She knew deep in her gut that those kisses, the caresses, the easy way Jack and Susie’s bodies fitted together signalled very clearly that something had been going on for quite some time. Hope couldn’t believe she’d been oblivious to it. She’d thought that she was the glue that bound Jack and Susie together, and that they’d only tolerated each other because they both wanted Hope in their lives.
‘She’s kind of vacuous,’ was how Jack had described Susie the first time he’d met her. ‘She’s even more shallow than the fashion and beauty girls at work. I didn’t think that was possible.’
Susie hadn’t exactly been about to join the Jack fanclub either. ‘I get the whole lanky artboy thing, I really do, or I did when I was a teenager,’ she’d drawled after her second encounter with Jack, when they’d bumped into her in Islington and the three of them had gone for a quick drink. ‘Now I’m into men who are strong enough to pick me up and shag me against the wall, y’know?’
Hope hadn’t known because she liked Jack’s lankiness, even though he wasn’t strong enough to drag her off the sofa when she was hunkered down for the evening with a chick-flick, Kettle Chips and a bottle of rosé. Or maybe it wasn’t Jack’s puniness that was the issue here, but Hope’s fluctuating weight, and how right now she couldn’t do the zip up on her favourite pair of skinny jeans. It was Susie who’d decreed that a girl should never have bigger thighs than her lover. Hope stared down at her body masked by the voluminous folds of her black maxi dress and prodded her leg, which wobbled obligingly.
Maybe it was her fault because she’d let herself go, and because she nagged Jack all the time and when she wasn’t nagging him, she was driving him to distraction with her messy ways and her blanket refusal to accept responsibility and make decisions. ‘I’m responsible for thirty six-year-olds between eight fifty-five and three thirty and I have to make decisions every five minutes,’ Hope was fond of saying when Jack tried to get her to commit to pizza toppings or scraping together another £50 a month to put in their joint savings account. ‘I’m exhausted with all the responsibility and the decision-making. Why don’t you do what you think is best and if I don’t agree I’ll be sure to let you know?’
She’d taken Jack for granted. Hope shivered, and it might have been with shame, and it might also have been because the humidity was lifting and the night was cooling down.
It was painful to sit on someone’s garden wall and calculate all the ways she’d been a terrible girlfriend, but the more Hope thought about it, the more she realised that in other ways she was a superb girlfriend. Jack was incapable of getting out of bed in time for work unless she told him he was going to be late at five-minute intervals as she tried to get ready for school. And because she got home first, she always had dinner ready for him. She read every issue of Skirt from cover to cover and could always spot his layouts and praised them to the hilt. She never minded when he stayed late in the office because they were behind schedule … though maybe he hadn’t had to work late as often as he’d claimed and it had been an excuse to pop round to Susie’s beautiful flat, which could have graced the pages of Elle Decor, so he could pick her up and shag her against one of her walls, probably the one with the feature wallpaper, which had cost £150 a roll.
Shame was turning back into anger. No matter if she was the worst girlfriend in the world, Jack had made promises to her. Promises that went hand in hand with having both of their names on a title deed, and the understanding that even though Jack hadn’t officially asked for her hand in marriage, he was going to soon. Very soon. The sooner the better, particularly as the subject of engagements had become the sorest of sore points lately.
It wasn’t just that her mother and Jack’s mother brought it up at every opportunity. It wasn’t just that they’d been to three weddings in three weekends last April. It wasn’t even that the achingly cool, stuck-up couple in the tent next to them at Latitude had been on their honeymoon. Well, it was all of those things, and the way that friends, relatives and acquaintances drove Hope (but never Jack) loopy with their claims that ‘You’ll be next,’ and kept asking her if Jack had popped the question or when he was going to put a ring on it.
It was a fair point, Hope thought, because they’d always been the trailblazers of their social set. The first to go steady. The first couple to get consummated. The first to go away on a minibreak. The first couple to move in together. They were always ahead of the relationship bell curve but now they were getting left behind as the people they’d been at university with were getting married to people they’d only been with for five minutes. Hope and Jack had been dating for thirteen years and now that they owned a flat, getting engaged was the next step. And it was only getting engaged – Hope wasn’t even thinking of getting married just yet – but every time she mentioned it to Jack, he pulled a face and muttered things about how people were getting married later these days, according to the latest survey. Or that he couldn’t spare the money for a ring when he wanted to upgrade his Mac.
It had all come to a nasty, shouty, flouncy head during their week in Barcelona during the Easter holidays. It was just the two of them and they’d spent lazy mornings on the beach, then when the sun got too fierce they’d retire to their hotel room for a siesta. In the evenings they’d pig out on seafood, tapas and Sangria. It had been wonderful, especially as Jack had kept hinting that he had a special surprise planned for their last night, and Hope had got it into her head that he was going to go down on one knee and present her with a ring. Possibly with a mariachi band serenading the proposal. After all, they’d seen a bride and groom and wedding party pose for pictures outside the cathedral on their second day in Barcelona, and Jack had smiled indulgently and said that Hope would make a beautiful bride. Well, he’d actually said, ‘I bet you wouldn’t be caught dead in a big old meringue of a wedding dress,’ but it had been enough to make Hope’s imagination run riot.
