“Don’t you want to have a small sip of wine with us?”
Thomas shook his head. His son had been unusually quiet all week, even for Thomas. Ed wanted to hold him and tell him that everything would turn out all right, but it felt like tempting fate.
“It’s only early,” Ed said lightly.
“You said it was late!” Elliott protested.
“Elliott, shut up and go to bed.”
The small boy got down from the table and wagged his finger at Orla. “Be very careful what you say. Daddy’s being very strange about pussies at the moment.”
Orla blinked.
“Good night,” Elliott said huffily and stalked to the door.
“’Night.” Thomas turned and ran after him.
Ed tried an apologetic laugh. “Sorry about that.”
Tanya appeared at the door. “I’m off.”
Ed blinked. “You’re not going out like that?” His daughter was wearing next-to-nothing and a full face of makeup to match it.
“I am. Bye. Don’t wait up.”
“Don’t wait up!” Ed yelled.
The front door slammed.
When he laughed again, it sounded flat. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”
“I think I like this new, domesticated you,” Orla said. She slid herself onto one of the stools at the worktop.
“I’m not sure that I do,” he admitted.
They both lapsed into an extended silence.
“Fully recovered from the canal thing?” Ed inquired politely.
“I’m on antibiotics,” Orla said.
“Oh. Good. Right.” Ed topped her wineglass up, deciding not to point out that she shouldn’t be mixing alcohol with antibiotics. If the tablets didn’t kill the bugs, the booze might. The conversation sagged again. “I’ll serve dinner if you don’t mind,” he said, resisting the urge to put his apron back on. “Otherwise it might well be burnt offerings.”
He lifted the lamb out of the oven.
She was studying him closely. Too closely. He could feel her eyes following his every movement and it was making them all jerky.
“It smells divine.” Orla sniffed the air.
“It’s lamb,” Ed said pointlessly.
“My favorite.”
“I didn’t know if you ate meat.” Although most of the crew voiced the opinion that she probably ate it raw. For breakfast. “It’s all bought. I take no credit for the preparation and accept no blame if it’s not to Madam’s liking.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” she said.
Ed served the meal and took the plates to the kitchen table, sticking Miss Jones to the fridge lest she get red-currant sauce splashed on her orange triangular skirt and ruin the rest of Elliott’s life. He hadn’t bothered to put on a tablecloth, primarily because he wasn’t sure where Ali kept them, and he thought candles might have given the wrong impression. He didn’t want Orla to think he was making romantic overtures. Now he wished he’d made a bit more effort. It was hardly relaxing to be sitting at the kitchen table eating convenience food under halogen spotlights, trendy though they were. Candles would have been a good idea. Orla sat at the table, and Ed joined her with a heartfelt sigh.
“Sorry this is so rushed,” he said. “This week’s been a nightmare.”
Orla held out her glass. “Shall we toast again?”
Ed clinked his to it. “Cheers.”
“To the future,” Orla suggested.
“Yes. The future,” Ed echoed. He cut into his lamb and was relieved to find that it wasn’t like shoe leather and was, in fact, fashionably pink.
“So,” Orla said, tasting hers. “Want to tell me what’s been going on?”
Ed sucked against his lip. “Alicia has left me.”
Orla sat back. “No.”
“She’s gone off with a young, penniless artist.” Ed gestured the full extent of his hopelessness.
“Oh my God,” she said. “How romantic!”
It was Ed’s turn to sit back. “No, Orla. Not romantic. Tragic.”
“Oh, of course. Tragic. Tragic.” She sipped her wine. “But in different circumstances and with a different woman, romantic.” Orla licked her lips, smacking them together thoughtfully. “Very romantic.”
Ed was tempted to glare at Orla. “Apparently he’s a dish,” he continued miserably.
“Of what?”
“Dishy. Handsome. You know.”
Orla shrugged. “I guess he must be.”
“Would you be tempted to turn your back on seventeen years of marriage just to sleep with someone who looked younger than Leonardo Di Caprio?”
