All Work and No Play (18 page)

At her husband’s funeral, Naomi Cole hadn’t shed a tear. She had stood like a ghost, like half a person, strong and yet desperately reduced.

‘It’s a lot of money,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know it was so much. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘You had enough worries dealing with Dad’s death, and keeping the hotel going.’

She met his eyes for the first time, and her look was keen. ‘You thought you’d pay it off yourself, didn’t you? Is this the reason for the second job with Thom? And the talk about going back to doing some consulting?’

‘Yes.’

She nodded again. ‘You worked hard to retire from the big company and be your own boss. Then you find out about all these loans and give up your dream.’

‘I haven’t given up my dream. I’m still writing the books; I’m just doing other things, too.’

‘You shouldn’t be supporting your mother. You should be establishing yourself so you can start your own family.’ Naomi’s eyes flickered to the closed door of the kitchen; Jane was sitting in the living room, giving the two of them space to talk.

‘That’s a long way away,’ Jonny said. ‘And the hotel isn’t going to make enough income to pay these bills.’

‘I can sell the hotel.’

‘You’re not going to sell the hotel,’ Jonny said. ‘It’s the only thing you’ve got left of Dad.’

That made her frown deepen, and her gaze sharpen. ‘I’ve got more of your father than a building we bought together.’

The financial bad news had been easy, compared to this. What he was going to say next was going to take his mother’s faith and crush it. It was going to smash every memory into ashes, leave nothing but the slate and wood of this hotel.

Jonny clenched his hands on the table. ‘Mum, I need to tell you about why Dad owes all this money.’

‘You mean his gambling?’

In the wedding photos, Jonathan Cole, senior, looked like his son. He didn’t have the same striking perfection of features, but there were the same smile lines dug in his cheeks, and the same laughing mouth. He was tall, dark and handsome. In every photo he was touching his new wife: holding her hand, pulling her closer, stealing a kiss. Even in the big, formal photo that was framed in the centre of the living room wall, he had his fingers twined with Naomi’s. His body leaned towards her, their
eyes locked in an embrace that was more intense than anything physical.

Jane absently bit her fingernail as she wandered along the side of the room, looking at each photograph in turn. There were years of Jonathan and Naomi Cole together, on holiday or at home. Jane recognised the London suburb she’d grown up in. Jonathan had been on the local cricket team, and, even when Naomi wasn’t in the pictures, Jane could tell the ones where she had been behind the camera. Even through years and the glass of the photo frames, she could read Jonny’s father’s love for his wife.

She hadn’t known Jonny’s parents’ story, really, but she could extrapolate it from the photographs. From hairstyles and clothes fashions, it was several years after their wedding when the first photograph of Naomi pregnant appeared. Then baby photos. Jonny had been a chubby lump of a baby, and Jane bet anything he’d campaigned in his adolescence to get those particular photographs locked away out of sight.

She picked up one of him as a skinny and bespectacled child and studied it more closely. This was how she remembered him, but, now that she looked at it, she could see the straight line of his jaw, the full curve of his lip, the innocent cheekbones. Everything that would make him so beautiful when he was an adult was in place,
though not yet focused. A whip-thin, angular blur of a child, overwhelmed by thick lenses and the fringe of thick brown hair.

But that smile. That was there, in baby teeth. It had always been there.

Jane put the photograph down and sat in an armchair. Jonny and his mother had been talking for about an hour and a half, while she waited here. The walls that didn’t have photos on them were lined with books, there was a television, and she could always do some work. But instead her eyes kept being drawn to the photographs. The documentation of three lives, one family.

Her mother had photographs, too—a pride wall in the living room. There weren’t any wedding photos, though; those must have come down after Jane’s parents divorced, when she was about six. There was a photograph of her mother in her army officer uniform, and photos of Jane and her brothers winning races, receiving their degrees, accepting honours. Jane had rarely looked at them growing up, nor these days, when she visited her mother. They were invisible as the wallpaper.

Her father, when she saw him, didn’t have photographs. He noticed actions, not pictures. He noticed noise and slaps on the back and job promotions.

