by Lisa Jewell
Which is why, even though she’d been going out with Smith for nearly two months now, she wasn’t in the least worried that he still hadn’t said it, that he still hadn’t told her he loved her. He didn’t have to. Jem knew he loved her, without a word leaving his lips. As far as she was concerned it was yet another sign that Smith was the One. It was all so easy, so effortless. Smith was so undemanding, he didn’t put any pressure on her.
Jem found it refreshing that he didn’t plague her with romantic gestures and overblown declarations and gifts and pukey tokens and acts of love. He didn’t go on about how beautiful she was, or how she was the most amazing woman he’d ever met, or how she was so sexy and so wonderful and so special. She’d had enough of all that to last her a lifetime and she knew that such devotion usually came with a price tag attached – the jealousy and possessiveness of an insecure man.
Jem was aware that other women might find her attitude hard to understand. She realized that many women spent the majority of their lives dreaming of a man who would finally notice the dazzling flecks of amber in their eyes, the fine golden hair on the back of their necks, the porcelain smoothness of their skin, a man who would stroke, caress and soothe, utter words of adoration and talk endlessly of the years to come and the joys of commitment, a man who would place them carefully and reverently upon a diamond-encrusted pedestal, throw rose petals at their feet and hand-feed them morsels of their favourite food, all the while unable to unglue their eyes from them for fear of missing just one second of their incomparable beauty.
Not Jem. All that stuff turned her stomach and made her want to vomit.
She’d loved it the first time it had happened, of course she had, especially coming as it had at the tail-end of a hideously awkward adolescence just as she’d finally convinced herself that she was to remain unloved and unpenetrated for ever.
His name was Nick and he was a comfortable-looking bloke with a strong jaw and the sweetest smile imaginable. He’d just come through an equally awkward adolescence and at the ripe old age of nineteen was just about to resign himself to a lifetime of virginity when Jem came along.
It was a classic summer romance, full of picnics and trips to the cinema, drunken nights in beer gardens and hours of fumbling in the front seat of his mother’s car, where Jem had found herself, after years of trying to keep other boys’ hands out of her knickers, frankly, quite desperate to get hers into his.
They finally dispensed with their long-standing virginities that summer, the day after Jem’s eighteenth birthday and, in comparison to stories Jem had heard subsequently from her female friends, it was a truly magical event that had lived up to both their expectations. They were madly, madly in love with each other.
So everything was perfect and Jem was happy.
Until one night, a few weeks later. She’d been well into her third pint and enjoying a raucous conversation with a raucous friend at a raucous girls’ night out – when in walked Nick. He’d ambled self-consciously into the bar, scanning the room for his precious Jem, his face opening up like a blossoming flower when he spotted her, his pace quickening as he approached, his arms outstretched to pull her into a desperate embrace.
‘I was missing you,’ he said, ‘my mates were boring me. I just wanted to be with you,’ and he’d gripped her to him, burying his face in her hair and Jem had tried to smile, tried to reciprocate the depth of feeling, the strength of passion, but failed miserably, feeling instead completely suffocated, trapped and compromised. Nick felt like someone different after that night. They were no longer equals. The scales had been tipped. And try as she might, Jem just couldn’t revive the warm, solid, easy love she’d felt for him before.
At the end of that summer, she went to university in London and he went to university in Newcastle, and although things were OK at first, their weekend meetings gradually became more and more stressful. Nick would spend hours interrogating Jem about her newfound male friends in London, about her every movement and action, and quiz her about every boy she’d kissed before they met. Then he started to cry with alarming frequency, huge, wailing, snotty, unstoppable tears. ‘I only went to Newcastle to prove to myself that I could live without you – and I can’t! I can’t live without you, Jem!’ When he’d started talking about transferring to a London university, Jem decided it was time. Enough was enough.
It was one of the hardest things she’d ever done and he reacted badly when she phoned him, blowing his grant on a flight from Newcastle to London because the train would have taken too long, and searching London’s student community, house to house, for her. He’d finally found her, trying to hide from him in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. They spent three traumatic hours going over and over the details of their relationship, Nick begging and pleading for another chance, until the sun started to sink and the vagrants began to set up their makeshift homes, and Nick finally gave up and went home.
Jason hadn’t believed Jem loved him, either and demanded her attention, her love and her reassurance constantly, for ten months, disappearing into huge black sulks for days on end when he felt that she had wronged him in some way. Danny had insisted that she stop seeing her friends – he couldn’t understand why she should possibly need friends, now that they’d found each other. Clem wanted to marry her after six weeks and then fell into a deep depression when she said no, claiming that he no longer wanted to see her because ‘it just hurt too fucking much.’
And then, finally, there was Freddie, a fantastically charismatic, hysterically funny and deeply sexy saxophonist, who Jem had been all set to fall miserably in love with. He was totally removed from all the ‘nice’ boys she’d loved before and she was more than ready to experience the other side of the coin, to hand him her heart on a plate. But he beat her to it. Within weeks he’d had his long tousled locks cut short, swapped his jeans and waistcoat for a pair of chinos and a check shirt and was talking seriously about selling his sax and getting a job in sales so that they could get a mortgage and maybe think about starting a family.
