Chapter Thirteen
STUART, TEN YEARS EARLIER
Jessamine and I sit together most days now, in the White Swan.
She’s an interesting woman, especially after the second vodka, but not so much after the fourth, when she becomes harsh and bitter.
I order my pints in halves so that I can keep up with her, round for round, without getting drunk myself.
“Daisy and I live with my mother,” she tells me now. “In her house.”
“What sort of house is it?”
“It’s a special house, I suppose.” Her accent is North London. Born and bred. “A cottage, but it’s detached, right at the edge of the Heath, feels like being at the end of the world.” She smiles as she says this. Her teeth are straight. Orthodontic straight. She was cared for.
“What’s it like, living with your mum?”
She grimaces slightly but then smiles again. “Pros and cons. Mainly cons. She’s a difficult woman.”
“And where’s your dad?”
It takes her a moment to find an answer to this one. “No idea,” she replies eventually. “Disappeared ten years ago.”
“When Daisy was born?” I observe.
She shrugs.
“Where’d he go?”
“Who cares?”
She flashes her eyes at me, and I see it then, her sadness, her fear, her fury, her hate. I think: You are a cruel, unhappy person. I think: You have been hurt. I think: I want to help you.
“Another one?” I say, eyeing her glass. She shoots me a venomous look. She wants to say no. Tell me to fuck off. But she doesn’t.
She drinks the last inch in her glass and hands it to me. “Yes,” she says. “Please.”
Soon after that, school ends for the Christmas break and Jessamine cannot come to the pub during the day. I wonder what she does at home with her moody tween and her miserable mother in their house at the end of the world. Does she drink vodka out of a water bottle? Does Hugo get walked at all?
I wander down through the Vale of Health a few days after Christmas, pleasantly faded around the edges after a lazy, boozy few days with my big brother and his family of gigantic teenage boys in Banstead.
I have brought a gift, or should I say a regift—a bottle of champagne (I hate the stuff), a card, and a Christmas stocking full of dog treats for Hugo that I picked up on sale from Tesco for ninety-nine pence.
It’s a windswept kind of day, dots of rain in the air, the sky dark and grisly, but I’ve had a pint on the way through Hampstead and I’m feeling good about life.
I meander through the Vale—is this place even real? I wonder vaguely. Do people actually live here, in these Christmas-card houses? Or are they cardboard cutouts, lit up from inside, puppets moving behind windows?
At the end of the Vale, I have two options—left or right.
I turn left just as the streetlights go on: a buzz, a fizz, a sudden transformation from gray to gold.
At the farthest end of the street, I see it.
A yellow cottage behind a gated driveway.
It’s scruffy, unloved, wreathed in damp, pus-colored light.
In front are a small red car that looks as if it is never driven, an old army jeep, and a trampoline with two broken springs.
A small plume of smoke rises from a spindly chimney pot.
There is a half-hearted string of fairy lights in the window, the suggestion of a tree.
As I reach the side gate, I hear Jessamine’s dog barking furiously.
Then I hear Jessamine saying, “Hugo. Shut up. There’s nobody there.
” The dog keeps barking, and eventually I see her face at the small window to the side of the front door.
I ring the doorbell.