She stood again and went back to the pictures on the sideboard, family shots of the three Coles together. These
pictures were looked at all the time. Naomi was an hotelier, and a careful housekeeper, but the glass had fingerprints.

They were captured images of warmth and love. They showed the kind of life that Jonny wanted to create over again for himself. They were what he feared had never really been true.

And she hadn’t done much for his opinion of relationships, either.

She heard a door open behind her and she turned, quickly putting down the picture of Jonny and his parents. Naomi came in, looking serene as usual, though her blue eyes were perhaps a little pink at the edges. Jonny, on the other hand, was pale and he kept on blinking, as if he were slightly shell-shocked.

The impulse to go and hug him was one of the strongest she’d ever had. However, she wasn’t sure whether Naomi even knew she knew what they’d been talking about, so instead she just met his eyes and tried to figure out how he felt, what he needed.

‘Jane, you haven’t been sitting here for all this time without so much as a cup of tea, have you?’ said Naomi, shaking her head as if all she had to worry about was the status of Jane’s thirst.

‘I’m fine, Mrs Cole,’ she said.

‘Well, come into the kitchen and I’ll make you one.
You must be thirsty and I’m afraid I need to put you to work. I’ve only got a few guests in for an evening meal tonight and when that happens we all eat together.’

She let herself be swept up into the large kitchen and furnished with a cup of tea and some vegetables for peeling. Jane peered around the room, hoping for some sign of what had passed in it, but all of Jonny’s folder of papers had been cleared away, and the place was scrupulously tidy, a Victorian kitchen adapted to both domestic and hotel use. No lingering scent of heartbreak in the air.

That didn’t mean much, though. Jonny had told her that his mother didn’t express her emotions easily. Unlike her son, who, she was beginning to understand, normally wore his emotions honest on his face.

Naomi was discussing pudding with him, giving him a big shopping bag of apples, and, although she could tell this was a task they had shared hundreds of times, she could also tell that Jonny was looking at his mother as if he were seeing her for the first time, despite the familiarity of his words and gestures.

It was between the two of them. She wanted to help.

Instead she picked up a knife and began scraping carrots.

‘Jane Miller!’ Naomi appeared at her side. ‘You can’t do that to a carrot. You’ll slice your fingers off. Use a peeler.’

‘A peeler?’

Again, Naomi appeared to be fully concerned only with Jane. ‘Do you cook, dear?’

‘Not really,’ she admitted. ‘I scramble an egg occasionally.’

‘Your mother never taught you?’

‘My mother always said that the army taught her how to eat anything and cook nothing. She showed us some basics.’

‘But you and those brothers of yours were too interested in creating mayhem than learning to cook. She had her hands full with the five of you, I remember. Lucky woman.’

For a moment, Naomi’s face did show an unbidden emotion: wistful longing. And Jane knew how this woman whose career revolved around making people feel at home felt about only having the one, precious child after years of trying.

‘Right.’ Naomi, all efficiency again, took the carrot from Jane’s hand and rummaged in a drawer, coming out with some instruments. ‘I am going to give you a cookery lesson. And while I do, you can catch me up on how your mother and brothers are doing.’

Jane glanced over at Jonny, who was peeling and coring apples. He had a sure hand with the fruit. Just as he knew how to fix a computer, how to dress, how
to write a book, how to put across a perfect appearance even though he didn’t care about appearances. And yet something about him seemed uncertain right now—not his movements, not his appearance, just whatever it was that made him Jonny.

She could haul him out of the kitchen and ask him what had happened, give him the hug she wanted to give him. Somehow, though, she knew that the best thing for her to do was to keep his mother occupied, let herself be mothered and let Jonny come to whatever adjustment he needed to in his own time.

She had no idea how she knew this. She only hoped it was right.

So she learned how to make a chicken and leek pie big enough to feed ten people. She told Naomi about her brothers’ lives, how her mother kept busy with the Territorial Army and charity organisations, about her own job and what it was like to live in London. As soon as the pie was in the oven there were potatoes to mash, and a salad to make, and the bustle of setting the big table in the hotel dining room and meeting the guests, all flushed from a day’s hill-walking, and Jane didn’t have time to say a word to Jonny until she sat down next to him at the table to eat.

