JEN
What would I do without Bex? I can’t believe that I doubted her belief in me. But when I was standing in Laurence’s kitchen and she told me that she didn’t think the mystery jogger was Laurence I felt like I was losing myself. It’s an odd sensation, almost as if everything is melting away, like being trapped in one of those surreal paintings by Salvador Dalí.
At that moment I was back in Laurence’s kitchen’s again, but it was summer. The bi-fold doors were open to the garden, and a warm breeze drifted inside. Laurence had cooked something from Ottolenghi, laid the table, lit a candle, opened a bottle of rosé. It should have been the setting for a perfect romantic evening. But it was far from that. It was a Saturday, the day after I’d been sacked. I’d confessed everything to Bex, but had said nothing to Laurence.
‘Come and sit down,’ he said, as I stepped into the kitchen. ‘Supper’s nearly ready. I’ve got some wine, but you may not want any after last night.’
‘Or it might be just the thing I need to perk me up,’ I said, pouring myself a large glass and flashing him a false smile. ‘How was your lunch?’
He talked about his friends from the practice – Chris, Peter, Zoe – and how they’d enjoyed the food at Trullo and then an exhibition about the Bauhaus. His mates were going to really miss him, he said, when he left to start up the new office. But Basel was only a hour or so away by plane, he’d be back and forth to London all the time. He had found us a nice Airbnb, but was looking forward to flat hunting with me.
I didn’t really listen. I kept rehearsing how best to tell Laurence about my job. About what I had done. But I couldn’t form the words. I had managed, eventually, to confess to Bex. But what would Laurence think of me when I told him the truth?
‘How much did you drink last night?’ he said, as he forked a piece of black bream into his mouth.
‘Too much,’ I said, gulping down some more rosé.
‘Perhaps you should take it easy on the wine,’ he said. ‘Actually, I was thinking we should both probably go on a detox for a while. What do you think?’
Laurence was an exercise nut, which meant that although he enjoyed the odd glass of wine, he wasn’t in the habit of drinking to excess. He had to be up early to go to the gym or in shape to do his regular evening run on the Heath. Nothing could interfere with that. If we opened a bottle, he would have a glass, and I would finish off the rest. So what he was really saying here was you need to stop drinking for a while, not me. I’d written about my fondness for alcohol in ‘Being Jen Hunter’. And under normal circumstances, this little row we were about to have would have made the perfect material. But now I no longer had a column.
‘I hope now that we’re moving to Switzerland you’re not going to go dull on me,’ I said.
Laurence didn’t respond, just cleared the plates. I hadn’t eaten much of the meal. The stuffing of paprika-flavoured pine nuts and rice that oozed out of the fish looked like something I’d seen splattered across the pavement outside our local lock-in. I reached for the bottle of rosé and emptied it into my glass. I knocked back the wine and went to the rack in the under-stairs cupboard.
‘What are you doing?’ he said, when he heard the rattle of the bottles.
‘Just opening a nice red,’ I said. ‘You said you’d bought some cheese, right?’
He didn’t respond. He laid the cheese from Neal’s Yard and some charcoal biscuits on a wooden board. As I went to pour him some wine, he put his hand over the top of the glass. I don’t know what possessed me – perhaps it was his sanctimonious expression that annoyed me – but instead of stopping, I continued to pour. The red liquid covered the top of his hand and cascaded down the side of his glass onto the walnut table, a table I knew he had bought from Matthew Hilton.
‘What the fuck are you playing at, Jen?’ he said, pulling his hand away. He jumped up to fetch a cloth to wipe himself. I suppose he must have thought I’d done it by accident, but when he turned back to face me he realised that I was still pouring the wine. A red puddle sat on the table, working its way into the expensive wood and dripping down onto the floor.
‘Jen – have you gone insane?’
He reached for my hand to stop me. But I managed to outmanoeuvre him and continued to pour from the bottle until every last drop had been emptied out.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ he shouted. ‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’
‘Have you thought whether I want to move to Switzerland?’ Despite writing in my column about my enthusiasm for a new life, I’d started to have some doubts about it.
‘I thought we’d talked about that,’ he said, as he began to mop up the red wine. ‘You said it would be good for your column. A change of scene. A new culture to write about and all that.’
He studied me and the empty bottle of wine that I was holding forth like some kind of ersatz trophy, trying to make sense of what had just happened.
‘But if that’s the case, if you didn’t want to move to Basel, what’s all this about?’ he asked, squeezing the wine-saturated cloth over a bucket. His hands were stained red now. ‘Talk to me, for God’s sake. You’re supposed to be the queen of the confessional column. Nothing’s “off limits”. You go where “no columnist has ever dared go before”. And there you sit, so pissed you’re barely able to talk.’
I knew that most of the time Laurence was an easygoing, good-natured man. But even he had his point of no return. And now he had reached it. I had pushed him towards it.
‘If we’re talking about feelings, have you ever given a moment’s thought to how I might feel?’ he continued. ‘After I’ve read about one of our conversations repeated verbatim in your column? Has that ever crossed your mind?’
I reached out for my own glass of wine, unable to meet his eye.
‘No, I guess it hasn’t, because you’re so self-involved, always on the lookout for a way to sell yourself and your life, always ready to betray a confidence for the sake of your tawdry column.’ The words came quickly and easily, as if he’d been waiting for an opportunity to express them. ‘No wonder you haven’t got any friends left. Well, let me tell you, if you carry on like this, you’ll find yourself without anyone at all.’
I finally roused myself to speak. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Isn’t it obvious what I mean?’ he asked. ‘Do I really have to spell it out to you?’
‘You said you didn’t mind me writing about you.’
‘I didn’t, to begin with,’ he said. ‘In fact, I found it flattering at first. But then, it became embarrassing.’
‘But I changed your name.’
‘All my friends and colleagues knew James was me,’ he said. ‘Why else do you think I put myself forward to lead the Basel office?’
I felt sick in my stomach.
‘I became a laughing stock in London,’ he continued. ‘A fucking joke. And all thanks to you and that stupid fucking column of yours, which was supposed to give readers a sense of the real you. Well, if this is what “Being Jen Hunter” looks like, I think I’ll take a pass, if it’s all very well with you.’
‘Laurence, don’t talk like that, you don’t mean that.’
‘Like what? You’re the one who has just ruined a table that cost the best part of four grand.’
‘So it’s about money, is that it? You could never deal with the fact that I’ve always earned just a tiny bit more than you.’ I still couldn’t bring myself to tell him that my only source of income had disappeared.
‘Jesus Christ, can’t you hear yourself?’ he said.
We fell silent, the air poisonous with rage, as Laurence continued to clean up my mess. After mopping up the wine, he started to try to get the stain out of the table, but as he did so some of the red liquid splattered onto his crisp white shirt.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ he shouted. He threw the cloth down onto the table and faced me, his eyes full of anger. ‘And don’t even think about writing about this. Don’t you fucking dare.’ He started to run through some of the things I had described in my column. ‘That time we had a row in an Italian restaurant because I accused you of flirting with the waiter. Oh yes, that was just great, to read about myself being portrayed as some kind of Neanderthal. I also really appreciated the one in which you talked about the feelings I had towards my mother and how I never forgave her for leaving my father. Yes, I know both my parents were dead at that point, but there was still a lot of explaining to do when it came to my two sisters. But my favourite – the column where you really excelled yourself – was when you described, in minute detail, my penis. Yes, that was a real classic. All my friends loved that one. And real, groundbreaking journalism, I must say.’ His voice was rich with sarcasm. ‘You must be very proud of yourself.’
It was this last line that broke me.