27.
Jess
They were a muted little group in the car on the way home. Nobody asked to play music, and there was little conversation. Even the dog no longer whined, as if he had accepted that this car was now his home. The whole time Jess had planned the trip, through the strange, frenetic few days of travelling, she had imagined no further than getting Tanzie to the Olympiad. She would get her there, she would sit the test, and everything would be okay. She hadn’t given a thought to the possibility that the entire trip might take three days longer than she had planned or that she would blow the budget in the process. She’d never once considered that they might need to stay somewhere on the way home. Or that she would be left with precisely £13.81 in cash to her name and a bank card that she was too frightened to feed into a cashpoint in case it didn’t come back.
Jess mentioned none of this to Ed. He was silent, his gaze trained on the road ahead, perhaps lost in thoughts of his father. Nicky, behind him, tapped away on Ed’s laptop, ear-buds wedged into his ears, his brow furrowed with concentration. Jess suspected there was some weird gadget of Ed’s that allowed him access to the Internet. She was so grateful that he was talking and eating and sleeping that she didn’t query it. Tanzie was silent, her hand resting on Norman’s great head, her eyes fixed on the speeding landscape through the window. Whenever Jess asked her if she was okay, she would simply nod.
None of it seemed to matter as much as it should. Because something fundamental had shifted in her.
Ed. Jess repeated his name silently in her head until it ceased to have any real meaning. She sat inches from this man, who, she now understood, was quite simply the greatest man she had ever known. She was only surprised that nobody else seemed to have realized it. When he smiled, Jess couldn’t help smiling. When his face stilled in sadness, something inside her broke a little. She watched him with her children, the easy way in which he showed Nicky some feature on his computer, the serious manner in which he considered some passing comment of Tanzie’s – the kind of comment that would have caused Marty to roll his eyes to Heaven – and she wished he had been in their lives long ago. When they were alone and he held her close to him, his palm resting with a hint of possession on Jess’s thigh, his breath soft in her ear, she felt with a quiet certainty that it would all be okay. It wasn’t that Ed would make it okay – he had his own problems to deal with – but that somehow the sum of them added up to something better. They would make it okay. He was the first person Jess had ever met with whom she understood the saying: They were just really good together.
She was afraid to ask him what any of this meant. She was afraid that she had rattled on for so long about how she didn’t need anyone, how she was quite self-sufficient, thank you, and how, what with her work and the two kids and the dog, there was no room for anyone else in her life, that he might have taken her seriously.
Because she wanted Ed Nicholls. She wanted to wake up with him, to drink with him, to feed him toast from sticky fingers. She wanted to wrap her legs around him in the dark and feel him inside her, to buck against him as he held her. She wanted the sweat and the pull and the solidity of him, his mouth on hers, his eyes on hers. They drove and she recalled the previous two nights in hot, dreamy fragments, his hands, his mouth, the way he had to stifle her as she came so that they wouldn’t wake the children, and it was all she could do not to reach across and bury her face in his neck, to slide her hands up the back of his T-shirt for the sheer pleasure of feeling his skin against hers.
She had spent so long thinking only about the children, about work and bills and money. Now her head was full of him. When he turned to her she blushed. When he said her name she heard it as a murmur, spoken in the dark. When he handed her a coffee the brief touch of his fingers sent an electric pulse fizzing through her. She liked it when she felt his eyes settle on her, something distant in his gaze, and she wondered what he was thinking.
Jess had no idea how to communicate any of this to him. She had been so young when she met Marty, and apart from one night in the Feathers with Liam Stubbs’s hands up her shirt, she had never had even the beginnings of a relationship with anyone else since.
Jess Thomas had not been on an actual date since school. It made her sound ridiculous, even to herself. She just wanted to show him.
She ached with it.
‘We’ll keep going to Nottingham, if you guys are all okay,’ he said, turning to look at her. He still had the faintest bruise on the side of his nose. ‘We’ll pitch up somewhere late. That way we’ll make it home in one run on Thursday.’
And then what? Jess wanted to ask. But she put her feet up on the dashboard, and said, ‘Sounds good.’
They stopped for lunch at a service station. The children had given up asking if there was any chance they could eat anything but sandwiches, and now eyed the fast-food joints and upmarket coffee shops with something close to indifference. They unfolded themselves, and paused to stretch.
