by Jenny Oliver
Jack leant over, with his arm around Emily’s shoulder and said something to Harry that Hannah couldn’t hear but made him put his hands up as if in apology. Behind him worried-looking waiters were hastily trying to find him a place at a table. Harry waved them away saying he could just lean where he was, in front of Emily and Wilf’s mum, Diana, at the top table. But Diana, clearly unimpressed with Harry’s slurring small talk, was already pushing her chair back and signalling to Wilf to do something. Hannah saw Holly nudge Wilf – who was chatting away to Jane on his left, completely oblivious – and beckon for him to go and sort his friend out. Wilf, who seemed terribly put out having had his story interrupted, glanced over to see what was going on, made a face that was somewhere between a frown and a laugh and then loped casually round the table to usher Harry away. He steered him towards a hastily set place at a table in the far corner, Emily’s eyes following them like daggers, ordering Harry to behave. Harry sat down with a guilty giggle and when he tried to stand up again, pointing towards Emily and clearly wanting to apologise, Wilf shoved him down hard on the shoulder.
All Hannah could think was, thank God Jemima had gone home. And wish that Harry hadn’t been seated in her direct eyeline. She watched him splashing vodka into his wine glass and then offer some to the woman on his right who glanced away with a look of disdain. Harry snorted a laugh and then leant back in his chair, swirling his vodka glass in his hand. To his clear surprise, the snakeskin-clad brunette sitting to his left leant right forward and, picking up the vodka from the table, took a sip straight from the bottle. Harry’s eyes widened, as did Hannah’s as she watched the pair chatting from across the marquee, the brunette clearly loving the addition of mischief. She linked her arm with Harry’s the moment the master of ceremonies called them all outside to watch the fireworks.
As they left the marquee they were handed blankets to drape over their shoulders to ward off the cold and cups of brandy-laced hot chocolate. Standing on the lawn, Hannah tried to keep her eyes fixed on the sky as it lit up like starbursts, but when their gazes were lowered to watch a giant Catherine Wheel, she caught Harry looking her way, the brunette from the table still hanging off his arm. When Hannah raised a brow and nodded towards his companion Harry turned and seemed taken aback to find himself linked to anyone. Hannah watched as he extricated his arm and then frown, seemingly lost as to what he had been doing a moment before.
Hannah blew out a breath and turned away, walking to the back of the crowd where she watched the rest of the show without looking down. Whatever had happened between now and New York, this wasn’t the Harry she’d spent the evening with, who was meant to be mesmerised by her stupid dress, who she had dreamt about seeing since her plane back from the hen do had touched down at Heathrow.
The party moved from the fireworks into the main house, where the huge living room had been lined with floor-to-ceiling high palm trees made out of gold lamé and festooned with fairy lights. Annie’s step-son River’s band was playing in the corner and there was a bar set up in the hallway at the base of the sweeping staircase. It was as Hannah was getting a glass of water, waiting for one of the barmen to fetch a crate of sparkling, that Harry caught up with her.
‘If it isn’t the ever aloof Hannah,’ he said with a slight slur, then to the barman added, ‘Two martinis, two tequilas, unless…’ he looked from the barman to Hannah. ‘Do you want one?’
Hannah shook her head. ‘No, Harry. Don’t you think maybe you should be thinking about slowing down?’
‘Slowing down?’ He looked puzzled. ‘Christ, I’m only just getting started.’
‘Harry, what’s going on?’
‘What do you mean, what’s going on?’ He frowned as if she was the idiot in their pairing. ‘There’s nothing going on.’
‘This…’ She pointed to the cocktails the barman was making for him. ‘This doesn’t seem like you.’
‘Oh right. And you know exactly what is me, I take it?’ he said, a touch more sharply than she had expected.
Hannah frowned. ‘No. No I don’t, I can only go on what I’ve met so far.’
‘Urgh.’ Harry shook his head. ‘Always the calm, in-the-right answer.’
‘Are you serious?’ Hannah took a slight step back. ‘Why are you being so mean?’
