7. Jack never liked this flat anyway, and even if he could afford the mortgage on his own, he wouldn’t want to live here.
8. Ergo [Hope wasn’t entirely sure what ergo meant, but it seemed like the right word to use] we need to put this flat up for sale.
9. There are many, many things wrong with this flat that need to be put right before I can even think about calling an estate agent.
Hope chewed ruminatively on the end of her pen and wondered if she should ask Gary from upstairs for some advice, but she wasn’t up to him kicking her skirting boards again, and wanting to know what had happened between her and Jack. Besides, he was leery enough without knowing that Hope would soon be on the market along with ‘a bijou garden flat, beautifully maintained by its current occupiers. Perfect first-time buy.’
Hope didn’t even want to know the sheer extent of the home improvements that needed to be done, but like so many other things in her life, they couldn’t be avoided. And it was only making a list – it wasn’t as if she needed to immediately drive to B&Q to buy grouting and nails and twenty pots of very cheap white paint.
She started with the bathroom because it was the smallest room in the house and the one that needed the least amount of work. They’d had the whole room redone soon after they’d moved in, when it became evident that there was some major leakage going on behind the washbasin. From there, Hope did an inventory in the bedroom, lounge and hall, and then returned to the kitchen to catalogue that room’s many faults, from dodgy electrics to torn lino to the broken carousel in the corner cupboard.
It took five pages to list all the wrongs that needed to be made right, but some of them were just little things that anyone could do. Anyone who wasn’t Hope, who didn’t even know how to put music on her iPod because Jack had always done it for her, and her extreme vertigo meant that anything involving stepladders was also out. Still, she reasoned, as she got up to give the soup a poke and a stir, she could wield a mean paintbrush and possibly she might be able to hammer in some nails under close supervision.
The soup tasted heavenly after Hope added a little more nutmeg, and she was just cutting a slice of the sourdough bread she’d also bought at the farmers’ market when the front door opened and Jack walked in.
Everything in Hope’s body, from sphincter to fists to throat, clenched. Jack first stood where he was and looked around like he wasn’t sure of his bearings. It was the oddest thing, but it seemed to Hope that he didn’t belong in their flat any more, and he certainly didn’t belong in their kitchen, which was where he was currently headed.
Last night in her great packing purge she’d wrapped all of Jack’s Alessi kitchen gadgets and stark-white china in newspaper, then placed them in a cardboard box, which was now perched on a stool. ‘“Jack’s kitchen stuff”’, he read out loud, then gestured at the pile of black bin bags in the hall. ‘Can see you’ve been busy, then.’
He sounded belligerent, like he was still sore about the iPhone and a bunch of other things he didn’t have any right to be sore about, because he was the one who was breaking up their once-happy home.
Hope put down the bread knife, because after the iPhone incident she didn’t want Jack to think she was still harbouring violent thoughts, and folded her arms. ‘I’m so sick of fighting with you,’ she said, cocking her head to look at him, trying to strip away the thunderous expression and the hip new clothes. Somewhere underneath that hostile exterior was the ghost of the boy she used to know. ‘We’re, both of us, better than that.’
Jack nodded. ‘I just came to get more of my stuff,’ he said in a less confrontational way. ‘Didn’t think it would be all packed up and waiting for me.’
‘It wasn’t meant to be a declaration of war,’ Hope explained, picking up the bread knife again so she could saw away at the loaf, though her appetite had deserted her. ‘I had to do something to make myself accept the situation, something that wasn’t eating ice-cream and moping.’
He had the grace to squirm a little. ‘So, how have you been?’ he asked. ‘Were things OK with Jeremy? I felt bad about ducking out on him like that, but he was so aggro and it didn’t seem like he wanted to spend quality time with me.’ Jack scratched his chin. ‘Or any other sort of time, come to that.’
‘Everything was fine. He ended up having a really great week.’ Hope didn’t want Jack to get off that easily, because making Jeremy suffer for Jack’s sins might have been his most nefarious deed to date, but she didn’t have the emotional reserves for another argument. Not when she was trying so hard to make plans and move forward. ‘And I’ve been fine too. Or I’m getting there, at least.’
