by Lisa Jewell
ROBYN
Robyn’s life had turned into a novel. One of those novels with shoes on the cover. And it was about a girl called Robyn who meets a man in a clothes shop while selling him a brown sweater and how he waits outside the clothes shop for her to finish work and then takes her to a beautiful bar in the basement of a smart restaurant in the beating heart of Soho where they drink pretty cocktails with cherry blossoms and pink vodka and talk for so long that the trains stop running and the evening turns to deepest night and they have to walk for half an hour to find taxis to take them home. It then follows the heroine and this man (his name is Jack) on every wonderful, joyous, honeyed, romantic cliché as they meet up again and again in locations such as London parks on sunny afternoons, floating restaurants on canals, pub beer gardens hung with fairy lights, art galleries, sweaty gigs and art-house cinemas to see films with subtitles.
The man called Jack turned out to be twenty-seven years old and, of course, since Robyn’s life was now a novel, not a bank teller or a student or a direct marketing account executive but a novelist. An actual published novelist. He did not write fat books with shoes on the cover, but slim books with out-of-focus photographs on the cover and one-word titles. He’d had his first book published when he was twenty-five, his second last year and was now halfway through his third. And because this was a novelized vision of real life, he had, of course, just sold the film rights to his first book for tens of thousands of pounds, so even though his books didn’t sell that many copies, his bank account was healthy enough for him to keep on suggesting more and more idyllic locations for their rendezvous and to slip £20 notes into her pockets to pay for cabs, on the nights when she went home.
More and more frequently, though, Robyn didn’t go home. She stayed at Jack’s, a suitably photogenic shabby little one-bed place in a fat stucco house on a leafy Holloway square with rattly sash windows and gnarled wooden floors and an oversized wrought-iron bed with an abstract painting hung crookedly above it. She did indeed pad barefoot around his shabby but lovely flat in his oversized sweaters, and drink tea out of his giant Starbucks mugs while curled up on his scruffy but elegant sofa, with his head in her lap, running her fingers through his glossy hair. She had never felt more beautiful in her life and she had never felt more as if the life she was living was the life that she had always been destined to live, mapped out millennia before in stars a billion light-years away.
When she was away from Jack she would pick through the photos on her iPhone of the two of them, arms outstretched, heads touching, beaming into the lens. She took a lot of photos these days: the view from Jack’s window, Jack’s hands around a glass, an arrangement of their possessions on a pub table, the back of Jack’s head, the dents in their empty pillows caught in the early sunlight of a Saturday morning. No detail was too small or insignificant; no aspect of their union was unworthy of a visual record. Jack teased her about it: “I’ve just dropped a lump of hummus on the kitchen floor—quick, take a picture!”
But Robyn couldn’t help herself; if her life was a novel then she was making the film of the book. Just in case, she supposed. In case it all went wrong. Because in books with shoes on the cover something always goes wrong. Girl meets boy. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy and girl have a stupid misunderstanding and split up.
But Robyn could not possibly conceive how this perfect union of two such compatible and uncomplicated people could ever find a way to unspool itself.
And when it did she knew that she was no longer living in a novel with shoes on the cover but in a novel with an out-of-focus photo on the cover and a one-word title.
∗ ∗ ∗
She’d thought it already, even before Nush had said anything. She’d thought it, if she was honest, from the very first time she’d seen him. She’d made him wait two weeks before sleeping with him, not in some pathetic attempt to keep him on the boil or to assert her feminine wiles, and not, even, to prolong the giddy innocence of those first few dates. Robyn didn’t play games and she didn’t politicize sex. The reason she’d made him wait was because of a tiny nagging sense of unease deep in the center of her psyche. She couldn’t place it or name it, but it was there, lurking like a strange man in the shadows.
She’d overridden it, of course.
She was in love.
She was gorgeous.
He was gorgeous.
She needed a better reason than nagging unease to reject his advances. And actually, from the moment their relationship was consummated, the feeling passed.
