Chapter 6
SIX
My chat with Jamie, as was often the case when I confided a problem in him – whether it was what shoes to wear to Molly’s thirtieth birthday party, whether my new balayage highlights looked brassy, or how to respond to the latest passive-aggressive voice note from my mother – left me feeling much better.
Of course he was right. Sam hadn’t done anything wrong. Staying overnight with an ex-girlfriend might be unusual, but he’d kept in touch and told me what was happening. Only a clingy, insecure person would make a big deal of it, and I wasn’t that person – at least, I didn’t want to be.
So I stuck to my resolve to take the high road, do the sensible, mature thing and talk to him.
On my way home from work, I popped into the farm shop, which rinsed me of the best part of twenty pounds for three small pieces of cheese, and bought a bottle of fancy red from the wine merchant next door, even though it was a Monday.
And when Sam got back from work half an hour after me, I greeted him freshly showered, my hair washed (at last) and smiling.
‘How are you?’ I asked, hugging him. ‘How was’ – Don’t ask about Ava – ‘your day? I’ve missed you.’
‘Long.’ He dropped his bag next to the front door, where I was guaranteed to trip over it on my way out the next morning, and stretched his arms over his head, yawning. ‘I’m knackered.’
‘Guess you didn’t get much sleep last night.’ It wasn’t a guess – I knew that he’d been up at midnight and had got the first train back to London at six in the morning. But I didn’t want to think about what other form not much sleep might have taken.
He shook his head. ‘Ava’s couch wasn’t the most comfortable, I’ve got to say.’
Couch. That was something anyway.
Feeling the knot of tension inside me ease slightly, I followed him through to the kitchen, where I’d arranged the cheese on a plate along with a bunch of grapes, a loaf of sourdough bread next to it filling the room with its warm, yeasty fragrance.
Milton was prowling around us, meowing enthusiastically – he loved cheese.
I gestured to Sam with the bottle of wine, and he nodded.
‘So how is she?’ I asked carefully, pouring merlot into two glasses. ‘It must have been weird seeing her after all this time.’
‘Not really.’ He sat down, stretching his legs out in front of him and taking a sip of wine. ‘She’s just the same.’
That wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear. An unrecognisable Ava, permanent smile and purple corduroy backpack consigned to the past, possibly with a new and unflattering haircut and a dodgy spray tan that had gone orange, would have been a far easier image for me to accept.
‘Is she living in Manchester permanently now?’ I probed.
Sam shook his head. ‘She’s just crashing at a friend’s place. She’s between jobs and the friend’s off travelling. But she’s starting work in London next month.’
Definitely not what I wanted to hear. ‘Is that why she wanted to see you? To tell you that?’
It would have been kind of strange, I analysed rapidly, to ask Sam to make a six-hour round trip to tell him she’d be living in the same city as him in just a few weeks.
But maybe reassuring. Don’t worry, Sam, I imagined her saying, I’m moving to London, but it’s not because of you.
I know you’re with Georgia now. I just thought I should warn you in case we bump into each other on the Tube.
Unlikely, but not impossible…
But Sam said, ‘No, that’s not why she wanted to see me.’
I’d been digging my knife into the brie, easing off a long, runny slice with a piece of bread ready underneath it.
But now I stopped, put down the bread and knife and watched the cheese ooze across the board, so slowly I could barely see it move, although I knew if I took my eyes off it for a minute and then looked back, it would have run down onto the table.
Like falling out of love, I thought glumly. You don’t see it happening until it has.
‘Why did she want to see you, then?’ I asked, hating the question but equally hating not knowing the answer.
‘I mean, come on, Sam. I’m not controlling – you know that.
But when you go off and see your ex for the first time in years, with no notice, and then don’t come home, and then tell me she wanted to talk to you about something even though she could have phoned you, or waited a couple of weeks and seen you without you having to traipse halfway across the country—’
‘I know.’ He scooped up my abandoned cheese and smeared it onto a slice of bread. ‘I know how it looks. I’m sorry, Georgia. I’m sorry about last night. I know you were worried. It wasn’t fair. I should’ve left earlier and come home… but I couldn’t.’
I looked at him steadily, waiting for him to carry on, picking the biggest grape off the bunch and eating it in two bites to stop myself from asking more questions.
He shrugged. ‘That’s it, I guess. That’s all I’ve got. I’m sorry.’
‘Seriously?’ I’d finished the grape and, all at once, it felt like all the anxiety I’d been feeling – for Sam’s safety when I hadn’t heard from him and about what it might mean for our relationship when I did – had crystallised into anger.
