off then partnership is a given, way ahead of time.’

  ‘You say that like you have it scheduled in your diary,’ he said.

  She smiled across at him. Little did he know how ordered her life was. It would undoubtedly shock the hell out of him with his day-at-a-time approach to life.

  ‘Actually, I kind of do,’ she said. ‘Life runs better if you have a plan.’

  She craned through the darkness to catch the slightest telltale sign of an eye roll, but he was just looking steadily back at her.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘Really, it does.’ She lifted one hand out of the blanket and pointed at him for emphasis. ‘Otherwise you can just drift through life, and suddenly you realise years have gone by without you actually having achieved anything. Think about it.’

  ‘Okay. Well then, what kind of plan are we talking about?’

  She thought about the shared timeline she and Rod had brainstormed one night over a bottle of wine. How in the moment she had thought it so reassuring, the knowledge that Rod saw their future as inextricably together, and she could see that fact written in black and white if she ever happened to question his commitment.

  ‘Well, life events mainly. Goals you work towards. You know the kind of thing.’

  ‘Not really. What kind of events?’

  ‘Well, this partnership thing is a good example. The goal on the list is that Rod will make partnership by the time he’s thirty-five. That’s why this bloody ball that I’m missing tonight is so important, because there’s a promotion up for grabs, and if he manages to get that, then the partnership will follow a couple of years early. And then a few years after that, when he’s settled in that job and we’re married, and we’ve maybe upsized our living arrangements, then we look at having kids.’

  ‘Wow. In that order?’

  She couldn’t tell if he was taking the piss with that sentence, and so she didn’t add that she had a spreadsheet on her laptop at home that had every hoped-for life event for the next ten to fifteen years plugged into it. That might be a challenge too far to him.

  ‘There is nothing wrong with having a life plan. I like knowing where I’m going, I like to not have the unexpected come and slap me in the face from nowhere.’

  ‘The unexpected can be good too, sometimes,’ he said.

  The light was very subdued, but there was no mistaking how he held her gaze very still when he said that, and for some reason her stomach took on a melty quality that it had no business doing. Especially not in freezing cold temperatures.

  ‘Ahahahaha.’ She groped for a facial expression that felt like it channelled indifferent instead of flustered. ‘I can do unexpected as well as the next person. I’m just saying it can actually be quite nice to feel secure about the future too.’

  ‘Don’t you think it limits you though, in some way? You’ve got this path mapped out. Where’s the room for spontaneity?’

  ‘We can do spontaneity,’ she insisted. She and Rod. Absolutely they could.

  He stretched a little in the flat seat and looked at her thoughtfully.

  ‘Okay then, tell me the last time you did something spontaneous, like on the spur of the moment, without planning it or putting any thought into it first?’

  She opened her mouth to reply, certain that any number of situations would spring immediately into her head, bemused when they then didn’t. The silence while he waited made the racking of her brain even harder. Then at last something came to her.

  ‘The year before last we upgraded at the last minute to a suite at this hotel in Paris,’ she said triumphantly.

  He failed to stop an amazed laugh.

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s your best shot at being spontaneous? A hotel upgrade years ago?’

  She’d actually thought it not a bad example. But he had an air of amusement about him, and if he wasn’t taking the piss out of her right now then his next attempt at it was definitely in the pipeline.

  ‘This is the real world, Jack. Jobs, ties, responsibilities. Just because you can jet off at a moment’s notice doesn’t mean the rest of us can.’

  ‘I’m not talking about jetting off. What about more day-to-day stuff, like taking a joint sick day off work and driving to the coast, or even just trying a new restaurant last minute?’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘I bet Olive would get what I mean. She obviously knew how to live in the moment.’

  The car was getting colder again, and she pulled the blanket up higher around her neck. The thought of Rod taking a sick day for a jolly was completely beyond her imagination.

  ‘You’re so bloody irresponsible,’ she said defensively, because he had somehow managed to make her life feel a bit stale, when in actual fact she had it arranged exactly as she liked it. ‘I’m just not that kind of person, and neither is Rod. We just see things differently, you and me. Family and home life … those things mean a lot to me.’

  He was watching her with an odd expression on his face.

  ‘It’s not that family isn’t important to me,’ he said. ‘It’s actually more that it is.’

  Before she could follow up on just what that meant, Jack pulled himself up into a sitting position and turned the ignition in the car. Warm air began to drift in through the air vents, lifting the temperature back up. When he settled back down, he avoided her gaze.

  ‘You don’t seem to spend much time with them,’ she said, watching him looking anywhere but at her. ‘Your family. If they are that important, I mean. Look at you going away on your own next week and everything.’

  Jack looked across at her through the semi darkness. The dashboard lights gave out an orange glow, and the shadow cast from the front of the car made her eyelashes seem never-ending. Her gaze was fixed on him. That was his solution in a nutshell. Going away on his own. Tried and tested. The only thing that worked to make life normal again. What was it that made him feel unable just to shoot this conversation down for once? Was it this crazy situation, the two of them stuck in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night? As if there was no one else in the universe even awake right now except for the two of them.

