by PJ Adams
“I’m glad I came,” I said, when we’d finished.
“Neat photos, huh?”
I gave him a hard stare. “I mean it’s been far too long and we should make the effort, is what I mean.”
He laughed. “Sure sis’, we must. Hey, let’s go get lunch, okay? There’s this place up by the Cam, does Tex-Mex just like back home.”
§
Even though the place was busy, we timed it just right and got ourselves a window table overlooking the river.
“We’ll do it, okay?” he said, as we sat watching the punts go past and waited for our food to arrive. “This. You’re right. We need to make the effort. We’re family, right? All of us.”
Eleanor smiled, and put a hand on his forearm. Her nails were long and painted deep red, dramatic against her pale skin. “We should,” she agreed. “Family matters.”
Back at the wedding, I’d been edgy, tense, and it had taken Charlie of all people who had helped me understand why. Since our folks had died a couple of years back, Ethan and I had been the only family we had. Him getting married changed all that: he was marrying into an ancient family with long traditions: just as he was gaining family was I losing mine?
I smiled at Eleanor, grateful. She was very reserved, and hard to work out, but that was the sweetest thing to say just then, as if she knew exactly where my insecurities lay and wanted to reassure me.
Family does matter. I thought back to that awful trip, flying in to JFK with Charlie, meeting up with Ethan who’d been able to get there a day earlier; driving out through Queens and the Bronx in steely silence, out along the coast to Bridgeport and then up to Naugatuck where my parents had lived, and now where they lay at rest in a funeral parlor.
“That day,” I said now, all of us gazing out across the river. “That day when you met me and Charlie at the airport and drove us home.” Home... “When you cut off the highway at Seymour and did the rest of the trip on back roads. It was a long time before I worked that out.”
He looked down, said nothing. Eleanor was looking puzzled, so I explained. “Our parents’ funeral,” I told her. “Ethan picked us up from JFK, but the route home would have taken us along the road where the accident happened.”
“It took me by surprise the day before,” he said. “Just driving along there, like I’d done a hundred times before, back when I lived with the folks. But then... that day. There was a long, gentle curve, no real hazards, but then there was a length of traffic barrier torn aside, a dark oil patch still. That was it. That was where it happened. I couldn’t let you see that, T.”
“I never did thank you,” I said. “Not just for that. For all the little things. The big things, too. You stepped up to the plate, took care of everything, while I just let myself wallow in grief and a relationship that was hitting the rocks already. I didn’t really think, at the time, and then it just seemed too late.”
Ethan shrugged and looked awkward. “We never really talked, did we? Then, or later. Just sealed it all off.”
We’d already been living in England by then, Ethan finishing his doctorate at All Hallows and then settling down in Cambridge; me bumming around, first in Cambridge and then in London, trying to find openings in publishing and eventually getting that first temp job at Ellison and Coles. But afterwards, after that trip, the funeral, we drifted.
“Do you think talking would have helped any?”
He shrugged again, and this time Eleanor joined in. “He bottles a lot up,” she said. “He doesn’t let things go easily.”
Our food came in all its Tex-Mex glory. Ribs and chicken wings, fiery salsas, mountains of fries and onion rings. It was funny to see Eleanor dig in. I wouldn’t have thought it was her kind of thing at all, but that didn’t stop her. The three of us drank Buds and Sol with our food, and for a time things passed in silence as we concentrated on our meal.
After a time, Ethan caught my eye and winked, almost like a naughty schoolboy under the teacher’s gaze.
One of those unspoken exchanges. Things were good between us. We’d each grieved in our own way and then moved on, and now we both understood that, and it felt as if a weight had finally been lifted.
§
Perhaps some things are best left un-said, though.
Afterwards, we walked idly along by the river Cam. It really was a beautiful day, and it felt so relaxed, away from London and all the mess that had filled my head; just me, my brother and his wife who I was just getting to know.
