Chapter 4
Sunday 1 October
Dan and Lorna were in the car heading over to Grove Park, where Jeremy’s Pitch & Putt was located. As usual, they were arguing. Dan had hoped they might stop with the perpetual feuding now they had agreed to break up, but if anything it had got worse. They used to squabble about what to watch on Netflix and whose turn it was to do the hoovering. Those seemed like tame affairs compared to recent bust-ups over how to split the outstanding household bills once Dan had moved out of the flat, and which items of furniture belonged to whom, and why Dan wasn’t more upset about the separation. At least there had been no disagreement over who owned the books. Lorna had never been much of a reader and was only too happy to be rid of Dan’s vast collection of paperback novels.
The latest spat concerned how best to break the news of their separation to Jeremy. Dan favoured the slow and subtle approach, whereas Lorna believed in ripping the plaster off the skin in one go, which Dan found ironic as she could be a real wuss when it came to pain.
“If it was down to you, you wouldn’t tell him at all,” said Lorna.
“Not true,” said Dan, although he had privately given serious consideration to that option.
“I’m just going to come right out and tell him,” she threatened.
“No you won’t.”
“And how are you going to stop me?”
“If you do, I’m taking the kitchen table.”
“The kitchen table is mine.”
“I paid for half of it.”
Dan hated the pettiness into which he had descended these past few days, bickering over ridiculous things like kitchen tables. It was such a long way from the noble, magnanimous person he aspired to be. As always, Bill Clinton was his guide. He couldn’t recall exactly what the great man had said on the subject of arguments, but it had been something to do with the problems of this world coming from people who clung to the past instead of looking to the future, and from those who clenched their fists instead of opening their arms.
Dan had definitely become a clenched fist, and Lorna had become a pair of folded arms, as he noted when he took his eyes off road duty for a second to glance at her. The face he’d fallen in love with nine years ago was pinched and hard. The lips were pursed, the eyes suspicious, the cheeks daubed with angry spots of colour. He’d done this to her, and she’d probably inflicted similar damage on him. They’d turned each other into mean, ugly people.
“I still don’t get why this is such a big deal to Jeremy,” said Lorna. “We’re not breaking up with him . He’ll continue to see both of us, just not together.”
“You don’t understand. This is a sensitive time for him. He’s going through an emotional trauma.”
“You mean some woman on a dating website ghosted him. Big deal! Jeremy’s always getting dumped by women, and he always bounces back. It might even help him to know that you’re in the same boat for once. You can be bachelor boys together. I’ll bet you’re looking forward to that!”
“That’s not how he sees it. Our relationship has always been very important to him.”
“More important than it is to you evidently!”
Dan said nothing to this. He pulled into one of the spaces in the little car park outside the park gates. They exited the car and stomped across the gravel in silence.
“As soon as we go in there, I’m telling him,” Lorna warned as they approached the entrance to the clubhouse and café.
“I’ll saw the table in half if you do,” muttered Dan.
She stopped then, causing Dan to stop, too. “What is it?” he asked, and then he thought Oh no , when he saw her pink face and wobbling lower lip.
“Why are we doing this, Dan?” she asked .
“We’ve been over it a million times.”
“And I still don’t get it,” she said, shivering. She looked vulnerable and lonely and Dan had to resist the urge to hug her.
“We don’t love each other,” he said.
“Don’t we? Maybe we just need to work at it.”
“We’ve tried. I make you miserable. You’re going to want kids one day. Wouldn’t it be better to have them with someone who you don’t feel like punching every five minutes?”
“It’s not every five minutes,” she said. “Maybe every twenty-five minutes.” She tried to smile, then gave up. “It seems like you’ve made up your mind about this and there’s nothing I can say or do to change it. Even if I turned into a twenty-five-year-old Hillary Clinton, you’d still leave me.”
“I’m not leaving you,” Dan reminded her. “We’re breaking up. It’s mutual. We agreed all this.”
