The Present

by Charlotte Phillips

  ‘My promotion came through!’

  He put an arm around her and hustled her down the hall and into the sitting room.

  ‘That’s amazing!’

  It was amazing. It didn’t feel amazing. The pleasure she took in it was for him, for the hard work he’d put in. All this talk with Gran, and now the thing that would have pleased her most a couple of months ago no longer felt right at all. She took a gulp of the champagne.

  ‘That’s not the only thing we’re celebrating.’

  He did a jokey Keith Chegwin step. ‘Guess what I’ve booked!’

  Oh crap.

  ‘THAT holiday. The one we talked about. The one we were going to treat ourselves to when I got the promotion.’

  Because there was no if, when it came to their life events, only when. Hadn’t she thrived on that very thing?

  ‘Get your culture head on, baby, we’re going to Venice.’

  It felt as if the world was spinning out of control. She clapped one hand to her forehead and held the other one up to ward off the manic stream of consciousness.

  ‘Rod, we need to talk.’

  ‘Let me get you a top-up,’ he said, as if she hadn’t spoken.

  He made a move to take her still half-full glass. She held it out of his reach.

  ‘Can we sit down?’

  She grabbed him by the wrist and pulled him to the sofa, made him sit. His body language switched from triumphant to exasperated, and he perched on the edge of the seat with his arms tightly folded.

  How to put it. How did you say things weren’t going to plan, when in actual fact they were going more to plan than they had in ages? Their plan. Somewhere along the way she had gone off course, and now nothing felt the same.

  ‘I’m not sure things are working,’ she blurted at last.

  He put his fingers to his temples and made small circles.

  ‘Sorry – what exactly do you mean? You changed your mind about Venice?’

  His forehead pulled into a confused frown. She couldn’t blame him. All of these things he thought she wanted, she had thought she wanted them too. No wonder he was mystified.

  ‘It’s not about Venice.’

  A long pause.

  ‘This is about the World War Two nonsense, isn’t it?’ he said at last. ‘I may have gone a bit far when I said I wouldn’t be here when you got back. I was just angry, you do get that right? Now you’ve finished with the ridiculous mission, I’m willing to put it all behind us and get back to normal. Let’s just forget it ever happened.’

  ‘It wasn’t nonsense to me,’ she said. ‘And yes, it is about that, but not in the way that you think.’

  Maybe that was at the root of it.

  He waved a dismissive hand.

  ‘Figure of speech. Now your mother’s at the house we could shift things around a bit if that’s what you want. We could look into keeping Olive’s house on, talk to your mother about staying there long- term. It would make all the difference having someone living in with Olive, looking after her day-to-day care so you could just get on with things without the stress.’

  New promotion, romantic trip to Venice, Gran on the mend. Frankly, the idea of her mother as live-in carer was a step too far in terms of realism, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was trying to come up with ways to keep their life on track. These things should make her happy. Would have made her happy. With the possible exception of the mother thing.

  But it all made her feel as if she needed some time out.

  It became clearer by the moment that their shared future, as they’d planned it, was suddenly out of focus, at least for her. She ran a hand through her hair. How to explain it to him.

  ‘Maybe it is about the World War Two thing,’ she said. ‘I don’t know. Gran had this amazing short-lived relationship back in 1944. Spontaneous and romantic, impulsive. Just talking to her about all that has made me feel a bit hemmed in by all the long-term plans we’ve made. I feel like there’s no room for change. And I know I’m not being fair to you here because this has always been what I’ve wanted, a future with you, it really has. I’ve always liked knowing what we’re doing, I’ve always liked working towards a goal.’

  ‘But now you don’t. Because you’ve been swept up by a bit of romantic history. This is the real world, Lucy. It’s 2017, not 1944.’

