If Hope hadn’t had a headache before they started on the never-ending questions about reindeers and aerodynamics, then she definitely had one now. Eventually she could take no more, and stuck Kiki’s Delivery Service in the DVD player, and within five minutes there wasn’t a sound coming from anybody and Hope could get on with writing out Christmas cards.
Rather than brave the staffroom and Elaine’s wrath at break-time, Hope went out into the blistering cold, this time in wellington boots and two pairs of socks, to wander around aimlessly and try to decide what she was going to do with the rest of her life, now she’d finally accepted that Jack wasn’t coming back.
Now she’d have to figure out who Hope Delafield was, when she wasn’t one half of Hope and Jack. Or HopeandJack, which was what everyone called them, like their names were just one word and that they were one being, instead of two separate people.
Being single was hard work, and Hope wasn’t even thinking of Lauren and Allison’s tales from the dating frontline. She was thinking of having to go back to living in a shared house, like she’d done when she was a student. And deciding who’d get custody of the car and the washing machine in the split, and winding up their joint bank accounts, and cooking meagre meals for one, and living every single day without someone who was sunk into the very marrow of her bones. Who knew what mood she was in before she even opened her mouth. Who’d shared every bad thing and every good thing that had happened to her in the last thirteen years. Who communicated with her in their own private language of in-jokes and looks and hand gestures.
It wasn’t just about finally letting Jack go. It was about letting a part of herself go with him, and maybe she wouldn’t be on her own for ever, and maybe she’d even fall deep in love again, but it would never be the same. Jack had had the best of her, and whoever Hope might love in the future would love a woman who was a little bit less than what she used to be.
Remarkably all her soul-searching had only taken fifteen minutes. Hope trudged back to school, inwardly dreading the last ninety minutes of term, when Blue Class would give out their cards and presents and, as a special treat, perform their Lady Gaga medley all over again. As she walked through the playground, sticking to the edges so she wouldn’t be spotted and immediately have several small children clinging to her, her phone beeped.
It was a message from Wilson. Is everything OK? Even if it isn’t, you’ll get through this. You’re made of strong stuff.
It was sweet of Wilson to think so, because Hope felt as if she was made from something weak and insubstantial like blancmange or bubble wrap. She didn’t know what was going to happen between them, and she didn’t want to be one of those pathetic girls who couldn’t be on their own and had to be in a relationship, but Hope was curious to see what Wilson and her could be. Even just ‘a series of consecutive one-night stands’ might be fun, judging from his performance a few hours ago.
I am OK, she texted back. Apart from a demonic hangover. Thanks for everything you did last night. All of it. I’ll be in touch once the dust settles.
And that was all Hope could write, because there wasn’t anything else to say, but just as she got to her classroom, her phone beeped again and her heart did an unexpected little skip and a jump – until Hope saw that she had a message from Jack. I’ll see you at counselling tonight. Don’t be late.
Her heart stopped skipping and jumping in favour of plummeting to the floor. It wasn’t just Jack’s uncompromising prose style, which told Hope in no uncertain terms that he was still furious with her, and likely to stay that way for quite some time. She also didn’t want Angela there to witness Jack’s fury and listen to all the gory details, her eyes darting back and forth behind her smeary glasses as she judged Hope. Or judged Hope even more than she already had.
The incipient dread cast a gloom over the rest of the day, even though it was spent with Blue Class exchanging cards and gifts. Hope hadn’t been left out either. She received many home-made cards – her favourite was Javan’s, which featured Father Christmas being slaughtered by a squad of ninja assassins – and soon her desk was obscured by a huge pile of presents. As well as several tins of Quality Street, Roses and Celebrations, there were gift baskets from Boots and the Body Shop, mugs, teapots, cookery books and scented candles, and Stuart’s mum, Saskia, had gone all out with a bottle of Moët and a hamper from Carluccio’s, which didn’t make Hope like Stuart more, but she did feel even more guilty about not liking him. However, her favourite present was the hat, scarf and gloves commissioned by Sorcha and Luca’s mums and knitted by Timothy’s mother, who usually sold her woollies in a very posh boutique in Camden Passage.