I hadn’t gone up to Cambridge to dig over the remains of the past. In fact, as I drove up there I’d made a conscious decision not to raise it. This was family stuff, completely separate. I didn’t want to spoil that.
But when Ethan paused, half-turned towards me, and said, “I hear you’ve seen something of Eleanor’s brother since the wedding,” I realized from his manner that it was something that had been bubbling below the surface all along.
I glanced at Eleanor, a short distance away and, keeping my voice low, said, “A bit, yes. Did you hear what happened? Sally Fielding–” he visibly flinched at the name “–well, she passed away. Shit, Ethan, I’m sorry, I thought you knew...”
Such a clumsy ass! I just blurted it out like that. He’d been close to her, back at All Hallows; I’d assumed he would know. Hell, I didn’t even think that far, I just let the words rush out.
Eleanor came and took Ethan’s hand. Giving me a sharp look, she said, “That’s hardly a surprise. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be blunt, but she’s been a walking pharmaceuticals lab since her Cambridge days...”
So she’d heard it all.
“I just... I’m sorry. I thought you’d have heard already.”
Is it bad that my first thoughts were not of my brother’s feelings but of what damage I might have done to our relationship in the space of a few seconds?
“I didn’t know you knew about Sally,” said Ethan. “It was a long time ago. Ah... I guess Will told you, didn’t he? It was a long time ago.”
“He told me some, yes,” I said. I was very aware of Eleanor’s presence. Now clearly wasn’t the time to rake over stories of old flames. Of gang-bangs and whatever else had taken place. No, not now.
We walked on until we reached a big green park Ethan said was called Jesus Green. At one point Eleanor hung back to watch some kids playing doubles on a fenced-off tennis court, and I stayed with her. I didn’t realize at first that she had deliberately separated me and Ethan, but then she said, “I don’t think we need to go back there, now, do we? All that’s in the past, where it belongs.” There was a sudden steely edge to her words and I wondered what she meant, but then I understood: back there to Ethan’s time at All Hallows, to the time with Sally Fielding.
I faltered, shook my head, wondering where she was heading.
“No need to open old wounds,” she added.
“I didn’t even know there were wounds,” I told her. “Will won’t say much.”
“Clearly,” said Eleanor. “Ethan’s told me about that time.”
And for a moment I thought she was going to tell me more about what had happened with Sally Fielding, but no, it was far more personal than that.
“Ethan found it really hard,” she said. “When you came over. You just walked into the middle of things, and took up with all his friends. He found it very difficult.”
“I... but I didn’t know I was walking into anything. I was just visiting my big brother.”
“All the Fielding nonsense was just blowing over and poor Ethan was still trying to deal with it. You didn’t see any of that; you were oblivious. Like I say, Ethan hangs onto things, he doesn’t let them go easily.”
And then he was turning, that big goofy grin on his face, and I waved and smiled in return and the moment was past.
But my head was swirling again. All those naïve old memories of my time at Cambridge, hanging out with Ethan and his buddies. Had I really missed everything? The undercurrents and tensions, the rumors that must have been flyin
g? Had I been totally blind to whatever my big brother had been dealing with at the time?
And since then... the drifting apart, the tensions when we met, the sense of things unspoken. I’d thought it had just been one of those unfortunate things, but had it been deliberate, him pushing me away because he had resented my blundering in at a difficult time?
Those memories of Cambridge had been happy ones for me. Bonding with Ethan, exploring a new country, making decisions that would affect my future.
But now...
Had I really got everything wrong back then?
§
The rest of the visit was, as the English are so fond of saying, nice.
We stopped off in a quaint little tea shop and drank Earl Grey. We chatted about the antiques trade, and about a trip Ethan and Eleanor had planned back to Yeadham Hall for a week exploring the north Norfolk coast. We talked about Eleanor’s parents, how they still had plenty of spirit even with their declining years.
