After a minute or two, the doorbell chimes again. You can both hear Sophie in the kitchen, laughing and talking, so Sarah gets up and opens the door herself.
You follow her. It’s Becca and Daniel, Sophie’s friends from the village.
‘Oh,’ says Becca, smiling, ‘have we come to the wrong house?’
‘Come in,’ Sarah says, ‘Sophie’s in the kitchen.’
‘Hello, Becca,’ you say, kissing her on the cheek even though you only met her the once and even then are not even sure if you spoke to her at all. You shake hands with Daniel.
They both take off their jackets and, for want of something to do, Sarah takes them and hangs them up in the cloakroom. Everyone is in the kitchen. She retrieves her wine glass from the hall table and goes in to join them, leaning against the doorframe. As well as Becca and Daniel, already furnished with wine, Sophie is holding court to Diana and Ian. When Sophie sees you, she gives you a nod towards Ian, who has launched into what sounds like a political discussion with George, who’s busy plating up what look like tiny quiches on to a lamb’s lettuce garnish.
‘Want me to take those through?’ Sarah offers. ‘You’re running out of room.’
‘Oh, fabulous, thank you,’ George says, without looking up. ‘Of course they don’t want the hassle,’ he adds to Ian. ‘The party’s not going to want to stir things up too much before the next election…’
The dining table is laid for eight.
Sophie smiles at you.
‘Let’s eat, shall we?’
George has been having jovial, red-faced conversations with Ian, who is seated next to him; and Sarah, who is sitting on the other side, is chatting with Diana. That leaves you with Daniel, whom you didn’t get to talk to at all in the pub, but who turns out to be all right. He’s a doctor, currently working obscene hours at the hospital in Middlesbrough. You have an interesting talk about the plight of junior doctors and how the NHS is being covertly dismantled under everyone’s noses.
This makes you both glance across at George, defender of the NHS; an unlikely warrior in a pink tailored shirt.
George has been plying Ian with some seriously expensive wine; if that wasn’t a mistake, Ian is clearly playing him. It’s obvious to you that he has no financial influence in his firm at all, or, if he has, he has no intention of arranging any donation to the Labour Party. But it’s not up to you to stop George from making a tit of himself, is it? Besides, you’re too far away. Maybe after the meal is finished you can intervene.
Sophie could do it – subtly – and you look down to the other end of the table where Sophie is pretending to listen to Becca talking about the local am-dram’s latest production, but actually is watching you. Or perhaps she’s watching George and has merely glanced across to you in that moment, because she looks away again without acknowledging you. She is nodding, and keeping a weather eye on George. Sarah catches her eye, raises an eyebrow. Sophie rolls her eyes and gives a tiny shake of her head. She knows.
George is rat-arsed.
Sophie is pretty drunk, too; in fact almost everyone is apart from Sarah. She stopped after one half-glass of white and refilled it from the tap.
‘I’m glad we got to have this chat,’ Daniel says. ‘I didn’t get the chance when we saw you in the Royal Oak the other week.’
‘No,’ you say, ‘it was a busy night. Will was there, wasn’t he? Wonder where he is tonight.’
‘Will? You mean Bill’s lad?’
‘I guess so.’
Daniel smirks, swirling his wine glass. ‘This isn’t really his type of gig. I was surprised to see him in the Royal Oak, to be honest.’
‘How come?’
‘He disappeared a couple of years ago, finally. We all thought we’d seen the last of him. Thought he’d gone to live with his mum in Morecambe, but apparently she’d moved house and hadn’t told him her new address.’
‘Really? That sounds a bit rough.’
‘Oh, he was a proper handful when he was a teenager.’
Even so, you think. Your mum not telling you where she lives? That’s what you might call an overreaction. Unless he was more than a handful, and even then – your own son?
‘What on earth did he do?’ you ask.
