Juliet sank onto a nearby low wall and pressed the lock on Minton’s extendable lead to stop him going further. He returned to her side at once, leaning into her leg and sniffing her hand for a treat. She reached automatically into the pocket that always had a zip-lock of kibble in it now for Coco, and rewarded him, but her brain had gone on to the dot-to-dot analysis and she couldn’t stop it.
If Ben hadn’t stormed out like that, his heart wouldn’t have had that sudden spasm all alone somewhere on Longhampton Road.
If they hadn’t had a row, he wouldn’t have stormed out, pumped full of adrenalin, his mind reeling with hurt and resentment and shock that his soulmate wasn’t actually sure if she wanted to have children with him, after fifteen years.
And if she hadn’t yelled at him that if he couldn’t even get the bathroom started, when would he get round to potty-training, or paying for nursery, or any of the other boring tasks that she knew she would find herself having to do, then maybe he wouldn’t have yelled back, or stormed out, or died . . .
Juliet stuffed her hand into her mouth as a sob broke out of her.
Ben had died because they’d had a massive row about him not facing up to adult life the way she was; it wasn’t about him, it was about
her
.
She’d been tiptoeing around it for months, but that was the tough truth. The house wasn’t ready to have a baby in. It wasn’t even safe for their dog. Left to Ben, it never would be, and he hadn’t seemed to care that it was driving her mad. If she was really honest – the sort of honest she’d been with Louise, out of sheer desperation – Juliet had started to wonder whether maybe they were growing at different rates, like an unbalanced tree: Ben the eternal teenager, happy to do favours for other people and worry about tomorrow later, and Juliet the reluctant adult, paying the bills, worrying for two.
It was the thought that maybe they weren’t the perfectly matched couple that had made her sick and sad and angry – not him. Not Ben himself.
She was vaguely aware of a car slowing down, then stopping.
‘Hey, Juliet! Do you two want a lift? It’s raining.’
Juliet looked over and saw Lorcan leaning out of his van. Emer was in the passenger seat with Roisin squeezed between them, and from the banging in the back, she guessed the rest of the Kellys were travelling with the tool kit and using it to play steel drums.
She shook her head and tried to look normal. ‘No, you’re OK.’
‘Ah, go on,’ yelled Emer. ‘We’re going via the chipper – we’re celebrating Sal getting his first gig! Oi! Shut up in the back!’
Juliet managed a weak smile. ‘Tell him congratulations, but I’m fine, honestly.’
Lorcan leaned out a bit further, peering at her strained face. Then his door swung open, with the engine still running, and his jeans-clad leg appeared. ‘Emer, you’ll have to drive home,’ he said, jumping down. ‘I’m going for a walk.’
‘You’re not . . . Ah, Lorcan. Will I get you two some chips?’ Emer twigged something was up and slid across the seat to get behind the wheel. She didn’t look entirely confident about taking over, and the expression on Roisin’s face wasn’t too positive either.
‘Dunno. I’ll ring you,’ said Lorcan, not looking back. His gaze was fixed on Juliet, and his dark eyebrows were creased with concern.
Juliet started to protest that he really didn’t need to, but something about his solid presence made her feel better and awkward at the same time. She waved as Emer ground the gears and lurched off, to shrieks of protest from the passengers.
‘Are you going somewhere in particular?’ he asked, spotting the bouquet in her hand, as well as the dog lead. ‘Ah. OK.’
Juliet didn’t say anything.
‘Want some company? You can tell me to get lost if you’d rather be alone.’
Juliet pressed her lips together, trying to keep her emotions in check. ‘I’m . . . I don’t know. I was just going to walk around where Ben died and leave these somewhere. It’s a silly idea.’
‘No, it’s not.’ Lorcan didn’t say anything else, and Juliet realised that was one of the things she liked most about him. He just said what he thought, and left it at that, unlike so many other people around her, always telling her how she should feel, how they’d feel in her situation, and on and on until she wanted to scream.
He inclined his head towards the road, and without speaking, they set off, Minton trotting ahead of them.
Images of Ben’s last night pushed through Juliet’s head, as she saw the walls and trees along the road through his eyes. Most of the darker thoughts she’d managed to pack into the back of her mind over the last year, ‘saving’ them until she was strong enough to give them proper space, but now she made herself face them. Because if not now, when?