Hope didn’t know what to say next. She couldn’t ask Jack where he’d been, or how he’d been, because he’d been with Susie and Susie made him much happier than she could, and it was hard to understand how you could know someone all your life, think that you knew everything about them, then one Sunday they’d be standing in the kitchen of the flat that you both owned and seem like a total stranger.
‘I’ll sort Jerry out a goodie bag from work,’ Jack said, as he frowned at the mound of pumpkin debris still heaped on the chopping board, but if he didn’t live here any more then he didn’t have the right to nag her about tidying up as she cooked. ‘What are you making?’
Hope gestured at the big pan on the stove. ‘Pumpkin soup. You can have a bowl, if you like,’ she offered magnanimously. ‘I added a teensy bit of cumin and nutmeg to give it a bit of welly.’
Jack was already getting down a bowl. ‘You’re so predictable, Hopey,’ he said with his back to her, as he rooted through the cutlery drawer, which had degenerated into chaos in his absence, to find a spoon. ‘You always make soup the day that the clocks go back. I bet you even put the flannel sheets on the bed.’
‘Well, it’s winter now, and why do you have to start picking on me within five minutes of walking through the door?’ Hope saw that she was brandishing the bread knife in what could be misconstrued as a threatening manner, and put it down again. ‘I told you, I don’t want to fight, so you can either stay and have a bowl of soup or you can, well, like, leave.’ She said it calmly and reasonably without shouting or whining and it was impossible to know which one of them was more shocked.
It was probably Jack, because he narrowed his eyes as if he suspected that Hope had devised some new subtle way to exact revenge on him.
‘Are you going to have some soup? It’s not like I’ve spat in it or anything,’ Hope said dryly.
Jack slowly nodded. ‘It smells good,’ he conceded, with a tiny shrug. ‘Well, I guess I could stay for a spot of lunch, if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course I don’t,’ Hope said, and she wondered why this careful, cautious politeness was more painful than when they were screaming at each other. She carefully ladled out a bowl of soup and even grated some fresh nutmeg to sit prettily on the surface. ‘Help yourself to bread.’
It felt just like how they used to be: Jack happily eating something she’d cooked and making appreciative noises while he did so. Even looking up and smiling at Hope as she half-heartedly began to clear up the mess she’d made. She was just wiping down the worktop with a damp piece of kitchen roll and ignoring Jack, who was telling her to use the sponge cloths they’d bought expressly for that purpose, when her phone rang.
Hope glanced at the wall clock and her heart sank before she’d even looked at the name that was flashing up on her phone.
It was quarter past two. It was her mother, who wasn’t meant to be calling for another fifteen minutes.
Hope pulled a face as she picked up her phone. ‘Hi, Mum,’ she said brightly. ‘Did you have a nice week away? What was the weather like?’
‘Rained every day until the morning we left,’ came the glum reply. ‘Your father and Roger couldn’t play golf so they kept getting under our feet.’
‘Oh dear,’ Hope cooed, glancing over at Jack, who was leafing through her DIY of Doom lists and looking completely pole-axed at the sheer
amount of work that had to be done before they could go their separate ways. He looked as if he might start to cry, which did Hope’s already bruised ego the world of good. ‘So did Jerry get back OK?’
He had, though her mother had a very dim view of his new haircut and the fact that her express approval hadn’t been obtained before Hope had taken him to the barber’s.
‘Mum,’ Hope groaned. ‘His hair looks much better now there’s much less of it. Please don’t give him a hard time. We had a lovely week together.’
She grimaced at Jack and expected him to grimace back at her, because it was what they did during these Sunday-afternoon calls, but he was still reading her list with a face like boiled suet.
‘Well, the week wasn’t that lovely, was it?’ her mother said acidly and before Hope’s stomach could begin to churn, she got down to business. ‘He told me about you and Jack. Really, Hope, what have you done?’
‘I haven’t done anything!’ she insisted weakly, and she should have prepared better for this, because it was inevitable. Hope was amazed that Jeremy had managed to hold out for a whole twenty-four hours.
