Chapter Seventeen
The young doctor in Triage recognizes Gene immediately. “I know you!” he says, looking up from his paperwork in the small curtained-off cubicle. With one hand he holds a sandwich, from which he takes an oversized bite as he sits down. Lila tries not to look at the little blob of mayonnaise on his chin.
Gene’s face lights up, as it always does, and he immediately pushes his way up so that he is a little taller in the metal hospital bed and salutes. “Captain Strang, reporting for intergalactic—”
“No…” The doctor takes another mouthful and chews. “Dog bite, wasn’t it? A few weeks ago? How are you getting on?”
Because of his age, Gene is attended to relatively quickly. Or within three hours, which, Jensen observes, is pretty much record time for Accident and Emergency. It is not a break, apparently, even though Gene has to be helped in, supported by Jensen, while grimacing wildly and letting out periodic moans of pain. But it is a bad sprain and will need to be rested and iced for at least a week. When they are discharged, with what Gene clearly regards as disappointingly mild painkillers, he thanks the medical staff with the slightly too emphatic gratitude of someone who relishes being the focus of attention. For the twenty-minute drive home, he talks endlessly of their niceness and how great it is not to need insurance for everything.
Lila does not speak for any of it, leaving all conversation to Jensen and Gene, using her time to text the girls to make sure they have done their homework, to reassure them that everything is fine, and finally, as it grows late, to ask them to go to bed. Even when she is not texting, she remains silent, her brain humming with a quiet fury that drowns out the casual conversation around her.
Bill is cleaning the kitchen. He has cleaned it relentlessly since Gene’s arrival, with the pointed determination of a dog spraying his scent. When she opens the door, he looks up with an expression that is half embarrassment and half resentment that Gene has somehow arrived back in the house again. The two old men look at each other, and then Bill turns pointedly away. “He’s alive, then,” he says, with mock surprise.
“You nearly broke my leg, you asshole.”
“I did nothing. You wouldn’t have tripped on the rubble if you hadn’t spent half the afternoon at the public house.”
“I wouldn’t have tripped if you hadn’t come after me with a carving knife.”
“It was a metal spatula! If you ever did anything in this house other than cause chaos and steal people’s socks you’d have been aware of that!”
“Shut up !”
Lila drops her bag loudly on the floor. There is a sudden silence. She looks at Bill, then at Gene, who is being eased into the chair by Jensen. “So when does it stop?”
All three men are staring at her.
“This is insane . This is all insane . You are both headed toward eighty. My mother is six feet underground. You haven’t even seen each other for decades. When does it stop? ”
“ I’m not about to be eighty,” Gene mutters.
She’s shouting now, unable to stop herself. “I’ve had it. I’ve honestly had it. I cannot live with you two behaving like a pair of toddlers over something that happened—what?—thirty-five years ago? My life is in crisis, my children are struggling, and I cannot do one more day of trying to mediate between two ridiculous old men who refuse to let go of the past.”
She takes a deep breath. “So this is what we are going to do. If you both want to stay here, in my house, you are going to work out how to live peacefully together, and if you can’t, you can both leave, because it’s not fair to force me—your daughter—to make the adult decision as to who should go. Do you understand?”
“But, Lila—” Bill begins.
“No. I’m not interested. You are both adults, even if you seem to have forgotten that. You sort it out between you, or you find somewhere else to live. Oh, and you can make yourselves useful and babysit while you start your negotiations, because I’m going for a drink. Or to finish the drink that was so rudely interrupted. Jensen?”
Jensen, who is clearly stunned, glances at his watch and raises his eyebrows. “Uh—okay.”
Before anyone can say anything else, Lila picks up her bag, walks back out of the house, and heads toward Jensen’s pickup truck.
···
“We could try to go back to the pub but it’s gone closing time.” Jensen is driving along the road, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the gear stick. “Great tirade, by the way. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen Bill actually look cowed before.”
Lila barely hears him. Her ears are still ringing from her shouting, her brain still humming with the image of the two old men, silenced in front of her. But mostly she is thinking. She checks her reflection in the passenger mirror and rummages in her bag for an old mascara. She finds a dog treat, a pen from a hotel she had stayed in sometime in 2017, and a tampon that has escaped its wrapping and is lightly dusted with crumbs. She wipes under her eyes instead, hoping she doesn’t look too awful. “Do you have alcohol?” she asks.
“Do I have alcohol?”
“At your flat.”
“Probably a couple of beers. But you don’t drin—”
“I do tonight,” she says. “Stop at the nearest shop.”
