Playing by the Rules

by Imelda Evans

  But every day it was harder and harder to do.

  In the circumstances, the distance to Saturday seemed both endless and much too short. But eventually it came and, with it, The Family Dinner.

  For the second time in a week, Kate found herself with butterflies in her stomach that had nothing to do with Josh. Not that the Josh-related ones had gone away. Indeed, they had taken up such apparently permanent residence that she was considering giving them names. The dinner ones were additional. And numerous.

  As they approached the restaurant, the clamour inside her was such that she seriously doubted she would be able to eat anything. Given the number of meals she had been eating in restaurants lately that mightn’t be such a bad thing, but in the interests of family harmony, this was probably not the time to test that. It might occasion comment.

  Fortunately, she was saved from having to explain a complete lack of appetite by the realisation that her mother’s new partner felt exactly the same way.

  In an apparent attempt to get as many important introductions over with as quickly as possible, her mother had arranged for Jo and her parents to come to dinner as well as Kate and Josh. It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but to Kate’s empathetic eyes, the poor guest of honour looked as though he was facing a firing squad.

  For reasons she couldn’t readily explain, his nervousness made Kate feel much better. Had she had been expecting arrogance? Perhaps. Intellectually, she knew that it was unlikely that he had any thought of trying to take her father’s place. But the feeling that that was exactly what he was trying to do had been unquashable and it was enough to make him seem arrogant, in her anticipatory fears. Now that she finally met him, though, his transparent desire to please, and his equally obvious fear that he wouldn’t, acquitted him of that charge.

  Which left her free to at least try to like him. So she did. And rather against her expectations, she found it quite easy to do. He was intelligent, and charming enough, once he got over the nerves. He was a widower, which relieved Kate, who had hated the idea of her mother being, even well after a divorce, the ‘other woman’. His name was Brian, which was unexceptionable, he had a good job and he was completely, unmistakeably, besotted with her mother. For that last characteristic, she had to like him, no matter how strange it was to see anyone behaving that way towards her mother. She tried to concentrate on the liking and ignore the strangeness. Josh’s ready hand with refilling her glass helped.

  Inevitably, there were some bad moments.

  The first was when Brian asked Josh about his ‘intentions’ towards Kate. He obviously meant it as a joke, and Kate could understand why he was trying to make one. It was early in the evening, when the ice was still pretty thick over the linen tablecloth and his nerves were so obvious that they might as well have been standing out on stalks. But given her fears about him taking her father’s place, it was badly chosen as a way of endearing him to her. She half-considered just leaving.

  But Josh defused that one by pinning her arm to the table, making it impossible for her to get up and assuring him, in the same jocular fashion, that he intended to make Kate happy. That was both sufficiently all-encompassing and vague enough to mean everything or nothing and seemed to satisfy everyone. Her mum, in particular, looked so relieved that Kate hadn’t the heart to object. And after he refilled her glass – again – Kate also managed to calm down.

  The second bad moment was when Kate first heard him call her mother ‘Lizzie’. Her name was Elizabeth and most people shortened it to Liz. But Kate had never heard anyone but her father call her mother Lizzie. She almost hated him for it. Then she caught the look on her mother’s face – in much the same way as you catch a basketball when you miss it with your hands and your stomach provides the backup. Her mother was in love with him. As much in love with him as he was with her.

  She knew she should have expected it. The very fact of this dinner was a statement that she cared for him. But seeing it was still a shock. Fortunately Josh was once again ready with the wine and by the time she had sipped her way through the glass she had accepted that it was true. She couldn’t say she had exactly come to terms with it, but she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t seen it, and having seen it, she couldn’t fail to give them her blessing.

  Of course, she didn’t do it in so many words. But she went out of her way to be nice for the rest of the dinner, they parted very amicably, and her reward was her mother’s obvious, radiant happiness.

  It didn’t stop her from crying in the car.

