All okay down there?
He must assume I’m back at Tash’s, or at another friend’s place after my little jaunt to Euston. And he’s resisting barraging me with calls and demands to come home. Instead, he’s playing the long game, giving me ‘space’.
And now another message appears.
I was thinking if you’d like a full day at a spa I could organise that?
I blink at it, then glance back quickly at Fergus, catching myself feeling... not guilty exactly. But as if Vince might be watching me somehow, from four hundred miles away in Shugbury, while I’m having an extremely enjoyable evening with another man.
But notjustwith another man! Alice is here too – she invited him – and why shouldn’t I make new friends? Proper ones, that is, who make me feel happy and relaxed and more like my old self. The best of myself, even, rather than somehow lacking as a woman. There have been no subtle put-downs tonight.
As I pour our coffees I remember Deborah popping round sometime in November last year. The talk had turned to Christmas plans. ‘D’you make your own Christmas pudding, Kate?’ she asked.
‘No, I just buy ours,’ I replied.
‘Oh, I do admire the way you cut corners,’ she trilled. ‘And I know not everyone’s into Christmas, the way I am.’
Excuse me! Had I said I wasn’t ‘into’ Christmas? I love it actually. I especially loved it when Edie was little. We’d strewn our flat with fake snow and put out mince pies for Santa, all that. It was so much fun. However, I’ve never believed it must involve buying a zillion ingredients – including suet, as if it’s wartime – weeks before the big event, and then mixing or grinding them or whatever the fuck you do.
And then of course Deborah made one for us. Or for Vince really, because he’d mentioned how much he’d loved his mum’s. ‘It really isn’t difficult, Kate. There are plenty of recipes online!’
That ‘recipes online’ thing again – as if, when faced with a computer, I’d mistakenly think it was a peculiar-looking TV!
What a relief it is to be far, far away from all that, I decide, ‘relaxed’ from two glasses of wine now and wishing I’d politely suggested where Deborah could stick her pudding. But never mind that because I’ve left that place – and my marriage, I decide rashly as Fergus finishes his coffee quickly and gets up from the table.
‘I’m on baby duty tonight,’ he explains. ‘So I’d better get back.’
Ah, so he’s not single. Of course he’s not. He’s a complete catch.
‘You have a baby?’ Alice asks brightly.
Fergus chuckles. ‘Finn’s not mine. Well, heis.He’s my family, absolutely. But he’s my daughter Liv’s little boy and they live with me and I suggested she went round to her friend’s later tonight, to get a bit of time off...’With me,he said. Notwith us.I don’t know why I homed in on that detail.
‘I do hope we haven’t ruined your plans!’ Alice looks genuinely perturbed, as if she’d bound him to a kitchen chair and forced her delicious roast dinner on him.
‘No. Not at all,’ he says firmly. ‘This has been lovely. I did message Liv to say I’d be a bit later. She said I need a social life too—’
‘Well, I’m glad,’ I say quickly, before I can stop myself.
Fergus smiles warmly, protesting that he doesn’t need help with the boxes of books, and insisting on carrying them all out to his van himself. As we see him out I catch Alice looking at me in a bemused way. Or perhaps I’m imagining it?
‘Lovely man,’ she muses, as we watch him climb into his battered blue van. ‘Isn’t he, Kate?’
I look at her and can’t keep down the smile as Fergus waves, before pulling away. ‘Yes,’ I reply. ‘He really is.’
CHAPTER TWENTY
Vince
Kate wasn’t bowled over by Vince’s offer of afullday at a spa. At least, he assumes she wasn’t. By the next morning she hasn’t even deigned to reply, or to the other messages, which he only meant as friendly and caring and not pressurising at all.
Whywon’t she message him? Is he being punished for something? If so, what?
He’s also baffled as to why the working week has spun by and there’s been no further email – and no calls – from his editor, despite Monday’s EOP deadline.
Has the whole world forgotten he even exists? Is he just a dog-feeding serf now?
Several possibilities have been swirling around Vince’s mind:
