She is about to say something, but Eric is not looking at her; he is scribbling something on a small pad of paper he has also pulled out of his shirt pocket. Eventually he looks up and smiles. ‘Lando’s your ink man. And very good he is too,’ he says, glancing down at the script on his forearm.
‘So you’re—’
He tears the top page from the pad of paper and hands it to her.
‘Eric the Optician.’ He heads for the door but, as he opens it, he grins back at her. ‘Butyoucan definitely call me Eric the Viking.’
She looks down at the piece of paper in her hand. On it is an ink drawing of a Viking wearing ridiculously large glasses. She laughs, and looks towards the window.
But Eric the Optician has gone.
She is still smiling as she pins the picture to the noticeboard next to the lone calendar. Jo is aware that herface feels strange, slightly stretched and achy. And she wonders exactly when it was that she last laughed.
6
Mr James Beckford & Ms Jo Sorsby
The previous evening, buoyed up by the memory of the laughter, Jo texted Lucy. Nothing significant, just the story of Eric the Viking. Lucy immediately responded with a row of laughing emojis. It felt natural, more like their old selves.
But this morning, Jo doesn’t feel much like laughing. The postman has just been.
It is an official letter, nothing more. An oversight. An old water bill that needs paying. Inside, James has scribbled what she owes. No further message.
Yet the familiarity of his handwriting unravels something in her. She tries to fight the feeling, to gather herself. As she pins the letter on the noticeboard – she will deal with it later – she notices a blotch by the postmark on the envelope and realizes her face is wet.
That is the trouble with tears: they catch you unawares.
Jo might not have left her job in thebank if she hadn’t cried.
She cried in the stationery cupboard at work, sitting huddled on the floor, tears forming welts in the letter-headed paper that no one used any more. Maybe there was a certain ironic symmetry in her now running a stationery shop in London. A shop hardly bigger than that cupboard.
The crying didn’t start in the stationery cupboard. She might have got away with that. It started in the conference room. It was April and her mother had just called to tell her that she was worried about Uncle Wilbur. He had locked himself out of the shop and he seemed to think his keys were in the Lake District – which made no sense at all. Jo had been distracted, but it was a meeting she had to attend, and really, it shouldn’t have been too difficult; she was only there to field questions about the bank’s database – her area of expertise. Others had to deliver the bulk of the presentation.
One of the people who spoke was her boyfriend of six years, James. As he took the room full of people through the year’s forecast, she sat with one arm resting along the table, the other propped up, her thumb and forefinger gently fingering the diamond earring in her right ear. James had given her the earrings for Christmas and she wore them most days. She remembers thinking he looked good: tall and athletic; nice white shirt, charcoal-grey jacket. James was a confident speaker. And he had every right to be; he was good at his job. He held the attention of everyone in the room, not because he was loud or amusing, but because he was reasonable. Everyone liked James. She loved him.
But did he love her?
She had no idea where the thought came from. She pressed her thumb more firmly into the prong at the back of her earring, as if pushing home the point: yes, of course he did.
But all that did was to take her back to Christmas Eve and she relived her blushing, crushing disappointment when she had opened the small leather box to find not an engagement ring but a pair of tiny diamond earrings. At the time she had not been able to look at James, but had lowered her head, audibly whispering, ‘Oh, they aresobeautiful,’ while her mind had shouted,How could you do this to me? How could you? In front of my family!It was another hour before she had been able to look at her mother, and even then Jo refused to meet her eye.
In the conference room, she pressed harder on the back of the earring, until pain and emotion were focused into a tiny spot on her right thumb.James does love me and one day we will get married.She had been planning it for several years. Not in a Pinterest, mood-board kind of way; but images would flash into her mind now and again: the flowers she might carry; where they would get married; where they might go on honeymoon. And so it had gone on, until she had collected a series of mental images, like Polaroid snaps, of their future life.
She sat in the conference room wondering what her colleagues would think if she asked them to clear the coffee cups and bottles of sparkling water, if she laid her imaginary photos on the conference-room table. Would they have nodded reassuringly and said,Yes Jo, of course. We always knew you two would marry?
At this point she recalls she looked at James – now barely hearing his voice – and she knew that, above all things, there was one thing she wanted to say to him.
That is when he caught her eye; his voice faltered for an infinitesimal moment, and in that fraction of time, she knew.He is never going to ask me. He doesn’t love me any more.And as she had started to cry, she knew she would never tell him that one thing:
I really want to have a baby, James.
She was not aware of the unnatural silence in the room until someone touched her arm, forcing her to stand. Then she was conscious of this person putting her body between Jo and her colleagues who were now frozen, as if in suspended animation. She remembers thinking,I didn’t expect this from Jemima. Jemima, who could be scathing in her dismissal of others; Jemima who, going by the photos in her office, seemed to like dogs more than people.
She left Jemima at the conference-room door, walked straight to the stationery cupboard and shut the door.
‘Joanne? … Joanne?’
It is some moments before Jo realizes that Malcolm is at the counter. She has her back to the shop and has been staring at the letter pinned to the noticeboard.
