‘Oh well, I’d hate to deprive you of quiet time …’
As luck would have it they met Lawrence as they started down the drive so Johnny could tell him they were going and Verity could thank him for a fantastic party and they were back at The Kimpton Arms before Ken could call last orders. Verity left Johnny in the bar exchanging pleasantries as she escaped upstairs.
Someone had been in their room to turn down the beds and leave a Ferrero Rocher on each of their pillows, which was an unexpected treat.
Verity longed for a bath, but Johnny would be up soon and it would feel weird to be naked on the other side of the door from him. Though actually, everything felt weird, Verity decided as she had the quickest shower she’d had since she’d left home and not had four sisters demanding entry to the bathroom, or running the tap in the kitchen to make the water go cold and evict her that way.
By the time Johnny did knock on the door of their room, Verity was in stripy pyjamas, in bed, covers pulled up to her neck. She was hitting every romantic novel cliché out of the park this evening. Certainly she was as nervous as a virginal debutante marooned with a sardonic stranger at a remote country inn as she granted Johnny leave to enter in a breathy voice.
Johnny came into the room, gave her a wary smile and headed straight for the bathroom.
Verity could hear him brush his teeth then gargle and spit mouthwash. Water running. Rummaging in his shower bag. Everyday sounds suddenly turned into an intrusion because they were coming from a stranger.
A man she’d met only a couple of weeks ago. Had seen him a handful of times since then, knew a handful of facts about him (Cambridge, architect) but really she knew nothing about him at all. And now there were so many things she wanted, needed, to know.
‘So, exactly who was Julia talking about?’ Verity asked as soon as Johnny came out of the bathroom. He was wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt and Verity averted her eyes from the sight of his long, lean legs. How Verity wished that she could be blasé and light-hearted and treat this situation as a series of amusing anecdotes to entertain her sisters with.
Johnny folded up the clothes he’d been wearing, placed them on a chair then got into bed. Had he not heard her or was he simply determined to ignore her?
‘Light off?’ he asked. She murmured her assent and the room was plunged into darkness.
Verity was never going to be able to sleep. Not now, when her tenseness had upgraded to locked muscles and a thumping headache. She was going to have to turn the light back on and get out of bed to take a couple of tablets and …
‘Julia was talking about the love of my life.’ Or maybe Verity would stay right where she was to hear Johnny’s whispered confession. ‘It’s too bad that she married my best friend.’
‘Your best friend?’ Verity confirmed in a hoarse whisper.
‘Yup.’ Johnny popped the p. ‘We had a fight, I went to the States and she married him on the rebound. He was the rebound guy. Anyway, that’s why we can’t be together.’
‘She can’t get a divorce then?’ Verity believed in the sanctity of marriage – she was a vicar’s daughter after all – but she also believed that if two people were unhappy being married to each other then there should be a get-out clause.
Johnny sighed so loudly that Verity expected Linda to suddenly bang on the door and ask them to keep it down. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s very complicated.’
‘Why? Are they Catholic?’
‘No.’ The word was dragged out of him.
‘So, they’ve had children? Right, yeah, that would make it complicated.’
‘No, no children.’
Verity really didn’t see what the problem was then. Unless Merry’s crackpot theory had been on the money … ‘Oh dear, has she got a terminal illness …?’
‘No!’ It sounded like Johnny was about to snap.
Verity upgraded her headache from thumping to pounding. ‘Haven’t you ever thought that it might be easier to call it quits and find someone else? Someone who wasn’t married?’
‘Why would I want to date anyone else? My heart already belongs to her.’ He didn’t sound very happy about this ownership of his heart or maybe he was annoyed with Verity for refusing to let the subject drop but she was finding it very hard to understand the specifics.
‘So, are you two sleeping together then?’ Verity decided it was best to get right to the nub of the matter. Because Johnny was using a lot of fancy words but it still meant he was having an affair with a married woman, no matter how much he tried to dress it up.