Had Ben been thinking of her – angrily – when he’d had his cardiac arrest? That tormented her more than anything, that his last thought of her had been pain at the hurtful things she’d said. She hoped, had bargained with God, that he’d seen some happy memory of the two of them together, before he died.
Was it really selfish to wonder that?
Juliet realised Minton had stopped and was sniffing around a lamp-post. For a mad second she wondered if this was it, if this was the place Ben had collapsed, outside . . . She peered to make out the curly iron sign. Outside the Gables.
It could well be. By the time the paramedic had banged on her door, Ben was in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, even though it was already too late, and she wasn’t in a state to ask the man exactly where it had all happened. He’d taken pity on her hysteria and removed the keys from her shaking hands, driving the van to the A&E, even though, he told her, he wasn’t really supposed to.
She stopped. Lorcan had stopped as well, and she knew he’d twigged what she was doing. Maybe it would have been better to be alone, she thought. I could have said a poem or something. Recited lyrics from
X&Y
.
But as she thought it, she knew there was no point. This was more about her than Ben. She celebrated him every day in little ways, not just Grief Hour, which had shortened recently. Coldplay was wearing off. No, this was more about her, making it through a whole year without him for the first time since she was fifteen. Battered, and stunned, but still breathing.
‘I could go?’ Lorcan offered, reading her face. ‘If you want some privacy?’
Juliet slowly shook her head. Ben wasn’t here. He wasn’t going to materialise like Banquo’s ghost, and in any case, hadn’t she preferred him haunting her own garden, not some random portion of Rosehill’s residential area?
‘No. I’d only stand out here talking to myself until the owners come out. At least we look like two normal human beings having a chat.’
‘Fair enough.’ He peered at the hedge next to them, trimmed into a fat oblong. ‘This is a good-looking hedge. What’d you call this?’
‘Box,’ said Juliet. ‘Can you smell it? Always reminds me of National Trust houses, and Olde England.’ She rubbed the leaves between her fingers and inhaled the dark-green scent. ‘Ben loved box. He talked about growing some in the garden and cutting them into topiary shapes. It would have taken years.’
‘Better get some soon, then. Add it to the list. For the house,’ he added, as if she had some other list.
Juliet twisted the leaves in her fingers. He’d have stopped at this hedge to admire it. Ben always stopped to smell the flowers and plants. Maybe his last thoughts had been about dark-green hedges and shears and her in a summer dress in their garden full of box-cockerels.
Slowly she took her bunch of herbs and flowers and pushed it into the dry centre of the thick box hedge, until it vanished from sight in the scratchy twigs.
‘Goodbye, Ben,’ she whispered. ‘I love you.’
She closed her eyes as the tears pushed up her chest, and then they sank down again. Juliet had become skilled at taking the temperature of her grief, monitoring tiny fluctuations like a nurse, and now she felt a strange calm relief at the edges of it, like glimmers of light around the curtain on a winter morning.
‘OK,’ she said, in a voice higher than her normal one. ‘Let’s go home.’
‘Are you sure?’ She felt Lorcan’s hand on her shoulder, comforting. ‘You can stay here as long as you like. I can take Minton home, see off passers-by, whatever.’
Juliet let out a long sigh. ‘No. I don’t know what I thought would happen. I thought it would all be different today. But I’m just the same.’
‘What did you want to be?’
‘I don’t know. My old self? A new, stronger self?’
She had a sudden mental picture of herself as a superhero butterfly, bursting out of her old body, shiny and strong. Ready for a new life.
But I don’t want a new life, she thought, automatically, then wondered if that was absolutely true.
The thought shook her.
‘You’re a strong woman,’ said Lorcan. His hand turned her gently into his shoulder, where she laid her head. It was comforting, brotherly, and she let herself stay like that for a moment, before raising her head.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Take me somewhere very noisy and distracting. But not a pub. Or to play pool.’
‘I know just the place,’ sighed Lorcan. ‘Unfortunately. How’d you feel about recorder practice?’
‘Perfect,’ said Juliet.
Chapter 23
Louise stared at the pink gloop in her cocktail glass and wondered what on earth had made her think that Ferrari’s had suddenly acquired a London cocktail-maker. This wasn’t a cosmopolitan. Not unless you now made them with . . .