Her cupcakes and cards seemed like a paltry offering compared to the generosity of their parents, but Blue Class received them with rapturous delight, apart from Stuart, who apparently was now dairy- and gluten-intolerant and had a nut allergy, too.
By the time the bell rang at one, Hope was exhausted, mentally, physically and emotionally, and it was a miracle on the level of the Virgin Birth, which all of Blue Class were intrigued and confused by, that she’d managed not to burst into tears.
She did almost cry when Elaine presented her with a crate of home-made elderflower vodka and the offer of a lift home. Although the lift home meant that Elaine could give her a stern talking-to both in the car and after Hope had half-heartedly invited her in for coffee and cupcakes.
‘So, are you regretting the way you behaved last night?’ Elaine asked, once Hope had presented her with a mug of black coffee and two misshapen cupcakes that hadn’t passed her stringent quality control. It was a welcome change of subject. On the way home, Elaine hadn’t stopped telling Hope that she was having a mid-twenties crisis.
‘Elaine, you don’t understand.’ Hope was sitting bolt upright in the uncomfortable armchair that had a spring loose where her left buttock cheek liked to rest. She knew that if she sat as she usually did in a slouch/sprawl combo, she’d be fast asleep within minutes. ‘Jack and I had a talk the weekend before last, well, mostly he talked, and he’s chosen Susie. He loves her and he wants to be with her, so I don’t know why he’s quite so angry with me. Yeah, I stayed out all night and I should probably have called him, and he caught me kissing Wilson on the doorstep this morning. But, really, he needs to lay off the wronged-lover routine because he’s not my lover any more.’
‘Kissing? This morning? Did you spend the night with Wilson? What have you been doing?’ Somehow Elaine managed to sound both disapproving and as if she’d die if Hope didn’t confess everything at once.
Hope didn’t confess everything. She confessed right up to the kissing and then faded to black, because no matter how ashamed she was of her duplicity of the night before, she wasn’t ashamed of what had happened on Wilson’s sofa, because, as she’d told Jack that morning, it had nothing to do with anyone but her and Wilson.
By the time Elaine left, with the rest of the non-standardised cupcakes and a tin of Roses, which she’d swapped with Hope for a large box of Ferrero Rocher, they were friends again.
‘We’re having people over for Christmas Eve,’ she said to Hope as she stood shivering on the pavement and waiting to wave Elaine off. ‘If you fancy it.’
‘We’re going up North on the twenty-second,’ Hope said, and she literally had to bite her tongue so she didn’t add a ‘just kill me now’ on to the end of the sentence. ‘Have to tell the parents the bad news in person.’
Elaine gave Hope a quick but fierce hug. ‘I’m so sorry about you and Jack, sweetie. Is there no chance that you might get back together?’
Hope shook her head. ‘Seriously? I think he’d made up his mind weeks ago, and agreeing to counselling, well, he was just going through the motions.’ She squirmed unhappily on the doorstep. ‘It’s taken me a while to get my head round it; it’s why I never told you. I thought that I could persuade Jack to stay, especially once the parents became involved, but I was just deluding myself.’
‘So, was that why you copped o
ff with Wilson?’ Elaine asked. ‘To convince yourself, or was it one last attempt to make Jack jealous so he’d realise you were his one true love?’
‘God, no! I mean, Jack’s angry, but I think it’s more self-defensive anger because now he has a vague idea of what he put me through and he feels guilty,’ Hope said. ‘The thing with Wilson happened because I wanted it to. I wanted it very much. Does that make me a bad person?’
‘Of course it doesn’t. You deserve a bit of fun,’ Elaine insisted vehemently. ‘So, I guess I won’t see you until the New Year, then?’