‘How about sausage rolls?’ said Ed, pointing towards a concession. ‘Coffee and hot sausage rolls. Or Cornish pasties. My treat. Come on.’
Jess looked at him.
‘I need some trash food. Some calorific greasy junk. Who wants some greasy carbohydrate, kids?’ He motioned to Jess. ‘Come on, you food Nazi. We’ll eat some fruit afterwards.’
‘You’re not afraid? After that kebab?’
His hand was above his brow, shielding his eyes from the sun so that he could see her better. ‘I’ve decided I like living dangerously.’
He had come to her the previous night, after Nicky, who had been tapping silently away at Ed’s laptop in the corner of the room, had finally gone to bed. She had felt like a teenager sitting there on the other sofa to him, pretending to watch the television, waiting for everyone else to go to bed just so she could touch him. But when Nicky finally sloped off, Ed had opened up the laptop rather than move straight to her.
‘What’s he doing?’ she had said, as Ed peered at the screen.
‘Creative writing,’ he said.
‘Not gaming? No guns? No explosions?’
‘Nothing.’
‘He sleeps,’ she had whispered. ‘He has slept every night we’ve been away. Without a spliff.’
‘Good for him. I feel like I haven’t slept for several years.’
He seemed to have aged a decade in the short time they had been away. Jess wondered if she should apologize, if spending too much time with her chaotic little family would do that to any man. She remembered what Chelsea had said about her chances of having any kind of love life. And then, as she sat, suddenly unsure what to do next, he had reached out a hand to her and pulled her into him. ‘So,’ he had said softly, ‘Jessica Rae Thomas. Are you going to let me get some sleep tonight?’
She studied his lower lip, absorbing the feel of his hand on her hip. Feeling suddenly joyous. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Excellent answer.’
She thought they might have had three hours. It was hard to tell.
Now they changed direction, walking away from the mini-mart, weaving their way through clumps of disgruntled travellers looking for cashpoint machines or overcrowded toilets. Jess tried not to look as delighted as she felt at the thought of not making another round of sandwiches. She could smell the buttery pastry of the hot pies from yards away.
The children, clutching a handful of notes and Ed’s instructions, disappeared into the long queue inside the shop. He walked towards her, so that they were shielded from them by the crowds of people.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just looking.’ Every time he stood close to her Jess felt like she was a few degrees warmer than she should have been.
‘Looking?’
‘I find it impossible being close to you.’ His lips were inches from her ear, his voice a low rumble through her skin.
Jess felt her skin prickle. ‘What?’
‘I just imagine myself doing filthy things to you. Pretty much the whole time. Completely inappropriate things. Disgraceful things.’
He took hold of the front of her jeans and pulled her to him. A bolt of such heat went through her that she was amazed nobody could see it. Jess drew back a little, craning her neck to make sure they were out of sight. ‘That’s what you were thinking about? While you were driving? All that time while you weren’t speaking?’
‘Yup.’ He glanced behind her towards the shop. ‘Well, that and food.’
‘My two favourite things, right there.’
His fingers traced the bare skin under her top. Her stomach tensed pleasurably. Her legs had become oddly weak. She had never wanted Marty like she wanted Ed.
‘Apart from sandwiches.’
‘Let’s not talk about sandwiches. Ever again.’
And then he placed the flat of his hand on the small of her back, so that they were as close as they could decently be. ‘I know I shouldn’t be,’ he murmured, ‘but I woke up really happy.’ His face scanned hers. ‘I mean, like, really, stupidly happy. Like even though my whole life is a complete disaster, I just … I feel okay. I look at you, and I feel okay. I feel like we’re going to get through this.’
A great fat lump had risen in her throat. ‘Me too,’ she whispered.
He squinted against the sun, trying to gauge her expression. ‘So I’m not … just a horse?’
‘You are so not a horse. Well. In the nicest way I could say that you were –’
He dropped his head and kissed her. He kissed her and it was a kiss of utter certainty, the kind of kiss during which monarchs die and whole continents fall without you even noticing. When Jess extricated herself it was only because she didn’t want the children to see her lose the ability to stand. Her finger traced his lips, just for the pleasure of touching them, and he grinned.
