Chapter Eighteen
It wasn’t a date. Harriet had made that very clear to her children, who were rather nonplussed about the whole thing, and to Ellie, who was watching them at her house while she went to Tom’s for dinner and had looked both intrigued and smug when Harriet had told her where she was going. Harriet had even told Lady Stokeley on the drive into Oxford, when she’d asked if she had any plans this weekend. Harriet had blurted out about the dinner, and how it wasn’t a date, and Lady Stokeley had raised her thin eyebrows and quite eloquently said nothing.
Now it was seven o’clock on Friday evening and she was due at Tom’s in half an hour. What to wear? Harriet felt she needed to make a bit more effort than her usual skinny jeans-and-floaty-top combo, but definitely not too much. Would adding a chunky necklace and lipstick do?
“You’re spending a lot of time getting ready,” Mallory grumbled as she slouched into Harriet’s bedroom.
“Not really.” With effort, Harriet turned away from the mirror where she’d been scrutinizing her reflection. She hadn’t had her hair done in months, and she’d used to get it cut, styled, and highlighted every four to six weeks. Was she really that gray?
“So this isn’t a date,” Mallory said, bouncing on her bed. “What is it then, exactly?”
“Dinner with a friend.” Harriet reached for her lipstick.
“Dad wouldn’t like you having dinner alone with a guy.” Then maybe Dad shouldn’t have cozied up to his secretary.
“Dad and I are separated, Mallory. He doesn’t get a say in this.”
“And if you’re having dinner with someone else, then you’re probably going to get divorced, right?” Mallory lifted her chin, her bold look contradicting the telltale wobble of her lower lip.
With a sigh, Harriet put down her lipstick. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. Nothing’s been decided, and Dad and I still have a lot to work out. In any case, you seemed like you were pushing for me to go out with Tom. You left us alone in the examining room, didn’t you?”
Mallory looked away. “I wanted to see what would happen. I didn’t think anything actually would.”
Typical. “And nothing has,” Harriet assured her.
“Except that you’re going on a date.”
“Mallory.”
Twenty minutes later, Harriet managed to extricate herself from both children and puppy and was walking down the high street towards Tom’s flat above the surgery. The evening was mild, the sky turning lavender with shreds of silvery cloud, the village quiet and peaceful on a Friday evening in May.
Nerves jumped and writhed in her belly and started fluttering up her throat. This might not have been a date, but it felt like one—too much for her peace of mind. As much as she’d told herself she needed to move on, wanted to feel attractive and valued again, wanted to try something, all she felt now was sick.
With a hand that was not quite steady, Harriet knocked on the door of the surgery, and Tom opened it almost immediately. “I was waiting,” he explained at Harriet’s slightly startled look. “So I could take you upstairs. To my flat,” he clarified quickly, and Harriet gave a little laugh. She wasn’t the only one who was nervous.
Upstairs Tom’s flat was cluttered and cozy, with a living room with two squashy sofas and what looked like a hurried effort to appear tidy. Newspapers and books were stacked in haphazard piles and there were coffee rings on the low table between the sofas, but it was a homely and pleasant space, if clearly a bachelor’s pad.
“Something smells delicious,” Harriet said brightly.
She still felt nervous, every exchange sounding clumsy and awkward. Tom reached for her light coat and they had a bit of a tussle trying to get it off.
“It’s spaghetti bolognaise,” he said when he finally relieved her of her coat. “The only thing I can really make, I’m afraid.”
Richard was a good cook. Harriet had a sudden, piercing image of him making pancakes on Saturday morning when Mallory and William had been little. He’d worn her apron, which had looked ridiculous, and flipped the pancakes spectacularly high, making the children scream with laughter. But he’d been able to cook properly—when they’d been first married, he’d go to the Chinese market and get all sorts of exotic ingredients—lemongrass, fermented black beans, Sichuan peppercorns. He’d toss things into a wok willy-nilly and always come up with something delicious.
“That sounds lovely,” Harriet said, realizing the silence had gone on a second too long. “I’m always up for some pasta.” She sounded inane. She felt inane, and she knew she needed to loosen up.
“Wine?” Tom asked, and she nodded with relief.
“Yes, please.”
With a glass of wine in her hand and Tom occupied at the stove in his little galley kitchen, Harriet felt marginally better.
She wandered to the window overlooking the courtyards and tiny gardens backing onto the buildings on the high street. “So what made you choose to live in Wychwood-on-Lea?” she asked.
“I liked the look of the place,” Tom replied with a smile and a shrug. “I was driving through one day, on the way to my parents near Oxford, and I thought it looked quaint. The kind of place you’d see in a series on the telly, you know?”
“Pictured yourself as Dr. Doolittle?” Harriet teased, and he let out a little laugh.
“Something like that, I suppose. What about you?”