‘Because you do nag him a lot. Marge and I remarked on it last time we saw you both, and you do have that temper.’
‘So, it must be my fault,’ Hope hissed down the phone. ‘Just like I suppose it was my fault that Jack decided to shag my best friend behind my back for months. Yeah, I can see that that was all my fault!’
Her mother was beyond words; all she could do was gasp in shock as Hope steeled herself to shoot Jack a defiant look, because why the hell should she have to keep his sordid little secret for him? But the defiance slipped away because when she actually looked at Jack, he was sitting there crying. His face was all crumpled up and red, and tears were streaming down his cheeks and when he saw her looking he buried his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking.
Hope took no pleasure from Jack’s pain. The only other time she’d seen him cry was when he was seventeen and Bucky, the Benson family collie, had to be put down.
‘There are difficult phases in every relationship,’ her mother was saying rather unbelievably as Jack’s phone started to ring. ‘But sometimes they can bring a couple closer together.’
He scrubbed his face with the sleeve of his new, expensive-looking black jumper, gulped back a sob and answered his phone. ‘Hello, Mum.’
Of course it was his mum. Because it had been three minutes since Jeremy’s bombshell made Hope’s mum call early, and three minutes was the time it took for Marge Benson to leave the Delafields’ house, hurry next door, relay the terrible news to Jack’s dad that everyone’s favourite couple was on the rocks, then call her son to find out exactly what had been going on. Jeremy might have spilled the beans, but he obviously hadn’t told them why Hopey and Jack were no longer together and, again, Hope took no satisfaction from hearing Jack mutter fiercely, ‘Look, it wasn’t like that. I’ve been … well, I’ve been seeing someone else.’
Her mother was still jawing on, her tone verging on hectoring ‘… Obviously, Jack’s done a terrible thing, but Jerry says that you’ve put on weight and sometimes you don’t even wear a bra when you go out. What kind of message does that send out? It says that you’ve let yourself go. Of course Jack is going to stray if you’ve stopped making an effort …’
‘Thanks for the support, Mum. Do you have even the slightest idea of what I’ve been going through?’
Jack got to his feet and stumbled to the bedroom, shutting the door behind him so he could speak to his mother in privacy, though Hope was sure that he wasn’t getting such a hard time. Not Jack, their beloved only child who shot sunbeams out of his arse.
‘Hope, you know that we love you to pieces,’ her mother said, and it seemed to Hope, as if often did, that this alleged love was in spite of the way she’d turned out rather than being completely unconditional. ‘I’m just saying it takes two people to make a relationship, and two people to break one up.’
‘Yes, and those two people would be Jack and my former best friend. Oh, I’m forgetting that none of this is Jack’s fault; I drove him away because I’m a fat bitch who doesn’t wear a bra.’
‘There is no talking to you when you’re in one of your moods,’ her mother rapped back. ‘Obviously this hasn’t been easy for you, but it’s been quite a bolt out of the blue for us, too.’
‘The thing is that really it’s got nothing to do with you,’ Hope said, even though it had everything to do with her parents and Jack’s parents and their grandparents and, when she stopped to think about it, probably the whole of Whitfield had a vested interest in their relationship.
Her mother seemed to think so. ‘It has everything to do with us and if you can’t sort out this mess, the shock is going to kill your grandma.’
‘Mum, please …’
‘You’ll have to come home so we can talk about this properly,’ her mother stated implacably. ‘Can you get a few days off if you explain that there’s a family emergency?’
‘Not a chance in hell,’ Hope said equally firmly.
‘Well, you’ll have to get the train down on Friday after school. I must say, I thought you’d be more upset than this. You sound almost flippant.’
‘I am not flippant, and believe me, I’ve been plenty upset about this. I’ve cried myself to sleep more nights than I can remember, and the reason I’m so bloody lardy is because I’ve been stuffing down chocolate like it’s going out of fashion,’ Hope admitted, and she was on the verge of tears now, but they were angry tears because she was so furious with her mother she’d almost lost the power of speech. ‘I am in pieces right now.’
