Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Friday night at the pub was always busy, but tonight, when Jack walked in, the place was practically overflowing.
Thankfully, Devon held prime position at the bar, standing next to Bets.
Over the top of everyone’s head, Devon mimed drinking a pint and Jack nodded.
Devon pointed to a table over in the corner.
From behind the bar, Greta shot him an unfriendly stare. Bets didn’t even look his way.
Great, looked like a fun evening already.
Only pride had pushed him out of the door this evening.
He’d known what to expect. Dodging through the crowd, Jack made his way to the table where the Top Dogs team were sitting, although he might as well have called it Team Bets.
Ella, Diane and Dave, the local plumber, all looked up as he approached.
Only Richard, the vicar, gave him a warm smile of welcome, which Jack felt, given his station in life, he didn’t have much option about.
‘Evening, all,’ he said, taking one of the last three chairs.
‘All right,’ said Dave, with a vaguely wary air. ‘Busy innit.’
‘Yeah, a good turnout,’ he said. ‘Hi, Ella, how are you? Been a while.’
‘Good, thanks,’ said Ella with a distant smile. ‘You?’
‘Fine,’ he responded to her uninterested question.
So she’d joined the we-hate-Jack tribe as well.
He straightened up, determined to weather the evening.
He had to live here for the time being. Diane was studying her drink with a stony, prune-lipped face but he was getting used to her ice-cold-shoulder treatment at work.
She’d assumed honorary mother privileges ever since Bets had joined the practice all those years ago.
Some days, although not the last few, it felt as if Bets was the only member of the team who was civil to him, but he could feel the lack of warmth in her smiles.
The kilowattage had been dialled right back and he missed it.
‘Here you go.’ Devon appeared with three pints held between both hands, while Bets held a fistful of glasses in one hand and clutched a bottle of wine in a cooler to her chest.
‘Thanks, bro.’ Jack took a hasty sip to avoid Diane’s venomous gaze boring into him like a drill.
Conversation settled into smaller groups as Greta wiggled her way through the pub dispensing pens and paper and the obligatory picture-round sheet of badly photocopied, blurry black-and-white photographs of randomly chosen celebrities.
‘Who wants to be scribe?’ asked Ella, holding up the pen.
‘Bets,’ chorused Devon and Diane.
Dave shot Bets a puzzled look and she grinned back at him.
‘I’m a rottweiler when it comes to getting answers down.’ He and Bets exchanged a quick amused glance. Was she also remembering the memorable occasion at the quiz night in his local in Bristol when they’d actually won?
‘She is,’ agreed Jack. ‘She leaves no question unanswered.’
Dave shot Jack a distinctly unfriendly frown.
Bets dropped her gaze and took the pen and began writing their quiz-team name on each of the answer sheets.
Jack hoped that once the quiz started, people would lighten up and forget that he was public enemy number one.
‘Ten minutes and we’ll be starting,’ yelled Greta, her loud voice carrying easily over the noise of the pub.
He glanced over at Bets. Today her lip curled in a derisive sneer as she stared at him, as if he smelled very bad indeed.
Then her attention was caught by Dave, who showed her something on his phone.
He watched as her ready smile came to her face and her curls bobbed as she began to laugh.
The vague ache somewhere in his chest cavity increased as her eyes twinkled at Dave and she nudged him in the ribs, shaking her head.
Greta rang the bell over the bar and barked an order, telling everyone to pipe down.
One of Audrey’s stalwart volunteers tapped a microphone. ‘Testing. Testing. One. Two. Three. Can you hear me at the back?’
The quizmaster was an old hand and he rattled through the questions at quite a pace during the first couple of rounds, ensuring that there was no chance to get bored or chatty between rounds.
Jack noticed that Dave was very attentive to Bets, topping up her wine glass, asking if she’d like more crisps and supporting her decisions a little too vocally for Jack’s liking.
‘Now for the general-knowledge round,’ announced the quizmaster.
‘Are we playing our joker on this one?’ asked Diane. ‘I think we should.’
‘Don’t mind,’ said Devon. No one raised any serious objection, so Ella picked up the joker card and carried it over to the woman keeping score at the bar on an elderly laptop, who was responsible for updating the live spreadsheet being projected onto the rough plaster wall, from which the usual faded photographs of the village had been removed.
For The Half Moon it was extremely high tech.
‘Right. First question in our general knowledge round. What’s the capital of Azerbaijan?’ asked the quizmaster.
In tandem, Jack and Bets both whispered, ‘Baku.’
‘How on earth do you know that?’ asked Ella, staring from one to the other.
Bets shrugged. Jack didn’t say anything, but they caught each other’s gaze and Bets gave him a small, reluctant smile.
He bet she was also remembering the time they’d arrived at the airport for a weekend trip to Seville to find that their flight was cancelled.
Jack couldn’t help smiling at the memory.