  ‘I do get that. I know it sounds like I’ve got my head in the clouds, but I’m not saying I want to drop everything and backpack in Nepal. It’s not that massive a deal. I’m just saying I’m not sure if I’m going to want to own my first home at the age of thirty-two. I’m not sure I want to know my retirement age right now.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with forward planning. Especially when it comes to finance. I’ve always had life goals, I’ve always thought ahead. It’s the way I work. You know that. I need to know where I stand with things, and if you’re telling me you need time to find yourself, then I’m not sure I can buy into that, because I don’t need to do that. I’ve never been lost. I know what I want and that hasn’t changed.’ He was looking at her as if she were a complete stranger.

  She didn’t know what she wanted, she just knew it wasn’t this. How far had she come that the thought of seeing how things went didn’t fill her with dread? She was not used to feeling like this. Jack crept into her mind, and she shoved the thought of him away. She could not make this about Jack. Who could count on him? Even in telling her he liked her he’d made it clear it was going nowhere.

  It was about whether staying put here would be settling for the easy option, when she knew she could feel so much more. That would be unfair on Rod. He deserved much better than that.

  Moving back into the family home at the age of thirty. Not the way she’d seen things panning out, to be fair. It didn’t feel like regression or failure. Not yet.

  ‘Problems in paradise?’ Her mother’s eyes lit on the suitcase and bag as she put them down in the hall.

  There was still time.

  ‘Mum, don’t even go there.’

  She headed down the hallway towards the kitchen. Although, frankly, the drinks cupboard in the lounge was not without its appeal right now. Her mother drifted in her wake on a cloud of Chanel perfume, undoubtedly duty free.

  ‘Go where, darling? Go where? You’ve had a fall-out with your boyfriend. Tell me, darling, if your mum doesn’t immediately wade in with a tub of Ben and Jerry’s and a bottle of wine and a list of all his faults, is she even your mum?’

  Oh, for heaven’s sake! She really wasn’t sure she could take this. Knowing it wasn’t working with Rod was one thing. Taking a time out, packing her bags and leaving the house and the secure and steady future that they’d planned together was quite another. The feeling that she was careering forward with no game plan whatsoever was making her stomach churn, and now she’d moved in with the woman who was the personification of flying through life by the seat of your pants.

  She switched the kettle on and sat down at the table.

  Her mother switched it back off and got a bottle of white wine from the fridge, and two glasses.

  ‘I’ll start, shall I?’ she said, pouring Lucy a glass and handing it over. ‘The way he says “mmmmm” when he’s eating a meal he likes, those hairy wrists, and the way he says “tee hee” when he thinks something is amusing.’

  Lucy took a fortifying slug of the wine.

  ‘Mum. I am not doing a character assassination of Rod. He’s done nothing wrong. This isn’t even about him, it’s about me. It just wasn’t working.’

  ‘This is about the gardener, isn’t it?’

  Lucy’s face felt suddenly hot.

  ‘There is nothing going on between me and Jack. We are just friends.’

  Her mother actually winked at her.

  ‘You can’t kid a kidder. I’ve got eyes in my head, you know.’

  ‘Mum. Genuinely. This really is about me. Funnily enough I don’t need a man in my life to feel validated.’

  Her mother
carried on, oblivious to the pointed comment. Lucy wondered why she bothered.

  ‘There might be nothing going on, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t like it to. And he’s completely smitten with you, it’s written all over him.’

  She took a sip of her wine. Why on earth did that comment please her? She refused to give in to the urge to question her mother on why she might have thought that.

  ‘I’m not his type. And he isn’t mine. We are poles apart. Therefore, we are friends, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘There’s no such thing as “all there is to it”. You have to give it a go. Give life a go. Do you think I got where I am by not giving things a go?’

  Seriously?