‘That’s all you’ve got? You disappear for twenty-four hours because a woman you were in love with who you haven’t seen in years suddenly needs to see you, like, right now for some mysterious reason, and all you can say to me is “I’m sorry”?
Don’t you think you owe me an explanation? ’
Sam hacked at the cheddar. It wasn’t bog-standard cheddar but some other similar cheese with blueish veins running through it, which the woman in the farm shop had promised me was at the perfect point of ripeness.
For the price, it should have been ripened under a full moon and tended by vestal virgins, I’d thought, wincing as I handed over my credit card.
He looked absolutely miserable.
‘Yeah, I probably do owe you an explanation,’ he said. ‘But I can’t give you one. I’m sorry, but I can’t.’
‘You – what?’ I’d picked up another grape, but instead of eating it, I found myself squeezing it so hard between my thumb and forefinger that the skin burst open, sending cool, sticky juice trickling down into my palm. ‘You won’t tell me what happened or why you were even there?’
‘Georgia, nothing happened. I can promise you that, one hundred per cent. Nothing happened between me and Ava, and nothing’s going to.’
I looked at him. His face still had that guarded, closed-off look, but there was something else there too. He looked… worried? Sad?
‘I believe you,’ I told him, although I wasn’t actually sure that I did. ‘But why, then? Why did she want to see you? Why did you go rushing up there and stay for so long you missed your train? What’s going on? I’m allowed to be worried, Sam.’
‘Of course you are.’ He reached for my hand, turned it over, removed the squashed grape and wiped my skin with a napkin, as if I was a child. ‘But I can’t tell you.’
‘But that’s ridiculous. That’s, like, totally unfair. “Sorry, Georgia, I spent the night with my ex, and I’m not going to tell you what happened, and you’re just going to have to suck it up.” That’s basically what you’re saying.’
Sam shook his head – then he nodded. ‘Yeah, that’s basically what I’m saying.’
‘And you expect me to just put up with it?’
‘I don’t expect anything.’ He sounded weary, like he was stuck in a negotiation in which there could be no compromise and no winner either – which I supposed was exactly what was happening. ‘I’m just explaining that I can’t tell you anything more, and I’m asking you to trust me. That’s all.’
I opened my mouth and closed it again, filled with impotent anger.
The choice he’d presented me with was impossible: I could dutifully put up with whatever was going on – with not knowing what was going on – or I could cause a massive scene, possibly even end our relationship. And over what? Potentially nothing.
Then another thought occurred to me. ‘So when Ava moves to London in, what? Two weeks?’
He nodded.
‘You’re going to carry on seeing her then, and I still won’t be able to know why or what you’re doing?’ Putting the thought into words made me feel sick.
‘Maybe,’ he said. Then he sighed and added, ‘Probably.’
‘Sam, that’s— surely you can see how that looks, from my point of view?’
‘Of course I can.’ He poured more red wine into our glasses.
A splash landed on the table, and he carefully blotted it up with a corner of the napkin that held my exploded grape.
‘Georgia, I love you. I don’t want to hurt you, and I know this is hurting you.
I hate that. But there’s nothing I can do. ’
‘This doesn’t feel much like love.’ I took a gulp of wine, but it didn’t help my dry mouth. It tasted tannic and sour. ‘It feels like you’re choosing Ava – whatever’s going on between you and her – over me.’
‘That’s not what I’m doing,’ he protested.
‘Then what are you doing?’
He looked at me in silence. If winning the argument meant asking him a question he couldn’t answer, then I’d won. But it didn’t feel like a victory.
‘I think I’ll go to bed,’ I said finally.
‘I’ll clean up here so Milton doesn’t eat all the cheese.’
‘Thanks.’
I stood up, my legs feeling as unsteady as if I’d already run up several flights of stairs or possibly like I’d drunk a whole lot more than one small glass of wine plus one sip.
I didn’t kiss Sam goodnight like I would normally have done.
I just made my way to the bathroom, cleaned my teeth and removed my make-up, got my clothes ready for work the next day – all the things I did every night.
But it didn’t feel like a normal night. It felt like the beginning of something new and frightening, or like the end of a chapter in Sam’s and my relationship, the point where everything had gone from being great to being not-okay-at-all, in the space of two days.
Even though the night was warm, I put on pyjamas and then turned out the light and got under the duvet. I lay there in the darkness, shivering, sure that sleep would never come.
I’d done what Jamie had suggested. I’d tried talking to Sam like an adult, calmly and reasonably, and I’d got nowhere. So what was left?
The other thing – the thing that Jamie had jokingly suggested. Rattle his cage.
I didn’t like that idea – I didn’t like it at all. It felt manipulative and cruel, a disservice to myself and to Sam.
But it also felt like there was nothing else I could do.