TWENTY-SEVEN
Aubrey would have said this was not going to plan, but he’d never had a plan to begin with. Only a need to see Evie, the glimpse he’d had of her at Roscoe’s office pure torture. He’d been unable to resist torturing himself more.
He moved his hand down her arm, taking hold of her hand. She stood quite still except for a shaky breath, her eyes fixed on the ground, on a puddle of yesterday’s rain that was turning black and blue under the evening sky.
“I can’t,” she said. “I have to take Romona’s bike home.”
“Who?”
“The friend I’m staying with. I borrowed her bike…”
“Put it in the car.”
“It won’t fit.”
He let go of her hand and walked into the church hall. An old lady was there, rinsing out tea mugs. She directed him to a cupboard which smelt of wax and wet mops. When he walked back out of the hall and over to the bike, Evie looked dubiously at the battered toolbox in his hands.
“You’ll get oily,” she said as he started to remove the wheels from the bike.
And then: “It’ll get your car dirty,” as he hefted the frame and wheels into the boot.
“I don’t really care, Evie.”
He returned the toolbox, then opened the passenger door, looking at her. She walked slowly over. Got inside. Thank fuck, Aubrey’s heart said, soaring somewhere overhead, idiot thing, getting perilously close to the sun.
“I’m not dressed for dinner,” she said as he pulled out of the small car park onto the busy road.
“We can go anywhere.”
She gave a faint smile. “Vegan restaurant?”
“If you like.”
“I’m not…” she began, toying with the bike helmet on her lap. “I’m not preachy. I don’t care what my friends eat. I told you that at dinner. At Conyers. I told you to go ahead and eat, that I wouldn’t judge.”
“I know.”
“So why are you suddenly making such a big deal about it?”
He let out a breath, cursing Liv’s memory, even though she’d been speaking more than a kernel of truth.
“I suppose it’s the easiest example of the differences between us.”
“Of all the reasons you think we won’t work?”
He half nodded, shrugged, hating to be negotiating this—them—so coldly, rationally, when rationality had so little to do with it.
“I would have thought there were more serious potential issues,” Evie said.
He shot her a look. “Like what?”
“Well…” She smiled. “Like it all being a ruse purely so I can throw drinks over your clients.”
“Hah. I’d have to get some clients first.”
“What happened at BlacktonGold? Why did you quit?”
Aubrey paused. “Difference of opinion.”
“With my father?”
“Yes.”
“About Domnall?”
“Among other things.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, you’re not.”
“I am! I know how hard you worked. I can respect that, even if I don’t like the outcomes of it. I’m not half as small-minded as you keep making me out to be.”
Aubrey glanced over. She was probably right. She was probably right about a lot of things, like the reasons he’d walked away when confronted with the garden. Safer to nip this doomed romance in the bud. Safer than risking his heart again. Except, he’d concluded bitterly coming home from Roscoe’s office, it was a bit too late for that. Evie had been there… Evie had turned up out of the blue, just like every damned daydream, Evie walking back into his life. But this Evie was pale and wet and trembling. And talked to him like a stranger, like an acquaintance, just her brother’s friend. He’d watched her leave, stood in that silent white kitchen, Roscoe tactfully not saying a word as they heard the office door shut behind her. Evie running down the stairs and back into the rain, running away from him… And it was one of those old cartoons… Someone had thrown the weight over the cliffside and he was watching, helpless, as the rope whipped past him, rapidly uncoiling, the loop around his ankle about to drag him down, too.
Too late to worry about getting hurt.
“Romona’s away,” Evie said, having given up waiting for him to reply. She said it in a light, precise way, and though he watched the road, he could feel the careful look she gave him.
“Oh?” he prompted in that same light way, not wanting to jump to any conclusions.
But she said, “Aubrey,” as though starting a completely new subject. “I don’t want to go to dinner. I’ll feel like I’m being judged, like you’re watching my every reaction.”
“That’s not—”
“I know. But I won’t be able to relax. So how about… Look… There’s a supermarket around the corner from Romona’s place. We could each buy what we want, make our own dinners. Cook them together. Eat them together. That’s what you’re worried about, isn’t it? You want a serious all-in relationship and you don’t think we’ll work. This would be a better test than eating out, because that’s what it’d be like, isn’t it? Sitting in a flat together, nothing to do but look at each other across the table, nothing to talk about but the day we’d had, and the weather, and…and if we need to buy washing up liquid.”
Aubrey wrinkled his nose at this depiction of domestic bliss. “I want to take you to a nice restaurant.”
“Yes, I know the type you mean. The wine menu starts at three figures and they keep scraping the crumbs from your table between every course and the table linen’s so thick you could construct space suits from it.”
“Not somewhere quite that stuffy…”
“Supermarket,” Evie said firmly. “Romona’s flat. Awkwardness. Deafening silence.”
“I’m more worried about screaming. You stabbing me with a stick of celery.”
Evie laughed. “I’d use an asparagus spear.”
“I see you’ve put some thought into it.”
“Since the moment we met.”
“Well then,” he said dryly. “How can I refuse? Tell me the way to Romona’s flat.”
