Chapter Thirty-Eight
ANNIE
I remember that day clearly. The children were at a nice age.
Jessamine was eighteen, Jasper was two years younger.
Jessamine was a dreamer; she wanted to be an actress.
She’d been at one of the best private schools in North London, yet had managed to fail all but four of her GCSEs, including English and math, which we had to pay handsomely for her to retake at a crammer school the year after.
The year after that she went to stage school, where she had just about scraped a pass.
A few weeks later, after graduating, she would leave, make a film, have a stupid affair, get her heart broken, get an office job, fall in love with her married boss, move back home, and never leave. And Jasper… well, we could never have imagined the path his life would take.
I had just sliced into a quiche. Or was it a pork pie? I can’t remember. I just know that I was holding my slicing knife when it happened: the sound of a small, friendly female voice over the fence at the side of the garden.
“Excuse me?”
We all stopped and looked at each other.
“Hello? Excuse me?”
Allen put down his napkin in that slow, measured way of his and got to his feet. He stood and turned to the fence and said, “Can we help you?”
“Well, maybe. It’s just there’s a cat out here and it’s stuck and I wondered if it was yours?”
I saw Allen’s expression change to alarm. “Is it gray?” he asked.
“Yes,” came the voice.
“Wait there, I’m coming round.”
“Actually, it’s OK,” came the female voice. “I’ve got him free. Shall I pop him over?”
“No,” said Allen. “Come to the side, just to your left. There’s a gate.”
And then a moment later, the gate opened, and a girl walked in carrying Allen’s cat in her arms. She was pretty, with long, dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, a pale denim jacket, a spotty dress, white Converse, a canvas bag with badges on it—scruffy, but artfully so.
The cat jumped down and ran toward the back door of the house.
“His collar was caught on a tangle,” the girl explained.
“Her,” said Allen. “She’s a girl. And thank you. We’re very grateful to you. Would you like to sit down? Have a glass of water, something to eat?”
There was a gleam of sweat on the girl’s forehead. “Yes,” she said thankfully, “actually, a glass of water would be amazing.”
I could tell then that she was enchanted, tantalized, could barely believe that she had entered this secret corner of this magical enclave.
People peer over walls and fences and gates in the Vale; they want to know what’s behind them, who lives here, what secret universe we inhabit.
And now this gorgeous, fresh-faced girl was on the other side and there was a table laid with a French linen cloth that had been in my mother’s family since the early 1900s, two lovely teenagers, me, my handsome husband and his precious cat, the sun shining through trees and rosebushes, the sense of being somehow a part of the Heath itself here, right at the very farthest tip of the Vale.
I could imagine her telling her friends about this later on, this magical interlude.
Allen had not brought a girl home for a long time at that point in our lives. I thought that phase was over, but I could feel it in the air that afternoon—smell it even, and my smile was brittle, my voice was flat.
My husband pulled a chair out for her; I poured her a glass of iced water; she sat down.