“You bet your sweet ass….” Orla looked up and stopped. “I wouldn’t even consider it.”
“I don’t know what’s made her do it.” Ed shook his head, nonplussed. “I thought we were happy.”
“Did you?”
“Well, yes. Although sometimes it might have been a married-for-more-years-than-I-care-to-remember type of happy. We never had anything much to worry about. Very few people can say that, these days.”
Orla studied him. “From the first time I met you, I saw a man who was sacrificing himself for others.”
“Me?”
“Yes. You, Ed,” she said earnestly while helping herself to microwaved mange-tout. “You are a man trapped by duty.”
“Am I?” It was something he’d considered once or twice. Particularly after a few beers.
“Well, you were,” Orla observed.
“Yes.”
She slid her fingers across the table and reached for Ed’s hand, holding it with a firm but comforting grip. “We have a lot to discuss, Ed. About the future. If Alicia was your only obstacle to accepting my job offer in the States, then that obstacle has just very conveniently removed itself.”
Ed wanted a glug of his wine but didn’t dare extract his fingers from beneath Orla’s touch. His mouth had gone very dry. This was an angle that he hadn’t really thought about at all. His wife leaving him for someone else wasn’t something he felt able to embrace with glee.
“You are now free to make your own decisions about your life,” she said.
It was a paralyzing, scary thought. Ali had walked away to pursue her own life without a backward glance. Could he possibly do the same thing?
Orla’s eyes were soft and determined at the same time, seductive, sultry and strong. “Every cloud has a silver lining, Ed,” she said as she slid her finger slowly round the rim of her wineglass. “And I might just be yours.”
Ed licked his lips nervously. Perhaps candles wouldn’t have been a good option after all.
CHAPTER 40
Jemma snapped one of those pointless, pencil-thin and tasteless breadsticks in half and risked her very fine sparkly white teeth by biting it. “My sister and your brother are driving me potty,” she said with an exasperated huff. “They are both so bloody stupid.”
It was seven o’clock and Calzone’s was already comfortably busy. The pesto sauce and Chardonnay brigade were out in force, and their laughter crackled in the air above the soft jazz. Neil had taken off the yucky jacket before he noticed the £1,700 price tag, and now he didn’t know what to do with it. He had hung it on the back of his chair and couldn’t stop checking that it hadn’t inadvertently fallen on the floor.
He had phoned the potentially topless bridesmaid yesterday to attempt to postpone their “session” until another time and had been met with a stream of invective casting aspersions on his parentage, himself and photographers in general. This made Neil think that she wasn’t quite the blushing bridesmaid she had portrayed herself to be. But then again, neither was he the suave, sophisticated society photographer that he’d made himself out to be.
That was the trouble with dating these days—or trying to. You couldn’t really be yourself or the chances were no one would want to go out with you. All the women he knew wanted to find themselves dynamic, urbane multimillionaires, or wanted to become dynamic, urbane multimillionaires themselves. It seemed as if th
e qualities of kindness, reliability, contented slothfulness and scruffiness were just not appreciated by the new millennium daters. And he was trying very hard to become dynamic, urbane and even just a minor millionaire, but it was all such a lot of effort.
Ed had never suffered from the family trait of lethargy. No sacrifice was too great to make Wavelength the successful, growing company that it was. But no matter what he did, his brother always seemed to harbor the overriding feeling that it was never quite enough. Whereas Neil blamed their father for his in-built apathy where everything was more than enough. Daddy Kingston had been a company director for most of his life—stressed, successful and totally selfish in his pursuit of that success. Then one day he decided he was going to die of an early coronary if he carried on and he resigned. Just like that. He banked his golden handshake, downsized to a smaller, cozier house, somehow discovered a previously untapped altruistic streak and took up a part-time job helping ex-prisoners to rehabilitate by starting their own businesses and, when they weren’t away on lavish exotic holidays, he and his wife played golf every afternoon. It was an idyllic existence, and he continually said how he wished he had got out of the rat race earlier. Neil aspired to the same thing—but without the striving, success and ensuing stress in the middle. Ed, however, was definitely taking after his father in his working life. Neil just wished his brother would put a bit more effort into trying to save his marriage.