  Josh looked sideways at his passenger. She was crying. She was doing it quietly and with a very creditable attempt at discretion, but the snuffling noises were a giveaway.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Stupid question. Obviously she wasn’t okay. But he didn’t know how else to ask.

  ‘Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know.’

  Great. The answer made even less sense than the question.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  He heard her sigh in the darkness.

  ‘Nothing, really, I guess. My mum’s happy. I can see that. And he seems nice. So there’s nothing wrong. Not really. It’s just . . .’

  Josh thought he was beginning to understand.

  ‘He’s not your dad.’

  He was rewarded with a bigger sniff and a determined nose-blowing.

  ‘No, he’s not.’

  He waited, but there was only silence from the passenger seat. He had no idea what to say next, but this conversation seemed too important to let die.

  ‘Your dad’s been gone a long time, Kate.’

  There was more sniffing, but her voice, when it came, was a little stronger.

  ‘I know. And it’s so silly for me to be like this. I barely remember him. Almost all the memories I think I have about him are really things she’s told me. It’s just that . . . they were so happy, Josh. When she talked about him, she would get this glow. It’s a bit like the way Jo looks when she finds a new artist she really likes. You know that look.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Do you believe in soulmates?’

  Conversational curve-ball alert.

  ‘Um . . .’

  ‘I do. Or at least, I used to. I used to think there was one person for every other person. One person you were just meant to be with. That’s what it was like for my mum and dad. That’s what it seemed like, anyway. So that’s what I’ve been looking for, pretty much all my life. That’s what I thought I was working towards. But now . . .’

  The silence threatened to engulf them again. Not a good silence. A silence full of broken things and pain. He couldn’t let her stay in that state.

  ‘Now?’ he prompted.

  ‘Now? Now she seems happy with someone else. And that’s good, I suppose, but I don’t know what it means. Does it mean I was wrong about Alain, or was I wrong altogether? I thought I’d made a mistake with him. Well, obviously, I made a mistake. But I thought I knew the script I was working from; I thought I’d just chosen the wrong leading man. But now . . . now I’m not even sure of whether I’m in a comedy or a tragedy. I don’t know whether this story will end with a wedding and a song or death and laments.’

  Josh was well out of his philosophical depth. He hadn’t given this anywhere near as much thought as she had. But she was crying again and her tears were tearing into him as though they were made of broken glass. He had to make an effort.

  ‘My mum says that young people now – actually, she said, “you young people”; she was laying down the law to me and Jo about getting on with finding partners —’ He was rewarded with a faint smile and was encouraged to go on. ‘She says that young people now put too much store in the idea of a “soulmate”. She said that we want too much. We want it to be perfect from the beginning. She reckons that there isn’t just one perfect person for every other person. There are lots of people – well, maybe not lots, but more than one – who could be right. But there’s one who’s the right person in the right place at the right time.
And when you find them, you make a commitment to them and that’s what makes them, eventually, your soulmate.’

  ‘So what did she think was your problem? Wrong person, wrong place, wrong time or lack of commitment?’

  She really needed to give some warning of those incoming curve balls. This was not something he talked about. Especially not to women. But he couldn’t get out of it now.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe my life – my job – isn’t really conducive to the right timing.’

  ‘Is it because you move around so much?’

  Josh shrugged. ‘It’s not just that. For a start, my hours are so unsociable that it’s almost impossible to have a relationship with anyone outside the industry. And like I said, it’s a very mobile business. It’s not just me who’s prone to moving on. So it’s easier to keep things light. Not to get too involved. It’s better for everyone.’

  ‘God, that’s awful.’

  Startled, he took his eyes off the road for long enough to look at her. She looked as if she meant it. She sounded like it too. He’d never thought of it like that. His mother’s disapproval had offended him, but not moved him. But now, here in the dark with her, he felt the need to prove that he was a pragmatist, not a rat.

  ‘There was one girl, once, who could have been more serious.’

