She was over it, she’d moved on. Their time together had been both wondrous and painful in equal measure, and sometimes it was hard to separate the two in her mind. Yes, her life was now a tad dull, but at least she had control. With Jonah she’d always felt a little
out
of control. Could any good possibly come out of meeting up with him?
“What should I do, George?”
“What did he say?”
“He said he’d like to meet up.”
“And would you like to?”
Yes, no, she didn’t know. It wasn’t black and white. Nothing about them had ever been straightforward.
“I’m scared,” she admitted.
“I know, honey, but are you having such a fabulous time at the moment that you’d be happy to turn down this chance? Who knows where it could take you to?”
“What if it makes me even unhappier?”
“You can’t go through your life running scared, Claire. Life is about taking chances. And you’ve been given a fucking exciting chance here. How many other women would relish the opportunity of a night with Jonah Kennedy?” Georgia paused and then chuckled. “And if you play your cards right you might even get
more
then one night. Honey, the ball is in your court.”
---------
The ball is in your court.
Claire laughed at the irony of that phrase, considering how Jonah’s life, when they’d been together, had been all about tennis. She said goodbye to Georgia and made her way home, stopping briefly at the dry cleaners round the corner from her modest West Hampstead terrace house to buy some moth balls.
No sooner than she’d closed her front door, she kicked off her heels and ran upstairs to her study to turn on her computer. Whilst she was waiting for it to fire up, she decided to keep herself busy to mask the jitters. It felt as if the plague of fluttering moths which had chewed through her carpet had decamped to her stomach. She took the two plastic moth balls and turned each a little anticlockwise, just how the dry cleaner had demonstrated. The scent inside wasn’t the nasty naphthalene which she remembered her mother using when she was growing up, but cedar wood, which was actually quite pleasant. She hung one up in her own cupboard before shutting its door firmly and planted the other in Miriam’s.
Back in her study, her inbox finally filled the screen. She ignored the two hundred unread emails and scrolled down to the only one that now seemed to matter: Jonah Kennedy. She clicked on his name, re-read the mail and pressed to reply. She kept starting, writing a sentence or two and then deleting. Nothing she wrote seemed to sound right. Had Jonah spent hours trying to perfect his tone? Not too needy or too cocky or too indifferent. After thirteen years and all they’d shared, getting the tone right seemed to matter.
Dearest Jonah
I am so genuinely pleased you contacted me. It’s been too
long. Consider this your green light. I would love to see
you again.
Claire
X
She quickly pressed ‘send’ before she could regret it and then started reanalyzing what she’d written. Perhaps
dearest
was too much. Maybe saying she would
love
to see him again was a little over the top.
Stop.
She reminded herself that she was thirty-seven years old, a grown-up, and this wasn’t about playing hard to get or being cool. It was about putting a simple goddamn date in the diary.
She began checking through her other mails and within five minutes a reply pinged into her inbox.
Jonah:
What about tonight? X
What
about
tonight? She was free, she didn’t need a babysitter and her screen test make-up still looked fabulous. But wasn’t tonight too soon? It wouldn’t give her a chance to mentally prepare, or to back out.
Claire:
Tonight works for me.
X
Jonah:
I’m staying at the Dorchester. Can you get here for
7pm?
X
Claire:
I’ll do my best. Hope you still recognise me. I’m not
sure if I still look like Kate Winslet.
X
Jonah:
You’ll always be my Kate. See you in the lobby at 7.
X
Claire spent a long time staring at her reflection in the gilt-framed rectangular mirror that filled her entrance hall. What Georgia had said about Jonah made her nervous. She’d struggled to resist the Jonah of old but, if age really
had
made him better looking, there was no hope. And the last thing she wanted was him looking at her and being disappointed that time had ravaged her beauty.
She wasn’t sure what he’d think. He’d always told her she resembled a red-headed Kate Winslet and, to a degree, this was an astute observation. There was definitely a likeness in their faces and Claire even more definitely shared the same curves and body-shape issues as the English actress. She’d once had a bust to be proud of, a bust that Jonah had adored. After she’d finished breastfeeding Miriam, however, her breasts had shrunk in size and she now thought of them woefully, as two, ugly, withered prunes. She remembered joking with Anthony. “You do realise,” she’d told him, “that I’ll never be able to have an affair or be with another man because I’d be way too embarrassed for anyone else to see me naked.” This was still the truth and she hadn’t made love with another man since Anthony.
She decided to keep on the dress she had worn for the screen test but swapped her shoes for emerald wedge sandals which matched the velvet choker. Lipstick was touched up with her stick of deep-red Mac which she then popped into her fake leopard print clutch. She’d long had a penchant for leopard print, which hadn’t really been to Jonah’s taste, but he’d always said it looked good ‘on her’. Would he even remember? She took one final glance at her reflection and wished herself a silent ‘Good Luck’ before locking the front door behind her.
