Читать книгу: «The Mum Who Got Her Life Back», страница 4
Chapter Seven
Jack
My God, but she’s lovely. I’d thought she was gorgeous in her work clothes, all casual, but in her simple blue dress she really is something else.
‘Are you sure your friends won’t be missing you?’ Nadia asks as – miraculously – we find a tiny table tucked away at the back of the pub.
‘I’m sure they’ll cope without me,’ I tell her as we sit down. ‘So, what else would you have been doing tonight?’
She smiles. It’s a lovely smile: generous and open, but a little hesitant. Her eyes are an incredible shade of green, her skin glowing, her hair long, dark and shiny, falling around her shoulders in soft waves. ‘If Alfie had come home, we’d probably have watched some Christmas movies together,’ she explains. ‘We’d have cracked open the snacks – the nuts, the Twiglets, all the festive delicacies.’ She chuckles, and her eyes seem to actually sparkle, which does something peculiar to my insides. ‘We really know how to have a good time,’ she adds.
‘Alfie’s your son?’ I ask, unnecessarily.
‘Yes – he’s a twin. Molly, his sister, is home already, but I’ve hardly seen her. And Alfie’s spending Christmas at his girlfriend’s parents’ hunting lodge up in the wilds of Aberdeenshire …’
‘A hunting lodge?’ I repeat.
Nadia sips her white wine. ‘That’s kind of misleading. You’d think it might mean a little wooden shack out in the hills, wellies piled up at the front door …’
‘That’s exactly what I’d think,’ I agree, although I can’t say the subject has ever crossed my mind before.
‘Yes, well that’s what I assumed. Alfie keeps insisting they’re not that posh, but I managed to coax him into telling me the name of their place – this lodge – and of course I googled it immediately …’
‘Of course! Who wouldn’t?’
She chuckles. ‘Yep, well, it’s actually a Baronial mansion with twenty-four rooms and a dedicated annexe for falcons.’
‘Falcons. Wow.’
‘Someone’s specifically employed to be the falcon keeper. I mean, that’s all they do.’
‘They probably involve quite a lot of care and attention,’ I suggest.
She laughs and pushes a strand of hair from her face. ‘Sorry. I’m really going on. It’s the time of year, y’know. It’s all a bit … heady.’
‘I know what you mean,’ I say, thinking: heady is precisely the right word, and I want this kind of headiness to stretch on and on. I do hope she’s in no hurry to go home.
‘So, what are you doing for Christmas?’ she asks. ‘You mentioned your daughter …’
‘Yeah, Lori’s fourteen – she’s my only one – and me and her mum take it in turns to have her on Christmas Day.’ I grimace. ‘Have her. I mean, enjoy her delightful company …’
‘And this year?’ Nadia asks with a smile.
‘I’ll see her on Boxing Day when I’m back in town. I’m off to my parents’ first thing in the morning. They’re up in Perthshire, near Crieff but out in the country. They have a dairy farm …’
‘Is that where you grew up? You’re a farmer’s boy?’
‘That’s right.’ I smile, reluctant to bore her to death with my entire life history – although her interest seems genuine. ‘But I moved here when I was nineteen,’ I add.
‘Desperate to get to the big city,’ she suggests.
‘God, yes. No doubt I still smelt of the farm …’
Nadia flashes another smile. ‘Do your parents still have it?’
‘Yes, incredibly – they’re both seventy this year.’
‘Pretty young parents,’ she remarks.
I nod. ‘Yeah – they were still teenagers when Craig, my big brother, was born. He and his wife handle a lot of the day-to-day now.’
‘And there’s just the two of you? You and your brother, I mean?’
‘Erm, we had another brother,’ I murmur, ‘but there was an accident …’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ Nadia exclaims.
‘A long time ago now,’ I say briskly; Christ, the last thing I want to do is heap all that stuff on this beautiful woman whom I’ve only just met. I mean, for fuck’s sake, it’s Christmas Eve, she is utterly lovely and I’ve somehow swerved onto the subject of death … ‘So, how about you?’ I ask quickly.
