On Friday Alfie came back from Tom and Nicola’s house with an envelope of cash.
‘All done,’ he said. ‘Paid in full. I’m taking you down to the Melville for champagne!’
‘Or,’ she said, thinking of her sore feet and her dirty hair, ‘we could buy a bottle of champagne and drink it in bed with pizza and sex?’
He eyed her curiously. ‘Pizza and sex, you say?’ He smiled and began stripping off his overalls. ‘Here.’ He passed her the envelope of cash. ‘You go and get the champagne and I’ll have a shower and order the pizza.’
She peered inside the envelope, her fingers touched the edges of the notes. Tom’s money, she thought. She caught her breath.
‘OK,’ she said, grabbing her trainers off the floor. ‘It’s a deal.’
The village was buzzy. The early spring weather had brought people out of hibernation. Some of the restaurants had even put their pavement tables out and for a moment she wished she’d taken Alfie up on his offer of a night out in the village.
The chilled cabinet was at the back of the shop. Alfie had told her to spend up to thirty pounds. She found a bottle of something vintage for £29.99 and took it to the till, only to turn a corner and find herself standing right behind Tom Fitzwilliam in the queue. She almost put the bottle down and left, but before she’d had time to make a move, Tom turned and saw her standing there. His face opened up into a smile of genuine pleasure and he said, ‘Josephine! Hello!’
‘Tom,’ she said, ‘hi!’
She moved ahead of him to put her bottle on the counter. Tom eyed it. ‘Are we celebrating happy news?’
She shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, her voice coming out far too loud and far too intense. ‘Just celebrating pay day. With your money, I believe.’
‘Aah,’ he said, looking at the notes in her hand. ‘Alfie’s last day. Of course.’
She turned back to the guy behind the till and handed him the notes. He passed her her penny change and began rolling the bottle in tissue paper.
‘How are you, anyway?’ she heard Tom ask from behind her.
‘Absolutely fine,’ she said, without turning around. ‘How are you?’
‘I am also absolutely fine.’
‘Good,’ said Joey, her heart racing, ‘good.’
The man put the bottle in a bag and passed it to her and she said good evening and thank you and turned to find Tom Fitzwilliam waiting for her. He had a small smile playing on his mouth and he was so handsome that she could barely look at him.
‘Are you walking back up the hill?’ he said.
She nodded.
‘Good,’ he said, ‘me too. I’ll walk you up.’
She managed a smile. ‘OK.’
‘It was lovely to see you the other night,’ he said as they stepped out of the wine shop.
‘Likewise,’ she said.
‘Freddie was most perturbed.’
She threw him a look.
‘Boring old Dad talking to a mysterious, beautiful young woman.’
‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Right. Although I refute any suggestion that I am beautiful or even young.’
‘Don’t be disingenuous.’
‘I’m not! I’m going to be thirty in three years. And I am cute, at a push, but I am definitely not beautiful.’
‘Thirty is shockingly young when you’re fifty-one. And yes, you’re very cute. And very beautiful.’
Joey swallowed. There was nothing ambiguous about this. Tom was flirting with her. A situation that had lived inside her head for weeks was now happening in reality. She needed to cut it off right now. But instead she found herself saying, ‘Well, thank you, I am very flattered.’
He stopped for a moment, and she stopped alongside him. His mouth half opened as though he wanted to say something, but then it closed again and he smiled at her. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘what happened outside the pub that night—’
‘Please,’ she said. ‘Please don’t. I can’t even bear to think about it.’
‘But that’s the thing,’ he said. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. When I’m alone, in the car or in the shower, I replay it in my head, over and over again.’
Blood rushed to Joey’s face. ‘Oh.’
‘I’m not expecting you to say anything. I’m not expecting you to do anything. I just wanted you to know. That I liked it. That it was nice. That I didn’t think badly of you for it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I appreciate that.’
They’d crossed the pedestrian crossing opposite the Melville and were at the bottom of the escarpment. Here there was a narrow pavement, overhung with foliage, muted street lights buried deep inside heavy spring blossom. There were no houses down here, just an old red telephone box and a tiny Victorian letterbox built into the wall. They were, to all intents and purposes, invisible.
