Barefoot in the Dark (13 page)

‘Right,’ he said finally. ‘Let’s kick some gravel.’

Hope kicked, pushing on hard, in order that she would be breathless, and wouldn’t have to talk back to him too much. He didn’t seem to care. He matched her stride easily, keeping up a commentary on the fun run as they ran. Hope wasn’t really listening. He was banging on about one of the sponsors, and how he’d offered to have his team all dress up as comedy hearts.

‘I think he’s mad,’ he was saying. ‘But it might help with the TV coverage.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Oh, and talking of TV, that reminds me. I spotted our man, as it happens.’

Hope slowed a little as they approached a junction, knowing, precisely, which man he meant, because there was only one man on her mind.

‘Saw who?’

He was becoming breathless himself now, his early pace obviously catching up with him. ‘Jack Valentine,’ he panted, jogging on the spot while a train of cars streamed past from the lights. He placed a hand against her back now and began to herd her across the road. She wished he wouldn’t. She lengthened her stride again. He caught up. ‘In that free magazine. The one you get at the doctors. You know –’

She was listening now. ‘No.’

‘That one they give away.
Ladies Only
, or something? I meant to bring it in for Madeleine.’

‘Oh, right.’

‘Well, she’s so keen to get someone from the television involved. Only he was with that woman. I thought Madeleine might be interested. I mean if his girlfriend’s a big shot at HTV, it might be useful, mightn’t it? You never know, do you?’

Hope didn’t know. More to the point, Hope didn’t much want to know. ‘What woman was this?’ She kicked her legs harder.
What
woman?

‘That woman from the telly,’ he panted. ‘You know her. Used to present that news programme. Hey – we on a mission here or something?’ He was gasping audibly by now. ‘Allegra something. Allegra S something… Staunton, that’s it. Hey, he gets about, our boy, doesn’t he?’

Hope didn’t watch a lot of television, but the name rang a definite bell. ‘In a magazine? How come?’

‘The CancerCope ball. One of those society features. They always do them. The great and the good. The “
glitterati
”.’ He said this with what Hope took to be a wry flourish. We are not worthy.

Hope couldn’t imagine why someone like Simon would be a reader of society pages. But then there was lots about Simon she didn’t know. And she was perfectly happy for that state of affairs to continue. Though not perfectly happy right now. How could he have a girlfriend? How could he have a girlfriend and sleep with
her
?

Their cars were coming into view, and Simon began to slow. Hope ran faster, sprinting now. She was breathing in gasps as Simon drew level with her.

‘Well,’ he said, beads of perspiration crowding his forehead and nose. ‘Twenty-seven thirty-two. You certainly know how to make a man build up a sweat!’

Hope wiped the back of her wrist across her forehead. She felt nauseated. And dizzy. She’d had nothing to eat since midday and her body was yowling its protest. She walked a few paces up the road to cool down, while Simon stood, bent-backed, his pale hands on his paler knees. Yes, she did know who Allegra Staunton was. She could picture her. A telly blonde. That was the accepted vernacular, wasn’t it? Just the kind of woman Jack Valentine
would
have on his arm. Simon was sniffing now. Loudly. Then swallowing. Horrible. But better, she supposed, than spitting. Iain always used to spit when he ran. She fished her car key from the little pocket in her shorts. She needed to get away from Simon now, before any other nuggets of innuendo occurred to him. She started back. Simon had fished out his own key.

‘You know, it’s daft us bringing both cars down here,’ he was saying. ‘I’ll pick you up next time. Make much more sense.’ He seemed to be hovering.

It would make no sense at all. It would place him outside her house when they finished their run and leave openings for him to hover even more.

‘I’m happy enough to drive myself,’ she said, conscious as she said it that she must also avoid intimating that her picking him up would be workable. Simon was getting too close for comfort. She unlocked the car and opened the door. ‘I’ve got to stop off at the Spar, anyway.’

‘Oh, right.’ He began walking towards her. ‘Wednesday? Thursday? Er… Hope, I –’

‘We’ll sort it out at work,’ she said hurriedly, sliding into her seat. ‘Better dash or the kids’ll get there before me.’