‘Um, you mean … my background and stuff?’
‘Yes.’
‘God, where to start?’ She laughs, and her eyes meet mine, and there seems to be a kind of … moment between us. An understanding, perhaps, that we will talk about other, deeper things; not tonight, but later on, when we know each other better. Because there will be a later on, I’m sure of it already, and I sense she feels it too.
‘I grew up in Ayrshire,’ Nadia is telling me, ‘and we moved to Glasgow when I was a teenager. There’s just me and my sister, Sarah – she’s the truly grown-up one. A fully formed adult by the age of ten. Then I moved to Dundee, went to art college …’
‘You’re an artist as well as working at the shop?’ I cut in.
She colours slightly. ‘Well, um, I kind of … dabble.’
‘Right. I have to say, I can’t even draw stick men. So, how long’ve you worked in—’
‘Would you like another drink?’ she asks quickly.
‘Oh, erm – yes, but I’ll get them …’
‘No, it’s my round.’ She has already leapt to her feet. ‘Same again?’
‘Yes please.’
I watch her as she wends her way through the crowds towards the bar. Fair enough, I decide; she probably doesn’t want to be quizzed about her shop job right now. Maybe she’s just picked up some seasonal shifts.
‘Whereabouts d’you work, Jack?’ she asks as she returns with our drinks.
‘I manage a charity shop,’ I reply.
‘Really? Which one?’
‘We’re just a small operation really – half a dozen shops across Scotland, but just the one in Glasgow. The charity’s called All For Animals, we fund sanctuaries – it’s a bit of an unfortunate name as it’s often referred to as AA …’
She chuckles. ‘I know your shop. I’ve been in a couple of times, actually. It’s lovely. I mean, I know charity shops have raised their game, displaying things nicely, organising the clothes in colour groups – but yours is a cut above.’
‘Thanks,’ I say, surprised and flattered by her enthusiasm.
‘I bought Molly a Biba-style top and some vintage magazines for myself,’ she continues. ‘I was chatting to the guy who was manning the till – a tall man, very chatty, said he’s in charge of the book section …’
‘That’s Iain …’
‘He seemed lovely.’
I smile. ‘He is. He has his issues but he really does care about the shop, and the other volunteers. Makes everyone coffees …’
‘How kind of him.’
‘… with water from the hot tap,’ I add with a smile.
Nadia laughs kindly. ‘So, it’s not all volunteers, then? I mean, you’re not one?’
‘Nope, the managers are paid.’ I smile. ‘Honestly, it is a proper job. I also do some freelance proofreading for publishers and authors …’ I pause. ‘I’m sure you’re wildly impressed,’ I joke.
‘I am. I really am.’ And so the evening goes on, with both of us covering vast swathes of ground, personal-history wise, and the-state-of-our-lives-now wise: our families, our work (she happily tells me that she models occasionally for life drawing classes, but still seems reluctant to talk about her job at the shop). There is barely a lull, and every now and then, one of us breaks off to apologise for ‘going on’.
‘You don’t really want to know about dairy herds,’ I tell her, noticing now that we have pulled our chairs closer and are leaning towards each other, across the table.
‘I do,’ she says. ‘All the books I loved as a kid were set on farms. I longed to sleep in a hay barn and collect eggs. Did you have sheepdogs?’
‘Well, yes, because we had sheep too …’
‘The ones with black faces?’
I can’t help smiling at that. ‘Yes. We still have them. Scottish Blackface …’
‘Is that what they’re called? I love those!’ She grins at me. ‘Any other kinds?’
‘Um, a few Shetland and Hebrideans. They’re good if you want to do things organically. They’re smaller, very hardy, coming from the islands originally—’ obviously ‘—so they’re not as reliant on feed, they can graze on rough ground, on heathers …’ I break off and chuckle. ‘I’m telling you about the dietary needs of sheep.’