For a moment Verity was sure she could feel Johnny glaring at her in the darkness.
‘No.’ He packed an entire afternoon into the ‘no’, it was that drawn out. Also, a little exasperated. ‘What we have … it’s not about sex. If I wanted sex that badly, then it’s easy enough to go out and pick up a woman who also wants to get laid with no promises, no strings attached. End up in bed together for a night of meaningless sex that satisfies you at the time, scratches the itch, but then leaves you feeling just as empty as you were before.’
His voice. It was a voice that would have Tom Hiddleston suing for copyright infringement, and it was talking about sex, no-strings sex, which always seemed like it would be more abandoned, more hanging-from-the-light-fittings than other kinds of sex, and it was making Verity feel all sorts of things. Things which made her squirm, her body becoming heavier, languid, as she pictured Johnny in some dive-bar giving sultry looks and a seductive half smile to a woman then taking her back home, both of them kissing and grinding against each other as soon as the front door shut behind them, tugging at each other’s clothes so they could be naked, free, Johnny’s lean body on top …
That was quite enough of that! Verity snapped on the light, eyes screwed shut against its brightness, but also so she wouldn’t have to look at Johnny. ‘Headache,’ she bit out. ‘I need tablets.’
It was quite the feat to get from bed to bathroom with her eyes shut but Verity managed it, though she did get intimate with the Corby trouser press at one point. She lurked in the bathroom for a while after she’d taken a couple of ibuprofen, in the hope that Johnny might be asleep, but when she felt brave enough to sidle back into the bedroom, he was awake. Worse than awake; he was sitting up, arms folded, eyes fixed on Verity as she quickly shuffled back to her own bed.
‘I didn’t realise that this weekend arrangement meant that we had to bare our souls to each other. It’s only fair that it’s your turn now,’ he said baldly. ‘So, what’s your story? Why have you sworn off dating?’
Verity had her back to him as she climbed into bed so she could grimace to her heart’s content that suddenly it was her romantic lifestyle choices, or lack of them, that was up for debate.
‘I told you, I’m too busy for dating.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ Johnny said and Verity couldn’t bear doing this any other way than under cover of darkness, so she turned off her bedside lamp again.
It was hard to put it into words. To explain it to someone who wasn’t family, hadn’t known or worked with Verity long enough to understand her foibles, her funny little ways.
‘Well,’ she said. ‘Well, the thing is that, it sounds so melodramatic when I say it out loud, but the best way to explain it is … I’m an introvert.’
There was a pause. ‘When you say you’re an introvert, what exactly do you mean?’ Verity could hear the doubt and scepticism in Johnny’s voice that she’d heard many times before, usually from people just before they said, ‘God, you talk a hell of a lot for an introvert.’
‘It’s not that I’m shy, not really, or that I hate people, because I don’t, it’s more that I find the world noisy and exhausting. Like, when I’m put into a new situation or meet too many people, after a short time, I can feel myself shutting down. Like a computer that’s got too many browser windows open.’
She sighed at the thought of browser windows. It was Verity’s unhappy lot in life to exist in an age of technology
. ‘The world is such a noisy place. There are car alarms and shop alarms, sirens blaring, even the self-service tills in the supermarket get uppity and insist that there’s an unexpected item in my bagging area when there absolutely isn’t.’
From across the room Johnny chuckled. ‘That’s true enough.’
‘And then there are people. So many people, every single one of them without filters or indoor voices.’ Verity was on a roll now. ‘Having to express every single last thought that comes to them. I can’t even go for a restorative walk in a park without someone having a loud conversation on their phone, or listening to music on their phone and assuming that the rest of the world wants to hear it too. There’s only so much I can take!
‘I have to work because I don’t have a trust fund,’ Verity continued as she neared the end of her long, rambling rant about how noisy modern life was. ‘I have a very large, very loud family that I love, I have friends too but dating, a boyfriend, it’s just too much.’
