by Rebecca Done
Her cafetière was still half full on the patio. She filled both cups and handed one to him. ‘Is this …?’ he said, looking up at her.
Though the pattern was now faded by seventeen years of dishwashing to an unattractive outline of shadows in pastel, the word Venezia was still clear around its circumference. She nodded. ‘It’s my favourite, actually. Has a very comfortable grip.’
He laughed. ‘Well, that’s good to know, Jess. I’m glad it’s come in useful.’
They shared a smile and she sat down next to him. Two electric-blue dragonflies zipped past their noses, in search of water and somewhere to bake in the sun.
‘God, this is great,’ he said, inhaling the sight and scent of her ramshackle little garden. ‘You’re actually growing things. Bucking the national trend for widespread stunting.’
She smiled. ‘Well, I like bees too much.’ She reached for the plate of churros and was about to offer him one when she realized firstly that it was empty and secondly that Smudge was licking sugar crystals from his nose. She started laughing. ‘I would offer you breakfast, but I think Smudge has just eaten it.’
‘That’s okay,’ he said with a smile, ‘I have plans for breakfast.’
She felt a twinge of disappointment.
‘Sorry that I’m such a cliché, by the way,’ he said then, taking a sip of coffee and nudging her shoulder gently with his.
‘How do you mean?’
‘Not calling you. This week’s been a bit crazy.’
‘Oh.’ She nudged him back. ‘It’s no problem, honestly. Is Charlotte okay?’
‘She’s fine, but the bed-wetting’s been a bit of a thing recently. I think it’s to do with being in a new house.’ He looked across at her. ‘Sorry about all that the other night.’
‘God, don’t be,’ she said, shaking her head, though she wasn’t quite sure which bit of the night he was apologizing for.
From somewhere down the road, a lawnmower purred into action.
‘So … do you have any plans for breakfast?’ he asked her.
She smiled into her coffee.
‘If you still fancy doing something, Charlotte goes to Helen every Friday,’ he said. ‘The childminder. I have the day free.’
From the Roberts, the heated discussion was fast becoming both a blazing row and radio gold. The studio guests were out of control, bellowing en masse into each other’s microphones. From the crab-apple tree the pigeons began to coo more excitedly too, as if they also had deep-rooted concerns about the macroeconomics at the heart of this debate.
Will was watching her, amused. ‘Do I get the feeling you’re not loving the idea?’
‘No! I absolutely do love it. Sorry – hang on.’ She leaned over, snapped off the radio and beamed at him. ‘I’m all yours.’
He met her eye with a wry smile at exactly the same time as she very nearly blushed. ‘Do I skip the obvious joke?’
She laughed and plucked the head from a nearby daisy. ‘Yes please.’
The sound of dogs barking drifted over the wall from the direction of the salt marsh. Smudge flicked an ear disdainfully, but it wasn’t enough to make him move from his hot little patch of grass.
‘So, Jessica. I have a one-time offer for you.’
She smiled. ‘Wow.’
‘Well, hang on. You don’t know what it is yet.’
‘Too late. You’ve talked it up. Go.’
Feigning apprehension, he blew out his cheeks. ‘Okay. Fancy a day trip to Norwich?’ He waggled his eyebrows. ‘My car has air con.’
‘Stop it, Will. I don’t think I can cope.’
They faced one another over brunch in a cafe at the foot of Elm Hill, which offered good views of the snaking cobblestoned street beyond the window. The sun was angling through the glass, gently baking their bare arms; and from the radio behind the counter floated the melodious strains of acoustic guitar. The scent of Italian coffee billowed.
‘So when did you shave your head?’ she asked him, scooping up a forkful of pillow-soft, pan-fried root vegetable hash.
The cafe was packed – mothers and toddlers, couples taking the day off work, writers on laptops enjoying an early lunch. Jess was grateful that the gentle burble of chatter was enough to drown out their own private conversation.
Finishing his scrambled eggs, Will wiped his mouth with a napkin before picking up his coffee. ‘The day I left the farm. Needed a disguise. I told you, false noses are so 1992.’
