They kneel on the bench overlooking the roof terrace wall, the city spreading beneath them, a landscape of light. Behind their backs, the party is now at a great distance. Will doesn’t laugh much, but there is a woody warmth in his voice that draws her in, a gentle sense of humor, and unlike most men he asks her lots of questions and listens carefully to her answers. He says he’s in “the deeply unglamorous business of logistics, but can’t be trusted to transport his own sunglasses to a party without sitting on them,” and pulls out a broken pair from his shirt pocket. She laughs and wonders why she’s never found logistics fascinating before—you order things one day, they arrive the next!—and she can tell by the way his eyes shine that he’s enjoying her, this conversation, her unlikely enthusiasm. Jessie feels she could talk about these things all night, that there’s a world beneath this world she’s never fully appreciated before, that they all take for granted, like electricity or Wi-Fi or air—but their talk moves on, to the show at the National, their loathing of the gym, their love of Woody Allen, the smell of bonfire smoke, mown paths through long grass, her half-baked dreams of being a freelance illustrator one day and having her own little art studio at home, Will’s dream of selling the company and living a less frenetic life . . . Then, without warning, like a man urgently compelled to declare his true identity, he blurts out that his wife died in a cycle accident, just over a year before. In the distance, a fluming firework, a splatter of red. I’m so sorry, she says, forgetting herself, having drunk more than she meant to, reaching for his hand. Before she has a chance to feel foolish, his fingers close over hers like they’ve been waiting for them. And in the pressure of his fingers she feels his need for contact. They sit in silence, an electric current circuiting their hands, their bodies. It is both the strangest and most intensely natural ten minutes of her life. When she looks up, people are leaving, shooting them curious second glances. He doesn’t take her number. For some reason, she cries all the way home.
By the following evening, Will has got her e-mail. He suggests meeting in the park at lunchtime on Monday. It sounds sweet, chaste. And it feels like an invitation to a dirty weekend in Paris. “Very, very complicated,” warns Lou, who’s asked around about Will and discovered a daughter “who sleeps clutching her dead mother’s nightie” and a handsome widower known not to be on the market for anything more than no-strings hot sex. “Damaged goods, Jess,” she says. “He’ll break your heart.”
Jessie agrees. She meets him on Monday anyway. There are wiry dark hairs flattened under his watch. She can’t stop looking at them. Will’s smile always starts in his eyes, spreading slowly, remaining there even when his mouth has stopped smiling. He has a way of teasing her, a bit like a brother would, someone she’s known all her life. She likes it, even though she doesn’t feel remotely sisterly to him. He is endearingly intrigued by her creativity, as if she were an artist, not someone who designs soup packets. He makes her see that she’s got too used to herself, like people in a stale marriage cease to see their spouse for who they are: she’s forgotten she can intercept the trajectory of her life, completely redesign it. They meet up every day that week because it feels a mad squandering of happiness not to. They visit galleries, seeing familiar artworks entirely anew. They wander central London’s backstreets, the city never looking more beautiful. He does not try to kiss her. One day, Jessie runs back home from work and falls into Lou’s arms in despair. Disaster. Code red. She’s fallen in love with a man who doesn’t fancy her. It’s fur coat and no-knickers time, advises Lou, pouring Jessie a glass of white wine whilst opening a bag of pretzels with her teeth.
So it is that, three weeks after the party, one sunny July lunchtime, she meets him in her success dress—tiny waist, a breathless starlet décolletage, the red a brilliant, unforgettable clash with her gleaming copper hair—and teaches him swing dance steps in the park, the ones she’s learned at her Hackney evening class, not caring about the people staring, pressing him close to her, feeling his knotted body soften, something in him give. Afterward they lie in the grass laughing, and he pins her to the ground by her wrists, lowers his face to hers, and they kiss for the first time. She blows him away, he whispers, his eyes full of tears, his lips brushing her earlobe, a gust of heaven, a light in a deep, pitch-black mine. Later that day, after work, in her tiny bedroom, he will peel off that red dress (the dress that hasn’t fitted since Romy) and kiss her singleton’s drum-flat belly, her thighs, her neck, over and over until it is impossible to tell where she ends and he begins. The noise of the office, Lou and Matt fucking, the traffic roaring beneath her bedroom window, the pain of a sandal blister on her heel, it is eclipsed that summer by the sheer lust and happiness that turns her into one of those London women who smile and blush to themselves as they swing from a handrail in a hot crowded tube carriage.
Then the memory started to fade: a peachy dawn light nosed its way into their Applecote bedroom, wiping Jessie’s old life from the shadows, as if to say, See how all those disparate moments were connected, plotted like a line to this old house in this remote Cotswold valley? You are here now. Sleep. And she did.
“Oh, Jessie.” Will opens one eye, takes in his strange surroundings. The corners of his mouth curl with a sleepy smile. “Where are we? What have you made us do?”
Laughing, she kisses him on the lips. She likes the animal taste of him in the morning. “Coffee? I’ll hunt down the pot.” She grabs the nearest clothes from her suitcase—a yellow tea dress, smelling of their old house. “Brr. This place needs warming up.”
“I’ll chop logs later.” He grins. “You know, I think I might have been waiting all my life to say that.” Propping himself on his elbows, Will watches his wife brushing the restless night’s tangles from her hair.
When she was pregnant, Will would brush her hair, their eyes locked in the mirror, her hair luxuriant with hormones, floating with static, as they, too, seemed to float above ordinary life. There hasn’t been much time for that sort of thing since Romy was born, nor in the last manic few months since they decided to move. This summer, Jessie thinks, these last two weeks of summer, we will find the time and peace to be that couple again. The agony of decision-making is over. They are here. For better, for worse.
Walking into the kitchen, Romy a warm, dense weight on her hip, Jessie can taste the weather in the room. It is drafty, damp, stirred by the smells of the morning garden, even though the windows are all closed and the black range radiates a doggy heat. The oldest part of Applecote, it’s easy to imagine a cook making pies in here, scrubbing mud-clagged potatoes, the beams greasy with lamp smoke. She loves the bath-sized butler’s sink, the butcher’s block, scarred with knife and scorch marks, the rows of cavernous wall cupboards still stuffed with dented copper pans.
She loves it because it is the opposite of their modern stainless steel London kitchen, Mandy’s kitchen, the site of those indelible awkward dinner parties of the early days: Romy screaming down the baby monitor; Will’s friends, older than her, far more successful and serious, until they got drunk and the husbands would stare at her with an odd mixture of envy and suspicion and make jokes about Will being thrown back into the diaper years, and the wives would start crying about Mandy, then apologizing, flapping their hands and saying they’re sure Jessie’s lovely, too, which made it worse. Yes, she’s happy to say good-bye to all that. A dishwasher would be nice, though.
Making a mental note to call the plumber, she arranges Romy on a cushion on one of Applecote’s spindle-back chairs—Romy’s still too small to reach the farmhouse table properly, and her own high chair was broken in the move. Romy sits, not wriggling for once, gazing around the room in wonder, eating dry Cheerios from a plastic bowl.
It’s like the first day in a holiday house. Jessie digs the coffeepot from a cardboard box, sets it up on the unfamiliar range, and hopes for the best. After a while, a satisfying drip falls from it and beads on the hot plate, rolling, fizzing, until it vanishes entirely with a sizzle, like their old London life.
“Bell Bell,” she hears Romy mutter.
Jessie turns around, smiling, then starts. Bella is wearing a dove-gray silk dressing gown Jessie’s never seen before, her dark hair loose, swirling dramatically over her shoulders. “Wow, where did you . . .”