Chapter 43.
‘What if you just faked it?’ Lara says, when we meet for Sunday lunch a few days later at a pub near her mum’s house. She’s just back from Rome, and we’ve spent the past half-hour looking through photos of her and Felix meandering around the world’s most romantic city.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, fake it till you make it. Tell Ash you’ve forgotten about Jamie, get back together, and then... over time, it gradually becomes true. Until you wake up one day and realise that what you have with Ash far surpasses what you ever had with Jamie. It’s got to happen one day. It’s practically science.’
I blink at her flippancy. If it was that easy, I’d have done it long ago. Thinking about Jamie all the time has been exhausting. It’s not what I want. But I don’t know how to stop.
She looks past me and out through the window, onto the roundabout and main road. Her face looks pinched and peaky in the wintery light. She seems on edge today. Not with me, necessarily. Just the world at large. She was brisk with the waiter earlier, which isn’t at all like the Lara I once knew. She’s never been into chastising people who can’t argue back: we’ve both worked in customer service jobs, and have experienced more than our fair share of being told off by people in salmon-coloured trousers complaining about their salads being cold.
I guess taking care of her mum must be getting to her more than I thought.
I frown. ‘Ash is a good person. I can’t lie to him like that.’
‘You really think you’re going to find a scientist or doctor who can prove your theory?’
‘I might.’
‘Well, if you do, remember to check their alma mater isn’t the University of WTF.’
I recoil slightly. ‘Okay . . . I will?’
She shuts her eyes briefly. ‘Sorry. I’m tired. Sorry. Look – in the nicest possible way, maybe before you try to find a doctor or a scientist, you should talk to a counsellor.’
‘Yeah, maybe.’ I feel faintly nauseous at the thought of being confirmed mad, instead of it merely being suspected. I set down my drink. ‘Anyway, are you okay? You hardly ate.’
When we lived together, we used to have a league table of the best Sunday roasts in Norwich, pinned up on a piece of graph paper in the living room. It was Jamie’s thing, really, because Lara and I were usually too hard up to buy lunch out. But he liked to treat us.
She wrinkles her nose. ‘Just knackered.’
‘You do look a bit translucent.’
She smiles faintly. ‘And you look like a person with a broken heart.’
‘I’d like to come and see your mum.’ I’m not too sure how Corinne feels about me these days, given I blanked her daughter for nearly a decade, blamed her for Jamie’s death and failed to be there when Billy died. I’m not sure I’d want to see me, if I were Corinne.
‘She’d love that,’ Lara says. ‘She always adored you, Neve. That never changed.’
‘Work’s going to be a bit full on this week, but... next weekend?’
‘Any time. Whenever. You know you’re always welcome.’ She reaches for my hand and squeezes it hard, in a way that feels like she is trying to tell me something.
‘Lar. Is she dying?’ The thought is almost unbearable, even as I’m saying it out loud. It hasn’t occurred to me before now – I’ve been so caught up in my own problems. But now that I think about it, why else would Lara have taken extended leave from work to move back to Norwich and help out for so long?
But Lara just smiles weakly. ‘Christ, let’s hope not.’
That night, I head to Mum’s. The house is freezing, and she’s tucked up in the living room beneath a blanket, a glass of something amber-coloured in her hand. She’s watching Strictly Come Dancing . It’s one of her favourite programmes, because some guy once told her she had the rhythm to make it as a dancer. Despite this clearly being a line to get her into bed, she’s never forgotten it, and enjoys behaving every year like she’s judge number five.
‘Oh,’ she says, glancing up as I come in. ‘Thought you were Ralph.’
I’m surprised to see she’s sitting on a new, crushed-velvet silver sofa. ‘Mum. What’s this?’
‘ Strictly . It hasn’t been very good this year. Aren’t they supposed to be celebrities?’
‘Not the TV. The sofa.’
She smiles and strokes it with one hand. ‘Someone at the pub was selling it. And my old one had all those broken springs, so I thought, why not.’
‘How much?’
‘Couple of hundred quid.’
‘Mum, I could have got you a gorgeous sofa.’
‘What’s wrong with this one?’
Perhaps she’s seen a version of it on Bev’s Instagram. When Bev got a leopard-print beach cover-up, Mum started wearing an identical one, for pottering round the house. And when Bev dropped the name of her collagen-retinol-whatever night cream, a pot of it showed up in Mum’s bathroom the following week. ‘It doesn’t really... go, does it?’
She surveys the room and shrugs. ‘Go with what?’
Fair point. This room is a mishmash of peeling William Morris wallpaper, a peach deep-pile carpet straight out of the 1970s and some wonky white flatpack furniture. Not for the first time, I wonder if my dream of restoring this house together will ever actually happen. Mum just doesn’t view it in the same way I do. Its character and charm completely pass her by.
Perhaps, after all these years, I need to finally accept that’s never going to change.
It’s only three weeks till Christmas, but she hasn’t got any decorations up. After Dad left, she never bothered, because Christmas is apparently only worth celebrating if you have a man by your side.
I sit reluctantly down on the sofa. The velvet grates slightly beneath me.
‘Whisky?’ Mum asks, nodding at the bottle on the sideboard.
I shake my head.
‘How’s Ash?’
