‘He shall never know I love him: and that, not because he’s handsome, but because he’s more myself than I am.’
The journey home was five long, awkward hours, maybe the most awkward hours of Nina’s life. Noah had said only nine words to her during the entire journey. ‘Do you want to stop at the next services?’ he’d asked somewhere around Leicester and though Nina could have done with a visit to the Ladies, she said only two words to him, ‘No, thanks,’ because she didn’t want to prolong the agony. She’d just have to clench her pelvic floor muscles the rest of the way to London.
Her head pounded with all the thoughts crowding her mind.
Her throat ached with all the words she wanted to say.
Nina went from hot to cold as she thought about the night before, tangled up in each other, and then the bitter morning after.
She felt terrible and from the tense lines of Noah’s face in profile, when she dared to steal a glance at him, he wasn’t feeling much better himself.
However awful the trip home, Nina was aware that this was the last time that she’d spend with Noah and already, even though he was sitting next to her and changing gears very aggressively, she missed him.
And then, though it seemed like no time at all and also as if several decades had passed, Noah pulled into Rochester Street.
‘No need to turn into the mews,’ Nina insisted in a voice so croaky from unshed tears and not speaking that it sounded as if she had a forty-a-day fag habit. ‘You’ll never be able to turn the car around again.’
Noah unclipped his seatbelt. ‘I’ll get your bag,’ he offered tersely.
‘It’s all right. I can manage,’ Nina rasped brightly, reaching round to grab the bag off the back seat and nearly decapitating Noah in the process. ‘Sorry! And thanks for yesterday. I’ll see you around, OK?’
For a second, not even a second, their eyes met and immediately, Nina could feel the hot sting of tears. Noah opened his mouth to say something but she couldn’t take hearing another cruel but well deserved jibe from the lips that had kissed her so sweetly. She quickly slammed the door and scurried for the mews, for the sanctuary that was Happy Ever After though it was hard to scurry when her legs felt as heavy as sand bags.
It was Saturday afternoon and the sun was shining so the shop was heaving with customers. The queue to pay snaked all the way across the main room so Nina had to fight her way through a crowd of book-lovers to get to the door that led to the stairs without being spotted by …
‘Nina! What are you doing here? I didn’t expect to see you until Monday,’ Posy shouted from behind the till. ‘What’s wrong? You look very puffy-faced. Have you been crying? Don’t tell me that you and Noah have broken up already. Oh, Nina! I was hoping this wouldn’t happen.’
Everyone waiting in the queue swivelled round to eyeball Nina with expressions that were sympathetic, curious, kind.
But Nina didn’t want their kindness. If anyone were even a little bit nice to her, she’d start sobbing. So she shrugged. ‘You know me, Posy,’ she croaked. ‘Breaking men’s hearts is my speciality.’
‘Poor Noah,’ Posy said sadly. ‘Sebastian is going to be so cross with you.’
Sebastian Thorndyke would rue the day he was ever born if he decided to give Nina ANY grief at all about what she’d done to poor Noah.
Verity, who was bagging up books and had obviously been drafted in to help in the shop against her will, from the woebegone look on her face, shook her head sorrowfully. ‘Poor Noah,’ she added her voice to the chorus, then gave Nina a swift and assessing once over. ‘I don’t think Noah is the only one suffering. You look awful. Are you sure you’re OK?’
Nina was not OK. Nina didn’t think she was going to be OK ever again. ‘I’m fine,’ she assured Verity. ‘Hate to break it you, Very, but this is what I look like without make-up on.’
Verity narrowed her eyes. ‘I’ve seen you without make-up on and you didn’t look like you’d been to hell and back like you do right now.’
‘Way to make a girl feel special,’ Nina said in the same carefree tone that took every ounce of acting ability that she possessed. ‘Now, I don’t know what you’re doing serving on the till but would you like me to take over, Very? Your left eyelid is twitching.’
Verity’s left eyelid was indeed twitching, which meant she was a couple of customers away from a meltdown. ‘Oh, would you? It’s just that Tom’s at lunch and Little Sophie had to go to Sainsbury’s to get some things for Mattie.’
It was the very last thing Nina wanted to do: having to put her gameface on and be sociable. But then the very, very last thing she wanted to do was go upstairs to be on her own with her tangled, head-hurting thoughts.