‘They’re coming,’ he said.
Jess found herself staring at him goofily.
‘Trouble.’ He glanced back at her as they approached, bearing their paper bags aloft. ‘That’s what my dad said.’
‘Like you hadn’t worked that one out by yourself.’ Her lips tingled. Her thoughts swam sweet and sticky, like honey. Jess felt like he was imprinted all over her. She held back, watching Ed chat to Nicky, the opening of paper bags as Nicky revealed what they’d chosen, waiting for the colour on her cheeks to fade. She felt the sun on her skin, heard birdsong over people talking, revving cars, smelt petrol fumes and cheap food, and the words echoed through her head, unbidden: this is what happiness feels like.
They set off slowly back to the car, faces already buried in paper bags. Jess watched her daughter walking a few paces ahead, her skinny legs trailing behind the others and it was then that she noticed something was missing.
‘Tanze? Where are your maths books?’
She didn’t turn around. ‘I left them at Dad’s.’
‘Oh. Do you want me to call him?’ She fumbled in her bag for her mobile phone. ‘I’m sure I can get him to pop them straight in the post. They’ll probably arrive back before we do.’
‘No,’ she said. She inclined her head slightly towards her, but not quite meeting Jess’s eye. ‘Thank you.’
Nicky stopped, as he reached the car. His gaze slid to Jess and back to his sister. And something heavy settled in her stomach.
By the time they reached their final overnight stop it was almost nine o’clock and they were drooping. The children, who had been snacking on biscuits and sweets for most of the last leg of the journey, were exhausted and cranky, and headed straight upstairs to examine the sleeping arrangements. Ed carried the bags and Tanzie tugged the dog behind her.
The hotel was vast and white and expensive-looking, the kind of place Mrs Ritter might have shown Jess on her camera-phone and she and Nathalie would have sighed about afterwards. Ed had booked it over the phone and when Jess had started to protest about the cost there was a slight edge to his voice: ‘We’re all tired, Jess. And my next bed may be at Her Majesty’s Pleasure. Let’s just stay somewhere nice tonight, okay?’
Three interlocking rooms, in a corridor that seemed to double as an annex to the main hotel. ‘My own room.’ Nicky sighed with relief as he unlocked number twenty-three. He lowered his voice as Jess pushed open the door. ‘I love her and everything, but you have no idea how much the Titch snores.’
‘Norman will like this,’ said Tanzie, as Jess opened the door to room twenty-four. The dog, as if in agreement, immediately flopped down at the side of the bed. ‘I don’t mind sharing with Nicky, Mum, but he really does snore badly.’
Neither of them seemed to question where Jess would be sleeping. She couldn’t work out if they knew and didn’t mind, or whether they just assumed either she or Ed was still sleeping in the car.
Nicky borrowed Ed’s laptop. Tanzie worked out how to operate the remote control for her television, and said she would watch one programme then go to sleep. She wouldn’t talk about the missing maths books. She actually said, ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ Jess didn’t think Tanzie had ever said those words to her.
‘Just because something doesn’t work out once, sweetheart, doesn’t mean you can’t try again,’ she said, laying out Tanzie’s pyjamas on her bed.
Tanzie’s expression seemed to contain a knowledge that hadn’t been there before. And her words broke Jess’s heart. ‘I think it’s best if I just work with what we’ve got, Mum.’
‘What do I do?’
‘Nothing. She’s just had enough for now. You can’t blame her.’ Ed dropped the bags in the corner of the room. Jess sat on the side of the huge bed, trying to ignore her throbbing foot.
‘But this isn’t like her. She loves maths. Always has. And now she’s acting like she doesn’t want anything to do with it.’
‘It’s been two days, Jess. She’s had a massive upheaval. Just … let her be. She’ll work it out.’
‘You’re so sure.’
‘They’re smart kids.’ He walked over to the switch and turned the lights down, gazing up at them until he’d got it dark enough. ‘Like their mother. But just because you bounce back like a rubber ball, it doesn’t mean they always will.’
She looked at him.
‘That’s not a criticism. I’m just saying that it’s been a pretty intense week. I think if you give her some time to decompress, she’ll be okay. She is who she is. I can’t see that changing.’
