The Importance of Being a Bachelor (6 page)

Now, not only had he not had a date with a potential right kind of girl for over a week but he also had nothing lined up for the future either. He reasoned that the best thing he could do to cheer himself up on a Saturday morning would be to take himself over to Beech Road, find a nice café and treat himself to a slap-up English breakfast. Then he would head to Marks and Spencer on the High Street to hang around their ‘Meal for One’ chill cabinet in the hope of sourcing a few potential right-kind-of-girl dates.

Quickly getting dressed, he made his way out of the house and ducked into his local newsagent’s to pick up a
Daily Mail
and the latest issue of
Men’s Health
. Whiling away his time in the longish queue at the till Adam recalled various snippets of his conversation from his last right-kind-of-girl date (had she really confessed that she called home from work twice a day to leave a message for her cats on the answerphone?) and was oblivious of his surroundings until he looked up to see that the queue appeared to have stalled because the woman directly in front of him was searching around for change to pay for the copy of the
Guardian
in her hand. Tutting under his breath Adam reached into his pocket and pulled out a two-pound coin.

‘Here,’ he said, handing her the coin. ‘Take it.’

‘I really couldn’t,’ said the woman, rummaging around the pockets of her vast handbag.

‘Go on,’ said Adam. ‘It’ll be my good deed for the day.’

She looked up and smiled. ‘Thank you. I really don’t know how I could have left the house without—’

She stopped.

‘Adam Baxter!’

‘It’s Bachelor,’ he replied. ‘Adam Bachelor and you’re . . .’ He momentarily scanned her mental image through his brain cells. A girl. A girl from school. A bit of a brainbox. Not particularly exciting. May well have teased her about wearing braces. That was it.

‘You’re Stephanie Holmes!’

The last time he had seen Steph Holmes was probably on the day of his final English O level paper. She had been sitting at a desk a few seats in front of him and he remembered being impressed at the speed with which she had opened up the exam paper and started writing. She was easily the smartest girl in the school and was bound for greatness while he was, as the various teachers who wrote his numerous school reports never tired of saying, ‘very intelligent but inherently lazy’.

‘It’s got to be at least twenty years,’ said Adam, marvelling how the time had flown.

‘Oh, don’t say that! It means we’re both really old and I don’t think I’m ready for that. Look, let’s agree it’s been more like fifteen and we’ll say no more about it.’

Adam paid for his things and they walked towards the door of the shop. ‘So what have you done with your decade and a half?’

‘Where to begin? After school my mum sent me to a private sixth-form college, after that I went to Oxford, after Oxford I went travelling for a while but I had to return early because my mum fell ill – it was just me and her you see – and then after she passed away I ended up moving to the US to work for a bank in New York. Then I moved to a bank in Tokyo, then I moved to another bank in Tokyo, then I decided I had had enough of both Tokyo and banking and moved back to Manchester and bought a house on Wilton Road and started working for a women’s shelter that a friend of mine set up in Stretford.’

Although she had attempted to gloss over it quickly Adam felt he ought at least to acknowledge the fact of Steph’s mum’s death but then he remembered that they were in the middle of the newsagent’s. This was neither the time nor the place. Instead he went for a much lighter topic. ‘Which number Wilton Road are you?’

‘Two eighty-three, why?’

‘Two eighty-three! I’m mates with your neighbours Jon and Shelley. They live at two eighty one!’

‘Small world.’ Steph smiled.

‘I can’t believe you’ve done all that in fifteen years! You must never have stopped.’

‘Maybe I should apply for early retirement. Anyway, how about you? What have you been up to since school?’

‘Nothing that impressive,’ replied Adam. ‘Left school, did a bit of this and that, moved around for a bit, came back to Manchester, did a bit more of this and that and now I run my own bar on Wilbraham Road. You probably know it, BlueBar?’