And then they were in front of strangers, and there was nothing she could say to find out what had happened. So
she slipped her hand underneath the table while the potatoes were being passed and touched Jonny’s thigh, firm and solid in his jeans.

He looked at her, their eyes met, and for the first time in her life Jane understood what it meant to communicate without words.

Are you all right?

I’m okay. We’ll talk later.

His hand covered hers for a brief instant and squeezed. They were in a bubble of warmth, a moment for two. Jonny leaned towards her, the side of his face brushing the side of hers, and whispered, ‘Thank you.’

Then the potatoes came, and the social conversation, and they weren’t touching any more. But Jane felt as though they were.

‘She knew.’

Jonny threw himself on his couch, which was big and soft and squishy. His face was pale, the cheekbones seeming more pronounced.

‘About the debt?’

‘About some of the debt. Not all of it. But she knew about my father’s gambling.’

Jane joined him on the couch. She’d felt close to him all through dinner, surrounded by people, but then, once they’d actually been alone in his car, she’d started doubting
again. He’d driven with concentration down the dark and twisting roads to his flat in Keswick, and every second of silence had seemed like an hour to her. That sudden gift of being able to communicate without words had disappeared.

And now they were alone on his couch and she wasn’t quite sure what to say any more. The hug she’d so wanted to give him when they were in his mother’s hotel seemed too much to offer and ask, too much like the sexual contact they couldn’t have.

‘How’d she find out?’ she asked, keeping a safe distance from him on the couch. If she got too close, she would smooth back his hair, try to caress colour into his cheeks.

‘She’s always known. He’s been a problem gambler for years. He told her soon after they married, apparently. It used to be the horses, the football, anything he could bet on at the bookies’. She helped him with it, she said, and he went for long stretches without gambling, but sometimes he would slide. Times of stress. She didn’t know it then, but she thinks now that maybe finding out about his heart disease scared him back into the old pattern.’

‘And you never suspected?’

‘Never. They were—they were too close to let such a secret out from between them, even to me.’ For the first time, Jonny looked at her, and his eyes were the colour
of a wind-tossed lake, a restless sea. ‘He must have been very frightened, to go so far.’

His eyes and his words got rid of her inhibitions. Jane slid across the couch and put her arms around Jonny’s shoulders and hugged him.

He responded immediately by wrapping his arms around her tight and pulling her to sit on his lap. He buried his face in her hair and Jane felt him breathing deep, nestling in closer to her. Her cheek rested against his neck, where his pulse beat under his skin.

Time reduced to heartbeats and breaths taken, Jonny’s scent and warmth drawn down into her body. She was offering him comfort, she knew, but she had never felt so safe.

An indefinable number of moments later, he loosed one of his arms from around her and stroked his hand through her hair. Long, slow strokes, as if he were soothing her, too, by sifting his fingers through her curls.

She raised her head and did what she’d wanted to earlier. The skin of his face was warm and just rough with stubble, the bones precise and perfect under her hand. With her touch she saw colour come back along with his half a gentle smile.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘I didn’t do much.’

‘You were there. That was what I wanted.’

‘How do you feel?’

He blinked a few times, considering, and she noticed that the colour of his eyes had calmed back into deep blue. He had his father’s mouth, but his mother’s eyes.

‘Better,’ he said, and sounded surprised. ‘My father wasn’t the perfect man I thought he was. But he and my mother had a real marriage.’

Still caressing his face, she remembered the photographs. Jonathan and Naomi Cole’s real marriage had been a part of every day of Jonny’s life. He’d grown up feeling an integral part of his family, wanted and valued not just for who he was and what he did, but because he completed the unit just by existing.

No wonder his flat, which he’d moved into five months before, was already more homelike than any place Jane had ever lived. No wonder he had that warmth in his voice and his smile, that ability to be happy in his honest self and to make her feel special.