A Most Desirable Marriage (16 page)

Jo laughed. ‘Sorry . . . yes, something like that. But it all kicked off last night . . . bloody Lawrence told Nicky about me and Travis.’

‘And I take it he was underwhelmed?’

‘Could say that.’

‘And Cassie?’

‘She knows too. But she’s been amazing. Doesn’t seem angry, just thoroughly disappointed in her parents.’

‘I must say . . .’

‘Don’t.’

‘So what did Nicky say?’

‘Nothing . . . to me at least. But he had a set-to with Travis after the show. He refuses even to have the conversation with me.’

‘Oh dear. What’ll you do?’

Jo shook her head. ‘You know what? I’m not going to do anything. It’s his problem. I’ve apologized in about five messages to him. There’s nothing more I can do if he continues to sulk.’

Donna clapped her gloved hands. ‘Good to hear you being so robust about it, darling.’

‘I think he’s being childish. Fine, be cross with me if he has to. But as you’ve said a million times, I’m not hurting him. And if Cassie can be OK with it . . .’

‘Obviously Lawrence was jealous though.’

‘Jealous?’ It had never occurred to her. ‘I don’t think so. What makes you say that?’

‘Why else would he have dobbed you in to Nicky behind your back?’

‘He didn’t dob me in, exactly. He assumed Nicky knew. But it’s his precious house he’s worried about. Thinks Travis is getting his feet under the table and robbing him of his inheritance.’

Donna laughed. ‘LOVE IT. Serves the idiot right. You should do just that.’

‘I wish.’

‘So it’s going well . . .’

Jo’s shoulders slumped as she let out a low groan. ‘It’s great.’ She looked up at her friend. ‘But he’ll be gone soon . . . another job somewhere. This play’s been good for his career.’

‘Ouch.’

‘Can’t think about it.’ But despite her words, she could think about little else. She and Travis had stayed a long time on the sofa, lying in each other’s arms, the night before.

‘Don’t like to leave you,’ he’d said.

‘Don’t like it either.’

He’d laughed softly. ‘This is where the Power of Now is supposed to kick in. To rescue us from the future.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, after a moment’s consideration. ‘Not working for me so far.’

‘Nor me neither. But hey, I haven’t gone yet. It might be a while . . .’

They’d both known that wasn’t true. He’d already told her that the man in the tweed coat – one Jack Lebus – was considering him for a part in an HBO mini-series about to start shooting in New York. He was waiting to hear from his agent today.

‘This is why,’ Jo told Donna now, ‘I refuse to waste time on Nicky’s hurt pride at the moment. I might only have a few more days with Travis.’

‘God, darling. This is worse than
Brief Encounter
. Aren’t you heartbroken at the thought of losing him?’

Jo shrugged. Have I ever really had him to lose? she wondered. It was almost as if Travis were a will-o’-the-wisp, a beautiful figment of her imagination.

*

When she went back home it was still only a quarter to eight, but Cassie was already in the kitchen with a mug of tea and a slice of toast with Marmite.

‘Hi, you’re up early.’

Her daughter looked resolute. ‘I’m going back to sort it out with Matt.’

Jo sat down at the table. ‘Today? Is it because of us, me and Travis?’

Cassie shrugged. ‘I am kind of over playing gooseberry . . . but it’s not just that, Mum. Hearing you talk about him last night, it reminded me what I’m missing . . . having someone who really gets me, thinks I’m the bee’s knees.’

‘You don’t think you have that with Matt?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe once. Anyway, I’ll give it one more go.’ She took a sip from her cup. ‘But if he won’t let up a bit on the farm, I’m not sticking around to be ignored for the next thirty years.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘I want kids. And yes, it’d be an idyllic place to bring them up, but not if it’s going to be the planet over the children. He should have married one of those tough, red-faced farmer’s wives. They put up with all kinds of shit. But I’m not like that.’ She shrugged. ‘So . . . we’ll see.’

‘He’d be stupid to let you go,’ Jo said.

‘Yeah, well, he might be stupid. Men are stupid. Look at Dad.’

She’d already packed her stuff into the new backpack she’d bought, put on her new trainers. By nine-thirty she was gone, Jo and Travis waving her off on the doorstep like an old married couple.