Romona’s flat was the attic floor of a small Victorian semi. Aubrey had a hell of a time putting the wheels back on the bike in the cramped ground floor hallway—it was raining heavily again outside. He cursed silently as the spanner slipped and banged his knuckle, Evie watching him, plastic carrier bags in her hands, dripping rainwater all over the dirty, cracked terracotta tiles.
“Chain it to the radiator,” Evie said when he was done.
He did so, took the bags from her, and followed her up the narrow, creaking stairs. She was right, at least, about all of this being extremely unromantic. But he walked into the flat after her and his heart was beating like a bird taking flight.
The flat looked like it belonged to a forty-something academic, which was, it turned out, exactly what Romona was.
“She’s a politics lecturer,” explained Evie as they unpacked shopping onto the scrubbed pine surfaces of the old Victorian sideboards that made up the narrow galley kitchen. It was built into the eaves, the roof sloping. The splashback tiles were glossy, Mediterranean blue. Arty ceramics and living herbs cluttered the shelves and window ledge. “I met her at university when she was a mature student.”
“You studied politics?”
“Yes.” She glanced at him. “Not going to make some quip about that?”
“No.” Instead, he’d found himself mildly surprised, although he didn’t know why. Just that the revelation set off a mix of jumbled thoughts all at once: Evie a student. How smart she undoubtedly was. That she had graduated, unlike him. That she had only graduated three years ago and was very young. That his choice of law speciality—tax—had been entirely due to Liv’s influence. That Evie was right: Liv had controlled his life for years. But she didn’t anymore.
He found himself smiling at Evie, suddenly happy in that bizarre way that often happened around her, like it had when walking back to Conyers from the viewpoint, his entire mood lifting as though the world had just pivoted towards the sun.
She was arranging her ingredients neatly by a wooden chopping board. Baby corn and mangetout and mixed mushrooms. Miso paste and garlic and soy sauce. Her dark bobbed hair was brushing her jaw, her pale green jumper a little creased, clinging to her slim form. Yes, he was suddenly sure he could sit and look at her across a table forever.
“What are you making?” he asked.
“This noodley soupy sort of thing. I always make it when it’s cold and grey outside.”
“Can I have it, too?”
She looked at him, eyebrow quirked. “Not your chicken thing?”
“Yours sounds nice. Though I suppose I shouldn’t waste this chicken.”
“Leave it in the fridge for Romona.”
“She’s not…?”
“Vegan? Vegetarian? Not even remotely.”
“Well, in that case…” said Aubrey, putting the meat in the fridge, “I might steal some of her milk and make a coffee.”
“Make yourself at home. And make one for me. There’s—”
“Oat milk. Yes, I’ve got it.”
She started peeling the garlic, watching him with a small smile as he filled the kettle. “Is this all a ruse so that I have to do all the cooking, while you just sit at the table with your newspaper and your pipe?”
“Yes, woman. Exactly.” He got out another chopping board as the kettle boiled and started to chop some ginger root. “Stop yapping and make my dinner.”
“That’s how it’d be, wouldn’t it?” Evie said, laughing to herself. “You coming home all grumpy from the office, and expecting me in the kitchen, in my apron, cooking your steak and potatoes.”
“Fetching my slippers. Lining the children up for inspection.”
“Wiping their faces so they look all clean and cherubic, though they’ve spent the day being absolute devils.”
“Driving mummy to the gin.”
“Yes, mummy’s drunk,” Evie agreed, laughing. “The steak’s all dried and burnt and Aubrey Junior is wearing your best tie as a bandanna and using your umbrella as a sword.”
“And the girls are crying. Baby Evelyn’s just thrown up on the kitten.”
“She’d be devastated,” Evie said, laughing even harder. “Poor little kitten.”
Aubrey grinned, ginger forgotten, watching the mirth in Evie’s eyes. She went to wipe away a tear of laughter, then stopped. “Garlic on my hands!”
“And I’ve got ginger on mine.” So he got a corner of his sleeve and dried the corner of her eye, the fingers of his other hand cupping her cheek for the barest moment, slipping into her hair, the fire of the spice in the cool damp stands.
She looked up at him, eyes crystal clear and serious now. “That’s what you want, isn’t it? The children? And the wife?”
He let go, stepped back, returned to the task on his chopping board.
“Is it something we should talk about?” Evie asked.
“On our first date? If that’s even what this is.”
She touched his arm, but only for a moment, as though unsure where the contact would lead.
“I want children,” she said quietly. “One day. In a few years. Before I’m thirty, is what I always thought, though I admit I haven’t thought about it much. But I do know I want them. I always have.”
When she was thirty, he would be forty. It wasn’t impossible… It might work… It was ridiculous to think about it at all.
“Evie… Let’s not…”
“But we may as well be clear from the start,” she interrupted. “Because you’re so blunt about everything, Aubrey, except anything that actually matters.”
She ignored his look of rebuke and continued, undeterred. “You are. You act as though you care about nothing and that I’m the only emotional, sentimental one. But I think the truth is that you have deeper feelings than almost anyone I’ve ever met.”
He cut a very small, very precise rectangle of ginger.
“And you’d rather not talk about them,” she said into the silence he left. “I know. I won’t make you. But I do see it. Just so you know.”