‘See! Where’s that fire when you’re dealing with Jack? You’ve turned into a lightweight. You’ve let him treat you like shit and now you’re going back for more,’ Wilson said and he tried to cup Hope’s chin, but she pulled away.
‘I’m not just rolling over and playing dead. I’m fighting for him because I think what we had is worth fighting for.’ In her head there was still that picture-perfect memory of Jack coming through the front door and smiling when Hope said, ‘Hard day at the office, dear?’ like she did every evening, even though it had ceased to be funny the second time she’d said it, and had turned into just a habit that neither of them was inclined to break. That was what she wanted back; to feel safe and comfortable, and like everything in her world was where it was meant to be – not this crazy, chaotic state where she was alone, without Jack, and her stomach was constantly churning and she could taste fear at the back of her throat.
‘What you had, as in the past,’ Wilson pointed out, and he wasn’t even trying to be a little bit gentle with her any more. ‘You deserve better than him.’
‘You’re telling me to throw half my life away and I can’t do that,’ Hope said, and now the tears that she was brushing away with gloved fingers weren’t happy tears. ‘What he did … I can get over that, I know I can. He’s not the first man to have an affair, and if we can figure out where we were going wrong, if I can learn to trust him again, then our relationship might be stronger than it ever was.’
Wilson opened his mouth to – Hope was sure of this – argue the point, but she put her hand on his lips. ‘No more,’ she begged. ‘Please. There’s no point in discussing it. My mind is made up and there’s nothing you can say that will make a difference.’
They stood there for a long moment, Hope sniffing and wiping away each treacherous tear that threatened to run down her cheek. Wilson was illuminated in the street lights so when she looked up she could see the flecks of grey in his sideburns, and that he seemed resigned rather than angry or disappointed.
‘I think you’re a bloody idiot,’ he said at last, and just as Hope was bristling all over again, he added, ‘I’ll wait with you until you find a cab.’
‘I’m getting the bus,’ Hope argued, as she turned away from him and prepared to limp down Parkway in boots that she longed to take off and hurl into the nearest bin.
‘Fine, I’ll walk you to the bus stop, then,’ Wilson said, and he tucked his arm into hers. Hope wasn’t in a position to argue because their fight had left her feeling weak and shaky, and now at least she could lean against him and take some of the pressure off her poor feet, and he was shielding her from the worst of the gale-force wind. ‘For someone who’s decided to do the decent thing and stick with her childhood sweetheart, you don’t seem very happy.’
‘I thought we weren’t talking about it,’ Hope pleaded, which would have sounded more effective if she wasn’t burrowing deeper into Wilson and using him as a human windshield. ‘We’ve only got about ten minutes left in each other’s company so let’s not have another argument.’
‘Has Jack forbidden you from seeing me, then? When did we go back to Victorian times?’
No, I’ve forbidden myself from seeing you. Jack doesn’t care if I see you or not. ‘I said that I didn’t want to talk about it,’ Hope reminded Wilson, as they walked past a crowd of people shivering in the queue outside the Jazz Café, then turned the corner into Camden High Street.
Hope was just about to tell Wilson that she could manage the last fifty metres to the bus stop on her own when two tramps suddenly lunged at each other and fell to the ground in a tangle of stained clothes and matted hair. One of them tried to bite the other one, and Hope decided, as Wilson adroitly steered her past them, that it probably was better if he stayed with her until she was safely on the bus.
The countdown board at the stop informed her that there was a 29 due in two minutes. Hope reluctantly unthreaded her arm from Wilson’s. ‘Well, I suppose this is goodbye,’ she said with a brightness that she didn’t feel.
‘You’re only going to Holloway,’ he said. ‘Not off to war.’
The dazzle of car headlights and neon shop signs reflected off his glasses so it was hard to read his expression. Hope tried again. ‘Well, then, I’ll see you around, I guess.’
‘I’m not going to wait for you …’
‘I never asked you to!’
‘I’m not going to wait for you,’ Wilson repeated with heavy emphasis. ‘But if you wise up to what a terrible mistake you’re making sometime in the not too distant future then you know where to find me.’