The house suddenly seemed very quiet. Just the two of them. Travis looked at her. She looked back at him.

‘Did we run her off? I feel bad if we did,’ Travis said.

‘We may have. But it’s probably just as well. She has to sort out her marriage sometime.’

‘Sure. I guess I feel guilty that she had to deal with us too.’

Jo nodded. ‘Me too. She was so generous, didn’t give either of us a hard time. And she really could have.’

They stood in silence in the kitchen. Jo had put the kettle on and it had boiled, turned itself off, but neither of them made any attempt to get the tea.

Then both of them moved simultaneously towards each other. His arms were round her, her cheek pressed against his shoulder.

‘We could always try and assuage our guilt by going upstairs . . .’ he muttered into her neck.

She laughed. ‘It’s a very bad idea you know, using sex to medicate.’

‘But hey, we are very bad. We’re super-bad. It’s been confirmed. What have we got to lose?’

There was a freedom, a joy about their lovemaking that morning. All anxiety, all restraint had vanished. And they knew each other’s bodies by now, knew what the other liked. It was pure pleasure.

‘I never thought . . .’ Jo began later.

Travis looked at her enquiringly when she didn’t finish the sentence. He’d run her a bath and she was lying back in the warm water as he sat in his black YSL trunks, cross-legged on the bath mat.

‘I never imagined . . . I would have this . . . not with anyone, particularly not with someone like you.’

‘Like me?’

‘Well, you know . . .’ She didn’t want to say ‘young’, didn’t want to say ‘gorgeous’.

‘Because of Lawrence?’

‘Yes. But I mean particularly you.’ She turned her head to look at him. ‘You’re just very unlikely.’

This made him laugh. ‘I’ve never been called “unlikely” before.’

‘But you are. To me. And extraordinary.’

Travis looked away, embarrassed. ‘I’m so not a girl-in-every-port kinda guy, you know.’ He paused. ‘I . . . just couldn’t resist you.’

His simple statement brought tears to her eyes.

‘I haven’t told you . . .’ he began.

She held her breath.

‘Bobby rang late last night. I got the part. Leave Friday.’

She didn’t ask why he hadn’t said something sooner. It didn’t matter. The normal sensitivities between two people who were contemplating a life together – such as assessing the other’s long-term suitability on all fronts, including sex, money, trust – were irrelevant. But nothing was going to stop her heart contracting at his news. She pulled herself up in the bath.

‘You got the job. Fantastic! Congratulations.’

He grinned. ‘Yeah, thanks. HBO, a full-on mini-series set in a New York apartment building on the Upper East Side. It’s a co-op . . . you know, the ones where the residents’ board decides who gets to live there.’

‘What’s your part?’

‘I’m the son of one of the apartment owners, squatting really, and not approved of. Being manipulated by a society hostess on the floor above. All dumb soap stuff, sex, money and politics . . . should be awesome.’

‘I’m so pleased for you. Don’t let them murder you in the first series.’

Travis laughed, stood up as Jo did and held out the towel as she stepped out of the bath, wrapping her in it and pulling her into his arms again. She felt almost dizzy at what he was telling her.

*

They didn’t say, ‘We’ll keep in touch’. He didn’t say, ‘I’ll be back soon’. She didn’t say, ‘Don’t leave me’. But the thoughts were there. They constantly pricked the edge of her consciousness, and she saw Travis’s in his eyes – that hesitation sometimes, when he would just gaze at her but say nothing.

In the days left to them they closed out the rest of the world, ignored all calls, enjoying the brief time uninhibited. Often they just talked and talked together about life, the universe and each other, with a freedom based in their imminent separation. And they made love, of course, lingering over each other’s bodies, savouring every element that gave them pleasure, as if committing the softness of skin, the contour of a muscle, the scent, the line of lips and cheek, to memory.

Early on Friday morning – Travis had to leave for the airport by ten – they lay for the last time together, their bodies tight against each other. Jo had been awake for hours in the night, and she knew Travis had been restless too.

‘Will you be OK . . . on your own?’ he asked, his tone hesitant as if he didn’t want to offend.

‘I don’t know,’ she said honestly.

He looked down at her. ‘You know this has been magic for me.’