Alicia was wonderful, Neil mused. He only wished he could find someone just like her. He stared up at Jemma, who was sucking the end of her breadstick and returned quickly to his dish of linguine. There was a certain desperation creeping into his dating habits, he had noted. After all, he had just turned thirty-six, and suddenly from somewhere had unexpectedly sprung the desire to be married and spend his weekend shopping at Ikea and Baby Gap as all his other friends did. Maybe the taste of take-away food was starting to pale. Whatever it was had driven him to join Snappy Setups, and he should have known from the name that it was likely to be a disaster.
Snappy Setups was a dating agency that “specialized” in finding partners for “busy, beautiful, professional people” who were presumably too tied up in being busy, beautiful or professional to have a life or bother finding people to love for themselves. And the odd photographer. Who was neither busy, beautiful or particularly professional, but was, by his own admission, too lazy.
The concept was sold on the simple idea of why should you need to spend an entire evening deciding if the woman for whom you’d just bought a gin and tonic was Miss Right, when you could get through half a dozen said women in one night. Speed dating. The fast-food version of good old-fashioned courting. It took Neil back to his days of extended adolescence in Scamps disco. Had that been any different? Only financially, he decided. This was an expensive cattle market and, therefore, trendily acceptable.
For the paltry sum of one hundred pounds, Snappy Setups made sure you were herded round a swishy wine bar for the evening by a “fixer”—his had been, inevitably, blond, bubbly and called Felicity—who was intent on finding you the “date of your dreams.” You were allowed half an hour to suss out each prospective soul mate before Felicity appeared to whisk you away to meet the next victim—or predator, depending on your viewpoint. Half an hour to decide whether you could hear wedding bells or the waste bin calling—at which point you were supposed to mark a little white card accordingly to allow Felicity to do further “fixing” and move on without a backward glance. There had been some very attractive women present, but the whole thing had been terribly depressing, and by the end of the evening Neil had lost the will to live and was ready to admit defeat and string a rope up round the beams.
The women seemed even more desperate than he was, and explaining why you were still single at the tender age of thirty-six to the fourth person in a row was enough to bring on a panic attack. The only person he really and truly fancied was Felicity and, when he found the nerve to voice this opinion, she informed him that she’d been with the same man for five years and there was no way she’d ever sign up for this sort of stupid stunt. At least he thought she said stupid stunt. The music was very loud.
There was something very demeaning about hoping to select a woman as if you were going round Sainsbury’s looking for a nice bit of rump steak. He wasn’t the most romantic soul on the planet—in fact, one or two of his girlfriends had, in the past, felt moved to remark on it. But even Neil would rather spend Friday nights in with a take-away and an old James Bond film than find a relationship with all the verve and glamour of doing the National Lottery.
“You’re not listening to a word I’m saying,” Jemma said.
Neil snapped his head up, and she was glaring at him. “I was thinking.”
“About what?”
He tried to look as if he’d been concentrating. “About what you were saying.”
“And?”
“And, I think you’re right.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” Neil said with conviction. “Absolutely everything.”
Jemma smiled. “Good.”
Neil smiled back. “Good.”
“That’s what I like about you, Neil. You’re so easy to talk to.”
He gave a self-effacing shrug. “Thanks.”
“So you think we should meet regularly to discuss tactics?”
“Yes,” Neil agreed. “Regularly.” This was as easy as falling off a log, and the bill at Calzone’s was easily going to be less than one hundred of our fine English pounds.
“Good.”
“Good.”
“God, is that the time?” Jemma drained her wine. “I don’t want to beat about the bush. I need to get you out of that outfit right now.”