‘I’m not being mean, Hannah. I’m being me. This is who I am,’ he slurred, jabbing at his chest. ‘Anything else is you making me something I’m not. Sorry,’ he added with a laugh.
Hannah shook her head and looked away for a second. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Fine, Harry, just remember it’s Emily’s wedding. Don’t do anything else to upset her.’
‘Upset her? When have I upset her? I haven’t done anything. God, I’m just having a good time. Aren’t I allowed to have a good time? Isn’t that the whole purpose of weddings?’
Hannah shrugged. ‘Fine, Harry, suit yourself.’
The other barman appeared and, pulling out a bottle of fizzy water from the box he’d carried over, poured Hannah a glass. ‘Sorry for the wait, ma’am,’ he said and Hannah shook her head as if it was nothing.
‘Water?’ Harry frowned. ‘Why are you drinking water?’
‘Because I know my limit, Harry,’ she said, about to walk away.
He laughed. ‘You’ve probably got an uptight little rule about when you stop drinking, haven’t you?’
‘Are you kidding?’ She glared at him, aghast. ‘Is this because I said that you had rules? You’re so childish.’
Harry scoffed. ‘Seems to me like you’re fine telling other people what’s wrong with them but you can’t hear it yourself.’
Hannah didn’t know what to say. She just looked at him for a moment, dumbstruck. He’d turned away from her and was collecting the drinks that the guy behind the bar had poured, struggling to hold them all with two hands.
‘Well?’ he said, looking back at Hannah with one brow raised in challenge.
‘Harry, I think you’re just drunk. I think maybe you shouldn’t be talking any more.’
‘No,’ he said, sloshing the drinks as he turned to look around for whoever it was he’d got the drinks for. ‘No I shouldn’t, I should take these and find someone who is just as happy as me to drink them with. I’m assuming, after this little chat, that that won’t be you?’ he asked, stumbling backwards slightly as if he couldn’t quite stand still.
‘No, Harry,’ Hannah shook her head, swallowed over a lump of disappointment and disdain. ‘It won’t be me. It will never be me,’ she added before walking away so he couldn’t say anything else to upset her.
***
Hannah marched as far as she could in the opposite direction to Harry and found herself in the kitchen where she paused for a moment by the sink and surreptitiously ran her wrists under cool water to try and calm down.
She never had to see him again in her life, she knew that. She knew she didn’t have to stand there and mull over what he’d said. She’d known he was a pain in the neck the moment she’d met him in the Dandelion Café. Yet she didn’t want him to think those things of her. To find her aloof and uptight. She had thought he was her friend. She had thought, whatever happened between them, that they had been on a level emotionally. That they understood each other. That the threads of their minds connected in ways that they didn’t with other people. And yet, one drink too many, and he could go straight back to the box marked Stranger.
She moved through the crowd in the direction of the big sliding-glass windows where she could see the glitter-strewn swimming pool. Holly and Wilf, Annie and Matt, Emily and Jack were all sitting round a garden table, a heater glowing next to them, a bottle of whisky being passed between them. At the other end of the pool she saw Alfonso, sitting with his trousers rolled up and his legs dangling in the water next to a beautiful redhead who was laughing at all his jokes.
How different from France the end of this wedding was, she thought, about to turn away and go home. How easily it all slips back to what it was before.
&n
bsp; But then someone came up behind her and, reaching past, pulled open the handle of the sliding doors.
It was Jane. Dressed in a lemon and black leopard-print shift, fabric Hannah recognised from her portfolio, hemmed with black fringing that reached all the way to the floor. ‘You trumped me,’ Jane laughed, looking Hannah up and down. ‘I thought I’d nailed it, but you trumped me. Look, William…’ She beckoned to a guy walking towards them, her fiancé William Blackwell, sharply handsome in his tux, a bottle of champagne under his arm and a couple of glasses in his hand. ‘Look, this is Hannah. Look, her dress is better than mine, isn’t it? I knew it, damn it.’