-------------------------
The Dorchester, on London’s Park Lane, opposite Hyde Park, held a special place in Claire’s heart, although she didn’t think Jonah would have known it. Her grandparents used to take her there for the occasional posh afternoon tea when she was a little girl. Little cakes had been served on multi-tiered display platters. Chocolate éclairs, scones, warm sausage rolls, tiny cucumber sandwiches with their crusts cut off. White-gloved waiters wore long black tail coats; the beverage itself was served in delicate floral china cups, the purest Ceylon blend that existed. It had always felt like such a treat. Royalty couldn’t have been served better!
As she approached the hotel from the tube station Claire slowed down her pace. She felt as anxious as a pubescent teenager about to go on their first date. Thoughts raced through her mind. What should she say? How should she be? They mustn’t, at all costs, talk about what she’d done. No, she reminded herself. What
they’d
done. Not today. She glanced at her watch. Five minutes late. Would he already be waiting in the lobby? She hoped so, because she didn’t want to be there first. And then she heard him.
“Claire.”
She could have recognised that sexy, lazy drawl blindfold from a line-up of hundreds. It stopped her in her tracks. It was a voice that had a direct passage to her heart. It was a voice that melted away her anxiety. It was a voice that ignited her desire. But she still couldn’t see the man it belonged to.
“Claire.”
And then, as if he instinctively knew that something was needed to put a stop to the frenzied activity going on in her brain, he suddenly appeared before her, like an apparition on the pavement, scooping her into his arms, wrapping them around her so tightly it was as if he didn’t want to ever let her go. As they stood there, rocking back and forth, thirteen years of space and time peeled away like the layers of an onion.
“You feel good,” he whispered into her hair.
“So do you.”
“I don’t want to let you go.”
“Then don’t.”
Eventually he pulled away and held her at arms length.
“I need to take a good look at you.”
It gave Claire the opportunity to drink him in too. Georgia was right. He
had
aged well. The dimple was still there, only somehow it appeared endearingly magnified as it creased his cheek. The subtle grey streaks in his hair and the more weathered skin on his face gave him an air of sexy maturity. His large grey eyes were still hot and smouldering, and they were dancing too. And as for his body, she didn’t need to see it to know that it hadn’t changed either. She’d felt it when they’d embraced. He still had the taut, beautifully sculpted chest and arms of an athlete and he hadn’t shrunk a millimetre. His six-foot three frame towered over her, despite her being raised on four- inch wedges. As she checked out his jeans, sneakers and tight white T-shirt, she wondered how she’d ever let him go in the first place. What on earth would this Adonis make of her?
“You haven’t changed,” he smiled, “although maybe you’ve got thinner.”
“It’s an optical illusion,” Claire grinned back. This time it was a natural smile, not the forced ones she seemed to have been pulling most of the day.
“It is so good to see you.”
“You too,” Claire said shyly.
“Claire Jackson, thank goodness I didn’t let another day pass before seeing you again.”
It was funny hearing him use her maiden name. Although she
was
now, strictly speaking, Claire Jackson again because her divorce was finalised, she still answered to her old married name, de Klerk.
“I’m so pleased you suggested tonight,” she said, “because if we’d waited any longer I fear I might have backed out.”
“Why?”
She shook her head.
“I’m not sure,” she whispered, “but I’d possibly have tried to convince myself that it was a bad idea.”
He took one of her hands in each of his and she felt a bolt of electricity shudder up both her arms.
“How could
this
ever be a bad idea?”
Their eyes locked and despite any resolve she might have had, in that split second, she could feel herself falling for him all over again, just like she had when she was nineteen. She didn’t trust herself to speak.
“Come on,” he said, putting his arm around her and lightening the mood by playfully pinching the side of her waist, “I’ve booked us a table at Nobu.”
----------------------------
It wasn’t a surprise that Jonah had chosen a Japanese restaurant. Sushi is a sportsman’s staple. Athletes need a high protein diet and you can’t get much more high protein than a platter of sashimi. She’d been to plenty of sushi bars with him in his home town of San Diego, but they’d never eaten at Nobu, Old Park Lane. The sommelier poured them each a flute of champagne. When he’d finished, they clinked their glasses and Claire leaned in conspiratorially.
“Are you aware that it was in the broom cupboard of this restaurant that Boris Becker got a woman pregnant?” she asked.
Jonah raised an eyebrow at her, eyes twinkling, ignoring her piece of tittle-tattle.
“To us,” he said.
“To us,” she echoed.
“I don’t care about Boris Becker and broom cupboards. I want to know about you,” he started. “I want to know how life has been treating you.”
