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3
RUPERT
He had dreamed of bumping into her again for years, of being given a second chance. He had always imagined them picking up where they left off, his life suddenly more joyful and fulfilled because of her presence. But when that second chance had presented itself to him he’d been overcome by fear – fear that she hadn’t been thinking about him, fear that she wouldn’t still be interested ten years down the line; what sane woman would? He had come across as awkward and aloof, and then he’d just walked away without a word, without asking for her number, without even saying goodbye.
It had been nothing like he had imagined and he wondered if that was why he had never tried harder to find her, knowing deep down that if he did, it would leave him disappointed.
Rupert bent down to clip his dog’s lead on to his harness. He’d never really considered himself a dog person until Captain came into his life. He didn’t know how he would have coped with the loneliness he felt in York without Captain.
It was a cold day for June, even for Yorkshire. The sky was blue but the wind blowing off the river made him long for the hot summers of Massachusetts. Jess was all he’d been able to think about since he’d realised who she was in the pub the previous evening. That and what a terrible impression he must have made on her. She had looked so glamorous and he had been dressed in scruffy jeans and an old jumper. At least he’d moved on from the football shirts of his youth.
He’d known she was at the bar long before she’d spotted him. He’d been sitting in his usual corner with a couple of colleagues – another uneventful Saturday night at the end of another uneventful week. There were times when Rupert wondered if his life was just passing him by, if work had completely taken over and all he would be remembered for were a few dry academic books that nobody read. Even his parents didn’t seem interested in his career anymore.
‘Here’s trouble!’ Rupert’s friend, Chris, had said to him with a wink and a nudge as the hen party arrived in the pub. He’d felt the energy change around him and it was Gemma he recognised first, her laugh, her exuberance – she’d always been a perfect counterfoil to Jess’s quiet homebody demeanour. It had taken him a moment to recognise the slim brunette with the red lipstick and the green eyes. It couldn’t be her, could it? But then she’d smiled at something Gemma had said and he had known. Nobody else could light up a room with their smile like that.
His initial instinct had been to run. He’d been waiting years for this opportunity, but how could he see it through? Real life was never like your imagination. What if she was dismissive? What if she was still angry? Worse, what if she didn’t recognise him?
He’d realised that Chris was still talking to him and he’d forced himself to look away from her. He had smiled tightly, a smile that could be interpreted as disapproval of this gaggle of drunk women who had disturbed his Saturday night. And then Chris had said something that had made him laugh – he couldn’t even remember what it was now – and when he had looked up Gemma was staring at him, her eyebrows raised. He’d seen Jess whisper something to her and the next thing he had known, Gemma was calling him over.
He should have run when he had the chance.
‘You know them?’ Chris had asked eagerly. Poor single Chris – always looking for the woman who would change his life. Rupert hadn’t replied. He had already been talking to Gemma, teasing her about her hen night outfit as though they’d seen each other yesterday. All his awareness had been on Jess though, just as it ever was.
He’d managed to avoid talking to her directly for most of the evening, answering the questions Gemma shot at him instead as he’d felt the press of Jess’s thigh against his and tried to ignore how that made him feel. Later, while Jess was in the loo, he’d answered more personal questions from Gemma. He had found himself asking a few questions as well. He’d wondered if Jess was avoiding him.
When Gemma had insisted that he walk Jess back to the hotel, his stomach fizzed. It had felt as though it was his one chance. But he had blown that chance. When she’d slipped her hand into the crook of his elbow, when he’d pulled her closer, it had felt as though a decade had slipped away, as though they were back where they started and he had never boarded that flight to America all those years ago. So why had he gone and walked away from her again?
Possibly because he wouldn’t have known which version of the truth to tell her – because she was bound to want to know why he was back. He hadn’t been sure if he could lie to her and he hadn’t been sure if he could tell her the truth.
As Rupert opened his front door and allowed Captain to drag him out on his morning walk, he told himself that walking away again had been the best thing he could have done, for both of them.
4
JESS
‘Are you angry with me?’ my mother asked.
‘Of course I’m not angry with you, Mum,’ I replied. ‘I am wondering why you didn’t tell me though.’
We were in the garden of my mother’s flat in Highgate. She had moved out of Cambridge after I graduated from university, after my father died, moving to London to be nearer to me. We always had a need to be near each other since Dad died; Mum had been an only child too and she wanted to keep what family she had close. It had worked out well for both of us in the end.
My mother, Caro Jefferson, was a poet. She lived quietly on her not-insubstantial royalties and my father’s even less insubstantial life insurance payout. She got involved with community projects in Highgate, wrote for the local magazine, helped organise the costumes for the pantomime, that kind of thing. She was happy there – who wouldn’t be? Highgate is beautiful.
