Chapter 6 #2
‘Clueless? Yeah,’ Hannah confirmed, a wry smile she couldn’t hold back tilting her lips.
‘I basically kept him alive that year. He’d been at some private school in Surrey up to then, but there wasn’t a space for him in the one up here – it was the local comp or nothing.
I stood between him and a lot of lads who’d have liked to haze the posh boy. ’
‘Interesting,’ Charlie said, raising an eyebrow. ‘But that wasn’t what I meant. I was asking whether he looked after a family member, like you suspected.’
‘Oh. Sort of,’ Hannah said, her cheeks turning pink.
‘Though it was less a case of looking after, and more a case of . . . managing. His mum was unbelievably difficult: moody and, now I look back on it, incredibly manipulative. His dad had left, like mine, but Lillian refused to divorce him. She had some mad idea that she’d eventually get him back, even though he’d deliberately taken a job that meant he worked abroad all the time.
He was from near here, originally, and he’d never been happy living down south.
Moving Jude and Joe to Derbyshire was a ploy to get their dad to come home to them, which never happened.
When her plan didn’t work, she resented the fact that her kids had managed to adjust – make new friends, build proper lives for themselves here. ’
‘That sounds . . . very messed up,’ Charlie said in open disbelief.
‘Yep,’ Hannah agreed. ‘She was a total nightmare. Still is, probably, though she’s supposedly a pillar of the community: head of the WI, active in the Rotary Club .
. . all that stuff. She lives in the big old house at the bottom of my mum’s street, the one with the weeping willow and the massive bay windows.
I was her least favourite person, when Jude and I were kids.
Very much from the wrong side of the tracks. ’
‘Come off it,’ Charlie scoffed, ‘this is the Peak District, not the Bronx. And you’ve just said you lived on the same road.’
‘I’m serious,’ Hannah said. ‘I’m from the council house end.
Mum owns her place now, but it was rented when I was young.
And we always struggled for money, even though she worked so hard.
My dad would appear from time to time and throw some cash her way, but then we wouldn’t hear from him for months – or worse, he’d come asking Mum for a handout.
’ At this, Charlie’s expression darkened. She shook her head in disgust.
‘Me, Ed and the girls probably seemed pretty chaotic, too,’ Hannah continued. ‘Very loud, and always either arguing or up to something we shouldn’t be. We weren’t bad children – but definitely not the nice, quiet, middle-class sort Lillian wanted hers to associate with.’
‘So you had very little in common, and yet became best pals,’ Charlie observed.
‘Yes,’ Hannah said. ‘I guess we just . . . recognised each other. It was almost like we’d met before. We both just got things about the other that nobody else did.’
‘Oh my god . . . you were, like, fated mates,’ Charlie murmured, theatrically fanning her face with her fingertips.
Hannah snorted. ‘You have got to stop reading so much omegaverse smut on AO3. It’s rotting your brain.’
‘I will not stop, and you can’t make me,’ Charlie pouted. ‘Let’s say it was a Romeo and Juliet situation, then. Did the two of you get together across the barricades as teenagers? Was it crazy hot because you knew his mother would disapprove?’
Hannah laughed briefly, then said, ‘Not at all. It was slow. Scary. I spent years terrified to touch him, if I’m honest. By the time I realised I felt that way about him, there was so much between us. So much to lose, if we messed things up.’
She’d been fifteen when she’d noticed the size and solidity of him – realised the sharp angle at which Jude, suddenly six feet tall, had had to lean over her to read from the GCSE history textbook they were sharing.
It was after school, in the sitting room at Hannah’s house, and as they sought an answer to the question of whether Thomas Cromwell should have foreseen his own downfall, Hannah had wondered whether she too was guilty of ignoring inconvenient facts.
She’d been gripped by an abrupt, burning awareness of something she’d actually known all along: her best friend was a boy.
The changes in him came thick and fast after that.
Gawky, skinny limbs became lean and muscular; his shoulders widened and his jawline sharpened.
He kept wearing glasses instead of trading them in for contacts, but chose ones with heavy, dark frames that highlighted the brightness of the grey-blue eyes behind them.
By the end of the following year, he’d become someone other people noticed, too.
Girls began to simper and flirt with him in ways that made Hannah – for reasons she didn’t fully understand then – want to throw things at them.
‘You just sort of . . . yearned for him, then? For how long?’ Charlie asked. Her eyes had gone round, as if she was struggling to picture Hannah lovelorn and longing. Given her carefully crafted reputation as a romance refusenik, Hannah couldn’t blame her.
‘A long time,’ she admitted. ‘Until I was twenty-three.’
‘Twenty-three? Are you telling me you didn’t so much as kiss him until you were twenty-fucking-three?’
‘I am.’
‘Jesus Christ.’ Charlie poured more wine into their glasses and took a deep gulp from her own, as though she’d just had a shock and needed to steady her nerves. ‘I’ve seen the man! Surely keeping your paws off him for that long took superhuman restraint. It must have been miserable.’
‘At points, yeah,’ Hannah said, instructing herself not to think about Thea, the softly spoken Grace Kelly lookalike that – to Lillian’s delight – Jude had brought home for Christmas during his final year at Cambridge.
At the time, Hannah had been seeing Josh Brady: a good-looking stoner who’d been in their year at school, and whom Jude had always disliked.
Josh was back home after flunking out of Keele University, and if any part of Hannah was aware she’d deliberately chosen to date the anti-Jude, she’d decided to ignore it.
‘So why do it to yourself?’ Charlie demanded. ‘Assuming, of course, that the yearning went both ways.’
‘Because deep down, I knew we were a bad fit,’ Hannah said, her self-control slipping a little as she ground out the words.
‘You saw his presentation today: he’s a literal genius.
He was a youth member of Mensa, for god’s sake.
His mum enrolled him at ten. The older we got, the clearer it was that – in a lot of ways that really mattered – we were nothing alike.
The world he was going to be a part of . . . people like me don’t live there.’
‘People like you . . .?’
‘Normal people. Ordinary people.’
‘I don’t even know what that means,’ Charlie said hotly, brows knitted together. ‘What’s normal? Who’s ordinary? Isn’t everyone special, to whoever loves them?’
‘That’s a very sweet idea,’ Hannah said, straining not to roll her eyes.
‘Perfect for one of those live, laugh, love type posters people put up in their kitchen. It doesn’t work that way in real life, though, does it?
He was always going to leave – always going to end up somewhere I couldn’t go, at least not as his equal. ’
Every word Hannah spoke was costing her something now.
Pride. Peace. She carried on anyway. ‘I felt like I’d lost a limb when he first went away to university.
I lived for him coming back at the end of every term, but each time he did it was like he’d grown, expanded, and I’d feel like I was stuck – small and shrinking away to nothing.
We stayed friends while he was there, but it was weird.
Dishonest, somehow. We both knew that, for the first time, there were things we weren’t telling each other, but it was easier to pretend we hadn’t noticed.
I visited him once – met all these rich, clever people in this beautiful, historic place.
I felt like the village idiot. I held it together until I left, then cried the whole train ride home. ’
‘My god, Hannah,’ Charlie murmured, her eyes soft with sympathy. ‘That’s awful. But . . . you must have got over it, if you eventually got together?’
‘Over that particular incident, yeah,’ Hannah said. ‘And eventually, for a while, I managed to kid myself that him wanting me, and me wanting him, was enough. That none of the other stuff mattered. We had six months where it was good.’