Hope drove through the darkening Sunday evening streets and tried to still the new waves of regret that washed over her. The woman wasn’t necessarily his girlfriend. Even if she had been when the picture was taken, that meant nothing. The CancerCope ball had been three months back – January? Before Christmas, even. She recalled Madeleine mentioning it. Commenting that a fundraising ball was something they might attempt at some point. God, she wished she could get hold of a copy of that magazine. But what would be the point? What possible purpose would it serve except to confirm her suspicion that Jack Valentine was someone who went out with glamorous women? Why wouldn’t he? By his own admission he had a lot of lost time to make up. He’d made no bones about it. God, why had she slept with him? It wasn’t even as if they were seeing each other. A slick of ruby shame burned on her cheeks. When had he ever sought her out? When had he ever
asked
her out? They’d had dinner, yes, but that had been work. Must have been, in hindsight, because nothing had come of it. Since then – God, it was too awful to contemplate. Her first real connection with someone of the opposite sex and she’d run completely away with herself. She’d chased him, that’s what she’d done. She’d sought him out.
She
had. With her stupid cushions. Trotting round there, all smiles and eyelashes. What had she been thinking? She’d simply handed her body to him on a plate. She pulled her keys from the ignition and hated herself.

Why would he call her? He’d already dined.

Chapter 14

By three on Sunday afternoon, Jack had decided he would stop hanging around at the flat in case Hope phoned him, and went off to visit his father instead.

He’d woken at ten, feeling refreshed and relaxed in an entirely unfamiliar way. It was a full half minute before he realised why, but only twenty seconds more before he realised she’d gone – all evidence of her being there having vanished, bar a single black hair that was coiled on his pillow and the mug of cold tea that sat inches from his nose. He’d padded around the flat, naked, grinning, and fisting the air, as the rewind of the previous night spooled through his mind. Result! Re
sult
! A fine night. A night to remember. A watershed night, in fact. He’d broken his duck and he felt like a lion. No. He just felt like a man again. Sated. Which was plenty to be going on with. Though it was a little strange she’d shot off like that. No note or anything.

Still, he’d thought, peering hopefully into the fridge for more milk, perhaps she had to get somewhere early, and had decided not to wake him. That was probably it. His discovery that he didn’t have her number was a bit of a blow. Quite apart from the fact that he’d quite like to talk to her, being sated was something with a limited life span. What he’d most like to do would be to drag her right back and have sex with her again. And this, in itself, was an interesting thing to contemplate. His memory of similar encounters pre-Lydia was that his principal, number one, morning-after feeling was one of wanting one of them – himself, her, whichever – to be gone. To be somewhere else. And yet, here she was, gone, and he wished that she wasn’t. Curious. But no matter. He went to fetch the mug of tea, and brought it back out to the kitchen to microwave. She’d call him, no doubt, when she could.

But by the time he was ready to leave for the nursing home she still hadn’t called him, and his entire journey there – a one-way trip of about thirty-five minutes – was punctuated by bouts of post-coital insights small and large. Many of these were of an unashamedly carnal and ebullient nature, but nestling among them now was the nagging thought that perhaps it was not such a bad thing that he didn’t have her number, because it was never a good thing to seem too keen where women were concerned. He’d been there already and where precisely had it got him? No matter how much his loins were telling him he wanted to see her again, there was another more insistent voice telling him not to start getting too over-enthusiastic about a woman he hardly knew. Not to regard his morning-after euphoria as anything more meaningful than it actually was. Not to confuse the message with the messenger, in fact. It had been an awfully long time. And not just that. He’d done what he’d set out to, hadn’t he? Why go inventing problems that might not even be there? The words ‘commitment’ and ‘relationship’ ebbed and flowed along the shore of his consciousness, and despite knowing full well that these were simply two staples of the old-bag lexicon that had informed most of Lydia’s bitchings about men (bloody rich, as it had turned out), he was fairly certain they were endemic in much of womanhood. Along with walking in front of the TV during replays and leaving things halfway up stairs. No. He shouldn’t fret about not being able to call her. No rush. He could get her number in work in the morning. Whatever. Bloody hell, but he’d shagged someone at last!

His father, Jack knew, was going to die. Some days he could deal with this knowledge better than others. Some days he would arrive at the nursing home and stride up the long drive, with its rose-stumps and leaf mounds and air of quiet stoicism, and feel strong and accepting and able to cope. Other days, like today, perhaps to bring him back to earth, it made him feel vulnerable in a way he rarely felt elsewhere in his life. It was an inevitability he didn’t feel remotely equipped to have to live through. It scared him. His father would be gone and there’d just be him and Ollie. Just him and his only son. Alone in the world. But thinking of Ollie always made him feel better, albeit in a frightened kind of way. That was the way it worked, having children. You had them and then you moved up to the next notch. He’d soon be the one at the top of the pile. No longer receiving but dispensing advice. Strange how a scant few years could shift the dynamic so profoundly. He and Lydia and Ollie had been a family. As had his mum and dad. But Lydia’s parents – her git of a brother, even – they had been a part of his family too. His extended family. The whole web of relationships – the tussles over Christmas, the remembering of birthdays, the inevitable rows – and now, today, it was almost all gone. He no longer hadan extended family. Sooner or later his father would die, and that would be it. His family would consist of just him and Ollie. That was all. Finite. That was
it
.