“Similar story, really. When I was expecting our third child we decided we should move out of London—that’s what everyone was doing—and we toured the area and liked the looks of Wychwood-on-Lea. Quaint without being too twee or tony.”
Tom arched an eyebrow. “You don’t like tony?”
“I didn’t want to be rubbing shoulders with celebrities or people who think they’re far more important than they are.” And yet she had, perhaps, without realizing it, become like one of those people.
She had an image of herself at the open house Christmas party she’d thrown a few years ago, watching everyone with narrowed eyes, assessing outfits, salaries, social status without even realize she was doing so.
“Is it too early in the evening to ask what happened?” Tom asked and Harriet refocused, startled.
“What happened…?”
“With your husband.” He glanced back down at the stove, intent on stirring the sauce.
Yes, it was too early. In the evening and in their friendship. It felt rude to say as much now and so Harriet stalled, taking a sip of wine.
“We grew apart,” she said after she’d swallowed. “Like a lot of people do. What about you?”
“Sarah left me.” Tom spoke flatly, with an edge of pain to his voice. “For someone else, unfortunately.”
“I’m sorry.”
He shrugged. “We got married young, maybe too young, just out of university.”
Which was when she and Richard had married, twenty-five and fresh-faced, full of idealism and hope. “And what happened?”
“We settled down into a routine, as you do. I was finishing my clinical experience and Sarah was working as a teacher in a rough school in London. We hardly ever saw each other, and we were scraping by on a pittance.”
“Yes.” Harriet’s throat had gone tight.
The details were different but the story felt the same.
“We were also trying to have kids,” Tom said. He glanced at her, wry and uncertain. “Sorry, I’m offloading. Is this too much information?”
“No.” She tried to smile. “I’m interested.”
“It wasn’t happening, and the doctors couldn’t figure out why. I think secretly we blamed each other. In any case, it added to the strain and it started to feel like a relief to spend more time apart. Longer nights at work, seeing friends separately on the weekends.”
How many times, when Richard had rung her to say he was working late, had she felt a little treacherous frisson of relief? She hadn’t even acknowledged it to herself, had presented a martyred but slightly annoyed air to Richard, as if he was inconveniencing her but she’d manage…
She was ashamed of herself. In so many ways.
“It all sounds a bit familiar,” she said to Tom. “Unfortunately.”
“Right. It happens to plenty of marriages, doesn’t it? I didn’t see the affair coming, though. That kind of blindsided me.”
“Yes.” As far as she knew, Richard hadn’t had an actual affair.
The emotional stuff counted, of course it did, and yet… It was forgivable, wasn’t it? And if it was, what did that even mean for them?
“Did the two of you ever talk about getting back together?”
“No, that never came up, sadly. I found out about the affair through email. Sarah had already left.”
Harriet grimaced. “Ugh. Sorry, that’s rough.”
“Yep.” Tom smiled, trying to rally. “But it was over a year ago, and I’m trying to move on, so…”
“Right. Can I help with anything?” Tom handed her a Caesar salad kit and Harriet set about assembling it. Their little heart-to-heart was clearly over, and she was relieved to have got off so lightly. Tom hadn’t asked any probing questions and he didn’t seem likely to now.
“How’s Daisy?” he asked as he ladled out sauce and Harriet brought the salad to the table.
“Fine. Doing much better, thanks to the antibiotics. I’m hoping she’ll be trained soon.”
“She seems like a real sweetheart.”
“Yes, she is a cutie. And the children love her. I wasn’t sure about bringing a puppy into the chaos that is our home, but it was definitely the right choice.”
“A pet can be a great healer.”
“How come you don’t have one?” Harriet looked around the flat just to check there wasn’t some animal hiding somewhere.
“We had a dog,” Tom said as he poured them both more wine. “A Labradoodle. Sarah treated it like our child, which I suppose was understandable considering our circumstances. When we divorced she took the dog. She was more attached to him than I was, so I agreed.”
“Ouch.” It all sounded pretty awful, and yet that was what happened with divorce, wasn’t it? People divided things up.
They steered the conversation to more innocuous topics then, and Harriet finally started to properly relax and even enjoy herself. It was nice to chat, and she had to admit it was nice to feel Tom’s admiring glances, the low level of flirt he kept going. Was that terrible of her?
After a dessert of a shop-bought apple tart they ended up on either end of the sofa, finishing the wine and chatting some more. The sun had set and the room was dim, and the mood was… something.
It had been a long time since Harriet had dated. A long time since she’d felt flutters in her stomach, and these flutters weren’t entirely the good kind. Actually, she felt kind of nauseous.
Tom leaned one arm across the back of the sofa, his fingers inches from her shoulder. In the dim light, the moon just starting to appear in a twilit sky, she could catch the glinting gold strands in his hair. She inhaled the scent of his aftershave, something citrusy and unfamiliar. It all felt romantic, and yet… not.
