Page 49 of Happily Ever After
‘I thought you were going to attack me with a pair of shears,’ I admitted. ‘But I do admit to a momentaryLady Chatterleyconsideration.’
Jay’s expression brightened. ‘Well, that’s hopeful, at least. I did get a look in at being a lusty young stud.’ Another small step, so close that I could see the light of the increasing dawn reflecting in his hair. ‘But I promise to take things very, very slowly. All right?’
‘I think that would be good, yes.’ My voice came out very small, very quiet. He smelled of clean linen, of rumpled sheets and sleep, with a musky top note that was probably just shower gel or shampoo but to me smelled alluringly male. When I looked above Homer, Jay’s head was on one side, and his eyes were asking me a question that I wanted to answer with my entire body. ‘All right?’ he whispered, a hand tangling into my hair to draw my face closer.
‘Mmmm.’ I stood on tiptoe to reach his mouth and we kissed, a toast-crumb and tea-flavoured kiss that somehow managed to conjure images of potential nights of tangled sheets and heat rather than burned bread and stewed leaves.
After a while, which could have been moments or could have been decades, Jay stepped back, although his fingers still grazed the skin of my cheek. ‘Er,’ he said. ‘Well.’
‘Mmmm?’ I said again, lost now in a potential fantasy which leaned a lot more towards the raunchier side of my reading habits than Jane Austen would have cared for.
‘I’d better get dressed and walk you back to the house.’
‘Oh.’ Disappointment and thwarted lust crashed together into my heart. I’d hoped – had I? – for more. But Jay wasn’t a ‘take advantage of the moment’ sort of guy, I realised.
‘You don’t want to be caught sneaking in with that lot, do you?’
‘No.’ He was quite right, damn him. Whilst my literary-powered brain had been imagining moments of passion on the kitchen table, practicality had to win out. Jay had been right all along, life really couldn’t be like the books. Us having wild sex here and now would mean getting back to the house to the likelihood of being met by either Lady Tanith, Hugo or Mrs Compton, and any one of them would query why I was carrying a load of books. And I couldn’t leave them with Jay, in case I decided that telling Hugo was the only thing to do. I would need to show him absolute evidence of his mother’s self-deception.
Jay gave me a wicked smile. He clearly knew what I’d been thinking. ‘Right. Give me five minutes.’ He set off for the hallway. ‘Actually, better give me ten. Not sure I can get my trousers on yet.’
I laughed and let him go. Now that someone else knew about Lady Tanith and Oswald, I felt better. Lighter. I understood how Hugo felt, telling me about the dresses after keeping the secret to himself for years – sometimes you just needed someone else to know.
I walked around Jay’s kitchen, tidying our plates and mugs into the deep butler’s sink and wiping the table free of crumbs. Living in a small space in the bus for so long had taught me that if everything wasn’t put away immediately, after twenty minutes you were wading through knee-level mess and trying to find somewhere to sit that didn’t have cutlery on it. Then I looked at the walls, where botanical prints decorated the plain plaster, and stacks of gardening books and magazines were piled roughly but tidily in a corner.
There was one photograph. Unframed, tucked under a magnet on the fridge and slightly curled at the edges. A much younger Jay, hair tied back, and wearing a University of Durham sweatshirt, arm around a smiling girl whose head was pushed right up against his so they could both fit into the photograph. She looked frail but happy, short curls bouncing around her thin face and a look of mischief in her eyes.
I took the photo off the fridge and looked at it properly. Yes, I could see the sibling resemblance. Jay and Flora both had the same dark hair and eyes, the same high cheekbones and similar smiles. If he was at university when this was taken, it must have been fairly close to her death.
‘That’s the last picture.’ Jay had come into the kitchen behind me, unheard. ‘Flora wanted us to do a selfie. She’d come up to Durham to visit me.’ Gently he took the picture from my hands and then stared down at it. ‘We were both pretty rubbish at taking selfies,’ he said quietly. ‘This was the only one that had both our faces in.’
I thought of that photograph on the table in the attic. Oswald looking uncomfortable, with Lady Tanith squeezed in next to him, smiling happily. Who had taken it, Caroline? Richard? How had Oswald been persuaded to stand still next to Lady Tanith for long enough? Not that it mattered. She clearly treasured that picture, her and her beloved. The denial that Lady Tanith must live under was almost a solid weight. How could I ever blow her world apart with the evidence? But somehow, somehow she was going tohaveto find out, and then she’d know that I knew and… But love took so many forms. Did I have a right to impose my belief in the way it looked onto Tanith, who had presumably loved Oswald in her own way, even though that love hadn’t been returned? Her feelings had still been valid.
I tried to imagine Tanith faced by utter reality and failed. Nothing was like books. This was people’slives.
‘She’d have liked you.’ Jay gently hooked the photograph back under the magnet. ‘Flora. You would have made her laugh.’
‘Why don’t you frame it? Put it on the wall?’ I watched the picture’s edges curl back into place, shadowing Flora’s happy smile under a twist of paper.
‘It seems – too final, somehow, you know?’ With one last glance at those happy faces, Jay turned away. ‘Yes, right, I don’t have the only way to grieve, I know that. But ten years… it’s still not long enough.’
‘So you can understand Lady Tanith? A bit?’ I waited for him to swirl his waxed coat over his shoulders.
‘Understand? Nope, not if I live to be two hundred. But sympathise with? I guess I can maybe do that.’ Jay opened the front door. ‘But only because it’s probably my best idea for keeping safe if she finally loses it and ties us all up in the basement.’ He ushered me through into the chill of the early morning. ‘If she utters one “mwahahahahaha”, I’m heading for the hills as fast as my sturdy gardener’s legs can carry me.’
20
THE TALLIS HOUSE – ATONEMENT, IAN MCEWAN
Jay left me at the back door of the house. ‘I’ve got some beds to reshape,’ he said, although I had no idea what this involved, ‘so I’ll be around somewhere if you need me.’
‘I’ll be fine. As long as Lady Tanith doesn’t suspect our big secret, she’s not going to be any worse today than she is on any other day.’
‘Well, you know. Need me, just scream.’ Jay shoved his hands into the pockets of his coat. ‘I’d like to kiss you goodbye, but Lady Tanith is probably glued to the front window, keeping an eye out for hanky-panky among the staff.’
‘Yes, better not.’ I felt the heat of the earlier kiss ripple through me again, an overcoat against the cold morning. ‘I’ll see you later.’
‘You will.’ Jay melted off again into the bushes, as though he were part foliage himself, while I squared my shoulders and opened the kitchen door, preparing myself for a day of outright lying.
