Chapter 42
42
JESSE
Now
‘First day of Year 4 – you’re such a big girl!’
Jesse and Ida held hands as they walked in the September sunshine to school. New backpack and pencil case primed. ‘What do you think Mrs Peacock will be like?’ Jesse asked effusively.
‘She was very nice when we visited her classroom on transition day. She’s held a koala.’
‘Oh great! Has she been to Australia?’
‘She’s from Australia!’ Ida said, as if it were the biggest hoot.
‘Oh wow, that’s so cool.’
‘She’s from the place where the quokkas are… near the island.’
‘Well,’ Jesse said theatrically. ‘You two are going to get on like a house on fire!’
‘A house on fire! That’s silly!’ Ida said as she looked up at her dad and laughed.
There was a spring in both their steps as they walked up Pancras Road towards Ida’s school. When they arrived at the gates at the bottom of Camden, Hannah was waiting outside, not making eye contact with Jesse, but smiling adoringly at her daughter. Both parents were grateful for the distraction. Ida was their focus, Ida was their everything, Ida would get them through this.
‘Good morning, Ida!’ Hannah said, as she unfolded her arms from across her body and opened them wide. Ida ran into her mother’s embrace as Hannah kissed her cheek, squeezed her tight, then ran a hand along her messy plait, trying not to inspect it. Hannah bit her tongue. Jesse had been plaiting Ida’s hair most of Ida’s life, and still it looked messy. Messier than when she did it anyway. Her unruly, golden-brown waves were not easy to plait, she could give Jesse that.
‘Morning.’ Hannah smiled to Jesse, briskly, optimistically, keeping things civil.
‘Morning,’ Jesse replied.
‘Are we all ready for Year 4?’ Hannah asked the collective.
‘I think Year 4 is going to be your best year yet!’ Jesse declared, although he felt a punch in the stomach as he said it, as he let the darkness in at this most inappropriate moment and thought about all that Ida had shouldered in Year 3. Loss. Grief. Separation. ‘Mrs Peacock is Australian!’ Jesse enthused.
‘You didn’t say Mrs Peacock was Australian!’ Hannah shot back, flummoxed.
‘She only just told me,’ he said, pointing his thumb casually at their daughter, smile forced, jaw tense.
Let’s not do this now.
Hannah took a deep breath.
‘Shall we?’ she said as she took Ida’s hand and led them through the gate into the playground.
Ida took Jesse’s hand with her free one and insisted Mummy and Daddy swing her across the playground as they went. To other parents they looked like the perfect family. Same golden shades of hair, same skin, bronzed from summer, Ida swinging with glee, although a few closer friends knew that it was tricky to arrange playdates with Ida; which parent was she with that weekend? What had happened in their family for their lives to be so different to last year on the first day of school? Luckily, everyone focused on their own kids and they got to the classroom door, where Ida stopped swinging and Jesse moved her backpack from his shoulder onto hers. Hannah resisted the urge to redo Ida’s plait but she fussed and smoothed her hair down all the same.
Ida kissed Daddy first, then Mummy, then she went skipping off to her friend Evie, who was already waiting with Mrs Peacock by the door.
‘Bye sweetpea, love you!’ Jesse said, saluting her.
‘Bye!’ Hannah called. ‘Henrike will get you from Cookie Club!’
The parents smiled as Ida looked back over her shoulder with wide, tentative eyes.
‘You’ll be great,’ Jesse mouthed. Ida disappeared through the door, to a little pat on the head from the teacher, and Jesse handed Ida’s overnight bag to Hannah from his other shoulder.
Hannah’s smile dropped. Jesse waited for the barb.
It’s the hair, isn’t it?
Their handovers and exchanges over the summer were terse and transactional. Hannah felt spurned by Jesse and his failure to show up for dinner when she was trying to make it work, even though deep down, she hadn’t really wanted to. Marriage had bored her to tears for much of it.
In late July, Jesse had taken Ida back to France for a fortnight, where Ida splashed with grandma in the pool, ran through the sunflower and lavender fields (not that field, Jesse couldn’t face it) and Jesse broke Caryn’s heart with the words: no news .
‘Why don’t you just message her on social media, darling?’ Caryn asked during Jesse’s birthday lunch, as Ida went to play with a cat under a nearby table. ‘That’s what people do nowadays, isn’t it?’
Jesse shook his head as if to say, No, Mum, I blew it.
In mid-August Jesse had returned to work and Hannah took Ida to an all-inclusive in Ibiza for a week, where she read around the pool while Ida made friends at the kids’ club and they watched movies in the evening. Hannah had longed for company and attention and almost hooked up with a hot Spanish kids’ club leader, before reminding herself that logistically it would be difficult: she couldn’t exactly bring him back to her room and she suspected he still lived with his parents.