‘That’s yours? Oh yes, I know it. Never been in it, mind. It all looks just a little bit too trendy for my liking. If I go out at all these days it’s more likely to be for a meal. Still, you must be doing really well to have your own bar. Well done you.’

There was a long pause, most of which was Adam’s fault because he was engrossed in thoughts about Steph. She clearly wasn’t his old type. And she wore glasses. Adam had only ever been out with one other woman who wore glasses and she hadn’t actually needed them: they were part of a sexy buttoned-up secretary look that had been popular at the time. Those glasses had been a prop, something to be removed in order to elicit the ‘Why Miss Jones, you’re gorgeous’ response whereas Adam could tell that without her glasses, Steph would be struggling to find him. Still, in general at least she fitted the right kind-of-girl label and given that he had nothing better on he was prepared to give her a go if only to keep himself in practice. He checked her left hand. There was no ring in sight. He wondered if he should ask more questions but in the end decided he would be better off just jumping in with both feet.

‘Look, I don’t suppose you fancy going for a coffee do you?’

Steph pulled a face. ‘I’d love to, it’s just that—’

‘Go on,’ he interrupted, flashing her his best smile. ‘You know you want to. One coffee, maybe a small pastry and then I promise that you can get on your merry way. In fact you won’t even have to talk to me. If I get boring you can just whip out your newspaper and I won’t complain. Go on, what do you say?’

‘You’re not going to take no for an answer are you?’

Adam grinned and shook his head. She was putty in his hands.

‘Fine,’ she relented. ‘Let’s go for a coffee. But I really can’t be too long.’

‘One day it really will be all right.’

As Adam was going for coffee with Steph, Luke was lying in bed eyeing the remains of a long-digested coffee and croissant breakfast as he dozed in Cassie‘s arms.

‘We should get up and do something,’ said Cassie, yawning. ‘At this rate the whole day will be over before we’ve got out of bed.’

‘I know,’ said Luke, ‘but it’s so nice and we’ve both had pretty manic weeks so can’t we stay here a little longer and just be?’

‘You’d love that, wouldn’t you? If it was up to you we’d spend all day in bed.’

‘And all night and the day after too.’

Cassie’s smile faded as though something serious had come to mind. ‘I know this isn’t really the time or the place . . . but are you going to tell Jayne about our plans to get married?’

Luke sighed and sat up. Was it really impossible for women to be happy about anything for more than ten minutes at a time? Would their lives fall apart if they weren’t in constant search of the next obstacle? ‘She wouldn’t want to know,’ he said briskly. ‘I doubt that she would care one way or the other. She’s probably remarried herself for all I know.’

‘And what about Megan?’

‘What about Megan?’

‘Surely she deserves to know that her dad’s getting married again?’

‘Of course. Don’t you think I’d be with her right now telling her to her face if I could?’ Luke put his head in his hands and Cassie leaned across and kissed his temple.

‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘One day it really will be all right.’

The story of Luke and Jayne was a depressingly familiar one, or at least that’s what Luke’s solicitor told him when they initially tried to find a way for Luke to gain access to his daughter. Whenever Luke looked back at that first meeting with Jayne he was struck by how random life was. Everything would have been completely different had he not bothered going down early to his housemate’s get-together at the Crown and Garter in Ealing and instead spent, as he had intended, the better part of the evening at home cramming for his Master’s in construction management. Jayne, it turned out, had planned to leave his housemate’s celebration at just after nine. Luke hadn’t planned to get there until well after ten. If they had both stuck to their plans then their future might never have happened. Maybe Jayne would have got together with one of Luke’s other housemates or maybe Luke would have asked out the girl at work with whom he had been sharing awkward smiles in the lifts for weeks. Still, just after eight as Jayne was fending off the advances of one of Luke’s mates Luke walked into the pub, bought a drink, found his friends and casual introductions were made. Luke grabbed a spare stool and placed it in the only space available left: next to Jayne.