William tried to look diplomatic. ‘You both look sensational.’
Jane rolled her eyes. ‘Come on,’ she said to Hannah. ‘We’re going outside, I don’t think I’m drunk enough for dancing.’
Hannah looked between the two of them, Jane who’d stepped outside and was holding the door open, William who gestured for Hannah to go ahead of him. And instead of going home and moping about Harry, she went outside and sat around a pool filled with glitter, underneath a giant gold palm tree and drank champagne wearing what was agreed by the group, that after the bride, was the best dress in the place.
It wasn’t like before, Hannah thought as she saw Alfonso walk away from the pool with the redhead and, hearing the band drift outside, imagined Harry downing shots of tequila with whoever would join him, because now she had all these people. These friends. And she wasn’t Mum Hannah or Accidentally pregnant Hannah, or Work Hannah. She was just Hannah. A woman in a beautiful dress sitting under a gold lamé palm tree, laughing.
Chapter Seventeen
It was two days later when Hannah’s phone buzzed with a text. Autumn seemed to have officially started, having thoughtfully held off till after Emily’s wedding. The ground was littered with leaves; reds and golds that flittered through the air as Jemima kicked them with her boots.
They were walking to school together and when Hannah saw Harry’s name appear on the screen of her phone she put it back in her bag, didn’t want to taint the journey with anything he had to say. Jemima was swirling and whirling, jumping in puddles, stretching to reach conkers from their branches and trying to catch sycamore helicopters as they fell.
Hannah was trying not to think about Harry. Trying not to think about the way he had made her feel at the bar. Stripping away every chat, every conversation, every look, every glance that had ever passed between them with some stubborn stupid words.
Up ahead, Jemima had paused next to a flattened hedgehog in the road.
‘Can I take it into school for show and tell?’
‘No,’ Hannah said, trying to steer her away from the poor animal.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it’s dead and decaying and dirty,’ Hannah said. ‘Come on, let’s go, we’re going to be late.’
‘You’re so mean,’ Jemima huffed.
Hannah made a face. ‘That’s so unfair,’ she said, but Jemima was already off up the road kicking leaves in a sulk.
Hannah paused where she was by the squashed roadkill. The exchange making her think of something Holly had said in her hand-fasting speech.
She had talked about the woman, Enid, seeing beyond the tantrums and the anger, looking behind them to find the cause.
This incident was clearly on a much smaller scale, but she knew all Jemima wanted was to show off her flattened hedgehog and Hannah had dismissed her without thought. As she caught up with Jemima she said, ‘It’ll still be there after school, maybe you could show your friends then. It’ll be better if they see it in context. You know? On the road and with all the leaves.’
Jemima looked momentarily unconvinced, but then she gave a solemn nod and said, ‘OK.’ She slipped her cool hand into Hannah’s and added after a couple of paces, ‘I don’t think you’re mean.’
‘Thank you,’ said Hannah, who was trying to push away the new and niggling idea that she should have tried harder with Harry. That if, as she had thought, there was a connection between them – that she could see in him someone that others couldn’t, perhaps not even himself – then surely she owed him the possibility of looking beyond the tantrum to find the cause?
That didn’t mean excusing him his behaviour, but perhaps she should have tried harder to understand it. At the wedding her focus had been on him liking her dress, or rather her in her dress, and then on the hurt she’d felt after their chat. She hadn’t once, really, thought about Harry. Wondered why he’d turned up quite as bad as he had. Yet she’d been quite certain that he hadn’t been the Harry that she’d walked with, drank with, laughed with in New York.
At the school gate Jemima kissed Hannah goodbye and skipped into school with her handful of conkers and a story about a dead hedgehog.
Hannah had some distracted chats with the other parents at the gate, thinking only of her phone and the text waiting to be read from Harry. It was another ten minutes before she was alone again, walking back down the road, past the hedgehog, and getting her phone out of her bag.
Whatever he had to say, she thought she would use the opportunity to suggest a coffee. Face to face she could question him on his behaviour, see what he was ready to reveal, if anything. At least then she would feel as if she had tried, as if she had done everything she could.
