Hope had forgotten that having a conversation with Wilson was like trying to thread a rusty needle with a frayed piece of cotton. ‘What kind of suspicions?’
‘The usual kind.’ When Hope let out a tiny growl of frustration at his utter inarticulacy, he shifted uncomfortably as if he realised that he had to do better. ‘OK, OK. I thought maybe she was seeing someone else, I just didn’t think it was your bloke. Well, not until we all went to that thing in Clissold Park.’
Hope frowned as she cast her mind back to that Saturday afternoon a few weeks before when the four of them had gone to a one-day festival in Stoke Newington, all buoyed up with the prospect of not having to camp in a field and with shiny backstage passes on lanyards, courtesy of Skirt magazine. As hard as she tried, Hope couldn’t remember any instances when she’d caught Jack and Susie exchanging heated glances. Or sloping off together without any explanation and returning a long time later, all hot and flustered.
But then she had spent most of the day getting very merry on the free cocktails supplied by the vodka company sponsoring the backstage hospitality, then queuing for the Portaloos. Still, Hope was sure that if there’d been something going on that day, she’d have noticed it. This was her boyfriend and her best friend they were talking about, after all. Or her ex-best friend and her ex … No, she couldn’t bear to think of Jack as her ex-anything. Couldn’t even form the thought.
‘I don’t remember them doing anything out of the ordinary,’ she insisted weakly. ‘Can you be more specific?’
Wilson shrugged. ‘She’d send a text on her phone. A split second later, he’d get a text and read it with a smirk on his face. Then he’d text, she’d get a text, smirk, text, smirk, text.’
‘But that could have just been a coincidence!’
‘It could have been, except it looks like it wasn’t. You saw them together. What did you see, anyway?’
Although Hope had been trying to convince herself that the heated embrace was a trick of the light and she’d put two and two together and ended up with a number that was way, way greater than four, when she cast her mind back to what she’d seen earlier, she had perfect recall of Susie’s hands inside Jack’s jeans, his hands on her tits, the hungry slurping sound as they kissed … God, it would be etched right into her cerebral cortex until the day she died.
‘I saw them kissing,’ she said, and she was amazed that her voice sounded so clear and calm. ‘And it was the kind of kissing that people do when they’re shagging each other but they can’t actually shag each other at that particular moment.’
‘Right.’ Wilson folded his arms. ‘You sure you’re not just jumping to conclusions? Because I’ve noticed that you tend to do that.’
‘I do not!’ Hope said indignantly, because she didn’t. Apart from the whole engagement-ring fiasco in Barcelona, but that was because Jack had unwittingly led her on. Besides … ‘Since when were you such an authority on me? You’ve only ever said about five sentences to me in the whole time I’ve known you.’
‘Well, maybe I might have taken the trouble to get to know you better if you weren’t always glaring at me or getting annoyingly drunk and giggly with my girlfriend.’
‘I don’t giggle,’ Hope informed Wilson icily, and the way she was feeling right now, she didn’t think she’d ever knowingly giggle ever again. ‘Anyway, we’re getting wildly off-topic. So, when you had these “suspicions”’ – Hope did air-quotes, which, pleasingly, made Wilson wince – ‘did you confront Susie about them?’
‘Well, no, not then,’ Wilson said.
‘But you did ask her about them later?’
‘I started to ask her but it just turned into an argument about me being half an hour late to pick her up the week before,’ Wilson said dryly.
‘So you didn’t pursue it?’ This was even harder than the time Hope had tried to get to the awful truth of who’d let Herbert, the class hamster, out of his cage.
‘To be honest, I didn’t want to start dragging up stuff if it meant that all my worst thoughts were confirmed.’ Wilson scratched his chin. ‘No one but a masochist wants to put themselves in a position where they’re likely to get hurt.’
In all her rage and pity and getting really, really annoyed that Wilson was giving her the third-degree like this was all her fault, Hope had been forgetting something – this wasn’t just about her. Wilson was also an innocent victim in all this. She reached out to touch Wilson’s arm, which made him flinch, but then they’d never touched before. The slight displacement of air when they had leaned in and pursed their lips at a spot approximately five centimetres away from the other’s cheek couldn’t be classed as touching. But now her hand rested on his arm and stayed there. ‘Wilson? Look, I’m sorry.’
