The bijou East London flat she shared with her girlfriend Lou, pre-Will. Flamingo wallpaper. An orange sixties egg chair bought from a shop on Brick Lane. A tumble dryer scorching “hand wash only” underwear. Jessie is in her early thirties: the decade of wedding invitations has begun, the first pregnancies, and dating has started to feel a bit like a game of musical chairs, no one wanting to be the person left standing. Mostly, she thinks this is nonsense: if it happens, it happens; she’d rather be on her own than with the wrong person. Still, she can’t help but wonder why it hasn’t happened to her yet.
She’s applying red lipstick, leaning into a gilt oval mirror in a flatteringly lit room. Her face is wide, girlish, her complexion still undimmed by motherhood’s broken nights, completely unlined since her pale skin has never been able to take the sun. The bedroom reflected in the mirror is tiny, crammed with an old shop rail—smart fifties-style dresses for work, cowboy boots, heels, far too many ankle boots, an ongoing costly quest for the elusive perfect pair—a bookshelf sagging with magazines and secondhand books from her favorite stall beneath Waterloo Bridge, photos she’s never had time to organize in an album even though she has no responsibility for anyone but herself.
Through the thin, adjacent bedroom wall she can hear Lou and her boyfriend, Matt, giggling, a prelude to the noisy sex that will soon follow, the sex that she isn’t having, and hasn’t had in nearly six months. In her hurry to leave before it gets awkward, she forgets her Oyster card. She likes her Oyster card. Her flat-share. Her busy city life. It still gives her a kick because, like all nonnative Londoners, Jessie carries around the knowledge of where she started: a cottage in Somerset, the familiar sequence of noises and smells that is her mother, dressed in her nurse’s uniform, making an intense breakfast for the two of them the day she leaves for design college in London; Jessie, clutching a bag of her least uncool clothes; her mother’s eyes wet and needy, making Jessie feel guilty and more desperate to get away. Her judgmental younger self has no idea that she will have a daughter, too, one day, and the thought of her little girl ever leaving home will bring tears to her eyes. Or that motherhood will make her crave the sort of landscape she is fleeing, the damp soil, the simple worm-turned grassiness of the country childhood her mother worked so incredibly hard to provide.
Jessie’s polished single self is arriving at work, the design “studio”—a large, beige office—humming with the quiet industry of overqualified multinational twentysomethings, the beep of software updates, the hiss of the coffeemaker, like a huge industrial machine. Corporate packaging. She’s good at it—she has a reputation for being creative, a little maverick, working on projects late into the night. Sipping a soy latte, she sits in her lime-green ergonomic chair, moving lines about a screen, rotating three-dimensional shapes, considering the typography on a toothpaste tube, but a deeper bit of her brain, the unpredictable irrational bit where desire, dreams, and stories live, is wondering if that man will be in the park at lunchtime again.
Same bench in St. James’s Park, close to Horse Guards Parade, where you can smell peaty horse dung and hear the growl of the diplomatic black cars around Downing Street. Older, maybe in his late thirties—she’s always liked this, something to do with growing up without a dad around, Lou says—he is not particularly tall but has wide, strong shoulders, like a swimmer, and dark floppy hair, a crumpled air of Parisian dishevelment. He is easy to imagine sitting up in bed, naked, smoking, a black-and-white photograph. She is intrigued by the way he stretches out his legs, laces his fingers behind his head, and glares up at the sky as if challenging it to a fight. Sometimes, as she walks past, their eyes hook—his an unusual speckled brown—and she feels it as a physical tug.
Afterward, she wonders if she’s imagined that connection in order to compete on some silly erotic level with Lou. She cannot imagine this man existing outside St. James’s Park. But one warm June evening, he materializes miraculously on a Bloomsbury roof terrace at a party thrown by one of Lou’s boyfriend’s friends. Lit by a halogen beam flickering from a wall of bamboo, he cuts a brooding figure, raking his hand through his hair, smoking fiercely. He looks like he doesn’t want to be there. She watches him until he notices her, and his expression changes: surprise, something else. He stubs his cigarette on the floor and cuts his way through the crowds. “You’re the girl from the park,” he says, his voice soft, low, already private. She nods, suddenly shy. “Will,” he says, shaking her hand, smiling right inside her.