She smiled. ‘How did it feel?’
‘Not that great at the time, actually. Katy did it for me.’ He winced at the memory. ‘Managed to make me feel like a convict all over again.’ He nodded at her. ‘You kept your hair short. Not quite as short as mine, thankfully.’
‘Do you like it?’ she asked, putting a hand up self-consciously to touch it.
‘Yeah, I do,’ he said, like that much should have been obvious, and then set down his cup. ‘It’s funny, I spent a lot of time looking in the mirror after I moved to London, trying to decide whether anybody would recognize me if I stepped outside.’
‘And did they?’
‘Nope. Or if they did, they didn’t care. London’s a pretty good place to be anonymous.’ He smiled faintly. ‘I did actually think about going to Italy, after I got out. But I was still on licence, and the farm was the best place for me to hide. Then I moved to London, and I was broke, so going abroad wasn’t really an option. And after that … I met Natalie, who had no idea who I was, and for the first time in five years I could pretend to be a normal fucking person. I loved it. I felt like a kid at Christmas.’
Jess speared a cube of sweet potato with her fork as she worked up the nerve to broach the most delicate subject of all. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ she said carefully, ‘but I’m kind of surprised that you had a baby.’
He raised one eyebrow but said nothing, waiting.
‘I just mean that babies are … complicated.’ She swallowed, struggling for a moment to get the words out. ‘I wouldn’t have expected you to opt for extra complication at that point in your life. Or maybe ever. You know – after everything that happened.’
‘Well,’ he said, equally carefully, ‘I didn’t exactly opt for it.’ And then he pushed his knife and fork together on his empty plate, sat back in his seat and waited for his words to make an impression.
They did.
‘Oh,’ was all she could manage at first. She set down her fork and took a long slug of coffee while she attempted to process what he’d just said. ‘So, it wasn’t planned?’
‘Well, Natalie was on the pill when we met. Or so she told me. Anyway, I was a bit of a mug about it – I knew she got all gooey around children but I never really paid much attention to what that meant in the context of me not wanting them – and the next thing I knew …’
‘Ouch.’
‘Yeah, it was a bit.’ He frowned at the memory. ‘So then I had to decide, am I going to be a complete wanker and leave her or am I going to be a nice guy and stay?’
‘So you opted for nice guy.’
‘Well, of sorts. Natalie made it easy on me, really. I was living in her flat, she was climbing the ladder at work, determined to be the breadwinner …’ He took a sip of coffee. ‘But, yeah. If you can call it that, I suppose I opted to be a nice guy. Or nice-ish. We argued a lot.’
‘What about?’ she asked quietly.
‘Um, lots of things. She couldn’t understand why I felt so weird about us having kids, for one.’
Jess waited, sensing he wanted to elaborate.
‘I don’t know, Jess,’ he said eventually. ‘I guess I always just imagined … having children with you. It seemed to me like that was the natural order of things.’ He glanced at her. ‘Natalie was three months’ pregnant when I came back to find you that second time. That’s why I bottled it on your doorstep. I just – I couldn’t bring myself to tell you I’d got a girl pregnant. Stupid, I know.’
His words struck Jess right in the gut, a series of lit
tle punches, and it took her a couple of moments to regain her composure. ‘You did the right thing,’ she managed eventually, feeling him watching her. ‘With Natalie.’
There was a short pause. ‘Well, I did the proper thing. Pulled myself together. Learned to cook. Cut back on booze. Decorated a room for Charlotte. Carried on doing my odd jobs for old dears.’ A short pause. ‘Tried to become responsible, I suppose.’
‘Odd jobs?’
‘That was how I paid my rent before I met Natalie. You know – painting, putting up shelves, trying my hand at plastering. Which is harder than it looks, by the way.’ He smiled. ‘Some people are definitely born to be teachers, Jess. Turns out I’m one of them.’
Jess looked down at her coffee, suddenly overcome with memories of Matthew scrawling frantic formulas across the blackboard at Hadley Hall, shouting them out as he wrote, jabbing his stick of chalk to emphasize each point, so passionate that his class should grasp what he was telling them. It made her want to weep with regret.
