Barefoot in the Dark (12 page)

‘You see,’ she called again, as her legs disappeared inside. ‘There we are –
oof
!’

‘Hope? Hope? Are you all right?’ He reached up and grabbed the sill himself now, mildly impressed at the sudden surge of power in his biceps. He really must get back down to the gym. He could still hear her wincing. And now he could see her. She was sprawled on the bathroom floor, clutching her leg.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, balanced over the fulcrum of the sill now. His feet skittered ineffectually against the brickwork. There was no way, NO way he was going to get through this window. She scrabbled to a sitting position on the bath mat and blinked up at him.

‘Don’t be daft, Jack. Get down. I’ll come round and let you in.’

But he was half in already. He heaved his arms against the windowsill.

‘No problem,’ he grunted. ‘I’m in already.’ And with an extra heave he scraped his hips in along with him, landing, with a thud, by the toilet. She was sitting, one knee up, with her back against the bath, scrutinising her leg.

‘Damn,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I’ve laddered my tights.’

He gathered himself up, hitting his head against the towel rail. He rubbed it.

‘Oh, dear. Sorry about that. But, oh well –’ Sod his head. He was feeling rather jolly. He peered at the ladder. ‘They’re disposable, aren’t they?’

Her head snapped up. ‘
Disposable
? What planet are you on?’

Oh dear. Had he blown it? Weren’t tights disposable? Lydia’s always seemed to be. So much he didn’t know about. He sat back on his heels and smiled sheepishly at her.

‘Then I’ll buy you some new ones.’

And then, without any evident reason or warning, she threw back her head and laughed. The biggest laugh he’d ever heard in his life. From a woman, for sure. If you didn’t count Hil. Which he didn’t. Inexplicable. And though he knew his bathroom wasn’t really the place for it, he knew it was also high time to move in.

His opening parry, a rather clumsy two-handed approach on his knees, was greeted with more enthusiasm than he’d dared hope for, and in moments he was going at the kissing with gusto, her arms around his back and his hands in her hair. But he had been on the receiving end of enough bangs and scrapes and bruises to know that however urgent and beguiling the idea seemed right now, there would be little satisfaction in having sex with Hope on his bathroom floor. Quite apart from its decidedly bijou nature, it sported all sorts of paraphernalia that were not conducive to libidinous abandon. The dental floss on the side of the sink. The duck-in-flight terracotta plaque on the wall. The faint whiff of Sainsbury’s summer breeze toilet cleaner. The proximity of the loo brush to his left knee. All this he registered while he was still kissing her. As well as something else. That she was kissing him back. Boy, was she kissing him back. It was this, more than anything, that had him decided.
Carpe diem
. Sod it!
Carpe
Hope Shepherd! There was a perfectly serviceable bed not five yards from the patch of lino, and it was there, not here, that they needed to be. But it was getting from the one place to the other that was going to be the problem. Hope (being female) that was going to be the problem. Give a man anything vaguely erotic to look at and he was instantly, wholeheartedly, unstoppably aroused. A woman, on the other hand, was wired altogether differently. In Jack’s experience, women were all too prone to getting sidetracked. Give a woman a moment for sober reflection and her neurones could so easily be diverted from their course. From ‘yes, do it now’ to ‘what the hell am I doing?’, or even worse, to ‘oh, God – what knickers am I wearing?’ Or, in Lydia’s case, to ‘Sorry, I’m just not in the mood.’ Hope
was
in the mood. No question about that one. The sticky bit, the trick, as with tuning a telly, was to get a fix on the signal and keep things that way. He moved exploratory hands over various soft bits of her. He kissed her more. He moaned into her hair. He had to get her to the bed now, but without giving her sufficient time to take stock and engage thought. Eye contact. That was it. Keep her focussed. On task.

Her hands were round his neck and she was kissing his whole face now.

Then she stopped. ‘Jack, you do have a bed, I presume?’

Bloody hell. Bloody hell, this was going like a bomb now. There was clearly less danger of her going off the boil than there was of him reaching it way too soon. Within seconds of her question, which he had answered with some feeling, she was up on her feet and almost dragging him there.

He’d made the bed, which was good, but left his pile of dirty washing on it, which wasn’t. But he figured that given another five minutes, she wouldn’t even care. Didn’t care
now
, by the look of it – his right arm, effecting clearance, only narrowly avoiding being pinioned by her bottom as she threw herself prostrate and panting on the bed. This was becoming surreal. Did women actually
do
this? He’d anticipated a little more vertical fumbling, a little
soupçon
of shyness, a little light undressing, a little his ’n hers probing-among-underwear stuff.

