We All Live Here

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-seven

Bill lasted twelve days before he moved back to the bungalow. He announced his plans gently on Sunday morning, while Violet sat on the sofa in her pajamas playing a video game that seemed to emit either bleeps or explosions every five seconds. He explained that, while he loved being with Lila and the children, right now his need for his own quieter space was paramount. “Penelope is going to stay with me for a while,” he said, when Lila had opened her mouth to protest. She had experienced a strange swell of mixed emotions: grief, at not being able to give him what he needed, but also relief, because she couldn’t give him what he needed, not without locking her girls in the shed.

“Penelope is going to keep an eye on me. And it’s probably time I worked out what to do with that bungalow. It can’t stay empty forever.”

He had it all planned out. Jensen’s Polish friends were going to come in two days’ time and move Bill’s things, so that all he needed to do was oversee the process. Penelope had already been in and thoroughly cleaned and warmed the house. He would visit them still, he assured her. Perhaps even cook dinner occasionally. Everything was going to be fine.

Except Lila didn’t feel everything was fine. She felt as if she was being abandoned all over again.

“I’m so sorry,” she had said, holding his hand. “I’m so sorry it turned out like this.” She suspected she might be holding it a little too tightly, but she couldn’t help herself.

“Not your fault, darling girl.” He had placed his other hand over hers. And then he straightened. “Anyway, I’m getting back to my usual self. Doing my exercises. The doctors are most satisfied with how things are going. And, of course, Penelope is a blessing. She’ll keep an eye on me.”

And now here they are on Monday morning, and Lila is watching the three heavyset Polish men wrestle once again with the piano on a pair of dollies. (Penelope has removed Bill to the kitchen for this one, sensing correctly that watching his beloved instrument swaying precariously on the tiny wheeled trolleys will not be good for his blood pressure.) His wardrobe has already been carried downstairs, with boxes full of his clothes and books, and loaded into the battered white van. It is only now, as she watches his belongings leaving her house, that she sees how much had ended up here.

Lila helps him into Penelope’s car when the van’s tail lift rises with a whine for the last time, and after a final round of sweet tea, the Polish men are ready to go.

“I’ll come and see you later,” Lila tells Bill, hugging him. “Let me know if you need anything. Anything at all.”

“I’m fine, darling,” he says, and gives her a reassuring smile.

“It’s all under control,” says Penelope, brightly. It has become her constant mantra, this last few weeks, no matter what is going on around them. It’s all under control! she says through gritted teeth, or from a slightly manic smile. It’s all under control!

“You’re still coming to Violet’s school play next Friday, though, yes?” Violet had brought home six tickets. Apparently divorced parents got special dispensation, and hospitalized grandparents further special privileges from Mrs. Tugendhat. Lila hopes this means she is forgiven for the costume debacle.

“Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” he says, with the relaxed expression of someone who is no longer going to have to wear earphones to drown out the sound of Public Enemy or America’s Next Top Model , atop the frantic barking of a neurotic dog. “Oh, and, darling, they couldn’t fit the garden bench into the van, so someone will come for it later. I hope that’s okay.”

Lila watches Penelope pull her red Ford Fiesta out carefully into the quiet road, indicating and driving at a steady 15 mph all the way up to the junction with the main road, even though it is a 30 mph limit and no other traffic is visible. Bill will be safe with her , she thinks, and that’s something.

It is only when Lila steps back inside her house that it really hits her. Where the piano had sat in the hallway there is now just a dusty patch on the rug. The bookshelves have thinned, and the semi-reclining easy chair he had brought from home is now an empty gap in the middle of the living-room floor. Truant walks around slowly, sniffing suspiciously at the floor space where these items have disappeared. In the kitchen, recipe books are missing from the side, along with some of Bill’s kitchen equipment, his Roberts radio, the blue willow fruit bowl he tried to keep full in case it encouraged the girls to eat better. She moves a pile of paperwork and a couple of bottles of detergent into the gaps, just to make it look less empty.

That is not going to be possible in Bill’s bedroom. There is now just a bare bed. All the accoutrements of Bill’s life—his rug, slippers, bedspread, wooden towel rail, his piles of reference books, 1970s Teasmade, and old magazines all gone, along with the rest of the furniture. Lila stands in the doorway and folds her arms firmly around her middle, gazing at the many layers of absence in the room. This is life at this age, she muses, a million goodbyes, and you never know which are the final ones. You just absorb them, like little shocks, trusting with each one that you’ll be able to keep moving forward.

