He glances at his watch. It’s too early to suggest dinner, a change of scenery, some fresh spring air to slap them both round the face and bring them to their senses. They haven’t really done enough work yet to justify calling it a day. And the nagging ring at thebottom of one of their bags – Nathan, he’d be willing to bet:Just checking in, no pressure but wondered how it’s going– brought him to his senses just in time. Just before he reached his hand out to put it over hers. To say some things that could not easily be taken back, that would hang in the air between them, screaming for resolution – the kind of resolution that can only take one form.
‘There’ll be time for play later,’ Jess says, eventually, after what feels like an impossibly long silence, each of them, he suspects, weighing up the pros and cons of giving in to their animal instincts. He is glad someone has broken that silence, that someone has been sensible. He would have assumed it would be him, but in the moment, he lacked the willpower. He knows he is not currently boyfriend material; he knows he has a deadline for this novel in order to keep his advance, and he needs the advance, and he knows that there is no way he’ll meet that deadline, never mind the micro deadline Nathan has set them both, if he allows himself the kind of distraction that comes with the beginning of whatever this would be – a fling, a relationship, a friendship with benefits beyond co-authorship of a critically acclaimed novel. But he is only human, with human desires, and it’s been a while, and there’s something about Jess and the way the occasional sunray lands on her hair, colouring it honey-toned, the way her layered eyes seem to promise depths of thought and mystery – something that makes him light up inside so that he wasn’t quite able to hold his hand up and sayno, stop, let’s not do this, at least not yet.
He nods, agreeing, not questioning out loud what she means byplayor what she means bylater. And so they go back to the book: back to thrashing out the plan they hope to present to Nathan next week, back to restructuring the story, and arguing over plotlines and which characters should be amalgamated or disappear entirely. Jess, he has noticed, is careful to say encouraging things about particular turns of phrase or scenes that she thinks land well. He knows it’s the compliment sandwich at work again; and yet, knowing this doesn’t change the fact that every time she says something positive about the book, something inside him melts. He is a chocolate soufflé with a gooey middle, the kind that come in pairs of glass ramekins you save because you tell yourself you’ll make a soufflé of your own one day and not just keep buying them at the supermarket.
And now that he is thinking about chocolate soufflés, Alex notices that he is genuinely hungry. Looking at the clock, he is surprised to see it is well into dinner time. They’ve survived on buttery flapjacks all afternoon and he hasn’t noticed the hours ticking by. At home, he works in a room where a clock looks down at him at his desk, simultaneously mocking and motivating him. He is constantly checking it, monitoring his own progress, calculating and re-calculating his writing speed, even though he knows that repeatedly doing this is responsible for slowing him down considerably. But here, he hasn’t thought about the time at all. Here, writing has been fun, energising. He remembers this feeling from his first book, when he wrote withoutknowledge of the publishing industry and its vagaries, when he wrote without the pressure of prior success and the reading public’s expectation of his Next Great Novel. He wishes he could recover that pre-MFA joy: the joy of storytelling, of painting with words, of unbridled creativity. Now, there is too much baggage that he drags across the page along with his pen. But Jess has made him feel lighter again; it’s as if he’s had a transfusion of her passion, of her excitement. Her eyes dance and her hair bounces on her shoulder as she scribbles lists and circles bullet points. She has something of that beginner’s joy he misses in himself, but it’s something else, too – her innate zest for life itself is contagious. And attractive. Has he mentioned attractive?
He finds himself wanting to protect her, wanting nothing to happen to her that would tarnish this joy.
‘You keep looking at the clock,’ she says now. ‘Am I boring you?’
But she asks this with a smile, knowing the answer.
‘Sorry, sorry,’ he says. His constant double apologising had been trained out of him in the US, but he’s been back in London for long enough now that the habit is back in full force. ‘I’m just thinking about dinner.’
‘That’s a good thought,’ she says. ‘We should probably save some of these flapjacks for tomorrow at least.’
Alex reaches into his bag for his phone. He’s about to grab it to google restaurants in Godalming, but he thinks better of it. He doesn’t want to see his missed calls, his social media notifications, his email.
‘Let’s walk into town,’ he says. ‘See what it has to offer.’
‘The old-fashioned way? No Yelp, no Google?’
‘No Yelp. No Google. We wander, see what takes our fancy.’
She looks ruefully at her own bag, wondering perhaps if it’s socially acceptable for her to check her own phone.
‘Deal,’ she says, though she takes her bag with her when she goes to freshen up. He won’t judge her for quickly scanning her messages, for not wanting to stay in their bubble, just the two of them and their novel. He’ll be disappointed, but he won’t judge her.
He has an urge to walk hand in hand with Jess through the town, but he manages to suppress it. They walk close to each other, though, and seem to bump shoulders more frequently than he usually does when walking side by side with someone. Which of them is responsible for that, he couldn’t possibly say.
‘This place feels very familiar,’ Jess scrunches up her face when she’s confused, a small vertical line appearing between her eyebrows, which by the time she is his age, in a few years’ time, will no doubt have scored itself there permanently.
She’s not wearing her glasses, so maybe everything looks familiar to her in a blurry kind of way. He can’t work out what she needs these glasses for: sometimes she wears them to work on the book, and sometimesnot. Sometimes she wears them out and about, but also sometimes not. ‘It’s getting dark,’ he points out, steering clear of saying something that would betray how closely he is observing her, and filing it away as something to ask her about later. ‘So it looks like most English towns right now.’
‘You might be right,’ she says, in a tone that suggests,You’re definitely not. She’s done this a few times today and he is learning to recognise it as one of her habits – perhaps conflict avoidance or lack of confidence or, as his sister Louisa might have said, just a lifelong skill born of living in a world where women have to placate irritable men who don’t like being questioned.
‘I mean,’ he says, ‘I might also be wrong. You might have been here before, for all I know. Or maybe seen it in a friend’s photo.’
But then they turn down a street, and she starts laughing – a different laugh from the easy, joy-filled sound he so loved earlier. A harsher laugh.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she says.
‘What?’
‘I’ve figured it out. You don’t recognise these cute cobbled streets?’
‘No.’
‘It looks exactly likeThe Holiday.’
Ah yes. He’s vaguely heard of that film.
‘Please tell me you’ve seenThe Holiday?’
Alex has not. He feels the best course of action here is to stay silent.
‘You know – Cameron Diaz swaps houses with Kate Winslet and falls in love with Jude Law?’