“Of course you did,” said Lorna, snatching a tissue from her bag and wiping her eyes. “Come on then, let’s get it over with.” She strode towards the entrance and Dan had to trot to catch up with her.
They found Jeremy and his young assistant Gary alone in the clubhouse. It had only just gone nine am – a little early for customers. Gary was cleaning the coffee machine. Jeremy was behind the cash register looking at his phone. His face immediately brightened when he saw who had entered.
“Hey, you two, what a nice surprise! What’s up? ”
“Not a lot,” said Dan. “We just thought we’d drop by and say hello.” He saw Lorna was about to speak and he gave her a warning glare and mimed a sawing motion. She glowered, but said nothing.
“You’ll never guess what I’ve discovered,” said Jeremy. “I was just telling Gary about it.”
“Oh yeah, what’s that?” asked Dan.
“He’s a real Sherlock is Jeremy,” said Gary admiringly.
Jeremy held up his phone. “I was checking back through my conversations with Kay last night when I spotted this.”
Dan and Lorna came closer to look at the screen, which showed a photo of a nearly empty car park. It was a striking shot, with a line of tall, slender trees at one end casting long shadows across the tarmac. In the background was a church spire gleaming in the slanting rays of the sun. Underneath it, Kay had written: I snapped this this afternoon. What do you think?
A short correspondence then followed:
Jeremy: It’s beautiful (followed by lots of hearts)
Kay: Thanks! It was a total accident finding it. Aren’t the shadows of the trees amazing? And that church! I didn’t stay long because I didn’t have my bike and I needed to get back for Pointless.
Jeremy: Did you make it in time?
Kay: Just!
“And from this you discovered what exactly?” asked Dan.
“Which library she works at. ”
“How?”
“Listen to this, it’s brilliant,” said Gary.
“First,” said Jeremy, “I know where this car park is. It’s on Lowfield Road in Edmonton. I went there last night to check, and I was right. Second, take a look at this…” Using his thumb and forefinger, he enlarged the screen until it was filled by the church spire. Beneath it was the church clock, just visible, showing the time at ten to five.
Jeremy continued: “I checked the TV schedules for Pointless and saw it was showing at 5.15 pm that day, which, if she left straight after taking this photo, means she must live around twenty-five minutes walk from this car park. In an earlier message she mentioned that she lives five minutes walk from work. So her library has to be a maximum of thirty minutes walk from this car park. I tested it out last night, walking away from the car park in a random direction for thirty minutes to see how far I got. That gave me the radius of the circle I had to search within. On Google Maps, I found two libraries inside that radius. One of them is shut on one of the days when she works, so she must work at the other one.”
Dan felt like applauding. “My God that’s brilliant Jerry! Well done!”
Lorna looked stunned. “You really must love this girl Jezza.”
Jeremy shrugged, blushing a little. “I suppose I must. What I feel when I think about Kay is, well, I think it must be the same as what Dan feels when he thinks about you, Lorna. She’s all I want, all I’ll ever want.” He looked at them both with his clear blue eyes, so full of love and a simple, yearning kind of happiness, and it made Dan squirm inside.
“Jerry…” Lorna began, but Dan swiftly interrupted. “How about the three of us go for a round of golf? Gary can mind the shop for half an hour, can’t you Gary?”
“Of course!” said the assistant.
So out they went into the fine autumn morning, each armed with the pick of the clubhouse’s seven irons, wedges and putters. The sun sparkled in the dew on the undulating greens and fairways, the yellow flags fluttered, and in the surrounding trees the feral parakeets squawked like rowdy spectators.
They played the first two holes, and most of the talk, such as it was, came from Jeremy, and all of it concerned Kay and how he ought to approach her on his visit to the library.
“Should I go straight up to her?” he wondered. “Or should I go in and browse the shelves and wait for her to recognise me?”
“You should definitely go straight up to her,” said Dan, knowing it didn’t matter what advice he gave as Jeremy would never find the woman with the cheekbones and personality-free eyes – not sitting behind the desk of a Bush Hill Park library.