Jem had been amazed. Wasn’t that the way girls were supposed to behave? Wasn’t it women who wanted commitment, security, babies, and men who just wanted to get drunk with their mates, have fun and play the field for as long as possible? Not in her experience. As far as Jem could tell, men were the ones with a strong need for commitment and security. How else could you explain the fact that at least nine times out often it was the man who proposed marriage? They can’t all have been armwrestled into it.
Another thing Jem had learned about men was that they were threatened by a woman who didn’t crave commitment and security, who wasn’t straining at the leash to walk up the aisle, who didn’t stop and drool at the windows of every jewellery shop she passed or turn to melted butter at the sight of every passing pink-cheeked cherub in a pushchair. As much as men might moan and whinge about these traditionally female traits, at least they knew what they were dealing with – ‘the nag’, ‘the ball and chain’, ‘her indoors’. It had all been tried and tested by their father and their father’s father and his father before them; women like that were a known quantity. It gave joyous meaning to nights at the pub or out with the lads – you deserved it after all you’d had to put up with from the demanding old harridan all week. It was part of life’s rich tapestry and eventually, a couple of years down the line, the man would pretend to be strong-armed up the aisle, just to keep the tradition going, even though it was really what he wanted, too.
But these days – well. These days all the rules were broken and for some reason a lads night out isn’t quite so enjoyable when you’re worrying about what your free-spirited girlfriend is up to with her mates, and it takes the edge off rolling home pissed at one in the morning when she rolls in at two in the morning, completely slaughtered and having had a much better night than you. Where’s the fun in being a bloke if you can’t dangle the carrot of commitment in front of your girlfriend for years on end? And if she doesn’t want commitment, the ring, the babies, the
n what the hell does she want? So Jem had found that most men, when confronted with a girl who just wanted to have fun, became confused and for some reason took over the role of the traditional woman, going to extraordinary lengths to try to tie their girlfriend down, break her spirit and control her.
But not Smith. Smith was perfect. He was happy for Jem to do her own thing, in her own way. He was generous and kind and easygoing and so affectionate. Jem had never known such an affectionate man. He never left her alone, was always dropping kisses on the top of her head, squeezing her hands, stroking her neck and grasping her to him in rib-crunching bear-hugs. Jem knew why. He’d confided to her on their first date that he’d been celibate for five years. Five years! He hadn’t had any physical contact with a woman for five years. It was another sign. It had to be more than a coincidence, his celibacy. He must have been waiting for her, waiting for Jem. And she was more than happy for him to make up for lost time with her.
He smelt nice, he looked nice, he dressed beautifully and he felt gorgeous. He didn’t hassle her with his emotions and insecurities, he gave her space, he gave her time. She really liked all his friends. He really liked all her friends. And the fact that he was rich enough to pay for meals out and cabs home without Jem feeling guilty was just the cherry on top of it all.
OK, so it wasn’t love’s young dream. OK, so they’d bypassed all the usual courting rituals – the long, animated talks over late-night drinks, the endless hours spent in bed inspecting each other’s moles and scars and belly buttons, the hour-long phonecalls you never wanted to end and pizzas in the park on freezing winter afternoons. And maybe they didn’t really have all that much in common – she’d been right about the dry white wine and the fancy restaurants. But they were so easy in each other’s company. Even now, at this early stage in their relationship, they were able to sit comfortably in silence, in public. It didn’t matter when they ran out of things to say. There was no embarrassment. And Smith wasn’t the most adventurous and spontaneous of people. But that didn’t matter to Jem. She’d had her share of romance, and she didn’t want any more.
She really didn’t mind that Smith had forgotten both their one-month anniversary and their two-month anniversary. She found it refreshing. And she didn’t mind that he never paid her compliments or noticed when she changed her hair or wore a new dress. She certainly didn’t mind his lack of discomfort about her nights à deux with her close friend Paul or his complete lack of jealousy about her ex-boyfriends and old loves. She was happy that he spent so much time at work and didn’t put any part of his life on hold to make room for her. She didn’t want any of that. She didn’t want the attention, the demands, the neediness. She’d been under the magnifying glass, the spotlight of insecure love for long enough. And now, she just wanted Smith.
Chapter Thirteen
Ralph had given up reading Jem’s diary over the last two months. Well, the current diary, anyway. It was just full of Smith this, Smith that and Smith the bloody other. It was like Ralph had ceased to exist the moment Jem had slept with Smith. He had been hoping for some doubts to creep into her entries, some reference to the fact that Smith wasn’t quite right for her, wasn’t good enough, that she’d made her decision too soon. But it hadn’t come. She was utterly blind to it, she was ‘in love’ with Smith and her diary was a constant, gurgling, gushing, vomit-inducing account of how perfect he was and how wonderful they were and how great the sex was.