She tried to work out what the tastes were on her tongue.
Ribena and surgical spirit.
‘Can I get you another?’ asked Peter, cheerfully finishing off his small glass of white wine.
‘Are you trying to get me drunk?’ she replied, only half joking.
‘Yes!’
Louise thought he probably was too – a few cocktails had led to some outrageous behaviour in the old days. But knowing that he knew that wasn’t helping; her body was clinging to sobriety like a determined Victorian spinster, no matter how much alcohol she forced into it.
‘Come on, let your hair down,’ said Peter, mistaking her hesitation for maternal concern about Toby, dropped off at Diane’s for the evening. ‘Your mum’s happy to have Toby till the morning. Here, have a look at the cocktail menu. What’s the Ferrari’s house special?’
‘Anti-freeze and cider?’ Louise dragged up a smile, and was rewarded with a real look of pleasure on his face.
She reminded herself that many women would love to be bought drinks by a good-looking company director with all his own hair. Peter was making a real effort, and so was she. Fresh shirt for him, full make-up for her, proper grown-up conversation about non-baby themes. What the Internet advice people called ‘you-time’, designed to recharge a flat-lining relationship.
I have got to
try
, thought Louise. Even if it feels like I’m acting in front of a big green screen and none of this has anything to do with me.
Maybe another cocktail would do it.
‘OK,’ she said, pushing her glass away and reaching for the laminated cocktail menu. ‘Why don’t I try a martini? They can’t get that wrong – it’s just gin, vermouth and an olive.’
‘Perfect. One more drink each and we’ll move on.’ Peter’s smile broadened. ‘To venue two.’
They were sitting in the bar area of the restaurant, but they weren’t there to eat, apparently. That was venue three.
‘And where
are
we going?’
‘Surprise.’
‘I’m not sure Longhampton has that many surprise venues.’ The waitress hovered and Peter ordered another glass of wine for himself, and a dirty martini for Louise. She handed back the cocktail menu. ‘Are we going to bingo?’
‘No!’ Peter sounded aghast, then realised she was joking. ‘Not bingo. This is a
date
.’ He reached across the table and took her hand, linking his fingers between hers, and smiled. ‘It has been pointed out to me that maybe the wine-tasting was a bit selfish. This is more of a
date
date.’
‘Pointed out by whom?’
Peter shook his head. ‘Doesn’t matter. I tried to remember what sort of stuff we did when we first met – you know, the things we’d do because you liked them – and . . . here we are. Cocktails, surprise venue, dinner.’
Louise started to take umbrage at the implication that she’d forced him to a load of tedious dates, but she pushed that aside and focused on the sweet underlying message – that Peter had dragged himself along to things because he wanted to be with her, all those years ago.
Not
all
those years ago, she reminded herself. Eight years ago. She still had jeans from then in her wardrobe.
‘Like what?’ she asked, a smile creeping into her voice. ‘Don’t tell me that when I was
hauling
you to the Wolseley, you’d rather have been at home with your needlework?’
‘I would. Given a choice between that and the stand-up comedians. To be honest, I never got half the jokes.’ Peter grinned and there was a flicker of warmth that reminded her of the old days.
‘If I’d known that—’ she started, but the drinks came, suspiciously quickly, and she stopped.
‘I just wanted to be with you,’ he said quietly, and Louise caught her breath at the simple desire behind his words.
‘Cheers,’ said Peter, and she raised her glass to his.
The martini tasted of dishwasher fluid, but she still smiled as she took the first revolting sip.
Louise found she got used to the taste of Ferrari’s martini, and the second cocktail fanned the little spark of goodwill into a warm glow. By the time Peter helped her into her jacket, they’d reminisced about some mad nights out she’d totally forgotten about, and she was feeling much more positive about the whole evening.
‘Where are we
going
?’ she asked him again as they set off down the deserted High Street.
‘Patience,’ he said, with pretend despair. ‘Were you this bad at Christmas as a child?’
‘No, I never even shook a parcel. Juliet was the tape-peeler.’ Louise tucked her arm into Peter’s and leaned into him as they walked. The thought of Christmas made her feel glowy too: Toby’s first Christmas he’d stand a chance of remembering, everyone round at Mum’s. They could make it especially nice for Juliet this year. Make her feel part of
their
family. Because she was. Auntie Jools.