‘’Fraid not, but if I was around, you know I’d love to come to yours for Christmas Eve. You have the wildest parties,’ Hope added wistfully, as she remembered the time Simon had bought canisters of laughing gas off the internet and decanted it into party balloons so his guests could huff it down and spend the rest of the night giggling like loons. ‘Like I say, if you do happen to be around, you know where we’ll be,’ Elaine said, and she shrugged and did a weird, starey thing with her eyes that Hope couldn’t decipher, but then again she was so sleep-deprived that she could barely see straight as it was.
Three hours later, Hope was at the wired, teeth-chattering, about-to-start-hallucinating-little-green-men stage of tiredness. She sat in Angela’s waiting room and wondered if Jack was going to be a no-show. She’d already seen the patient who had the appointment before them rush out with his head down as was his wont, and Jack should have been here by now. Hope prayed that it wouldn’t just be her and Angela.
A minute before their session started, Jack arrived, red-faced and out of breath. ‘Sorry, I’m la …’ he began, then Hope saw him mentally check himself, because he was still angry with her and didn’t owe her an apology for being late. ‘Christ, you could have made a bit more of an effort, couldn’t you?’
He was also going to pick on everything she said and did, because it was what Jack did when he was in a bad mood, especially when Hope was the cause of it. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said in a conciliatory fashion, because she’d decided to take Jack’s anger as her due and she simply didn’t have the energy to get angry too. Hope gestured at her sloppy sweater, leggings and Uggs ensemble. ‘It was the closest I could come to wearing pyjamas, without actually wearing pyjamas.’
‘Yeah well, if you hadn’t been out all hours shagging that pretentious wanker, then you wouldn’t be so tired,’ Jack snapped.
‘I told you, there was no actual shagging,’ Hope sighed, like that really mattered. It still counted as cheating even if there hadn’t been a penis entering a vagina, but before she could get into specifics, Hope realised that Angela was standing in the doorway and looking as if her eyeballs might hurl themselves out of their sockets.
‘Right, well, best to get started right away,’ she said, as she hustled the pair of them down the corridor that led to her room. Hope had a horrible feeling that this evening their session wouldn’t be cut short by fifteen minutes. ‘So, how are you two?’ Angela asked before their bottoms had even made contact with the sofa.
‘Oh, so-so,’ Hope prevaricated, but she could feel the full weight of Jack’s glare, even though she was staring resolutely ahead at a spot 5 centimetres to the left of Angela’s left ear. ‘You know how it is.’
‘Why don’t you tell Angela how it is?’ Jack demanded, before directly addressing Angela, who was quivering where she sat. ‘She went out last night and shagged Susie’s ex to get back at me, or because she’s pissed off that I don’t want to stay with her and get married and have babies. I don’t know. Hope’s not exactly been forthcoming on the details, even though I practically caught them at it on the doorstep this morning.’
There were so many half-truths and untruths in Jack’s statement that Hope wasn’t sure how to defend herself. ‘We were kissing,’ she told Angela, because for once it was easier to talk to Angela than to Jack. ‘This morning. It was just kissing.’
When the man you were kissing wasn’t the man you’d been in a relationship with for the last thirteen years, it was always a lot more than ‘just kissing’, but Angela nodded as if she understood. Maybe she did have hidden depths after all.
‘And spending the night with another man?’ Angela queried, her voice almost breaking on the last word. ‘When Jack was seeing someone else it altered the equilibrium in the relationship; by mirroring Jack’s behaviour, were you hoping to shift it the other way?’
You what? ‘It wasn’t like that,’ she protested weakly. ‘Jack and I aren’t in a relationship any more, so technically I didn’t do anything wrong, even if my timing was lousy. But, the thing is, Jack, that I get it. I get what happened with you and Susie now. About wanting someone so badly that even though there’s a million good reasons why you shouldn’t, that one selfish reason cancels them all out.’
Jack sneered, as if he’d never been in that position and didn’t have even the vaguest idea of what Hope was talking about. ‘Did you even think about what it might do to me?’
‘I didn’t really see how it would affect you one way or another,’ Hope admitted. ‘So I tried not to think about you at all.’
It sounded so callous when she tried to be honest, Hope thought despairingly. Jack obviously thought so too. ‘Not good enough,’ he stated bluntly. ‘I think you owe me an explanation.’
