The office continued its normal summer flurry of inactivity. Everyone tried to look busy to justify being there at all, but there really wasn’t a huge amount to do. Orders were low, there was work on the books but that was all arranged and dates pencilled in. The only people really working hard were the fitters.
In previous years, I’d used this season to sit and catch up with women’s magazines. There was always a large pile in reception – Mr Welsh’s thinking being that the wives could sit and flick through articles about hair and dieting whilst their men talked the serious business of windows. Mr Welsh, now in his seventies, had a rather fixed idea of gender roles, and I’d tried to tell him that, nowadays, the wives were often out-earning their husbands and wanted a say in what kind of windows they had put in their homes, but he still refilled the magazine rack every week and got Sheila to put the nice cups out.
This summer, however, I took to bringing in books I’d borrowed from the library. First of all, I’d searched for books about ghosts, but found I scared myself too much reading those. It had been bad enough imagining every creak of my old floorboards to be otherworldly presences, but when it got to the stage that I was having to leave the downstairs light on and sleep with Mum’s old crucifix under the mattress, enough was enough. I turned to the psychology section instead, found a series of books on beliefs and parapsychology, and I was reading my way slowly through Pickering library’s thin collection on the subject.
I kept away from the Allbrights. Although Max’s coat was practically burning a hole in the back seat of my car, and I had the card he’d given me propped up on my bedside table, I told myself that if he wanted his coat back, he knew where I was. The card was… well, the card was propping up my alarm clock, that was all.
I drove up onto the moor once. Absolutely not hoping to run casually into Max and maybe give him a cool, contemplative smile and look winsome and mysterious, but, to my disappointment, he wasn’t there to be winsomely smiled at. So I sat and looked over the ruins of the Fortune House, watched a small police forensics team hard at work and wondered again about Grant’s final visit. I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that we’d probably never know what had called him up to that isolated little dale in the middle of that short summer night, and the ‘unfinished business’ nature of it rankled.
A couple of weeks passed. I became better read in the subject of ghost hunting, despite the teasing I got from the rest of the staff, and the police kept phoning me to tell me that they hadn’t found anything ‘of note’ up at the Fortune House. Whatever Grant had been doing up there had died with him, I had to learn to live with that. I imagined, when I thought of them at all, that Max and Jenna were busy with their weekend openings; the baking and repairing and generally keeping up appearances in that huge old house. None of it was anything to do with me.
But I couldn’t ignore the sense that, for some reason, my life had started to feel smaller, somehow. Not physically, of course, the house was still the same size, as was I, but metaphorically. I cursed myself for it. Now I’d seen ‘how the other half live’, I’d got a weird kind of an itchiness in my soul. An impatience with the normality of my day-to-day existence; get up, go to work, come home, cook something, go to bed. I found myself getting a bit snappy at work, prompting raised eyebrows and choruses of ‘Ooooooooh!’ when I berated a team for lateness where normally I would have let it slide on these long, hot days.
I expanded my reading outside the parapsychology section of the library and slid a bit further along the shelf into psychology. I began to inwardly analyse everyone in the office under my breath and probably incorrectly, but there was something infectious about the headings in those books. When I found I’d reduced the perfectly inoffensive Malcolm to ‘passive-aggressive, mother issues, stunted emotional growth’, I decided it was probably time to move along the shelf a bit.
And so it was that, on this sultry, humid Sunday evening, I was sitting outside in my tiny backyard with a book about the cases of Oliver Sacks, some of them quite horrifying. The heat had increased with the darkness. All around me, families were barbecuing or just sitting around, drinking and trying to keep cool. Nobody could go to bed, it was too hot.
Someone knocked on my front door. The knock was barely there, it sounded more as though someone had brushed against the door in a skirmish of drunken passing, so I stayed in my seat until it came again.
Definitely a knock this time. I looked at my phone. It was 10.30 p.m. Who would come calling at this time of night? The brief thought that Max might have come by to pick up his coat flashed into my head, but I forced that one down under the weight of the sensible thought that it was far too warm for him even to have missed the coat, let alone suddenly find a need for it, unless someone wanted to do a photoshoot of him looking mean and moodily ghost-hunterish somewhere. The only way to find out was to answer the door.