Just as a friend, of course, she reminded herself.
It turned out, as she opened the text, that she needn’t have bothered with her convoluted thinking process. The answer had been on her phone all along.
I’m really sorry. I’m a dick. My only excuse is that my dad died that morning.
Hannah leant against a garden wall.
Her phone buzzed again.
I don’t know who to talk to. Will you meet me?
Chapter Eighteen
Harry didn’t expect her to turn up. He had only fleeting memories of the night of the wedding, but he could remember everything he’d said to Hannah in vivid detail.
He sat stirring sugar into a cup of coffee. He didn’t take sugar but he couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten and he needed the energy. The bell over the door of the diner chimed making him look up and there she was in the doorway, looking the wrong way for him. He did a crappy little wave when she turned her head in his direction. As expected, there was none of the bright-eyed pleased-to-see-him that she’d had in New York, but it still made him wince and look momentarily down at his coffee. If she’d looked at him with any emotion at all it had been pity. Everywhere he looked there was pity.
She slid into the diner booth opposite him. He’d picked this place because he’d never been before and would never come back. It was near his parents’ house, a greasy spoon café where everything was painted green.
A miserable waitress came over with a coffee pot and refilled Harry’s cup, then filled the cup by Hannah’s place without even asking. She got out a pad and said, ‘You eating?’
Hannah shook her head.
Harry had had a cursory look at the menu but the idea of food made him feel sick.
‘If it’s just drinks then you can only have the table for forty-five minutes,’ the waitress said, tucking the pencil behind her ear.
Harry frowned, looking round the almost-empty diner. The waitress raised a brow and added, ‘Gets very busy round eleven.’ Then walked off to clear away a plate on an empty table in the corner.
‘Hi,’ Harry said, looking up at Hannah.
‘Hi,’ she said back.
‘I’m really sorry.’
She nodded.
‘I don’t think any of those things that I said. I don’t know why I said them. I shouldn’t have even gone to the wedding. Christ…’ he said, sitting back and running his hand through his hair. ‘Honestly, I would do anything to go back and unsay what I said. I don’t even know how I acted but I know it wasn’t good.’
‘Harry.’ Hannah wrapped her hands around her chipped cream mug. ‘What happened with your dad?’
‘He had an
other stroke. Watching TV. Eggheads or something. Got really angry at one of the contestants. Can you imagine it? Dying shouting at the TV.’ He breathed in through his nose and then slumped back against the booth as he exhaled.
‘I’m really sorry,’ Hannah said and Harry nodded. He watched her stir some milk into her coffee and then take a sip. ‘Oh my god, that’s disgusting,’ she said, caught off guard by the dreadful taste.
Harry snorted a laugh. ‘Tell me about it. Here, have some sugar.’ He reached over and handed her a couple of sachets.
As she ripped them open and they both watched the gold granules pour out into the drink, she said, ‘And how do you feel? Are you OK?’
‘Yeah I’m fine,’ he said, watching her fingers as they stirred the spoon in the coffee.
She glanced up at him, her hand stilling. ‘Harry…’
‘What?’
‘It’s OK to not be OK when your dad’s just died.’
He paused. Rubbed his hand over his mouth. Sat back again against the hard booth seat. What he felt sat like a walnut lodged in his chest. Painful every time he swallowed, moved, spoke, laughed. Not that he’d laughed much. He wondered who else he was going to talk to if it wasn’t her. And he knew if he didn’t say something it felt like the walnut would never go. Just stay lodged for ever. ‘I just… I just feel a bit like I hadn’t realised how much space he took up in my life.’ He pushed his hair back and stayed with his hands behind his head.
‘And?’ she asked, taking another tentative sip of her coffee, testing if the sugar had masked the taste.
‘And there’s so much that I wanted him to say still.’ Harry sighed, bringing his hands down to the table and tracing the handle of his mug with his finger. ‘Like these hurdles that I had in place, you know, before we could get on OK.’