He pulled his T-shirt over his head in a fluid motion and dropped it onto a chair. Her thoughts muddled immediately. Jess couldn’t see his bare torso without wanting to touch it. A little too thick around the middle to be perfect, perhaps. But that made it somehow more beautiful.
‘How did you get so wise?’ she said, gazing at him.
‘Dunno. I guess it rubbed off.’ He took two steps towards her, and then he knelt down and pulled off her flip-flops, removing the one on her injured foot with extra care. ‘How’s it feeling?’
‘Sore. But fine.’
He reached for her top. He unzipped it slowly and without asking, his eyes fixed on the skin it exposed. He seemed almost distant then, as if his thoughts were on her, yet miles away. The zip caught near the end, and she took it from him gently, her hands over his, unhitching the two sides so that he could peel it from her shoulders. He stood there for a moment, just gazing at her.
He kissed her then, and said softly, ‘I don’t think we should think about it any more.’ He kissed her shoulder. ‘I think we shouldn’t think full stop.’ He kissed her neck. ‘It’s our last night on the road and there’s nothing much we can do about anything. For tonight at least.’
He reached for her belt, undid it, then her jeans, his fingers measured and precise. She watched them and her heart began to pulse in her ears.
‘It’s time, Jessica Rae Thomas, that someone looked after you.’
Edward Nicholls washed her hair, his legs around her waist, as she lay back against him in the oversized bath. He rinsed it gently, smoothing it and wiping her eyes with a facecloth to stop shampoo getting into them. She went to do it herself, but he shushed her. Nobody had ever washed her hair, outside a hairdresser’s. It made her feel vulnerable and oddly emotional. When he was done, he lay in the steaming, scented water with his arms wrapped around her and kissed the tips of her ears. And then, as if some part of them agreed jointly that this had been quite enough romantic stuff, thank you, she felt him rise under her and swivelled, lowered herself onto him, and they fucked until the water sluiced out of the bath, and she couldn’t work out whether the pain of her foot was greater than her need to feel him inside her.
Some time later, they lay half submerged, legs entwined. And they started to laugh. Because it was a cliché to fuck in a shower but it was sort of ridiculous to do it in a bath, and it was even more ridiculous to be in this much trouble and yet this happy. Jess twisted so that she lay along the length of him, and draped her arms around his neck and pressed her wet chest to his, and she felt with utter certainty that she would never be as close to another human being again. God, I love you, she told him silently. And then so that she didn’t let those words burst, unbidden, from her mouth, she smothered him with kisses. She held his face in her hands and she kissed his jaw and his poor bruised temple, and his lips, and she felt his arms holding her to him and told herself that whatever happened she would always remember how this felt.
He brought his hand down over his face, wiping the moisture from it. He looked suddenly serious. ‘Do you think this is a bubble?’
‘Um, there’s lots of bubbles. It’s a –’
‘No. This. A bubble. We’re on this weird journey, where the normal rules don’t apply. Real life doesn’t apply. This whole trip has been … like time out of real life.’
She noticed that the water was pooling on the bathroom floor.
‘Don’t look at that. Talk to me.’
She dropped her lips to his collarbone, thinking. ‘Well,’ she said, lifting her head again, ‘in a little over five days, we’ve dealt with illness, distraught children, sick relatives, unexpected acts of violence, nearly broken feet, police and car accidents. I’d say that was quite enough real life for anyone.’
‘I like your thinking.’
‘I like your everything.’
‘We seem to spend a lot of time talking rubbish to each other.’
‘Well, I like that too.’
The water had started to cool. She wriggled out of his arms, and stood, reaching for the heated towel rail. She handed him a warm towel, wrapping one around herself. Oh, the utter sensual pleasure of fluffy hotel towels. He stood, rubbing at his hair vigorously with one hand.
She wondered, briefly, whether Ed was so used to fluffy hotel towels that he didn’t even notice. She watched him and felt suddenly bone-weary. She brushed her teeth, switched off the bathroom light, and when she turned back he was already in the enormous hotel bed, holding back the covers to allow her in. He flicked off the bedside lamp and she lay there beside him in the dark, feeling his damp skin against her own, wondering what it would be like to have this every night. To have a man all to herself for ever.
