Chapter 17 #2
‘They sound hilarious,’ he cuts in before the end of an anecdote about my GCSE History class, a trip to the British Museum and a skirt-caught-in-my-tights situation (which in my opinion is genuinely slapstick funny). ‘Teenagers, eh.’
‘Yep. Teenagers. So. How’s your work?’ I know a lot about his job, his career, his colleagues, because he always told me about them in the evenings.
I’d love to catch up on his news, actually.
It’s kind of odd knowing someone so well, and caring about them, even if the zing is gone and you bicker sometimes, and then just not know any more what’s going on in their daily lives.
Like starting a film or a book and not getting to the end.
He waves a hand. ‘The usual.’ Then he gives me a slow smile and does a thing with his mouth that I used to like. Now, I’m just wondering why he’s doing it. It’s weird, frankly. ‘But let’s talk about us.’
‘Okay.’ I’m not sure whether I really want to, though. I feel as though if I’m going to be talking about us I should be ready for it, and it turns out that I am not ready.
Jed pushes our breadbasket out of the way and reaches across to take both my hands.
‘Oh,’ I squeak. This seems a little forward. We are not currently in a relationship and you don’t just grab people’s hands right, left and centre when you’re having dinner with them.
‘I miss you.’ Jed looks deep into my eyes. ‘I know you miss me.’
I blink. I’m not sure… I mean, I did miss him, at first. Now, though…
I say nothing.
‘I made a terrible mistake.’ He squeezes my hands.
I still say nothing. He carries on holding my unresponsive hands.
‘I would like you to carry my babies.’ He strokes the backs of my hands with his thumbs.
I find myself staring at where he’s doing the stroking, thinking that it just feels a bit weird. You don’t just stroke people for no good reason.
‘Soooo.’ He does his mouth thing again, while I stare at him, my mind basically blown. It feels like my brain has been replaced with scrunched-up tissue. I can’t think at all.
‘When are you going to move back to Sydney?’ he asks.
I stare at him and then say, ‘Erm, I have a life here.’
‘Your life has been in Sydney for years.’
‘Yes, but I grew up here and I have my mum and my brothers and a lot of friends.’
‘You have friends in Sydney. And also, no-one should move to where their parents are. Given that they die first.’ He doesn’t even twitch at the insensitivity of his comment in the context of the recent loss of my dad. ‘All our friends and my family miss you.’
‘Why don’t you move here?’ I suggest.
‘Ha.’
I frown. ‘I’m serious.’
‘What? But… our whole lives are in Sydney.’ He says it like there’s no arguing with his point, like it’s entirely right. And, obviously, to be fair, his whole life is in Sydney. But that is because I gave up my whole life to join him there. Because I was in love (or so I thought, anyway).
‘That’s because I made a huge sacrifice and joined you there,’ I point out.
‘It wasn’t a sacrifice, though, was it? Because you love me. So you wanted to do it.’ He looks very slappably smug, like he thinks he’s made the most unarguable-with point.
It’s weird, really, when people can’t see the obvious counter-arguments to their own stupid ones.
‘Are you in love with me?’ I ask him.
‘Of course I am.’ He strokes my hands again, which I don’t like.
‘And so it would not then be a sacrifice for you to move here, for me?’ I know I’m being slightly unreasonable because I’m not sure how easy it would be for him to move jobs, but in theory surely I’m right.
He tilts his head to one side, and looks at me slightly pityingly, like I’m a small child who doesn’t understand what the grown-ups are talking about, and then says, ‘It’s different, silly.’
I tilt my own head to the side, mirroring his, and glare at him.
Then I decide I just cannot be bothered to have this conversation now.
It’s going to be a straight choice for me if I want to have kids: stay in England surrounded by family and friends and hope that I meet someone or successfully go it alone with a donor; or move back to Sydney with Jed. Assuming we can conceive kids, of course.
That is not a choice I want to think about while he’s wittering on at me. I want to think about it by myself, in peace.
Which in itself tells me that he is not my actual soulmate.
But, as I keep telling myself, we have to be realistic in life.
Who does get to live with their soulmate?
And, after all, I have lots of girlfriends in Sydney who I really like.
It wouldn’t have to be all about Jed. I would never have chosen to leave him and I would have been perfectly happy if I’d stayed.
Given, though, that he chose to leave me for that period of time, because I was ‘putting pressure on’ him to have babies (that still rankles, because suggesting, once a year, that we should maybe consider trying to do the thing he’d always sworn blind he wanted to do is not, in my opinion, putting pressure on), maybe I should take this second chance at life happiness and… not, in fact, go back to him.