It occurred to Joey that they could, right now, and with very little risk of being caught, have sex. It could happen. Easily. But then she thought of Alfie in their bedroom, shower-fresh, waiting for her.
She was about to pick up her pace, break into the awkward ripeness of the mood with a brisk comment along the lines of how the champagne would be getting warm when Tom suddenly stopped, leaned right into towards her and said, ‘Could you do it?’ His breath was as warm as a summer heatwave in her ear. ‘Could you do it to me now?’
‘What?’
‘What you did. Before. Outside the pub. Just …’ He took her hand gently and she closed her eyes and knew what was about to happen and wanted to stop it but didn’t want to stop it and then her hand was there, right there, her fingers cupped around him. She heard his groan of satisfaction soft in her hair, felt his hand upon her hip, pulling her towards him, his mouth falling into the soft place in the crook of her neck that made her tense and liquid all at the same time. She let the bag of champagne drop on to the earthy undergrowth and she ran her other hand around the back of his neck and pulled the smell of him deep down inside herself. For a moment they stood like that, like two people melded together into one, a gently writhing mass of urgency and need and breath and lust.
But then an arc of car lights swung across them and Joey and Tom broke apart. Joey reached down for the bag with the bottle in it and they turned as one, continuing on their way up the hill in complete silence until they got to Joey’s door, when Tom turned, nodded courteously and said, ‘Well, enjoy your champagne.’
Joey nodded, once, and let herself into the house.
Joey awoke at seven the next morning and, unable to find her way back to sleep, she pulled on a cardigan and Rebecca’s rubber gardening shoes and took her morning coffee to the bottom of Jack and Rebecca’s garden. Here she stood for a while, staring through the gauzy twilight towards the back of Tom’s house, hoping to find him staring back.
There was a little gate at the bottom of the garden. She’d never noticed it before. She pushed it open and found herself on a gravelled footpath. On the other side of the footpath was a wooded area. The trees overhead shivered and stirred with small birds. From here she could see that all the houses in Melville Heights had access to the same pathway. Leaving her coffee on the wall, she walked quietly along the path and stopped for just a moment at the back of Tom’s house.
She peered through the gaps in the wooden fencing, watching the vague outlines of Tom and Nicola moving about their kitchen, her stomach churning with guilt, with lust – with jealousy.
There was a fresh bunch of 50p daffodils on her mum’s grave.
She rested her own flowers next to her father’s flowers and then stood. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said. ‘I see Dad’s been again. He’s a sneaky one, isn’t he?’
She breathed in sharply against the tears that came at the thought of her estranged father – the loss of both of her parents in under a year – and then out again, her breath emerging as a cloud of icy smoke.
‘So, Mum, I’m fucking everything up. I mean really, really fucking it up. Worse than anything I’ve done before. Worse than the vodka incident. Worse than the running-away thing when I was sixteen. Worse than Robbie Miller. Worse than the thing with the moped. Just so, so bad. It’s that man again, Tom Fitzwilliam. We had another … encounter.’ Her voice caught on the words and she gulped back her tears. ‘Last night. While Alfie was sitting in our bedroom waiting for me to help him celebrate something really important …’ She checked over her shoulder, then whispered, ‘… he asked me to touch him. Again. And I did. And then we sort of … we clinched. Is that even a word? I don’t know. But we didn’t kiss. So I don’t know what you’d call it. But it was amazing and bizarre and one of the most intense things that has ever happened to me. And now, I don’t know – I don’t know who I am any more. I’ve been trying to forget about it, but I can’t. It’s all I can think about. He’s all I can think about. I feel a bit mad, Mum, I feel like I’m getting obsessed. Like …’ She paused and turned her eyes to the ice-blue sky. ‘Like I might be about to do something really, really stupid. And knowing I’m going to do it isn’t going to stop it happening. I feel like I’m one step away from the abyss and just I wish so much that you were here, Mum, I wish you were here to pull me back.’