  ‘Where is that, exactly? Because it looks to me like you’re still running the same incessant loop you’ve been doing since I was a little kid.’ She counted the stages off on her fingers. ‘Fresh start, get bored, neck back home, shirk responsibility, and repeat. On a loop for twenty-five years. That is you. Never a thought about how all that affects us. How it affects me. You are the centre of your own universe, and Jack is exactly the same. He is all about disappearing at a moment’s notice; he doesn’t plan anything; he throws away the rule book, and he doesn’t even do bloody Christmas. I can’t abide lateness, I hate unreliability, and I never use the word “spontaneous”. Unreliable is unreliable, whether you call it spontaneous or free-spirited or anything else. You know what the biggest problem with him is? He’s too much like YOU.’

  She said it at a jokey level, but they both knew the reality. There was a reason why she was so obsessed with steadiness, and it was standing right in front of her wearing a kaftan.

  ‘Darling, you were a million times better off without me,’ she said, sipping her wine. ‘I was not the kind of mother you needed. I was clueless about how to be that. One minute I was a twenty-something party girl, the next I was a single mother. I made an attempt to reconcile the two, failed miserably, and then your gran and granddad stepped in.’ A pause. ‘For the record,’ she added, toying with her glass and avoiding Lucy’s gaze, ‘every time I came home it was because I wanted to see you. And every time I did, it became clearer to me that you were way better off without me. You’ve never needed me.’

  Lucy looked up then.

  ‘I have always, always needed you,’ she said. ‘However rubbish you might have thought you’d be, you could not possibly have been worse if you were there than if you weren’t.’

  Her mother stared for a moment, and then opened her mouth, undoubtedly to wade in with advice on the back of this new revelation. Lucy held up a hand to stop her.

  ‘That does NOT mean you can get back on the subject of my love life. It does mean I’d really like it if you gave staying on a try. I’m going to have to live here for the foreseeable, I go back to work after Christmas, and I could do with the help sorting out Gran’s care. It might, God help me, even be fun.’

  She waited for the vague non-committal reply that any backing into a corner on commitment to stay generally elicited in her mother. There was a long pause.

  ‘Okay, so we won’t deconstruct Rod’s character over ice cream. I can accept that, but I think you’re making a mistake skipping over a major stage of the healing process.’

  For heaven’s sake.

  ‘Stop missing the point! Will you stay?’

  Another enormous pause, and then came a shrug.

  ‘I’ll let you tell Mother we’re going to be housemates, shall I? She’ll soon be back on her feet, it might even spur her on – she has this inbuilt urge to redo all my household tasks to a higher standard.’

  ‘Great. I’ll tell her this afternoon.’

  ‘You’re going to visit?’

  ‘I’m more than visiting. She’s not staying in that place over Christmas; we’re perfectly capable of looking after her between us.’ She took a deep breath and voiced the plan she’d been turning over for the last twelve hours.

  ‘I’m going to break Gran out.’

  Her mother looked startled.

  ‘You can’t possibly be serious. She’s far better off in there with the healthcare professionals. I can’t possibly condone something so reckless.’

  ‘The doctor pretty much told me all she needed was plenty of rest now. She’ll be much happier at home.’

  Her mother was shaking her head. Oh, how absolutely typical. There was no way she was going to get behind the project anytime soon, it was far too much like hard work for that. If Lucy needed help, she was looking in the wrong place.

  Chapter 11

  ‘I need a getaway driver,’ she said when Jack opened his front door. It definitely had nothing whatsoever to do with wanting to see him again. It had everything to do with him being the only person she could think of who wasn’t likely to tell her it was a crap idea. And then there was the fact that stuffing Gran into the tiny, freezing Mini might not be the best move on her road to recovery.

  He leaned on the door frame.

  ‘Going to rob a bank?’

  ‘Going to break Gran out of hospital.’

  He raised an eyebrow as if he thought she might have finally lost it, and her heart sank.

  ‘Oh, bloody hell, I thought you of all people would get where I’m coming from.’ She barged past him into the hallway and threw her hands in the air. ‘She is miserable as hell in there. I mean, the staff do the best they can, but they are just stretched so thinly, especially over the holidays. I can’t bear the thought of her in there by herself for Christmas, and I figure if I get everything set up at home I can look after her one-to-one as well as, if not better than, they can.’ She took a breath.