‘Nothing anyone could prove. It was all low-level nuisance stuff: stealing things, pranks, criminal damage. Everyone knew it was him. It’s a village; stuff like that doesn’t stay a secret.’
‘But then he disappeared?’
‘He said he was going travelling. I don’t think he did. Crossed my mind he’d been inside for a stretch, but after a while everyone forgot all about it. Anyway, he’s back now, so maybe he’s grown up a bit since then. Let’s hope so.’
‘Sophie was talking to him quite a lot,’ you say, ‘so I’m guessing he’s capable of holding an adult conversation.’
Daniel laughs at this. ‘Maybe. But Sophie’s one of those magical people who can hold a conversation with anyone and make them feel special. Why do you think George is so desperate to keep her happy?’
Is he? You want to ask it, but you hold your tongue and look across to Sophie, who just for a moment looks lost. She has pushed her food around on her plate but eaten very little, and she has stopped drinking, too. When she meets your eyes across the table, you smile at her.
Later, when the plates have been cleared, the guests disperse to the living room. You head to the kitchen to help tidy up, expecting to find Sarah in there, but there is only Sophie, rinsing crystal glasses.
‘Let me do that,’ you say.
‘Really? Thanks,’ she answers, handing you the cloth and drying her hands on a tea towel. She carries on scraping plates into the bin and stacking them into the dishwasher. ‘I’m glad you came.’
‘Well, it looked as if George was managing. You didn’t need my cricket expertise after all. Probably just as well, since I know about as much about cricket as I know about politics.’
She laughs, looks across the vast kitchen to the door leading to the living room. You both hear George’s meaty guffaw. ‘Everything okay?’ you ask.
She doesn’t answer for a moment, and you are about to repeat the question when she straightens and looks you in the eye and says, ‘Not really, if I’m honest.’
‘What is it?’
You like Sophie. Various phone conversations have followed that morning when she turned up at the cottage and demanded to know what you were doing with Jim in London when Sarah believed you hadn’t set foot in the UK for years. You assumed, quickly, that the best way to deal with Sophie was by being unflinchingly honest, and it has proved the best course of action at every turn.
Now, she seems unable to speak, and above the pink cheeks tears are welling in her eyes.
‘Sophie,’ you say, ‘tell me.’
She blinks the tears away and gives a tiny, tight smile. ‘It’s fine. There’s nothing you can do. Honestly, I’ll be all right in a minute.’
You take a step forward, put a hand on her upper arm, and she moves towards you, rests her head into your neck, your arms around her. She is shaking.
‘I’m afraid of him,’ she whispers. ‘I’ve never really been scared before. I don’t like it.’
Sarah
Sarah has been listening to Becca and Diana talk about village things for the past twenty minutes, while keeping an eye on George, who is doing his best to have one last go at Ian.
It’s not looking good. Ian has one of those tight smiles on his face that suggests everything has just become horrifically awkward. Sarah excuses herself and goes looking for Sophie, to warn her. In the kitchen she finds her with Aiden. They are standing quite close, holding a glass of wine each. Inexplicably, she is certain that she has just interrupted something.
In that moment George comes through from the living room, russet-faced. Sarah thinks – not for the first time – that he looks like a heart attack waiting to happen.
‘Fucking shitcunts,’ he says.
‘George! For fuck’s sake!?
??
He is, luckily, still sober enough to look behind him before he continues, ‘Now he fucking tells me he’s got nothing to do with the money. At all. End of.’
‘I told you,’ Sophie says.
The fact that Sophie clearly did tell him, and has turned out to be right, is like pouring petrol on George’s furnace. He puts his hands on the granite worktop and seethes.
Deep breaths, Sarah thinks. Come on, George.
‘I fucking gave him the Margaux, too. Bastard.’
‘Oh, come on,’ Sophie says. She’s at least as drunk as he is, and that means placating him is going to take second place to winding him up even more.
‘I can do without your input, thank you.’
