Jane had booked a room in a small boutique hotel in Mayfair that she’d stayed in before when she’d needed a bolthole, somewhere to lick wounds that wouldn’t stop stinging. As soon as she was shown to her room, and the door closed behind her with a soft, discreet click, she sank down on the bed, heavy shoulders bowed.
‘You are not a bad person,’ she said out loud. The comforting words of her tired old mantra. ‘Bad things have happened to you; they’ve shaped you into what you are.’
But who was she? She wasn’t Andrew’s Janey Monroe. Or Leo’s Jane Hurst. After all these years, it was time to simply be Jane again.
The name still fitted her as perfectly as it had done when she’d first chosen it.
She’d been with Charles a year by then. They’d progressed beyond trips to the supermarket. He took her to art galleries, museums, the theatre. Charles especially loved to take her to restaurants and steer her through menus full of dishes spelt out in words that she was still learning how to read. In all that time he still never touched her and Jane was finally starting to believe he never would.
Then one Sunday after lunch, Charles had sat her down. ‘You don’t have to tell me who you are or where you’re from,’ he’d said, because Charles’s particular and beautiful gift had always been for providing the solution, rather than focusing on the problem. ‘But you don’t have a name. You need a name. You need documents. A person can’t exist without documents.’
‘I don’t have a name,’ she’d said, because she’d cast it off as soon as she’d jumped on that train and would never sound it out again. ‘And I don’t have no documents.’
‘Any documents. You don’t have any documents,’ Charles had corrected her gently and at first he’d thought she was lying when she said that she didn’t know her exact date of birth. Then when it became clear that she was telling the truth and that she’d never even had a single birthday with cards and presents and blowing out the candles and making a wish, that she’d been only fifteen when he’d met her on that train, was only sixteen now though she felt older than the hills, he’d slid off the kitchen stool, walked into the downstairs cloakroom and hadn’t come out for some time.
‘Give me a rough idea of what your date and place of birth might be and I’ll put someone on the trail,’ he’d said when he emerged, his face red, eyes redder. ‘How odd that we’ve managed all this time without you having a name. What would you like me to call you?’
After watching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes every afternoon for a week, she chose Jane.
Jane Audrey Monroe. Audrey, because Audrey Hepburn taught her how to speak like a lady. Monroe, because Marilyn knew how to make people treat her like a goddess. And Jane, because Jane Russell didn’t take shit from no one. Anyone. She didn’t take shit from anyone.
Charles was pleased. ‘I like Jane,’ he said when he produced the forms she needed to fill in to become a new person. ‘It’s a good honest name.’
People always thought they knew where they were with a Jane. Janes were a blank canvas; they could be anything anyone wanted them to be. And a Jane had no qualms about walking into a hotel bar at noon all by herself in a long-sleeved, high-necked Alexander McQueen black jersey dress. Hair twisted up in a chignon. Make-up minimal. She took a seat at a table tucked away in the corner.
Jane was going to drink one glass of champagne, though she’d vowed never to drink again, to mark the end of this chapter of her life. To toast the future, however uncertain it might be.
She looked around the room. It was very muted – pale grey and dark wood, everything softly curved, reassuringly expensive. The other patrons were male apart from one forlorn-looking middle-aged woman who sat with an elderly man and resolutely stared out of the window as he read the Financial Times .
Jane tried to catch the eye of the waiter but he was already bearing down on her with a glass of champagne. He discreetly offered her a business card as he placed the slender flute on the table in front of her. ‘From the gentleman at the bar,’ he murmured.
Jane didn’t even deign to look at the card. ‘Tell him thank you, but I’m waiting for someone.’
She still drank his champagne, though. It was raining outside, fat drops coursing down the window, the room reflected back at her so she could watch the man in the corner leave the bar.
He hadn’t been gone two minutes when the waiter brought over another glass of champagne, another business card from an overweight, balding man a few tables along. Jane sent both champagne and business card back. He got up, brushed the waiter aside, mouthed the word ‘bitch’ at Jane as he shot her a furious, spiteful glance.