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her stiffen and a pure, possessive bolt of pleasure shot through him at the idea that she might be jealous.

  ‘What happened?’ Her tone was careful and devoid of tears and he preened inwardly. He was sure now. She was jealous. He was so pleased, he forgot to answer her question. ‘So . . . what happened?’ she repeated.

  ‘It was time for me to leave and go to my next job. And she didn’t want to leave.’

  ‘And you didn’t want to stay.’

  ‘I couldn’t. It was my first move in that job. The one I’m doing now. They’d taken a chance on me and trained me. They more or less invented the position for me. If I’d let them down, my name would have been mud.’

  ‘Did you ask her to come with you?’

  Josh squirmed a little in his seat. He’d never been examined by the Love Inquisition before and he couldn’t help feeling he was going to be tried and found wanting.

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘What do you mean, “Not exactly”?’

  Josh squirmed some more.

  ‘I told her I had to go and I said I’d like it if she wanted to move too.’

  ‘Well, with an offer like that, I’m not surprised she didn’t want to go!’

  ‘What was I supposed to do? Ask her to marry me? I wasn’t ready for that!’

  How had they got to the point of arguing about how he’d treated an ex-girlfriend from the starting point of her mother’s new lover? He needed to get a grip, on himself and this conversation.

  ‘In that case, it wasn’t about timing. She wasn’t the right person.’

  ‘How do you know? Maybe we were just unlucky.’ Oh yes, Josh, excellent getting of a grip. Tell the woman you’re kind of going out with that another woman might have been ‘the one’ if circumstances had been different.

  Kate shook her head firmly.

  ‘No. If she’d been the right one, you would have at least asked. You would have wanted to.’

  Josh took a deep breath and tried to speak more evenly. He felt as though this was important, although he wasn’t sure exactly why.

  ‘I did want to. At least ask her to come with me properly. I thought about it. But maybe you’re right. Maybe we weren’t meant to be together. Because in the end, I couldn’t do it. I kept hearing my dad, telling me that if you’re going to take a woman away from her family and everything she knows – if you’re going to ask her to leave all that for you – you have to be ready to do whatever it takes to make her happy.’

  ‘Like he does for your mum?’

  ‘Yes! Exactly. When he brought her here from Mauritius, he promised her family that he would make her happy. That he’d make it up to her for taking her away from her home and her life there.’

  They were between streetlights and he couldn’t clearly see her face, but he could hear the smile in her voice.

  ‘I didn’t know that. That’s lovely. And for what it’s worth, I think he succeeded. Your mum and dad are almost as much of an inspiration to me as my mum and dad are. Were.’

  He reached for her hand, in an attempt to stop the conversation sliding back to sadness. Even if it meant having to talk about his love life, or lack thereof, instead.

  ‘Yes, I think he did too. But it’s a kind of tough act to follow. As long as I’m in this crazy job, to ask someone to come with me, I’d have to love them as much as my dad loves my mum.’

  ‘Which is a lot.’

  ‘A whole lot.’

  ‘And your job makes it hard for you to get that close to anyone.’

  ‘Exactly! So I guess I’m doomed to be alone!’

  It was meant to be a joke, but even as he said the words, he knew it was falling flat. Something about the way he said it hadn’t sounded funny at all.

  Luckily, they had arrived. So the conversation naturally came to an end and he could let it go, which was just as well, as he didn’t know how to salvage it.

  It was official. He was losing his touch.

  Which might have been why, when they got into the lift together, he gravitated toward her like a meteor drawn helplessly to a planet. He couldn’t seem to control what he said around her, but in one thing at least, he knew they had no trouble communicating.

  Kate sank into his arms with a feeling of coming home, which would have worried her if she could be bothered thinking. But she didn’t want to think. After the night she’d had – indeed, the week she’d had – she was not going to turn down comfort when it was offered. Especially not if it felt like this.

  So once again, as the arthritic lift shivered to a halt and the doors wheezed open to an attentive audience, Kate and Josh were discovered locked together and not paying much attention to anything but each other.