It is so long since Lila drank that she has no idea what she should buy. And she is not sure that there is anything in this twenty-four-hour convenience store much more sophisticated than lighter fuel. She peers at the shelves behind the counter, watched by the guy at the till, who bears the wary expression of someone who has long learned that even benign-looking forty-two-year-old women may yet hurl themselves onto the cash register, start singing a national anthem, or wet themselves beside the freezer cabinet. She gives him a reassuring smile to suggest she will do none of these things, which he doesn’t return. She has never liked red wine, and beer might make her gassy, so she finally points at a bottle of vodka and grabs some tonic, then hands it to the man. “What do you want?” Jensen is behind her. He asks for a couple of no-alcohol beers. “I’m driving you back later,” he says, as if she has forgotten.
It is raining heavily by the time they are driving down Westling Street, and as they pass Bill and Francesca’s bungalow, she averts her gaze. It gets her, even now. She can picture her mother waving from the front porch, the way she would always brush her hands on her jeans as she walked toward Lila along the path, as if perennially caught in the middle of doing something. Lila had not understood the comfort she had drawn from walking into that house every week until her mother was gone. It is then that she notices Jensen patting his jacket. By the time he pulls up a short distance down the road, he has patted every pocket at least twice and seems preoccupied. He cuts the engine, thrusting his hands deep into his pockets as, without the wipers, the windscreen is slowly obscured by the rain. Then he reaches over to the glove box, opens it, rummages inside, and lets out a quiet curse. She looks at him.
“Flat keys,” he says. “They’re not in my pocket. I was in a hurry when you called and I have a horrible feeling…I might have left them on the side.”
“Don’t you have a spare?”
“Yes…In the flat.”
He stares through the windscreen at the block, as if he could somehow will himself inside. “My sister has a set but she works nights so I won’t be able to pick them up till tomorrow. I’m…really sorry.”
The feeling that hits Lila is unexpectedly bleak. All her plans ruined. Again. She knows this is a childish way to look at the world, but right now, she feels it, a foot-stamping tear-inducing rage.
Jensen sits back, thinking, then suddenly leans forward, his hand shuffling around again in his glove compartment. He pulls out a key on a small leather fob. “We could go to Bill’s?” She looks at his palm, at the little brass Chubb key. “His spare. He gave it to me after…I think he just likes to know that someone could get in if need be.”
Lila looks back up the road to where she can just make out the bungalow, set back behind a neat privet hedge. Quiet and empty, its windows like empty eye sockets in a blank face. “I…can’t. Not in there. I mean—it’s where my mum lived. Since she died it always feels…I just can’t. Sorry.”
He nods, not pushing her. He glances up at where the rain is now hammering on the roof of the car as the engine ticks down. Both of them are briefly lost in their thoughts. Lila can feel the bottle of vodka, disproportionately heavy in her lap. She wonders whether to just wrench off the top and take a swig or if that will make her feel worse. A forty-something woman drinking from a bottle in a pickup truck.
“Could you just…drive me home?”
“Bill’s studio,” he says suddenly. “He keeps the key to the studio in the kitchen. That’s just his space, right? Not your mum’s? Would that still be weird?” And suddenly Lila is alive again.
···
It takes Jensen a couple of minutes to let himself in and unlock the side gate to the garden. Lila bolts from the truck, throws the door shut, and runs in, her jacket over her head, the bottles tucked under her arm, her feet slapping through the puddles. Jensen hits a switch, shaking the rainwater from his shoulders, and the neon strip light above them flickers into life, illuminating the racks of tools, the worktable, the clamps and jigsaws. Sheets of graded sandpaper are stacked in a rack on the wall, the floor littered with wood shavings and sawdust. A piece of graph paper with some measurements and a pencil drawing of a table lie on the edge of the table, beside a tape measure and a hand plane with a burnished wooden handle. For all Bill’s rigid sense of order at home, his studio is a reassuring mess of creativity and clutter. There is a stool in front of his scarred wooden table, and a newly finished garden bench alongside the door, probably another project for a neighbor. Since he let go of his business Bill has regularly made pieces to order. She has always suspected he would do it even if it wasn’t for the money: for Bill, woodworking is meditative, calming, and she cannot remember a day when he hasn’t been engaged in making something. Even on the day of her mother’s funeral he had carved a little bird which he had placed on Francesca’s coffin.
Jensen motions her to the bench and pulls the little stool over so that he sits alongside it.
“I grabbed you a mug from the kitchen,” he said. “I didn’t know where he kept the glasses.”
“Classy,” she says, as he pours in some vodka, then tonic. The strip-lighting buzzes quietly overhead, making them both look pale and shadowy-eyed.