When I first saw the knocker, I thought it was a homeless man, trying to use my porch as shelter, and was about to offer him some change and the leftover beef joint in the fridge to move on, when he stepped into the light and I nearly fell over backwards.
‘Grant?’
‘Er. Hi, Al. Hello.’
‘Grant?’
Not a ghost. No ghost would smell quite so hot and unwashed. He’d gained a beard and was wearing a fishing hat and stained clothes that looked as though they had been stolen from a random selection of washing lines. My heart was somewhere in the back of my eyes, forcing them wide with the sheer speed of its thumping, but the rest of me had gone empty.
‘Grant?’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s me.’
‘But you’re dead!’ I almost wailed, as though I’d been personally disappointed by his reanimation.
‘Ah. Yes. Bit of a long story. Can I come in?’
Well, what do you say when your previously exploded, unseen for years ex-husband turns up late at night on your doorstep? In my experience, nothing. There are no words. I just stood back and let him over the doorstep, shuffling in his ill-fitting shoes and baggy tracksuit, until I could close the door behind him. Between the beard and the hat his cheeks looked sunken and sunburned and there were deep shadows under his eyes as if he hadn’t slept in a while. Well, good, I thought, because the memory of this reappearance was going to cause me sleepless nights for months.
We went into the living room and Grant stopped and looked around. ‘It looks nice in here,’ he said. ‘I like that lamp.’
‘You,’ I said with difficulty because my teeth were gritted and beginning to chatter in a sudden chill, ‘have got a lot of talking to do and I shouldn’t think any of the words you are about to use feature light fittings.’
I still couldn’t really take it in. Grant, dead Grant, was here. Walking, talking and evidently very much alive. My brain wouldn’t stretch as far as the implications, it was having trouble making sense of the simple fact of his continued existence.
‘And sit down,’ I added. ‘Before your trousers beat you to it.’
Grant sank, looking rather thankful, into the armchair that had been his chief repository when he’d lived here. I tried not to think ‘when he’d been alive’. I was freaked out enough already.
‘Look, Al,’ he said, taking off the fishing hat to reveal matted hair. ‘I’ve done something a bit stupid and I need your help.’
I inwardly congratulated myself for not screeching that he’d done a lot stupid by the looks of him and how dare he come to me for help when he’d cast me off like an outgrown T-shirt so he could go off and explore himself. I just said, ‘Go on,’ and perched myself on the edge of the sofa.
‘I don’t know if you’ve heard,’ he began, but my expression must have indicated that I had, indeed, heard, because he moved on swiftly. ‘I set up the explosion on purpose. I planted my belt and wallet so that I’d be identified – and I blew the place up and tried to disappear.’ He ran out of breath and stopped.
‘Why?’ I asked weakly. I wanted to go and make myself a cup of tea, or, even better, pour myself a stiff gin, but I had a horrible feeling that if I took my eyes off Grant, he’d vanish. Too much parapsychology, that’s what that was.
Grant was sitting hunched forward, hands between his knees. He looked abject. ‘There was this girl,’ he said slowly.
‘Jenna?’
His head came up. ‘You know Jenna?’
‘You blew yourself up. It kind of brought us together.’
He hissed out a long, deep, sigh. ‘Yes, Jenna. And she… we…’ He stopped again.
‘I know about the baby,’ I said, surprised that the words came out gently.
Grant flicked a look at me. I was slightly taken aback to see that his eyes were still that greenish blue, very bright in his shadowed, burned face. ‘Oh. Right. Sorry, Al.’
So he remembered too. Those long nights where I’d put the case for having a baby and he’d shot down all my arguments. I’d wanted a baby before my mum died, wanted her to have a grandchild, to see life going on. My brother and his children lived so far away, she’d had no input into their lives. I thought a baby here, now, would have given her something to hold on for. Grant had thought otherwise.
‘It was an accident,’ he carried on, muttering to the carpet now. ‘I wasn’t… sure. But Jen was so happy and we were going to move to this little cottage—’
‘Near the carriage house, yes, I’ve already done this bit,’ I said, somewhat testily. ‘Can we move directly to the blowing up?’