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen to me, Jess,’ he said, into the dark, as if he could hear her thoughts. His voice was a warning.
‘You’ll be okay.’
‘Seriously. You can’t do your optimism tricks on this one. Whatever happens, I’m probably going to lose everything.’
‘So? That’s my default position.’
‘But I might have to go away.’
‘You won’t.’
‘I might, Jess.’ His voice was uncomfortably firm.
And she spoke before she knew what she was saying. ‘Then I’ll wait,’ she said.
She felt his head tilt towards her, a question. ‘I’ll wait for you. If you want me to.’
He took three calls on the final leg home, all on hands-free. His lawyer, a man with an accent so grand he should have been announcing the arrival of the Royal Family at dinner, told him he was due at the police station the following Thursday. No, nothing had changed. Yes, said Ed, he understood what was happening. And, yes, he had spoken to his family. The way he said it made her stomach tense. She couldn’t help herself afterwards. She reached over and took his hand. When he squeezed it back he didn’t look at her.
His sister rang to say his dad had had a better night. They had a long conversation about some insurance bonds that his father had been concerned about, some keys that were missing from a filing cabinet, and what Gemma had had for lunch. Nobody talked about dying. She said to say hello and Jess shouted hello back and felt a bit self-conscious and a bit pleased at the same time.
After lunch he took a call from a man called Lewis, and they discussed market values and percentages and the state of the mortgage market. It took Jess a while to realize he was talking about Beachfront.
‘Time to sell,’ he said, when he rang off. ‘Still. Like you said, at least I have assets to dispose of.’
‘What’s it all going to cost you? The prosecution?’
‘Oh. Nobody’s saying. But reading between the lines, I think the answer is “most of it”.’
She couldn’t work out if he was more upset than he was letting on.
He tried to call someone else, but the answer phone kicked in. ‘It’s Ronan here. Leave a message.’ He hung up without saying anything.
With every mile, real life moved steadily towards them like an encroaching tide, cold, unstoppable. Jess thought about the fact that there was a whole swathe of his life she knew nothing about, and tried not to think about bubbles.
They finally arrived back shortly after four. As the Audi pulled into the street the rain had eased to a fine drizzle, the road looked oily with damp, the sprawling Danehall estate struggling to show spring promise. There was the little house, somehow smaller and scruffier than Jess remembered it and, oddly, like something that had nothing to do with her. Ed pulled up outside, and she peered out of the window at the peeling paintwork on the upstairs windows that Marty had never got round to painting because he said, really, you had to do a proper job, sanding it first and taking off the old paint and using filler to plug the gaps, and he had always been either too busy or too tired to do any of it. Just for a moment, she felt a wave of depression wash over her at the thought of all the problems that had been sitting there waiting for them on their return. And all the greater ones that she had created in her absence. And then she looked at Ed, who was helping Tanzie with her bag, and laughing at something Nicky said, leaning over to hear him better, and it passed.
He had stopped at a DIY superstore about an hour out of town – his detour – emerging with a great box of stuff that he had to wrestle into the back alongside their bags. It was possible he needed to tidy his house before he sold it. Jess couldn’t think what you would do to that house to make it any nicer.
He dropped the last of the bags by the front door and stood there, holding the cardboard box. The children had disappeared immediately to their rooms, like creatures in some sort of homing experiment. Jess felt embarrassed then by the cluttered little house, the woodchip wallpaper, the long row of battered paperbacks that snaked along the hall.
‘I’m going back to my dad’s tomorrow.’
A reflexive twinge at the thought of his absence. ‘Good. That’s good.’
‘Just for a few days. Until the police thing. But I thought I’d put these up first.’
Jess looked down at the boxes.
‘Security camera and motion-activated light. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of hours.’
‘You bought that for us?’
‘Nicky got beaten up. Tanzie plainly doesn’t feel safe. I thought it would make you all feel better. You know … if I’m not here.’
She stared at the box, at what it meant. She felt suddenly overwhelmed by the fact that this man had considered these things and wanted to protect them. She spoke before she knew what she wanted to say. ‘You – you don’t have to do that,’ she stammered. ‘I’m good at DIY. I’ll do it.’
‘On a ladder. With a busted foot.’ He raised an eyebrow. ‘You know, Jessica Rae Thomas, at some point you’re going to have to let someone help you.’
