One Plus One: A Novel (22 page)

“I lost the whole first half hour. And I didn’t understand some of their accents. And I couldn’t see properly. And I got really nervous, and I kept staring at my paper and then by the time I got the glasses, it took me ages to find a pair that fit me and then I couldn’t even understand the first question.”

Jess scanned the corridor for the organizers. “I’ll talk to them. I’ll explain what happened. I mean, you couldn’t see. That’s got to count for something. Maybe we could get them to adjust the score to take it into account.”

“No. I don’t want you talking to them. I didn’t understand the first question, even when I got the right glasses. I couldn’t make it work the way they said it should work.”

“But maybe—”

“I messed it up,” Tanzie wailed. “I don’t want to go over it. I just want to go.”

“You didn’t mess anything up, sweetheart. Really. You did your best. That’s all that matters.”

“But it’s not, is it? Because I can’t go to St. Anne’s without the money.”

“Well, there must be . . . Don’t worry, Tanze. I’ll work something out.”

It was her least convincing smile ever. And Tanzie wasn’t stupid. She cried like someone heartbroken. Nicky had honestly never seen her like that. It actually made him want to cry a bit, too.

“Let’s go home,” he said when it became unbearable.

But that made Tanzie cry harder.

Jess looked up at him, her face completely lost, and it was like she was asking him,
Nicky, what
shall I do?
And the fact that right now even Jess didn’t know made him feel like something had gone really wrong with the world. And then he thought: I really, really wish Jess hadn’t confiscated my stash. He didn’t think he had ever needed a smoke more in his life.

They waited in the hallway as the other competitors retreated
into cars with their parents, and suddenly, unexpectedly, Nicky realized he did feel angry. He was angry with the stupid boys who had put his little sister off her stroke. He was angry with the stupid maths competition and its rules that wouldn’t bend a tiny bit for a little girl who couldn’t see. He was angry that they had come all this way across an entire country just to fail again. Like there was nothing this family could do that turned out right. Nothing at all.

When the hallway had emptied finally, Jess reached into her back pocket and wrenched out a small rectangular card. She thrust it at him. “Call Mr. Nicholls.”

“But he’s halfway home by now. And what can he do?”

Jess bit her lip. She half turned away from him, then back again. “He can take us to Marty.”

Nicky stared at her.

“Please. I know it’s awkward, but I can’t think what else to do. Tanzie needs something to help her up again, Nicky. She needs to see her dad.”

—

He was back within half an hour. He had just been down the road, he said, having a bite to eat. Nicky thought afterward that if he had been thinking more clearly, he might have wondered why Ed hadn’t gone very far, and why it had taken him so long to have a snack. But he was too busy arguing with Jess, a few feet from the car.

“I know you don’t want to see your dad, but—”

“I’m not going.”

“Tanzie needs this.” Her face had that determined set, where you knew she was making out that she was taking your feelings into account, but actually she was just going to make you do what she wanted you to do.

“This is really not going to make anything better.”

“For you, maybe. Look, Nicky, I know you have very mixed feelings about your dad right now, and I don’t blame you. I know it’s been a very confusing time—”

“I’m not confused.”

“Tanzie is at rock bottom. She needs something to give her a lift. And Marty is not that far away.” She put out a hand and touched his arm. “Look, if you really don’t want to see him when you get there, you can just stay in the car, okay? I’m sorry,” she said when he didn’t say anything. “I’m not exactly desperate to see him, either. But we do have to do this.”

What could he tell her? What could he tell her that she would believe? And he supposed there was 5 percent of him that still wondered whether he was the one who was wrong.

Jess walked back to Mr. Nicholls, who had been leaning against his car watching. Tanzie sat silently inside. “Please. Will you give us a lift to Marty’s? His mum’s, I mean. I’m sorry. I know you’ve probably had enough of us and we’ve been a complete pain, but . . . but I haven’t got anyone else to ask. Tanzie . . . she needs her dad. Whatever I—we—think of him, she needs to see her dad. It’s only a couple of hours from here.”

He looked at her.

“Okay, maybe more if we have to go slowly. But please—I need to turn this round. I really need to turn this round.”

Mr. Nicholls stepped to one side and opened the passenger door. He bent down a little so that he could smile at Tanzie. “Let’s go.”