He shook his head and pulled his arm away from her. ‘You’ve got nothing to be sorry for. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.’
‘No, I mean, I’m sorry that I’ve made this all about me when you must be feeling pretty cut up about it too.’ Hope swallowed past that lump that had taken up residence in her throat again. ‘It’s just … well, I know what you’re feeling right now, because I’m feeling it too, and it hurts.’
‘It’s not the first time I’ve been in this situation, probably won’t be the last,’ Wilson said brusquely. ‘Still, it’s not something you ever get used to, your girlfriend cheating on you. If she is … All you actually saw was a kiss. One kiss.’
It wasn’t just one kiss. It had been so much more than that. There had been hands in places where they had no right to be and grinding and groping and breathy little gasps and moans. ‘Do you really think I’d be this upset if it had just been one kiss?’
‘But you did only see them kiss, and Susie said it was just a drunken snog and OK, so maybe they do fancy each other, is that so bad?’ Wilson didn’t sound like he wanted Hope’s opinion but as if he was trying to do damage limitation. Square away the facts until they seemed a lot less incriminating. ‘They fancied each other, they’d both had a skinful, stuff happened and you kicked off, and then Susie kicked off because that’s what women do, they love to kick off, and in a few days’ time, it will all have blown over, and Jack and Susie probably won’t even be able to look at each other. That’s what I think, anyway.’
Wilson was a regular chatty Cathy tonight, Hope thought sourly. ‘Well, that’s not what I think,’ she protested. ‘You didn’t see them. I did, and I know exactly what I saw and it’s just about broken my heart.’
The light was dim, but Hope was sure that Wilson had just rolled his eyes. ‘If this is the worst thing that’s ever happened to you, then you’ve led a very sheltered life.’
She had led a sheltered life, Hope knew that. Both her parents were still alive and gainfully employed, so there’d always been food, heat and light, and a bit left over for luxuries like trips to the cinema and two weeks on a campsite in Provence every summer. She’d got ten GCSEs, four A-levels, a degree in History and her SCITT with the requisite amounts of revision-related tears but no major angst. She’d dated the boy next door. She’d only ever shagged the boy next door once she was past the age of consent. Then Hope had moved in with the boy next door after university, and bought a flat with the boy next door as soon as she was bringing in her first wage.
At least she’d managed to get out of Lancashire and live in London, when most of the girls she’d been at school with already had kids. Some of them were even on their second marriages, but Wilson was kind of right: Hope didn’t just have a sheltered life, it was a very small life, too. ‘I’m sorry if my emotional distress is boring the pants off you,’ Hope said as she pointedly scooched across the seat so she was almost hugging the car door. ‘Maybe if I’d had a succession of crappy relationships, I’d be inured to the pain by now, but I haven’t. And well, it hurts like hell.’ Her voice throbbed and broke at the end of the sentence and Hope waited to see if she was going to burst into tears again, but no, she was resolutely dry-eyed as Wilson wriggled where he sat and then coug
hed a little bit.
‘I’m just saying that this is probably something and nothing, and it doesn’t help the situation if you’re going to completely overreact,’ he said in a much gentler voice. ‘You need to calm down.’
There was nothing more likely to make Hope start to hiss and bristle than someone telling her to calm down. ‘At least I have feelings,’ she snarled. ‘You’re just acting like the whole thing is a minor inconvenience to you. Don’t you even care that Susie’s been cheating on you?’
‘Of course I care!’ Wilson would never do anything as uncool as shout but his volume knob was definitely edging towards seven. ‘Susie and I might not have been together for twenty bloody years like you and Jack—’
‘It’s thirteen years, actually. Lots of marriages don’t last that long.’
‘… but I thought we were heading towards something serious, and so if there is more to this than a bit of flirting and one sodding kiss, then, yes, I’m upset about it. But, unlike you, I don’t go in for hysterics and hand-wringing.’