  He pulled his jacket around him a little, although the car was beginning to warm.

  ‘I’ve always been really close to my family. Spent loads of time with them. I lived at home until I was in my mid-twenties, they probably thought they’d never get rid of me.’ He took a breath. His mouth felt dust dry. ‘It’s just that things have been different the last couple of years.’

  ‘How do you mean, different?’

  ‘My younger brother died nineteen months ago.’

  The quiet in the car. The words hung in the air. The reality of it, spoken out loud. He took the briefest of glances at her eyes. They were full of sympathy.

  ‘Oh my God, I’m really sorry.’

  He shook his head at her, not wanting the sympathy. It didn’t help.

  ‘Since it happened, getting away has just worked better for me. New places, you know. The place where it’s most glaringly clear to me that he’s gone is at home. I mean Christmas … could there even be a time when that’s more packed with stuff you do year on year on year?’ He shrugged. ‘Just doing family stuff really isn’t a piece of cake. Not yet.’

  If it ever would be.

  ‘I can understand that.’

  She was watching him steadily. He could feel her eyes on him.

  ‘What was he like? Your brother.’

  ‘His name was Sean. He was two years younger than me. A lawyer. Worked in London. He had an undiagnosed heart problem, and died in the middle of a football game.�
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  The facts.

  Her gaze didn’t waver.

  ‘That must have been so terrible, I can’t imagine,’ she said. ‘I really meant what was he like? As a person.’

  How did you sum a person up in a few sentences?

  He closed his eyes briefly, considering in the silence. ‘He was two years younger than me. He looked quite a lot like me, dark hair, same build. He was a lot like me. We were into the same kind of stuff, sports, you know. Marathon running, diving, outdoor stuff. He was a good kid.’ He laughed at his own choice of word. ‘He was twenty-nine when he died, not a kid any more. I just think of him as my kid brother.’

  She smiled at him.

  ‘Anyway,’ he swept along. How tempting it was to try to lighten the tone. ‘It was just so bloody sudden. Like one second here, the next gone. It’s taken a long time to get my head around the fact that he isn’t here. My family was just like you described when I was growing up, there were days out, family holidays, Christmas was a biggie. But now there’s a big gap, and at times like that it’s just more obvious that Sean isn’t there any more. Family stuff isn’t straightforward. Not yet anyway.’

  ‘That’s why you travel so much? I get that.’

  ‘Partly that. It’s really helped to get away. Especially to places where there are no memories at all, no reminders. And it kind of fitted. Sean had wanderlust. He backpacked through his holidays from uni, and he took a year out to travel before law school. He was so bloody alive, that’s what made it all so impossible. The month after he died I went to sort his flat out. Clearing out your gran’s attic made me think of it for the first time in a while. These things that meant something to a person, connections they had.’

  How odd it had felt letting himself in to the hallway, the expectation that Sean would just walk out of the kitchen with a beer in his hand. The unreality of the reality that he wasn’t.

  ‘When we were kids we had this stupid list of things we were going to do: sports, challenges, places we were going to go. It was just a laugh really, but still Sean had ended up doing some of the things we’d talked about that were on it. I just found it when I was clearing his stuff, and took it home, and then I got to thinking about doing a few of the things on it. I thought it might feel like I was doing something for him, and it does feel like that in some ways. But mostly it’s about just keeping busy so you don’t think too much.’

  He glossed over the point, often pushed by his parents, that there were plenty of ways of keeping busy right here.

  ‘It must have been a massive shock. It’s that thing, isn’t it? The correct order of things. With Gran, there’s an inevitability about it, even though I might not like it. I know she’s past ninety. I know I’m running out of time with her, and I want to make the most of every moment.’ She smiled a little. ‘I think that’s why I’ve been a bit off the wall over this thing, finding this person, finding out more about the past. This, for me, in terms of how I normally behave, is like serious acting up. I HATE being late, you’ve no idea. I’ve always liked being on time, planning ahead, list-making. I am that person who has a meal list for the week stuck to the fridge. Everything was so up in the air when I was a little kid that I’ve just got this aversion to unreliability. My mother would be late for her own funeral. She would turn up, I’d get used to her being around, and then she’d be off again. I hated it in her, I’ve always hated it in anyone else, and I especially hate it in myself. It’s stupid how it makes me feel so uneasy because I can’t get back for this thing that’s been in the diary for months. And in any normal situation I would never have chanced taking this trip at all, not with the weather and the limited time I had and everything. I chanced it for Gran. She’s really been more of a parent to me than anyone else ever was, and I owe her a lot.’