‘That’s mean,’ Hope said, because his words hurt like a thousand little paper cuts. ‘And if I was making a mistake, which I’m 99.9 per cent sure I’m not, then there’s no way that I’d want to jump straight in to a relationship.’
‘Who said anything about a relationship? I thought we already discussed a consecutive string of one-night stands, during which time we probably wouldn’t see other people.’ Wilson was giving her that flared-nostril, superior look of old. ‘How is that a relationship?’
‘You’re not funny! In fact, none of this is funny.’ To show Wilson just how unfunny it was, Hope clonked him in the chest with her handbag.
‘You’re right. It’s not funny. It’s sad. In fact, it’s tragic.’
Really the only way to shut him up was to kiss him. Or Hope could have got on the 29, which had just pulled into the stop, but she only had to take half a step to kiss Wilson and her feet were killing her.
As Hope pressed her lips against his, she felt Wilson’s jerk of surprise, his mouth open on a gasp that never happened because she was there to silence it. And then he seemed to get over his shock, because his hands were on her and Hope could have died from the sheer relief of Wilson touching her again. No, not Wilson. Just someone touching her like they meant it.
Wilson cupped her face in his gloved hands and kissed her gently and he kissed her slowly, as Hope closed her eyes and tried to commit the feel and the taste and the Wilson-ness of him to memory because this would be the very last time she ever kissed a man who wasn’t Jack.
The thought of that filled her with panic, and Hope struggled to get even closer to Wilson, almost biting at his mouth, as people brushed and barged past them in their hurry to board the bus. It was probably just as well that they were in such a public space, standing in the middle of the pavement outside the remainder bookshop, because Wilson was fumbling to undo her coat so he could touch her breasts with glove-muffled hands, while his tongue danced in her mouth and, once again, Hope was rubbing and arching against him like a kitten on a catnip high.
If she’d been able to think clearly, then Hope would definitely have been reconsidering her rash decision to do the honourable thing and save her body for the exclusive pleasure of one man. But all she could think was, Don’t stop. Please don’t stop. God, just haul me into that little alley by the side of Pret A Manger and fuck me.
It took Hope some time to realise that they weren’t devouring each other any more, her coat was neatly buttoned up and Wilson was cupping her face in his hands again so he could lightly press a kiss on the tip of her nose. ‘You shouldn’t be out this late on a school night,’ he said a little breathlessly. ‘You’d better jump on the bus.’
Hope stared at him in disbelief. ‘But what about …’ she started to say, but Wilson was already walking away.
‘Like you said, I’ll see you around,’ he called over his shoulder.
THE NEXT DAY, Friday, may well have been one of the worst days of Hope’s life. It was definitely in the top-five.
She’d started the day off despondently, which was only to be expected. The hangover didn’t help, but neither did the feeling that she might never see Wilson again, unless she made a special trip to the organic butcher in Kentish Town, then marched up and down the high street until she just happened to bump into him. It wasn’t just that she’d never see Wilson again, but also that she was saying goodbye to
her last chance to have a different life, which had Hope feeling so gloomy as she trudged to school in a torrential downpour and fierce wind that had her almost horizontal.
She wanted her and Jack to be all right again, like she’d never wanted anything else in her life, but now Hope realised that if Jack came to his senses and came back to her, she was saying goodbye to the chance to spend the night in seedy bars flirting with louche men. To jetting off to Paris or Prague or New York at a moment’s notice. To having wild, passionate affairs. Hope might not have necessarily wanted to do any of those things, certainly not on a school night anyway, but maybe she wanted to know that doing these things might still be possible.
Blue Class could sense that Hope’s mind was not on them or their lettering skills as she sat at her desk with her chin in her hands and her head filled with intrigue and sex in expensive hotel rooms. She only came to when there was an anguished shriek from the furthest corner of the classroom where Stuart had Timothy in a headlock. There were also two incontinence incidents, which meant that Hope had to spend half an hour going through the school’s toilet procedure. ‘You need to try and save your pennies up for break time,’ she reminded them, as she did several times each week. ‘But if you really have to go in a lesson, then put your hand up and ask to go to the bathroom.’