But there was no time for that. She was feral. Like a wild cat. An exquisite mass of glossy (if laddered) legs and black baby-soft wool. He peeled his T-shirt from his torso, all the better to feel it. Then joined her on the bed and disengaged his neocortex, very slightly shot through with performance anxiety, and not quite believing his luck.

Chapter 12

‘I don’t believe we did that,’ said Hope, some half an hour later. She was lying flat on her back on the bed beside him, her naked body, disappointingly, now covered with the duvet. There were some unexpected benefits to long-term abstinence. It had been barely ten minutes since they’d collapsed, panting, against the pillows, yet already Jack could feel the troops massing for more. It was a quarter to ten. The night was still young.

He turned to face Hope, but she was staring at the ceiling.

‘Well, we did,’ he said. They had, he thought. He had.
Finally
. He couldn’t keep the smile off his face. But her own expression was grim.

‘No, actually I don’t mean that.’ She continued to look up at the ceiling. ‘I mean I can’t believe other. All this post-coital analysis. All this gobbledegook. All this squinnying, as his mother would have said. Jesus! How did his mother crop up? Perhaps he’d better put his hand back somewhere pertinent.
I
did that. Which is different. I mean, well, I don’t mean that to sound… well, you know, I mean you’re a man, obviously, so… I mean, it was great –’ She turned her head and looked at him. Her eyes were slightly smudgy. Mascara, he supposed. He could see now that her irises weren’t as opaque as he’d thought. There were a few amber flecks among the brown. ‘Great,’ she said again. ‘And, I mean, you… you’re so… well, it’s been… well, you know. It’s just that… ’ She stopped again here to emit a heavy sigh. Women. So unfathomable. So very

He did. ‘It’s just what?’

Her lips twitched at the contact. She twisted her body towards him a little. Which was encouraging. ‘It’s just, oh, Jack, I don’t know. I feel a bit like… well, like – God, what got into me?’

‘Er, me?’ he offered. But she didn’t smile. Instead, she drew her brows together. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘Go on. Tell me I’m utterly incorrigible. I can take it.’

‘I wasn’t going to say that,’ she said, as if chiding him. ‘I was just thinking how I came here tonight expecting, well, kind of hoping
,
I suppose, that you might – well… ’ She looked uncomfortable. ‘You
know
.’ He didn’t. ‘Which was fine. And… but –’

And what? But
what?
She had her chin resting on the palm of her hand, and she was looking across him. To the bedside table. Jack knew, without even having to turn his head, that her eyes had come to rest not on the photo, but on the packet of twelve that was lying open beside it. The packet of twelve that Patti had ceremoniously bought him and that had sat in the drawer for all those months. And that she was thinking. He knew it. Not good. ‘ But you didn’t for a moment imagine you were going to ravish me at any point in the evening,’ he said quickly. ‘Well that makes two of us. I’m still gobsmacked, believe me.’

She sat up violently now, casting his hand off her breast like a badly lobbed tennis ball. And put her face in her hands. Her back was very smooth.

‘God, that’s it
.
I’m just stupefied. I can’t believe I just did that. Really I can’t.’

So not the right thing to say, then. Jack sat up too, and put one arm around her shoulder. Which still left one available, which he deployed again pretty smartish.

‘Hey, tell you what,’ he said. ‘How about I ravish
you
now? Even things up a bit. We’ll be quits then, won’t we? Then we can go have that soup.’

She stared into his eyes for such a long time that he began to feel he was playing the lead in a black-and-white foreign language film. Then she looked down at her hands. They were folded in her lap on the duvet. And then at his hand, which was still moving in circles over her right breast. A tiny smile twitched at the edge of her mouth. He tweaked her nipple encouragingly.

‘Hmm?’ he said.

She looked at him again, but by this time there was something rather different in her expression. A little-girl-in-a-sweet-shop coquettishness, maybe. She moved one of her hands back under the duvet and slid it along the inside of his thigh. ‘It’s just that, well. It’s been such a long time. Such a long time, Jack.’

‘For me too.’

‘Honestly? Really?’

He nodded vigorously. ‘Oh, yes. Really.’

Her hand stopped moving.

‘So it’s all right?’ She was doing the staring thing again. ‘I mean, it
is
all right, isn’t it?’