So, she was less than pleased when the surprise turned out to be tickets to see one of Jack’s favourite bands and they’d had a huge blow-out of a row; Jack had stormed off to see the band on his own and Hope had got drunk in the hotel bar with a gaggle of forty-something divorcees in Barcelona on a girls’ weekend.
Jack had come back from the show early and suitably contrite, and the next morning he’d bought her three stackable silver rings for the third finger of her right hand and now they were unofficially pre-engaged, which was a step in the right direction. Except what if Jack and Susie had been getting it on with each other by then, and the whole week that he’d been in Barcelona with Hope, he’d secretly been wishing he was with her best friend?
Jack had taken the thirteen years that they’d been together and thrown them away like they didn’t mean anything to him. Like Hope meant nothing to him; and yes, Hope was furious with Susie too, the kind of fury that made her scalp tingle and her skin itch, but she could only deal with being furious with one person at a time, and that person was Jack.
She wasn’t sure that she could ever stand to be near him again, and finally she could feel the first wave of grief well up inside her, and after that the lump in her throat, which made swallowing hard, and the prickle in her eye were inevitable. Hope sniffed hard as the first tear slowly trickled down her cheek and she knew it would be the first of many. Although she didn’t cry much, she cried hard, and she didn’t even have any tissues.
She batted away each tear with an impatient hand, but soon they were falling too thick and fast for her to do anything but hiccup and splutter in an effort not to start howling. Even so, a gang of lads walking along the other side of the street bellowed helpfully, ‘Cheer up love, it might never happen.’
Hope was scrubbing at her wet face with the hem of her dress, when she became aware of a car inching down the road, its headlights defiantly undipped. She shielded her streaming eyes as the car slowed even further, and if it was some kerb-crawling creep who had mistaken her for a prostitute she was going to get medieval on his perverted arse. Or possibly ju
st keep crying.
Predictably the car came to a halt alongside Hope, and she realised that, with her skirt all rucked up so that she was flashing an indecent amount of fleshy white thigh, she probably did look like a lady of easy virtue. She scrambled off the wall and started to walk briskly along the street because really she didn’t have the energy to get medieval on anybody’s arse, not even the two people whose arses really deserved it.
The car started up again.
‘Hope?’ called out a voice that sounded familiar, and when she slanted a glance at the car that looked familiar, too, in a pretentious kind of way.
‘Leave me alone,’ she said to Wilson, as she squinted through the open car window at him. ‘Please, just go away.’
‘I’ve been trawling the back roads of Upper Holloway for over an hour trying to find you,’ Wilson sighed, as if Hope’s refusal to be found had been deliberate and wilful behaviour on her part. ‘Just be a good girl and get in the car.’
‘Really, I’m fine,’ she gritted her teeth in a smile that felt more manic than likely to reassure Wilson of her calm mental state. ‘You don’t have to worry about me.’
‘Hasn’t there been enough drama for one evening, without you wandering the streets without your phone or keys, then ending up raped and left for dead in a skip?’
‘This is a perfectly safe area.’ Hope snorted derisively.
‘Yeah, yeah.’ He sighed again. ‘Just get in the car.’
‘No!’
Wilson didn’t even bother to dignify that with a response. He just pressed on the horn for one long, deafeningly loud moment.
‘What are you doing?’ Hope demanded. ‘This is a residential area. You’re probably waking up babies and small children.’
This time Wilson let out a volley of toots and when Hope saw the curtains twitch in a nearby house, she shot round the car, yanked open the door and got in.
‘There! You happy now?’ she snapped, resisting the urge to slam the door shut after her lecture on noise pollution and closing it gently instead. She settled for tugging angrily on the seatbelt as she clipped it into place, but it didn’t have the same effect.
‘Not even remotely,’ Wilson said, as he dropped a carrier bag in Hope’s lap. ‘Care package from your friend Lauren.’
Hope peered inside the bag to see a cardigan, her phone, her purse and the commuter mug her mother had bought her from a special offer in the Sunday Express magazine, which Hope had never used because she’d have felt like a dick getting it out on the bus. She unscrewed the lid and took a cautious sniff. It was full of wine; wine had alcohol in it and alcohol was a famous numbing agent. That was good enough for her.
She took a generous gulp of Sauvignon Blanc and, just like that, she was thinking of the bottle sitting in the bucket full of ice outside the kitchen door, right where Susie and Jack had been eating each other’s mouths off each other’s faces and, just like that, her eyes started tearing again.
Wilson sighed yet again, and Hope managed both to choke down her sobs and grind her teeth. ‘Time for the prodigal girlfriend to go home,’ he said, as he started up the car.
Hope wasn’t sure which word – ‘girlfriend’ or ‘home’ – made her cry just that bit harder. And it was snotty, phlegmy crying, which would have been humiliating at any time, but in front of Wilson, who groped for and then shoved a wad of tissues at her, it was utterly mortifying. ‘Home?’ she wheezed. ‘What happened after I left?’
He didn’t answer at first, because he was pulling into the kerb to give way to a car coming in the other direction down the narrow street. ‘The Spanish Inquisition, but with more shouting and swearing.’