  ‘And you are asking me because …?’ he prompted.

  Because I have officially bowed out of the Carmichael Christmas in favour of the Jackson Christmas, and the only other person currently in that camp is my mother.

  ‘Because you’re the only person I know who won’t tell me it’s not doable. And you have a car that won’t jolt Gran to hell while freezing her to death at the same time.’ She paused, and gave him what she hoped was a winning smile. ‘Obviously, only if you’ve nothing better to do.’

  ‘What could I possibly have to do that is more important than breaking a sick pensioner out of a medical facility?’

  She couldn’t stop herself from jumping up and down and grabbing his arm.

  ‘Oh, you are just the best, thank you! I knew you’d be up for it.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter if I’m up for it. We haven’t got her out yet. You think you’re just going to check her out like it’s some kind of hotel? Think again. She’s been really ill.’

  She flapped a hand at him.

  ‘She’s turned a massive corner. I’ll worry about that this afternoon. I’m going to get the house set up for her first, I just wanted to check if you were in or not.’

  He rolled his eyes and grinned down at her.

  ‘Another pensioner-themed road trip with you? How could I not be in?’

  Her stomach gave an odd little flutter and she swept on before she could think too much about why.

  ‘You might want to not use the word pensioner around Gran,’ she said. ‘She prefers senior citizen, and she’s not afraid to say so.’

  Less than an hour had passed before Jack gave in to the clock-watching and pacing. He probably shouldn’t be quite this happy about the prospect of what was undoubtedly going to lead to carnage at the hospital as Lucy tried to discharge an ninety-something woman who, by all accounts, had been unconscious until a couple of days ago. Was this what he was prepared to resort to now in order to be in the same room as her? He really ought to be getting some kind of a grip.

  Instead, he got in his car and headed over to Olive’s an hour too early.

  The house was quiet when he got there. He knocked and headed inside and down the hallway into the kitchen. There was no sign of Veronica, but through the garden window he could see Lucy, bundled up in a coat and scarf and dragging an enormous pine tree a foot
at a time across the frozen ground. He headed outside to help.

  ‘That thing’s bigger than you are.’

  She looked up.

  ‘I wanted to make it nice and festive for Gran. I’m doing Christmas, and I wanted to make a statement.’

  ‘A big statement.’

  ‘I couldn’t see the point of going small. Christmas just isn’t about going small, is it?’

  ‘Out of the way, then.’

  He walked over to her and grabbed a couple of sturdy branches. She didn’t move.

  ‘I can do it. I can’t just call you up every time I have to shift something heavy, can I? Which is precisely why I didn’t call you up. You’re early.’

  ‘You can always call me up if you have to shift something heavy.’ He grinned at her. ‘Or if you don’t.’

  She rolled her eyes, but there was a definite blush thrown in. He found he could quite happily never get bored of making that happen. He had it bad. Exiting the country really was the best route to perspective right now.

  ‘Stop bloody protesting and let me do it.’

  She stepped aside, and he dragged the tree up to the house, through the French doors, and into the sitting room, leaving a trail of pine needles in his wake.

  ‘Where do you want this thing?’

  She pointed at a corner of the room to the side of the fireplace. He hefted it upright and shoved it into the pot she’d put there. Droplets of melting frost showered him and the floor.

  ‘I thought you were doing Christmas at your place,’ he said, standing up. ‘Or is this for the benefit of the estate agent’s photos? You know, give it a festive flavour?’

  She looked appraisingly at the tree, and pulled a couple of branches into place.

  ‘Yeah, that. The house sale is on hold. Long story. Having it here now with Gran. Once we’ve got her out. Want to join us for Christmas? I thought I’d do open house. Oh no, I forgot, you don’t DO Christmas, do you?’

  ‘I’ve got a quiet hotel in the middle of the snow. Log fire, hot chocolate, vodka. Want to come?’