But will I regret it?
Jed has been talking the whole time I’ve been thinking, and I haven’t heard any of it.
Just like he didn’t hear most of what I told him about my job.
Right now, it’s six of one half a dozen of the other.
By contrast, when we were together, I listened to him and he did not really listen to me and it was much more of a ninety-ten I’d say.
I think we could be happy together. Spending bland time as a couple and deriving emotional sustenance from girlfriends (in my case) and golf (in his case). He isn’t a bad person. I think.
I really do not know.
Suddenly, I really, really want to go home.
Our main courses have just been put in front of us.
I eat mine as fast as possible, while Jed chats about something, and then I say that I’m really tired and have work tomorrow morning so I’m going to skip dessert and coffee and get going if that’s okay.
‘Why don’t I come home with you?’ Jed suggests. ‘And we can talk on the way. And then I can stay the night.’ Wow. The breathtaking arrogance of him.
‘That would be lovely,’ I lie, because I don’t want an argument. ‘But I really can’t do that. We haven’t made any kind of a decision about us and I don’t want to do anything we’d both regret…’
‘I wouldn’t regret it,’ Jed interrupts with a very annoying leer. ‘And I’m sure you wouldn’t either.’
‘I might well regret it,’ I say firmly. ‘And also my job is busy and I am tired.’
‘Okay. Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow evening then?’
‘Erm, no, sorry, I’m going home for the weekend.’
‘To your mum’s?’
‘Yep.’
‘Do you have to go?’ He is so thoughtless.
‘I want to go.’
‘Why don’t I come too?’
Seriously. He is also very, very annoyingly persistent.
‘No,’ I tell him baldly. ‘You should not visit my family unless we’re definitely getting back together. And we have not yet decided.’ Also I really cannot face being with him and Dominic together.
‘Well, I’ve decided.’ He says it very jocularly, like this conversation is all just a bit silly, like if he’s decided something then we will be doing it. Almost as though it’s funny. It is not at all funny, though, it’s bulldozing and annoying.
‘And I have not.’ I suddenly stand up and put my napkin on the table. ‘So goodnight. I’ll pay my half of the bill at the front desk.’
Obviously, because Jed is Jed and he likes a gesture (when he’s in the mood for them), he makes it to the front of the restaurant at the same time as me and insists on paying for the entire bill.
‘What’s mine is yours,’ he says grandly.
‘Thank you. Goodnight.’ I am really, really, really annoyed.
I don’t want to walk anywhere with him, so, even though it’s only a fifteen-minute stroll to my flat, I get straight into a taxi outside the restaurant and refuse to let him get in with me.
And then I spend the whole journey home really, really confused.
I don’t want to be married to Jed. So I think I know what I should do.
But for some reason I’m not certain.
* * *
I’ve got work tomorrow and I don’t want to feel like a zombie from tiredness all day, so I don’t want to be up all night thinking about the Jed question, so when I get home I put the TV on and watch one episode of my latest series.
I’m sleepy by the end of it, so I then get into bed and read until I fall asleep.
I continue not thinking about Jed the whole day at work, because I’m busy, and because I just don’t want to think about him it seems.
After work, I go for a drink for a couple of hours with some of my colleagues.
It’s quieter than the busy leaving drinks yesterday, and it’s lovely to catch up properly on what they’ve been doing over the holidays and tell them about my safari trip (heavily edited: there is no way I’m telling anyone right now, even Jenna, about what happened with Dominic).
Two of my teacher friends are mums of toddlers.
One of them is ecstatic to be back at work following the Christmas break even though she obviously adores her kids.
And the other is really missing hers and thinking about reducing her days so that she can be at home with them more.
They’re having very different experiences but one thing that they have in common is that they both have very supportive husbands who are devoted and very hands-on fathers.
I don’t want to waste my time with my friends thinking about Jed, but he does pop into my head while my friend Maryam is talking about her husband dancing in the kitchen with her daughter before teaching her how to peel a satsuma leaving the peel in one piece.
It’s a little tricky to imagine Jed being unselfish enough to devote time to children like that.
Then Dominic pops into my head from nowhere and I remember him talking extremely gorgeously about taking his nephews to the cinema.
I give myself a mental slap. I do not want to be thinking about Jed and I certainly do not want to be thinking about Dominic.