Ed threw the tea towel over his shoulder and opened the front door. He stood back in surprise. “Oh, hi.”
Nicola Jones looked very bashful. “Is this an inconvenient time?”
“No. Yes. No. Well, sort of.” Ed stood aside. “Come in. Come in.”
Nicola smiled and walked past him into the hall. “I’ve come to see how Elliott’s arm is.”
“Oh, right. It’s fine. Fine,” Ed said. “Well, no. It’s not really. It’s giving him a bit of pain. And he can’t play computer games or football, which also makes him cranky.”
Nicola laughed. Ed stopped and turned to her. “Nicola,” he said, pausing to bite his lower lip. “This is a bit difficult.”
Elliott’s teacher looked suitably concerned.
“You see…” He chewed his lip a bit more. “You see…my wife has left me. Us. Only yesterday. And, you see…”
“Ed.” Nicola touched his arm. “I’m so sorry.”
“Me too.” He tried to smile chirpily. “These things have a habit of happening, don’t they?”
“All too often.” Nicola’s mouth turned downward, and she looked incredibly cute when she was sad, Ed thought, and then was astonished he could think such a thing while still knee-deep in the aftermath of his separation. “How are the children handling it?”
Ed shrugged. “Remarkably well, but I don’t think it’s sunk in yet.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Nicola asked.
“I don’t know,” Ed said. “I’m not even sure what there is to do. I’m your typical hopeless, undomesticated male.”
“Oh, I don’t believe that for one minute!”
Neither did he. Not really. It would be difficult coping without Ali—after all, she did run a very tight ship—but he could manage. How many mysteries could there be to Bold Automatic washing powder?
“I could mind Elliott after school for you,” Nicola offered, “if that would help.”
“That would be fantastic!” He resisted the urge to kiss her. Even out of gratitude it would be unseemly. “Come through. He’s in the kitchen. I’m just about to increase their cholesterol levels with egg and chips.”
Nicola held his eyes. “You’re very brave,” she breathed.
Ed shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Stubborn. Foolhardy. Stunned. These were all adjectives which were more appropriate under the circumstances.
“And modest,” Nicola continued. “I like that in a man.”
Elliott appeared at the doorway, Buzz Lightyear’s arm dangling from the corner of his mouth like a lime-green roll-up. “My mummy’s gone, Miss Jones,” Elliott mumbled.
Nicola crouched down next to him and wrapped her arms round Elliott, hugging him to her. “I know. I know. Poor, poor lamb.” Elliott adjusted his Buzz cigarette. “I’ll help daddy to look after you.” She smiled up at Ed.
“Will you?” Elliott brightened considerably.
Nicola ruffled his hair. “Of course I will.”
“Will you stay for tea, Miss Jones?”
“Elliott!” Ed warned.
“I’d love to,” she said, standing up. “But I can’t. Not tonight. I’m having an old friend for dinner.”
“We’re having egg and chips,” Elliott informed her.
“Elliott!” Ed said. “Miss Jones has got better things to do than entertain us.”
“It’s just a friend,” she protested. “An old friend.”
“Daddy says we’re never having chicken nuggets in this house ever again,” Elliott piped up.
“Ali’s speciality,” Ed explained wanly. When Elliott was better, Ed thought, he would remind himself to kill him.
“That seems very sensible,” Nicola said to Elliott, who, given his chicken-nugget addiction, amazingly looked as if he agreed. “I came to see how your arm is.”
“It hurts,” Elliott said with a pitiful grimace. “But I think it will be better enough to go on the climbing frame again tomorrow.”
“Elliott!”
Nicola laughed. She laughed a lot, but it was sincere and not all girly and giggly, which would have driven Ed mad. “We’ll see,” she promised and whisked back her hair. “I won’t keep you from your supper. I just wanted to…well…”
“Yes,” Ed nodded. “Thanks for popping by,” he said as he showed her to the door.
“I meant what I said,” she reiterated. “I want you to call on me whenever you need help.”
“Thanks,” Ed said. “I appreciate that.”
“That’s what friends are for,” Nicola Jones added and, with a coy smile, she turned and walked away.
Elliott was picking at his chips with his fingers.
“Use your knife and fork,” Ed instructed.
Elliott picked up his cutlery. “It hurts my arm,” he complained.
“Nonsense. Just eat them, Elliott.”