Other things happened over the couple of weeks, but she ignored them as the possibility that her initial misgivings might have been founded on something real was too unpalatable to contemplate.
There was a conversation, on the decked balcony of his friends’ shared house in Tufnell Park. He’d already told her that his father was dead. That had been ascertained on their first date. Her father was an anonymous sperm donor. His father was dead, in a car crash when Jack was eight months old. It had bonded them together. “Poor us,” Robyn had said, “never seen our fathers’ faces,” and they’d made sad faces at each other and then laughed. Not that it was funny, but they were laughing because they were allowed to laugh, because it was their sad thing and they retained the rights over it.
Robyn met Jack’s mum, Sam, a month into their relationship. She was a nice-looking woman with extravagantly highlighted hair which she wore piled on top of her head with a big mother-of-pearl clasp. She was luxuriantly middle class, in Sweaty Betty leisurewear and bare feet, and her little two-bed cottage just outside St. Albans was a perfect late-nineties stage set of Designers Guild furnishings and antique pine.
She called Robyn “darling” and greeted her with a kiss on each cheek and a look of fascinated affection. They sat in a battered pine kitchen with a butler’s sink and a pale yellow Aga range and Sam smoked Marlboro Lights by the back door, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth where it was immediately picked up by the breeze and brought back into the kitchen.
“You two look adorable together,” she said in her raspy jazz singer’s voice.
Robyn and Jack glanced at each other and smiled. They knew that.
“Jack has been talking about you a lot,” she continued, throwing her spent cigarette into a flower bed and pulling the back door shut behind her.
“All good, I hope.”
“I’d say. And I must also say as the mother of just one precious boy, that when he comes home and tells me he’s fallen in love with a medical student who wants to be a pediatrician and looks like a young Megan Fox, well . . . music to my ears! I give you my blessing.”
She joined them at the farmhouse dining table, fixed Robyn with her direct gaze and smiled again.
Robyn smiled back at her, wondering what she was thinking.
“So, Jack tells me your father was a sperm donor,” Sam began, bluntly.
“Mum!” said Jack in alarm.
“What? You said it was all out in the open. It is all out in the open, isn’t it, darling?”
Robyn nodded and smiled. “No secrets in my house.”
Sam squinted her eyes together as though she were trying to throw her image of Robyn into some other sort of focus. “Absolutely fascinating. Isn’t it?” she added, as if seeking confirmation from a third party that, yes, it was indeed fascinating. “And do you look like your donor father?”
“Well, I don’t look like anyone else in my family so, yes, I assume I must.”
“And this was because, well, your father, your dad, the one who brought you up, he had fertility issues, is it?”
“Mum!”
“It’s okay,” said Robyn, “honestly, I’m happy talking about it. No. It wasn’t to do with my dad’s fertility. They had two daughters before me. It was . . .” She breathed in before continuing. “My sisters both had Rett syndrome. It wasn’t supposed to happen twice but then they found it was down to a mutation in my dad’s sperm. So that meant they couldn’t risk having any mo
re babies. Rachel died when she was fifteen. Gemma died when she was seventeen. And they thought about asking a relative to donate some sperm but decided that was too complicated, that it would be easier to use an anonymous donor. And that’s what they did—and here I am!” Robyn threw a “ta-da” pose and smiled. She’d told the story a dozen times before: The Tragic Reasons Behind My Miraculous Existence. She could tell it without an aching heart and a tear in her eye because she hadn’t really known her sisters. She was four when Rachel died, five when Gemma died, more concerned with school and playgrounds than the two sick girls who lived in a hospital three miles away.
Sam had her hand clutched to her throat. “Your poor, poor parents,” she said, “to lose two children. Everything they must have gone through and to find the balls from somewhere to keep going, to make themselves a family. You know, the human race gets an awful lot of flak, but really, most of the time, people are just going around, being quietly, silently, utterly amazing.”
