Chapter 10
TEN
JANE
This whole night has been a complete head fuck. I don’t usually swear, even in my own mind, but there really is no other phrase for it.
First seeing Rory, and being whisked away to his lair.
The outright shock and trauma of being confronted with him again, and the borderline fear I’d felt when we were first alone on the landing.
Rory was always a gentle soul, but right then, as he blocked me from going into my room, I saw a different side to him.
Green eyes blazing, nostrils flaring, a quiet and grim determination in his voice.
By the time I pulled myself together and came downstairs, creeping past Beth’s room and taking heart from her laughter, there was no sight of him. I’d wandered around, and seen that picture – the one of him and Angus on the deck of the Juliet.
That threw me for six, and by the time we started talking I felt like my heart was going to explode.
I sat there, sinking into that chair, drinking that perfect tea.
How did he even know how I took it? Still, though, I felt sick as I drank.
As I listened to his words, feeling the sting of his implied insults, the stark difference between us.
He could be a pin-up on a Hot Artist Calendar, his body all lean muscle from his work, his eyes alive with the forest, his wide lips full of promise.
Me? Well, as he’d pointed out, I was ‘just’ – just me. Just plain old Jane, project manager to a boring business, mother to an irritable teen, commander of nothing but her Deliveroo account. It’s like Maximus’s speech in Gladiator filled in with the mundane.
And then, it all got even worse. Even stranger.
I had no clue why he was so annoyed with me, no clue why he was fizzing with barely controlled anger.
He seemed so self-righteous, so convinced that he deserved something from me.
In my mind, all he deserved from me was a slap across the face – so why was he so upset?
It was like we’d switched roles somehow.
Was he mad because I’ve turned up on his territory and somehow soured things for him?
Nothing is clear, including my brain. My skull is stuffed with cotton wool and scorpions.
As he explains, as he tells me that he waited for me, that I dumped him ‘via his parents’, I am completely struck dumb.
Has he rewritten history over the intervening years?
Is this the story he’s told himself, the legend he has created to ease his guilt?
Or am I going crazy? That is definitely a possibility, I think, grabbing hold of the arms of the chair and digging my nails into the padded upholstery.
I need something real to ground me, because none of this makes sense.
None of this has any substance. If I don’t hold on I might float away, and appear in Beth’s bedroom like Banquo’s ghost.
‘What do you mean, that’s not what happened?
’ he snaps, voice low but somehow still a yell.
‘I was there, Jane. I was there outside the station, all night long. You’d been round to mine, and told my mum and dad that you were ending things.
That you wanted to go to uni instead. And then you went to France, and I never heard from you again. ’
I stare at him, trying to process what he’s saying.
The individual words make sense, but their meaning does not – none of it is true.
Except France. I did go to France, but I had zero choice in the matter – my parents insisted, and I had no energy to fight them by then.
No will left to try and defy their wishes, not without Rory.
There didn’t seem much point, to that or to anything at all.
I take a few deep breaths, and drink some more tea. It’s now lukewarm and disgusting, but I think I probably need the sugar. I look up at Rory, and rally my thoughts. He is as upset as I am.
‘Okay. If you say you were there, I believe you – but I still don’t understand, Rory.
You messaged me and said you’d changed your mind.
You sent me a big long text saying you couldn’t go through with it – that you loved me, but it would be a huge mistake.
You told me… you told me you didn’t want to see me any more.
That it would be best for both of us if we broke up. ’
‘No. No I didn’t. I would never. Shit. I’m getting the whisky…’
He fetches a green bottle from a cabinet, and despite my distress I still register that it is Glenfiddich, not an Irish single malt.
He’s gone full native. He holds it up to me in question, and I nod.
He glugs a generous dollop into each of our mugs.
It’s probably a terrible idea, but I need the boost too.
He drinks some down, then leans forward towards me. Thank God there’s a table between us, because I still feel that connection – that pull. How the heck has it survived all these years? Is it possible for love to hibernate, to be cryogenically frozen? To be paused?
No, I tell myself. This isn’t love. This is a combination of shock and confusion and the cumulative stresses and excitements of the last few days. A lot has happened in a short amount of time, and I am running on adrenaline.