The only thing Bill has left behind is the portrait of her mother, resting against the fireplace that has never been lit. Lila turns it slowly, gazing at her mother’s face within the ornate frame, and tries not to think about the hole that has lodged inside her where Francesca’s memory used to live. She asks the question she has asked a thousand times since the discovery of the letter: Why did you let yourself be seduced by him, Mum? Did you not even care how much that would destroy? She gazes at Francesca’s smile, at the serene expression that will never give her an answer. And then she turns it back, closes the bedroom door behind her, and heads downstairs.

Celie is picking Violet up from school on her way home, and Lila has supper to prepare.

···

Jensen appears as she is clearing up. Supper had been subdued: the girls are clearly affected by the shift in atmosphere that comes with the knowledge that it is now just the three of them again. They had stopped asking about Gene some time ago. Lila wonders if they had absorbed, as she has, the notion that Gene is someone who is only ever likely to be seen in fleeting visions, a grandparent who is as unlikely to stick around as Bill has been steadfast. They had picked at their spaghetti, and in truth she had little appetite either, and had let them go as soon as they asked. Violet had retreated into the living room with Truant, and Celie had disappeared upstairs.

Lila has just loaded the plates into the dishwasher when she jumps at the sound of knocking. Jensen’s face appears at the French windows, his ears tinged with red in the cold.

“I’ve come for Bill’s bench.”

She puts down the plates, her heart thumping, and goes to let him in. He steps over the threshold, bringing with him a bracing gust of cold air.

“Oh. Of course. I—I didn’t realize it was going to be you.” She is discombobulated by Jensen’s sudden appearance in her kitchen, aware that she is not wearing makeup, that she is in the jeans with the mud spatters on them.

“They’re still moving stuff around over there. I said it would be easiest for me to just put it in the pickup.”

Lila peels off her rubber gloves, trying not to look at him. “I’ll give you a hand,” she says.

The bench, it turns out, weighs a lot less than she had thought. It takes a matter of minutes for the two of them to lift it into the back of the pickup truck. He closes the back and the sound is horribly final. Lila folds her arms across her chest as he secures it with webbing straps. They stand for a moment on the street, not looking at each other. This might be the last time she sees him, she thinks, now that Bill has gone. And something in her cannot bear the thought that she will never be able to explain herself properly.

“I don’t suppose you’d like a cup of tea?” she blurts out. “I—I was just about to put the kettle on.”

He looks off to the left, his hands thrust deep in his pockets. And then his shoulders lower a fraction. “Sure,” he says. “Why not?”

They walk into the house through the back, and Lila is confronted for the first time by the sight of the memorial garden without the bench in it. Somehow more seems to have disappeared from it than just a bench. It looks now like a hollow corner, an empty space, no longer the focal point of anything.

“I think I should probably get another bench,” she says, her voice a little shaky.

“Yeah,” says Jensen, pausing to study the space. “It definitely needs something.”

She makes the tea in silence and they sit down at the kitchen table. Lila positions herself with her back to the garden, wanting suddenly not to look at any of it, as if the missing garden furniture now somehow symbolizes something so much greater. Jensen keeps his jacket on, as if he is primed to leave as quickly as possible. Perhaps he is just being polite by agreeing to the tea. She feels self-conscious now in his presence. She tries to work out how to open the conversation, but finds that she is already anticipating his every response, and it keeps stopping the words as they form in her mouth.

He asks a few questions about Bill, which eases things. She tells him the story of what had happened, of Penelope, and the girls, and her mixed feelings at him moving out. He tells her he’ll be popping into the bungalow every day. That he often did even before the heart attack so Bill will see nothing unusual in it, and she is grateful for his diplomacy.

“So where’s Gene?”

“Gone.” She explains briefly about the letter in the attic. She wants to say more, about how she feels like she’s lost her mother along with her father, how angry she feels with both of them, but it sounds stupid and childish and she, of all people, has probably forfeited the right to talk about how she feels in front of Jensen.

The tea is drained from their mugs. They sit in silence, watching Truant pace backward and forward. He does not like change either.

“I got your letter,” he says.

She waits for a moment before she says: “It’s all canceled. All of it. I’m not writing a book any more.”

He gazes at his empty mug.

“It was a stupid idea. I’ve actually wanted to tell you that, and to say I’m sorry in person too. So many times. I would have called…but after your girlfriend—”

He looks up sharply.

“I mean, she was right, obviously. I’m not trying to defend myself. But it was clear what she thought—the conversations you must have had about it…I guess. I didn’t want to do or say anything that might cause you further…” Her words keep congealing in her mouth.

“What girlfriend?”

