Joey was sitting on the 218 bus on her way home from work on Saturday when she saw a tall man in a blue jumper and blue jeans leaving the big JD Sports holding a carrier bag and looking slightly lost. Her instinctive reaction, coming a split second before realising that the man was Tom Fitzwilliam, was attraction. Intense attraction. The sort of attraction that makes you burn at your core.
The bus came to a halt at the traffic lights and she watched him walking first in one direction and then in another. He appeared to be looking for something and then she saw his pace quicken to a gentle run and his arm extend from his body as though – it seemed momentarily possible – he was about to take to the sky, like Superman. As he pulled his arm higher above his head, his blue jumper pulled away slightly from his stomach and she glimpsed for a startling moment an inch of bare flesh, creamy pale with the smooth, supple give of freshly baked bread crust. His long legs took him swiftly to the kerb, to the taxi that had pulled over at his command (not request. No. Command). He swung in his big carrier bag and then himself. The taxi pulled away in front of Joey’s bus and she watched it with some excitement from her seat near the front. By the time they’d loaded up with passengers at the next bus stop, Tom and his taxi were gone from view.
The house was empty when Joey got home. Alfie was at his mum’s, in theory painting her kitchen, in actuality most likely watching sports on her leather sofa eating a home-cooked meal off a tray on his lap. Jack was at work and Rebecca was on a hen weekend in Gloucestershire. For a while Joey wandered from room to room, absorbing the sense of space. She still felt unable to spread herself around this house and usually went straight from the kitchen to her bedroom and from her bedroom to the front door without lingering or settling. When she did occasionally sit in the living room, it was as a guest, conscious of not outstaying her welcome. ‘Make yourself at home,’ her brother always insisted. But that was easy for him to say. They were siblings. Brother and sister. Extensions of one another. He would never feel her presence as a weight or an unease. But the same was clearly not the case for Rebecca. Joey was a stranger to her, someone to hide from and to avoid.
The rooms in her brother’s house felt anonymous, no different in some ways to the rooms at the Melville Hotel in the village: all pale furnishings and soft golden objects with no obvious purpose. She could not imagine a baby coming into this house. She could not imagine the noise of it, the uncontrollability of it, the endless head space that it would occupy. Her thoughts returned, as they had a dozen times since Alfie’s unexpected pronouncement of last week, to the concept of her own baby. Wouldn’t it be nice, Alfie had said later that evening, for our baby to be the same age as Jack and Rebecca’s baby? They could grow up together. Be best mates forever.
The clear implication being that they should make a baby now. Not soon. Not at some point. But now.
And Joey did not want a baby now.
Most definitely not now.
As she thought this she came upon a photo of her and Jack posed between their mother and father outside their grandmother’s house in Exeter. She was about three years old, wearing a red sweatshirt and her hair in pigtails. Jack was an incredibly awkward thirteen-year-old with a heavy fringe that almost covered his eyes. He had his hand placed protectively on her shoulder. He’d loved her with a passion from the day she’d arrived. The ten-year age gap had never divided them. If anything the absence of sibling rivalry had brought them closer together. But it was her parents who drew her inspection now; if she was three in this photo then her mother would have been thirty-one. Thirty-one, married and a mother of a toddler and a teenager. Joey could see the bloom of youth still upon her mother’s skin, the lustre of her chestnut hair. Young, she thought, my mother was so young. Only a few years older than I am now. She had not thought of her mother as a young person when she was a child and then her mother had died before Joey had had a chance to notice that she was now old.
On her way back up to her bedroom, she passed Rebecca’s study door. Rebecca worked from home three or four days a week as a systems analyst. For hours at a time she wouldn’t come out. Joey would hear the hushed tones of her voice through the door as she passed by on her way to her attic room, or the plasticky click of her fingertips against the keyboard. But more often there was silence. As though there was no one in there at all.
She peered down the stairwell to check no one had noiselessly returned home, before gently pushing open Rebecca’s study door. She jumped and clutched her heart. A man, in the corner. But no, not a man, a life-size cardboard cut-out of her brother in Hawaiian swimming trunks. She remembered it from the photos of her brother’s stag night. He and his mates had carried the cut-out all around Bristol, getting pretty girls to pose for photos with it along the way.
It was a small square room. Three walls were covered with built-in shelves and a fourth housed a deep bay window overlooking the street. There was a coffee machine and a kettle, a tray of mugs and cups, a small fridge, a small cream sofa. Everything to ensure that she need rarely leave the room. On her desk were three large monitors, two keyboards, neatly stacked paperwork, a photo of her and Jack on their wedding day. Joey picked it up and gazed at it. She could barely remember her brother’s wedding. She’d arrived in the UK with a hangover and basically drunk her way through the next forty-eight hours until it was time for her to catch the Sunday evening flight home. She could not have told you what Rebecca had been wearing but, glancing now at the photo, it seemed it was a cream satin slip dress. She also saw that Rebecca had worn her hair down and combed to a shine and had small diamond drops from her earlobes. She had smiled, clearly at least once, and thankfully the photographer had been there to capture it. But Joey’s overriding memory of the weekend was looking at her amazing brother’s slightly mousey new wife and wondering why she wasn’t smiling.
She put the photo down and let her hands wander indiscriminately over the objects on Rebecca’s desk. A chartreuse paperweight. A tube of Cath Kidston hand cream. A very realistic plastic cactus in a green pot. A silver Links of London bracelet. A tiny photo of a Border collie being cuddled by a teenage girl who Joey assumed was Rebecca.
There was a window seat built into the bay, upholstered with grey ticking cushions. Joey sat down for a moment to take in the view across the valley. From here she could see over the tops of the trees opposite. She could see the chimneys of the houses in the village and the river and voluptuous hills beyond. And from the left-hand portion of the bay she could see directly into the right-hand portion of a mirror-image bay on Tom Fitzwilliam’s house. She could see a suggestion of a table lamp, the blur of a mirror, the profile of a woman’s face.
Nicola Fitzwilliam. Applying face cream. Her fingertips working into her porcelain skin.