‘Not good.’
She lowers the volume on the TV. ‘What happened?’
My instinct is to make something up and change the subject. But then I remember that nothing I can say could ever out-crazy the way she behaved over Dad. I should just tell her the truth. Lying is starting to become too exhausting. ‘This is going to sound weird, but when I first met Ash, I thought... I thought he was Jamie. There’s this thing called walk-ins, where—’
‘And he didn’t like that.’
I blink. ‘Mum, listen. I honestly think that Ash... might be Jamie. I know it sounds mad, but when I met him—’
‘I know. I heard you talking to Ralph about it.’
‘What? When?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. A few months ago, maybe.’
That Saturday I came over, back in June, when Ralph was eating soup and Mum was blaming her alcohol habit on open bars. ‘You heard me... telling Ralph I thought Jamie walked into Ash’s body?’
‘Yes. I heard everything. And I must admit, I did think you were talking a load of—’
‘So that time Ash and I came over here, and you were drunk and you kept calling him Jamie...’
‘I suppose,’ she says, with a heavy sigh, ‘I thought I could make you see sense.’
‘You what?’
She shrugs, sipping her whisky. ‘You were always so obsessed with Jamie. I wanted to make you see how ridiculous it was. I thought we might be able to... I don’t know. Have a laugh about it, I suppose. That it might wake you up, somehow.’
My breath catches in my throat. ‘Why would you—’
‘Because all these years later, you still can’t forget him. And for what it’s worth, Neve, I never thought your relationship with Jamie was healthy.’
I deep-breathe in that way people do when they’re trying not to punch someone. ‘Um, in what way, exactly?’
‘You were like I was, with your dad. Infatuated.’
‘No. I loved Jamie. Massive difference.’ Goose pimples have broken out across my skin. I glance at the gas fire, which is always dormant, and wonder what the risk to life would be of switching it on. Probably high. I expect we’d both explode, though hopefully Mum would go first.
‘But all these years later, you’re still not over him.’
‘Well, that’s love, isn’t it?’
She shakes her head. ‘No, it’s obsession. I could never get over your dad, either. Not for years afterwards. So it turns out, we’re not so different, you and I. They’d have given you a restraining order by now, if Jamie was still alive.’
My mother’s said a lot of stupid stuff over the years, but I think this just about tops it.
I find my voice, though it comes out in flakes and layers. ‘This is nothing like that.’
‘Yes, it is. It’s our fatal flaw, Neve. We get in too deep.’
‘No. I’m nothing like you.’
‘Oh, you’re more like me than you think.’
‘I can’t believe... you knew I thought this, all along.’
She knocks back the last of her whisky, and I watch her gaze stray straight away to the bottle on the sideboard, eyeing up her next refill. ‘Except there’s nothing to know, is there? Not really. You know Ash isn’t Jamie, deep down. You know that in your heart, Neve. You want him to be, but you know he’s not.’
‘I don’t . And I wouldn’t expect you to understand.’
‘You know, I don’t think Jamie ever loved you in quite the same way you loved him.’
‘Mum, I’m serious now—’
‘I know you lost the baby, darling.’
Ice plates my stomach. ‘What?’
‘Lara told me. Well, actually, she didn’t tell me. I guessed. You hadn’t been round for a while and you weren’t answering your phone and so I rang Lara, and she said you’d been unwell, and I asked her what with, and she said she didn’t feel it was her place to tell me. And so I guessed. Straight away.’
For once, the anger I feel isn’t directed at Lara. I can hardly blame her if my mother chose that moment to demonstrate perception for the first time in her life.
‘You never thought to mention this to me?’ You never thought to wrap me up in your arms and kiss me and tell me how sorry you were and that your heart was breaking along with mine?
‘It wasn’t my place. You obviously didn’t want me to know. Though I do wish you’d felt able to talk to me, of course.’
I think resentfully back to that summer, to the months before Jamie died. ‘That was the year Bev kept calling the police on you. Remember? You were a mess. How could I talk to you?’
It had been years since my father left, and she was still so furious, the police had to officially tell her not to be.
But it’s been nearly a decade now. And what am I doing? Self-destructing like she did – just breaking hearts instead of stuff.
I reach for a tissue from the box on the coffee table and dab my eyes. Being unexpectedly wrenched back to the trauma of losing the baby is hitting me hard.
Mum frowns slightly. ‘I am sorry, Neve. I wish I could have been there for you more.’
‘Why wish it? You could have been. Nothing was stopping you.’
Wordlessly, Mum removes the blanket from her lap and places it on mine. It feels soft, warmed by her body. The gesture brings fresh tears to my eyes. It’s the kind of thing Corinne would have done.
‘Did Jamie support you, when you told him about the baby? Was he there for you?’
I swallow away the memories of those last months. ‘What does it matter, now?’
‘It matters,’ says Mum, leaning keenly forward like she does whenever she’s about to dispatch some pop psychology, ‘because Ash is a perfectly nice boy, who seems desperate to love you. Yet all you can think about – all these years later – is Jamie Fraser.’
‘Jamie was the love of my life.’
‘Jamie’s gone, sweetheart.’
‘No,’ I say fiercely, though I can feel my resolve buckling like metal in the fierce heat of my heart. ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about. No.’