‘Sure, yeah, I wouldn’t have offered otherwise,’ she said, coming forward to relieve Verity of her customer-serving duties.
And for the next three hours, Nina smiled and commented on people’s book selections and generally acted as if she didn’t have a care in the world.
Eventually it was seven o’clock. The door shut behind the last customer. Then it was seven thirty and the cashing up had been done, the floor had been swept, books left higgledy-piggledy on tables and sofas and counters had been reshelved and Tom, Posy and Little Sophie were heading out the door too.
‘I’m staying over at Johnny’s tonight,’ Verity informed Nina as they trooped up the stairs to their flat. ‘I’m so sorry that your weekend with Noah ended so badly. Have you got any other plans for tonight?’
Nina had made a tentative arrangement earlier in the week to go to a rockabilly rave in Kings Cross with Marianne and Claude but earlier in the week was a millenium ago.
‘Of course you’ve got plans,’ Verity said without waiting for Nina to confirm. ‘You, Nina, stay in on a Saturday night? It would be like the ravens leaving the Tower. England would fall!’
It took ages for Verity to be gone. First she had to have her half-hour decompression lie-down, then she had to pack her overnight bag and ponder where she and Johnny might go for dinner, which depended on where they might go for brunch tomorrow and did Nina want to meet up with them and though Verity was an introvert, God, the girl could talk, Nina thought as she grunted in the places where Verity expected a response.
Then, at last, at last, Verity was running down the stairs because she was late and a minute later the shop door closed behind her and Nina was alone.
All those years Nina had spent wondering what love really felt like and now she knew. It felt like hell. It felt like the worst thing on earth. It felt much, much worse than anything she’d read about in Wuthering Heights. Compared to what she was experiencing on a lonely Saturday night, Cathy and Heathcliff had simply been a pair of idiots who’d needed their heads knocking together.
Nina lay in bed unable to sleep. It wasn’t even all the pain and regret she’d been bottling up since Noah had told her ‘This isn’t going to work’ that kept her awake. Her torment was less emotional and more physical. She was either so hot that it felt as if she was being roasted alive, sweat stinging her eyes and making her kick off the covers, or she felt so cold that her body would suddenly rattle with shudders that were a pretty close cousin to convulsions and she barely had enough energy to pull the duvet tighter around her.
Come Sunday morning, sleep deprivation was the least of her ailments. Nina had a skull-crushing headache, made worse by the coughs that wrenched her inside out. Her limbs had been stuffed with sawdust and getting from bed to hall to kitchen was as arduous as her walk across the moors two days before. Making a cup of coffee took what was left of her depleted strength so she barely had enough energy to drink it. Then the shivers started again and Nina all but crawled to the sofa because the living room was nearer than her bedroom.
Then she must have fallen asleep because she was plagued by dreams where she was lost on the moors. She could hear Noah’s voice calling her, but each time she tried to stumble towards him, she realised it was just the wind wuthering at her and that Noah was nowhere to be found. Or she’d see him in the distance but when she got closer, it wouldn’t be Noah but an old gnarled log or a slab of stone.
‘Where are you?’ dream Nina cried. ‘Don’t leave me. My heart’s broken.’
‘What is she going on about?’ asked a piercing, familiar voice.
‘I never thought that a broken heart would feel like this,’ Nina whispered to the cruel, uncaring wind.
‘It’s not a broken heart, it’s the flu,’ said the same voice and when Nina forced her eyes open, there was a face staring down at her, which was mostly obscured by a surgical mask. ‘Open your mouth!’
Nina opened her mouth, only to have a thermometer rammed in it.
‘Your bedside manner sucks,’ said a voice from the doorway and Nina turned her head, groaning around the thermometer because her neck ached, to see a cluster of people standing there. Posy, who’d just spoken, Verity and behind them, a tall, dark figure …
‘Heathcliff,’ Nina mumbled.
‘No, not Heathcliff, it’s me, Merry!’ and a hand on Nina’s chin turned her head back to the person standing over her. Nina blinked sleep-encrusted, swollen eyes as she stared up at Merry, or Mercy as she’d been christened, one of Verity’s many sisters. Mercy was a medical researcher at nearby University College Hospital and their go-to person whenever they were feeling poorly. ‘Let’s be having this.’ The thermometer was yanked out of Nina’s mouth. ‘Just nudging thirty-nine degrees. Are you achy?’