He had already stopped at the Esso garage and picked up some wine gums. Jack’s father had always had a great fondness for wine gums, and as the food at the nursing home was bland, at best, and he had so little appetite now, he was always grateful for this little treat. It wasn’t much, but then his father didn’t wantmuch. He was glad that at a time in his father’s life when there was so little he could give him, he could proffer
something
, at least. He paused, as he habitually did, to look back across Cardiff before going in. The nursing home was set high to the south west of the city. From one side the lawns sloped gently away with views over the Bristol Channel, and to the other, the city itself was miniatured before him, the white prongs of the Millennium Stadium winking sunlight in the distance. The last time he had been a regular here – when his mother died – the Millennium Stadium had not even been built. All that construction, all that life going on. All the things and events she’d never lived to see.

There was one nurse in the nursing home that Jack would have fancied, were it not for the fact that the whole notion of fancying someone at this time, in this place, was vaguely distasteful. Something he registered without really connecting to. Her name was Shelley, and she greeted him now.

‘How is he?’ he said. He always said this, even though the answer could only be ‘the same’, or ‘a little worse’, or ‘a lot worse’, or ‘dead’. He wasn’t ready for dead yet. Not ready at all. So there was always a welling of mild panic as he entered the stuffy entrance hall, that his father might actually pass away without him – a ridiculous anxiety, he knew. His dad could die at any time on any day. He could die while Jack was on air. He could die while he was away reporting on a match. He could die while he sat in the cinema with Ollie, with his phone switched off. But Jack didn’t think so. He thought – thought with some conviction, in fact – that in any of these scenarios there would be time to alert him. That there’d be a call in sufficient time that he’d be able to make it to be with him. But, irrational though it was, he had a fixation that what would actually happen was that he’d set off to visit entirely as per usual, and that his father would die while he was en route. Jack knew this was simply a manifestation of his anxiety; even so, his outbreath when Shelley said ‘comfortable’ was heavy with relief. That it wasn’t today. That it wasn’t yet.

‘Nice that the rain’s cleared up,’ she said next. ‘You could take him outside, perhaps.’

‘Yes, nice,’ agreed Jack, nodding. ‘I might.’

Jack’s father was awake and reading the
Daily Mail
when he got to his room, sitting in the chair by the window with a blanket over his knees. Jack visited often – at least once a week, but always felt unprepared for the deterioration he saw. As if time moved more quickly here. Like cat years or dog years. As if the man beneath the face was slipping rapidly away from him, growing ever more difficult to recognise, incarcerated and fading beneath a veil of sallow skin. He held up the wine gums.

‘Splendid, son,’ his father said, nodding. ‘Just the jobby.’

He always said the same thing. Splendid, son. Just the jobby. Jack, smiling, put them on the bedside table and sat down on the bed.

‘So,’ he said. ‘How’ve you been feeling this week?’

‘Not great,’ he said, throwing the paper on the bed. ‘You saw it I suppose? Typical. Just threw it away.’

Jack nodded. He was talking about football, of course. Football was in his father’s blood every bit as much as all the red cells and white cells, so it was no surprise that the performance of his teams (Portsmouth and Manchester United) acted as a barometer on any given week, indicating the state of his mood. It had ever been thus. It was the same with Jack, too. And Ollie? Yes, definitely. Jack liked the sense of continuity that gave him.

‘What about you?’ His father examined him. ‘You’re looking very chipper. More than you’ve a business to.’ He inspected Jack more carefully. ‘Come on, out with it, son. What’s her name?’

* * *

Hope. Where wasshe? What was she doing? He’d checked the answer-phone as soon as he got home, but still there was nothing. And when she hadn’t called by the time it had grown dark, Jack decided he either needed a very cold shower or a breath of fresh air. Not having a shower, there was just the one option. So he telephoned Danny to see if he fancied a pint. It was handy, he decided, him moving into the Cefn Melin flat, because both Danny and the local were only a walk away. Predictably, Danny had been up for it.

