Chapter Twenty-Three
STUART, NINE YEARS EARLIER
The bedroom door creaks slightly. I am wide awake and breathing heavily, disturbed from a very deep dream.
Jessamine doesn’t stir and it feels like the middle of the night, but it is hard to tell at this time of the year.
A bolt of pinkish light falls into the room from the open door, and I can just make out the shape of a human being.
“Hello,” I whisper into the darkness.
“Dad?” a child’s voice whispers back.
Fuck.
I duck under the duvet and hiss into Jessamine’s ear. “Jess, it’s Daisy.”
She rouses and groans. “What?”
“Mum?” The child’s voice is closer now and I wriggle farther under the sheets.
“What?” I hear Jessamine mumble. “What is it?”
“I can’t sleep.” Then a second later. “Is Dad here?”
“No, Dad is not here.”
“But there was a man’s voice.” I feel a hand passing over my form in the darkness. “Who’s that?”
And then Jessamine sighs. “It’s nobody. It’s just a friend.”
“Is it the friend who brought the champagne?”
“Yes, it’s the friend that brought the champagne.”
“Why is he here?”
“Because it was late and he doesn’t have a place to sleep at the moment.”
There is a long silence and then I feel a finger prod at me. “Man. You need to come out of there.”
“Daisy!” Jessamine chides. “Don’t be so rude.”
“I’m not being rude. He just shouldn’t be hiding.”
I peel back the duvet and smile sheepishly at the girl. The girl recoils slightly at the sight of me and I don’t really blame her.
“Hi,” I say brightly. “I’m Stuart. And you must be Daisy.”
She nods. Her eyes go to her mother, plaintively.
Jessamine says, “Daisy. It’s four in the morning. Please go back to sleep.”
“But I can’t.”
“I’ve told you before that you have to teach yourself how to sleep. You’re going to be eleven in October. You can’t depend on other people to put you back to sleep at your age. You need to find what works for you.”
Her tone is brusque, teacher-like.
“Counting sheep,” I say. “Have you tried that?”
She nods.
“Counting backward from a hundred?”
She nods again.
“Reading?”
She nods.
“I try reverse psychology sometimes when I can’t sleep. I tell myself that I don’t care if I don’t fall asleep. That usually does it.”
Daisy gives her mother another beseeching look and then huffs and leaves the room.
“Fuck,” says Jessamine a moment later. “Fuck.”
Now that I am out of the bag, so to speak, Jessamine has no reason not to bring me downstairs for breakfast the next morning.
She makes me tea in a small cup on a saucer and offers to fry some eggs.
I’m not really a breakfast kind of guy so I say thanks but no thanks and I fuss Hugo under the table.
“Should I go?” I ask. “Before your mum gets up?”
“No.” She shakes her head. She’s wearing a nightdress with socks and a cardigan. Her hair is tied at the nape of her neck with a very big satin scrunchie in pale blue. “Stay. It’s fine.” She pours me another cup of tea from a pot and hands me the milk in a plastic bottle.
“Are you sure?”
“Totally.”
Just then I hear the sound of a throat being cleared, the thud of shoe soles against floorboards. I brace myself.
“Morning, Mum,” says Jessamine.
I turn. The woman standing in the kitchen entrance looks about fifty but has a girlish air about her. She’s dressed in a pair of slim-fitting jeans and a fluffy black sweater, her dark hair in a center parting. She stops when she sees me at the kitchen table and turns her gaze to Jessamine.
“This is Stuart,” she says. “He stayed last night.”
“Stayed?”
She has the same voice as Jessamine, well-spoken with slightly hacked-off North London edges.
“Yes. Stayed the night.”
I watch the woman’s face and see it vividly: the disgust, the horror, the distaste.
“Gosh,” she says. “That’s very… unexpected.”
I breathe in and hold it. The atmosphere has become dense and acrid.
“Well,” says Jessamine, turning away from her mother and toward the sink, where she begins fiercely washing something up.
“He is in Istanbul with his wife. And Stuart”—she turns dramatically, soaps suds hanging from her wrists—“Stuart is a very nice man. So really, there’s nothing unexpected about it at all. ”
Her mother turns her face up slightly, peers down her aquiline nose at me. “Nice to meet you, Stuart,” she says. “I’m Annie, Jessamine’s mother.”
Her hands clutch each other across the front of her fluffy sweater; they are thin hands, ribbed with fine bones. The nails are painted red, and she wears a wedding band and a huge diamond engagement ring.
“Lovely to meet you, Annie. And sorry to give you a shock this early in the morning.”
“Really, not a shock. More of a bizarre surprise.” She sighs. “I’ll have a coffee, Jessamine. I’ll take it in my study.”
I narrow my eyes. I’ll take it in my study.
What decade have I been transported to? I watch Jessamine dutifully prepare the coffee using instant powder, skimmed milk, and sweeteners from a tube.
It all goes into a wide-mouthed cup on a saucer, and there on the edge of the saucer, a single thin brown biscuit.
Jessamine carries it carefully from the kitchen and returns a second later.
“What was that?” I ask.
“What was what?”
“That. The whole performance.”
Jessamine cocks her head toward the kitchen entryway and then back at me.
“Why do you have to make her coffee like that? Like a house-maid?”
“Like a…?” She grimaces. “Don’t be so stupid.”
“No, seriously. I’ve never seen anyone make a drink for a parent like that before.”
“Well, then you’ve clearly lived a very sheltered life.”
“Far from it, Jessamine. Far from it.”
“How would you make coffee for your mum?”
“In a mug. Give it a stir. Packet of biscuits.”
“All families are different.”
“They are, that is very true.”
A silence passes between us then. It seems to be asking for me to fill it with an intention to leave, but I feel, strangely, as if I should stay. There’s something in this dark house, something in the air, something that needs me here to bear witness to it.