Given the significant odds against it, maybe there had been something inevitable about their meeting. Luke didn’t believe in stars or destiny or any of that mumbo-jumbo but he couldn’t help believing that the two of them had been deliberately brought together because the moment he sat down next to her he felt as though a piece of himself that he’d never even known was missing had clicked into place. How was it possible to have so much in common with a random stranger? Was it an accident? Was it fate? Luke didn’t know but Jayne obviously felt the same because the moment they left the pub and were out of sight of their friends her fingertips had reached out for his own.

A year on the magic had all but disappeared, replaced by the mundanity of life – which neither of them were really prepared for. Living in an overpriced rented flat in the wrong part of Hackney, Luke liked to believe that they both knew their time together was coming to an end. Far from being perfectly matched it seemed that the only thing they had in common was the ability to bring out the worst in each other. Rows would follow rows, tempered only by brief bouts of making up before the cycle would begin all over again.

In the September of their second year together Jayne fell pregnant and everything changed. Determined to try and interpret their new circumstances as proof of the genuine nature of their feelings for each other they put all their effort into papering over as many cracks as they could find in a vain attempt to rescue their relationship. Within a few months they had moved up to Manchester and the year after Megan was born they got married in a register office in Jayne’s home town of Bath. All the Bachelors came down from Manchester for the big event; Luke’s dad made a joke in his speech about how he had always feared that all three of his boys would end up being ‘Bachelors by nature as well as by name’; and Luke concluded his moment in the spotlight with his own words of wisdom: ‘Some people spend a lifetime looking for the right person to love and still never find them. I’m just thankful that having found Jayne so quickly I’ll be lucky enough to spend my lifetime loving her.’

It barely took a year before things fell apart. Luke got seconded to a building project back in London which meant he had to live in a hotel from Monday to Thursday; Jayne’s control issues became more and more exaggerated and eventually she refused to allow Luke’s parents to take care of their granddaughter for more than a single hour a week despite the fact that she was desperately in need of assistance. Finally, one afternoon in the summer that Megan turned four, Luke returned home to find a note from Jayne telling him she was leaving him for good and taking their daughter with her. Guessing that they’d gone to her parents’ house Luke got back into his car and drove to Bath only to be told by his father-in-law in no uncertain terms that Jayne didn’t want to see him. From there things went from bad to worse and Luke found himself bouncing from lawyers’ offices to family law courts and back again in a bid to see the daughter he was missing so much. After weeks of toing and froing access was established. Luke would drive to Bath on a Friday, pick up Megan, take her back home to Manchester and have her back in Bath for just after seven on the Sunday.

It wasn’t perfect. He could see that his little girl didn’t understand what was going on but there was nothing he could do other than to squeeze her hand and tell her everything was going to be all right. But it wasn’t. Things became increasingly bitter between Luke and Jayne as divorce proceedings began but even so Luke wasn’t prepared for the bombshell that Jayne dropped next: she was moving with her recently retired parents to France to start a new life. Luke tried everything to make her stay. He reasoned with her, pleaded with her and finally resorted to the kind of angry legal letters that only made matters worse, but to no avail. Jayne left and took his daughter with her. Flying from London to Brittany every other weekend, staying in impersonal hotels time after time, all took its toll on Luke’s already fragile state of mind but he carried on for the sake of his daughter. And then it started. One week he’d turn up to collect Megan and the house would be empty; the following week he’d be told that Megan had come down with a cold and was too ill to see him. On and on it went, excuse after excuse until the one time he turned up unexpectedly and virtually forced his way inside Megan had been so distressed that she had sobbed inconsolably from the moment he arrived to the moment he left. And though he loved her more than life itself Luke knew he couldn’t do that to her again and so he never did. Lost and alone at the age of thirty-one, it was all Luke could do not to fall apart. Then one day a few years later he chanced upon Cassie, the girl who would change his life, and suddenly he found hope where there had been none. But the mystery of what had caused Jayne to turn against him in that cruel way had always remained.