As if the day couldn’t get any worse than sitting in a classroom that smelt of urine and disinfectant, Hope was summoned to Mr Gonzales’ office at lunchtime to find Dorothy and Sarah, who taught Year Six, waiting for her. Sarah was overseeing the junior-school portion of the Winter Pageant, but just as Hope was steeling herself for a very boring half hour discussing the dearth of parental volunteers, she was informed that Sarah was suffering from nervous exhaustion and had a doctor’s letter excusing her from all extra-curricular activities.
As far as Hope could tell, the only nervous exhaustion that Sarah suffered from was when her lawyer husband forgot to go to the off-licence on his way home from work. She managed not to share this, and she even managed not to burst into tears when the entire responsibility for the Winter Pageant was dumped in her lap. However, she did manage to lose her temper and tell a sobbing Sarah that she was ‘a bloody malingerer’, and Mr Gonzales had to have a quiet word with Hope in the corridor about ‘being a team player and taking one for the team’.
Hope was still seething at the injustice of it all at afternoon break, but as she sat in the staffroom with Elaine, her anger slowly receded to be replaced by a grim sense of foreboding at the thought of couples counselling.
It wasn’t as if the counsellor would make Jack sign a sworn affidavit to say that he would never cheat on Hope again, and Hope would promise to forgive him for cheating and to never bring it up whenever they had a row, and they could then be on their merry way. It would be an hour of dredging up all the unpleasant events that had led them to the counsellor’s door. ‘There’ll be probing questions,’ she grumbled to Elaine. ‘I hate probing questions.’
‘Yes, but they’ll be questions that you know the answers to. It’s not like she’s going to ask you the square root of anything, is it?’ Elaine took a sip of her tea. ‘What kind of therapy is it? Cognitive, NLP, behavioural?’
Hope stared at her blankly. ‘It’s the kind that costs ninety quid a session. Jack’s friend at work said that she was a really good counsellor.’
‘The thing about therapy is that you only get out of it what you put into it,’ Elaine said, with just the mildest hint of censure to her voice. ‘But it can’t fix things that are irrevocably broken.’
‘I am going to put everything into it,’ Hope protested. ‘I’m just well … scared that it won’t work, especially when I can’t help thinking that Jack only agreed to go to get our parents off his case.’
The bell for lessons rang and reluctantly they got up and left the staffroom. ‘You don’t have to get back with Jack if you don’t want to,’ Elaine suddenly said as they reached her classroom. ‘I mean, it’s not like someone’s holding a gun to your head.’
For a moment, Hope thought about the antique duelling pistols that her father had bought at a car-boot sale, then came to her senses. Her dad became incensed if her mother even dared to approach them with a feather duster. ‘Apart from our parents and, well, me, it seems like no one wants us to get back together,’ Hope said crossly. ‘When Jack and I are on and things are going well, we are an amazing couple. We’re in perfect harmony. We’re like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, so I get that you’re just looking out for me, but you could try and be a bit more supportive.’
‘You do know that when they weren’t soft-shoe-shuffling on the silver screen, Fred and Ginger loathed the very sight of each other?’ Elaine asked dryly as they heard a large thump and a bellow from her classroom and she had to hurry inside.
Jack was waiting for Hope at Finchley Road tube station with a fixed smile, and a bulging holdall as if he was all ready to move back in with her, which Hope took as a good sign.
‘How was your week?’ he asked, as they didn’t kiss each other, not even on the cheek, but stood there with a respectable amount of pavement between them.
‘It was bloody awful, if you must know,’ Hope said, because she was still furious about the Winter Pageant and had spent the entire journey from Highbury to Finchley Road perfecting the blistering invective due to Sarah when Mr Gonzales and Dorothy were off the premises. She really should have let it go by now and cleared her mind free of negative energy in order to be more receptive to the healing properties of relationship counselling.
Jack didn’t seem to mind, though. He nodded and said, ‘I hear you,’ with great fervour as they began to walk. ‘The fucking production department expect us to produce the February issue in two weeks, because they need to pull forward on our deadlines for the ten days we have off over Christmas. Wankers!’