‘Where were you living?’ she asked him. ‘When you met her?’
‘Converted cupboard in Bethnal Green. I had to go with the first landlord who didn’t want to check if I had a criminal record. So when Natalie asked me to move in with her, it felt like …’
A relief, Jess thought.
‘… everything was going to be all right.’
There was a pause.
‘So she fell pregnant –’ Jess prompted him.
‘Oh, yeah. Well, we were living in Camden back then and … you know, ever since leaving prison I’d had this craving for outside space. It was a bit of a compulsion. I did it all the time when I was single – just took myself off to the nearest park to look at the sky, feel the air on my face. So whenever me and Natalie had a fight I’d head out on to Primrose Hill and sit there on the grass, thinking about … everything.’
‘Everything like what?’
He sipped from his coffee. ‘You. Us. Prison. Whether I should stay with Natalie.’
‘You really think she did it on purpose? Stopped taking the pill?’
He nodded. ‘Well, that was part of the reason we were fighting. You know, I’d make accusations, she’d deny it and start crying – and then I’d look at her standing there in front of me all hysterical with her little baby bump sticking out over the top of her trousers, and I’d feel like the world’s biggest bastard. And then I’d remember how she’d rescued me from that cupboard in the East End and … you know. There was give and take on both sides, Jess.’
Jess swallowed away a surge of some very acidic thoughts about Natalie.
‘Anyway, a few years ago, she got really pissed on her birthday and admitted it. Said she’d done it to keep me, because she thought I seemed a bit twitchy.’
‘Shit.’ Jess shook her head. She looked down at the contents of her bowl, a little autumn rainbow topped off with the yolky yellow remains of a perfectly fried duck egg. Her hunger had suddenly evaporated. She felt almost nauseous.
‘She tried to make me feel as if the whole thing was my fault for not wanting a family with her in the first place,’ Will continued. ‘Anyway, the next morning I got up and looked at Charlotte across the breakfast table and … well. Let’s just say it’s impossible to have any sort of valid regret when your three-year-old takes your hand in hers, squeezes it really tight and tells you not to be sad.’
From somewhere in the corner, a baby began to wail. Jess felt entirely sympathetic.
‘Fucking hell,’ she mumbled. ‘She really did trap you.’
‘Yeah, but if she knew the truth about me …’ He trailed off, his face folding into a frown. ‘She would say that my dishonesty is worse than hers ever was.’
Jess shook her head. ‘You’re just too afraid to tell her. That’s different to –’ she hesitated – ‘deliberate deception.’ She leaned back in her chair again as the mother with the wailing baby passed their table and headed out of the door in an attempt to placate him with some fresh air.
‘Anyway, I’ve got Charlotte now,’ Will said eventually. ‘She makes up for most things. To be honest, Jess, I live for her now. I don’t have a job, I have no means of really supporting myself … All these years, without Natalie and Charlotte, I would have had nothing. And I don’t just mean financially. They put purpose back into my life when every last shred of it was gone.’
Jess finished her coffee and tried to pretend she wasn’t experiencing fierce stirrings of resentment towards Natalie.
He observed her for a couple of moments. ‘You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you angry before.’
‘It has been known.’ But then she found herself unable to meet his eye, so she glanced over at the counter instead. ‘Let’s get the bill.’
They wound their way back up Elm Hill and along the end of Princes Street towards the city centre, meandering slowly, not wanting to rush. Though Will had his sunglasses on again, she sensed somehow that his eyes were scanning the street as they walked, like he was half expecting a paparazzo to hop out from an innocuous doorway and have them plastered all over the front page of the Sun by tomorrow morning.
‘But you’ve managed to avoid marriage, so far,’ she said as they crossed at the lights opposite the church. From somewhere behind them, the cathedral bells began to chime, a heavy, comforting clunking of timeless song.
‘Well, that’s not difficult. Natalie’s been married before – she was young, only eighteen – and I made it clear from the start that I wasn’t keen. I mean, she can engineer a pregnancy, but she can’t exactly frogmarch me down the aisle.’