‘But only because I asked.’ We laugh, and she touches my hand across the table, which has the effect of shooting some kind of powerful current through my body. I want to lean over and kiss her beautiful mouth right there. I don’t, of course, because you can’t just swoop on a woman like that, can you? I catch her studying me with an amused glint in her eyes, and there’s a small pause in conversation that feels anything but awkward.
Because we know, I think, that this is definitely the beginning of something. I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sure of anything in my life.
Of course I’ve dated women in the nine years since Elaine and I broke up. There was Amanda, who was a regular customer to the shop, but it never really felt as if it was going anywhere, and eventually she moved away down south. My thing with Zoe last year was more fiery – she collected Mexican death masks and painted pictures with her menstrual blood. She was striking, passionate and unpredictable; one minute, she’d be insisting that we should move in together and the next, that I wouldn’t see her for six weeks as she was off to some Pagan drumming thing on a remote island. When we broke up, she egged my car. ‘What a waste of eggs,’ Lori chuckled as we sluiced the windscreen down.
For a brief period, I succumbed to my mate Fergus’s nagging that Tinder was the way forward. It wasn’t just for young people looking for casual hook-ups, he insisted. ‘Old fuckers like us use it too now,’ he enthused. Although I met a couple of perfectly lovely women, it felt terribly random, and I couldn’t be doing with all that swiping business. I know everyone meets online these days – Elaine’s had a couple of relationships that started this way – but it wasn’t for me. I started to think that perhaps nothing was for me.
But now, as the evening rolls on, I wonder if this was what I was holding out for: just a lovely, normal night in a pub with a gorgeous, sparky woman.
‘What about your kids’ dad?’ I ask, having given her a brief summary of the Elaine business.
‘We get along fine,’ she replies. ‘Even the break-up wasn’t that traumatic, not really. It was my decision, finally, but he didn’t fight it. Danny said he almost felt cheated that no clothes had been torn up, no prawns stuffed in curtain poles, not a single incident of screaming.’
I smile. ‘So, you’ve divorced now?’
‘Oh, we weren’t married. But we were as good as, of course. The kids were eleven when we split …’
‘And their dad really was okay about it?’ I ask.
‘It seemed like it at the time,’ she replies. ‘I mean, he started dating fairly soon, and he met his current partner a year or so after we broke up. They’re still together – very happy, by all accounts. But maybe …’ She shrugs. ‘Later on, Danny told me he’d been devastated. I said, “Really? I didn’t think you minded that much.” And he said, “You make it sound like you just put an old armchair out for the council collection men.”’
I can’t help laughing at that.
‘Have you heard of Danny Raven?’ she asks.
‘Yes, of course …’
‘Well, that’s him.’
‘Really?’ For some reason, this feels like a punch to the gut. Her ex is Danny Raven, fêted film-maker, for Christ’s sake. So why’s she spending her Christmas Eve in the pub with the manager of a—
‘Jack?’ Her voice cuts into my thoughts.
‘Yes?’
The smile seemed to illuminate her face as she leans more closely towards me. ‘It’s very, very over between him and me. We get along fine, and we raise our kids together. But I am most definitively on my own now. I mean, there’s no one …’ She pauses. It feels as if my heart has stopped. Even closer she comes, her beautiful face before me now. As she kisses me lightly on the lips, I feel as if I might topple off my chair.
We pull apart and look at each other. Somehow, our hands have entwined under the table. There’s so much I want to say to her, I hardly know where to begin. ‘I’d really like to see you again,’ is all I can manage, ‘if that’s all right with you.’
Nadia nods. ‘I’d really like to see you too. But, um, there is something …’
Oh, shit – here it comes: the ‘but’.
‘Uh-huh?’ I say, feigning nonchalance.
‘There’s, er … a thing I need to tell you.’