Hope blew her nose, not even caring at the wet, snotty sound it made. ‘Who was doing the shouting and swearing?’
‘Your friends, Lauren and Alex—’
‘Allison.’
‘Whatever. They shouted at Susie, who shouted back at them. Then Jack shouted at them for shouting at Susie. Then the black guy shouted at the four of them to stop shouting. A couple of your wine glasses got broken in all the excitement.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘Susie made a heartfelt but garbled speech about feelings and passion, then Lauren called her a “fucking heartless, two-faced whore” and Susie stormed out.’ Wilson paused. ‘Then Jack set off in hot pursuit and everyone else decided to go and look for you, but they were all drunk and none of the blokes had any of the girls’ mobile numbers, and vice versa, so it wasn’t a very successful search mission.’
‘So, what? You drew the short straw?’ Hope asked rather ungraciously.
‘Yeah, something like that,’ Wilson replied just as ungraciously. ‘And I’m sober and have my own transport.’
‘I made a fucking lamb roulade,’ Hope said, and she didn’t even know why she’d said it but suddenly it was all she could think about. ‘Have you any idea how much work is involved in making a lamb roulade, especially when you have to go all the way back down the hill to the butcher’s because you’ve forgotten to ask him to butterfly the joint, and I made pesto from scratch, all so I could make a fucking lamb roulade. And they ruined it. I mean, they didn’t ruin the lamb roulade, but they ruined my dinner party.’
‘Do you think maybe this is less about your lamb roulade and more about the lamb roulade being a totemic symbol for the state of your relationship?’
Was he fucking kidding her? ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’
‘It was just a theory.’ Wilson shrugged, and Hope noticed for the first time that he’d pulled into the kerb. ‘So, shall I take you home?’
Even the abstract thought of home made Hope experience a moment of sheer blind panic. ‘Not home,’ she mumbled, opening her purse and hunting for her Oyster card. ‘Could you maybe drive me to Holloway Road or Archway station, whichever one is nearer?’
Wilson couldn’t because, as he smugly pointed out, it was nearly one in the morning and the tube had stopped running.
‘OK,’ she conceded weakly. ‘I can get a nightbus from Holloway Road. It will take me longer to get to South London, but if I call Lauren she won’t mind waiting up for me.’
‘Fine,’ Wilson said, like he didn’t care where she went, just as long as she went somewhere.
THEY DROVE IN a tense, uncomfortable silence down narrow roads that all looked the same. It wasn’t until they drove past Archway station and hit Junction Road that Hope stirred.
‘You can just drop me here,’ she said.
‘I’m driving you into town, so you can get a nightbus to South London,’ Wilson said.
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that.’
‘Well, I’m doing it. End of discussion.’ Hope had been a teacher for two years and she doubted that even if she stayed a teacher for another thirty, she’d ever be able to get the same note of don’t-fuck-with-me-ness in her voice that Wilson had. ‘Anyway, how’s your hand?’
Hope had completely forgotten about her singed palm. Unbelievably, it was still firmly swathed in clingfilm. She stared down at the raised welt, which throbbed with a fair-to-middling pain, but compared to the pinched agony of her feet in her Stella McCartney wedges, the clenched knot where her stomach usually was, and the hollow feeling in her chest – which may or may not have indicated a broken heart – it was the very least of all her current ouches.
‘It’s OK, I guess,’ she mumbled. ‘Doesn’t hurt that much.’
Wilson nodded. ‘Are you going to keep it wrapped up like that?’
Hope knew the answer to this, she was a trained first-aider after all, but she couldn’t even remember what ‘ICE’ stood for, let alone the proper treatment for superficial burns. ‘Hmm, maybe it needs a dressing,’ she murmured half to herself. ‘So it doesn’t get infected. I’ll sort it out when I get to Lauren’s. She’s much better at treating minor injuries than I am.’
That short burst of conversation was followed by another painful silence until they got to Camden and Wilson had to jam on the brakes to avoid
mowing down two really drunk teenagers who’d suddenly lurched into the road. Hope was thrown forward and then jerked back by her seatbelt, and just as she was wondering if she’d manage to make it to morning without breaking a rib or getting a mild concussion, Wilson turned down a side road and suddenly stopped the car.
‘How could you not know?’ he demanded, before the engine had even died. ‘Don’t tell me that you thought everything was all right?’
‘What? No!’ Hope shook her head firmly. ‘Of course I didn’t. Like, why would I?’
‘Well, it’s not as if they were that discreet about it.’ Wilson leaned towards her and Hope shrunk back in her seat because they were in a confined space and Wilson looming at her when he was so angry wasn’t doing much for her tattered nerves. ‘God, you’re either the most unobservant or the most self-involved person I’ve ever met.’
Hope bristled at the accusation, which was untrue and unfair on both counts. ‘I am neither … Hang on! What do you mean about them not being discreet? Oh my God, did you know about this? You did, didn’t you? You knew!’
‘I didn’t know for sure,’ Wilson said gruffly, but he didn’t sound quite so furious. ‘I had my suspicions.’