  ‘It definitely makes you re-evaluate life when you lose someone. Especially realising life can be cut short like that. The year before it happened, I was really busy, working long hours, trying to build the business up. I’d not met up with Sean for a while. We’d both drifted along doing different things, and then months suddenly pass and you’ve not seen someone. Life’s so bloody fast. After we lost him I wanted to live in the moment a bit more and just get outside the comfort zone a bit. It makes you really aware of how short your time is, not just your own time, but the time you have with other people. That’s kind of why I pitched in with this stuff you’ve been doing for Olive. Because I know what it’s like to have that time run out.’

  ‘Bet this didn’t fit in with your ethos then, did it?’ Her gaze was completely level with his, her hair spilling over the passenger seat headrest directly opposite. ‘A tea dance with a gang of pensioners. I really know how to live it up, right? Bet you wish you’d stayed put this morning.’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t been clubbing for a while. That waltz with Edna filled a void in my life.’

  She smiled. Her hair shone gold in the halo from the dashboard light. Not thinking for a moment what he was doing, he reached across and pushed a stray lock of hair out of her eyes. They widened a bit in surprise.

  ‘I thought I had to jump off a cliff or at the very least keep moving to stop everything catching up with me. A road trip with you to see a gaggle of geriatrics, and I’ve not thought about any of it once. It makes a bloody change. It’s a whole new level of insane, spending a day with you.’

  Lucy’s heart kicked into freefall and she took a deep breath, which was then bloody obvious because she had to let it out into the cold in a misty cloud. It dawned on her that she was not bothered about missing the ball. Not one bit. For some reason, spending the night in a freezing car in the middle of nowhere was more appealing than attending a glitzy ball in a dress she’d spent ages choosing with her upwardly mobile boyfriend.

  Lying in the warm again-cold again darkness with her legs cramping up and her feet getting numb, it really bothered her how not-bothered she was about missing the ball.

  Chapter 8

  She noticed as she got out of the car the following morning and stretched her aching muscles that her house was the only one in the street that didn’t have some kind of seasonal nod going on. No fairy lights, no wreath on the door. Another trickle of guilt added itself to the churning blob in her stomach that had collected overnight and during the drive back from Hertfordshire. She was not pulling this Christmas cheer thing out of the bag at any level right now. Rod was right, it really was all so last minute. She caught sight of her own haggard face in the hall mirror as she let herself in, pale and sleep-deprived, with hair that wouldn’t have looked amiss on a muppet.

  Rod was sitting at the kitchen table. He didn’t rush to greet her, she noticed. If he had spent the night worried that she was freezing to death in a snowdrift, that sense of concern had disappeared since she’d managed to get a phone signal and text him from the motorway first thing this morning. He was grimly drinking coffee, and, instead of being relieved and delighted to see her home safely, he had morphed into irritated that she was over twelve hours late for the ball. He kicked straight off with his opening gambit.

  ‘What is it with you these last few weeks? I mean, I know I said yes to taking the wild-goose-chase trip to Hertfordshire because it seemed so damned important to you, but am I wrong to be a bit hacked off that you didn’t leave early enough to get back on time for the ball? Or that you didn’t check the weather forecast and maybe delay this insanity, if not until the new year, then at least for a few days?’

  ‘How did the ball go?’ she deflected, because the list of her recent cock-ups really felt like it could run and run here, and her brain was seriously tired. All she wanted was a shower and a few hours’ sleep, but more than she wanted either of those things, she wanted her steady, mutually supportive life back. The one she’d fucked up with this obsession over World War Two at the expense of 2017. She wasn’t used to this feeling of tension in her relationship with Rod. She did not like falling short, she did not like messing up her responsibilities. She did
not like this unexpected shift in her feelings.

  He sipped his coffee, his mouth pulled into a tight line.

  ‘Clearly socially it would have been easier if my date had turned up, but on the whole it went well. I managed to network a few new contacts, I spent some time talking about developing the services I already provide. It’s all about growth.’

  ‘That’s great. You see, you were fine without me.’

  ‘That is absolutely not the point.’

  Her stomach churned uncomfortably, and it had nothing to do with the fact she hadn’t eaten more than a few mince pies since lunchtime the day before.

  When it worked, their life ran like clockwork, and that was the way she liked it. More than that, it was the way she needed it to be. She’d caused this uneasiness by not planning and thinking things through, and the best thing to do now was not to crash out for a few hours, but to get the hell back on with it.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry for not checking the weather, and for not being there. If it’s any consolation at all, I did try everything I possibly could to try to get a phone signal and let you know I was stuck.’

  Her brain chose that particular moment to recall Jack wrapping his arms around her as he hauled her out of the snow and back to the car, and she shoved the thought away. She really was overtired. She swept on with the making of amends.

  ‘I’m going to have a five-minute shower, and then I’m cracking straight back on. I need to check on Gran, and then first up I’ll finish up everything at her house to make up for skipping yesterday. And then I absolutely guarantee I’m all yours. I’ll get the decorations up, I’ll stock the fridge, I’ll finish the present shopping.’