‘At some point you’re going to have to stop calling me Jessica Rae Thomas.’
‘I can’t help it. I like it.’
She liked it too. ‘Well, what shall I do, then?’
‘Sit down. Stay still. Put your injured foot up. And then afterwards I’ll walk into town with Nicky and we’ll buy a disgustingly unhealthy waste-of-money takeaway because it might be the last one I get for a while. And then we’ll sit here and eat it and afterwards you and I will lie around gazing in awe at the size of each other’s stomachs.’
‘Oh, my God, I love it when you talk dirty.’
So she sat. Doing nothing. On her own sofa. And Tanzie came and sat with her for a while and Ed went up a ladder outside and waved the drill at her through the window and pretended that he was going to fall off until it made her anxious. ‘I’ve been in two different hospitals in eight days,’ she yelled at him through the window, crossly. ‘I do not want to make it a third.’ And then, because she was not very good at sitting still, she sorted some dirty washing and put a load in, but after that she sat down again and just let everyone else move because she had to admit that resting her foot was a lot less painful than trying to do things on it.
And there was something so good about having everyone just potter around her, listening to the sound of Ed’s drill and catching his eye through the window as he attached the camera and called at her to come, come and look. She couldn’t remember the last time someone had done something to the house and it hadn’t been her. ‘Is that okay?’
She limped outside to see him. He stood back on the garden path, gazing up at the front of the house. ‘I figured if I put it there it’ll catch anyone who comes not just in your front garden but who hangs around outside. It’s got a convex lens, see?’ She tried to look interested. She was wondering whether once the children had gone to bed she could persuade him to stay over.
‘And often, with these sorts of things, you find that just having a camera there is a deterrent.’
Would it really be that bad? He could always sneak out before they woke up. But, then, who were they really kidding? Nicky and Tanzie must have guessed something was going on, surely.
‘Jess?’
He was standing in front of her.
‘Mm?’
‘All I have to do is drill a hole there, and feed the wires in through that wall. Hopefully I can put a little junction just inside and it should be fairly simple to connect it all up.’
He wore the satisfied look that men assume when in possession of power tools. He patted his pocket, checking for screws, then looked at her carefully. ‘Were you listening to a single thing I’ve said?’
Jess grinned at him guiltily.
‘Oh, you’re incorrigible,’ he said, after a minute. ‘Honestly.’
Glancing around to make sure nobody was looking, he hooked his arm gently around her neck, pulled her close and kissed her. His chin was thick with stubble. ‘Now let me get on. Undistracted. Go and dig out that takeaway menu.’
Jess limped, grinning, into the kitchen, and began rootling through the drawers. She couldn’t remember the last time she had ordered a takeaway. She was pretty sure none of the menus were up to date. Ed went upstairs to connect up the wiring. He shouted down that he was going to need to move some furniture to get at the skirting.
‘Fine by me,’ she yelled back. She heard the rumbling, thunderous sound of large things being dragged around the floor above her head, as he tried to access the electricity, and marvelled again that somebody other than her was going to do it.
And then she lay back on the sofa, put a fresh bag of ice on her foot, and started going through the fistful of old menus that she had uncovered in the tea-towel drawer, unpicking the pages of those splashed with sauce, or yellowed with age, weeding out the restaurants that were miles away, or long closed. She was pretty sure the Chinese didn’t exist any more. Some business with environmental health. The pizza place was unreliable. The curry-house menu looked pretty standard, but she couldn’t shake the thought of that curly little hair in Nathalie’s Jalfrezi. Still, chicken balti. Pilau rice. Poppadums. She thought of what he’d said about the two of them, side by side, gazing in awe at each other’s stomachs. And then she forgot the curry and just thought about his naked stomach.
She was so distracted that she didn’t hear his footsteps as he came slowly down the stairs. ‘Jess?’
‘I think this one will do it.’ She held up the menu. ‘I’ve decided a hair of unknown provenance is a small price to pay for a decent jal –’
It was then that she saw his expression. And what he held, disbelieving, in his hand.
‘Jess?’ he said, and his voice sounded as if it belonged to someone else. ‘Why would my security pass be in your sock drawer?’