Sarah, embarrassed, looks across to Aiden, who is pretending to be serious. By the way he is looking from one to the other, he is loving this display: marital strife at its most amusing. Probably, she thinks, he doesn’t get to see this first hand. Or maybe he does. Maybe his clients invite him to dinner parties regularly, claiming he is a colleague or a client of theirs, not the other way round. He’d like that, she thinks. He thinks he’s a good actor.
Having regrouped, a few moments later Sophie and George head back into the living room with brandy and glasses. They are all smiles.
Sarah goes to follow them, but Aiden catches her arm.
‘Wait,’ he says.
She turns, but does not raise her eyes to his. She thinks she knows what’s coming.
‘I know what you said, about us being friends.’
Here we are, then, she thinks. Here it comes. ‘Do you mind if I have a go at Sophie?’ At least he has the decency – such as it is – to ask her first.
He moves closer to her, close enough that she can feel the warmth radiating from his body, smell his scent. ‘I know what you said. I know you must have your reasons, and I respect them. But I wanted to tell you something. I’m not trying to change your mind. I just need to tell you.’
‘Tell me what?’ she asks, and now at last she looks up into those green eyes and fights with everything she can muster to keep her composure.
‘I love you,’ he says.
They are in the car, driving up the hill. Two hours have passed and Sarah has said nothing to him, nothing at all, short of a brief ‘thank you’ when he helped her into her coat. There was nothing she could think of to say. She has fantasised about him saying those exact words many times over the years. She has imagined that scene taking place everywhere from an airport hotel to a beach to a windswept hillside, thought about what she would say and what he would do, and, most of the time, it would end in a kiss at the very least. She never once thought of him saying it in Sophie’s kitchen, much less that what she would feel about it when it finally, actually happened was nothing stronger than disappointment. After all these years, to be offered the thing you believed you wanted most in life and to find it is not what you thought it was. He is nothing but a shadow, a shade, a cardboard facsimile of the man she held in her heart.
More than ever she wishes Jim were still here, because, even with the debts, the lies, the way he clearly, she realised after he died, made huge life decisions without talking to her, at least he was real.
All she really wanted was to get blind drunk and pretend it hadn’t happened; but she couldn’t do that because she had to drive home. And so instead she chatted to and laughed with everyone but him, flitting from person to person, while Aiden sat in the corner, nursing a glass of George’s single malt, and watched.
When she parks the car in the barn he gets out first. He is already halfway to the cottage before she can call out to him – ‘Aiden!’ – but even that is half-hearted.
Let him go.
Anger is loss of control. It doesn’t happen to me.
Nevertheless, tonight it almost did and it took me by surprise.
It’s white-hot, raging, consuming everything I’ve taken so much time and effort to create.
And all because of her?
Fickle, selfish, desperate, crazy fucking beautiful woman that I’ve fallen in love with.
How do I deal with that? How do I get control back, now?
Next time she treats me like that, I’ll draw blood.
Sarah
Sarah stands at the kitchen sink, holding on to it tightly as if the room is spinning. It isn’t; the house is quiet, the dogs are asleep, Basil is even snoring, but Sarah’s life is unravelling piece by piece and there is nothing left that’s solid.
Aiden’s car has gone and has not come back, not even overnight; she thinks, maybe, he might be looking for somewhere else to live. She wouldn’t blame him if he were.
Sophie called earlier to ask if she had happened to notice George’s car on the way out.
‘No,’ Sarah said in reply. ‘We were parked right down the bottom of the drive. Why?’
‘Some piece of shit keyed it,’ Sophie said. ‘George is beside himself.’
‘Keyed it? On the driveway?’
‘It’s not an accident. They’ve scratched the word “cunt” into the bonnet.’
‘What? Who the hell would do something like that?’
Sophie didn’t – couldn’t – answer, but there was an echoing, unspoken name hovering in the cold air between Sarah’s house and Sophie’s.