—

They all looked relieved. But it was a bad idea. A really bad idea. If only they’d asked him about the wallpaper, Nicky could have told them why.

T
he last time Jess had seen Maria Costanza was the day she had delivered Marty to her in Liam’s brother’s van. Marty had spent the last hundred miles to Glasgow asleep under a duvet, and as Jess stood in her immaculate front room and tried to explain her son’s breakdown, she had looked at her as if Jess had personally tried to kill him.

Maria Costanza had never liked her. She’d thought her son deserved better than a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl with home-dyed hair and glittery nails, and nothing Jess had ever done since had changed Maria’s fundamentally low opinion of her. She thought what Jess did with the house was peculiar. She thought the fact that Jess made most of the children’s clothes herself was willfully eccentric. It never occurred to her to ask why she made their clothes, or why they couldn’t afford to pay someone else to decorate. Or why when the kitchen sink overflowed, it was Jess who ended up under the sink wrestling with the U-bend.

She had tried. She really had. She was polite, she didn’t swear. She was faithful to Marty. She produced the world’s most amazing baby, and kept her clean, fed, and cheerful. It took Jess about five years to grasp that she wasn’t the problem. Maria Costanza was just one of life’s lemon suckers. Jess wasn’t sure she had ever seen her smile spontaneously unless it was to report some piece of news about one of her friends or neighbors—a slashed tire or a terminal illness, maybe.

She had tried to ring her twice, on Mr. Nicholls’s phone, but got no answer.

“Granny’s probably still at work,” she told Tanzie, ringing off. “Or perhaps they’ve gone to see the new baby.”

“You still want me to head over there?” Mr. Nicholls glanced at her.

“Please. I’m sure they’ll be home by the time we get there. She never goes out in the evening.”

Nicky’s eyes met hers in the mirror and slid away. Jess didn’t blame him for being negative. If Maria Costanza’s reaction to Tanzie had been lukewarm, her discovery that she had a grandson she hadn’t even known about was met with the same enthusiasm she would have expressed had they announced a family case of scabies. Jess couldn’t tell whether she was offended because he had existed for so long without her knowledge or whether her inability to explain him without referring to illegitimacy and her son’s involvement with an addict meant that she just found it easier to ignore him altogether

“You looking forward to seeing Daddy, Tanze?” Jess turned in her seat. Tanzie was leaning against Norman, her face solemn and exhausted. Her eyes slid to Jess’s and she gave the smallest of nods.

“It will be great to see him. And Granny,” Jess said brightly. “I’m not sure why we didn’t think of it sooner.”

They drove in silence. Tanzie dozed, resting against the dog. Nicky sat and watched the darkening sky. She didn’t feel like putting music on. She didn’t dare let the children see how she felt about what had happened in Aberdeen. She couldn’t let herself think about it.
One thing at a time,
she told herself.
Just get Tanzie back on track. And then I’ll work out what to do next.

“You okay?” Mr. Nicholls asked.

“Fine.” She could see he didn’t believe her. “She’ll feel better once she sees her dad. I know it.”

“She could always do another Olympiad, next year. She’ll know what to expect then.”

Jess tried to smile. “Mr. Nicholls. That sounds suspiciously like optimism.”

He turned to her, and his eyes were full of sympathy.

She was relieved to be back in his car. She had begun to feel oddly safe there, like nothing really bad could happen while they were all inside it. Jess pictured being in the front room of Costanza’s little house, trying to explain the events that had led them there. She pictured Marty’s face when she told him about the Rolls-Royce. She saw them all waiting at a bus stop tomorrow, the first stage in an interminable journey home. She wondered briefly whether she could ask Mr. Nicholls to mind Norman till they got back. Thinking about this made her remember how much this whole escapade had cost, and she pushed the thought away. One thing at a time.

And then she must have nodded off, because someone had hold of her arm.

“Jess?”

“Nngh?”

“Jess? I think we’re here. That GPS says this is her address. Does this look right to you?”

She pushed herself upright, uncricking her neck. The windows of the neat, white terraced house gazed unblinkingly back at her. Her stomach lurched reflexively.

“What’s the time?”

“Just before seven.” He waited while she rubbed her eyes. “Well, the lights are on,” he said. “I’m guessing they’re home.”