Robyn nodded and smiled. She knew exactly how amazing her parents were, not only for the way they had soldiered on so bravely in the face of so much adversity but also for the way they had raised her, the joyful, loving, secure upbringing they had given her.
“And what about you?” Sam continued. “How do you feel about your donor father? Do you ever want to meet him?”
Robyn shook her head. “No. Never. Ever.”
“But don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to know what he looks like? Who you look like?”
“No. Honestly. This is me.” Robyn touched her chest. “This is who I am. I am not my mother. I am not my father. It’s like I’ve made myself a single entity. Like I stand alone. It’s like I’m Eve.” She laughed.
Sam blinked at her in surprise. “Original woman?” she asked.
Robyn smiled and shrugged. “I suppose so.”
“Wow.” Sam let the single word hang in the air unadorned for a moment. Robyn watched her and saw unsaid words working their way around the muscles of her face. At first she thought that maybe Sam had been silenced by wonder and awe. But it then occurred to her that she was trying to work something out. “You know,” Sam said a moment later, “I’d never, ever thought about it like that before.”
“What do you mean?”
“Oh”—she straightened herself up, as though emerging from a hypnotist’s trance—“nothing,” she said. “Nothing really. It’s just interesting, isn’t it? How we form our identities. How we package ourselves. How we process the truth.”
The mood in the kitchen had become tense. It felt as if a bucket had been knocked over and something sticky and unpleasant were trickling out of it. The subject was changed, a supper of roast chicken and mashed potato was served and eaten, and Robyn had not really given the conversation much more thought until two weeks later, when she introduced Jack to her friends for the first time.
∗ ∗ ∗
It was in a pub in Mayfair, round the corner from the wealth management company that Nush worked for. The get-together was being billed as a celebration of her promotion from receptionist to assistant PA to a director, but was really a “come and meet Robyn’s mysterious new boyfriend” event, which meant a higher-than-average turnout, especially for a night outside the Buckhurst Hill comfort zone.
Robyn had felt so proud walking into the pub that night with her beautiful, clever, gentle man. She gripped his hand inside hers and virtually pulled him toward the table at the back of the room where everyone was gathered, desperate to show them the star of the next chapter of her Incredible Perfect Life.
She was happy for her friends with their nice boyfriends with City jobs and sports cars and teacher-training courses and bedrooms in their parents’ comfortable Essex homes. And she was happy for her single friends with their Saturday night plans and their Facebook existences. They were happy and she was happy that they were happy. But nobody else had what she had. Nobody had the precious pearl of their split-apart, their soul mate, a man with wooden floors and published novels and the bone structure of a Titian archangel. Her friends were still finding their way while Robyn sat cozy and warm and aglow with satisfaction at reaching her destination. Robyn was home.
Nush spotted them first and leaped to her feet, a tiny bird girl with dark eyes that were almost too large for her face, and newly cropped hair like a neat black cap on her head. She threw herself at Robyn’s neck and squeezed her hard. Robyn said, “Congratulations!” in a neatly cadenced singsong, an attempt to maintain the façade that that was why they were here, in a pub, miles from where any of them lived.
“Thank you.” Nush echoed Robyn’s tuneful intonation, her eyes darting across her friend’s shoulder to Jack.
“This is Jack,” said Robyn, pulling away, “and Jack, this is Nush, my best friend.”
Nush clasped his hand and then hugged him to her. “Oh, wow, it is so nice to finally meet you. You’re lovely!” Nush, it appeared, had started drinking before the arranged meet-up time of eight o’clock. She pulled away from him and regarded him, her eyes still on his. “You are so pretty,” she said, and Robyn and Jack glanced at each other and laughed.
“No, really, honestly, you are. Oh, wow, you two . . . You’re the cutest couple I’ve ever seen. Look, everyone”—she turned to address the rest of their group—“this is Jack. The Jack. Aren’t they the cutest couple you’ve ever seen? Aren’t they? I mean . . .” She paused, turned back to look at Jack and Robyn, then back again to the table and said, “They could be brother and sister.”