I inhale deeply, various possibilities already forming in my mind: she’s in love with someone. Or something’s wrong – maybe she has an illness? Or an issue with her kids? – and she doesn’t want to get involved with anyone right now. Fine, it’s been a lovely evening; but maybe I really should get home, seeing as I still have a pile of presents to wrap for my parents, my brother and sister-in-law …
‘What is it?’ I ask lightly, draining my glass.
She looks down. ‘I have to tell you … I don’t actually work in Lush.’
‘What?’
She reddens and nods with a closed-lipped smile. I’m baffled now; so why did she spend twenty minutes chatting to me about bath bombs? ‘I’m so sorry,’ I murmur, shaking my head. ‘I just assumed …’
‘Yes, of course you did.’ She is laughing now.
‘But I accosted you and asked you all those questions about skin stuff! Why didn’t you just tell me to leave you alone?’
‘Because I didn’t want you to leave me alone.’
‘But what must you have thought?’ I laugh, mortified by my mistake.
‘You didn’t accost me,’ she insists. ‘Look – it’s me who should be apologising …’
‘Why?’ I am genuinely bewildered.
‘Well, I, er …’ She looks down at her hands, and then, as her gaze meets mine, something seems to somersault in the pit of my stomach. ‘I let you think I worked there,’ she says, smiling. ‘Actually, I sort of pretended …’
‘You pretended? Why?’
She pauses and pushes back that wayward strand of hair. ‘Because,’ she says simply, ‘I just wanted to talk to you.’
Part Two
Sex and the Empty Nester: Things to Know
• Your friends will go on about how you can ‘swing from the chandeliers’ – or your IKEA ‘Maskros’ pendant lamp – now the kids have left home. There may be an expectation that you are doing it constantly. You might feel obliged to say you are.
• Even ordinary sex is better now that you don’t have to be silent.
• You might find yourself being super-noisy and shouty – more than you ever were pre-children – just because you can.
• Being able to wander about in the nude feels like a wonderful novelty of which you will never tire.
• It’s important to enjoy this stage while it lasts – because it might not.
Chapter Eight
Four months later
Nadia
Molly once explained to me how a microwave works, how its radio waves ‘excite’ the atoms in food, causing them to jiggle about in a frenzy, making everything hot. I feel this way whenever I’m with Jack, even several months in – not hot in a menopausal sweat kind of way, but sort of shimmery and super-charged.
At certain times my setting switches to FULL POWER: e.g. during sex. To think, I’d almost forgotten what the point of it was, apart from making babies. Like knowing who’s number one in the charts, I’d begun to assume it belonged to a previous era of my life; something I could get along without quite contentedly.
The full-power thing kicks in even whenever Jack just happens to stroll nakedly across my bedroom. I should be used to him now, as we have been seeing each other regularly since Molly and Alfie headed back to uni after the Christmas break. But I wonder if the novelty aspect will ever wear off, as I still want to shout, ‘There’s a beautiful naked man wandering casually across my bedroom!’ And I want to take a quick snap of his luscious rear view with my phone and beam it onto a huge building. Yep, I want to objectify him, plus lots of other things, because the truth is – although he’d deny this to the hilt – he has a lovely body. It’s not intimidatingly buff, and that’s a plus, in my book, as I’ve always found the idea of a six-pack disconcerting (especially as, size-wise, I am a generous fourteen). Jack has more your casual runner’s-type physique: fairly slim, although he insists that’s just the way he’s built – ‘A bag of bones when I was kid’ – rather than due to his endeavours on the fitness front.
I have to say, his bottom is especially lovely. Corinne has a word she uses, to describe an attractive male rear: biteable, adjective, meaning ‘evokes lust’. It suits Jack’s perfectly. I do have a few pictures of him on my phone – not of his bottom, but his lovely face, and of the two of us together; selfies taken when we’ve been out and about, doing the kind of things newish couples do: strolling through parks, visiting galleries, having picnics and walks along the river. When no one’s looking I’m prone to browsing through them. My boyfriend. It feels weird, using that term at fifty-one years old, but nothing else seems quite right. Jack is the kind of man I’d imagined, occasionally, might be out there somewhere: the one I’d kept missing as we went about our business in the same city all these years.