Jesus, she was gorgeous. And he didn’t have a clue what the hell she was on about.

‘Of course it’s all right, Hope,’ he said.

Chapter 13

Hope pulled into her drive to find Suze walking down it towards her.

It was ten past nine, and if someone had handed her a survey containing the question ‘who would you least like to see at this point in your life?’ this vision of fun-fur and novelty cats ’n dogs umbrella would have been her immediate response. God, what was her sister-in-law doing here?

Waving at her, at this point. If only Hope had spotted her sooner, she could have driven on down the street. She glanced in the mirror to see her brother sitting in their car, which was parked across the road. Reluctantly, she lowered the window.

Suze had placed her spare fist on her hip by now. ‘There you are,’ she said, smiling the special smile she had perfected for letting people know she was-not-at-all-impressed. ‘We’d almost given you up. You’re out and about very early this morning.’ She stooped now to peer in at Hope. The car filled instantly with the sort of cloying scent that Hope guessed cost Paul heaps of cash from various in-flight duty-free wagons.

‘Um –’

‘Where’ve you been? We kept calling.’ Hope wondered if perhaps she’d lost a few days. It had been an awful lot of sex, after all. And why were her brother and sister-in-law here anyway? ‘We called last night,’ Suze went on. ‘Several times. And then we called again first thing this morning –’

How first was first thing? Suze was looking at her more intently now.

Hope switched off the ignition and the wipers stopped mid-arc on the windscreen. Iain had always ticked her off about that. Wipers first. Ignition after. Why? What was going to happen to them, for God’s sake? ‘Why?’ she said now, suddenly irritable herself. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Well, no. Not a problem. It’s just that when you didn’t call back… anyway, no matter. We’re off to Ikea.’

‘At this time? They don’t open till eleven on a Sunday, do they?’

‘We’re stopping for breakfast. And we want to get parked. So are you coming or not?’

‘What – to Ikea?’

‘Yes, of course to Ikea. I thought you said you wanted to come with us.’

She had? When was that?

‘Um, well actually… I mean, thanks for asking me and everything, but I’ve got –’ God,
what
? ‘Football. Tom. You know –’

‘How come? It’s Sunday. Anyway, I thought the children were with their father this weekend.’

God, she was sharp. ‘They are. Only there’s a –’

‘I thought you wanted to get that table.’ Recollection kicked in as Suze pointed towards her husband. ‘Paul’s put the seats down and everything.’

‘God, Suze. Sorry. I had completely forgotten.’

Why was she apologising? They had made no plans to go to Ikea. Ever. They’d just had a conversation a couple of weeks back about the fact that
if
they were going there sometime in the near future that she might –
might
– like to go with them. No. That wasn’t how it had been at all. Suze had suggested that she might like to go with them. Hope had thought she rather wouldn’t. Still wouldn’t. And had never said she would. Only nodded at the ‘might’ to be polite, for God’s sake. That was all. No dates. No plans. So why was she acting as if she’d done something wrong?

Suze sniffed and looked at her watch. Then reached across and opened the car door. ‘Well, no matter. Plenty of time still. Did you have a nice evening?’

Hope swung her legs out, grateful that the ladder in her tights was hidden under her boot. ‘Evening?’

‘Last night. You were out.’

‘Yes, I… er… had to deliver some cushions. To a friend.’

‘Oh.’

Hope clamped her lips together while Suze stood to one side to let her out. She looked at her watch again. ‘Well, come on, then,’ she said. ‘Let’s get a move on.’

For a moment, Hope felt Iain’s absence in her life. And felt it keenly, unwelcome though the realisation was. Had Iain been here, Suze wouldn’t be bullying her like this. God, why did she have to say everything twice?

‘It’s very kind of you to think of me, but I really can’t, Suze. I’ve got too much to do.’

Suze exhaled. ‘Well, it’s a pity you didn’t let little old me know that before we trolled all the way here, isn’t it?’ She said this with a smile, but her eyes blazed fury. She blinked. ‘Eh? So shall
we
, then?’

‘What?’

She looked exasperated. ‘Pick up the table for you!’

‘No. No, really.’ Jesus! She didn’t want the bloody table! ‘I’ve got to measure up and everything. And I’m not sure it’s the one I want anyway. I need to… Look, thanks, but no. Don’t worry. No rush for the table. You go.’