‘I am not hysterical!’ Hope yelled, and she actually flailed on the car seat in a way that would have her squirming when she played this whole sorry scene back at a later date. ‘If you’re not going to drive me into town, then fine! I can make my own way but I don’t have to sit here and listen to you pretend that I’ve blown this whole thing out of proportion because I’m hysterical and I overreact when you …’
‘Christ!’ Wilson started the car with an angry twist of the ignition key. ‘I’ll take you into town as long as you promise to just shut the hell up!’
Hope closed her mouth with an audible snap so she could grind her teeth so furiously that her jaw started to ache, and if she kept that up, she’d be back to wearing a mouth guard at night like she had when she was a teenager and had had far less control on her temper than she did now. Well, not right at this second, but generally she’d learned to control her hissy-fitting by deep breathing. Deep breathing wasn’t an option when she was struggling with a veritable tsunami of rage. ‘You have no right …’ she began, her voice murderously low.
‘Not another bloody word!’
She settled back into a fulminating silence and for want of anything better to do, like giving Wilson a piece of her mind, Hope delved into the carrier bag and pulled out her phone. She switched it on and yes! There were missed calls. Ten of them. Ten ways for Jack to say he was sorry and make it convincing because she wanted him to be sorry and to promise that it (whatever it really was) would never happen again. But when she investigated further, eight of them were from Lauren and Allison, there was one from Marvin and even one from Otto, but nothing from Jack. Except, oh! He’d sent her a text.
R U OK?
And no. No, Hope wasn’t OK. Not when he couldn’t even take the time to send her a text that contained more than five characters. FIVE!
‘I hate him so much right now,’ Hope spat out, and she also hated that she had to qualify the statement. That she couldn’t just outright hate Jack, but she had to give it a disclaimer. ‘I don’t even know who he is any more, and I want to blame Susie for all of this, but y’know, when I saw them … well, it was obvious that Jack wasn’t being forced against his will.’
‘I thought we’d decided that we weren’t going to talk about this any more.’
‘But don’t you think we should talk about this?’ Hope persisted. ‘We’re the only two people who can talk about it.’
Wilson glanced over at her. ‘What part of “shut the hell up” are you having a problem with?’
‘You’re horrible!’ Hope ground out, literally ground out because her back molars were now clamped so tightly together it felt as if they’d have to be chiselled apart. ‘No wonder Susie has to …’
‘If you finish that sentence how I think you’re going to finish it, then I’m throwing you out of the car now, and I won’t care that we’re in Somers Town and you’ll probably get mugged by crackheads.’
There were a million things that Hope still wanted to say but she couldn’t say them. Not because she believed Wilson’s threats or that she was scared of crackheads (she’d willingly give them her Stella McCartney wedges to flog on eBay). But because she’d reached that knuckle-cracking, limb-stiffening, white-noise place where she was so angry that all she could do now was burst into tears.
It was almost a relief to be crying – not like she’d been crying before, when she’d felt alone and betrayed and sick to the stomach at the thought of Jack and Susie together, but crying because she’d worked herself up into such a temper that all she could do was cry. Unfortunately, angry crying was loud, verging on howling, and Hope knew from bitter experience that her face was scrunched up, wet with tears and livid red, not that she even cared. Her nose started running and she wiped it on the back of her hand and carried on crying, her whole body shaking with sobs – but it didn’t make her feel better or less angry, not when she wanted to shout and scream and smash a few glasses or pieces of china.
‘Can you stop that racket?’ Wilson asked as he drove past University College Hospital and up Gower Street. ‘Crying isn’t going to help.’
Hope didn’t trust herself to speak. She wasn’t even sure that any words she could manage to get out would be intelligible, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d really lost it like this. Not since she was at Leeds University and had confronted one of her housemates for letting her sister and her sister’s unwashed boyfriend have sex in Hope’s bed when she’d gone home for the weekend.