The long, cold winter has blossomed into a glorious spring, and by now I have met his friends and the volunteers at his shop. Iain claimed to have remembered me from when I popped in, and I was treated to one of his hot-tap coffees before Jack could dive for the kettle himself.
This coming weekend, significantly, I am meeting Lori. He’s been suggesting it for a while now, but I’ve been nervous. He’d also told me about his ex Elaine’s litany of boyfriends, and how they’ve tended to just appear at her house, to be presented to Lori, and then in a few weeks they’d be gone.
‘It’s not like that with us,’ Jack has insisted, ‘and she knows all about you. She really wants to meet you and thinks I’m hiding you away – or making you up.’
‘What, even though you’ve shown her pictures of me?’ I asked.
‘Yeah. She’s starting to think her dad’s a sad bastard who’s taken pictures of some random woman off the internet and is pretending she’s his girlfriend.’ He laughed, then turned serious. ‘She also knows your kids are academic types, at uni, and she said, “You’re not ashamed of me, are you, Dad?”’
Well, that did it. We agreed that I could go round to his place one Saturday, when Lori was there, and he’d make lunch.
Naturally, I’ve been to Jack’s place countless times, but when the day rolls around my mouth is parched, my hands sticky with sweat, as I emerge from the subway station and make my way to his flat. Determined to make a good impression, I’m wearing a summery cotton dress, plus cardi and minimal meeting-the-boyfriend’s-offspring-type make-up … at least, I hope that’s what it is. I’ve never been in this situation before. Jack has already filled me in on the fact that, whilst Lori isn’t terribly keen on school, she does love her drama club – which seems appropriate as I feel as if I am on my way to an audition.
In fact, it’s Jack who seems the edgiest when I arrive, and he fusses over serving our lunch: a big bowl of spaghetti puttanesca, slightly over-boiled, which is unlike him; Jack’s pasta is usually cooked to perfection.
I like Lori immediately. For one thing, she looks so like him; I knew that already, from photos he’d shown me, but it’s even more apparent in real life. As she tucks into her lunch, she’s relaxed and chatty, answering my questions about her drama club. And as I watch them together, I’m overcome by a surge of love for Jack.
‘Lori’s an actress who doesn’t want to be famous,’ he remarks, and they catch each other’s expressions and smile.
‘I so don’t,’ she declares. ‘But some of them do.’ She looks at her father. ‘Shannon does …’
‘That’s Lori’s best friend,’ he explains.
‘Yeah.’ Lori spears her spaghetti and smirks. ‘I love her but, you know. She’s kinda …’ She glances back at her dad, as if checking for confirmation. ‘Shall I show Nadia what she’s like?’ She nudges her phone, which is parked right at her side on the table, and he nods.
‘Go on then.’ He grins.
‘I feel mean,’ she adds, wincing. ‘She’s a really sweet person …’
Jack chuckles. ‘But.’
‘But,’ Lori repeats, smiling now as she flips to her friend’s Instagram account and shows me a series of selfies. She is deeply tanned, displaying colossal false lashes and those extreme brows that tend to look too defined: sharp-edged, as if cut from black fabric and stuck onto the face.
‘Wow,’ is all I can say.
‘I know,’ Lori murmurs, continuing to scroll through her friend’s pictures.
‘Those lips,’ I exclaim at one point.
‘They’re fillers,’ she says sagely, and I notice she’s edged her chair closer to mine.
‘Lip fillers? I mean … how old is she?’
‘Fourteen, same as me. And yeah – loads of girls are having them …’
‘But … how much do they cost?’
Lori shrugs. ‘About three hundred quid.’
‘Three hundred quid?’ I exclaim, hoping I don’t sound like some buttoned-up aunt.
Lori nods, and she and her father start laughing, clearly enjoying some shared joke. ‘She had them done for an audition,’ Jack tells me.