Bets, never one to let an obstacle get in the way of a plan, promptly announced that they would take the next available flight anywhere it went.
Unfortunately neither of them knew where Baku was and, when they looked it up, they decided that they’d play it safe and go to Barcelona instead.
‘Question two. How many bottles of champagne are there in a Balthazar?’
Once again, Jack looked over at Bets and they exchanged another smile. ‘Sweet sixteen,’ she mouthed at him and when he nodded, she wrote the answer down.
‘Are you sure?’ asked Dave, peering down at the answer sheet. ‘That seems a lot.’
‘It is a lot,’ said Jack, holding Bets’ gaze. ‘Twenty in a Nebuchadnezzar.’
‘Eight in a methuselah,’ she replied.
Everyone stared at the two of them.
‘One of the boys at school, Adam, his dad was a champagne merchant. There were all these huge, empty champagne bottles in the hallway of his house.’
‘It was Adam’s party trick, telling us the names of them all and how many bottles they held.’
They’d spent a lot of time with Adam, who’d been in the sixth form with Jack.
‘I wonder what Adam’s up to,’ said Jack, mainly to Bets. Unfortunately a lot of his schoolfriends from round here had graduated a couple of years ahead of him. With them having proper jobs and him busy studying, he’d lost touch with them. Or rather he’d been too focused on his life in Bristol.
‘Adam works in London,’ she replied. ‘For a sports-marketing agency.’ It didn’t surprise him that Bets knew. She was loyal like that.
‘Are you in touch with him?’
‘Occasionally. I see his sister. He and his girlfriend live in Kilburn.’
Jack nodded, wishing he hadn’t lost so many of his connections. For what? People who were all facade and no depth. For the last year, he’d assumed he wouldn’t come back here to live. It had been easy to let them slide.
‘Question number three,’ intoned the quizmaster. ‘What happened on the seventh of December 1941?
This time, Bets laughed and looked directly at him.
‘What?’ asked Ella.
‘It’s Jack’s birthday,’ said Devon.
‘I know John Lennon died on the eighth of December,’ piped up Dave, looking inordinately pleased with himself.
‘Jack, what happened on the seventh of December 1941?’ asked Bets with a teasing smile. ‘He used to tell me every single year on his birthday that this was the day that—’
‘Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese,’ said Jack in a stage whisper so that no one on the nearby tables could hear.
‘Well, you learn something new every day,’ said Richard the vicar, who, Jack realised, hadn’t made as big a contribution as the team had hoped.
‘Question number four. Where does Hadrian’s Wall start in the east of England?’
This time Bets exchanged a perplexed look at him and then at the quizmaster on the other side of the room.
‘Wallsend,’ she whispered, as much to herself as to the team. ‘We went there once.’
This was starting to get a little unsettling. He shot her a narrow-eyed gaze. ‘Did you help with the question setting?’ he asked. There was a touch of accusation in his voice but he couldn’t help it. The questions all felt as if they were personally connected to his and Bets’ life together.
‘No!’ she said, indignation echoing in her voice. ‘Did you?’
‘Of course I didn’t,’ he said, his denial a little too emphatic because he was so conscious of everyone around the table watching them. ‘Why would I do that?’
He saw her swallow and felt as if he’d struck her. What he’d meant with his denial was that he wouldn’t have done such a thing because it would have been unkind, not that he wouldn’t do it because he had no wish to relive any of these memories.
Bets’ lips pinched together, and she fluffed her hair so that a curtain of curls fell across her face. Staring at the red lights in her hair, he felt even worse. He knew that was her way of holding back tears and hiding her expression from anyone. Bets hated appearing weak.
Then he saw her metaphorically gird her loins, lift her chin and put her shoulders back.
For a moment he felt proud of her, before he wondered if he was allowed to be proud of her or would that be seen as patronising.
It was all so confusing. She’d been part of his life for so long and he hadn’t counted on all these complicated feelings or the occasional sense of being at sea without a rudder or a sail or an anchor.
As the quiz guy announced question five, they both tensed.
‘What are the ingredients of the cocktail, the Negroni?’
Bets gasped.
This was seriously weird, Jack decided. The rest of the table were now looking back and forth between them like they were the oracles.
‘Jack,’ she said, waving a weak hand.
‘Gin, vermouth, Campari,’ he said mechanically, wishing that he was anywhere but here. This trip down memory lane was excruciating.
While neither of them had ever been big on cocktails, if they ever went for one, they’d both always chosen a Negroni.
He stood up, as much to spare Bets as because he was unable to deal with the growing tension within the small group; everyone kept staring at him and Bets. He should have stayed in Bristol and saved them both this unwelcome scrutiny. ‘I’m going to the loo.’
Question six was being read out as he crossed the floor. He didn’t look back, both he and Bets knew the answer.
He couldn’t remember a time when he’d felt more uncomfortable apart from the last day in his flat-share, but then they say eavesdroppers rarely hear good of themselves.