Johnny didn’t say anything for a while as if he were having trouble processing all this information. ‘Why is having a boyfriend too much?’
‘Because if I’m dating then I will never have enough time for myself,’ Verity said a little desperately. ‘And the thing is, I don’t miss dating or boyfriends. Holding hands and hugging is really not my jam but it’s not even the touching, it’s being intimate with someone emotionally, I can’t do that. It’s exhausting. I suppose I think of myself as an island, really.’
‘And do your four sisters think you’re an island too?’
‘No, they think that when the right person comes along, everything will magically slot into place.’
‘You never know, it might,’ Johnny said as if he hadn’t listened to a single word that she’d said. ‘You must have had boyfriends in the past?’
‘Of course I have!’ Verity said indignantly, because her singledom was self-enforced, not because she was and always had been repulsive to the opposite sex. Even so, it wasn’t as if she’d been beating off prospective suitors. For most of her teen years, she’d been one of the local vicar’s five odd daughters. Maybe even the oddest. Then when she’d left home, left her sisters, it was hard enough to make friends, let alone form any romantic attachments until … ‘I was with this guy, Adam, that I met at university for three years so it’s not as if I’ve given up on relationships without knowing what it is that I’m giving up.’
‘So, you were in love with him?’ Johnny gently probed.
‘Yes, I loved him,’ Verity said with heat, because she could never think about Adam without becoming emotional. ‘I wouldn’t have spent three years with him if I didn’t love him, would I?’
Three years of trying to make things work, of trying to let Adam in, to lower her guard. All that Verity had succeeded in doing was making him unhappy, seeing the light dim in his eyes every time she pushed him away.
She didn’t want to be responsible for someone else’s happiness – it was far too much pressure. But it was much, much worse to be responsible for someone else’s unhappiness.
‘So, if you’ve been in love then I guess you’re not a misanthrope?’ Johnny queried and Verity thought she could hear just a hint of amusement in his voice as if he wasn’t taking her coming out as an introvert or anything that she’d just said that seriously.
‘Really not. That’s not what being an introvert is about. I don’t want to live in a cave like a hermit and shun all human contact. I like people. There are people I love dearly but … just in small doses,’ Verity finished, because she was finished. Done with this conversation. ‘For example, I’m all talked out now.’
‘Me too.’ Verity heard Johnny shift in his bed, the sound of the pillow being thumped back into shape. ‘We should probably get some sleep.’
They both mumbled goodnight. Verity had barely got comfortable when she heard the beep of Johnny’s phone then his sigh as he picked it up from his nightstand.
‘So, is that who you’re always on the phone to?’ she asked.
‘Yeah.’ Johnny was distracted. Verity stuck her head out from under the covers to see his face lit up by the screen as he replied to the text. ‘I suppose you’re angry that I never told you she was married but, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, it’s not really any of your business.’
Verity should have been angry with him, especially for that last dig, but she was too exhausted. Even so, she was definitely a little bit cross. ‘You don’t think that you’ve made it my business?’
‘Not really,’ he said in an off-hand voice as he stared at his phone. ‘If you hadn’t bumped into Julia and she hadn’t been so steaming drunk, then you’d have been none the wiser.’ He looked up with a weary expression. ‘I’m going to switch my phone off now until morning. Can we please try and get some sleep?’
That was precisely what Verity had been attempting to do before his infernal phone had beeped for the gazillionth time with a message from the love of his life who just happened to be married to someone else – his best friend no less. So, even if he wasn’t sleeping with her, he was doing something not-quite-right with his best friend’s wife. And yes, it was a big deal and absolutely yes, Johnny should have told her right from the start exactly why he was so in need of a fake girlfriend.
It didn’t matter about the many whys and wherefores of the situation; married people were out of bounds. That was one of the most fundamental rules of being a grown-up.
12
‘One cannot know what a man really is by the end of a fortnight.’
The next morning, with both of them huffy and puffy-eyed from tiredness, they drove back to London in near silence. It was that precious silence that Verity normally craved, though this silence was so loud it was practically screaming.
