25 #2
‘Well, you have some daft beach towels . . . and some from an old place that are so worn through they’re super-soft and comfortable and dry really well and . . . I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a towel away.’
‘Fascinating,’ he says, pulling two from the bottom of the pile.
‘No!’ says Janey. ‘They’re going to get ruined! The pups will mess them all up.’
‘They’re towels .’
Janey would offer to go home and get some of her old ones – she has some right shockers, it is true, even though she did her best at the clearout.
She couldn’t get rid of the dinosaur towel Al wore all summer for a year when he was four, in lieu of actual clothes, his scaly tail swinging behind him wherever he went.
Plus it was useful for wrapping your hair in, as long as nobody was there to see, obviously, which generally nobody was apart from Essie, and she wouldn’t notice her mother if she walked down the stairs wearing a Joan Collins turban festooned with diamonds and grew an extra foot.
‘We need newspapers too,’ says Janey. ‘Cor, I haven’t bought a paper for ages.’
‘Not even the Sundays? I love the Sundays.’
Janey realises she used to love the Sunday papers too.
Then, recently, they started to get her down: so full of films she will never watch, music she will never hear, recipes she will never try .
. . With a start she sees it for what it truly was: a slump, a real slump, when everything seemed so gloomy, when she lost so much fun, so much joy in the normal things of everyday life. Everything must have faded to grey.
‘Oh, yeah,’ she says, quietly. ‘I kind of assumed people just buy them for puppy-training these days; that’s what’s keeping the industry going.’
‘I used to have a paper round,’ says Lowell.
‘On the gardener’s bike?’
‘Good point,’ says Lowell. ‘I seem to have gone downhill in the area of owning my own bike.’
He lets the puppies out, and they immediately start to squirm and sniff their way around.
One bumps into the bottom of the washing machine and cries, and Felicity comes in from the fire and graciously bends her neck down from a great height like a giraffe on the veldt, to sniff and make sure everything is okay.
Janey pulls out their doughnut feeding bowl and Lowell fills it with milk; they are all able to lap it now, pretty much.
‘This is great,’ says Lowell. ‘Look at them! Look at their wee noses!’
All the tiny tails stand rigidly up as they concentrate on lapping busily.
Janey reads off the printout Essie has made for her.
‘Next you have to start putting baby cereal in their bowls.’ She glances up over her glasses. ‘Uh-oh.’
‘What?’
‘That’s when they start to poo properly.’
‘I see,’ says Lowell, taking it manfully. ‘Better get those newspapers.’
Janey gives all the wee dogs, now completely milk-drunk and staggering around, a small kiss on their tiny noses. Felicity is very keen to go out of the laundry and leave them behind, so Lowell lets her. He frowns and vanishes outside for a second.
‘Jack brought back her bed,’ he says, pulling out a rather chic large grey suede dog bed and settling it down by the fire. ‘He says he wants nothing more to do with her.’
Janey laughs, as Felicity bounds towards the bed with glee. ‘Do you think his pastor has told him to cast her out of the community?’
‘I think,’ says Lowell, ‘we are meant to throw stones at her whenever we see her. Glass of wine?’
He says it so casually. He can’t have realised, Janey knows, what a seismic effect it would have. Why wouldn’t they have a glass of wine? Perfectly normal thing to do. Nothing to read into it. But she is having some kind of internal panic attack, and immediately escapes to the bathroom.
The bathroom is as bare as everywhere else.
She inspects her face. Oh, lord. This used to be .
. . oh, goodness. She looks bright red. The lighting is gentle in the main room, but she fumbles in her bag for make-up.
Mascara always helps. And a bit of blotted lipstick.
Not so much as to make it obvious or go into the irritating little puckered lines around her mouth .
. . and does she smell of dog? But if she adds perfume she will be that overbearing too-perfumed middle-aged lady of the kind who likes to asphyxiate small nephews and the like.
Christ. Plus it might mingle with the smell of dog and seem as if she liked putting dog-scented perfume on.
She realises her hands are shaking and tells herself to calm down. This is ridiculous. It’s just a drink, for God’s sake.
With this very attractive man. Alone in his house. His very attractive house.
She looks down at herself and sighs. So why the hell would he be interested in her? Stop thinking like that, she tells herself. And get out of the damn bathroom before he assumes the absolute worst.