Another sigh. ‘After that, Jen sort of – she wanted to get married, have more babies and I… I still wasn’t sure. But she kind of went from really happy and looking forward to stuff to really sad about, well, about losing the baby and all. How could I say to her that I didn’t really know what I wanted?’
‘Like a normal person!’ I almost shouted. ‘Like an adult!’
‘Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t want to do that to Jenna, I couldn’t bear to see her upset and all, and I’d been out at the Fortune House with Max – I guess you know Max as well, then? – and I’d seen all the gas cylinders and it got me thinking. I did a bit of research and…’ He did a fast and expressive movement with both hands. ‘Boom.’
I rubbed my face. My skin seemed to have become very elastic all of a sudden. ‘And you didn’t think that you being dead might not upset her more than a grown-up discussion about the future of your relationship?’
‘Well, yes, but she’d get over it faster if I was dead. Wouldn’t she?’
I stared at him over my fingers. Grant had never had a great deal of imagination or empathy. Or, it now became apparent, common sense.
‘Right. Skating over the immense problem of you having destroyed Jenna utterly for the sake of not wanting to have a difficult conversation, what – and I want you to think very carefully before you answer this – what the ever-loving fuck has made you decide to reappear on my doorstep?’
Grant looked taken aback. I didn’t often swear, but I thought if any situation warranted a quick F-bomb, this was it. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a rethink.’
‘A rethink.’
‘Mmmm. Turns out it’s not that easy to make yourself a new life, even if you’re good with computers. And… and…’ He tailed off, took a deep breath and started again. ‘And I’ve discovered that I really, really do love Jen,’ he finished in a rush.
I stared at him until he started speaking again.
‘You and me, we were just mates really, weren’t we? I mean, we got married cos of your mum being so poorly and all, it was never this great romance, was it?’
Well, no, I thought. Not when you wouldn’t leave the house or your computer, or take me out or go anywhere with me or even have a proper conversation. It seemed churlish to bring that up at this point though. ‘Go on,’ I said again.
‘And there were a few girls after we split, I mean, not many. One or two. But they didn’t work out and then I met Jen.’ To his credit, he really did get a tiny bit more sparkle when he said her name, but then it would have been hard to get much of a sparkle from Grant, without cutting him into facets, and don’t tempt me… ‘And I wasn’t sure before, but I am now. I want to marry her and settle down and have children.’
I bit my tongue to force myself not to mention the cottage, the big house, the evident financial status of the Allbright family.
‘And I thought,’ Grant went on, ‘who do I know who’s really sensible and can sort things out when they all go totally tits up? There’s the guys I game with, and they’re great if you need a crew behind you to win the Sword of Afara, but for this? You’re the only person I know who could sort this kind of thing, Al. Plus, you know, you’re local. So I came here.’
‘Thank you so much,’ I muttered, tightly.
‘And I thought… I wondered if you’d tell Jenna I’m here. That I’m back.’
I paced. I made tea, I drank tea. I gave Grant a sandwich, which he swallowed almost in one gulp, and I thought. Mostly what I thought was, ‘This is way, way above my pay grade,’ and ‘What the hell do I do?’ Would Jenna be happy to see Grant? Or would she want to kill him for what he’d put her through? What on earth could I possibly tell her? That he’d orchestrated his own death with such care and attention to detail, just to avoid telling her that he wasn’t sure he wanted to marry her, and blown up Max’s book project location to make it work? That he’d deleted his computer history to prevent anyone finding out that he’d been researching how to do it? Anything I could think of saying to explain what Grant had done would destroy her completely.
I needed help. I was probably also going to need therapy to get over this. Grant was being of no use at all. He’d sat back with a mug of tea and the absolute certainty that he’d always had when we’d been together, that however awful something was, I would sort it out.
I paced a bit more and then decided there was only one thing to do. I fetched down the little bit of card from its position alongside my bed, and dialled the number.
‘Hatherleigh Hall.’ It was Jenna. She’d answered the phone. My mouth went dry and I made some little croaky noises.