“Do I look as awful as you?” she says, glancing up at it.
“Significantly worse. I’m always camera-ready.”
She glances around her. “Look.” There are two dark green paraffin lamps in the corner. Of course there are. Bill is prepared for every eventuality: power cuts, food shortages, earthquakes, and atomic bombs. She lights the lamps, turns off the fluorescent bulb, and suddenly the little workshop is restful, and oddly intimate. Right , she thinks. And takes three emphatic glugs of her vodka and tonic, ignoring Jensen’s look of surprise. Right , she thinks. I’ll show you, Eleanor.
···
The taste and strength of the alcohol are so disguised by the tonic that it takes a second mugful before she realizes it is having any effect at all. It is actually quite pleasant to feel so swimmy, to have the sharp edges of the day so delightfully blunted. Jensen is nearby on the stool drinking his alcohol-free beer and the rain is drumming on the flat roof and she is in a wood-scented cocoon, away from all the stress and conflict of drama. Why don’t I drink more often? She has another swig. She is not entirely sure she’ll go through with this, but it’s perfectly pleasant being here, in this space, beside a man she feels comfortable with, as he talks about a walled garden he restored in Winchester.
“So,” she says, raising her glass, “tell me something interesting about you.”
“Something interesting? Is my walled garden boring you to tears?”
“The breakdown. Tell me how it happened.” He looks a little startled again, so she adds: “Only if you want to, of course. I mean I’m not being…nosy.”
“You are, a bit.”
“I’m making conversation.”
“Really? ‘Tell me about the most traumatic thing that happened in your whole life’?”
“Tell me something else, then. Tell me about…Lipstick Woman. Your ex-fiancée.”
While he speaks, she is looking at the way his shoulders move under his T-shirt, his broad hands. What would it feel like to have those on her skin? What would it be like to have sex with someone who wasn’t Dan? When they had first got together, she and Dan had spent whole days in bed, the duvet scattered with sections of Sunday newspapers, the sheets full of crumbs from Marmite toast. They had so much sex in the first month that she had got cystitis and spent two days doubled over glugging cranberry juice. Then she thinks about the last six months they had lived together, the loneliness of having someone in your bed who didn’t even seem to see you, the racing thoughts, the endless arguments in your head, the cold back of doom facing you night after night.
“Am I boring you?”
Jensen is looking at her. He has a nice face. Maybe she just hadn’t noticed it properly before. “No,” she says. “No. I was just…thinking.”
“Anyway, so it was basically a lot of booze, a lot of drugs, a lot of evenings that ended with me desperately trying to remember someone’s name. And then I got into the relationship with Irina and it was really volatile, like, I never knew what she was going to go off about. But there was this bit of me that thought, ‘Better that than the girls whose names I didn’t remember,’ so I stayed with it. But it was just stress all day and then stress all night—she was the kind who liked to keep a fight going till five a.m., you know? You just kind of get acclimatized to the drama.”
He has nice hair, she thinks. She could run her fingers through that hair.
He sighs. “And after we got engaged, work got more frantic and my body just started to fall apart in bits. And then I found out she was sleeping with my mate at work, and my brain just…It was like a spin dryer, going round and round and round. I couldn’t sleep, I started to get panic attacks, I felt like I was braced all the time. But I thought I could plow on through. Until I couldn’t.”
“What happened?” she says, dragging herself back.
“Someone found me catatonic in the men’s loos. Couldn’t get up. Couldn’t speak. Went home and couldn’t stop crying. Stayed in bed for three weeks. I don’t even remember it, to be honest.”
He glances at her and away again, like this bit makes him feel awkward. “My parents didn’t really get it. But my sister intervened. After rehab, she got me into therapy, moved into my apartment for two months, and made like an attack dog to anyone who wanted me to party. And one of the things that came out in therapy was that I really hated my job. Hated it. Every time I thought about going back there I felt ill again. So…” He straightens up. “…so I trained and did this instead.”
He waits for her to say something, but she doesn’t know what to say. She is suddenly overwhelmed by the feeling that she really wants him to be closer.
“And it turns out just being in a garden all day is good for me. Obviously I don’t make much money but I—”
“Do you want to sit on the bench?” she interrupts, moving over to make room.
He studies her for a minute. “You want me to sit next to you?”
“Don’t you want to?”
He’s still reading her face, like she’s a puzzle he can’t quite work out. He doesn’t speak, but gets up wordlessly and moves onto the bench, keeping a couple of inches between them when he sits—a tiny gap of plausible deniability. She pours herself another drink and takes a long sip.
