53

Stella went home with Iain on Sunday evening. Her excuse – to herself and to Eve – was that she felt there were too many people in the house. Eve was well supported at the moment; she was in the way. ‘I’ll come down again when Eric goes back to work,’ she told her daughter. But she would probably have stayed if it hadn’t been for Jack.

Iain had been quiet at the weekend. Stella found him drifting off into his meditation a couple of times, sitting cross-legged on the bed, eyes shut, his index finger and thumb of both hands joined and resting, palms up, on his knees, in what he explained was a mudra and something to do with the energy flow of the body. He did not seem upset or agitated, just quietly distant in a way she hadn’t seen before.

They stayed at Stella’s flat that night, where she cooked scrambled eggs on toast, and they sat for a while, talking about the party. But Iain seemed unengaged and it was making her anxious. Later, they made love, Stella wanting to prove to herself that she and Iain were solid, that Jack had not come between them. And Iain did respond, their lovemaking intensely pleasurable, a momentary release from her pent-up emotions. But now he was sitting beside her, his palm pressed lightly between her naked breasts. It rested there for a moment, his pale eyes never leaving her face.

‘Your heart chakra is blocked,’ Iain said. ‘It’s been like that for a while now.’

‘How do you know?’

He gave a small smile. ‘They taught me. It’s not difficult.’

She stared at him. He must feel my lying heart bursting out of my chest, she thought. ‘What does it mean, when it’s blocked?’ she asked, to fill the silence.

He shrugged. ‘Depends … Emotional conflict of some kind, closing your feelings down …’ He paused. ‘You’d know better than me.’

And there it was. Stella held her breath. Iain’s expression was hard to read, but there was no mistaking the hurt in his eyes. He was waiting for her to speak, but she did not know what to say.

‘I’ve seen it, Stell,’ he said, pre-empting her. ‘You and Jack.’ He removed his hand from her body, clasping both in his lap.

Stella sat up, the duvet crumpled between them. The dim light from the single bedside lamp cast both their faces in shadow. For a tiny second she thought of bluffing it out.

‘It’s pretty obvious,’ he went on, before she had time to speak.

Stella thought back. She had hardly seen Iain over the summer, and when she had, Jack was not always present. But how or where was not the issue here.

‘I didn’t mean it to happen,’ she said quietly, wincing at the clichéd phrase.

Iain swayed. He looked bruised, as if he’d just received a blow. ‘What did happen?’

Stella hesitated, still reluctant to give him a chapter and verse he did not need to hear. But then she remembered Iain’s words: ‘Don’t ever pretend,’ he’d said.

So she told him about Jonny’s memorial evening, about the drunken kisses, about how they had thought their feelings, both that night and since, were circumstantial, fleeting.

He stayed silent and allowed her to talk. The story came out in dribs and drabs as she fought to edit her feelings for Jack, fought to understand them as she explained to her lover the unwilling passion she’d developed for another man. And in the telling, Stella realized just how much she did love Jack. How, in fact, she had never really stopped loving him. It was as if a blindfold she’d been resolutely clamping over her eyes had suddenly been stripped away.

Iain uncrossed his legs and rose from the bed.

‘Iain?’ She felt sick and scared.

He turned to her as he picked up his T-shirt and stepped into his jeans. ‘I wish you’d told me earlier,’ he said, looking down at her. ‘I waited, because I didn’t know what it meant. I hoped …’

‘I didn’t know what it meant either, I swear,’ she said. ‘I thought it was just a reaction to facing up to Jonny’s death.’

He raised his eyebrows sardonically.

‘I don’t own you, Stella. You know that’s not my thing. We’ve never needed the sort of claustrophobic relationship that suits other people. But right now I feel cheated. As if I’ve wasted the last seven years of my life on someone who was never willing to love me in the first place.’ Before she had time to object, Iain went on, ‘I was happy to give you space, I could tell you weren’t comfortable with us living together. And that worked fine while I thought you were committed to me in every other way.’ He turned his face away. ‘But you never were, right? Because you never got over Jack.’

Stella found she couldn’t answer and saw a sad smile flit across Iain’s face as her cheeks flushed with shame.

‘I’m sorry, Iain,’ she muttered. ‘I wasn’t aware I still had feelings for him. Really, I wasn’t. Not till this summer. I always believed you and I could work.’

Silence. Just the two of them in the dim bedroom, on opposite sides of the bed, and now on opposite sides of the relationship they had peaceably shared for years. Stella closed her eyes tight, wanting to cry but fighting back the tears. She was the one at fault here, and crying might seem like a bid for sympathy she did not deserve.

When she opened them, Iain was gone.