At each handover during the summer holidays, Jesse and Hannah had been cordial enough for Ida’s sake but just cold enough to not become invested , to let the other know that they were still pissed off and hurting.
‘Got time for a coffee?’ Hannah said, as a child ran through the gate and got in by the skin of his teeth. Her smile was hopeful and conciliatory. Jesse didn’t expect that.
He looked at his watch. He and Max were meeting a client on Lamb’s Conduit Street at 11a.m.
‘Yeah sure. A quick one.’
Jesse and Hannah walked to a Turkish coffee shop around the corner from Ida’s school and each ordered an Americano. Jesse fiddled with the baklava the waiter had put down with the coffees, rearranging neat squares into a neater line.
He waited for a hand grenade. Hannah was so good at releasing the pin and just throwing them.
‘I’ve been thinking,’ she said, as she tapped her palm with her teaspoon. She had her business meeting face on. Jesse waited for the blow.
‘How about one week on, one week off?’
Jesse hadn’t expected that either.
‘It’s simpler, it’s doable, Henrike is willing to work like that – she found a job as a teaching assistant to support her income – not Ida’s school, a special school near Archway, she doesn’t mind only nannying every other week.’
That’s good of her.
Jesse sipped his coffee to shield his face for a second. Let it sink in. This wasn’t the way he wanted to do it, but it was a solution. He would get to live with his daughter half the time and take her to school and plait her hair and embrace her meltdowns and do all the things that he felt like he was put on the planet to do – to raise her well – and it could work like that. And a week on and a week off seemed less disruptive than hauling her things around North London every couple of days.
Just because Hannah used Henrike didn’t mean Jesse had to. Just because Hannah used Henrike didn’t mean he didn’t have to; Ida clearly liked her. Especially since Henrike had brought Ida a cuddly ibex back from Germany after the summer break.
Jesse considered it. It could work.
‘What about holidays? What if half term lands on your week or mine, when it’s not meant to?’
‘Maybe we split half terms, make exceptions those weeks. And alternate Christmas and New Year week. But I really think it could work, Jesse, with some canny diarising.’
Hannah was very good at canny diarising.
Jesse nodded. This was easier than a fight. No need for mediation or lawyers. Hannah could reason. He picked up a square of baklava and threw it in his mouth.
‘Yeah, I think that would work.’ He tried not to look grateful, but the immense relief he felt made him want to hug Hannah’s brittle shoulders. He didn’t. She had started all of this. He let out a big sigh.
‘How are you?’ she asked.
Floored twice in one conversation. This wasn’t Hannah’s style.
‘Sorry?’
‘How are you doing? How’s your mum?’
Even when Jesse had returned Ida from France in August, Hannah hadn’t asked after Caryn, widowed, heartbroken and mostly on her own in the South of France.
‘Yeah, Mum’s OK. Well, she’s not, but she’s busy. She’s writing again. She’s coming to London next month.’
Hannah gave a sheepish look, as if to say best I avoid her. Perhaps she did feel some guilt after all, some accountability. Jesse wanted to concur, to tell Hannah that she was the last person his mum wanted to see, but he felt optimism in the new cordial tone, and he didn’t want to blow it.
‘I’ll give her your best.’
Hannah smiled and looked at her watch.
‘I’d better get going, client meeting.’
‘Me too,’ Jesse said. ‘So what do we do, get something drawn up? Written down? When do we start?’
Hannah looked at the diary in her phone.
‘And what should the changeover day be?’ Jesse asked.
‘From next week? And shall we do Sunday handovers?’
Jesse shook his head. Sunday evenings always felt too bleak; he hated the countdown to them. The feeling of being on borrowed time. ‘What about Friday to Friday? So weekends are filled with optimism and not dread?’
Hannah pondered it. That wasn’t what she’d had in mind.
‘I can’t do bleak Sunday afternoons any more, waiting to hand her back to you. If we did Fridays after school, we’d have the optimism of the weekend together, or the distraction of a weekend with friends if we’re handing back. School pick-up on the Friday can be the changeover.’
Hannah looked like such things had never occurred to her.
‘OK, I suppose that could work. Except I have a mad crazy busy week this week, so do you want to pick her up after school today and keep her until Friday?’
Hannah finished the dregs of her coffee and handed back the little backpack Jesse had given her at the school gates.
This felt like a massive bonus. Jesse had just spent the first weekend in September – the last of the summer holidays – with Ida in her freshly painted bedroom, and now he could pick her up after school today and have her for a few more days. He mentally rearranged his meetings and his diary.
‘Great, actually that works for me. I’m scheduled to go to LA on Saturday.’
‘Oh.’ Hannah looked a little put out, and Jesse remembered he hadn’t actually answered her question. How are you?