Tanya was cutting burnt bits off her egg white, and Ed noted that in her one day as a vegetarian she had become very picky. She had been extraordinarily quiet since she’d returned home from Brighton to face possibly the most devastating news of her short and relatively pain-free fifteen years. She had retreated into her bedroom, put on her headphones and had ventured out precious little since then. He would talk to her. Properly. Father to daughter. Later. Tomorrow. Soon. He hadn’t imagined telling the children would be so hard. Why? What was he—some sort of emotional vacuum? Of course they’d be devastated. He was devastated.
“Why did Mummy leave?” Elliott asked for the seventeenth time since they had returned from the Häagen-Dazs café at the front of the Odeon cinema in Hill Street and he had the unenviable task of informing them Ali had gone.
Ed sighed and put down his knife and fork. “Sometimes grown-ups fall out of love with each other.”
“That doesn’t sound very grown up,” his son observed.
“I know.”
“Is falling out of love like falling out of a tree?”
“Yes,” Ed said. “It is. Exactly like falling out of a tree.”
“It must hurt.”
“Yes,” Ed said. “It does.”
“More than my arm?”
“Even more than your arm.”
Elliott looked suitably impressed. He toyed with another chip. “Are you in love with Miss Jones?”
“No.” Ed was taken aback. “Whatever makes you think that?”
“I love her,” Elliott said plainly.
“Eat your egg, Elliott.”
The little boy pushed his plate away from him. “Daddy. Do you know how you can tell when you’re in love with someone?”
“No.”
“You get an erection.”
Thomas spat a half-chewed chip out onto his plate and started to cough. “Thank you for sharing that with us, Elliott,” Ed said.
Ed passed Thomas a glass of Coke, which he gulped gratefully. Out of all of them, he was most worried about his quiet, thoughtful son. Elliott would jabber his way through a crisis. Tanya would go all moody. But he never knew what went on in Thomas’s studious little head. “Okay?” Ed inquired with a concerned smile.
Thomas nodded.
“Do you get an erection when you see Miss Jones?”
“No.” Ed sighed. “Elliott, I’ll only tell you one more time. Eat your tea before it goes cold.”
“Do you get an erection when you see Mummy?”
“Look, Elliott, can we have this conversation when you’re about thirty-five? Or preferably never.”
“I only wanted to know,” his youngest son said huffily.
I used to get erections, Ed thought. I used to get them all the time. At one time his penis had a mind of its own. Never matter whether he was in a board meeting or on a shoot filming a commercial about a glass of milk, his old fella would be popping up all over the place. The word “inopportune” never troubled it. Even a stiff breeze would have it standing to attention. Now erections sort of had to be coaxed out of it. He needed time to be cajoled and caressed. The epitome of his sexual virility could be said to be having a bit of a sulk. He wondered whether that was what had made Ali develop wandering eyes, wandering hands and, ultimately, wandering feet. He wasn’t impotent—not by a long chalk. But there was, he admitted, a certain sluggishness in the trouser-snake department. It had, somewhere along the line without him realizing it, semi-retired into more of a trouser slug. You could buy all the conservatories you liked and call it caring, but deep down women liked nothing better than some well-aimed passion and ardor. And his ardor had, he admitted, been sadly lacking. It was only Harrison Ford who had moved him to any kind of passion recently, and even that was only in the movie sense rather than the biblical interpretation.
He’d like to bet that Ali was bouncing round the bedroom like a space hopper on speed with her new man. You did, didn’t you, in that first flush of euphoria? The “new man” wouldn’t be put off by the fact it was a weeknight and he’d be required to go to work knackered in the morning. Oh, no. When sex was new, it was energizing, liberating, it put a spring in even the most tired of steps. When you’d been making love to the same woman for a third of your life, it made you utterly, utterly shagged. The next morning your balls developed a dull ache and your briefcase dragged along the ground. Jemma had said this Christian was a boy—nay, a child! Ed remembered what he had been like at the tender age of nineteen. If he’d had a pound for every lustful thought and every errant erection, he would have been living in a swimming-pooled mansion in Bel Air by now.
These thoughts were not good for the digestion. Ed put down his knife and fork and stared at his cold, congealing egg. When he looked up, all three of his sorrowful, doe-eyed children were staring back at him, food abandoned. Thomas looked as if he was about to cry. How could he have been so foolish! He needed to get hold of Ali and talk to her sensibly about all this before too much damage was done. He had neglected her—and not just in bed. But that’s where the rot started, didn’t it? They would have a few days’ cooling-off period in the best-honored tradition of time-share. Perhaps Ali would get this fling out of her system and would come back and be prepared to carry on her uneventful life once the dust had settled. All Ed knew was that he wanted her back in his life, his bed, his kitchen—chicken nuggets and all.