Hope stayed standing by her car while they drove off, her brother giving two long toots on the horn to signify their departure to the rest of the neighbourhood, and Suze, with a face like a driven-over biscuit, staring very pointedly ahead. She felt for all the world like a teenage girl who’d just been caught smoking by the bike sheds.

Except it was so much worse than that.

He’d been asleep when she’d woken, edged into consciousness by the unfamiliar ticking of a clock somewhere. Fast asleep. She’d slipped quietly from the bed, so as not to wake him, and pulled on a T-shirt that was crumpled in a pile of clothes on the floor. Then she’d taken their soup bowls out into the little kitchen, washed them both up and stacked them on the draining board. She’d pulled back the net curtain but there was a man down in the garden – Leonard, she supposed – so she’d lowered the net again quickly and made a pot of tea. There was only just enough milk for two mugs.

She hadn’t known quite what to do or think. Only that she shouldn’t be there. She’d taken the tea in and put his beside him on the bedside table, only inches from his nose. His features, in sleep, looked smooth and untroubled. She could fall in love with this man, she knew she could, and the thought, so powerful and so utterly unwelcome, was almost enough to make her run from the room. She didn’t want to feel like that. Not now. Not about him. But she couldn’t seem to help it. She was awed by his body, bemused by his maleness. The way the hair under his flung-out arm was so pale and wispy, yet the rest of it was so dense and wiry, running in a cross over his chest and almost from neck to groin. She had been glad the duvet covered that bit. She didn’t want to see such an intimate part of him in the cold light of day. It would feel too personal. Too intimate, in fact. Altogether more so than the sex.

She let herself into the house and dropped her bag on the floor by the hall table. The answer-phone light was winking frantically at her, recording, no doubt, the chain of events that had placed her sister-in-law on her drive. She wondered if Jack’s voice would be on there too, but she didn’t press the button. She didn’t think she could bear that it might not be. She went up to shower instead.

It was the knickers, really. The stepping back into the pair of knickers that she had worn last night. They never seemed to mention things like that in books or movies. The dirty-laundry implications of unscheduled sex away from home. Of staying the night. Of hanging around. Of still being there in the morning. Oh, God. Stupid.
Stupid
. Thank heavens she was home now and could get it all off.

She hadn’t been able to shower at the flat – there wasn’t one – so, not wanting to breach any house rules by filling the bath, instead had washed herself all over at the sink. The bathroom window, she’d noticed, was still wide open. She gazed out of it while she cleaned her teeth with his toothbrush, watching the blobs of rain streak down the window frame, pooling at the bottom before re-falling below.

And then she’d had to go back into the bedroom and re-dress in the clothes she’d scattered to the four winds last night. Unswizzle her knickers, unravel her laddered tights, pull the now shapeless wool dress back over her head. All this while he’d slept. She didn’t want to wake him. She knew if she did he’d be on her in an instant, which, given that she knew she’d be unable to resist him, would only compound the angst now crowding her mind. Or worse. Or
worse
, he might be indifferent. Vaguely hostile. Be unable to hide the fact that he didn’t want her there. Why did she feel this way? Would he really be like that? Yes. Yes, he would. If not immediately, then soon after. She stepped into the shower to wash it all away. She’d never in her life felt so ashamed.

The house was as she’d left it. There was no reason why it wouldn’t be, but as she had never spent a night away from it since moving in, it felt strangely unfamiliar – cold. As if she’d just returned from two weeks in the Med. She rubbed herself dry and padded back naked to the bedroom, where the sight of her torso in the dressing table mirror brought new waves of horror to wash over her again. What had got into her? What had possessed her to let him have sex with her like that? What would he think of her?

God, but why did she think so little of herself? She was an adult, wasn’t she? A single adult. There was no reason on earth why she shouldn’t have sex with anyone she saw fit to have sex with, at any time she saw fit, and without reference to any of the cock-eyed rules of morality that had informed her teenage years. She was an adult. She needed to have sex. Sex was something fundamental to life, wasn’t it? And hadn’t she enjoyed it? Yes.
Yes
. But she still shouldn’t have done it. She pulled on fresh underwear and scowled at her reflection. She shouldn’t have let him. She shouldn’t have done it. What would he think of her now?

She needed to talk to Madeleine. Madeleine would make her feel better. Less the victim of a stupid adolescent crush, and more an independent woman who had just happened to have sex with a man. Madeleine, now in her late fifties, had sex whenever and with whoever she felt like, and it never seemed to bother her in the slightest. Hope wondered if it wasn’t something to do with having been bereaved as opposed to divorced. Madeleine’s sex life with her husband had been legendary. If it wasn’t actually in the middle of a shag that he’d keeled over, even Madeleine herself wasn’t fazed by the notion that their energetic couplings might have been a factor in his untimely death. A short life but a happy one. She’d said that more than once.

