by Zaza, Agatha
He watched as Edmund’s face lit up when he touched Ovidia. Jasper had never seen his brother embrace a woman before. Even though this was a chaste greeting, Jasper could too easily imagine Edmund kissing her, and he had to brace himself as he watched them touch.
Holly’s hand touched Jasper’s thigh. He ignored it at first, then mechanically put his hand on top of hers, and he felt her snuggle against him as if they were watching something on TV.
Holly had been in pale blue when he asked her to marry him. Anne had taken pictures. This morning they’d scrolled through the photos, and, as Holly had been in the bath, he’d gone through each one of them again, looking at the joy in her face but more so being surprised by the joy in his own.
He tried to recapture that feeling. He scanned his memory of the previous night, trying to seize the emotions on which he’d floated throughout the evening.
‘Will you marry me?’ he’d asked Holly, unable to remember any of the text he’d written and memorised and stumbling over the simple words.
He’d still been excited until the moment he’d knocked on Edmund’s front door that morning. He visualised the days leading up to his proposal. He tried to recall the anxious anticipation of looking for a ring, of walking past a bridal shop on a high street and stopping to imagine that he would, at some point, be enmeshed in discussions of dresses, suits, and flowers.
He couldn’t find those feelings.
Ovidia was holding another bottle — red wine, tucked beneath her arm. ‘Hello, everyone!’ she said cheerfully, as she let go of Edmund.
How much longer can I last? Jasper thought. His mind blank, he couldn’t imagine how he could escape. What would he possibly say to his friends if he ran from this house like he wanted to? The truth was almost farcical.
‘Congratulations, Holly. Congratulations, Jasper,’ Ovidia said, nodding to each of them; but, like Edmund, she didn’t offer a hand or a hug. Was that something she’d learned from Edmund? Jasper wondered. He saw her glance at the space beside Holly on the three-seater sofa, but she took the only other remaining seat — a side table on Edmund’s right, moving his glass of whiskey and his newspaper to the floor.
12
‘I’m Ovidia,’ she announced as she sat down, fighting the urge to run.
Anne and John introduced themselves, though they needn’t have. Edmund had described them to her. He’d told her trivia such as Anne being left-handed and that John hated brandy. While Edmund never told her the details of his conversations with his brother, he’d told her of this friendship, saying that he couldn’t recall Jasper ever having a friendship as strong as the one with John, and he was glad, though he found John irritating, pompous even. After he’d met Anne, he’d told Ovidia he thought the two of them would get on. Edmund had been to dinner with them after having arrived that morning from a transatlantic trip. ‘I could have been nicer to Anne,’ he’d said. ‘But I was just too tired to make an effort.’
Edmund had never met Holly. Ovidia wasn’t sure if he’d been deliberately avoiding her, but she knew that, on at least one occasion, he’d lied to Jasper about having planned an early morning trip, when in fact Edmund had spent the day at home.
Both John and Anne were looking at her with faint, friendly smiles, while Holly’s was bright and cheerful. Their expressions confirmed that they knew nothing of her existence.
In Anne, she saw the stylish woman she’d expected. The kind who, without expensive labels, could look effortlessly sophisticated. She could see Anne was nervous, discreetly tapping her index finger over and over again, yet her face remained calm and friendly.
Holly kept looking around at everyone as if she was waiting to speak but unsure if she should or unable to think of anything to say.
Starting conversations had once been so easy, but now Ovidia wasn’t sure she remembered how. She would have preferred to be indoors, listening to the music that she now couldn’t recall. But Edmund needed her with him.
‘So, do you live around here?’ John asked, clearing his throat.
Ovidia smiled again, wondering how long she would need to keep smiling to make sure they couldn’t see through her charade. How strange it was to be in a space with three people whose lives were intertwined with Edmund’s, people she should know and yet none of them knew of her existence. Even John, who made a living talking to people, had floundered, coming up with a silly question. He was obviously desperate to know more. If, before she’d come out into the conservatory, Edmund had already told them that he and she were together, he wouldn’t have told them much more.
‘Ovidia, what a lovely name,’ Anne said, gently kicking John’s leg. He flinched and rotated his ankle.