And so, as they ordered and tucked into scallop, salmon and sweet shrimp sashimi, they gave each other a précis of their lives. Jonah had known Claire as an aspiring artist, but Claire told him how she’d decided to retrain as a Nutritionist after they’d broken up, to give her a new focus. And about six months into her course she’d met Anthony at a party thrown by one of her fellow students. A couple of years later he’d proposed to her and, for better or worse, she’d said yes. Then Miriam had come along. Jonah asked to see a photo. Claire bent down to retrieve her leopard skin clutch from between her feet and placed it on the table. “Still loving the leopard skin,” Jonah joked.
He remembered
. She took her mobile phone out of the bag to give him a quick slideshow of her daughter: Miriam with a daisy chain around her neck; Miriam as a bridesmaid at Georgia’s recent wedding; Miriam making a sandcastle on a beach. “She’s absolutely stunning,” Jonah complemented. And then he took one of her hands in his and added: “but of course she would be. She’s yours.”
Claire asked him to show her a photo of
his
daughter, who was called Martha. She, too, was gorgeous and a complete opposite to dark, exotic-looking Miriam. Martha had white-blonde hair which skimmed her waist and Jonah’s broody grey eyes. “She’s a mini you,” Claire whispered, thankful that the sommelier had returned to fill her glass with more champagne. She needed it. It was hard thinking of Jonah having a child. It felt wrong.
They
should have had a child together. Things should have been different.
Stop.
This was a dangerous path to tread, even if it was only in her head, so Claire quickly changed the subject. “Right, your turn,” she said. “Now I don’t think you won Wimbledon, but did any of your dreams come true?”
Jonah’s dreams had been part of the problem. It had always been about him. When they’d met he’d already been ranked number ten in America, but he’d been plagued by knee injuries and an operation had forced him to take time out from competing. He’d taken a job as a tennis coach on the Greek island of Kos to recuperate. What he’d ended up with - a long distance girlfriend – had
not
been part of the plan. If anything, she’d been a
hindrance,
and Jonah’s coach had a gift for making her feel unwanted. But Jonah was smitten. “You’re my lucky charm,” he’d told her. “The coach knows nothing. I need you by my side.” It was a testament to how they felt about each other that their relationship had lasted as long as it did. Claire, who was studying Fine Art at St Andrews University just a few years before Prince William and Kate Middleton put the place on the map, had pulled pints overtime in pubs to pay for transatlantic flights so that she could accompany Jonah on the road at every possible opportunity. She’d been a dutiful tennis girlfriend, turning up to support him at some of the remotest and pithiest satellite tournaments. And, of course, once he’d started winning more and earning better money, he’d paid for her to join him. Bit by bit he’d clawed his way up the rankings. He’d been number three in the U.S by the time they’d split up. Not quite Andre Agassi standard but still bloody impressive! His pretty face had made him popular among female tennis fans, which was something else that Claire had found hard to deal with.
“My dreams,” he paused, reflecting. “Maybe as we get older we recalibrate our dreams.”
He reminded her that anybody who’s crazy enough to want to compete in the world of tennis does it because they want to be No.1. He was no different. He’d wanted to be a champion. It was all or nothing. But his body had let him down. He’d had three more knee operations since they’d last met and his right elbow had also started packing up. He showed her the new scar on the back of his arm and it took all the strength she could muster to not reach out and run her fingertips over it. There once had been a time when she’d known every faded stitch and wound on his body and they’d jokingly graded each surgeon for their sewing capabilities. Some of the wounds were botch jobs and Miriam could, quite frankly, have done a better running stitch. “Did you see me play Federer in the quarter finals at Melbourne?” he asked her. She shook her head without elaborating. She didn’t want to admit that she’d refused to watch or follow his career at all, because it was just too damn painful. Wimbledon had been the hardest to avoid, and she’d hated doing so because she’d been passionate about watching tennis and there was no other tournament in the world quite like it. Their relationship had, to a degree, ruined Claire’s love of the game.
He told her that this match against Federer in the Australian Open had caused a huge upset at the time and had been a nail-biting one to both watch and play. As the underdog and seeded more than thirty places behind the Swiss player, Jonah hadn’t been expected to win. “It was some of the best tennis I’ve ever produced,” he said, “and whenever it rains it’s still one of the classic games they broadcast until play is resumed.”
“But,” he said, as he sipped the remainder of his champagne and paid the bill, “I got into the world’s top ten, which wasn’t too shabby.” He tried saying the word ‘shabby’ in his best British accent and they both giggled at his poor effort. “And things are good now. I’ve been taken on as a Commentator by Sky Sports and apparently I’m not too bad at it. That’s why I’m in the UK. I’m commentating on all the tournaments building up to and including Wimbledon.”