Jess became momentarily distracted by a horrifying vision of Natalie crushing narcotics into Will’s cornflakes so she could drag him unimpeded to a registry office and elicit his dribbled consent to a lifetime of sham marriage. By the time she had reached the top of Bridewell Alley and Will had haplessly slurred his way through the wedding vows, Jess realized he was no longer at her side. Turning to look for him, she saw that he had been chatting to a Big Issue seller and was now jogging to catch up with her, magazine in hand.
‘I feel bad,’ she said. ‘I never stop.’
‘Force of habit. We do the soup kitchen thing each Christmas.’
She looked across at him. ‘Seriously?’
He laughed as they began to walk again, deep in the channel of winding, medieval streets where ancient buildings bowed towards one another above their heads. ‘Well, it’s like a White family tradition. Natalie used to do it with her mum every year. I always get goats for my birthday too – you know, like for a village somewhere in the depths of Burkina Faso.’
Jess wrinkled her nose and said nothing. Right now, she wanted to despise Natalie, not hear Will eulogizing about her philanthropic charms. Arriving at the top of the hill, they headed straight on to Back of the Inns, past all the clothing retailers, before turning right through the Royal Arcade.
‘This is going to sound really lame,’ Will said, ‘but spending time inside really does make you appreciate the little things. It brings you a bit closer to people who have nothing.’
She looked across at him. ‘But Natalie doesn’t know that.’
‘God, no. She just thinks I’m really into swapping goats for birthdays.’
She laughed. ‘And what does Charlotte get?’
‘Oh, all the same old plastic tat as the other kids. Especially at Christmas, to bribe her into the soup kitchen with us. Seven’s a bit too young to force selflessness on her.’
They emerged together on to the bustle of Gentleman’s Walk. The street was noisy and hot, packed with tourists and insurance workers on lunch breaks and shoppers stamping sweatily from one store to the next. There were dogs on strings, girls in hot pants handing out money-off vouchers, boys crouched down low on BMX bikes, weaving their way through the crowds. It was a good day for basking at a pavement table outside a coffee shop, for sitting in the square under the shade of the lime trees, for heading up to the castle to dangle bare feet into the cold wate
r of the fountain.
‘So what do you want to do now?’ Will asked, turning to face her.
‘Let’s go back to the car,’ she said.
He hesitated, and winced. ‘Can I be stubborn and say I really don’t want to go home yet?’
‘Me neither. I’ve got this crazy idea.’
He smiled. ‘Excellent. It’s been a long time since I had one of those.’
They drove to a budget hotel in the south of the city.
Will checked them in, paying with cash and mumbling something unnecessary to the receptionist about coming back down for their bags. Then he grabbed Jess’s hand and gripped it tightly as they moved wordlessly through carpet-freshened corridors, their eyes flicking from door to door to identify the right number.
Eventually, reaching their room on the second floor, they faced one another. ‘You okay?’ he asked her, because it was obvious that once they were the other side of that door, there would be no going back.
She nodded, and he turned the key to let them both in. The space inside was gloomy and stale, the watered-down sunlight filtered by net curtains and dust motes thrown around by some poorly executed vacuuming.
They sat down together on the edge of the bed. The sheets on the thin mattress were stiff and off-white, a row of mismatched coat hangers was dangling half-broken from an open rail and a yellowing notice slapped wonkily on the mirror above the television reminded them bossily to neither smoke nor expect breakfast. The whole place felt devoid of soul; perfect, then, for an act of ill-judgement.
Jess edged a nervous smile at him. ‘Did we really just do that?’
‘Check into a dodgy hotel mid-afternoon?’
She winced and nodded.
Will looked down at his hands, resting chastely in his lap. ‘We’ve done worse before now.’
She thought about it. ‘No, that was good,’ she said. ‘This … this is bad.’
He laughed softly and looked across at her. ‘I love that you think it was good. You know we’re the only ones in the world who think it was anything other than completely despicable?’
‘We were also the only ones there.’