It felt as though we’d looked at a thousand flats in north London before we came across this one, but as soon as we saw it, Mum knew it was the right one. I had started working at The Ham & High then – the newspaper for Hampstead and Highgate – and was living with Dan on Kentish Town Road. Mum’s flat was just far enough away for me to not feel Mum was on top of me, but near enough for us to go round whenever we were hungry. Cadet journalists and inexperienced photographers don’t earn very much.
Mum’s flat was the lower ground floor of a converted Georgian terrace. The flat itself was a little dark but the French doors in the kitchen opened out onto a beautiful garden where Mum could indulge in her other great love – breeding roses.
We were in her rose garden the morning after I got back from York, Mum pruning away as I sat nearby enjoying the early morning sun. I’d been hesitatingly telling her about seeing Rupert again. She’d known he was back in the UK but hadn’t told me.
‘I hadn’t wanted to upset you, darling,’ Mum said as she delicately pruned her precious roses. ‘It took you so long to get over him, I thought it was best left in the past.’
‘I’m surprised,’ I replied. ‘A romantic like you. I’d have thought you would have been scheming to get us back together!’ I grinned at her, but her face was serious.
‘There’s nothing romantic about what happened. Have you any idea what it felt like to watch you hurting like that?’
What could I say to that? My mother thought it had taken a long time for me to get over Rupert. I know now that I never did.
‘How did you know he was back?’ I asked.
‘His mother told me. We’re still in touch – I think she probably hears from me more often than she hears from her son though. They were never a close family, were they? He always seemed to prefer our house to his.’
A memory flashed in my head then of us doing our homework at my mum’s big kitchen table together, heads down over our books, kicking each other with our toes under the table. I hadn’t realised that Mum still kept in touch with Rupert’s parents. She returned to Cambridge now and again, but I hadn’t been back since she moved to London. I’d avoided Cambridge since Rupert left.
‘His sister is a doctor now,’ I said. ‘She lives in Sydney.’
Mum nodded. She already knew that too.
‘How did you feel about seeing him again?’ she asked. It was impossible not to notice the look of concern on her face. I knew she was worried about me. Mum knew better than anyone how ill I had been and she had been concerned about me going on Gemma’s hen weekend at all, thinking it might be too much for me. When I had first got ill, I’d left my job at the newspaper and moved into Mum’s spare room. I’d never got around to moving out again. I hadn’t been able to summon up the energy if I’m honest, so I turned the spare room into a bedroom-cum-study and I started writing a book about Ancient Greece, not knowing where it would take me at the time.
I didn’t know how I felt about seeing Rupert again. Part of me was regretting not talking to him more, not asking for a phone number or if he wanted to meet for a coffee before I went back to London. But part of me thought there was too much pain and heartache, too much left unsaid, to simply pick up where we left off.
‘It was lovely to see him,’ I said, not really answering Mum’s question at all.
‘I sense a but,’ my mother replied, putting down her secateurs and coming to sit next to me. She tilted her head up towards the sun and pushed her sunglasses up her nose. Sometimes she looked like a film star.
‘I never expected to see him again,’ I said. ‘I’d finally stopped thinking about him. It was a shock.’
Mum reached over to pat my hand. ‘Of course it was a shock,’ she said. ‘Did you talk about seeing each other again?’
I shook my head.
‘Why not?’ she asked.
‘There was so much I felt I couldn’t tell him,’ I replied. ‘About what happened, about how ill I was, about Dan, about still living here with you.’
‘Living with your mother is nothing to be ashamed about. Why did you feel you couldn’t tell him?’
Mum had a habit of always getting straight to the point.
‘He’s achieved so much,’ I replied. ‘He’s top of his field and I’ve achieved virtually nothing. We both had so much potential …’
‘You’ve had two books published,’ my mother interrupted. ‘Both of which sold well, and you’ve just signed a contract for two more.’
I knew I was making excuses and pretending that it hadn’t felt right seeing Rupert again. The truth was I hadn’t had the courage to take the opportunity and neither had he. But that didn’t mean I hadn’t been thinking about him constantly since I’d seen him, thinking about the past, about what could have been.
*
Later, when I was lying in bed unable to sleep, I found my eyes wandering in the dark to the top of the wardrobe where I could just make out the shapes of the two plastic boxes up there. One box contained all the diaries and journals I’d kept since I was seven years old, the other was full of photographs. Everything that was in those two boxes was so tied up with Rupert, with my father and with everything that happened the summer after we graduated that I hadn’t been able to bring myself to look at them for years.
Until tonight.
I turned on the bedside light and got out of bed, dragging a chair over to the wardrobe so I could stand on it and pull the boxes off. It was a struggle to do it quietly but I didn’t want to wake Mum. I didn’t want her asking questions.
