Chapter 16

Charlie and Robin fell asleep in the armchairs, lulled by the soft feathery voice of Radio Brian and his melodious Christmas tunes. Jack banked up the fire and then helped Mary carry the glasses into the kitchen to be washed. As usual she felt as if the surface of her skin buzzed with electricity when he was near her.

“Can’t believe a pub hasn’t got a dishwasher,” said Jack. Tiny as the kitchen was, it surely would be a standard piece of equipment. “I mean, why would the owner invest in that huge German coffee machine that takes up half of the available work surface, but rely on this minuscule sink to cope with all the washing up? Makes absolutely no commercial sense.”

Jack might not have looked at his phone for a little while, but his head continued to spin on the logistics of business.

It was certainly a kitchen not conducive to more than one person working in it at a time, or two who wanted to become better acquainted. Three could possibly lead to impregnation.

“You wash, I’ll dry,” said Jack.

“Okay,” said Mary, trying to sound a lot more at ease than she felt. Her brain knew she had less than no chance of a romantic liaison with Jack. He had done nothing other than keep her at his very long arm’s length for years, and yet here was her stupid heart quivering in her chest at being so physically close to him. Her brother singing “The Boy from Ipanema” in a gently taunting voice drifted into her mind. Jack really was him, long and lovely and about as attainable as Brad Pitt. Probably less so. Plus, she could quite happily appraise Brad without her nerve endings doing weird things.

She filled up the bowl with hot water and a squirt of dish liquid. Jack went to the drawer filled with tea towels. All different designs, age-old gifts to the landlord probably: Souvenir of Blackpool; a long poem: “The Italian Who Went to Malta”; the commemoration of Prince Charles’s wedding to Lady Di.

The view of his back made Mary’s heart beat almost as fast as his front did. Her involuntary reactions were truly starting to annoy her.

Mary dunked the first glass, rubbed it with a sponge, checked that the stubborn gluey wine had gone, gave it a quick rinse under the tap with fresh water before placing it on the draining board.

“You even do the washing up properly, don’t you?” said Jack, curious grin quirking up one side of his mouth.

“I try and do everything properly,” replied Mary. “It only takes a little extra effort to do a good job rather than a mediocre one. That’s what my dad taught us.”

Jack lifted up the glass, began to dry it.

“Do you still miss him? Even after… two years, is it now?”

“Yes,” said Mary, dipping another glass. “I’ve got past the floppy, crying-all-the-time stage, but that doesn’t mean he’s not in my thoughts. I still think, ‘I must tell Dad,’ when something happens that I know he’d like to hear about, or when I want to run something past him. And I still feel sad that I can’t ring, but I talk to him, and if he’s around, he’ll hear me, and maybe he’ll guide me. Dad wouldn’t want me to mope and be miserable; he’d tell me off. If I had children and I… left them, I wouldn’t want them to miss me so much that they didn’t enjoy things anymore.”

“Do you think you’ll have children one day?” asked Jack.

The question surprised her; he’d never asked her anything as personal before, but she tried not to let that show as she answered him.

“If I found someone nice to have them with.”

Admittedly her thoughts, on occasion, had strayed to pictures of herself and a nice man walking through a park: she pushing a buggy, he holding the lead of a collie they’d taken in from a rescue center, like the sort of dog her family had when she was growing up. But she would never attract someone who was truly interested in her as long as Jack was occupying her thoughts, because she wouldn’t show up on the dating radar as available. And tomorrow she would be twenty-five years old. Time to make things happen, not dream stupid dreams anymore that would never come to anything.

“What about you? Do you ever think about having children?” she asked.

Yes, he did, imagined him kicking a ball over the vast lawn at the back of his house or holding a little girl’s hand as she prattled on and he tried not to chuckle at her. But he wouldn’t have children if it meant he didn’t have enough time to read a story to them, or worked so long and hard that he had to send them away to boarding school. He wouldn’t have them if his marriage wasn’t rock-solid. And if by any chance it broke down afterward, he would do his damnedest to make sure his child wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire or be dragged into the poisoned lake that stood between warring factions. He knew his father hadn’t meant for that to happen, but still it had. No, better not to have them at all than risk he might replicate his mistakes.

“I’m not sure I will,” said Jack, setting the dried glasses on a tray to take back through to the bar.

“Why not?” said Mary.

“I’d be worried I wouldn’t be a good enough father.”

“Well, that’s just rubbish, if you don’t mind me saying, Jack. All parents make mistakes.” Ooh, was that a bit rude, said a voice inside her. She jumped in quickly to pat her dissidence down. “I mean, my parents made loads. They were only human. My dad never went to any of the plays my older siblings did at school, which he regretted, he said, because he came to the ones I did and he realized then what he’d been missing. And my mum always said she was a bit soft on us. For instance, my older brother made a mess of his GCSEs, and Mum was really cross at herself for not coming down harder on him for playing truant at school. But then again, maybe if he hadn’t messed up he wouldn’t have tried so hard to make up lost ground. He’s a chartered surveyor now and lives in a massive house. Maybe his wrong path turned out to be the right one in disguise.”