Back at the shop, we hugged and said our goodbyes without me going back up to the apartment. I wasn’t sure if that was my choice or if I didn’t go in because I wasn’t explicitly invited. I was back to that paranoid state of mind, reading intent into even the most innocent of things.
I’d come up to Cambridge to get away from all that, but it turned out that the trip had only made things worse.
Suddenly I longed for the days when my most pressing concern was what to wear to an evening book launch party, or where to take a favorite author for lunch.
Right now I didn’t need complicated, but no matter what I did I had complicated in spades.
On the way back, I pulled over at the Bishop’s Stortford services and called Julie, to see if she was free for a drink that evening. I needed sanity. I needed someone I could talk to. And Hell, but I needed cocktails!
24.
Cosmopolitan. Sex on the Beach. Hanky Panky. Orgasm (why, naturally). Harvey Wallbanger. Vodka Gimlet...
Write down an account of an evening out with Julie Donovan and you would inevitably be writing out a cocktail menu at some point. Julie was one of my discoveries at Ellison and Coles, and in a very short space of time had become a bestselling author and TV regular. Now, she was working on the second volume of her memoirs, covering her time as a working class Belfast girl studying at one of Oxford’s most exclusive colleges.
“Going well?” I asked her over Cosmopolitans, and she knew immediately that I was referring to the book. We were at one of our regular haunts, a cocktail bar just off Covent Garden.
“It’s going grand,” she said. “But that’s not what you asked me out on a Sunday evening to talk about, now, is it? So what’s been going on with you, then? How’s your man in the House of Lords? Or was it the other one, the one you kicked out and now won’t let go? Eh?”
That’s one of the things I liked about Julie. No bull; always straight to the point. She wrote like that, too, an editor’s dream.
I peered at her over the rim of my drink. Suddenly that all seemed so far away, sitting here at a tall table with a good friend, and all around us bright young things dressed from the pages of magazines, laughing and talking. This was my world. This was me.
Julie just sat and waited, her eyes fixed on me.
“Well,” I said. “Charlie... I’ve tried to be blunt, I’ve tried to tell him it’s all long over, history, but he just won’t let go. And Will... he flew me to the Alps for dinner. He makes love... well, I don’t know what to say about how he makes love. I’ve never known anything like it before.”
“So what exactly is your problem, hun?”
So I told her. I told her about how changeable Will was, how there was a whole side to his life that I knew little about, other than that it was dangerous, that when someone like Sally Fielding stumbled into it she could just be killed and Will, although clearly upset by it, could still dismiss it as the kind of thing that happens. I told her how I’d left the next morning and vowed that I was done with him, but how all it took was a moment with him a few days later and I melted.
“There was a group of them, back in their Cambridge days,” I said, after a pause as we moved on to Sex on the Beach. “They were known as the Cabal. That’s what Sally Fielding was involved with. I got pissed with everyone telling me only bits of what had happened, so I remembered what you said about researching a story: I went straight to the source and asked him. Will.”
“That’s what I said, is it, eh? ‘Go straight to the source.’ Honestly, Trudy, you shouldn’t believe what I tell you. I’m a journalist, after all. Go to the source? I bet you didn’t get anything from him, now, did you? Too close to events: they always have a blinkered view. Go to the bystanders, that’s what I say, if you want someone with a clear view. Always go to the bystanders.”
Hanky Panky. Vermouth, gin and the herby kick of Fernet Branca, served in a long-stemmed cocktail glass with a sliver of orange peel floating in it for garnish. My old publishing director had introduced me to it at the Savoy, where it was invented, and since I’d bought one for Julie it had become a firm favorite.
“So... bystanders, you say?”
“Hmm. I could easily have another one or three of these, hun. Yeah, bystanders. Onlookers. Someone close enough to be involved but without that blinkered perspective. Anyone fit the bill?”
I thought, my brain just a little fuddled by the three cocktails so far. Drinking on a Sunday night! Not good, come Monday morning...