‘Hello?’ Jen sounded nervous. Did she think this was a dirty phone call?
‘Hello, Jenna,’ I finally managed. ‘Can I speak to Max, please? It’s Alice.’
Jenna laughed, relieved, by the sound of it. ‘I think he’s down in the Queen’s Drawing Room,’ she said, sounding completely oblivious of the fact that most of us don’t have a drawing room at all, let alone a royal one. ‘Can I tell him why you’re calling? It might make a difference between him coming to the phone now or calling you back in the morning.’
‘Tell him…’ I groped for something. ‘Tell him I’ve had a rethink about coming to work for him,’ I said on a flash of inspiration. ‘Tell him I want to talk about the job.’
Jenna laughed. ‘Oh, good! He so needs someone to get this book organised! He told me he’d asked you and you’d shot him down – he was quite upset about that, actually. He really wants you on board, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said weakly, wondering how much more upset Max was going to be when he found out why I really wanted to talk to him.
‘Give me two minutes.’ And she was gone.
Grant sat, expectant as a Labrador over a biscuit tin, until Max came to the phone. ‘Hey, Alice. Jen says you’ve had a rethink…’
I cut him off. ‘I need you to come here, Max.’ My voice was low, urgent. ‘I need you here, at my house, now.’
A moment’s silence. Then, ‘This doesn’t sound as if it’s to do with the job.’
‘Please.’ I couldn’t even begin to explain over the phone, I just couldn’t. ‘Please, come, Max.’
I hear a breath. A soft, almost sympathetic noise. ‘Are you hurt? I’m coming now, I’ll find my keys.’ He moved away from the mouthpiece for a second. ‘Jen, I’ve got to pop over to Alice’s, have you seen my keys?’ Then back to me again. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Don’t worry, Alice, whatever it is, we can sort this out.’ And then the phone went down, leaving me with Grant eating the contents of my fruit bowl, and me trying to tidy up the living room a bit so that Max wouldn’t think I lived in a hovel. Then I realised I hadn’t asked him definitely, absolutely, on no account to bring Jenna with him, and made Grant go and sit upstairs in the spare room in case she came along.
I was trying to work on a plausible excuse for having dragged Max over, in case Jenna had come with him, when there was another knock on the front door and Max was there, alone, with his Range Rover squeezed in behind my car.
‘Ah, good,’ he said, when I opened the door. ‘This is the right place, and you’ve got all your limbs attached and no evident blood. So, what’s this about?’
Then Grant came down the stairs and Max reacted in the same way I had, only with more swearing. And louder, because Next Door Left banged on the wall.
‘Sorry. Sorry.’ Max had collapsed onto the table I kept in the hall to drop all the post I didn’t want to cope with. ‘But… no, I’m sorry. I’m stumped.’ He looked at me. ‘You could have given me a heads-up,’ he said, reproachfully.
‘How? What the hell could I say, over the phone with your sister in the room to give you a heads-up about this?’ I gestured at Grant, who was arrested in the act of stepping off the fourth stair. ‘It’s not really a heads-up kind of thing, is it?’
‘Well, no, I suppose not.’
A heavy kind of silence fell over us all. Teamed with the heat, it felt like being under a very thick blanket. ‘Look. Let’s go and sit in the living room, where at least there’s an open window. Grant can explain and I can make myself a very stiff drink.’ I moved as Max stood up and we kind of jostled against one another in the narrow hallway for a moment. He had that slight smell of orange peel about him that I’d noticed on his coat, and I wondered if it was a very expensive cologne or whether he just ate a lot of oranges. Then I cursed myself for even noticing, when events were, quite clearly, getting away from me.
I left them and went through to the kitchen. Out of the window, I could see the smoke and glow of Next Door Right’s barbecue dying down, my discarded chair and book and the twinkle of solar lights on Next Door Left’s slightly over-ambitious rose arbour. Everything looked normal outside. Straightforward. Uncomplicated. I poured myself a glass of cold water and drank it, knowing that I was using it to waste time. I didn’t want to go back into the sitting room, didn’t want to see Max all glorious amid my peeling furniture and dusty carpet. I also didn’t want to see Grant, because I’d just got used to the thought of him being dead and I didn’t want to snap and bludgeon him to death with a rolled-up copy of Prima magazine to save me from having to cope with this not being the case.
