Page 23 of Happily Ever After
‘Person?’
‘The one you saw outside last night. Did you find them?’
I was instantly thrown back to Hugo, running off into the night and my stomach gave a jolt.A bus or a man who wears dresses.‘Oh, yes. Yes, thank you, I did.’
‘Hmmm.’ He came closer, fiddling with the hearing aids, tucking them more firmly behind his ears. ‘You don’t look happy about it.’
‘It has thrown up something of a dilemma.’
‘Want to talk about it?’ Jay threw an arm out. ‘Come and have a coffee.’
‘Where?’
‘I’ve got a flask.’ The tattoo on his wrist flickered in and out of vision under the sleeve of his donkey jacket as he waved his arm again at a canvas knapsack on the grass the other side of the tree. ‘You look like you could do with a chat.’
‘I can’t really say anything; it’s not my secret to tell,’ I said, suddenly awkward.
‘Ah well, maybe you could give me the précised highlights then. Leave out any incriminating details?’
‘I think that would leave me with the words “the”, “and” and “wardrobe”, actually.’
Jay laughed and pulled a flask out of the bag, then sat down on the grass, his bare legs stretched out in front of him, and poured two cups from the old-fashioned tartan covered vacuum flask. ‘Narnia stopped being a secret about sixty years ago. Sit down. Tell me as much as you can, as much as you feel comfortable with. You’ll feel better, I promise.’
He looked at me over the rim of his plastic mug, sipping. The coffee smelled good, breakfast had been a long time ago and I really didn’t feel up to trying to force lunch out of Mrs Compton who had a propensity for asking why I needed another meal when I could do with losing a few pounds, and I was being paid to work, not eat.
I sat down next to him and took the other coffee cup, then found myself telling Jay about Hugo. That deep well of loneliness that he seemed to be perching over, trying to keep his mother happy by taking on the management of an estate that he resented. I managed to steer clear of mentioning the dresses, none of that seemed to matter as much once I’d heard him talk about the future that was being thrust upon him. His life revolved around being the second son, unprepared for the lifetime commitment that Templewood had become, and his bitterness towards his brother for breaking out. This led to me blurting out all the stuff about my sister and our relationship; about having to find myself a life without any real preparation apart from books. I went on for quite some time.
Jay drank his coffee and listened. He was very good at it, keeping his head tilted, presumably to hear better, his eyes flickering between my face and his booted feet, and not interrupting. He didn’t seem to have suffered as much as I or Hugo had from the late night and the soaking. There were no shadows under his eyes, although he clearly hadn’t shaved for a couple of days.
At last I stopped. The coffee was almost cold, but he’d been right, I did feel better.
‘So, you can’t tell me what it is that you found out?’ He took the coffee cup from me, tipped the cool dregs onto the grass and refilled it. ‘But you don’t want to be with Hugo now?’
‘I’m not entirely sure that I everwantedto be with him,’ I said thoughtfully. ‘It’s more that – fiction gave me expectations, I suppose. And now I feel stupid.’
‘Real life doesn’t have a narrative.’ Jay poured himself another cup of coffee. The cuff of his jacket rolled back and revealed his tattoo fully to the half-hearted sunlight. The design was small but looked like a posy of flowers tied into a bunch with a rainbow-coloured ribbon. ‘That’s the thing. It’s messy and confusing and heartbreaking, and things don’t always happen in the right order. Heartbreak doesn’t always mean that you get the guy in the end; sometimes you just get more heartbreak.’
‘But that’s not fair,’ I said.
‘No, but itislife. Books have to have lots of stuff going on and well-reasoned endings, otherwise nobody would read them. But life isn’t tidy like that. Bad stuff happens for no reason, then there’s five hundred pages of getting up, going to work, and going to bed. No happy ending, no narrative causality. Just shit and boredom and unhappiness.’
He sounded sad and slightly bitter. I drank the last of the coffee.
‘It’s not fair,’ I said again, putting the cup down.
‘No. It’s not unlike books thathaveto be fair, usually. The detective always solves the crime, the spaceship always discovers the lost planet.’ He gave me a rueful smile. ‘The hero always gets the girl. Or boy.’ He fiddled with the hearing aid again. ‘If the book doesn’t end the way the reader expects, then the reader feels cheated. It makes them feel stupid, that they invested all that time in a story that didn’t give them what they wanted.’
I sighed. ‘Life cheats all the time. It doesn’t have to give us what we want.’
He flashed me a smile. ‘No. I was born with a hearing defect. I thought that would be as bad as it got, but – well…’ Now his eyes went to the tattoo on his wrist and he rubbed it with a finger. ‘There were other complications. Like I said, no fairy stories here. At least, only of the evil, dark fairy kind.’ For a second he looked as haunted as I’d believed Templewood to have been, then he glanced back up at my face, and smiled. ‘We make our own stories, I guess,’ he said.
‘And my sister made her story so different from mine that it itches.’ I felt slightly embarrassed by seeing Jay’s pain. Almost as though I had to remind myself that I was also entitled to unhappiness. Mine may not be tragedy on tragedy, moreNorthanger AbbeythanHamlet,but it was all relative. My unhappiness was all relatives. ‘If I could have been more like her…’
‘Then you wouldn’t be you,’ Jay interrupted briskly. ‘And you’d have none of this.’ A wide arm indicated the lush grassland, with its backdrop of gently flowering shrubs and elegantly draped trees. ‘So you can’t compare non-existent lives. If you had been someone else, you may have been heartbroken by now and vowing to hide out in that bus and never meet another man.’
‘“Hurt and must never love again”?’ Some of those stories where the heroine or hero had promised themselves that they would never fall in love because they’d been dumped once had been, I had thought, unnecessarily overwrought.
‘That sort of thing. Or – or worse things could have happened.’ Jay looked back down at the grass again. He stroked it gently with one finger, revealing the tattoo again, so that the colours changed and flexed with the movement of the muscles of his arm. ‘Trust me.’ He looked up and into my eyes. ‘You’re doing all right.’