Five minutes after that, yet another glass of champagne, but no business card this time, just a note. You’re too beautiful to be on your own. I’d love to join you for a drink .
Jane couldn’t see her benefactor. ‘He’s round the corner,’ the waiter said when she asked him. ‘Looks all right. Not old. Think he’s Russian. Ordered a one-and-a-half-grand bottle of champagne, then asked me to bring you a glass. What do you want me to tell him?’
It seemed easy but actually it was the hardest way for a girl to earn her fortune. She couldn’t go back to this.
Jane stood up. ‘Tell him thanks awfully, but no thanks,’ she said, then walked out of the bar.
Leo had thrown up on the way to the flat in Chelsea where Mark and his crew were working. Then he could do nothing but fetch and carry very slowly while the others carefully took down a sagging ceiling, making sure not to damage the cornicing.
At five, he got the bus back to Kensington and loitered in the square. Not wanting to face Rose or Lydia, but knowing that he had to. As he dithered, a taxi pulled up almost alongside him, he glimpsed honey-blonde hair and as he crept closer, the driver got out, opened the boot and hefted out a familiar suitcase.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he asked Jane, as she opened the door in time for Leo to hand her out of the cab. ‘I thought you’d gone, that you’d left me.’
‘Change of plan, darling.’ She stood on the pavement next to him, suitcase by her side. Their own version of groundhog day. Only the rain was new. Jane looked up at Leo from under her lashes. He looked down at her. Her bottom lip was trembling. It could have been the cold or it might have been because she was remembering last night…
‘I’m sorry, Jane.’ Leo was getting so much better at saying it. ‘Sorry about coming home in that state and I’m so sorry that I said all those terrible things but you have to know I wasn’t going to hurt you when I came towards you. Everything had got out of hand and I thought that if I could hold you, connect with —’
He stopped when Jane put her hand on his arm, in much the same way as he’d tried to touch her the night before. ‘I know, darling,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry too. I overreacted. I don’t usually make a habit of hitting people with heavy objects. Is your face very sore?’
‘Yeah, but I’ve had worse,’ Leo said quickly before they could get sidetracked. ‘You really don’t have anything to be sorry about. It was me, wasn’t it? Off my head again and all grabby hands and I scared you. That’s what I feel really bad about – that I made you so frightened.’
Jane smiled and shook her head. ‘Darling, it was late, I was tired, you caught me off guard. I wouldn’t say I was scared so much as I just got a bad attack of déjà vu.’
‘Someone hurt you before?’ It didn’t make Leo feel the least bit better, but even more wretched that Jane, who barely came up to his chin and had to weigh half of what he did, had suffered at the hands of another man. ‘Did I trigger some —’
‘Look, you’ve said you’re sorry, I’ve said I’m sorry, we’re both sorry.’ Jane gave his arm another squeeze. ‘All the sorries have been said, darling. Let’s just move on, shall we?’
Leo had expected to fight much harder for forgiveness. It was a relief that he didn’t have to. ‘Fine by me. So, now you can get on with telling me why you came back.’
‘Well, darling,’ she said slowly. ‘The thing is that we are married, you and I, and it does rather complicate things. And I had a life with my ex and now he’s gone and I don’t know who I am without him, where I should be, what to do next. So, I thought that maybe we should just stay married for a while and see where we end up.’ Jane’s bottom lip trembled again and it seemed to Leo that she’d angled her head in the perfect position to allow a raindrop to cling to her eyelashes then begin a slow descent down her cheek.
‘Oh, Jane, please don’t bullshit a bullshitter,’ he said kindly. ‘Why don’t you try again?’
For one split second she looked utterly furious but then she pressed her lips tightly together as if she were trying to smother a laugh. ‘Darling,’ she said reproachfully, as if it was bad form on Leo’s part that he wouldn’t let her place the tip of one finger on his shoulder and push him right over.
‘Do you want to try it again without the theatrics?’ he asked.
They stood there in the rain, both of them waiting for the other one to blink. It wasn’t until Jane shivered that Leo unbent, unfolded his arms. ‘Come on,’ he said, and picked up her case. ‘Let’s get a drink.’
