Although I’d hoped for a weekend with minimal time spent out of bed, my parents had telephoned and asked whether I would like to go for Sunday lunch. As I hadn’t seen them for so long and I knew an olive branch when I saw one, I’d said yes. Now I was happier, it was easier to be philosophical about their reaction to the news of the break-up with Lucas. Even so, I hadn’t quite forgiven them for not supporting me when I needed them. I left London just before ten o’clock on Sunday morning. Driving out on the A4, I was reminded of all the times I had taken that road to the house, using it to reach the M40. Martha and Michael had gone up there again, I knew. The pain of being excluded was as sharp as it had been the first time. I turned off and began the trawl out of south-west London through Chiswick and on to the motorway towards Southampton instead. The sky was Wedgwood blue and, although there was a slight chill in the air, I had the window open to feel it on my face.
I had spent Friday evening and all of Saturday with Greg and I had just kissed him goodbye. He had been out to buy croissants before I woke up and we had eaten them for breakfast in his sitting room. I sat cross-legged on the old blue-and-white-striped sofa in the square bay window, watching him. The sun was pouring over the roofs of the terrace opposite, casting him in a light against which I had to screw up my eyes. He was wearing dark jeans that fitted well around his hips and thighs and a faded turquoise T-shirt. His big bare feet slapped gently across the boards as he brought coffee from the kitchen. Until Wednesday I hadn’t realised he wore contact lenses. This morning he was wearing his glasses, which emphasised the intelligence of his face.
When we had finished eating Greg reached across and pulled me close to him. We sat in silence for a minute or two, twining our fingers against each other’s. I ran the ball of my thumb over each of his short, trimmed nails. A fine layer of dark hair covered the backs of his hands and I had to fight an urge to put his fingers in my mouth.
‘Tell me about Danny,’ he said.
I looked up in surprise. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Why he is like he is. What’s his story?’
‘Well, I don’t know a huge amount about his background beyond the basic facts. I’ve never been to his mother’s house, or not inside. He doesn’t talk about his family much but he can be pretty scathing about them. And he flies into a rage if anyone asks him about them.’ I touched his hair and he leaned his head against my hand. ‘What I do know,’ I said, ‘is that Danny’s father is much younger than his mother. There’s fifteen years between them. According to Lucas, Danny’s father was a real boy about town and went out with some of the most beautiful women of the time. Then he took everyone by surprise and married this older divorcee.’
‘She must have been quite something.’
‘She wasn’t particularly beautiful. That was one of the things that shocked people at the time: before that, he had been all about appearance. Patrick told Lucas this – he didn’t especially like the people in that set but he knew them. Apparently Danny’s dad was known to be quite cruel about women he didn’t consider good-looking. She was forty-two or forty-three when they married.’
‘So he was – what? – twenty-seven?’
‘Something like that. Anyway, she was desperate for a baby and she got pregnant really quickly and everything seemed fine. But then, as soon as Danny was born, Danny’s father went back to being a playboy again. And in the most public way. Lucas said he heard that it was like he deliberately set out to humiliate her.’
‘Funded by her money?’
I nodded. ‘The odd thing is that before they got married and even afterwards, during the pregnancy, people really did believe that he loved her. Everyone had thought originally he was after her money and of course it did turn out to be that but, if it was an act at first, he fooled everyone. Danny’s mother was heartbroken.’
‘She must be over seventy now, then?’
‘Yes. She lives in Chelsea. I met her once. She’s nice. Posh. And she and Danny’s father are still married. They just live separate lives. I don’t know whether he lives in London or not, even. I think he spends a lot of time in France.’
‘Explains why Danny doesn’t have any problems living on Lucas’s money.’
‘On one level. But that worries me, too, because Danny’s immensely proud, as you probably realised. He always has to be better than everyone else and his job was a big part of that. The money was important but also he needs to know that he’s valued higher than other people – it’s where he gets his self-esteem. I don’t know how he’s going to get on without people telling him how brilliant he is all day.’
‘I think his self-esteem is more fragile than he could bear anyone to know.’
I looked at him. His perception had surprised me several times. Since Wednesday I had learnt more about him than I had in months at the house. I was discovering new facets to him all the time; it was like being able to listen to a whole album having only previously heard tantalising snippets of individual songs. I was hungry for as much information about him as I could get, as if knowing him better could make him more mine. ‘Are your parents married?’ I asked.