I tried to focus. The people I’d met back at Cambridge, when I’d thought Ethan was pleased to see me and hadn’t realized that he was actually going through shit and resented me being there. Them.
“Well,” I said. “There was Joe. Sweet and incredibly shy. Took him forever to ask me out, but nothing ever came of it. Nice guy, but he’s got a wife and a small baby now... not sure he’d appreciate me popping up out of his past right now.”
“So who else?”
“There was Neil. He was one of Ethan’s closest buddies. Uber geek, but always thought he was God’s gift. Stinking rich now.”
“Really? You have a number for him?” We chuckled into our cocktails, and then realized they were empty now.
Harvey Wallbangers were next up.
“And then there was Hammy. Ahmed’s his real name, but they all called him Hammy. He was at the wedding. Mathematician or something.”
“So are you in touch with any of these guys? Anyone you could take for a drink and grill about what happened in the past so you can put your pretty little mind at rest?”
“Well I could ask Ethan, I guess,” I said, and we both laughed into our drinks again. Then I paused to think. “Most likely is Hammy,” I said. “After the wedding he sent me a Facebook invite. I think there might be the embers of an old crush there.”
“So you’re friends on Facebook?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t accept. I was a bit uneasy, I guess. Lots of things happening all of a sudden.”
Julie held out her hand, and gestured impatiently. “So give it here, then,” she said. “Gimme your phone.”
“No! You can’t just...”
“It’s okay,” she said. “I don’t want to see yer man’s cock shots. I just want to hack your Facebook account, okay?”
Somehow that reassured me. It made sense after the day I’d had, and the cocktails I’d had, which I realized were running dry again, so I paused to order a couple of Vodka Gimlets from a passing waitress.
And then I realized Julie had my cell phone. Had I given it to her? Had she just grabbed it from the top of my bag while I was distracted with ordering drinks?
“Nah,” she said now. “I’ve just accepted his friend request for you, so I can see his profile, but he doesn’t have a phone number listed there. Looks kind of cute, though, if you like a bit of puppy fat to hold onto, and I know I do. But jeez, he likes Girls Aloud, for the love of God? That’s one mixed up son of a–”
“So what’re you doing now?” She was typing something. On my ph
one.
“Don’t worry,” said Julie. “Trust me. I’m just messaging him on Facebook with your phone number. Apparently you were pleased to meet him again at the wedding and it brought up lots of old happy memories of your time at Cambridge, and it’d be good to catch up. Oh, and could he tell you anything about the Cabal?”
I snatched for my phone, but she pulled away and then pressed the screen with a flourish.
“Sent,” she said, and then the cocktails came, and we laughed – I don’t know why – and then I had my phone again and somehow it didn’t matter any more.
§
I don’t know how I got through the next day. My head pounded, my throat was so dry it felt like sandpaper grating whenever I tried to swallow. I felt sick, too, the kind of sick that can only be cured by a full English breakfast.
I sat there in a window seat of a café just around the corner from my office, a big mug of coffee steaming before me, a half-finished breakfast pushed away, and a stack of manuscripts awaiting my attention. I often came here to work. Coffee and muffins and a window seat from which I could watch the world pass by. In theory it was to get away from my desk, but in practice, with my phone and iPad, I could never really get away from the desk.
Still, at least that nauseous hole in my stomach had something in it now, and I was starting to feel a little more human again.
My phone. I reached for it and checked my in-box, but it was just work mail. Nothing from him. Nothing from Will.
So much seemed to have happened since that date: the trip to Cambridge with its unpleasant truths about a time I’d previously remembered fondly. Drinks with Julie. Oh dear, those cocktails...
The date. The awkward conversation about Sally Fielding, that nagging feeling that I was being manipulated somehow. Should a man who could do what he did to my heart still leave me suspicious of his motives? It seemed so wrong to be so conflicted.
I started a text message and stared at the blank screen of my cell phone for minutes. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do.
I put my phone away again and reached for the first manuscript.