Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-one
It is the oddest thing: Lila cannot stop smiling. It is as if a strange sense of joyousness has infected her little family; they had ridden home together in Jensen’s pickup, Violet and Celie squashed between them in the front three seats, and Gene sitting in the open back, wedged against whatever is under the tarpaulin, pulling faces for the girls against the rear windscreen while they all prayed that no police would pass by. The girls keep singing “You Can Fly!” in one of those rare, unforced moments of sibling harmony. It makes Lila’s heart swell, and she joins in, despite the fact that she knows only half the words, exchanging silent, amused looks with Jensen, even though she probably sounds like an idiot.
When they get back, Gene heads off to pick up his things from Jane’s, possibly to make sure he has installed himself before Lila can change her mind again. He takes Celie, and she watches them head out of the front door, chatting companionably about animation, while Violet slumps on the sofa with a sandwich that Lila has made. Her energy has drained out of her like an empty battery, and she stares unseeing at the television screen, Truant waiting attentively for crumbs at her feet.
She tells Violet she’s brilliant, that Bill thought she was faultless, that everyone is very proud of her, and Violet nods benignly, not really listening. She will need half an hour to decompress before she’s ready for bed, and Lila finally leaves her to it, heading into the kitchen. When she looks outside, Jensen is carrying something bulky through the back gate. She walks out through the French windows, and as he removes the tarpaulin, she sees that it is a two-person oak Lutyens bench, silvered with age, and a little battered. He puts it carefully in the place where Bill’s bench had been, adjusting it so that it is perfectly centered on the York stone.
“I got you a present,” he says, standing back to show her.
Lila stares at him, at the bench, at the way the garden has a focus again. She walks up to it, running her hand over the grain, feeling the weathered surface under her fingertips.
“Some clients were going to throw it out. They’re going modern. I thought it might work here. At least till you find something else. I know it’s a bit scruffy.”
It takes Lila a minute to find the words. “I love it,” she says. “I don’t like things that look new. It’s perfect.” She sits down on it in the cold night air and he sits beside her. This must have been the thing beneath the tarpaulin on his truck. She keeps running her fingers over it, feeling the gnarled wood, the age in its surface. She shakes her head disbelievingly. “You’re always thinking about what I need.”
“I know. I really need to stop that.”
“Please don’t.”
They sit there for a while on the bench, and Lila feels herself gradually immersed in an unfamiliar sensation: peace. For months, perhaps years, she has been in permanent brace position, dipped low, her hands over her head, waiting for the next thing. The ups have been jagged, inconsistent, prone to turn abruptly into downs. Right now, for the first time she can remember, she just feels…level. As if calm is seeping into her bones. She sits back, gazing out at her garden, at the glowing kitchen at the end of the lawn, and lets out a long breath. “You know, the weirdest thing happened this evening. I was looking at Dan at the school play, and he just felt like someone I didn’t know. Like I was watching him with Marja’s son, and his hair and his clothes and the way he talks, and I looked at this man and I couldn’t believe we were married for all that time. He just seemed…alien to me. And I thought about all those years we were together and it hit me that, if I’m honest with myself, for so much of it we weren’t great.”
She glances sideways at him, smiling ruefully. “We were always bickering, just a bit irritated by each other, but too busy with work or the girls to look properly at it. Because you’re just meant to get through that stuff, right? And the love and connection is meant to somehow sit underneath it all like—I don’t know—grass under a rock, a bit battered but ready to grow again when the rock lifts. And then he left and I was so hurt and angry he had done it that I never stopped to think about whether or not it was the right thing. I was so filled with self-righteousness, that he had abandoned us, made us all victims. That he had broken our family.”
She shakes her head. “And tonight I looked at him and I thought maybe we broke our family. Because we had long stopped trying with each other. Or we stopped being curious about each other. We stopped being kind to each other. Or maybe we were two people who were never really a great match in the first place.”
“I guess—I looked at him tonight and I just felt released. I felt like I could let him go, because he probably wasn’t the right person for me anyway. And that just feels…weird.”
“Good weird?”
Lila thinks. “Maybe. I haven’t quite digested it yet.” She stretches her arms above her head. “You know, I’m realizing every day that I know nothing. I’m nearly forty-three and I genuinely know nothing.”
“That’s the fun bit,” says Jensen. “Working it out.”
“Mm.” She gives him a sideways look. “I’m a bit worried my family is going to be too much for you. I mean we are quite a lot.”
“I like your family. It’s all out there. My family look like the Waltons from outside but inside it’s just a seething mass of resentments and insecurities.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I like my madness visible from the outside.”
“Well, you certainly get that here.”
And here it is, the decision she had made some days ago, after speaking to Eleanor. The thing she needed to get out in the open. She swallows. “I need to tell you something else. After our—our thing, I made a big mistake. Yup, another big mistake. I met this guy and I thought we had something going on. But I—”
Jensen stops her. “Lila. I don’t need to know everything. We’ve been around the block enough to know that stuff happens.”
“But you need to know what kind of a mess you’re getting yourself into.”
He screws up his face. “Yeah. I think I have a pretty good idea.”
“And you still want to do this?”
“Apparently.”
“Bloody hell. Your therapist clearly has work to do.”
“So she tells me.” He turns to her then, and his face is serious. “I just need to know one thing—”
She cuts him off. Her heart thumping, she takes his hand in hers and leans toward him. “Jensen, I really, really want to do this. I feel so lucky to have another chance with you. When I’m with you I keep thinking of things we could do together and I feel excited, because honestly? I’ve only ever really felt like I was on my own. I think my whole life I’ve felt I was on my own. And I know I can be on my own—I’m pretty good at it—but I just…I just want to do it all with you. You make me feel better about pretty much anything. You make me feel like who I am is basically okay. I think…you may actually be the best man I’ve ever met. So if you’re in, I’m in. I’m definitely in.”
She is gazing at him, waiting intently. He opens his mouth and closes it again.
“Too much?”
He blinks. “No. That’s—um—lovely. I was just going to ask when we were going to eat something. Because I’m absolutely starving.”
She stares at him. “Oh, my God. You’re going to be really annoying, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.” And then he starts laughing, and then he is kissing her, pulling her in, smothering his laughter with his kisses until, despite herself, she is laughing too.