But eventually I couldn’t hover about in the tiny kitchen any longer. I filled a big jug with water, added a few sad ice cubes and, trying not to compare and contrast my randomly self-defrosting fridge with Max and Jenna’s enormous American fridge, carried it through to where the two men were sitting in differing stages of relaxation.
Grant had slipped right back into his ‘at home’ persona. He’d got his feet up on the coffee table and was furtively scratching his navel. Max was hunched on the sofa, hands around the back of his neck as though he was trying to pull his head inside his body. He looked up when I came in.
‘What the hell are we going to do?’ he asked.
‘I was hoping you would think of something.’ I put the jug down on the table and pushed Grant’s feet back onto the floor. ‘Do we tell Jenna, or what?’
‘Oh, you have to tell her,’ Grant said eagerly. ‘That’s the whole reason I came back!’
‘That and running out of money,’ Max observed dryly. ‘What were you living on, incidentally?’
‘I sold my car for cash. Told Jenna I’d put it in the bank, but I kept it. I thought I’d be able to pick up some work, but it turns out it’s hard without any ID.’
‘Where did you go?’ I asked, eyeing him sternly. ‘Somewhere that outfit fitted in, evidently.’
‘I was trying to get to London. But train tickets are really expensive,’ Grant whined. ‘I only got as far as Peterborough.’
Max and I looked at one another. There was nothing to say.
‘I’ve been staying in a B&B, but the money was running out and I was afraid that the police would be watching my accounts and looking for activity online, so I had to keep my head down. I bought the clothes in a charity shop, because I’d only got the stuff I had on when I went up on the moor and I needed to change. I hadn’t dared to pack anything, because Jen would have noticed.’ Grant talked quickly, as though he wanted to get the story out.
Max collapsed his head again. ‘Oh, God.’
Outside, a threatening grumble indicated an oncoming storm. There was the sound of a thousand barbecues being wound up speedily and next door’s dog was escorted past the window for a comedically fast late walk. Rain must be forecast, I thought, and wished it could have arrived in time to have soaked Grant to the skin on my doorstep. Then I had a word with myself about this vindictive thinking. Grant had just been being Grant, looking to other people to solve his problems. The fact that those people were Max and me was almost incidental.
‘And how were you going to work things if I didn’t already know Jenna?’ I asked Grant, who was looking hopefully from Max to me as though waiting for us to slap our foreheads and yell ‘Eureka!’ ‘Give me her address and ask me to pop over one afternoon? Somehow casually raise the subject of her boyfriend still being alive?’
Grant’s expression told me that, yes, that had pretty much been his plan. I didn’t know whether to be glad that my already having met the Allbrights would make this easier for him, or whether to declare this was all beyond me, move to Scotland and join my brother on an oil rig.
The first fat drops of rain smudged the street lights against the window. ‘Damn,’ I said. ‘My library book’s outside.’ I knew I had to go out and get it, but I was paralysed by the current situation.
‘Fetch it in.’ Max spoke to his lap. ‘We promise not to decide anything without you.’ His words were heavily sarcastic and Grant wriggled in his chair.
‘I’m really sorry,’ he said, still with that top note of whine. ‘I didn’t know what else do to.’
‘One, stay dead. Two, not be dead in the first place. Three, oh, I dunno, set up home in Peterborough and never mention any of our names again?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Grant said again. ‘But I’m in love.’
‘Oh, God. Jenna.’ Max resumed his attempt to pull off his own head and I slipped outside to the yard, where the sky had begun to rumble impressively and gigantic drops of rain were falling in that steady, determined way that says a downpour is only seconds away.
I picked up my book and turned my chair up so that the seat wouldn’t get wet, collected the assortment of bowls and cups that I’d been snacking out of, and turned to go back indoors, just as a tremendous crack of thunder erupted overhead and the night flickered as though the lighting man in the sky was experimenting with effects. The streets echoed to the sound of people shouting and laughing as the deluge started, and then went quiet as they all sought shelter. I went back into the living room.
