32 #2
‘For the last ten years, absolutely fucking furious,’ says Lowell. ‘But before that . . . she was nice. Fun. I was just the one in the middle; they didn’t have to worry about me so much. Not like only having one.’
‘Or two,’ says Janey, but she’s smiling.
The sun strikes through the trees on to a wide tree stump and she sits down on it, checking for bugs first. It’s an old coat; it’ll survive. Verity and Felicity have found a fairy circle and have sat down on the ground, child and dog intent on something crawling along a branch.
Lowell is standing, enjoying the sun on the back of his neck.
‘As I got older, and when Verity was little, we thought – I thought – this was just the most magical place in the world. I told her that fairies came here to show you bells if you couldn’t hear them and she believed me completely.’
Janey sees his hands unconsciously sign the words for fairy and bells; he doesn’t even know he’s doing it.
‘That’s beautiful,’ she says.
He looks at her. ‘I don’t think she cares now.’
‘I don’t know,’ says Janey. ‘She’s interested in something.’
‘Getting an iPad,’ says Lowell.
‘Essie wouldn’t be interested either. She might take a picture of it for her Instagram.’
Her shoulders slump.
‘Tell me more about Essie,’ says Lowell.
‘She just . . . she’s out of work and has no direction, and she just . . . she treats me like garbage and I don’t know what to do. I know she’s hurting, but I can’t get through to her and I don’t know what I did wrong . . . well, we got divorced. But I didn’t . . . ’
She swallows hard and says the next thing very quietly.
‘My ex had an affair. I tried to save it, but I couldn’t. Essie despised me for it, for not being able to hang on to her beloved dad.’
‘You were brave to leave,’ says Lowell gently.
‘I didn’t,’ says Janey, frankly. ‘He wasn’t a bad guy. He didn’t hit me or anything. He just...’ She doesn’t know why it’s coming out now. Choking out of her. ‘He just didn’t want me enough.’
There was a long silence, broken only by talkative birds.
‘What happened to us?’ says Lowell finally, in his soft growly voice. ‘What happened to the young people we were, so full of it?’
‘What?’
‘Joy. Hope. Springtime.’
Verity and Felicity are now jumping around at the other end of the glade, Verity holding up a stick Felicity can reach easily. The dog’s great silver tail swishes through the greenery.
‘I don’t know,’ says Janey.
Lowell is still staring at the flowers. ‘They bloom so beautifully, and for such a short time.’
‘Well, I know that feeling,’ says Janey, and for a moment he looks at her, and she feels herself being looked at, and tries to hold it, to not bustle or turn away, or panic, like when she accidentally has her phone camera facing forward.
He can’t possibly be thinking what she is thinking.
He is perfectly well-preserved – well, perhaps rather stout, but nonetheless he is tall, has a house and has all his own hair, which means he is worth everything on the market, could get any woman he likes, could even have more babies with a hot, yoga-loving thirty-year-old.
Whereas she, at the same age, feels like a joke.
A stupid, middle-aged, foolish joke, most likely to be found at home sending money to strangers on Facebook who pretend they’re doctors in the American army.
She smiles at him. He isn’t moving.
‘Well,’ she says finally, trying to sound insouciant, running her fingers through the flowers, ‘I know there’s no point in picking them.
I know they only last a day, and actually it feels cruel to pick something so lovely and so fragile, and I know in fact that, if I do, the fairies and the hares will come and curse me . . . ’
He smiles. ‘Uh-huh?’
‘But I’m going to pick some.’
She gets up, cursing her own yearning; finds a hidden patch behind a rotting tree that nobody would ever call a beauty spot.
‘And I’ll take them from here so it doesn’t spoil anything.’
He nods. ‘Although won’t you only be upsetting the really malevolent fairies?’
‘Malevolent is an excellent word. You don’t hear it much these days.’
‘Because nobody under forty can spell it.’
They both laugh, and she wanders over and bends down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘You are very beautiful wild, and it’s selfish to want to carry your scent with me, but that’s how humans and flowers co-exist. And I’m going to pick you and you’ll die but you were going to . . . ’
She stands up.
‘I can’t.’
Both Verity and Lowell look at her.
‘You can’t pick the bluebells?’
She shakes her head. ‘We don’t know, do we? What if they scream when we pick them?’
‘You eat lamb!’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘I have no moral consistency anywhere. I’m worse than Essie, and sometimes she pretends she’s a vegan.’
‘Do you kill spiders?’
‘No! Oh, my God, only monsters would do that.’
‘And you won’t even pick a bluebell.’
There is a long silence, and now there are only the birds chirping, noisily, in the woods far above their heads, the rustling of leaves with gentle breezes making their own sweet way, and just for a second, for the tiniest of seconds, Janey isn’t thinking anything at all.
Isn’t making a list in her head of what she needs to be doing that day, what needs to be done, laundry and shopping and dinner and her children and work and the car and that wobbly banister that keeps catching everyone out and the state of her neck and the nice coat she has been meaning to take to the dry-cleaners for eight months .
. . all of it evaporates, on a cloud of pale purply blue.
And she feels it once again, like a surge of sap that comes when she’s with Lowell: that tearing excitement – how can she have forgotten it after all this time, forgotten what she had spent so many of her teenage years dreaming of, fantasising about; so much of her twenties searching for and fumbling about with; what she had found, or thought she had, once or twice, then lost it, or been disillusioned, sometimes quickly, and finally very, very slowly, a deflating balloon of years and years and years until she had felt completely shrivelled.
The back of her neck prickles. Lowell looks at her for a long, steady second and this time she holds it, bathes in it, moves closer towards him.
‘ Ah !’
Verity appears, Felicity bounding beside her, great armfuls of bluebells in each hand. She ceremoniously presents them each with a huge bunch.
‘Thank you,’ signs Janey, rather clumsily. The spell is broken. ‘And I’ll bring you the things we talked about and show you how to use them. But honestly, I think you’ll be fine.’
Verity nods.
‘Oh, yeah,’ says Lowell. ‘Um, and is your girl going to help me with the pups?’
‘I think so,’ says Janey. ‘If she ever speaks to me again.’