Did that mean he’d have noticed her if she hadn’t been hidden away? I didn’t want to know how good she was at her job, I just wanted to know her vital statistics and the colour of her hair. I was aware that the questions bouncing around in my head would make me sound like an obsessive, paranoid girlfriend if they were to make themselves heard. But wasn’t that what I was? Wasn’t that what Tom had turned me into? I couldn’t help myself.
‘Is she hot then?’ I asked. His brow crinkled as if working out the most diplomatic answer. If he said ‘No’ too quickly, I’d know he was lying. If he said ‘Yes’, he’d be mad. We both knew he couldn’t win.
‘She’s all right, I suppose,’ was all he could muster, which, given the options, was his best shot.
‘Does your ex, Rebecca, work in the City?’ I asked.
He sat up straight. ‘No,’ he said hesitantly.
Was that all I was going to get?
‘So, she doesn’t work in your industry? That wasn’t how you met?’
‘I wasn’t aware that I’d mentioned Rebecca,’ he said tightly.
A rush of heat spread up from my toes as it slowly dawned on me that he hadn’t. I’d put his reluctant ‘let’s not talk about it’, together with a picture of him and a woman who I guessed was called Rebecca, and let my mind run riot. I wanted to suck all my stupid, insecure words back in.
‘What’s all this about?’ he said, turning towards me, his face serious.
I moved closer to him and lifted his arm over me, as I laid my head in his lap. A diversion tactic to give my cheeks time to cool down.
‘I guess I just feel that there’s large chunks of your life that I don’t know about yet,’ I said, ‘and I just want to know everything that there is to know.’ I gave a little laugh and picked up his hand from where it rested on my stomach, and held it to my lips.
My heart was thumping as I waited for a response. Had I pushed it too far? Was he just going to get up and walk out?
The seconds ticked by like hours and I tried to gauge which way he was going to go as the pulse in his thigh beat against my cheek.
‘What do you want to know?’ he said, finally.
I let out the breath I’d been holding in. ‘Everything!’
He laughed. ‘By that, I assume you mean my love life. Isn’t that the only thing that girls really want to know about?’
I lifted my shoulders and wrinkled my nose. ‘That obvious, eh?’
He looked down at me, and I could see the fairy lights in the tree reflected in his eyes. My stomach flipped as he smiled. ‘Okay, you go first . . .’ he said. ‘Where’s the most unusual place you’ve ever made love?’
I almost choked, and sat up. ‘That’s easy . . . I had a one-night stand on a cricket pitch, but you already know about that.’
‘Tell me again . . . slowly,’ he teased.
I went to hit him round the head with a cushion but he caught it mid-flight.
‘Okay, so have you ever been in love?’ he asked.
‘It’s not your turn,’ I said.
He tilted his head to one side and raised his eyebrows. ‘Yes or no?’
The moment had suddenly become laden with anticipation. Funny, isn’t it, how the very real physical act of sex, even with unnamed strangers, can be spoken about with humour and joviality, yet talking about an unseen emotion called love is fraught with tension.
‘Once,’ I said, determined to keep my voice calm and steady.
‘Who with?’
‘A guy called Tom. I met him at work, when I was going through my retail period.’
He looked at me questioningly.
‘You know. Between my hairdressing and interior design phases.’ I’m sure I’d given him a quick run through my haphazard CV at some point.
‘Ah.’ He sighed. ‘The enlightenment years.’
I smiled, grateful to him for relieving the intensity of the conversation.
‘So, what happened?’ he asked.
I cleared my throat. ‘We met when I was twenty, went out for close to three years, and I began to think we had a future.’
‘But?’
‘But, despite how I felt about him and how he claimed to feel for me, he still managed to sleep with someone else.’
‘Oh,’ he mustered. ‘How did you find out?’
‘It was with a very good friend of mine, dear Charlotte, who decided that she was actually more in love with him, than she was a friend to me.’
‘Christ. I assume you’re not friends anymore.’
I laughed wryly. ‘Funnily enough, no. I haven’t spoken to her since, and have no intention of speaking to her ever again.’
‘So, was he your last boyfriend . . . before we met?’ he went on.
‘Seriously, you’ve had five hundred questions and I haven’t even had one,’ I said, laughing. ‘He was my only serious boyfriend. I’ve had other relationships over the three years since, but nobody of any significance, until I met you.’
He smiled.
‘Now, it really is my turn,’ I said.
He sat back and stared straight ahead, avoiding my gaze.
‘So, what about you? Have you ever been in love?’
His foot nudged the edge of the cobalt-blue rug that lay under the coffee table. I didn’t want to force anything, if it was still too raw. I waited a moment longer. ‘It’s not important,’ I said, far more brightly than I felt. ‘If it’s . . .’
‘Yes,’ he said quietly.
I chanced it. ‘With Rebecca?’
He nodded. ‘She was the one I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with . . . but it wasn’t to be.’
His answer made me wish I’d never asked.
‘But anyway, enough of all that,’ he said, as if shaking himself out of the place he was in. ‘I wanted to ask how you’d feel about spending some time together over Christmas. If it’s difficult, I understand . . . you know, if it’s . . . I just thought . . .’
I reached across and put a finger on his lips. Smiling, he said, ‘Is that a yes, then?’
He pulled me towards him and kissed me. ‘So, you’ll come for Christmas dinner?’ he asked excitedly.
I wrinkled my nose up. ‘I can’t come on Christmas Day.’ His shoulders dropped. ‘But you could come down to my parents. They’d love to meet you,’ I added.
‘And you know that I can’t,’ he said, sadness in his voice. ‘Mum’s on her own as James is having lunch with his girlfriend Chloe, so she needs me there. It’s a tough time of year for her.’
I nodded. He’d already told me that his father had died two days before Christmas.
‘Why don’t you come down on Boxing Day?’ he said.
‘But my brother and his wife are coming for lunch, and they’re bringing the baby.’ Though even as I was saying it, I knew it was an easier ask of me to go to him, rather than him come to me. My parents had each other and Stuart, Laura and the baby. Pammie would be lucky to see a neighbour.
‘I guess I could drive down late afternoon . . .’ I offered.
‘And stay over? We could go for a drive the next day, find a nice pub or something.’
We sounded like two over-excited children hatching a plan.
The next day, I called Pammie to check that she was okay with it. It seemed the courteous thing to do.
‘Well, this is a turn-up for the books,’ she said, which immediately put me on the back foot.
‘I’m so sorry, Pammie. I thought Adam had already spoken to you. He said he’d call you first thing this morning.’
‘No, dear,’ she said. ‘But no matter. It’d be lovely to see you. Will you be staying down here?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Though I probably won’t be there until early evening.’
‘So, will you be wanting tea with us?’ she asked.
‘My mum’s doing a turkey for lunch, so just a little something in the evening would be lovely,’ I said, not wishing to come across as rude or ungrateful.
‘But we won’t wait for you . . .’
‘Goodness no, you just carry on and I’ll be there when I can.’
‘Well, it’s just that Adam gets so hungry and he’ll be starving by then,’ she went on.
‘Yes, of course. I understand. You go ahead and I’ll just have tea with you all later.’
‘So, we’ll all eat together then?’ she went on, as if she wasn’t hearing me.
‘Perfect,’ I said, though I didn’t really know what I was agreeing to anymore.
7
It had sounded a great idea at the time but, in reality, once I was at Mum and Dad’s, I’d have been happy to stay there. It was warm and cosy and reminded me of Christmases past when, as an excited seven-year-old, I’d shake my little brother awake in the middle of the night. We’d creep down the stairs, so terrified of seeing Santa Claus, yet not wanting to miss him either.