But Ralph hadn’t given up the long periods of time spent just sitting in her room. He liked it in there. It smelt good and he felt safe and warm with all Jem’s feminine artefacts, it was second-best to her actually being there herself. He felt close to her when he was in her room.
He was sitting on her bed now, thumbing through her old A-Z, taking note of all the little roads that had been circled and wondering what they’d been circled for. Parties? Job interviews? Flatshares?
It was two o’clock in the afternoon. Claudia was away. All his mates were staying in with their girlfriends. A Friday night in. Ralph had felt unloved and depressed so he’d headed straight for Jem’s room.
He put the A-Z back in her top drawer and his eye fell again upon the pile of old diaries under her table. He’d managed to resist the temptation of looking at them so far – it made him feel more disciplined, less unethical, marginally better about himself and his underhand behaviour. He looked at them and looked away again. No – he mustn’t. He looked again. Fuck it, he thought, and reached for the bottom diary, an old accounting book covered in UCL stickers and smiley faces. Written on the cover was ‘1986’. He pulled back the front cover, the old, brittle paper crackling slightly as he turned over the first page. He started reading.
Six hours later, he stopped. A whole day had gone by and Ralph had learned an awful lot more about Jem. He’d learned about her adolescence, how much she’d hated her frizzy hair and her anaemic complexion and the fact that she was so short; how while other girls were losing their virginity and getting pregnant and coming into school with florid lovebites adorning their necks, Jem was busy crossing streets to avoid having to walk past anyone remotely resembling a teenage boy. She’d been painfully shy and painfully unconfident, crying into her pillow every night because she was so ugly and no man would ever want her. She’d been fifteen before she’d had her first kiss and then it had been so unpleasant and shared with such an ugly specimen of male youth that she’d rubbed at her mouth with the back of her hand for a good ten minutes after it was over, shuddering at the memory.
She’d then gone out, briefly, with a succession of ugly youths, desperately trying to cling on to her honour and her virginity, before Justin Jones had asked her out. Justin Jones had, apparently, been the school heart-throb, a dark-haired dish with the pick of the school’s girls at his feet.
‘Why me?’ she’d asked, referring obliquely to the contrast between herself and the more overtly attractive female students who would queue up daily just to stand in Justin’s wake. ‘I dunno,’ he’d said, half-smiling, ‘it’s not the way you look, it’s just something about you. I just really fancy you.’ Justin Jones had unwittingly instilled in Jem with that one, long-ago, offhand comment a confidence that any amount of fawning compliments from lovesick suitors could not have achieved. He had paid her personality a compliment. He’d flattered her spirit, and Jem knew she didn’t have to be anyone else but herself. She was an attractive person and anyone who couldn’t see that was not worth knowing.
Since then, it seemed, Jem had had a whole string of relationships with nice blokes who’d made complete pains of themselves, smothering her with love and making unreasonable demands of her. Until Smith.
At last Ralph was beginning to understand what Jem saw in Smith, why she was so in love with him. Smith didn’t call on her emotionally, he didn’t restrict her or control her.
How ironic that she should have fallen in love with him because he didn’t give a shit about her. How ironic that she thought he was so different from the other boys when, in reality, he was exactly the same, and the only reason he wasn’t showering her with gifts and adoration and proposals of marriage was because he was in love with another woman. How ironic …
Ralph took a beer out of the fridge and flopped on to the sofa, searching through the rubble on the coffee table for the remote control. He’d just missed The Simpsons and now Real TV was on Sky, a series of totally unamusing real-life videos of people nearly drowning under white-water rafts and being rescued from burning buildings.
Smith was out tonight, at a press do. It was possible that he and Jem might be alone tonight. Maybe, instead of shuffling around trying to find reasons not to talk to her like he usually did, he should use it as an opportunity to get her to open up. Find out even more about her. He already knew more about her than he’d known about even his longest-standing girlfriends. He knew all her insecurities, her romantic history and her needs and desires. Now he wanted to get to know her better than anyone had ever known her before.
Eventually he heard the front door open, and seconds later Jem burst into the room – Jem always burst into rooms, such was the force of her enthusiasm – all parcelled up in a big black coat and a deep-purple furry stole.
I’ve just had a really nice chat with that girl from upstairs. She’s very friendly, isn’t she?’
Ralph had always found Cheri to be absolutely the opposite, but maybe Jem was a better judge of character than he was.
‘She’s a dancer, you know. She trained to be a ballerina until she grew too tall. It explains why she’s so elegant, she holds herself very well.’
Ralph just thought she was a stuck-up bitch with too much attitude even for him.
‘What are you doing tonight, Ralph?’
He shrugged and scratched his head, ‘Um, fuck all actually. Pretty sad for a Friday night.’
‘Excellent. Look, I’ve been blown out by my friends so I thought I’d just cook a curry, drink a load of lager, have a bit to smoke and then go to bed early. D’you fancy joining me? Well, apart from the going to bed early bit, of course.’ She giggled adorably.