  Only this time, the audience consisted of Jo, with her hands over her mouth . . . and six foot two of crumpled, tired, shocked and heartily pissed-off Frenchman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At first, Kate didn’t believe it. She thought she must be hallucinating. She blinked several times, but when she’d finished, Alain was still there. He must be real.

  It had happened. In her most secret dreams, this was what she had imagined: Alain showing up on her doorstep, saying it was all a horrible mistake and begging her to take him back.

  In her dreams, she hadn’t imagined that he would find her wrapped in the arms of another man. It hadn’t even occurred to her as a possibility. But here she was and, wonder of wonders, she didn’t feel the slightest bit guilty. With the impression of Josh’s kiss still on her lips, what she felt was exhilarated.

  Somehow, with Josh’s arms around her and his breathing tickling her neck, she couldn’t muster anywhere near the level of excitement that she had expected to feel on seeing Alain there, in Australia, just a few steps away from her. In the fantasy, his appearance on her doorstep was her cue to throw herself into his arms and forgive him, whereupon he would get down on one knee and give her the ring he should have given her weeks ago.

  But now . . . now, she didn’t feel at all inclined to throw herself into his arms. That would mean removing herself from Josh’s embrace and that was something that she hadn’t been planning on doing for some time.

  But she could hardly just leave him standing there. He’d come all this way; she owed him at least the courtesy of acknowledging his existence. So she disengaged herself from Josh – a non-trivial task, since he seemed to want to hold on to her – and started moving towards Alain.

  Then the lift doors shut.

  He’d done it again. Honestly, the man must have the fastest lift-button finger in the known world.

  ‘I thought you might need a minute,’ he said, confirming her suspicion. ‘I
take it that was Alain?’

  Kate looked at him blankly, as she realised that Josh had never met Alain. That was weird. She had begun to feel as though she had known Josh forever. She had known him forever, in a way, and yet this showed that he didn’t really know anything about her. He had never even met the man she had thought she was going to marry.

  ‘Do you want me to get rid of him?’

  Kate couldn’t help feeling a jolt of pleasure as she saw his frown and heard the protective concern in his voice. It was rather lovely that he wanted to be her knight in shining armour. Maybe she should let him.

  No. She rejected the thought almost as soon as it had come. That was ridiculous. Knights were supposed to protect you from dragons, not ex-boyfriends. Anyway, Josh wasn’t her knight. He wasn’t her anything.

  In spite of what her mother wanted to think, he wasn’t her boyfriend. Yes, she had been going out with him on what, at a stretch, you could call dates. But that situation had a pre-set use-by date, which could arguably already have passed, now that the dinner was over. So he couldn’t, by any reasonable standards, be called her boyfriend.

  He could perhaps be called her flingee, if she was a flinger. But she’d abandoned the idea of a fling some time ago. She’d never been exactly clear on what it meant, but she was pretty sure it didn’t include having anything to do with each other’s families. And even if this could be called a fling, surely the key part of a fling was that there were no strings? So he couldn’t be ‘her’ flingee. It was a logical impossibility.

  The only word that made sense, that combined how nice he’d been to her and how short-lived this interlude had to be, was ‘friend’.

  Mind you, she didn’t have many friends who looked at her the way he was looking at her now. Nor would many of her friends have thought that this would be an appropriate time to put their arms around her, as Josh was doing.

  A small voice in Kate’s mind suggested that ‘lover’ might be a better word than ‘friend’. But that was ridiculous. She, Kate Adams, did not have lovers. Boyfriends, yes. A husband, one day, yes. Lovers, with all the connotations of hastily formed, illicit affairs, had no place in her neatly ordered life. But the voice stuck out its tongue and said that if she didn’t like it, she was going to have to find some other way to describe Josh, because, with the way his mouth was rapidly approaching hers again, ‘friend’ really wasn’t going to cut it.