‘Oliver,’ Lori adds. ‘She’s into musical theatre. Wants to go to London …’
‘Or work on cruise ships,’ Jack cuts in.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘And how about you?’ I catch myself. ‘Sorry. I know people always do that, ask what you’d like to be—’
‘… when I grow up,’ Lori says with a grin. ‘Don’t know really. I just like my drama club. We do improv, we write little plays – it’s just … good.’ She shrugs and smiles. ‘I don’t want to be up on some stage, belting out ballads, doing the big-eyes-and-teeth thing …’
I nod, and because it seems okay to do so, I tell her all about Danny, and how some of the actors in his films were discovered working in cafés, or in school plays. She’s vaguely aware of his better-known films, and I’m happy to share what I know about the film-making process. Then once again I am privy to her Instagram feed – specifically pictures of Lori and her drama club friends involved in various acting workshops.
‘That’s Shannon?’ I ask, picking her out from a group picture, and Lori nods.
‘Lor,’ Jack says as he clears away our bowls, ‘tell Nadia what happened last time the two of you were left alone at your mum’s …’
‘Dad,’ she groans, feigning horror, although I suspect she wants me to know. She turns to me. ‘Shannon threw up all over the living room carpet.’
‘Oh no!’
‘Orange sick,’ Jack adds with a grimace. ‘Lori’s adamant that Shannon brought the booze …’
‘She did, Dad! Where else would it’ve come from?’
Jack eye-rolls, clearly enjoying playing the part of the disapproving dad.
‘She has a fake ID,’ Lori tells me, ‘so she can buy anything …’
‘Plus, she looks way older than she is,’ Jack remarks, at which Lori nods.
‘I’d never get away with it, even with a fake ID. I don’t drink anyway. I don’t like it.’
‘Well, you’re only fourteen,’ I remark, hoping that doesn’t sound patronising – and I’m fully aware that lots of kids of that age do drink. There were certainly a few incidences where both Alfie and Molly had tottered in, clearly tipsy well under-age.
‘I don’t think I ever will,’ she adds lightly, and I catch a quick look between her and her dad, before she blurts out, ‘I forgot! I made brownies for you coming.’
‘Really?’ I am extremely touched by this. Without wishing to read too much into the gesture – perhaps she just enjoys baking, like Alfie used to? – I decide to interpret it as a sign that she really was looking forward to meeting me today.
The afternoon flies by, and when it’s time to leave I am almost sorry to go.
‘Great to meet you, Lori,’ I say, as I pull on my jacket.
‘You too,’ she says with a smile.
Jack sees me out. ‘Did that go okay?’ I ask.
‘What do you think?’ He pulls me closer and kisses my hair.
‘I think she’s lovely. She’s a real credit to you.’
He smiles and shrugs off the compliment. ‘She’s very much her own person. But thanks, darling. We, um, had a quick word, when you were in the loo …’
I feign a terrified face. ‘What about?’
He laughs now, brushing away a strand of hair from my face, the way he does sometimes. ‘She just said you were lovely too. And normal!’
‘She said I’m normal?’ I remark, laughing now.
‘Yeah. “Not weird”, she said. You know how everything’s “weird” these days? I mean, someone only has to scratch their ear in public to be classed as “weird”. She said I was weird, the other day, for singing while I was cooking—’
‘Did she? Christ – I sing all the time …’
‘Apparently you’re not weird, though,’ he says, kissing my lips. ‘But you are very gorgeous.’
I smile, fizzling with happiness. So I’ve passed the test, I reflect, as I stride towards the subway. I am filled with the most delicious, chewy brownies (top marks to Lori), and a feeling that Jack and I have somehow moved along another small but significant step.
So his daughter thinks I am actually all right. I know I am grinning madly – I literally cannot stop – as I descend the escalator to the train. And I also know that if Lori could see me now, she’d think I was far too weird for her beloved dad.