Wilson muttered something under his breath, and then he dared to pat her knee and let his hand rest there. Anyone could have told him that when Hope was crying angry tears, then you should never, ever attempt to touch her, not unless you wanted to get slapped.
Hope smacked his hand off her knee. ‘Don’t touch me!’ she spluttered, her voice clogged with mucus.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ Wilson demanded. It was a valid question. Hope herself wanted to know what was so wrong with her that Jack and Susie had had to find solace in each other. ‘You’re meant to teach six-year-olds, not act like one.’
Wilson wasn’t helping. He was making everything worse, and some small part of Hope that wasn’t subsumed by rage and snot understood that; and the other larger part of her that was currently making all the decisions had come to the conclusion that enough was enough. As Wilson stopped at the traffic lights at Cambridge Circus, she scrabbled for the door handle.
‘Now what are you doing, you silly woman?’
Hope succeeded in wrenching the door open. ‘I can take it from here,’ she sobbed, but they were quieter sobs because she was almost, almost, all cried out.
‘I’m not letting you wander around Soho in this state,’ Wilson said, but he sounded reluctant and Hope couldn’t really blame him, which meant that her rationality and reason were beginning to return. ‘Just stay where you are.’
But Hope already had the door open and the lights had turned green and Wilson was holding up a stream of traffic, all tooting their horns. Still faintly weeping but mostly hicupping, she scrambled out of the car and stumbled across the road. Wilson shouted something after her but it was swallowed up by the night, and Hope ducked down a side street and stayed there until she was absolutely sure that he wasn’t coming after her.
HOPE SPENT WHAT was left of the night in Soho. She couldn’t face the journey to South London and Lauren’s pity and concern that would make her come undone all over again, so she stayed where she was.
Well, first she sat on the stone steps of the Seven Dials monument in Covent Garden but she kept getting harassed by lagered-up men and one lagered-up woman who needed help getting her shoe back on, so eventually Hope hobbled to Bar Italia in Soho. She had to wait an hour for a seat and once she had one, she kept ordering coffees that she didn’t drink and paninis that she didn’t eat just so she had squatter’s rights. An endless stream of clubbers, scene-kids and hipsters, most of them chugging espressos to keep the co
me-down at bay, was entertaining enough that Hope could sit there and not really have to think about anything.
She didn’t know how long she’d been sitting there but her bottom had gone numb and the sight of her fifth cup of cold cappuccino and a congealed panini was starting to make her feel sick. She couldn’t stay there for ever, even if she’d wanted to. One of the counter staff had been over to wipe her table down at least ten times in the last half hour, so with a heavy heart and even heavier feet, Hope gathered up her carrier bag and headed out to meet her uncertain future.
It was a glorious day. The sun was already high up in a soft blue sky. A man was walking his schnauzer, a copy of the Sunday Times tucked under his arm. Hope checked her phone; it was only a little past seven. She hadn’t been up this early on a Sunday since she’d stayed up all of Saturday night at Latitude dancing with Susie.
Hope wished that she didn’t have to go home. Ever. Again. She was almost tempted to prolong the inevitable and hunker down in her favourite West End greasy spoon for a fortifying mug of tea and a bacon sandwich, which she might actually eat, but common sense prevailed. Tomorrow was the first inset day of the new school year and she’d promised the deputy head that she’d make her famous chocolate brownies for the infants v. juniors staffroom bake-off they had at the beginning of each new term.
The thought of having to do anything oven-related after yesterday’s dinner party was almost enough to make Hope cry the first tears of a new day. Instead, she stopped at a Tesco Metro to buy ingredients for the brownies, then stuck out her hand to hail a black cab rather than taking the tube. Her shoes were no less painful than they had been last night and if a black cab had its light on before eight on a Sunday morning, then God obviously wanted her to take it.
Hope stood outside 47 Dunhill Road for long, long moments after the taxi had driven away. If God had really been on her side, he’d have forgotten about gifting Hope with a cab for hire and arranged instead for a handy tornado to pick up the building and its inhabitants and deposit them in a field miles away. But it was still standing there in the middle of the terrace and Hope had no option but to drag herself up the garden path.