‘And for me.’ She swallowed hard, but she was not going to cry.

‘Kiss me one more time . . .’ he asked.

‘You’ll be late.’

He laughed. ‘It’ll be worth it.’

11 November 2013

It was Monday morning, two days after Travis left, and Jo hadn’t been outside all weekend, hadn’t spoken to anyone since walking with him to Hammersmith Tube station so that he could catch the Piccadilly line train to the airport. Donna was away staying with friends, but Jo was relieved. She wasn’t ready to share her loss with anyone, not even her best friend.

And she wasn’t bereft. She was still basking in the glow of the powerful attraction they’d been lucky enough to share. Travis seemed to be there with her still. There was no proper realization yet that she might never see him again. So she lay naked in the bed they’d shared, wrapped in the warm duvet, the faint scent of him still on the pillows, the sheets. She wandered about the house, sat for hours just staring into space, opened a book and had no idea what she’d been reading, listened to the radio and had no idea what she’d just listened to, barely aware that Travis was really gone, that it was just her now, her life waiting to be redefined for a second time in less than six months.

It was her agent, Maggie, who broke the spell.

‘Just wanted to find out how it’s going . . . with the book?’

Jo held the phone to her ear, paralysed, not knowing how to reply.

‘Jo?’

‘Hi, yes, I’m here . . . sorry.’

‘Did I interrupt something?’

‘No . . . no, it’s just . . . well, I haven’t really made much progress.’

‘OK. By “not much progress”, what do you mean exactly?’

Jo let out a short laugh. ‘About fifteen thousand words.’ she lied fluently, knowing she should care more, both about the lying and about the fact that she’d actually written barely fifteen hundred. But she found it didn’t seem important. Maggie was silent for a moment.

‘Are you stuck? Or just unsettled . . . what with all that’s been going on for you.’

‘Sort of both. But it’s still three months till the deadline.’

‘Six weeks. End of the year.’

‘Oh.’

‘Jo . . . are you OK? Should I be worried?’

‘Frances won’t get to it till the end of January though, will she? She never reads them immediately.’

‘But it’s still important you deliver on time. We don’t want to risk her cancelling it because you’ve missed the publication slot.’

‘I suppose not.’

‘Do you need more time?’

‘No. No, I don’t think so. It’s only fifty thousand words. I can do that in six weeks, I have before.’

‘Right.’ Her agent was trying to sound relieved. ‘Well, let me know how it’s going, will you?’

‘I will. Promise.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘I’ll get something to you by Christmas, so you can look through it before we send it off.’

After the call was ended, Jo just sat there at the kitchen table, her stomach churning. She had no idea what she was going to write. The existing story outline was somehow foreign to her now, the whole thing about bisexuality, about Lawrence really, seemed like a nasty taste in her mouth. How was she to invent a sympathetic character around a subject she just wanted to forget? But write it she must. I’ll start tomorrow, she thought, and slowly made her way upstairs and lay down under the duvet, pulling the covers snug round her head.

*

When Jo finally sat herself down in front of the computer and read what she’d written, she found the words, few as they were, sounded flat, rote and uninspired. No Young Adult is going to read any further than page one, Jo thought, and deleted the whole lot. She had been true to her word and this Tuesday morning she had forced herself out of bed earlier than usual, stripped the bed, tidied the room, cleaned up in the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee and retreated to her study and the document that should have been a nearly finished draft of her next book.

Even her young hero’s name was wrong: Jake. Won’t do, she thought, searching around for the right one, something sensitive without being feminine, strong, definitely not trendy – a likeable name, but class-neutral. She flicked through one of the boys’ names sites on Google. The name had to be up to date, no Martins or Mikes or Daves. And it struck her, as she plumbed the Zacs, Oscars and Lukes, that it was pretty insane, a woman of her age thinking she could get inside the head of a modern-day teenage boy. But she’d done it in the recent past, and successfully too. Bobby, she thought. A good name. Then the appealing face of the boy who had killed himself flashed across her mind and she dismissed it quickly. Robbie, maybe?