There was a brief silence until she added: “Oh, God, I mean, you actually could! You could. You could really be brother and sister. Holy shit . . .”
Nush’s words got swallowed up by whoops of hilarity from the rest of the group and Robyn smiled apologetically at Jack, who smiled back reassuringly, and the conversation twisted and turned easily away from the subject of Jack and Robyn and whether they might be related, and Robyn did not, in fact, give the concept another thought until later the next day when she’d caught Jack at the sink in his bathroom, his chin angled up to shave his jawline, and thought for the briefest, most fleeting of seconds, that she was looking at herself.
“What did your dad look like?” she asked almost immediately, a quickening sense of dread leaping from her stomach to her throat.
Jack stopped what he was doing and glanced at her reflection in the mirror. He paused for a moment and then shrugged and rinsed his razor under the tap. “I don’t really know.”
“But you must have seen photographs of him?” she continued.
“No,” he said, plucking a towel from the rail. “My mum burned them all.”
“She burned all the photos of your dad? God, why?”
“Because she hated him.”
“What, seriously?”
“Yeah. They’d been together for three years, madly in love, then he buggered off the minute he found out she was pregnant. He went to live in a commune in France, shacked up with some eighteen-year-old. We never heard from him again. Mum took me to the commune when I was about eighteen months old, so that he could meet me, gets there and finds out that he’d been killed in a car crash ten months earlier.”
“She just burned all the photos?”
“Yeah. I guess. Or chucked them out or something.”
“She didn’t even keep one so that you would know what he looked like?”
“No. Well, I guess she thought that I’d meet him one day. I guess she thought he wouldn’t be dead.”
“But what about his family? His parents? Didn’t you ever see them?”
“He didn’t have any parents. He was brought up in a children’s home. He was a Barnardo’s Boy.”
It seemed a detail too far. French communes and car crashes was one thing—an orphaned Barnardo’s Boy was another. It was too much of an artistic flourish. Too romantic. It could be true. It probably was true. But then again, it might not be . . .
Robyn’s mind darkened then and discomfiting thoughts jostled
for space in the shadows. The sheer force of her first glimpse of Jack in Zara all those weeks ago, the way his mother had been so strange with her in the kitchen that day when they’d been talking about her donor father; Nush’s pronouncement in the pub the other night that they looked like brother and sister; that moment, just now, when she’d caught his reflection in the mirror and thought it was her own; and now this . . . burned photographs and Dr. Barnardo’s.
She’d read those stories in flimsy magazines about long-lost siblings meeting up in adult life and falling instantaneously in love. She’d read them with horror and disgust. But surely, she reasoned with herself, even if she did have brothers and sisters out there—and there could be no more than nine, those were the rules—what possible, infinitesimal chance was there that one of them would walk into her branch of Zara on a Thursday night looking for a sweater? It was surely so improbable as to be entirely impossible. But was it any less possible than any other meeting between two people? Between a woman and her soul mate? Could not the mere suggestion of an invisible connection between two people provide the impetus to propel a person off the pavement and into the basement of a clothes shop? Could not a genetic link in fact predispose two people toward a liking for a particular high-street fashion chain (and Robyn had specially applied for a job at Zara because she liked their clothes)? So it might not in fact be pure random coincidence. It could all be down to brown sweaters.
All these thoughts passed through Robyn’s head in less than one minute. They left her feeling wounded and bruised. She looked at Jack again—she studied his face as he turned from the mirror and walked toward her, smiling. He was not her twin. He had his mother’s startling turquoise eyes and her slightly oval-shaped skull. But that nose and those lips . . . They were hers, and he—he belonged to her, like no one else had ever belonged to her. She possessed him and he possessed her, in that calm, unquestioning way of family.