He turned in his seat as she pushed herself upright. “Hey, kids, we’re here. Time to see your dad.”

—

Tanzie’s hand gripped Jess’s tightly as they walked up the path. Nicky had refused to get out of the car, saying he’d wait with Mr. Nicholls. Jess decided she’d let Tanzie go in before she went back and tried to reason with him.

“Are you excited?”

Tanzie nodded, her little face suddenly hopeful and, just briefly, Jess sensed that she had done the right thing. They would salvage something out of this trip, even if it killed her. Whatever issues she and Marty had could be sorted out later.

Two new small barrels sat by the front steps, filled with a purple flower she didn’t recognize. She straightened her jacket, smoothed the hair from Tanzie’s face, leaned forward, and wiped a bit of something from the corner of her mouth, and then she rang the doorbell.

Maria Costanza saw Tanzie first. She gazed at her, and then up at Jess, and several expressions, none quite identifiable, flickered rapidly across her face.

Jess answered them with her cheeriest smile. “Hi, Maria. We, um, were in the area, and I just thought we couldn’t pass without seeing Marty. And you.”

Maria Costanza stared at her.

“We did try to call,” Jess continued, her voice a singsong, and odd to her ears. “Quite a few times. I would have left a message, but—”

“Hi, Granny.” Tanzie ran forward and threw herself at her grandmother’s waist. Maria Costanza’s hand went down and she let it rest limply against Tanzie’s back. She had dyed her hair a shade too dark, Jess noted absently. Maria Costanza stayed like that for a moment, then glanced at the car, where Nicky stared out impassively from the rear window.

God, would it kill you to express some enthusiasm, just once?
Jess thought. “Nicky will be over in a minute,” she said, keeping the smile firmly on her face. “He’s just woken up. I’m . . . giving him a moment.”

They stood and faced each other, waiting.

“So . . . ,” Jess said.

“He—he’s not here,” Maria Costanza said.

“Is he at work?” She had sounded more eager than she had intended. “I mean, it’s lovely if he’s feeling . . . well enough to work.”

“He’s not here, Jessica.”

“Is he ill?” Oh, Christ, she thought. Something’s happened. And then she saw it. An emotion she was not sure she’d ever seen on Maria Costanza’s features. Embarrassment.

Jess watched her attempt to cover it. “So where is he?”

“You . . . I think you should talk to him.” Maria Costanza brought a hand to her mouth, as if to prevent herself saying more, then extricated herself gently from her grandchild. “Hold on. I’ll get you his address.”

“His address?”

She left Tanzie and Jess standing on the doorstep, and disappeared down the little hallway, half closing the door behind her. Tanzie looked up quizzically. Jess smiled reassuringly. It wasn’t quite as easy as it had been.

The door opened again. She handed over a piece of paper. “It will take you maybe one hour, maybe an hour and a half, depending on the traffic.” Jess registered her stiff features, then looked past her to the little hallway, where nothing had changed in the fifteen years she had known her. Nothing at all. And somewhere in the back of Jess’s head a little bell began to chime.

“Right,” she said, and she wasn’t smiling anymore.

Maria Costanza couldn’t hold her gaze. She stooped then, and put her palm against Tanzie’s cheek. “You come back and stay with your
nonna
soon, yes?” She looked up at Jess. “You bring her back? It’s been a long time.”

That look of mute appeal, of acknowledgment in her duplicity, was more unnerving than almost anything Maria Constanza had ever done in the years of their relationship.

Jess swept Tanzie toward the car.

—

Mr. Nicholls looked up. He didn’t say anything.

“Here.” Jess handed him the paper. “We need to go here.” Wordlessly he began to program the postcode into the GPS. Her heart was thumping.

She looked in the rearview mirror. “You knew,” she said when Tanzie finally put her earphones in.

Nicky pulled at his fringe, gazing out at his grandmother’s house. “It was the last few times we’ve spoken to him on Skype. Granny would never have had that wallpaper.”

She didn’t ask him where Marty was. She thought she probably had an idea even then.

—

They drove the hour in silence. Jess couldn’t speak. A million possibilities ran through her head. Occasionally she looked into the mirror, watching Nicky. His face was closed, turned resolutely toward the roadside. She began slowly to reconsider his reluctance to come here, even to speak to his father these last few months, casting it in a new light.