The cursor winked at her: in out, in out. The page read: ‘Chapter 1’ in an authoritative way. Nothing. And then she suddenly found herself crying, as if the document had somehow upset her with its blankness. The tears were followed by panic, a sense of unreality, as if her body were collapsing, falling inwards as she sat there in her ergonomic chair. Like a person who has died and not been found for weeks.

And who would find her if she had? None of the men in her life, that’s for sure. Her father dead, Lawrence defected, Nicky insulted beyond comprehension – an open wound that she tried not to think about – Travis far away and gone across the sea. Only Cassie and Donna remained to care, and Cassie was busy rebuilding her own life among the pigs and bolting lettuces. For a while Jo didn’t move, the dark screen the only witness to her distress. It was a while before the tears gradually began to falter, then stop, as if she had come to the bottom of a deep reservoir, simply run out of tears. Everything went very still, her mind empty, almost peaceful. Just me. The words floated across her brain, testing her. Just me. And the more she heard them, the less they seemed to frighten her. Just me . . .

She had no idea how long she sat there, almost in a trance. But eventually, the breath began to fill her lungs again, her spine straightened. And she found her fingers reaching out for the keyboard, almost with a will of their own. They hovered above the letters, pausing for a moment as if waiting for the off at the beginning of a race, then began moving fast and sure. Letters, words, sentences which became paragraphs began to appear on the previously blank document, her hands apparently channelling words that she herself was unable to hear.

Out came thoughts and feelings she’d skimmed over for a lifetime, things she barely understood: about her mad mother and her cold, unloving father; about the leering men hanging about the house; about Bobby; about her father’s sudden absence and a lost teenage looking after her selfishly distraught mother. About Lawrence and his inability to hear her, to take her seriously much of the time. And her denial that he had. About her loss . . . of them all.

But these seemed to be words formed as her fourteen-year-old self. As if her development had not moved beyond that time when she was faced so starkly with the cruel reality of life. The text, which rapidly filled up the pages, sounded youthful, frightened, lost. She was writing from a place beyond her rational mind, ostensibly about her own pain, but the character – who had morphed from a boy called Jake to a girl called Tess without any conscious thought on her part – took on a life of her own, two lives in fact. One was the good, functioning teenager who looked after her younger siblings and her alcoholic mother. The other, angry and wild, who ran rampant with a gang of town boys getting up to all kinds of trouble related to sex, drugs and crime.

And as Jo wrote, the two versions of Tess, at first so separate, gradually began to come together into one more functioning whole under the almost mystical auspices of her online mentor – a woman or a man, Tess never quite knows which – to whom she talks daily and who is her support and only reliable friend.

Three days later, the word count now way beyond the fifteen thousand she’d pretended to Maggie she’d already reached, the outline firmly in place, she realized she had a book. Not the book she’d been commissioned to write, admittedly, but she pushed on nonetheless, knowing now that she couldn’t stop. If it didn’t work and Frances didn’t like it, she would just have to risk the consequences.

She was sitting having a cup of tea at the kitchen table when her phone rang. She heard Travis’s voice with a sudden lurch of her heart. ‘Hi, it’s me.’

‘Hi, you.’

‘Thought I’d call and see how you’re doing.’

Jo laughed. ‘I’m OK. Well . . . if I’m honest, a bit bloody manic.’

‘Doing what?’

‘I’ve been on a loony writing jag. How’s it going your end?’

‘Yeah, pretty good. Met the director and the producers. Think it’s going to be OK, but I don’t start shooting for another ten days and I’m just hanging about right now.’

‘Miss you . . .’ Jo said into the silence.

‘God, me too.’ She heard him sigh. ‘Sure made me laugh, though, the way we said goodbye. It was like we were distant friends who’d bumped into each other on the station. Bye, see you around, must hook up, kinda thing.’

She laughed. ‘We were so keen to pretend we didn’t mind!’

‘As if.’

‘That’s why I’ve been so focused. “Doing” stops “thinking”.’

‘Is that so?’

‘Not really. Well, sort of. For short periods anyway. But it’s not all bad, thinking about you . . . in fact it’s positively pleasurable if you take away the fact that you’ve gone . . . completely gone . . . just upped-sticks and deserted me.’ Jo adopted a melodramatic tone, keeping the truth in her words from becoming too real for either of them.

‘Yeah, the leaving bit’s a bummer.’