Though this was beginning to look as if it wasn’t necessarily a good thing. Jack had told his father all about Hope. At some length. Not just because he was feeling so ridiculously pleased with himself, but also because he knew it was what his father wanted to hear. That he was seeing someone. Well, that wasn’t strictly true. But at least there was a chance that he wouldn’t die and leave his son all alone. Jack’s father worried more about Jack than anything else. He worried that he needed a proper home. That he needed a family. He worried whether he’d be all right once he was no longer there. So Jack had told him. Not about the sex, of course. But much of the rest. The chipmunks. The lock-out. The cushions. He’d liked that.

‘She made you cushions?’ Danny said, after they’d downed their first pint and Jack had told
him
about Hope’s unexpected visit. Why did he do that? Why couldn’t he just keep his mouth shut? ‘Blimey,’ Danny went on. ‘You want to watch that, mate. Sounds a little cosy to me.’

Jack knew that. He also knew that to tell Danny about the cushions had been a spectacularly grave error of judgement. Not because there was anything intrinsically wrong about Hope having made him cushions, but because telling Danny about it immediately flagged up every one of the vague discomforts that he was beginning to have about it and lobbed them back, irrefutable and set in stone, in his face. Why hadn’t he thought that before he told him? He was glad he’d decided not to tell Danny they’d had sex.

‘It’ll be a hearthrug next.’

He knew.

‘Or she’ll start making you casseroles. Before you know it, she’ll be wanting you to get a door key cut for her.’

He
knew
.

‘Don’t be daft,’ he said, depressed by Danny’s relentless ribbing. Perhaps coming out for a drink with Danny had been an error of judgement, full stop. He was a great friend, but sometimes, particularly after he’d been with his dad, it felt all wrong. He needed to be on his own. He couldn’t talk to Danny about his dad. Not really. There were whole areas of Jack’s life that Danny simply didn’t penetrate, and that was just fine. But thinking this seemed disloyal. He was a good, supportive friend. Just wearing at times. Not least because it sometimes felt Danny had taken ownership of him since his divorce. Like he was some counselling guru who always knew what was best for him. He didn’t like the inequality it had caused in their friendship. He just wanted things to get back to normal. To talk to Danny about football. Just football and sex. Though not this sex. Because that felt wrong, too.

But Danny had been there for him when he’d needed him. That was what really mattered. Jack sipped his pint. ‘I think you’re barking up the wrong tree there, mate. It was just a gesture. A nice gesture. She’s a nice person.’

Danny blew out his cheeks and tapped a beer mat on the table. ‘Nice. Exactly my point, mate. Make no mistake. She’s getting her claws into you. And once a woman starts getting her claws into you with cushions, it’s only a matter of time before you’re back down the slippery slope and dragged back up an aisle. Beware the power of the penis, mate. It’ll get you into trouble.’

Danny said it with feeling. ‘Hardly,’ Jack replied. ‘She hasn’t phoned me, after all.’

‘Ah,’ said Danny. ‘That’ll be because you haven’t called her –’

‘But I
can’t
!’

‘– and now she’s sulking.’ Danny stared mournfully at his pint for a few moments. ‘They’re good at that, women.’

‘Don’t be daft, mate,’ Jack said again.

When Jack got home from the pub Hope still hadn’t called, and once he’d abandoned the idea of driving to her house – where
was
it? He didn’t know the street name even – he remembered that he did have Hil’s number, and that Hil being Hil, she’d probably have Hope’s number in her Palm Pilot. She was efficient like that. She’d have taken her details when she came on the show. He leafed through his address book. He ought to ring Hope. Sod being circumspect and cool. He wanted to ring Hope. It was only ten. Not too late. Perhaps they could meet up in the week. Perhaps he could take her out for a meal. Go on a date. That would be novel. But if he rang Hil he’d have to submit himself to an interrogation. An in-depth interrogation. Why was it that since he had found himself single his love life was so much the
plat
du jour
? Why did people feel they had the right to scrutinise his every move? Why was his sex life (or lack of) suddenly a matter of public record? He didn’t ask Hil, or Patti or Dave, for that matter, to keep him posted on theirs, did he? Sex. That was what it was really all about. Yes, they were anxious to see him happy again – and he did appreciate that – but there was also (and this was true of Danny as well) an element of straightforward voyeurism about it. And Hil would tell Dave and Dave would tell Patti, and Patti – bloody Patti probably wouldn’t be adverse to telling South Wales on air. She’d been bad enough over that ridiculous Cinderella nonsense.