Page 31 of Happily Ever After
‘Whassamatter?’ he asked, blearily, scratching a hand through his hair.
‘I brought your jumper back.’ I thrust the bag towards him. ‘Thank you,’ I added.
A gradual, blinking wakefulness arrived on his face. ‘Oh! Oh, right. Yes. Right. Good.’
He took the bag, but I’d looped it over my wrist, so we were, for a moment, joined by a Sainsbury’s cable, him trying to pull it off over my hand, while I tried to disentangle it so it would slide off. We wrangled for a second.
‘Look, it’s bloody freezing; come in a second while we get this bag off.’ Jay scuffed a few steps back, his socks slithering on the patterned tiles of the hallway floor, and I, drawn by the orange plastic, followed him inside.
A closed door to our right was presumably the living room, fronting onto the green. At the end of the hallway I could see a kitchen, where a couch lined one wall and an Aga another. A cast-off blanket showed that Jay had been lying on the couch.
‘Are you all right?’ I asked him. ‘You’re not ill? I wouldn’t have come if I’d thought you were ill, I just wanted to bring your jumper back and I found it in with my washing and remembered you wanted it.’
‘Oh. A conversation. Hold on a minute.’ He let go of the bag and turned, shuffling a floor-clearing way into the kitchen. I followed and caught up as he looped the second hearing aid into place. ‘Right. Go.’
Cursing myself for forgetting his deafness, I repeated myself, although I mostly edited it down to asking if he was feeling all right and that I’d brought his jumper back.
I got a smile. ‘No. Not ill. I’m good. Just – well, it’s Sunday. It’s my day off, and if I choose to spend it lying around in my PJs eating crisps and watching Netflix while scratching myself, well. What else are Sundays for?’
I looked around the kitchen. It was warm and bright and tidy and some mismatched blue and white crockery stood on a small dresser in the corner. There was no huge teetering pile of washing up waiting to be done, or damp just-out-of-the-washer clothes mouldering in a basket, and it struck me as unnaturally neat until I realised I was comparing Jay to the only other man I really knew, who was Jude’s husband Ollie, whose opinion of housework could be summed up as ‘ignore it until it goes away’. ‘Too many late nights being dark and tortured?’
‘Ah.’ A hand scrubbed through his hair again. ‘You remembered that.’
‘Yes.’ I wasn’t quite surewhyI had remembered it. The vaguely Heathcliffian surroundings, perhaps, in that muddy shelter.
‘Well, I may have exaggerated a touch. I have terrible insomnia. Awful. So I sleep when I can, which was today…’ Now he pointed at the couch. ‘Until a literary-inspired presence from the Big House woke me up.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ I said, confidently. ‘You must have already been awake.’
Jay tilted his head. ‘I… might not have been?’
‘You didn’t have your hearing aids in. If you’d been asleep you wouldn’t have heard me knock.’ I waved a hand at the hallway and the front door. ‘You were awake and you saw me through the glass door.’
The head tilted further. ‘Did your voracious reading happen to includeSherlock Holmes, by any chance?’
‘It might have done,’ I admitted, slightly ashamed. This was Jay’s house. He was perfectly entitled to spend his time however he wanted, and it was none of my business whether he’d been awake or asleep. ‘Anyway. I’d better go.’
Jay laughed. ‘Oh stay and have a cup of coffee or something. You’re here now and I’ve blown my cover as a brooding hero by answering the door wearing a onesie and slipper socks, haven’t I?’
Feeling slightly more cheerful, I sat down on the sofa. ‘I think you rather shot the brooding hero down when you mentioned watching Netflix, eating crisps and scratching yourself.’ I stopped myself from going on to mention that, anyway, I knew he was gay.
‘True. Can’t, somehow, imagine Mr Darcy rattling about Pemberley dressed like an overgrown nine-year-old whilst filling his face with cheese and onion.’ Jay put the kettle on the Aga and spooned coffee out of a labelled jar into two mugs. ‘Anyway. How’s life up at the House? Have you found those diaries yet?’
Oh God. I’d forgotten that I’d mentioned the diaries. Lady Tanith didn’t want her sons to know about them until she’d had chance to ‘vet’ them first. ‘Er. No. I’m beginning to think they’re mythical.’
‘So you’re still cataloguing? How’s that going?’ He leaned back against the rail of the Aga and looked at me. I found that I was trying to pinpoint his resemblance to Hugo and failing. Jay certainly didn’tlooknine years older than his brother. Perhaps… perhaps Oswald had beenJasper’sfather? But Richard was Hugo’s? I tried to remember everything I’d ever gleaned about precedence of inheritance, and whether the age gap between the brothers was sufficient to mean that Jasper had been born around the time that Oswald died. ‘I’m sorry, was it a difficult question?’
‘Oh, no, sorry. I was… thinking. Yes, still cataloguing. It’s going to take me years at this rate, if Lady Tanith doesn’t throw me out on my ear first, but I don’t think she will because the cat seems to like me.’
‘The Master? Yes, he likes me too.’
‘Clearly he’s an impeccable judge of character then,’ I said, and it came out more sarcastically than I meant it to.
‘Ah, I’m not so bad.’ The coffee was made, and Jay and I sat side by side on the couch to drink it. ‘Compared to most people round here, anyway. Have you met Mrs Compton?’
‘Oh yes. And you’re right. She makes Caligula look like a friendly and polite citizen.’
‘She’s my next-door neighbour. No wonder she adores Lady Tanith; they were clearly both cast from the same mould. I keep waiting for the evil to seep through the dividing wall, like damp.’