“I think we need music,” she announces. She gets up and makes for Bill’s transistor radio on the worktable. She may have been a little unsteady on her feet, but she hopes he hasn’t noticed. She switches it on and it goes straight to Radio 3—gentle classical strings in a minor key. The room feels suddenly filled with intent.
“This feels…”
“Nice?” she says hopefully.
“?‘Nice’ is an awful word. Supermarket cakes are nice. Your nan is nice.”
“I’m not a cake. Or a nan.”
“You’re certainly not. I’m just not sure what—”
It is at this point that she lunges forward and kisses him. It is not that she is overcome by lust, more that she doesn’t know what to say anymore, and is afraid of what might come out of her mouth. Plus she hasn’t kissed anyone in three years and really, really wants to see if she still can.
It turns out she can. His lips are fuller, softer than Dan’s. She observes as they touch hers that she and Dan hadn’t kissed properly for years. Not like this. Somehow proper kissing is the first thing to go in a failing relationship, the first casualty of long-held resentments and a lack of casual affection. Jensen smells of soap and a shampoo she recognizes but can’t name, and tastes faintly of beer and there is a tongue involved and it is a little shocking, and then it is revelatory, and then it is just…dreamy. She had forgotten, she had actually forgotten, how good this was. She is pulled in, her capacity for thought floating away in little pieces, even as a tiny voice in her head is yelling, like a twelve-year-old: I’m kissing someone! I’m actually kissing someone again! He pulls back after a few years and blinks, his eyes on hers.
“Okay. That…was unexpected.”
“But…nice?”
“No.”
She feels herself prickle with embarrassment, and he says quickly, “Nice is way too inadequate a word to describe that.”
She deflates slightly with relief. “I haven’t kissed anyone in three years.”
“I’m here to tell you you’ve still got it.”
She feels the smile light up her face, goofy and unstoppable. “Really?”
He frowns, considers this. “Actually, I might not be a hundred percent sure. I might need to try again, just to check.”
This time he pulls her gently toward him and he kisses her. It is a kiss filled with certainty, shot through with actual desire. She had forgotten the utter deliciousness of being desired and it smoothes out whatever wrinkles of discomfort were left in her and she feels her body turn fluid, molten. They kiss and his hands are on her, in her hair, holding her face, intertwining with her fingers, then sliding down her thigh. She surrenders to all of it, long-dormant cells in her body sparking to life, his weight, pleasingly solid, pinning her as she eases herself backward onto the bench. I can do this, she thinks, as he kisses her neck, making her shiver pleasurably, her hands pulling him to her. There is a brief flicker of anxiety when she remembers her underwear choices that morning—she’s pretty sure nothing more exotic than an old Marks & Spencer five-set cotton brief—but then she decides that Jensen is not a man who is likely to worry about the lack of expensive lingerie. He has gently undone the buttons on her shirt with one hand, his mouth not leaving hers, and when he touches her breast she finds herself arching toward his hand, in thrall to her own body, to his—
He abruptly lifts himself up on his elbows. “I need to ask. How drunk are you?”
She opens her eyes. “What? Not that drunk.”
“I mean, I’m not entirely sure what’s going on here. Because we started with you being very clear that this wasn’t a date and—”
She puts her hand to the back of his neck, pulls him to her so that their faces are inches apart. She wants his lips back on hers. She says softly: “Do we have to have this conversation right now?”
“Well…yes?”
“It’s not very sexy.”
“Nor is waking up tomorrow feeling like you took advantage of someone. I like you, Lila. I know you’ve been through some stuff and I just…don’t want to be…more stuff.”
“You are absolutely not going to be stuff.” When he doesn’t look convinced, she reaches out with her right hand and fumbles in her bag for her phone. She finds voice memo and says, into the microphone, her eyes not leaving his: “This is Lila Kennedy, stating for the record that she is a grown woman of sound mind and slightly more infirm body, absolutely not being taken advantage of by Jensen…” She stops. “I don’t know your surname.”
“That’s disgraceful,” he says. “What kind of woman are you?”
“A woman who is trying to put your mind at rest, and have an excellent shag.”
“Well, now you’ve introduced a whole new pressure element.”
“Okay, a mediocre shag. Just a shag. Look, why are you making this so difficult?”
“Phillips. It’s Phillips.”
He is kissing her again and laughing at the same time, which is odd, but nice, and then he stops laughing and she relaxes, and then feels something quite, quite different from relaxation, and then, as he stops kissing her and starts moving his lips down her stomach, she drops her phone and stops thinking altogether.