“So, dinner lady,” Tom said, smiling.
She’d already told him about her new job, and Tom had laughed when she’d regaled him with horror stories of children who didn’t like what was on offer, or the boy who had burst into tears when Harriet had accidentally flicked a piece of macaroni in his face.
“Yes, it’s not all that bad. The timing works out really well and I actually like being in with the children.” She’d also found a surprising camaraderie with the slightly terrifying head cook, Ruth, and her two overworked minions.
That afternoon, at the end of the week, they’d all kicked back with a cup of tea and had a chat. Ruth, Harriet discovered, had a husband on disability and four teenaged sons. Elaine and Tiana, the two women who worked under her, had similar burdens—Elaine with a mother with early onset dementia, Tiana with a fifteen-year-old daughter who’d just announced she was pregnant. In comparison Harriet’s problems paled.
“Do you think you’ll look for something else?” Tom asked.
Would she? It made sense. “I suppose,” Harriet said after a pause. “Eventually. But I’m not in a rush. I just started, after all.” And, in a weird way, she actually liked what she did.
No, it wasn’t using her brain in the way she had eleven years ago. And no, it didn’t pay very well. But it felt like a necessary step in the journey she had never expected—or wanted—to take.
“Well, it sounds like you’ve had quite a few hard knocks,” Tom said with a smile that made Harriet’s stomach start fluttering again, this time in a mixed way. It felt nice to have someone look at her with so much warmth and approval. Someone who was single and interested and present.
“As have you. Hopefully we’re not too battered.”
“Hopefully.” Tom shifted on the sofa and his fingers brushed her shoulder. Harriet jerked involuntarily.
Tom smiled self-consciously and shifted a bit closer. It had been twenty years since Harriet had been on a date with someone she didn’t know, and that someone had been Richard. Even so she recognized the look in Tom’s eyes, the expectant hum in the air.
She froze, unsure what to do. How to feel. Then she thought of Richard and his kisses with Meghan. Technically, he’d said, he’d started it. So why shouldn’t she? Even up the score a little?
It wasn’t the best reason to kiss somebody, especially when that somebody wasn’t her husband, but Harriet was curious. And, yes, even the tiniest bit excited. It wasn’t quite desire, but it was something. She shifted closer too. Tom’s pupils flared—message received. Harriet held her breath.
Tom smiled a slightly self-conscious, wry smile that Harriet couldn’t decide if she liked or not. It looked a little too deliberate. Then he leaned forward, his hand drifting down to her shoulders. Harriet closed her eyes.
It all felt choreographed somehow, far more complex and less natural than she would have liked. And then—lips. The feel of them on hers was another jolt and, this time, a bigger one. They were so… unfamiliar. Dry, thankfully, and soft, no problems there. His hand tightened on her shoulder. He angled his body closer.
Harriet didn’t move, didn’t respond. She felt as if she were standing on the other side of the room, watching this play out with a kind of distant curiosity.
Then Tom nudged open her mouth with his tongue—and eww. She didn’t want his tongue in her mouth. It was slimy and wet and—ugh. She didn’t want to be kissing him. At all. The realization was both instantaneous and overwhelming. She drew back.
“Sorry,” Tom said quickly, as if he thought she might be grossly offended. “I thought…”
“It’s fine.” Sort of. She’d just complicated what could have been a nicely simple situation. Harriet took a deep breath. “I’m not sure I was ready for that, though.” She knew she wasn’t.
“That’s okay. I mean, I’m patient.”
“Okay.” Harriet knew he would be waiting a long time. A very long time. “I should probably get going.” She rose from the sofa and Tom did as well.
“Maybe we can do this again?” he asked. “The dinner part, at least?”
“Yes…” Harriet heard the note of hesitation in her voice. “Yes,” she said, a bit more firmly. “I think so. Maybe.” And then wondered what she was agreeing to, and why. Moving on didn’t have to involve dating quite yet, and certainly not kissing.
Tom didn’t try to kiss her goodnight, not even on the cheek, which was a good thing. Harriet wasn’t sure how she would have responded to that. As it was, they did the awkward hug dance back and forth for a few seconds before they both fluttered their fingers and then Harriet was released out into the now-chilly night.
Whoa. She wasn’t at all sure she wanted to do that again anytime soon. And yet… what did she want to do? It was the never-ending, unanswerable question.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket, surprising her. The number wasn’t one she recognized, and with trepidation—fearing a call from A&E or worse—she answered.
“Harriet? It’s Colin. Colin Heath.”
“Colin…” Harriet knew him, of course, but she had no idea why he’d be calling her. “Sorry, is something wrong…?”
“A bit,” Colin said, and he sounded uncharacteristically grim. “It’s Richard.”