She shut up, not even sure if that made sense.

“I don’t know if I have a healthy family template to copy,” said Jack. “I don’t want others to suffer because of things I get wrong.”

He meant Reg, of course, Mary knew. Reg was a hard man, totally work focused. He was gruff and rough, his manner brusque, and he’d been warped and damaged by being rejected for another man, but he never missed an opportunity to boast about his son. “Oh, that lad of mine has got us into Marks & Spencer, I knew he would”; “I told him, I said, ‘Our Jack’s the man to talk to about that, he’d know.’ ”

Mary took in a fortifying breath. She was about to overstep the mark and, again, she’d probably get shot down for it, but what did she really have to lose now?

“I can tell you without any doubt, Jack, that your dad loved you very much and he was so proud of you. And just in case you’re wondering how I know that, it’s because he told me he did.”

Jack’s hand stilled on the glass he was drying. “Did he? When?”

“Loads of times. He’d put the phone down after talking to you and sort of smile as he said, ‘That was my lad on the phone.’ ”

She could go further, decided she should.

“He once said to me: ‘I’m proud of our Jack, Mary. You mark my words, he’ll take this company to new heights,’ and he was pleased as punch when you got the Marks & Spencer order. He once told me he’d sent you away to school because he wanted you to have the best education he could afford, as there was no point in having money if you couldn’t spend it on those you loved.”

She saw Jack swallow before he asked her, “He said that? Really?”

“I wouldn’t lie for effect, Jack,” she said with a nip in her voice. “I remember taking tea in for him one time when he’d just come off the phone. He was smiling and turned to me and said, ‘If only I’d known I had it in me to have a son like our Jack, I’d not have waited so long and I’d have had a dozen of ’em.’ ” She imitated Reg’s broad Yorkshire accent as she said it. “And I said to him, ‘You should tell him that, Mr. Butterly. He’d be thrilled to bits.’ ”

She looked up at Jack to see that he was waiting for her to continue, so she did.

“And he said, ‘I’m not that sort of bloke, Mary. He knows anyway without me having to say it.’ ”

The expression on Jack’s face as those words sank into him told Mary that Jack hadn’t had the slightest inkling that “he knew anyway.” He looked rocked to the core, and she had an overwhelming urge to reach out and touch him, hoping to transmit somehow by proxy the love Reg had for his son, and that she had witnessed. She didn’t, but she told him instead something her own dad had said about the setup at Butterly’s when she’d spoken to him about it.

“Some people, especially in that generation, found it hard to say how they felt, as if it was a weakness. I got the feeling that your grandfather Bill Butterly wasn’t exactly a loving, hands-on father, and maybe your dad never learned from him how to articulate his feelings. Maybe, just maybe he wanted it to get back to you what he was thinking without having to speak the words himself. Maybe that’s why he told me, because he could only manage to say what he felt in an indirect way, because a direct way was just too difficult for him…”

Mary’s words trailed off because Jack looked felled, and that wasn’t the effect she’d hoped to have on him. She went into a momentary panic, cross at herself, expected him to say, “Yes, thank you, Mary,” in that same dismissive way he’d used when she’d told him he should be making vegan scones. Then, barely above a whisper, he said, “I wish I’d known.”

“I did try to—” She stopped herself, poured the water out of the bowl, silently cursing herself for heading toward a conversation she didn’t want to stray into.

“Try to what?”

“Nothing.”

“It isn’t nothing.”

“Okay, then, I did try to tell you once but you shut me down.”

Jack looked somewhere between dumbstruck and horrified. “When? When did I do that?”

“When you came back to work after your father had died. I knew what you were going through, I knew that you could never have prepared for the impact, and I stopped you in the corridor one day to tell you what your dad said to me about you. I thought it might help you. But you said, ‘Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait, Mary.’ ”

“Did I? Did I say it like that?”

“Exactly like that.”

“Why would I do that?”

His lack of self-awareness made Mary prickle with an annoyance that fueled her next words.

“Because I’m just Mary who files your correspondence and makes your coffees. Not someone to take any serious notice of.”

There, she’d let it out; it had been sitting inside her for years.

The words seemed to hang in the air for a moment, with long tails of echoes. Jack had never blushed in his life, but he felt heat rise in his cheeks and when he spoke next, his voice low.

“I’m really sorry if I did that, Mary. I can’t remember it, but if I did, then please accept my belated apology.”

“Don’t worry about it, it’s fine.” Mary acknowledged the admission, dried her hands while thinking that she wouldn’t have dared say all that to Jack had she been scared of getting on the wrong side of him. It was the first step in letting him go. The realization triggered waves of both relief and sadness at the same time.