Lorna kept casting stern glances at Dan, silently reminding him what they were here to do. Dan tried to ignore these, but the stress of it all was affecting his golf, which wasn’t going very well. He would find his moment to tell Jeremy the news, but it had to be just right. By the time they reached the third hole, Lorna had had enough. She decided to speak just as Dan was readying himself to tee off.
“Jerry, we have to tell you something,” she said.
Dan swung his club, and it was almost but not quite an air shot. The ball dribbled about seven feet from the tee.
“Oh, bad luck Deedee!” cried Jeremy, not having heard Lorna.
Jeremy moved to place his own ball on the tee, then adopted his legs apart stance, shook out his shoulders, wiggled his bottom and squinted into the distance as if this was the third hole at St Andrews rather than Jerry’s P&P. Before he could raise his club, Dan finally spoke: “Jerry, can you stop a moment.”
Jeremy looked up, blinking in surprise. “What is it?”
“Um,” said Dan.
“Dan and me are breaking up,” said Lorna.
Even in the midst of his anxiety for his brother, Dan winced at her poor grammar. He’d left school at sixteen and was not anyone’s idea of an intellectual, but he’d always loved reading, and through reading he’d figured out and gained some respect for the rules of English. He sometimes thought that if Lorna had learned the difference between me and I , their relationship might have stood a better chance.
Jeremy’s mouth fell open, and not because of Lorna’s grammar. The lower jaw simply dropped as if the muscles holding it up had suddenly vanished. The muscles in his hands performed a similar trick as his club toppled to the turf. He stood there, legs astride in the golfer’s stance, staring at them both in awed horror, as if they’d just announced an imminent asteroid strike and the end of all civilisation.
Then, bizarrely, he cracked a smile. “You’re kidding me right? This is a joke! Who came up with it? Was it you Dan? Of course it was. You had me there for a second you old bastard! But I get it now. You’re trying to take my mind off Kay, or trying to get me to stop going on about her. Fair enough I suppose.”
Dan felt very tempted to crack a smile himself and pretend it was indeed a joke. If Lorna hadn’t been there, he might have done just that. How long, he wondered, had he persisted with his relationship with Lorna, not for her sake but for Jeremy’s, because he didn’t want to have to face this moment?
Jeremy had only been nine when they lost their parents – Dan had been thirteen. They then endured five miserable years in the care of their sadistic Uncle Nigel. Jeremy had got the worst of it because Dan soon grew too big for Nigel to beat up. The nightmare ended when their guardian, in the midst of whipping Jeremy with his belt, keeled over and died of a pulmonary embolism. A blood clot had travelled up from his leg and lodged itself in an artery in his lung. If he could have, Dan would have mounted and framed that blessed clot and hung it on his wall.
During the Uncle Nigel years, Dan had become a sort of Dad figure to his brother. And when Dan started going out with Lorna, Jeremy had immediately adopted her as a quasi-Mum. Lorna had found this uncomfortable – she’d never fully understood Jeremy or his particular needs. But despite her qualms, she’d done her best to perform her role and helped give Jeremy the sense of stability he craved.
With some difficulty, she now said: “It’s not a joke, Jerry. I’m so sorry but we really are breaking up.”
“No you’re not,” said Jeremy calmly, as if speaking to a madwoman who was claiming to be Margaret Thatcher. Then he repeated it loudly, several times, with barely any pauses in between: “No you’re not! No you’re not! No you’re not!”
“You’ll still see me,” said Lorna desperately. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m still going to be just as much a part of your life as before. And think how much more you’ll see Dan now that me and him aren’t with each other anymore. You can go out on the town and chat girls up together. You can be each other’s wingmen. Isn’t that right Dan? … Dan?”
Dan had been looking at Jeremy’s collapsing face while she was saying all this and had become so eaten up with grief that he’d started crying, too. “I’m so sorry bro!” he sobbed, hugging his brother, who was by now sobbing, too, and still, weirdly, standing in his golfer’s stance.
As they hugged, Dan was vaguely aware of Lorna’s astonishment. She’d never seen him cry before.