Back in the big room, Lowell has poured two very large glasses of red wine, and Janey takes one gratefully, even though she knows it will make her look redder than ever. She sits down on the surprisingly comfortable corduroy sofa, and worries immediately about spills.
‘I’m amazed you allow red wine in here,’ she says, and he looks confused again. ‘You know, in case someone spills it?’
‘Are you likely to spill it?’ he says. ‘I can get you a towel as well.’
‘Well, normally I don’t,’ she says. ‘But now you’ve mentioned it, I’m worrying about it.’
‘You brought it up!’
Janey takes a large slug to bring the level down in the glass, then sets it carefully on a coaster on a side table.
Lowell blinked. ‘I don’t have people round very often,’ he confesses.
‘I’ve never seen you around the town,’ says Janey. ‘You’re not in choir or anything.’
He laughs. ‘You’ve obviously never heard me sing.’
‘Honestly, being able to sing is very low down the priorities for being in the choir. I’m not a hundred per cent sure you need a pulse.’
His eyes stray to the mantelpiece, and Janey notices for the first time that there is a picture on it.
‘Oh, there’s Verity!’ she says, jumping up and going over to examine the picture.
Verity is a very serious-looking child. She has her father’s dark eyes, but otherwise there isn’t a huge resemblance; she has a pointed chin whereas her father’s is round; russet hair and a petite build where her father is dark and sturdy.
‘She’s beautiful,’ says Janey.
‘She looks a lot like her mother,’ says Lowell, and his face is pained.
‘How is . . . ’
‘Oh, well,’ says Lowell, and takes another long swig of his wine.
It feels rather as if the evening is slightly hanging on a knife edge.
It strikes Janey that a different, less bruised person than her might say, Oh, we’re not going to talk about our families tonight.
We’re not going to talk about our pasts, or any of that , and stride across the lovely room and put his glass of wine aside (carefully), pull off his glasses and simply sit on his large, comfortable-looking lap.
There is, in fact, quite a lot of Janey who would have liked to do that.
To do exactly that, right now. So much. But she has never been confident in that way, not even when she was younger.
What if she terrifies him? What if he goes, Christ, what the fuck? What if? What if?
So instead she gives him a warm, encouraging, pretty much professional smile, and doesn’t say anything, which is the way she encourages people to open up to her in clinic about their hearing loss; the way she’s been good at her job for years and years and .
. . well. Lots of years. Being a good audiologist means being good at listening, in more ways than one.
She sits back down, still wearing the smile, and picks up her wine, physically holding it, as if it is a barrier to her marching across the room .
. . his look of shock and horror as she disports herself like a hussy .
. . no, she can’t bear to think of it. But she wants him so badly, it frightens her.
‘Oh, you don’t want to hear this,’ he says, interrupting her train of thought.
‘Of course I do,’ she says, looking around again to hide her pink face.
Felicity is snoozing gently in her lovely bed; the puppies have settled, it appears.
The fire is flickering, the room is warm, the wine is delicious, the lighting very flattering.
It would have been such a nice evening for a seduction, truly. Is it too late?
‘Well, if you’re sure. I was married, working in Aberdeen . . . ’
She wistfully lets it go. And listens, which she has always been so good at.
They had been in Aberdeen, but his wife had had an affair with a colleague, so they had moved to the country to have a second chance, which was when they’d enrolled in Janey’s clinic.
But Thalia had been increasingly unhappy – she was young, Lowell says.
He’d married a lovely young woman but she’d had to leave all her friends behind, and – he winces – her social life.
She was miserable. Started picking fights with him about everything.
‘It wasn’t your fault,’ says Janey gently.
‘It was ,’ he says forcefully. ‘It was entirely my fault. I married her, knowing there was an age gap, pretending it didn’t matter.
I figured it would be fine, she wanted children, and we’d settle down together – but it was like, after Verity arrived, she immediately became terrified.
About what she’d missed out on, what was going on without her.
I had made her old before her time. She said that. ’
‘She wasn’t a teenager, though,’ says Janey, frowning.
‘Oh, no, she was thirty-two when we met,’ says Lowell. ‘Christ, no. I was an idiot, but not a pervert. I hope.’
‘And you were . . .?’
‘Forty-four. It didn’t . . . I didn’t think that much of it. I mean, it was a bit of a gap, but I wasn’t old enough to be her dad or anything.’
Janey nods. ‘I get it.’