‘I think,’ he says slowly, carefully measuring out each syllable. ‘That neither of us seems to have the full picture of what happened. Did you or did you not go around to my house and tell my folks it was over between us?’
‘Stop sounding like a barrister!’ I say, feeling defensive.
‘And no, your honour, I did not! You want to know what happened to me? I got that message from you, about an hour before I was due to leave. I read it, and my whole world fell to pieces. I was sitting on my bed crying my eyes out, trying to think of what to say to you – how to reply to that – when my dad walked in. He took one look at me, and grabbed my phone. He read the message, and shook his head, and said: “Well, at last he’s acting like a grown-up.” Then he told me he had something to show me.
Something that had been dropped off at ours, through the letterbox. ’
Rory is all ears now, a small frown marring his brow as I tell my tale.
‘What was it?’ he urges, some of the sharp edge gone from his voice.
‘It was a note. One sheet of paper, folded up. Your handwriting – and don’t tell me it wasn’t, Rory, because I could recognise it by then, after all the… exchanges we’d had.’
Cards, letters, love poems. One of the many sketches he’d done of me one day we sat in the park, drawing each other.
Romantic tokens, kept in a wooden box at the bottom of my wardrobe.
Keepsakes that were thankfully gone by the time I recovered enough to look for them – my parents were nothing if not efficient in the aftermath of it all.
‘Okay, Jane. I believe you. What did the note say?’
‘Not much,’ I reply bitterly. ‘It seemed I wasn’t worth a lot of your time.
It said – and honestly, I think this is a direct quote, it was burned into my brain – it said: “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.
I love you, but I can’t carry on this way.
I hope you understand and that one day you can forgive me.
It’s for the best.” And there were three kisses. Kisses! I remember that most of all…’
‘Fuck,’ he mutters, his jaw working, his eyes staring off into the distance.
‘Well. Yes. That sums it up. When your message landed, I wasn’t sure I could believe it – I was still planning on coming to find you, trying to convince you you were wrong.
To beg you to stay with me, I suppose. But my dad kept my phone, and when I saw that note…
well. Even I had to admit it was over. And I never really knew why.
That’s eaten away at me over the years, you know?
How you could go from being this man who was wildly in love with me to this boy who just… threw me away…’
I’m crying now, and I don’t even care. So what if I am? I’m allowed to be upset at the way he treated me. I was a baby, and he stomped all over me. What I didn’t quite expect was for him to be crying too.
‘Oh God,’ he says, voice jagged and raw. ‘It was them. It was our parents. They did this…’
‘What?’ I ask, frowning. ‘They did what?’
‘They arranged it all. How did they know, though? How did they find out what we were planning?’
I stare at him, seeing the wheels turn in his mind. I’m not quite sure what’s led him to this conclusion, but I do have some experience these days.
‘Teenagers are sneaky,’ I say, gesturing upstairs with my eyes.
‘But they’re never quite as clever as they think they are.
I suppose back then, too, there weren’t as many ways to be secretive…
no smartphones, for a start. I guess we thought we were being super-spies, but parents – mums in particular – have a way of knowing when their kid is up to something.
A kind of radar. Maybe… maybe they did figure it out.
I suppose having a rucksack of clothes under my bed wasn’t exactly stealth behaviour, and you always had Callum around…
but why does this matter? What do our parents have to do with anything? What are you saying exactly, Rory?’
Even to my own ears I sound shrill by the end of that sentence, and he glances at me sympathetically. His eyes are right on mine, and I feel like a spider trapped in a web. I can’t look away, much as I want to. He wipes away his tears, and visibly tries to pull himself together.
‘I’m still figuring it all out. It was a long time ago…’
‘It was. But I still remember every single moment.’
‘Me too, Jane,’ he says, not unkindly. ‘Me too. And I did write that note – but not to you. That was the note I left for my family. I put it under my pillow for them to find when we were long gone. And the message… I remember, that day, I had a right go at Callum. I thought he’d robbed my phone, you know what a little gobshite he was… ’
I laugh despite myself. He really was, forever getting into trouble. ‘What does he do now?’ I ask.
‘Spinal surgeon in Sydney.’
‘No way!’