‘Yes, they’re still together. They live in Australia now, just outside Melbourne. My brother emigrated and when he had children, my parents decided to move out there, too. They’re close to their grandchildren and they’re happy. Their house is on a cliff, looking over the sea. You’ll love it.’
I got a jump of excitement in my stomach. He thought we had a future, one that reckoned in parents, and Australia.
My internal monologue faded out again as he pressed me down under him. It was a lovely form of abandonment, to concentrate on his body. But it was also the only thing that could stem my guilt about Lucas, the base flavour I could taste in everything now. Only in bed with Greg could I shake off entirely the feeling that stalked me through the course of each day, that back at Stoneborough Lucas would be paying in misery for my happiness.
I was coming into the New Forest now. Even by its own standards it looked beautiful that morning. I had once heard it described as being like a cathedral, a monument to God on earth, and there was something holy about its goodness. It was just before noon as I drove the long straight road that cleaved it in two. The trees wore their new season’s leaves, bright green and highlighted by the rays of sun streaming through them. A pair of ponies cropped the soft grass by the stream at the Balmer Lodge Hotel. The sight of it all lifted my spirits. In the past few days I had begun to breathe more easily. I realised that since the beginning of the year I had felt something like constant claustrophobia, a sense of being surrounded on all sides. There was my job, the strange suffocating atmosphere at Stoneborough and my relationship with Lucas, which on some deep level I think I had always known was wrong. Now despite the hurt of my exclusion by the others, there was at least oxygen again.
By the time I reached their house, an old farm-worker’s cottage on the outskirts of Lyndhurst, I was ready to see my parents. I was prepared for their disappointment about Lucas: my new secret happiness with Greg, however tentative still, was an inoculation against it.
Dad heard my car pull up and came round through the side gate from the garden to greet me. I got out of the car and locked the door. He put his arm round my shoulder and squeezed. ‘Hello, my darling,’ he said, kissing my cheek, his neat grey beard bristling against it. His broad face was smiling, his eyes wide as an owl’s. He was in his usual weekend uniform for the spring/summer season, a pair of tired-out corduroy trousers and a short-sleeved cotton shirt with a breast pocket. ‘You look well,’ he said, looking me over and giving my shoulder another squeeze. ‘You leave it too long between visits. We like to see you, your mother and I.’
I’d never believed the story that once one had left it one’s childhood home started to get smaller. It was undeniably true, though. I had begun to notice the shrinkage when I went away to university but now, perhaps also suffering from comparison to Stoneborough, the house really did look tiny. It was hard to believe that there could be three bedrooms behind that semidetached doll’s-house faqade. It had been built in the thirties out of red brick and years ago my parents had put in a wisteria, which now covered the front.
‘Your mother is planting out her runner beans,’ Dad said. ‘We’ll stop her now and have some coffee.’
She was down at the far end of the thirty-foot garden, kneeling at the base of a bamboo cane and pressing earth around a seedling. She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear us approaching over the grass. We gave her a slight shock and, as she looked up, I realised suddenly that she was getting older. No one thing about her had changed since Christmas, her hair was no greyer, her face no more lined, but she seemed somehow a less definite version of herself, her colours infinitesimally muted. Her scent as she embraced me, however, was the same as it always had been, Rive Gauche cut with the smell of the garden: rich earth and oak leaves.
After coffee Mum walked me around and showed me the new plants she was trying. She was an excellent teacher and had many educational successes, lots of whom still came to visit her when they were back in the area, but to me it seemed that she considered the garden, modest in size as it was, her greatest achievement. She took particular pride in the fact that, for most of our childhood summers, my brothers and I had eaten food she had grown. She crouched now to train a sweet pea up to the next rung on its trellis. ‘I’m sorry about the other day, Jo,’ she said, still concentrating on the plant. ‘It was a bit insensitive of us. I think Dad and I always thought that you and Lucas would marry. It was a shock.’
‘Don’t worry, Mum. I was being too touchy. It just felt like the whole world was against me that day.’
‘Have you heard from him?’
‘No. He’s furious with me.’
‘But surely you haven’t done anything wrong? He can’t be angry if it’s just that you don’t think it would work between you.’