They both began to laugh, not because it was at all funny, just enjoying the contact, the sound of each other’s voices.

‘It’s been good talking,’ Travis said later, at the end of their long conversation.

‘Very.’

‘Take care of yourself.’

‘And you.’

‘Bye now.’

As Jo put her phone down she had a feeling they wouldn’t talk soon, or perhaps ever. It was over. Like a mirage in the desert he had come into her life without warning, gone just as suddenly – shimmering, tempting, hardly real. She quickly put her mug in the sink, ran some water into it and hurried upstairs to bury any yearnings for Travis in another page full of text.

*

‘Go away, Lawrence.’

There was a baffled silence on the other end of the phone. ‘What did you say?’ her husband asked.

‘I said go away. I can’t be bothered listening to another bloody whinge about the house right now. Just leave me alone.’

And she put the phone down and got on with her writing, barely giving him another thought. She was pinned to the computer from morning till night, and now, nearly three weeks after Travis had gone, she was nearing the last five thousand words of the book. It was virtually writing itself. It was only in her tea break that she finally got around to reading Lawrence’s texts – three separate ones sent over a period of a couple of hours that morning.

First text: ‘Are you OK, Jo? I really need to talk to you. L.’

Second text: ‘It’s not about the house.’

Third text: ‘It’s v. important. Pls ring. L.’

God, she thought. What does the man want this time? What can be so important if it’s not the house or money? She hadn’t even asked him for any money, not since she’d borrowed a small amount from Donna a month ago. She wasn’t spending much at the moment anyway. With a sigh she dialled his number.

‘Hi.’ Lawrence’s voice was frosty.

‘What’s up?’

‘We need to talk, as soon as possible.’

He still sounded chilly and was obviously waiting for Jo to apologize.

‘OK, well, go ahead, I’m listening.’

‘Not over the phone.’

‘Oh, come on, Lawrence. Cut the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Just get on and tell me what the problem is. I’m busy.’

‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Jo. There’s really no need to be so offensive,’ he said. And she could picture his mouth pinched in that prudish way he had when he thought he had the moral high ground.

She didn’t answer.

‘If you must know, it’s Nicky.’

‘What about him?’ Jo was not in the mood to be given another lecture about her behaviour towards her children, not least because she was very upset by her son’s continued refusal to contact her. Since Travis’s departure she had texted or left messages for him on an almost daily basis, but he’d returned none of them. Cassie said he was being a ‘plank’, and that she should ignore him. But Jo was finding that hard to do.

Lawrence could be heard taking a long breath.

‘Amber’s pregnant.’

‘Oh, God . . .’

‘But it’s not as simple as that. I’d rather talk to you face to face . . . if you can tear yourself away from whatever it is you’re doing.’

‘All right. Where?’

*

She went to the back of the café, where there were squashy armchairs and ordered a green tea as she sat waiting for her husband, her mind totally taken up with fictional Tess as she worked out the next sentence, the next paragraph.

Lawrence gave her a curt smile as he sank his long body into the chair opposite.

‘Glad you could spare the time,’ he said.

She ignored his huffiness. ‘Tell me about Nicky.’ It was only hours since Lawrence’s phone call about the baby, and she was having trouble getting her head around the fact that her son, still so young in her eyes, was going to be a father.

He shook his head slightly, clearly bewildered.

‘Well . . . Amber’s ten weeks. And she’s adamant she doesn’t want it.’

‘And Nicky does?’

Lawrence nodded. ‘He’s distraught that she’s even considering aborting it.’

Jo frowned. ‘Didn’t she know she was pregnant before this? I mean ten weeks is pretty far gone.’

‘Apparently not. She doesn’t have periods very regularly, Nicky says.’

‘Probably because she doesn’t eat enough.’

‘Whatever . . . but Nicky wants us to talk to her, persuade her not to get rid of it.’

‘Us? As in, you
and
me?’ She paused. ‘He hasn’t spoken to me in weeks, Lawrence. It’s been really upsetting. All the messages I’ve sent and nothing back. Know how you must have felt with Cassie . . . but this is a godsend if it means we can be in touch again.’ She paused, hearing how that must sound. ‘You know what I mean . . .’