I could still remember the long hot summer of 2003 when Rupert and I were seventeen, the summer I first met Dan. I could still remember the sound of Gemma and Caitlin bickering and the sensation of the sun on my skin as Rupert, Dan, Camilla and I lay by the river. I could still feel the coolness of the water as we swam lazily in the river in the afternoons and the feeling of Rupert’s hand in mine. I could still remember the way Camilla used to look at him, the way she would touch his arm or his knee when she talked to him.
Camilla and I were at school together, but we were never close. Sometimes she’d turn up with Gemma and Caitlin; sometimes she’d seek us out on her own. I knew it wasn’t me she came to see though – I knew it was Rupert and I was glad of Dan that summer. He was Rupert’s friend but he always felt like my ally. I can still remember the sense of inevitability I felt when he and I went to London together and Rupert and Camilla stayed in Cambridge.
So many memories, but the one thing I could never remember, no matter how hard I tried, was the sound of my father’s voice. However tightly I had tried to hold on to it, it had faded over the years.
My memories, like most nostalgia trips, were rose-tinted. I’d almost forgotten how angry I used to feel whenever Camilla touched Rupert. That underlying sense of jealousy and rivalry that I felt back then had melted into adulthood and an understanding of the complexities of life, of the shades of grey – teenagers seem to have an almost over developed sense of black and white, of right and wrong.
It seemed that things hadn’t worked out between Rupert and Camilla after all but I wasn’t sure that changed anything. The past has gone and the years in between have been too long and too full of difficulties for the reunion Gemma seemed to think Rupert and I deserved.
Haven’t they?
I sat down on the floor next to the boxes and pushed the one with the photographs away. I wasn’t ready for that yet. I opened the box containing the journals and found the first one and I started reading.
… A few days after we turned seven, my grandmother died.
At her funeral I cried big fat tears. I hated that I couldn’t stop them from falling in front of everyone. I hated that I couldn’t be stronger for my mum. You stood beside me in your school uniform, your jaw set stoically – a baby version of the way you set your jaw later whenever anyone disagreed with you.
You refused to go to school that morning, insisting on being at the funeral, on being with me even though your parents didn’t want you to. They told you that you were too young to go but you said you were twelve hours older than me and you came anyway. Halfway through the service, when I thought my tears would never stop and Dad had run out of tissues, I felt your hand slip into mine, hot and sticky and reminding me that you were there. Everything would always be all right as long as you were there. You may only have been twelve hours older than me but you always understood the world better than I ever did.
We were born twelve hours apart – you at 6 p.m. and me the following morning – in the same hospital, our mothers recovering in beds next to each other, an odd but lifelong friendship developing from that initial bond. You were early and I was late, which was the pattern that continued for the rest of our lives. You were always waiting for me to catch up with you.
Our parents’ houses stood back to back and our mothers’ friendship transferred to us. We grew up together, in one another’s pockets. We made a hole in the back fence so we could cut through into each other’s gardens instead of walking around the block to the front door. We wandered in and out of each other’s houses as though we owned the whole street. We did everything together from the moment we were born.
Our first day of school seemed less daunting because we had each other. We were always in trouble for talking, or for reading some book or other that we weren’t meant to be reading, both of us so ahead of the rest of the class even then. Sometimes, when they made us work in pairs, the teachers would separate us, make us work with other people. But you were always looking over your shoulder, making sure I was OK.
When you were six you punched the boy who used to bully me. You got in a lot of trouble for that. Afterwards you told me you were going to marry me one day, and always look after me. You were the only six-year-old I’ve ever known who tried to stick to that promise.
The autumn after my grandmother died we were sent off to separate schools, hothousing us in single-sex environments, prepping us for the ‘great things’ our parents had planned for our futures. I missed you desperately. I was so used to you then that I missed the testosterone in my every day, even if I wasn’t really aware that’s what it was that I was missing. Every evening when we got home we ripped off our expensive school uniforms and pulled on the dirty, scruffy clothes we preferred wearing to sit in my mother’s apple orchard, catching up on our days, daydreaming.
And then, when we were eleven, the unthinkable happened.
They took you away from me …
5
JESS
‘Don’t be mad at me,’ Gemma said in the voice of someone who had done something that would make me mad.
The two of us were lying on our backs listening to soothing music as two beauty therapists performed a procedure known as Billion Dollar Brows on us.
‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What have you done other than make me undergo this torture?’ I wasn’t sure I was a Billion Dollar Brow sort of person. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d set foot in a beauty salon. It must have been over six years ago and I was sure eyebrows had been much less complicated back then.
‘You’ll thank me for it,’ Gemma said.
‘For what? The eyebrows or whatever else it is you’ve done?’
‘You’ll thank me for both in the end,’ she said.
‘Gemma, what have you done?’