‘Well, you know what it’s like. People aren’t exactly rational when it comes to this sort of thing,’ I said, hating the lie and feeling the tide of guilt rise again.
‘Hmm. Well, it’s a shame but I hope you’ll meet the right person soon. It can make you very happy, marriage. Your father and I have enjoyed each other’s company.’
It was only very lately that my views on the subject of marriage had calmed. Until perhaps as recently as a year earlier, I reacted badly to my mother talking about it. I don’t know, when I had grown up with such a good model in front of my eyes, why I had thought of it as a bourgeois trap, something that would hold me back. Mum had always said that, when I met the right person, I wouldn’t be chafing to be free all the time and I could see now that perhaps she was right.
She refused my offer of help with the planting out and so I went inside to peel the vegetables for lunch. The kitchen window was open and the water drummed tunefully into the stainless-steel sink. I was glad I had come. It was good to see them both and, in an odd way, being away from Greg for the day gave me time to enjoy thinking about him.
After ten minutes or so, my father came into the kitchen and started to chop the peeled potatoes. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to ask about Lucas. I want to know how things are going at the office.’
‘Good, actually,’ I said, relieved. ‘I’ve got something to show you.’ I dried my hands and fetched my bag. In it was a piece I’d done about a local teenager who had been singled out for prosecution by a major record label for downloading music illegally. The story had been picked up by The Times and I’d had a call from an editor there. I’d enjoyed talking to her and at the end of the conversation she’d asked whether I would be interested in any freelance shiftwork at weekends. I’d been so excited when I hung up that I had had to go down the corridor and do a private dance in the stairwell of the fire escape. Greg had bought an especially nice bottle of wine for us to celebrate with.
Dad was delighted, too. ‘Well done, Jo. That’s brilliant news. Give it your all. You never know, it might be the start of something exciting.’
‘She mentioned that someone on her desk was about to go on maternity leave. It might be a sort of trial.’
Lunch was late so that we could make the most of the warmth of the afternoon. We sat out at the table and read the newspapers and caught up on each other’s news. Both my parents had bright A-level years and they were enjoying the teaching and expecting good results. The smell of roasting beef wound its way out of the kitchen window and made me hungry.
At four, just as we were eating, I heard my phone buzz in my handbag. I ignored it but had forgotten that, unless one picked up texts immediately, the phone would continue to pip periodically. After it did so for the third time, Dad asked why I didn’t just answer it.
The message was from Greg. ‘I can’t wait to kiss you again,’ it read. I couldn’t help an enormous smile. My mother, keenly perceptive as ever, saw it.
‘Oh Jo, you’ve met someone else.’
I couldn’t deny it. It was bad enough not to have told her already. Part of me had been bursting with the news all day. I wished I could communicate to her what it felt like to go to sleep with his arms around me, although that was a conversation I could never have with my parents. I wanted to talk about it with them but I didn’t want to diminish it, and I knew that they would disapprove and judge that I had traded everything with Lucas for something lesser, on foundations far less secure. Someone I had hardly known. And I could never tell them that Greg had been with Rachel.
‘Does Lucas know?’ she asked. ‘Poor thing. So soon after Claire died, and his uncle.’
‘Please don’t give me a hard time. I didn’t plan this.’ I heard my voice rising.
‘I’m surprised at you,’ said Dad. ‘For years you’ve talked about Lucas and now you’ve thrown him over.’
‘You don’t even know what’s going on with Lucas at the moment,’ I said. ‘But you’re happy to believe that the blame lies with me anyway. A lot of it does, perhaps most, but not all. So please don’t lecture me without the facts.’
‘Well, why don’t you tell us the facts?’ he asked.
I hesitated, torn between wanting to protect Lucas and wanting them to understand. ‘Lucas changed,’ I began. ‘When Patrick died and he got that house. To start with, I thought it was OK. He said he wasn’t going to let it change anything and that he would stay in his job, even though he had so much money he didn’t have to. It’s not just the country place; there was a flat in Hampstead, too, which he’s sold, and loads of art and investments and other things.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Well, you know he’s always wanted to write?’
Dad nodded. He’d had a long conversation about that with Lucas once.
‘Danny talked him into believing that he’d never be able to do it with a full-time job and so he resigned and now they’re both living in the country.’
‘Danny as well?’ asked my mother, surprised.