‘I’ve got work in the morning,’ I said, inconsequentially, but as a hint that I didn’t want this to go on all night.
Max raised his head and his eyes met mine. There was real desperation in them. Grant was fiddling with a loose thread in the arm of the chair, looking as though he was waiting to be rescued from this situation of his own making.
‘What do we do?’ Max half-whispered. ‘Do we tell her, or what?’
I bumped my head gently against the door frame in the hope that the pine would knock some ideas into me. Tell Jenna that Grant was back? Well, we’d have to. The shock of running into him otherwise could send her over the edge. But how could we explain it? Telling her the truth wasn’t an option, not at this stage, how could she possibly deal with knowing that Grant had planned to disappear forever from her life? It wouldn’t be kind. My book, still in my hand, jabbed me in the hip and I had an idea.
‘Amnesia,’ I said.
‘Oh, I want to forget any of this ever happened,’ Max said fervently.
‘No, no, look.’ I flicked through to the appropriate chapter. I’d read it only yesterday, sprawled out on my miniscule lawn listening to the neighbourhood having water fights. ‘A man, brain damage, no memory…’
Max’s eyes widened. He looked at me and then at Grant, who was still picking. ‘Could we? I mean, could it work?’
‘Grant, when the house exploded – for a reason you’ve totally forgotten and it was probably an accident anyway – is there any chance you could have been hit on the head by a brick and knocked into a fugue state, from which you recently recovered to find yourself in Peterborough, with no memory of how you got there or who you were?’ I asked.
Grant frowned.
‘But, as your memories gradually started to come back, you remembered this house, so you came here, and talking to me brought back the rest of your memories?’ I carried on prompting.
‘Er.’
‘And you realised that it was going to be a shock to Jenna to find that you’re really still alive and so you asked Max…’
‘And you,’ Max broke in. ‘I’m not doing this on my own. I can’t. Oh God, Jenna…’
‘…and me to break the news to her carefully.’ I finished and eyeballed Grant sternly. ‘Isn’t that what really happened? Grant?’
The light of understanding gradually crept across Grant’s face. It was accompanied by another flash of lightning, as the world’s most appropriately timed thunderstorm continued overhead. ‘Oh!’ he said. ‘What, I pretend to have had amnesia for the last six weeks?’
‘It’s remotely plausible.’ I gazed around at the two of them. ‘And you can always gradually “remember” later, if you feel yourself ever able to tell her the truth. But for now, let’s stick to the amnesia storyline and hope it works.’
Max suddenly jumped up from the sofa, took me by both shoulders and kissed me. It was a proper full-on kiss too, not just a quick peck on the cheek, and I knew I’d hold the memory of his slight stubble grazing my chin, the fresh-orange smell of him and the taste of his mouth on mine close to my heart for a long time. ‘You are a genius, Alice,’ he said, and it was heartfelt but obviously his heart didn’t feel like mine. Because mine felt like a cushion that’s been sat on and then replumped. ‘An absolute frigging genius.’
My face was flaming, but luckily, at that moment, the lights went out. You could probably still have read the small print on a ticket stub by the glow from my cheeks, but we were all too busy swearing and I managed to hide away by grubbing in a drawer for the battery-powered candles.
At last we sat, crowded around the tiny flickering candles, most of which had a slightly desperate Christmas theme and had shed cheap glitter all over the carpet. The insufficient light, coupled with the flashes of lightning and the unnaturally lengthened shadows that resulted on the walls of my living room, were giving a definite Macbethian vibe to the moment.
‘We’ll have to do this carefully,’ Max said, elbows on knees and hunched. ‘It’s going to be a huge shock for Jen, whatever we say.’
‘She’ll still have questions.’ I addressed Grant, who was fiddling his fingers and watching the shapes against the light. If he started doing ‘this is a rabbit’, I would definitely have to kill him. ‘You have to make sure you’ve got your story straight.’
‘I don’t remember anything. I remember being in bed with Jen, the next thing I can remember is suddenly finding myself in a B&B in Peterborough with no idea how I got there.’ Grant grinned at me. ‘Will that do?’