Finally, and it couldn’t have come soon enough, Johnny was pulling into the corner of Rochester Street.
Verity scrambled to disengage her seatbelt. ‘No need for you to get out too,’ she said quickly. ‘As long as the boot’s open, I can take it from here.’
She smiled weakly at Johnny; he smiled weakly back at her, both of them embarrassed by their late-night confessions. Verity seemed to recall that at one stage she’d referred to herself as an island. Who did that? She did that, apparently.
‘Look, Verity …’ She was already halfway out the car when Johnny spoke for the first time since they’d left the motorway at Brent Cross and he’d asked if she still wanted the air con on. ‘I should have been honest with you from the start. I understand if you want to break off our arrangement, but I really hope you don’t. I still owe you a fake-date.’
‘It’s fine. I’m fine. Honestly, everything’s fine,’ Verity assured him. She finished her inelegant scramble from the car. ‘I promise I’ll be in touch.’
She had her fingers crossed behind her back so it wasn’t a lie. Verity had done too much lying recently, starting with Peter Hardy. Peter Hardy had come with many complications but he had nothing on Johnny and his decades-long love triangle.
‘So, I’ve decided not to see Johnny any more,’ Verity told Posy the next day during their mid-morning bun break. ‘Neither of us are in the right head space for a relationship right now.’
Since Mattie had opened the tearoom, they now had a mid-morning bun break and a mid-afternoon cake stop and the waistbands on all Verity’s jeans were feeling a little snug.
‘That’s a shame,’ Posy sighed. They were sitting in the office and meant to be going through the post-launch sales figures but everything stopped for buns. ‘You’re definitely going to call it quits, then?’
‘I think so,’ Verity said as if she were still pondering the matter when she’d already decided before she’d even shut the boot of Johnny’s car that she was never going to see him again. If she carried on with this fake relationship sham, then Verity was condoning Johnny’s sex-free, text-heavy affair with his best friend’s wife. Then there was the sheer skin-flaying embarrassment that Verity experienced when she remembered
what she’d confessed in the darkness of their twin room. It was painfully obvious that she and Johnny needed to stop. Quit. Never see or speak to each other ever again. Even if Verity couldn’t stop thinking about how nice his arms looked in a T-shirt. ‘We’re not really a good fit,’ she said firmly.
Posy was getting that romantic, dreamy look on her face that she so often had these last few weeks. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t be so quick to end things with Johnny. On paper, me and Sebastian aren’t a good fit but look at us now.’ Just in case Verity couldn’t take the hint, Posy waved her hand in front of Verity’s face so she could see the platinum wedding band and beautiful sapphire engagement ring that Sebastian had placed on her third finger.
‘Quite frankly, and please don’t take this the wrong way, I’m still trying to process you and Sebastian,’ Verity said.
‘Oh God, me too.’ Posy pulled a face at her orange-and-cardamom bun. ‘But this isn’t about me. I think you should give Johnny another chance. Men like him don’t come along too often.’
‘I know that he seems handsome and charming and …’
‘… has a great sense of humour. He cracked a very funny joke about P.G. Wodehouse at the tearoom opening,’ Posy reminded Verity. ‘Compared to Nina’s latest horror show of a boyfriend, Johnny is in a class of his own.’
‘I can hear every word you’re saying!’ Nina shouted from behind the counter. They really had to start shutting the office door. ‘Gervaise is not a horror show. He’s just going through stuff.’
Gervaise was a performance artist who described himself as sexually fluid, though as far as Verity could tell being sexually fluid simply gave him free rein to cheat on Nina with other women and men. Nina had finally kicked him to the kerb while Verity had been away for the weekend, only for Gervaise to turn up in the courtyard very late on Sunday night and shout up at their windows that he was going to immolate himself unless Nina took him back.
‘Do you think he could immolate himself quietly?’ Verity had asked.
True Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 11