Neil’s smile widened. He loved women who were upfront about what they wanted.
“I’ve got a date,” she said as she stood and slipped on her coat. Jemma winked at him. “Hot stuff.”
And Neil had that awful sinking sensation in his stomach that indicated she wasn’t necessarily referring to him.
CHAPTER 41
Elliott is clinging to the wooden post which supports our rather elegant, honeysuckle-clad porch and he’s screaming.
“I want Daddy to come!”
I look pathetically at Ed for assistance, and he gives me a look-what-you’ve-brought-us-to glare. I am collecting my children at my predetermined appointed time, and it’s a hundred times more agonizing than I ever could have imagined.
When I got up this morning, the sun wasn’t shining as my vivid imagination had hoped. Neither were the birds tweeting. The sky was weighed down with grubby clouds and the roads were wet with rain. Christian had a hangover from too much Diamond White last night and was stomping round the bathroom, and I couldn’t wait to leave the house. I was so excited about seeing my children, and I thought, hoped, that they would rush into my arms, relieved that I was back in their midst. But, like the weather, they are all being gray, grizzly and depressing.
“I want Daddy to come,” Elliott repeats at full volume, bracing his legs into the gravel.
“Daddy can’t come,” I say in my best pleasant and reasonable voice. “Daddy’s busy.”
Ed leans on the doorpost, looking like a man who has hours and hours of leisure time stretching far ahead of him. Buckled and belted into the back seat of the car, Tanya and Thomas hang their heads and try to ignore the rest of us.
“Elliott, please don’t be naughty.”
“I’m not being naughty! I’m being upset!”
“Elliott, please!”
“I want you and Daddy to be my mummy and daddy again!”
“We are your mummy and daddy. That’s a silly thing to say.”
“I’m four. I’m allowed to say silly things. You’re the ones who’re grown up,” he howls. “You’re the ones who should stop being silly!”
I hate the logic of children, which is heartbreaking in its simplicity.
I try the reassuring tack. “Whatever ha
ppens, we will always be your mummy and daddy.”
“Daddy says you’re not. He says you’re like shits that pass in the night.”
“Ships, Elliott. We’re like ships that pass in the night.” I glance up at Ed, and his features are frozen. Perhaps we are shits after all, to be able to do this to our trusting children who don’t deserve it at all.
“What if Mummy takes you somewhere nice and then we can talk about it a bit more?”
Elliott releases his death grip on the honeysuckle. His face loses its Jim Carrey contortions, and he shows grudging interest. “Where?”
I smile softly. I absolutely adore my son in between wanting to throttle him, and I’ve missed him so much this week it’s given me stomachache. I’ve missed all of them. Ed included. “Anywhere you like.”
“McDonald’s,” Elliott announces.
My heart shudders. “We can go anywhere,” I state again, hoping that Elliott will get the hint that this is not a good choice. “Anywhere.”
“McDonald’s.” He is absolute in his finality. If I am ever going to get him to part with the foliage and his father, McDonald’s it must be.
“Okay,” I say with a resigned sigh.
Ed gives a disdainful snort which says, “First day out as a single parent and you can’t think of anywhere better to take them than McDonald’s?” And he’s right.
“I’ll bring them back later,” I say, humbled. “About five.”
“Fine,” he answers tightly and closes the door.
“I’d like a Happy Meal,” Elliott trills, and I herd him into the car before he can change his mind.
McDonald’s is packed. I’ll swear that there are children hanging from the light fittings. There are certainly plenty crawling round under the tables. I move my knees for yet another ketchup-smeared three-year-old and note that the place is heaped with the remains of long-dead hamburgers and clearly the McDonald’s policy of trying to keep their outlets ultra-tidy has gone somewhat to pot today. We are all sitting round a little red table on the most uncomfortable chairs in the universe in a sectioned-off part of the restaurant that’s designed as Ronald McDonald’s car. It is painted in the migraine-inducing colors of orange and pink, and I might as well be in hell.