They drove through the dusky countryside to the outskirts of a new town and a housing development where the houses were box fresh, laid out in careful, sweeping curves, and new cars gleamed outside like statements of intent. Mr. Nicholls pulled up to Castle Court, where four cherry trees stood like sentinels along the narrow pavement upon which she suspected nobody ever walked. The house looked newly built; its Regency-style windows gleamed, its slate roof shone in the drizzle.

She stared at it out of the window.

“You okay?” They were the only two words Mr. Nicholls had spoken the entire journey.

“You wait here a minute, kids,” Jess said, and climbed out.

She walked up to the front door, double-checked the address on the piece of paper, then rapped with the brass knocker. Inside she could hear the sound of a television, and see the vague shadow of someone moving under bright light.

She knocked again. She barely felt the rain.

Footsteps in the hallway. The door opened and a blond woman stood in front of her. She wore a dark red wool dress and matching
pumps, and her hair was cut in one of those styles that women wear when they work in retail or banking but don’t want to look like they’ve entirely given up on the idea of being a rock chick.

“Is Marty here?” Jess said. The woman made as if to speak, then looked Jess up and down, at her flip-flops, at her crumpled white trousers, and in the several seconds that followed, from the faint hardening of her expression, Jess could see she knew. She knew about her.

“Wait there,” she said.

The door half closed, and Jess heard her shout down the narrow corridor. “Mart? Mart?”

Mart.

She heard his voice, muffled, laughing, saying something about television, and then the woman’s voice dropped. Jess saw their shadows behind the frosted-glass panels. And then the door opened and he stood there.

Marty had grown his hair. He had a long, floppy fringe, swept carefully to one side like a teenager. He wore jeans she didn’t recognize, in deep indigo, and he had lost weight. He looked like someone she didn’t know. And he had gone quite, quite pale. “Jess.”

She couldn’t speak.

They stared at each other. He swallowed. “I was going to tell you.”

Right up to that point a part of her had refused to believe it could be true. Right up to that point she had thought there must be some huge mistake, that Marty was staying with a friend or he was ill again and Maria Costanza, with her misplaced pride, just couldn’t face admitting it. But there was no mistaking what was right in front of her.

It took her a moment to find her voice. “This? This is . . . where you’ve been living?”

Jess stumbled backward, now taking in the immaculate front garden, the living room, just visible through the window. Her hip bumped against a car on the drive and she put out her hand to
support herself. “All this time? We’ve been scratching around for the last two years just to stay warm and fed and you’re here with an executive home and a—a brand-new Toyota?”

Marty glanced awkwardly behind him. “We need to talk, Jess.”

And then she saw the wallpaper in his dining room. The thick stripe. And it all fell into place. His insistence that they only speak at set times. The lack of a landline phone number. Maria Costanza’s assurance that he was sleeping whenever she rang outside the usual time. Her determination to get Jess off the telephone as quickly as possible.

“We need to talk?” Jess was half laughing now. “Yes, let’s talk, Marty. How about I talk? For two years I’ve not made a single demand on you—not for money or time or child care or help of any kind. Because I thought you were ill. I thought you were depressed. I thought you were living with your
mother
.”

“I
was
living with Mum.”

“Till when?”

He compressed his lips.

“Till when, Marty?” Her voice was shrill.

“Fifteen months.”

“You were with your mum fifteen months?”

He looked at his feet.

“You’ve been here fifteen months? You’ve been here more than a year?”

“I wanted to tell you. But I knew that you’d—”

“What—kick up a fuss? Because you’re here living a life of luxury while your wife and kids are back at home scrabbling around in the crap you left behind?”

“Jess . . .”

She was briefly silenced as the door opened abruptly. A little girl appeared behind him, her hair a virgin sheet of blond, wearing a Hollister sweatshirt and Converse trainers. She tugged at his sleeve. “It’s your program, Marty,” she began, and then she saw Jess and stopped.

“Go to your mum, babe,” he said quietly, his gaze flicking sideways. He put his hand gently on her shoulder. “I’ll be through in a minute.”

She looked at Jess warily. She was the same age as Tanzie. “Go on.” He pulled the door behind him.