‘When I was born, our next-door neighbour suggested it. She thought it was from Shakespeare,’ Ovidia replied to Anne’s question first. ‘Turns out her experience of Shakespeare was a high school production of Romeo and Juliet. I live across the road,’ she said to John, delivering both answers as if they were mere trivia, as if the question of whether she was cohabiting with Edmund was as inconsequential as a neighbour’s knowledge of Shakespeare.
‘You live across the road?’ John echoed, as if he was checking that he’d heard her correctly.
Ovidia ignored his question. She’d been to therapists; she knew he’d want to keep talking until he uncovered an explanation that satisfied him.
She turned to address Holly, while forcing the wine bottle’s screw top open. She could feel them all watching her. Even Jasper’s eyes seemed to burn into her. She took in details of him in measured glances, repressing the urge to stare. Edmund hadn’t mentioned how thin his brother had become. ‘He’s lost a bit of weight’, and later, ‘Looking much better now that he’s put some meat on’ was as much as he’d said.
If this was ‘meat’, as Edmund had called it, then what had he looked like before? Jasper’s fingers were bony and his jaw seemed larger, jutting from his face. His skin had a powdery-white pallor to it, as if he’d recently been ill, and he had dark circles around his eyes. He looked much older than her, though he was a year younger, and he retained only a trace of the good looks she remembered.
‘I really should get round to meeting this girl,’ Edmund had said about a year ago. ‘He seems to be serious about her.’ But from then on, he’d mentioned her only in passing. Until the previous night, as they sat in the kitchen silently eating microwave meals and a prepacked salad from its packaging. Beside each of them was tepid tap water in mismatched glasses. They were eating late, as they’d spent the evening each refusing the other’s offer of food, both unable to make the effort to eat. The television had been on for a while, but neither had been able to focus. Ovidia had tried a book, trying to fill her time until bedtime when, she hoped, she would sleep for a few hours.
‘Jasper just asked Holly to marry him,’ Edmund had said.
Ovidia had looked at his hands and then the space around him. His phone had been nowhere near him. This meant it would have already happened. Edmund would have read the messages and only told her now. His face had looked tired but otherwise impassive. Had he shown any happiness at the news, then perhaps Ovidia would have tried to do the same.
‘That’s nice,’ she’d said. She should have felt something at this news, regret or maybe relief, but it did not lift her from the funk in which she was mired. She looked down at her food, a pile of beige, brown, and white sauces with a suggestion of mince, and reminded herself that it was lasagne, though she could taste nothing. She’d shaken more pepper over her food.
‘Is it?’ Edmund had asked.
She tried to think of an appropriate response: a shrug, a joke, something. Edmund had put a forkful of food into his mouth and chewed, his eyes cast to the space behind her shoulder.
‘I don’t care,’ she had replied.
‘Holly, you must be so excited.’ She made eye contact with Jasper’s fiancé, smiling as convincingly as she could muster. ‘Edmund told me last night. He was gutted when he realised he shou
ld have joined you for dinner.’
If Holly had looked happy before, she was now incandescent, Ovidia thought.
‘Really?’
Ovidia looked to the ground, unable to continue her lie. She pulled at her earlobe.
They’d gone back to the glass room after they’d eaten and sat in the same chair Holly was in now. Edmund had occasionally picked up his mobile to answer the texts that continued to come from his mother. Then Edmund had put his arm around her, and they’d stared into the night until finally it was time to go to bed.
‘Tell me about your proposal,’ she asked, her smile feeling much too tight. She would not ruin Jasper’s big day, she told herself, gripping the wine bottle to steady her once again shaking hands.
She kept her back to Edmund as she spoke. ‘It’s been forever since I had anything to do with a wedding.’ She raised the bottle of red wine, now open, to offer it to the others. ‘How did you two meet?’
13
Jasper was glad John was with him. When he’d decided to ask Holly to marry him, he knew he wanted John and Anne to be there along with his family: Edmund and their parents. John and Anne had been in his life for four years — less by a summer, longer than Holly. Jasper found them easy to be with; they were both patient — or was it accepting? They were consistent and reliable. John and Anne had entered his life exactly when he needed them.
‘Are you okay?’ A voice had cut through the grey suffocating mist that enveloped him.