‘It’s good enough for now.’
‘Okay.’ Max took a deep breath. ‘When do we do this? I need you there, Alice.’
‘Oh, but I…’
‘Look, I dashed over here tonight and I didn’t even know why! You owe me one.’
I looked at Max, all hollows and shade, like a carved head. He was right, I did owe him. And then I looked at Grant, who was smiling, and sighed. ‘I know. And yes, we have to break it to Jenna carefully, not just wheel Grant out with a “look what we found”. Oh, this is complicated.’
‘Come and work for me.’
‘What?’ I tried to see the expression on Max’s face, but the stupidly insufficient and unseasonal lighting effects meant that he was largely a pool of dark. ‘I can’t. I’ve got a job.’
‘You can change jobs. Honestly, I’ll give you a great package, good pay, all that. I really, really need help with the book, and research, and then there’s all this—’ He gestured at Grant. ‘Someone needs to be around to keep an eye on Jenna, and make sure the story doesn’t slip. And besides,’ he gave me a grin, ‘when you rang you told Jen it was about taking the job. What are we going to tell her, if you don’t?’
‘I’ll tell her we couldn’t agree on a salary!’ I hissed. ‘I’m not giving up a job I’ve had for…’ I calculated quickly, ‘eighteen years for some fly-by-night one-off book research. I’ve got a retirement to plan for!’ I finished, realising suddenly how sad and thin my excuses sounded. Retirement was looking to be a good forty years ahead and that was a long, long time to be answering emails about the arrival times of a fitting team.
‘Oh.’ Max sounded taken aback by my sibilant refusal. ‘Oh. Right, yes, that’s very sensible.’
Sensible. Was that what I was reduced to being? Big, sensible Alice, living in the house she grew up in, doing the job she’d done since she left school. Complaining that nothing ever happened in her life? I opened my mouth to say something else, but realised that I couldn’t. Just couldn’t. Give up the regular salary, my little office, my job where I knew everyone and everything? No, no, no. But then a tiny tickle of rebellion wormed its way into my soul. ‘Look, I’ve got a lot of time off owing, we’re really quiet at the moment, let me go in on Monday and sort things out and I could maybe take the rest of the week off? I could give you a hand with the book and help you break the news to Jenna.’
Max looked at me, a direct look in which the candlelight flickered, reflected in his eyes. ‘How the hell,’ he said slowly and clearly, ‘have I managed without you in my life all these years?’
‘Badly, I suspect.’ I took refuge in briskness, in practicality. ‘Now, if you two will excuse me, I’ve got work in the morning and a lot of organising to do.’
Max stood up. The lights came back on, spotlighting him in all his tall, dark glory, and from outside, we heard the cheers and whoops of the neighbourhood getting its late-night telly back. ‘Yes, of course. You’re right, it’s late. So, it’s decided, I’ll wait to see you on Tuesday and we can break the news to Jenna together?’
Grant looked up.
‘Not you,’ I said. ‘We’re going to have to do this gently and slowly, not say “Guess who?” and wheel you out of the back of the car.’
‘But where should I go?’ He looked forlorn. ‘I mean, I’ve got no money, nothing.’
Max and I exchanged a look of utter exasperation. ‘All right, you can stay here for a couple of days,’ I said. ‘The spare bed is made up. And I can coach you to make sure you’ve got your story straight.’
I began to pick up the candles, one by one, very slowly. Max bent beside me to help. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, so close that it made the hair on my neck prickle. ‘You’re a lifesaver, Alice. I mean that.’
After Max had gone and whilst Grant was in the bathroom chiselling off the worst of Peterborough, I relived the evening. Well, bits of it. Max kissing me, Max and I being partners in this conspiracy, Max whispering to me. Then I wondered if it was really such a good idea giving him a hand with his book, even if it was just for a week. But the thought of how delicate, slight Jenna was going to react to the reappearance of Grant kept me from changing my mind again. At least I could be there to help her adjust to him being back. Or I could hold her coat whilst she attacked him with every sharp object to hand, I was good either way.
And then I listened to Grant singing ‘My Way’ in the shower, using all my hot water, and I opted for handing her the knives.