‘So achy. Hot. Then cold. Everything hurts,’ Nina realised. ‘Oh God, this is just like when Emily Brontë caught a chill, which turned into tuberculosis and then she died.’
‘It’s not TB. I keep telling you, you have the flu. You’re not going to die,’ Merry said comfortingly. ‘Although actually, flu isn’t to be taken lightly, people can die from the flu,’ she added not so comfortingly.
‘Morland, I absolutely forbid you from entering this disease-ridden hovel. Go downstairs this instant,’ commanded the tall, dark figure at the living-room door, who wasn’t Heathcliff, but Sebastian Thorndyke. ‘I’m not having you dying on me.’
‘For God’s sakes, Sebastian,’ Posy hissed, but she took a couple of cautious steps back. ‘I wish you’d think before you speak.’
‘Well, of course Tattoo Girl isn’t going to die,’ Sebastian said witheringly. ‘You’re far too robust to be snuffed out by the flu. Though, quite frankly, a light dose of the flu is just desserts for what you’ve done to poor Noah. He’s trying to put a brave face on it, but he’s devastated.’
Nina hadn’t thought it was possible to feel any more rotten but her visitors were doing a good job of proving her wrong. Tears leaked from the corners of her eyes. She wanted to ask after Noah, demand to know what he’d said about her, though it couldn’t be anything good, but the effort was too much and all she could manage was a feeble cough that hurt like hell.
‘Well, Nina is devastated too and she absolutely isn’t going to die,’ Verity said firmly, but she didn’t move from the door so she could take Nina’s hand or mop her exceedingly sweaty brow. ‘And I’m sure people who die of the flu have underlying medical conditions or are very old. Do you think she should see a doctor, Merry?’
‘Nothing a doctor can do for her,’ Merry said cheerfully and in an odd sort of way, it was also quite comforting to have everyone talk about Nina as if she wasn’t a very present, hot and sweaty lump on the sofa. ‘Flu’s a virus so she can’t take antibiotics. Just paracetamol or ibuprofen to lower her temperature and plenty of liquids to stop her from getting dehydrated.’
‘Poor Nina,’ Posy cooed from the door. ‘We’ll make sure you have plenty of Lemsip. And I’m sure we can scrounge up some chicken soup from somewhere for you.’
‘Such a pity that you and Noah only lasted three dates,’ Verity noted sorrowfully. ‘I bet he’d be the kind of boyfriend you’d really want around you when you had the flu.’
‘He thinks I’m a horrible person.’ Nina couldn’t raise her voice above a creaky whisper. ‘Because I am. No one will ever love me.’
‘Oh, Nina! That’s not true,’ Posy gasped. ‘We all love you.’
There was a rousing chorus of agreement from Verity and Mercy though Sebastian protested that ‘love is pushing it, especially as you’ve just broken Noah’s heart, ooof,’ this from an elbow in the side from Posy, ‘however, generally I think you’re a cracking girl.’ Then Tom’s distant voice called up the stairs, ‘Is anyone but me going to do any work today? Posy! There’s a delivery.’
‘All right, all right,’ Posy snapped. ‘I’d better go. You too, Very. Text us if you need anything, Nina.’
‘Yes, feel better soon,’ Verity said earnestly but she was already backing away and Sebastian was long gone, which left only Mercy who proudly produced a battered box of ibuprofen from her handbag.
‘Two of these bad boys, every six hours.’ She frowned. ‘You should try and eat. It’s not a good idea to take tablets on an empty stomach.’
But Nina didn’t want to eat, which was a first. She could barely force down the glasses of water and Lemsip that Posy and Verity brought her at regular intervals, both of them wearing latex gloves and surgical masks courtesy of Mercy, so they didn’t catch flu too.
Normally, Nina quite liked having a minor illness. She could lie on the sofa watching boxed sets and eating food without any nutritional value. But this was a major illness and all Nina could do was vacillate between too hot and too cold on sheets that were starting to stink a little bit.
She hardly slept and hardly stayed awake either but existed in a delirious dream state where Noah and Heathcliff had morphed into one distant, disdainful ex-lover.
Nina couldn’t even say how long she was out of action because day and night, hours and minutes, had ceased to have any meaning. She’d later find out that it was Thursday morning, the fifth day of her confinement, when she struggled her way to wakefulness only to wonder if she was still asleep because this had to be a nightmare.
Staring down at her with a pained expression was her mother.