‘Want to come over?’ Sarah asked.
‘Not today,’ Sophie responded. ‘I’m busy trying to peel George off the ceiling. He’s still on the phone to the insurance people. He’s back in London tomorrow. Maybe we could do lunch on Tuesday? I’ll give you a call when things calm down.’
Now, Sarah is looking out over the yard and wondering if there’s any point going over to the workshop. She needs to work – she has to, especially now things are clearly ruined with Aiden and he is probably going to move out. Without the rent, she will undoubtedly have to sell the house, and fast. She will have to take whatever anybody offers her.
The thought of it makes her feel sick.
What am I supposed to do, when she decides to stop talking to me?
Do I pursue her and risk making it all worse?
Or do I do the thing I am best at: take a step back, observe, work out the next move and all the possible parameters before I act?
So she is no longer my ‘friend’.
That always leaves the other one, right?
Fickle, fickle man I am, that I can move on so easily… don’t make me laugh. I’m not leaving her behind. I’ll never do that. She’s mine; she has been mine since the first time I saw her.
Everything, everyone else is only there to play their part in getting us back together.
If she will have me, I will even change. Maybe.
But one thing’s for certain.
I am not finished with her yet.
Aiden
You are sitting drinking wine with Sophie McCormack in the conservatory of the Old Rectory at half-past twelve on a Monday. It feels very decadent.
‘How are you feeling?’ you ask.
‘Much better,’ she says. ‘I have to admit it’s been a stressful couple of days.’
‘George?’
‘Oh, he’s all right. He’s full of bollocks but he always comes round in the end.’
She told you about the Lexus being carved up on the phone, yesterday. You told her you hadn’t seen anything, of course. She told you about George’s fury at it; the car has now been driven away to the dealership in Leeds. She suspects Will is to blame.
‘Why would he do that?’ you ask.
She smiles and shakes her head, as if she has already made a mistake by mentioning his name. You want to tell her to be careful, but this is not the right moment to do it.
You need all the friends you can get.
‘How’s Sarah?’ Sophie asks, pouring another glass of wine. The bottle is almost empty. In the time it has taken you to drink one glass, she has drunk three.
‘You should call her,’ you say, which is your way of being discreet. Besides, you don’t want So
phie to know that somehow you’ve fucked things up with the woman you claim to love, all over again.
‘I said I’d take her for lunch tomorrow.’
‘You’ll probably see her before me, then. I keep missing her.’
‘You need to give her time,’ she says.
‘Maybe.’
She is doing her best to look happy, but something is troubling her. She is as beautiful and groomed as she always is, but under the smooth, ‘barely there’ make-up she is pale. In your experience, you cannot push someone like Sophie. The more you ask, the more she will retreat. What will work is to wait.
‘Did you tell her all about it? What you do, I mean?’
‘Eventually.’
‘It’s not as seedy as it sounds.’
‘It’s not seedy at all,’ you add, but of course that’s just your opinion.
‘Quite.’
‘You didn’t seem surprised, when I told you.’
She laughs. ‘Well, I was. But at least I know that such things exist.’
Ah, you think. Here we go. Sarah said as much.
‘You’ve seen a masseur,’ you say, as if you didn’t know already.
‘Once or twice.’
‘Any good?’
‘Fairly crap, if I’m honest. The idea of it was much better than the real thing.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. There are quite a few guys doing it now.’
Sophie finishes her wine, looks at the bottle and knits her brows, as if she hadn’t realised it contained so little. You can tell she wants to go and get another one, but it’s broad daylight outside – although the clouds are dark grey, scudding overhead – and even Sophie has her principles.
‘I can imagine you’d be better. You strike me as a… professional. Someone who takes it seriously.’
‘I do,’ you say. ‘I take pride in my work.’
‘Making women come,’ she says.
‘Making women aware of themselves, how incredible they are.’
She laughs. ‘You’re a charmer.’