65

Jack could see just how much effort Lisa had made with her appearance as she shrugged on her coat and wound her pashmina round her neck. She looked beautiful tonight. But it made him sad to see the vulnerability in her face, the insecurity beneath her tentative resolve. He quailed to think of what she had to face.

Lisa seemed almost shy as she waved an awkward goodbye from across the room. And Jack could understand why. But as he saw her off to meet the man with whom she’d had a two-night stand, he felt more like a worrying father than a cuckolded husband. It surprised him, his lack of jealousy. But he was also relieved that he wasn’t prey to that gnawing, raw, crazed torment he had so recently experienced when he heard about Stella and Peregrine, shafts of which still left him lying rigid with sleeplessness at night.

‘I don’t know how long I’ll be,’ Lisa said, as she opened the front door.

‘Have you got your key?’ Jack asked. A stupid question, Lisa always had her key.

She nodded, throwing him a wish-me-luck look that neither of them could articulate.

Greg had agreed to meet Lisa in a gastropub they both knew, a ten-minute walk from the house. She hadn’t told him why she needed to see him, just that she really did. And although he’d been surprised, apparently he hadn’t objected to the rendezvous. Or so Lisa told Jack.

As soon as the door was shut, Jack went to the kitchen and poured himself a large Scotch. He was restless and thoroughly anxious. The next hour was crucial. Not only would it determine the baby’s and Lisa’s futures, but also his own – even Stella’s, he still hoped.

He thought back to that moment in the café. God, how he loved her. Looking into those beautiful eyes, he had felt the previous doubts about his competency to sustain a relationship fall away. Stella was his soulmate; it would be different with her, if he was given that chance.

Jack waited. He wanted to get out of the house, take a good brisk walk in the cold night air and disperse his worries. But he didn’t want to be out when Lisa came home. Greg might take one look at her and run for his life. He might not believe the baby was his – Jack was pretty sure he wouldn’t, if a woman suddenly pitched up and claimed two nights in the sack had made him a father. And even if Greg did believe her, would he necessarily want to get involved? Perhaps, Jack thought, if he had feelings for her.

Jack clutched desperately at this thin skein of hope. Lisa did admit they’d been attracted to each other from the start. But it was a work environment and they were both spoken for. They had known each other a year or so when the show took a team up to Yorkshire in the summer to film a celebrity-packed sports event in aid of a disabled children’s charity, and she and Greg had been ‘thrown together’, as Lisa put it. She had clearly been nervous telling him the details, but Jack, knowing that almost the same thing had happened with him and Stella, could not, in all conscience, protest.

If she comes back quickly, Jack thought, as he tried to concentrate on another episode of the Vietnam documentary, it’s not a good sign. It was eight o’clock and she had been gone an hour already. Maybe Greg would be late. Maybe it would take her a while to pluck up the courage to tell him. Surely she’d be home by now, he thought, if he’d told her outright to fuck off. He was driving himself mad with various scenarios. Stella always used to tell him, ‘Never make assumptions; assumptions make fools of us all.’ But it was hard not to. He turned off the television – he would have to watch the episode again another time because he hadn’t taken in a single word.

Jack wondered, as he sat there in the silence, whether Stella would consider being with him, regardless of the baby. It was what he wanted more than anything in the world, to make it work with her again. He didn’t see why his future with Stella should rest solely on Greg’s willingness – or not – to take responsibility for his child. For a moment he considered calling her. But he knew he should wait.

It was nearly eleven thirty when Jack finally heard Lisa’s key in the door. He’d spent the evening drinking too much whisky and munching his way through a jumbo bag of cheese and onion crisps. He was nearly asleep in front of his computer, but he jumped up to welcome her, then waited, heart in his mouth, as Lisa slung her keys in the bowl on the shelf by the door. She put her bag down on the floor, slowly took off her coat, which she hung on one of the hooks on the wall, then sat herself down on the sofa, still with her scarf on, all without looking at him or giving him the slightest clue as to how her evening had gone.

Jack came and sat beside her. ‘Well?’

She turned to look at him and he could see the tiredness in her blue eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said softly.

A million questions rose to Jack’s lips, but he held back, not wanting to pester her. It nearly killed him.

‘He didn’t believe me at first,’ Lisa went on. ‘Or maybe it was more that he couldn’t get his head round the possibility that he was suddenly about to be a father. But I think he accepted I wasn’t lying.’

She fell silent. ‘He’s split up with Elaine. Last month.’

‘OK … So he’s on his own?’ Jack ventured.

Lisa nodded. ‘At first he was angry. He asked me what I wanted, like I was some money-grubbing tart …’ The rest of the sentence was incomprehensible as she burst into tears. ‘Oh, Jack, it was so humiliating.’

He pulled her into his arms and let her cry. After a while she sat up again. ‘But we talked and he calmed down, and I think he realized I was just telling him because he has a right to know.’

Jack, wired to the hilt, could not wait any longer for the steady drip, drip of information to deliver the answers he needed. ‘Does he want to be involved, then?’

Lisa raised a cynical eyebrow at his question. ‘You’d like that, wouldn’t you? It’d let you off the hook, right?’ She moved away from him, her shoulders stiff. ‘I’ve told you, Jack. You’re not responsible for me or the baby. I’ll get out of your hair as soon as it’s born, go and stay with my dad for a while, then work something out.’

‘Don’t, Lisa. You’re certainly not doing that. I’m just trying to find out what you and Greg decided … if anything.’

She didn’t reply for a minute, just sat there, sniffing pathetically.

‘He said … he … he did say he would see me again.’

‘Oh, right.’ Patronizing bastard, Jack thought. It was good news, though, surely?

‘But, you know, it’s awkward, me being so pregnant … and living with you. He said he couldn’t walk me home in case you were lying in wait to duff him up.’

Jack liked the selfish wuss less and less with every passing minute, but he said, ‘I hope you set him straight.’

She nodded and he saw the first glimmer of a smile. ‘I know I’m making him out to be a bit of a shit, Jack, but he’s really not. I think he was just blown away by what I told him.’ She sighed. ‘I like him a lot. He makes me laugh.’

Jack felt the first and only frisson of jealousy, but tried to ignore the implication that Lisa hadn’t laughed much with him, although it was probably true.

‘This isn’t a loaded question, Lisa,’ he said after a short silence, ‘but do you think you and Greg could ever make a go of it?’

Lisa shook her head, but the movement was uncertain. ‘I don’t know. It’s not exactly the best way to start a relationship, is it? But we do get on. And he doesn’t have kids yet, although he wants them, he says. He and Elaine were doing IVF, but it wasn’t working. I think that’s what split them up.’

She yawned. ‘I need to go to bed,’ she said, and Jack knew he couldn’t badger her with more questions to which there were no definite answers, anyway. He would just have to be patient and stop expecting a magic bullet that would have Greg running joyfully into Lisa’s arms, scooping up her and the baby to live happily ever after – in Australia, preferably.