The pub was a couple of streets away and empty, apart from a few stragglers in work clothes, lingering over pints rather than heading home.
He drank beer, she had a glass of Viognier and Leo talked about how he missed that warm fuggy scent of flat beer and stale smoke there used to be before the smoking ban. He talked of pubs in the East End he’d gone to as an art student ‘because they were authentic and full of old men nodding off over their pints and copies of the Sun and we thought they were authentic too. They hated us for being pretentious, class tourists. Always used to shark us when we played pool.’
He grinned. She grinned back. ‘Did you try to drink pints of bitter even though you really hated the taste?’
‘How do you even know what pints of bitter are?’ Leo pretended to choke on his lager and Jane giggled. ‘Didn’t you cut your teeth on champagne and canapés?’
‘After a while a girl can get bored of living off vintage champagne and gull’s eggs.’
The pizza they’d ordered arrived and she ate two pieces. Leo ate the rest and when his belly was full and he was on his second beer he felt mellow, expansive; that must have been why she decided to confess. ‘I thought that Andrew, my ex, would take me back like a shot, but when I called him I had to tell him that I’d got married to you in Vegas. I had to. He was already talking about whisking me off to City Hall at soon as I landed at JFK.’
Leo looked at her curiously. He still couldn’t tell when she was lying. ‘What did he say?’
‘There was quite a lot of name-calling, accusations; things said that are quite hard to come back from – again, I saw quite a different side to him. Not a side that I liked, so I decided that it was probably better to cut our losses.’ Jane sat back and wriggled her shoulders, as if she was relaxed and supine, but her fingers clasped around the stem of her glass were so white-knuckled and tense that Leo wondered if they might snap. ‘There you have it, darling. Honesty isn’t always the best policy.’
‘I didn’t come back for Rose’s money,’ he said quietly. ‘I came back because I did some things before I left, really shitty things, betrayed her trust, and I’m not going to tell you what I did but I want… need Rose to forgive me and yeah, I haven’t got off to a good start with that.’
‘I could help you,’ Jane said. ‘I do have rather a unique skillset when it comes to —’
‘Stop trying to play me,’ he said, sharply enough that Jane’s fingers tightened again. She put her glass down. ‘Why does it always feel like you have a secret agenda?’
‘Darling…’
‘No more darlings, no more bullshit,’ Leo decided. After last night, after whatever had happened with Mr Ex, she still had no reason to come back to him unless… ‘You did some digging on Rose, didn’t you? Shouldn’t have been too hard. All you had to do was type her name into Google or Wikipedia.’
He’d done it himself, over the years. When the loneliness and the homesickness were a physical ache and he wanted to be close to Rose again. The handful of dry facts on a computer screen didn’t even begin to capture what Leo missed, but to a woman like Jane, used to a certain standard of living, they must have made for some interesting reading.
‘It’s no use,’ he told Jane, who dipped her head as if admitting that she’d been rumbled. Maybe that was why she wouldn’t meet his eye. ‘Rose isn’t going to leave me a penny, so if that was what you were banking on, then I might just as well call you another cab. Maybe you can still make it to New York tonight.’
Leo placed his hands, palm, up, on the table, as if he were a magician wanting her to search him for concealed keys, hidden feints, before he pulled out his next trick. Jane placed her hands on the table too. ‘So, neither of us are the best people that we can be; well, tell me, who is?’ she said. ‘There’s no reason why we couldn’t make this marriage work.’
‘Why would you want to be stuck with me?’ Leo asked, because it seemed to him that the world was hers for the taking. That another rich man would soon come along to make everything better. ‘What’s in it for you?’
‘I had a very brief chat with my lawyer this afternoon, before I meet with him next week,’ Jane didn’t even attempt to answer his question. ‘It turns out we can’t get an annulment. Not for non-consummation, even if we had the Pope vouch for us. Neither of us are already married or related by blood and we can’t prove insanity either. Or temporary insanity.’
‘That’s a bummer.’