‘Neither of them have jobs, and Lucas wanted me to give up mine and go and live with them up there, too.’ From the look on my father’s face, I could see that he was beginning to understand. ‘I began to lose respect for him. I need someone who is doing stuff. I’m not explaining this very well.’
‘Actually I do see, Jo,’ said my mother. ‘It’s very unstructured.’
‘I need someone who’s living in the real world. And then there’s Danny.’
‘Yes, what is Danny supposed to be doing, if Lucas is writing?’ she asked.
‘Working on ideas for films, he says, but really he’s not doing anything. He’s just taking advantage.’
‘And what happened to his job? He was doing so well, wasn’t he?’
‘He was sacked.’ I didn’t tell her why.
Mum shook her head. ‘Well, he won’t be able to do that for long. He’s thirty this year, isn’t he? It’s OK to drift along in your twenties but that won’t look good when he’s thirty-five. He’s not going to be in any position to offer a girl anything, is he?’
The idea of Danny offering anyone anything, rather than taking it, made me want to laugh.
‘And what about Martha? Is she seeing anyone?’
‘Mum, for God’s sake, it’s not the only thing worth doing, you know.’
‘What does your new man do?’ said Dad quickly.
I relaxed, liking that description. ‘He’s a software designer.’
My parents weren’t really ready to talk about Greg but I was relieved to have been able to make them understand about Lucas a little. I didn’t tell them about what had happened on that final night and I was glad that I didn’t have to. I was beginning to see that in a strange way I was grateful to Lucas for his violent outburst. It shared the bad behaviour a little, evened the balance sheet between us.
I stayed until the light began to fade. In the end, having been slightly apprehensive about going home, I found I was reluctant to leave. I often felt a little homesick as I drove away from my parents’ house and that night the feeling was stronger than usual. It was good to have cleared the air with them. I was still faintly exasperated by my mother’s seeming determination to push us all into fully paid-up adulthood but in Danny’s case at least I could see what she was driving at. I wondered where he did think his life was going.
As I neared London, however, my ease of spirit began to ebb away. I was going to my house for the first time since Friday. As I parked up outside, I could see that the sitting-room lights were on. Martha was already back. I let myself in as quietly as possible and went straight to my room.
The following Thursday Greg got tickets for a new band that he thought I might like. The gig was at a small underground club just off Charing Cross Road and I took the bus up from Putney to meet him there. I’d changed into jeans and my new heels before leaving the office and as I walked down the street I became aware that I was swinging my hips with every step as if I were keeping a hula hoop going. I felt alive in a way that I didn’t ever remember feeling before. Everything was suddenly so vivid: the motion of my body as I swung along the pavement, the bounce of my bag against my hip, the rise of the down on my arms against the light evening breeze, the feeling of my hair against my back where my top revealed bare skin. I could feel my breasts touching the inside of the material of it and it was like being very gently stroked. I had a new sense of physical awareness, a sudden and amazing hypersensitivity, both to my own body and to everything around me. The air smelt of city – car fumes and dust and cigarettes and the bodies of people still on the home commute – and I loved it. I smiled at a guy with thick dreadlocks smoking a rollie outside the guitar shop and he smiled back and gave a low wolf whistle as I went by. Instead of feeling embarrassed as I would have in the past, I laughed and exaggerated the swing still further. ‘Hey, beautiful girl,’ he called after me and although I knew it wasn’t true, it felt it, just for a minute.
I could see Greg waiting for me on the corner of Manette Street, attracting surreptitious looks from the girls passing him on their way into the club, but I pretended that I hadn’t noticed him. He was watching me but I wanted to savour the feeling of his eyes on me a bit longer. It was like being undressed by him: I knew he was picturing how my body looked under my clothes and I wanted him to. It was he who made me feel like this: connected. In little more than a week, he had revealed an extra dimension to the world. It was technicolour all of a sudden, after years of black and white, and the change was the more extraordinary because it came after I’d cut myself off from so much that I’d thought essential to my happiness.
Tonight the band would have only a fraction of my attention: the rest would be taken up by my senses absorbing as much of Greg as they could, the heat from his body as he stood close to me, the feel of his hand in the small of my back and slipping into the pocket of my jeans, the smell of him. My ears would be listening to the music but the rest of my body would be marking time until we got back to Shepherd’s Bush and his bed again.