Hope remembered exactly the same scenario happening last year. Jack had ended up doing sixteen-hour days and she’d had to do all his Christmas shopping for him. ‘Don’t tell me that the Production Editor’s been standing over your desk again demanding to know why it takes you more than two hours to design a double-page spread?’
‘She has. Now it’s all-out war between the art department and the production desk,’ Jack exclaimed, looking at Hope in surprise like he couldn’t believe she’d remembered. ‘So, what’s been going down at The Bull Pen?’
They spent an enjoyable ten minutes walking to the consulting rooms in Frognal and bitching about their respective employers, and by the time they were sitting in the front room of a very large terraced house, they were still happily bitching, this time about the Monet on the wall.
After five minutes, they saw a man scurry down the hall, head lowered. ‘Do you think he’s crying?’ Jack asked in a stage whisper. ‘Do you think our therapist has made him cry?’
‘Maybe she probed him too deeply about his mummy issues and he had to confess that at the age of forty-seven, he still wets the bed.’ She was spouting nonsense because she was nervous, but Jack giggled and then Hope giggled, and every time it seemed as if they might stop and get themselves into a serious, therapy-type place, one of them would hiss, ‘Bed-wetter,’ and the giggles would start all over again.
They were still giggling and nudging each other when they realised there was a sallow-faced, middle-aged woman standing in the doorway of the waiting room and watching them with a mixture of expectation and dread.
‘Hope? Jack?’ she queried, as they both flushed guiltily. Hope gathered up her handbag, tote, Evening Standard and her hat, gloves and scarf, and wondered if they’d already violated the therapist-patient code before even making it as far as the consulting room.
‘I’m Angela,’ the woman said. She led them down a draughty corridor to a room that was just as cold and had big French windows, which looked out on to an overgrown garden. Angela sat in a chintz-upholstered armchair and directed Hope and Jack to the matching sofa.
Hope sank down into the sofa depths and cautio
usly looked around. There was no raffia or batik or dream-catchers, but there was a box of tissues on the coffee table in front of her, and Angela was definitely a cat lady. Arranged on a sideboard were several framed pictures of the same tabby cat and, Hope made a mental note to discuss this with Jack at a later date, a cross-stitched sampler of said cat with an extremely malcontent expression on his furry face.
‘… discussion, solution and ultimately resolution.’ Hope realised that Angela had been talking for quite some time and that she hadn’t been paying the slightest bit of attention, even though she was committed to couples counselling and raring to go. She also noted that Angela’s left eye wandered to the side, and her mousy hair, streaked through with salt and pepper, could really do with some intensive conditioning – well, Hope could empathise with that. She nodded earnestly like she’d been listening to every single word and agreed with each one of them.
‘Yeah, that sounds cool,’ Jack mumbled when he realised that Hope wasn’t going to do anything other than nod manically. ‘Right, Hopey?’
‘Really cool,’ she agreed, her voice all squeaky because this was a little bit terrifying and Angela didn’t seem like the sort of person you could really confide in. She had a pinched, almost haunted look to her face like her life had turned out to be a series of big disappointments and she wasn’t entirely sure why.
‘So, I spoke to Hope briefly on the phone, but why don’t you both tell me what you’d like to achieve from our sessions?’ Angela asked.
Hope knew the answer to this one. ‘He cheated on me with my best friend, even though he promised that there was nothing going on,’ she began in a garbled rush because Angela needed to know the plain, unvarnished truth before Jack could put some spin on it.
‘Well, yeah, I did,’ Jack admitted calmly, as Hope felt herself sink a little further into the chintz-covered cavern that was the sofa. She’d bought a new notebook so she could jot down the key points of each session to read them back afterwards, but now Hope wasn’t entirely sure that she wanted to make notes so that she’d have to relive what had gone wrong all over again. ‘But we were having big problems way before that. Like, our relationship had bottomed out. And we could either get married like everyone expected, or break up. But I guess we’d been together for so long that I was scared of not being together, and when I started seeing someone else, it was because it was the only way I knew how to change us, me and Hope, y’know? At first, that’s what was going on, but then I realised that I was falling in love with the other girl, Susie.’