Maddie hadn’t been rejected. That was the thing. She didn’t have that switch, so it couldn’t be turned on.

She called Madeleine, while still in her bra and pants.

‘I’ve done it.’

‘Done what?’

‘Been to bed with someone.’ It sounded, surprisingly, all right, saying that to Madeleine. Sort of rugged. Uncompromising. Cosmopolitan-esque.

‘Sweetness! That’s marvellous! Do I know him? Was it good?’

‘Yes, you know him.’ She took a breath. ‘Maddie, it was Jack Valentine.’

There. She’d said it. And she felt a little better for it, which surprised her. Madeleine whooped.‘Finally! You harlot, you! Mind you, I knew it was only a matter of time.’ Of course she’d known. But more to the point, had Hope known that too? Yes, of course she had. It was just the amount of time that she’d miscalculated. But it was all right. She could be a sexual animal when she was talking to Madeleine. It felt like it had been – exciting. Spontaneous. It didn’t feel shabby. She could pretend it didn’t matter if he didn’t call her now.

But he hadn’t called her yet. And where, oh where, was her optimism now?

‘You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ she added anxiously.

‘Not if it’s a secret. Though why it would be I have no idea. You’re both available, aren’t you? Wow
ee
,’ she added. ‘So how did all this come about? I mean, I knew you had a bit of a thing for him, but, my word, you’re a shifty mare.’

Hope told her about the cushions. It had seemed such a nice, uncomplicated idea at the time, untarnished, she’d told herself, by ulterior motives. Just a gesture. A gesture of friendship. Of empathy… She sighed. That wasn’t true, and she knew it. ‘… and then,
God
, I don’t know. It just sort of happened.’

‘And I can hear the glow in your voice, darling.’

‘It’s not a glow. It’s a tremor. I feel awful.’

‘Awful? Why on earth do you feel awful?’

‘Because I just threw myself at him, Maddie. Went round there and threw myself at him. God, I can hardly bear to think about it. How could I do that? How could I be so forward?’

How indeed? Madeleine made a tut tut sound down the phone. ‘Sweetness, get real. Which century do you imagine you’re living in?

‘I know. I
know
. But it still feels wrong to me.’

‘But why?’

‘Because he must think I’m so, well, easy.’

‘Dear me, Hope – you sound like
Jackie
magazine circa nineteen-seventy. The world doesn’t work like that any more. It’s only sex, darling. That’s all. Who cares about the logistics of who made the first move?’

It was actually not so much the logistics. She knew that. It was her crushing insecurity. Would there ever be a time when she didn’t have to lump it around with her? When she loved herself enough again not to care who else did?

The telephone rang finally, at a quarter past six, and she eyed it for a moment, almost too frightened to pick it up.

It was Simon.

‘Only me,’ he said. He always said ‘only me.’ As if he didn’t much matter. As if it being only him would never be anything other than a disappointment to anyone. To her, at least. Which, right now, it was. There was a brief pause. ‘Well,’ he said then. ‘Are we on?’

They were supposed to be running at seven. She had not forgotten. Merely put her head in the sand. Hoped that if she did nothing and he did nothing it simply wouldn’t happen. Which was stupid. She had answered the phone and now she would have to go running with Simon. How could she not?

‘We’re on,’ she said, trying to sound like she meant it. Perhaps a run would do her good. Clear her head. If not her conscience. ‘Anyone else coming?’

‘Just you and little old me,’ he said happily. Oh dear.

‘I can’t make it a long one,’ she said quickly. ‘I have to be back for the kids.’

It would do her good. The evening was dry and crisp and threatening a frost, and her breath was cotton wool in front of her as she jogged up to meet him. She liked running best when there was a chill in the air.

They met at the park. Two circuits of the pavement that ran around the perimeter of the park, Simon told her, came to exactly three point two miles, as long as you included the war memorial. Just a spit over five kilometres, which was perfect. He knew this, he said, because he’d driven it earlier, to check. He had a chunky watch on, one of those watches that could tell you the time in Buenos Aires while simultaneously monitoring your mean gradient and reminding you how far off sea level you were. He spent some moments fiddling with it before they set off.