Chapter 4
Jude had been back in the UK for about seventy-two hours, and he was still struggling to tell what day of the week it was. First thing this morning his iPhone had informed him it was Friday, so he was definitely in the correct place: a mid-sized conference venue near Sheffield.
Thanks to his screwed-up circadian rhythms, he’d arrived at the Mercury Centre unnecessarily early. It wasn’t even eight thirty, and while there were already people bustling in and out of all three conference rooms, there was no sign of Clive.
Jude’s stomach growled, reminding him that his body remained functional, even if his brain hadn’t yet recovered from the hellish, two-day journey that had taken in nine time zones and required numerous airline sick bags, plus a prescription for diazepam.
Aware that lunch wouldn’t be served until after the conference talks concluded some hours from now, he decided to go in search of food.
Even putting the nightmare trip from Sydney aside, it was little wonder Jude needed sustenance – nor that he felt drained.
Being back under the same roof as Lillian had set his nerves on edge in a way he hadn’t anticipated.
Had being around her always involved walking on that many eggshells?
He’d forgotten what it was like to have to self-censor so vigilantly; to have to consider in advance everything he did, and every word that came out of his mouth.
Since his return, his mother had done nothing to indicate she was anything other than pleased to see him.
She was thrilled with his success at work, and with the freedom and lifestyle this afforded him.
More than happy for him to continue living on the other side of the world, so long as this promised prosperity.
However, the low hum of agitation inside Jude spoke of her brittleness – of the risk that some wrong move could shatter the peace.
It was an old fear. Muscle memory. Jude’s childhood instinct to do as he’d always done – keep her steady – was irrepressible, but for the first time he recognised that it was costing him something.
He was sure he hadn’t fully exhaled since he’d set foot in Beckford on Tuesday.
The risk that he could bump into Hannah at any moment only intensified his anxiety.
He had no idea where she lived now, but it wasn’t out of the question that she’d pop into the village to visit her mum or Claire, who he knew lived nearby with her husband and two sons.
He remembered how, during a brief phone call home in his early days in Sydney, Lillian had sneered her disapproval at Claire’s surprise pregnancy, discovered during her final year of A levels.
Always fond of her, Jude was pleased to glean from mutual friends that she hadn’t been fazed by local gossip.
In fact, Claire had achieved good exam grades, had her first son and then married his father.
She’d given birth to a second baby two years later and, from what he could gather, was now training part-time as a primary school teacher.
Jude suddenly felt exhausted, in a way that even extreme jet lag couldn’t explain.
He leaned against the side of the vending machine he’d just located and let himself close his eyes for a moment.
It shouldn’t have bothered him that he knew far less about how Hannah lived these days than he did her siblings.
It had been his choice to sever all contact between them.
She’d always attracted admirers without trying, and in the latter years of their friendship he’d loathed the group nights out that inevitably saw a parade of men swarming around her like greedy wasps at a picnic.
When their relationship fell apart, one of the few things Jude felt sure of was that she’d have no trouble replacing him – and that it would kill him to know she was with someone else.
He couldn’t face a future where his mobile phone became an unexploded grenade; a weapon that might go off in his pocket at any moment with a call, text or social media post that declared how happy she was with some new boyfriend.
Now, he tapped the phone against the vending machine’s card reader, punching in the codes for a can of Coca-Cola and a chocolate-covered cereal bar. He was going to need all the help he could get to stay awake and on form today.
As he sipped the fizzing soda, wincing at its sweetness, the enormity of what he’d done when he cut Hannah off loomed before him in a way it hadn’t when he was on a different continent.
Here, her absence from his life wasn’t a hole he could gingerly tiptoe around; it was a chasm, like the crater left behind by a meteor strike.
Everything reminded him of her – of what they’d once been to each other.
For Hannah, new layers of meaning had probably smothered old, shared memories.
She’d think of her nephews, buying comics and sweets when she popped to the QuickMart, not of the time she and Jude had bribed Joe into buying them illicit cider, then drunk it in Hannah’s back garden.
A visit to Sheffield would mean shopping, clubbing or a theatre trip, whereas to Jude, it was forever fixed as the place he’d finally been honest with her.
Where he’d told her he loved her above anything else in the world, and convinced himself she felt the same – even if she couldn’t bring herself to say it in so many words.
With a deep breath, Jude instructed himself to focus on the task immediately at hand. He needed to pull himself together, find Clive and give a presentation that was worthy of what he and the team who’d been behind him for the past four years had built together.
Then, regardless of his brother’s bizarre entreaties for him to stay here for weeks on end, he needed to get back to Australia as soon as humanly possible.
When Jude returned to the conference room, Clive was deep in conversation with a woman in chef’s whites. Not wanting to interrupt, he hung back until they’d finished chatting and the caterer had made her way back to the venue’s kitchen.
As she passed by him, Jude noted that she was very pretty; she had the sort of face you saw in old Hollywood movies.
But he registered her beauty in the same way he would have a man’s, or that of an especially elegant painting or piece of furniture.
The observation didn’t move him; didn’t spark anything he recognised as desire.
He was . . . somewhat deficient in that department these days – like a car that had been left in a driveway for too long and no longer wanted to start.
Briefly, he wondered what sort of metaphorical jump leads would be required for his engine to shudder back into life, only for his brain to supply the answer to that question with alarming speed. He forcibly pushed the thought aside as Clive waved at him.
‘What a sight for sore eyes,’ he said, his Yorkshire-accented voice warm and sincere. He held out his hand for Jude to shake, then thought better of the gesture and pulled him into the tightest hug Jude had experienced since Joe visited Sydney eighteen months ago.
‘It’s so good of you to come all this way,’ Clive went on, ‘so fantastic to see you.’
Thoroughly disarmed and unexpectedly emotional, Jude cleared his throat and said, ‘I’m happy to be here. It’s great to see you, too.’
‘Look at you,’ Clive said. ‘You’re even taller than I remember. Is there something in the water Down Under?’
‘Unlikely,’ Jude answered, warming under the older man’s friendly gaze. ‘You’re probably just not used to seeing me standing up. In supervisions I was usually sat in a corner, hunched over a page of equations I couldn’t fathom and trying not to cry. Remember?’
Clive laughed, a boom that ricocheted around the conference room – which was now dressed and ready for the delegates who’d soon begin arriving.
He was a round-faced, round-bodied, gregarious man in his late fifties.
Jude had always imagined that with the addition of a white, stick-on beard and red costume, he’d be the perfect am-dram Father Christmas.
‘Nonsense,’ Clive said. ‘Brains like yours don’t come along often! I was blessed to teach you whatever I could. It was my pleasure.’
Clive was one of the only people Jude had ever met who thought his intelligence a delightful curiosity, rather than a responsibility to live up to.
Supported by a stream of schoolteachers, Lillian had always told him that squandering his brainpower would be shameful – that every opportunity it offered should be exploited.
Clive had taken a different tack: in his mind, Jude’s brilliance should be enjoyed, stretched for its own sake – not considered some shortcut to success that it would be sinful to scorn.
They’d met by chance at a dinner while Jude was still at Cambridge, and – though he hadn’t intended to leave and undertake his PhD elsewhere – something in the man’s easy manner had struck a chord that kept reverberating as Jude made postgraduate plans.