So I’m sitting in the sunshine overlooking Quarry Hill Cove gravel pit in deepest, darkest Birminghamshire or somewhere, on one of those deckchairs you buy in service stations for a tenner, my thoughts as warm as the summer’s day. Joe has completed one dive and is currently on the jetty shrugging off his air tanks and kicking off his fins. I’m very happy just to take in the view. Sigh.
I’m content for the first time in a long time. Sometimes we hurtle through life, don’t we? I’m rushing off to work or racing round the supermarket, doing a dozen other things that I really don’t want to be doing and it’s easy not to stop and simply take a breath. That’s what Joe has done for me, he’s brought an enrichment to my life which is, in turn, creating a feeling of settling deep in my core. No, I’ve not been reading self-help books, but it’s how I feel. Can’t help it.
Then I realise that this is a lot like love feels. That sends a jolt through me. I look at Joe as he chats to the other members of the dive club and feel my heart swell. There was no thunderbolt moment when we met, but over the weeks that I’ve known him there’s increasingly been a quiet knowing and a certainty that he is a good man.
He comes towards me, rubbing a towel over his hair. His wetsuit is unzipped and peeled down to his waist. I shield my eyes against the sun to better look at him.
‘What are you grinning at like a Cheshire cat?’
‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘Everything.’
‘You’re not bored?’ He flops down on the grass beside me.
‘Far from it. It’s nice to be able to spend time together.’
‘Yeah.’ He runs a finger gently along my arm and makes me shiver with delight.
His phone rings and I pass it to him. On the screensaver, I can see it’s Daisy calling.
‘Hi, sweetheart,’ he says. ‘What are you up to?’
I zone out so that he can carry on his conversation with his daughter in private. I know that she’s with her mum today and that the plan was for them to go shopping. I get a little pang of envy. Things are going so well with Joe and me, but I feel that he’s still holding me at arm’s length. I think it’s time for me to meet his children properly. So far, we’ve still only exchanged a brief, disinterested hello.
Joe hangs up. ‘Daisy has new shoes. All is well in her world.’
I laugh at that and then think that this is probably as good a time as any to bite the bullet. ‘I’d like to be more involved with your life,’ I say, tentatively. ‘If I met your kids then we could spend more time together and do stuff with them too. They’re part of you and I’d really love to get to know them. Maybe we could all have a day out together.’
Joe frowns. ‘It’s a great idea …’
His tone doesn’t match the words.
‘But?’
‘They’re at a difficult age,’ he says. ‘It’s easier, I’m sure, with younger kids who are more malleable, but teenagers are strange and fragile creatures for all they pretend not to be. They’re both toughing it out, but I know inside that they’re still hurting. What happens if I bring you into our lives and they’re happy to accept you, then in a few months, we break up?’
‘Isn’t that a risk worth taking?’
‘I don’t know, Ruby. I can understand where you’re coming from but, for me, it’s a big step. If you decide you don’t want to be with a family man and put up with all that entails, you can just walk away without looking back. I’m the one who’ll be left picking up the pieces again.’
‘We could take it really slowly,’ I say.
Joe laughs. ‘Look what happened last time we said that.’
‘True, but we both mean it this time. We could go out to dinner with them or to a film. Nothing heavy. See how we get on. I’m really happy with you but, at the same time, I feel as if I’m in one small compartment of your life. We’re having to snatch small moments when we can. If we are going to take this forward, then I’d like to be more than that.’
‘Joe!’ One of the club members shouts him from the jetty. ‘You’re up again.’
He holds up his hands.
‘Go,’ I say. ‘That’s fine. Just tell me you’ll think about it.’
‘OK,’ he agrees.
I squeeze his hand. ‘Thank you.’ He stands and brushes the grass from his wetsuit. ‘Be careful out there.’
Then he bounds down to the jetty and I settle back in my deckchair. The sun’s on my face, the breeze is in my hair, life is good and I can’t help but smile.
Chapter Fifty-Three
I’m on the train with Charlie and we’re heading up to London. The barriers were open at the local station so we didn’t buy a ticket and are hoping that there’s no ticket inspector on the train. I’m working on the theory that the prices are normally so flipping expensive that if I manage a freebie every now and then, it balances it out and brings train travel down to the realm of just over-priced rather than outright extortion. What we’ll do at the other end, I’m not sure. However, I’m leaving Charlie in charge of our criminal activity.
‘Tell me again,’ I say. ‘We’re doing what?’
She looks up from painting her fingernails. The whole carriage smells of pear drops from the polish and people are tutting in that particularly passive/aggressive British way.
‘We’re going to hang round the hotel that the boys are probably staying in.’
‘Probably?’
‘Someone swears she saw Mark there this morning and so we’re going to check it out.’ She gives me a fixed stare. ‘There’ll be lots of Thatters there.’ The collective name for Take That fans. Sometimes, not surprisingly, known as Mad Thatters. ‘You’ll have to pretend that you really like them.’
‘I do.’
‘But in the way that I really like them, not in the half-hearted oh-I-buy-all-their-CDs way that you like Kylie.’
‘I go to Kylie’s concerts. As many as finances will allow.’
‘Ah, but if it was a choice of eating or buying a ticket for a Kylie concert what would you do?’
‘Eat, obviously.’
Charlie gives me a smug look. ‘I rest my case. You are a merely a fairweather fan. I stuck by Gary even through the wilderness years.’
‘Yes, but I’m sure Gary wouldn’t want you to go hungry for him.’
‘I am very hungry for him,’ she quips and then laughs lasciviously at her own joke, frightening the elderly man sitting next to us. Poor bloke.
‘Don’t they get annoyed by all their fans chasing them around?’
‘We’ve been with them from the start,’ Charlie says. ‘Some of us. Effectively, we’ve bought their houses, their posh cars, their places in the sun. There are bricks in Gary’s walls that I have personally paid for. I think they owe us a little of their time, don’t you?’
Fair point.
‘If we all suddenly dropped them and started following, say, Spandau Ballet, where would they be?’
‘That’s never going to happen, is it?’
Charlie grins at me. ‘Not while there’s breath in my body.’ She holds out her nails for me to admire.
‘Nice.’
‘I was going to get them painted with butterflies for Wonderland and all that, but I ran out of time.’
‘Work gets in the way of a lot of things,’ I agree. ‘We could try to get some stick-on butterflies in Accessorize at Euston.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Charlie says.
So we manage to sneak out of an unguarded side entrance to Euston station and get our journey for free.