‘I invited Rupert to my wedding and he’s RSVP’d yes,’ she replied very quickly, the words tumbling out of her mouth.
‘You’ve what?’ I felt my stomach lurch at the thought of it. After spending the last few nights going through my old diaries, reading through my memories of Rupert as a child, a teenager, our first kiss and everything that happened afterwards, I had been trying not to think about him at all. I had been failing spectacularly but seeing him at Gemma’s wedding wasn’t going to help. I’d worked so hard at moving on that this felt like a setback.
Except the part that felt like a second chance.
‘He’s coming to the wedding,’ Gemma said. ‘And he’ll dance with you and realise what a terrible mistake he made and …’
‘Gemma, stop,’ I said. ‘Stop getting carried away. If you’ve invited him because he’s an old friend and you’d like him to be there then that’s fine.’ I was being much more reasonable than I felt, mostly due to the presence of the two eyebrow technicians. ‘But if you think there’s going to be some great reunion, you’re mistaken.’
‘I just want us all to be together again,’ she said. ‘Well, except Camilla of course.’
‘And Dan,’ I replied, wondering what he was doing these days. Gemma didn’t say anything.
‘When did you invite Rupert?’ I asked, changing the subject.
‘I sent an invitation to his department at the university. He replied with his address and telephone number, if you’d like them.’
I was tempted. More than tempted. I wanted her to put the number into my phone so I could call him the minute I got out of the beauty salon. But I ignored that feeling, took a deep breath and tried not to think about the fact that in just over a week I’d be seeing him again.
‘I’m sorry,’ Gemma said when I didn’t respond. ‘I wanted to do something nice for you. You were always meant to get married first – you know that.’
I didn’t know what to say to that because it was true. It should have been me first. It should have been me ten years ago. Rupert and I should be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary instead of being forced into some awkward situation at Gemma’s wedding. We could have had a house together; we could have had a family. I could have avoided Dan and never got ill. I could have been happy for the last decade instead of wasting my time thinking about what might have been.
‘It’s OK,’ I said.
‘So you don’t mind?’
I sighed. Gemma and Rupert had always got along well. They had the same sense of humour, even though Rupert’s was far more restrained. They spent years as teenagers ribbing each other and I knew that she had missed him when he left. He was one of the few people who stuck by her, who didn’t try and encourage her to go to university when she hadn’t wanted to.
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘But don’t try and matchmake. Just leave it OK?’
‘I told you he was single, didn’t I?’ she carried on regardless. ‘And his first question was whether you were seeing anyone.’
‘Really?’ I asked, despite myself.
‘Yes, he seemed quite keen to know that.’
My heart skipped at the thought of that, although I tried to put it out of my mind.
‘Look, Gemma,’ I said. ‘It’ll be lovely to see Rupert again at the wedding, but it doesn’t mean we’re getting back together. It was a long time ago and we’re different people now.’
‘I’ll sit him next to your mum,’ Gemma said, ignoring me. ‘She can write a poem about it all.’
‘What do you think?’ the eyebrow technician asked suddenly, holding a mirror above my face. It took me a moment to recognise myself. I looked ghastly and had to bite my lip to stop myself saying so. I could hear Gemma gushing about her amazing new eyebrows in the background, so I forced a smile and told the therapist that they were perfect. I actually wanted to cry. I was still so pale and thin, and the sudden encroachment of dark oppressive brows just didn’t look right. Brows like this suited women like Gemma, with her tanned skin and good bone structure. On me it looked like a five-year-old had got into her mother’s make-up bag.
I managed to keep quiet as we paid and left the salon. I didn’t want Gemma to realise how upset I was but she knew me too well.
‘Shall we go for a coffee?’ she asked.
I made a non-committal noise. All I wanted to do was go home and scrub my forehead for the rest of the evening until I looked less ridiculous.
‘Jess, what’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ I replied in an attempt to sound breezy.
‘Don’t lie to me, Jess. What’s wrong?’
I sighed. ‘I look like Noel bloody Gallagher,’ I said. It was ridiculous to be this upset about eyebrows, but honestly, they looked dreadful.
Gemma started laughing to herself and headed off down the street. I followed her, brushing my fringe down in an attempt to hide my brows.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I know it was meant to be a treat but I hate them. They don’t suit me like they suit you.’
Gemma looked at me then, still smiling. ‘They’re fine,’ she said. ‘They always look a bit alarming when you first have them done, but they’ll fade and you’ll thank me when you see the wedding photos.’
‘Will I?’
‘Eyebrows are the windows to the soul,’ she said.
‘I thought that was eyes?’
‘Window frames then.’ She laughed, linking her arm through mine. I’ve always wondered what it must be like to feel as carelessly happy as Gemma.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get that coffee.’