Lila blinks. “The one in the supermarket?” When he still looks blank she says, “Red hair?”

He pulls a face. “You mean my sister.”

Lila stares at him.

“My sister. Nathalie. I told you about her. She—I was a bit knocked sideways by what happened. And she just, well, hung out with me for a couple of days. Just to make sure I was okay. I think they get worried after…you know…”

Lila wants to apologize again, to acknowledge her part in his hurt, but all she can think is That’s not your girlfriend. “Oh,” she says, and then, “Oh.”

When she looks up he is gazing at her. “You thought I had a girlfriend.”

“Well, I didn’t think you’d hang around for long.” She raises a smile. “You’re clearly a catch.”

“A catch.” He raises his eyebrows. There is a sudden hint of a smile, and it’s the loveliest thing she’s seen for weeks, and suddenly she’s talking, the words spilling out of her.

“Jensen, I’m so, so sorry. I just…I fucked everything up. I was still so messed up about Dan and Marja and a million other things and I was panicking about money and I just—I just didn’t think things through properly. I know it was a hideous, hideous thing to even think of doing. I just—I’m not that person. I can see everything that was wrong with it now—I can see it all so clearly. I just hate that you think I’m this person, and all I can tell you is I’m doing everything possible to show you I’m not. I was for a moment, obviously, but that’s not me. Not the real me. Maybe I don’t even know who the real me is right now. But I’m trying to make sure it’s someone better.”

She stutters to a halt. “Oh, God, did that make any sense?”

“Am I allowed to therapize it?”

“No.”

“Okay. Then it makes perfect sense.”

“Can you forgive me? Even a bit?”

“I can forgive most of it.” He rubs at a mark on the table. “Maybe not the reference to my ‘homely body.’?”

“You were the one who said you had a dadbod.”

“Yeah, but the dadbod has an intimation of something sexy about it. A homely body is…” He pulls a face. “…sexless.”

“Nope. You’re wrong.”

“I’m wrong.”

“The—uh—evidence of that night would tell you that wasn’t true. And, anyway, I told you I was disguising the truth. If I was going to write about you honestly as yourself, obviously I would have said I’d spent the night with a David Gandy lookalike.”

He tilts his head. “Nice recovery.”

“Anyway. I personally like a dadbod. It’s…far sexier than a six-pack.”

“Okay, now you’ve ruined it.”

“I’m serious. I can’t think of anything worse than some man prancing around displaying his abs. It would make me feel hopelessly inadequate.”

“I don’t know why. You have a fabulous body.”

They both blush.

She gazes at his hands as they sit in silence, trying not to think about how those hands had felt on her, the capability of them, their reassuring strength. He looks as if he’s about to speak, then changes his mind. Both of them fall back into silence.

“Well. Thanks for letting me apologize in person,” she says, eventually. She thinks there is no point not being honest. What does she have to lose after all? “I—I just miss you being around. A lot.”

When he doesn’t speak she says, “I’m not trying to pressure you or anything. But I just needed you to know that. In case I never see you again.”

“That’s a bit dramatic.”

“Well, you could be moving to South America for all I know.”

“To get over my heartbreak?”

“Okay. Now you’re being annoying.”

He grins. He gazes into his mug. And then he looks up. “Do you want to go out Friday?”

It takes her a moment to make sure she heard him correctly. “Yes,” she says. And then, with a big smile, “Yes.” And then her smile disappears. “Oh, no. I can’t. That’s Violet’s school play. Can we do Saturday?”

“I have to go back to Winchester. I’ve got another ten days’ work down there.”

“Thursday?”

“I’ve promised to see my parents.”

She cannot let him go. She cannot. She thinks. “Then…would you…like to come to a particularly chaotic primary-school production of Peter Pan ? Maybe we can grab a bite afterward? Bill can be your chaperone if you’re worried I’m going to jump your bones.”

“Can you make sure he sits between us at all times?”

“Penelope too. I’ll have a whole human wall to prevent unnecessary touching.”

“Then that sounds magical,” he says.

He does not kiss her when he leaves, even though every bit of her wants him to. She understands that too much has passed between them for all but the most careful of steps forward. But he touches her hand fleetingly, and tells her he’s glad they’ve spoken.

She stands on the front doorstep, her arms wrapped round her against the cold, trying not to beam as he climbs into his truck. He lifts his hand from the driver’s seat, a salute, and she raises hers back. She waits for him to start the ignition. And then, abruptly, he climbs out and half walks, half jogs up the path and sweeps her into a big bear hug. And he says into her ear, quietly so that his voice is barely a murmur, “I really bloody missed you too.”