The blonde woman had a confident, reassuring smile. She appeared in front of him as his vision blurred and the feeling of blood churning in his head intensified. He felt his knees weakening.
‘Yes,’ he breathed.
‘No, you’re not. You’re going to pass out. John!’ she’d called, as Jasper crumpled to the ground. The two of them had held him capably, slowing his fall, and, when he’d got to the ground, the woman tried to turn him on to his front.
Jasper had resisted. The concrete was hard against his ribs and cold against his face. He pushed off the ground with all the strength he had, rising only onto his elbow.
A few droplets of water spilled upon them from the leaves above. They were in a park nearly bereft of humans on a chilly and grey Tuesday afternoon. The city’s vegetation was still the deep green of summer. Though autumn was approaching, it hadn’t arrived yet, and the weather had been miserable for days. Jasper had used it as an excuse to remain indoors, out of contact with the world.
‘Do you have any medical conditions? Should I call an ambulance?’ the woman asked.
‘No, for God’s sake, no!’ he’d said as loudly as he could, emitting a feeble croak.
‘Drugs?’ she’d asked.
‘No,’ he whined and shook his head. He clutched his abdomen as pain shot through his stomach.
‘I’m calling an ambulance anyway,’ John said.
Jasper struggled to sit up as John pulled a mobile out of his jacket pocket. The rain had stopped hours earlier, but the puddles that remained had soaked through Jasper’s trousers and muddied his elbow. His coat was much too warm for an August afternoon, and Jasper had worn it to cover up the fact that his clothes were much too large for him and to hide his near-emaciated body. Jasper realised that he must have looked like a drug addict, at best.
‘I’m just …’ he began, and the blonde looked at him as if anticipating his answer, ‘… a bit hungry, I haven’t eaten for a while.’
John paused, not having yet dialled. The woman immediately rummaged through her large leather handbag, bringing out a bar of Twix, a tinned espresso, and a half-empty packet of crisps.
He ate three crisps and eyed the chocolate bar, even if it brought back unwanted thoughts.
‘A perfect shade of Twix,’ he said to himself in a whisper. Dreading the rush of sickly-sweet stickiness, he’d declined the bar and continued eating the crisps slowly, fighting the wave of nausea that threatened. He looked to see John put his mobile away, as if relieved.
‘Everything all right then?’ An older woman stopped. She shook her head at the sight of him. ‘I know most of the homeless ones around here. I haven’t seen him before.’ She talked over Jasper to the woman and John, as if Jasper was irrelevant. ‘There’s a shelter near here, but they all run off back to their drugs — prescription nowadays.’
‘I live just around the corner, thank you.’ Jasper had enough in him to be indignant at her suggestion.
‘They all say that. Doesn’t look like he can afford to live around here, but, then again, looking homeless could be some latest fashion,’ she sniffed. ‘Best of luck. Call the police if he gets rowdy.’ She sauntered off, humming Mamma Mia, her platforms silent against the pavement.
The crisps were a relief. The first sip of lukewarm espresso eased the food’s way down his throat, and the shot of caffeine sent a jolt of energy through him. Jasper hadn’t eaten in days. The kitchen in the flat he’d recently moved into held frozen convenience foods, putrid fruit on the sideboards, and cereal going stale in open boxes. Every time he bought food, he promised himself he’d eat it. Yet with each microwave meal, every pizza ordered, each Chinese takeaway he opened, a surge of revulsion overcame him. For the last few days, he hadn’t even been able to look at food without waves of nausea raging through him. He hadn’t seen his parents or Edmund, knowing they might try to force him to eat — how they would, he couldn’t guess. Until those crisps crackled in his mouth, he’d been beginning to believe he’d never eat again.
‘Let’s get you on to a bench,’ the woman suggested.
The two of them helped him up, and he’d staggered to a nearby seat, leaning reluctantly against John until he felt the firmness of the bench beneath him. For a moment, he felt utterly humiliated at having been rescued by two strangers and mistaken for a drug addict by a third. Then he just felt hungry. They sat quietly on the bench, the two strangers watching him slowly nibble and sip as if he was a baby.
‘Well, we can’t leave you like this,’ the woman said. After ten minutes, Jasper had eaten only a quarter of the packet. ‘Can we call you a taxi? You’d be better off at home.’