‘My thoughts exactly. It has to be divorce, darling.’ Jane leaned forward so she could rest her hands on his, palm to palm. It felt like a dare, even though they’d already kissed, even though he’d been inside her. ‘I know you don’t trust me, that I’ve given you no reason to, but I have nowhere to go. Apart from what we won in Vegas, I don’t have anything. Andrew was quite insistent I FedEx my engagement ring and jewellery back to him right away so I can’t even sell them.’ She took a deep breath. ‘That’s why I was really hoping you might still need a wife.’
‘I don’t want to lie to Rose any more. I’m sick of lying to everyone, myself included,’ Leo said, even though it was nice to pretend that Jane had picked him, chosen him.
‘But it’s not a lie. We are married and I just thought, hoped, that we could go back to those two people that we were when we first met,’ Jane suggested.
‘All those days ago?’
‘Feels like years ago!’ Jane traced the length of his middle finger slowly and Leo could feel his cock hardening just from that fleeting gesture. He was a hopeless case. ‘Before we got married. When we sat in that bar. You, the charming stranger, and me, the damsel in distress.’
‘Was I really that charming?’ Leo’s eyes felt so heavy-lidded that he was amazed he could still see out of them.
‘You were devastating,’ Jane told him. ‘If I hadn’t just been jilted and if we’d been somewhere more private, I think you could have had me naked in about five minutes.’
She was still stroking his middle finger up and down, slowly. So slowly. ‘I think you’re being too flattering,’ Leo said and this game he knew how to play. ‘Ten minutes probably. Ten minutes to get you naked, fifteen minutes to get you wet, twenty minutes to have you begging for it.’ Leo laughed when Jane snatched her hands away and put her finger to better use by wagging at it him, but she was laughing too. ‘Oh, Jane, Jane, Jane, please stop trying to play me, it’s not going to work any more.’
The problem was that when she played him it was so much fun, and though Jane said that their new détente didn’t extend to her getting naked for him, they walked back to the house hand in hand. They were just in time to catch Rose as she came back from her night out with his mother.
Rose looked tired, a little sad, and maybe it wasn’t the right time, but Leo had to try.
Jane got there first. ‘Did you have a nice time with Linda? Dinner and a show, wasn’t it? What did you see, anything good?’
Good manners took precedence with Rose. ‘A revival of Anything Goes . We weren’t in the mood for anything too challenging,’ she said and as she started to walk up the stairs, with the two of them trailing in her wake, her steps were slow and laboured. So different from how she’d marched along this morning. But it was late. She’d gone to the office and his mother was always hard work; no wonder Rose was exhausted.
It was apparent that Rose needed all her breath for the climb up two flights of stairs but when they’d reached the top and were about to go their separate ways, Jane touched Rose’s arm. She was so much braver than Leo was.
‘We’re both so sorry about last night. I’m sure you must have heard me screeching like a Billingsgate fishwife,’ Jane said, getting straight down to it. ‘When Leo comes home in that state, it’s how I tend to react.’
Rose’s smile was wintry at best. ‘And yet you still married him.’
Jane squeezed Leo’s hand. ‘I had drunk rather a lot of champagne,’ she said as if she was confessing to a terrible crime, and a miracle happened. Rose grinned. It took fifty years, even sixty years, off her. She looked younger than Jane, more wicked than Leo, in that split second.
‘If I hadn’t drunk as much champagne as I have, then made some very questionable decisions as a result, I would have ended up leading a very boring, very quiet life,’ she said.
‘I am sorry.’ Leo couldn’t say any more than that, no matter how much he wanted to. There were things he didn’t want Jane to know, some things he wasn’t ready to remember himself.
Jane tucked her arm into Leo’s. He thought about putting an arm round her shoulder but decided against it. ‘We had a fight. Not our first. Not our last and it’s not the end of the world, but if you’re fed up with us then we can easily stay in a hotel.’ Jane said.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Rose snapped. That she wasn’t too tired to be annoyed had to be a good thing. ‘Of course you must both stay here. It’s a big enough house, but next time you feel the need to have a row maybe you can wait until you’re off the premises.’
And with that, Rose tottered off down the corridor without even wishing them goodnight.