‘Oh, Hopey, poor old thing, don’t cry. I’m sure that Jack never meant to hurt you. He loves you,’ her mother said, and at least now she sounded like Hope’s emotional wellbeing was her number-one priority. ‘Look, sweetie, please come down for the weekend for some proper TLC.’
Usually Mrs Delafield was more about tough love, rather than TLC. ‘I don’t know,’ ventured Hope. ‘There’s so much to do here. Like, if we’re going to sell the flat …’ She trailed off as her mother took another sharp intake of breath.
‘I think it’s far too soon to be thinking about that kind of thing,’ she said, once she’d got over the fright that Hope had given her. ‘If you get the fast train, you can be here by seven, and I’ll pick you up from the station. We can have a nice girly weekend, just you, me and Marge.’
There was absolutely no point in arguing. Hope knew her mother would drive up to London if she had to, but … ‘What about if I persuaded Jack to come home with me and we drove up on Saturday?’
‘No need for that.’ Her mother gave a shrill laugh. ‘Dad and Roger are going to drive down to London and spend some time with Jack, and we’ll get this whole horrible business squared away.’
For one brief, blissful moment, Hope dared to believe that with some heavy-handed parental intervention, the whole horrible business could get squared away, but there were Jack’s worldly goods encased in black bin bags in the hall and her list for the rest of her life sitting on the kitchen counter, and there was nothing to be squared away. It was all fucked up and over.
‘I don’t think that’s going to happen, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘How can he still love me if he’s doing that with her?’
‘Stop being so silly. Jack obviously adores you. We’ll talk about it over the weekend,’ her mother said in a slightly manic voice. ‘Now, be sure to let me know what train you’ll be getting, though you should probably be able to make the four o’clock train out of Euston if you don’t dawdle. I’ve got to go, I have some bread proving.’
‘Fine. OK. Whatever.’ Hope guessed that her mother had achieved all she wanted from their phone call. ‘I’ll email you the train times, though all the talking in the world isn’t going to change what’s happened.’
‘Oh, and don’t keep sounding so negative, Hopey. You need to have a can-do attitude. This will all blow over, I’m sure of it, and that remi
nds me, I’ll make you an appointment to have your hair done on Saturday afternoon. Jeremy said your hair was mostly tangles, so we’ll get Mandy to give you a comb-out. I’ll remind you to take a couple of ibuprofen before we leave for the salon.’
As Hope rang off, Jack emerged from the bedroom and they shared a strained smile. ‘So I hope you didn’t have any exciting plans for next weekend,’ he said sheepishly.
‘By exciting plans, did you mean being frogmarched to Hair by Mandy to have a comb-out on Saturday afternoon?’ Hope asked peevishly.
Jack winced. ‘Ouch.’
He sat back down on the stool and dipped a finger in his bowl of soup. ‘This is barely lukewarm now.’
‘I’ll heat it up again.’ Hope poured the contents back into the big pan, which was still on a low simmer, and stirred. ‘So, did you actually agree to our two dads coming up for the weekend?’
‘I tried to say no several times but Mum doesn’t understand that word.’
Hope attempted another smile. ‘You never know, it might work.’ And just like that, just from looking at Jack sitting in their kitchen with her, in their home, where he truly belonged, all Hope’s plans for the future, and her good intentions to move on with her life were gone. Out of the window. Because, really? They weren’t what she wanted from her life. Jack was what she wanted, which was why she couldn’t help herself from going over to him so she could wrap her arms around him and kiss the top of his head, and Jack was letting her, so that was a good sign, right? ‘I still love you,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘Have you really stopped loving me?’
‘I’ll always love you,’ he said, and he bent his head so he could kiss her knuckles. ‘But this thing with Susie … it’s like we can’t get enough of each other. Sometimes I feel like I’m drowning in her.’ Jack stopped and looked imploringly up at her as if he didn’t have the right words to describe this supposed thrall that Susie had wrapped him in, and that maybe Hope could help him out.