‘Why should I?’ Hope asked, wishing that they weren’t doing this when she’d had no sleep for thirty-six hours, was still in the grip of a tequila hangover and felt so vulnerable that it seemed as if her skin had been stripped off and her nerve endings had come to the surface. ‘There are some things that you’re better off not knowing, and there are some things that are none of your business. You absolutely refused to talk about your affair with Susie even though you knew I was in utter hell about it.’
‘Ha! You see?’ Jack crowed triumphantly. ‘I knew this was about Susie. I knew it was about revenge.’
‘God, you haven’t listened to a single word I’ve said, have you? Jack, you’re my ex-boyfriend, you don’t have a say in who I see or what I get up to any more.’ And she knew she was being childish, but Hope curled her legs up under her, tucked her arms into her chest and bowed her head, to show that she was absenting herself from the proceedings, because between Jack and Jack’s ego there really wasn’t any room left for her.
There was silence. The kind of silence that had teeth and claws, so Hope tried to focus on the sound of her own breathing, making it deep and even and regular, so that despite all the emotional distress, she was close to falling asleep when Angela cleared her throat timidly.
‘Well, this is all rather … well …’ Hope lifted her head in time to see the utter helplessness on Angela’s face as she struggled to summarise the shit that Hope and Jack were in. ‘So, did you have a chance to do the homework?’ Angela asked a little desperately.
Jack cleared his throat. ‘You really want us to go through our homework assignment? Really?’
Hope had to agree with him. What did it matter where they were going to be in ten years’ time? It certainly wasn’t going to be with each other.
‘Well, I do think it’s a very useful exercise,’ Angela insisted, and she looked so woebegone that Hope started to feel sorry for her, and even Jack sighed in capitulation.
‘Right, so I had a definite plan of where I’d be ten years from now, and it was in a live/work space in Hoxton where I ran my own design company, and I got to travel a lot and had all this interesting work, and the latest gadgets, and that was great, just what I wanted, even if it did feel a little shallow – but somehow, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t see Susie in the picture.’
Hope cautiously raised her head out of the crook of her arms, only to see Jack giving her the evil eye. Then he shrugged. ‘I tried so hard to put Susie into my future, then Hope didn’t come home last night and when she did rock up she was with him, and I could have killed them both.’
Angela actually gasped at Jack’s display of uncharacteristic machismo, though Hope was less
than impressed. ‘Well, I could have told you that Susie wasn’t cut out for a life of domestic bliss, even if it was in a live/work space in Hoxton,’ she said, and she sounded bitter but she’d earned the right to be bitter.
‘It’s not that,’ Jack said sharply. ‘It’s that I was only thinking about one part of my life, the professional part, and I’ve spent all day being mad at you because when I think about the future, I don’t really want the minimalist designer loft, it’s just something that I think I should want. Really, when I look into the future, all I can see is you and me and we’re living somewhere like Brighton, ’cause I could still commute to London from there, or I might freelance or have my own studio or what have you …’ Hope could see him relax, the rigidity slowly ease out of him as he began to describe the Jack and Hope of the future. Because it turned out that she was in Jack’s future.
Apparently, ten years from now, they had three children, two boys and a girl, but they were trying for another baby because they didn’t want an odd number of children and, besides, Hope came from a large family and Jack had hated being an only child. They lived in a house five minutes’ walk from the beach and in the catchment area for the best local schools.
Jack wasn’t exactly sure if Hope was still working as a teacher, or had decided to stay at home and go back to work once their youngest child that hadn’t even been born yet started primary school, but she baked a lot of cakes, and they kept chickens in their back garden as well as having an allotment where Hope grew their own vegetables. She was also a stalwart of the local Preservation Society.
Basically, in the space of ten years filled with child-rearing and gardening, Hope had turned into her mother. And, quite frankly, Hope wasn’t on board with the idea that Jack got to do something he loved while she spent all her time barefoot and pregnant. Well, not barefoot – if she was raising chickens and growing spuds, she’d spend most of the time in her wellies.