‘No, really, I live in the mews just behind here,’ Jasper insisted, gesticulating vaguely. ‘I’ll be fine. I just need to get my strength back.’
The couple looked at each other, their faces saying they were not convinced. ‘Well, is there someone we can call?’
‘No need. I’ll just order a pizza.’
‘Seriously,’ John narrowed his eyes, ‘we’ll call someone, or we’ll call the police. We’re not going to leave you out here.’
Jasper had reluctantly given him Edmund’s number, stumbling over the digits, though Edmund had had the same number for years.
‘Says he’ll be here in forty-five minutes.’ John had put his mobile back in his pocket after a short call. Hello, is this Edmund? My name’s John. We found your brother collapsed on a pavement. No, he says he doesn’t, but we think he does need someone to keep an eye on him.
The blonde looked at her watch and looked around her as if pressed for time. She ran her hand through her nearly waist-length hair and tugged the belt of her cardigan, tightening it around her lean and petite body.
‘Louisa,’ John said, ‘there’s no need for the two of us to stay here. You go on ahead. I’ll call you when I’ve got him somewhere safer than a bench.’
‘If you’re sure you’re all right with him?’ Louisa said.
John nodded.
Louisa had kissed him. Jasper noted how her tongue lingered for the briefest of seconds against his lips — a bold yet discreet lick. He looked down at the packet of crisps and only then realised they were salt and vinegar.
John had then taken Jasper to a small café nearby whose décor harked back to the days of empire with pseudo-Victorian furniture and a board outside promising afternoon tea for thirty pounds. John had ordered himself a pot of tea and, for Jasper, freshly squeezed orange juice and plateful of butter biscuits.
‘Biscuits,’ Jo
hn said with flourish, ‘always does the trick with my girls.’
Jasper ate them with surprising appetite. The biscuits were easy to eat and mildly flavoured. Had he tried biscuits? he asked himself. Perhaps they held a secret. They crumbled in his mouth, and he felt stronger, tackling the plate with shaking hands. Again, humiliation surged through him as he noticed his nails were ragged and dirty.
John’s presence was reassuring, and, to be sociable, Jasper asked what he meant by ‘his girls’.
‘My daughters, and, well, my wife’s pretty fond of biscuits, too.’
When Jasper finished the biscuits he said, ‘That’s better. I feel rather stupid. Sorry for taking you out of your way.’
‘Wasn’t doing anything special,’ John shrugged. ‘You looked like a man in need of biscuits.’
‘In need of a psychiatrist, more like,’ Jasper said, sipping his orange juice.
‘Well, you’re in luck. Well, almost …’ John said, as Edmund rang to say he was just around the corner.
14
‘Yes, please,’ Holly said, and Anne too nodded at Ovidia’s offer of wine. The men still had traces of their champagne remaining. John gulped his down and said, ‘I’ll have a bit, too.’ They all reused the champagne flutes, Ovidia having forgotten suitable glasses for the red wine.
Holly wondered what Edmund had whispered to Ovidia. Now able to examine Ovidia closer, Holly agreed with John. Ovidia was unexpected. She was cool — for lack of a better word. She could imagine her doing an Ironwoman competition or obstacle race on TV. Holly couldn’t see Edmund and Ovidia on a street together. She couldn’t imagine where they’d be or what they’d be doing. She had expected Edmund to be with a woman more classically styled, perhaps a slender, older woman with polished blonde hair, muted colours, and discreet jewellery — a bit more like Anne, maybe.
But Holly thought she, like Anne, was putting too much into Ovidia’s appearance. In retrospect, she understood what Anne had been trying to say when she mentioned Ovidia’s race. She’d been trying to explain the jarring difference between the two: Ovidia’s slippers and bright colours and Edmund’s muted greys and browns. Ovidia looked far more suited to Holly’s own world, to the world of clubs and music and arts journalists — where patrons entered their forties disregarding their own ageing. Holly was sure that Ovidia would be more inclined to that sort of socialising than Anne, and that, since it was now evident that Ovidia was Edmund’s partner, they’d go out together sometimes. She wondered if Edmund would come with them. Perhaps to art galleries or things like John’s book launch, which she missed and had been disappointed to hear that Edmund had been there.