‘Just you and your parents, then?’
Alex speaks with something like awe. Truth be told, she’d have killed for a family like his. Noisy dinner times, brothers to wrestle with, sisters whose clothes she would steal. Multiple adults around at all times.
‘Just me and my mum, actually.’ She takes a deep breath to get the next part over with. ‘My dad died when I was little. I don’t remember him.’
There it is: the brow crease. ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘It’s okay, it really is.’ She takes a deep breath, ready for her standard spiel, to get this over with as quickly as possible. She hates feeling like she has to comfort other people over her own loss and reassure them that she’s fine and they don’t need to waste energy worrying about her. ‘My mum wasn’t around much, either, so I spent a lot of time with my grandparents, and they’re great. My mum had me in her twenties, so they were young grandparents, and they took me to the zoo and museums and all sorts.’
‘Are they—’
‘Still around, yes. It’s the same grandma who made those flapjacks you enjoyed earlier. They live in Pimlico, just up the road from me now. I still see them a lot.’
When Lily moved out of the Brixton flat to get married, Jess couldn’t bear to look for another random person to share a flat and a life with. She thanks the gods of Gumtree every day for delivering Lily to her the last time she did that, and she thinks it’s unlikely that lightning could strike twice in that luckiest of ways.Come and live in Pimlico, Alan had said on the phone, and Jess had laughed because she knew what the rents in Pimlico were like, and her book influencer business was doing well – better than she could have hoped, in many ways – but not, like,thatwell. But then Val had added,We’ll help you with the money, and the prospect of living alone suddenly didn’t seem so bad if it included weekly comfort meals with two of her favourite people. She feels bad about the money, though. Every month,she thinks she’s almost there, can almost pay the rent alone, but then the landlord will put up the rent or an affiliate platform will change the way they do payouts or a book festival will be late paying her for chairing a panel, and she’ll have to put off the phone call she has been wanting to make for three years:I’m okay now, don’t worry about helping me out anymore.
‘That’s cool,’ Alex says. ‘It sort of feels like how life used to be. Like maybe life should still be. People living close to their families, you know.’ He tells her that his own parents – both sets of them: mum and stepdad, dad and stepmum – live in Tunbridge Wells, his siblings scattered throughout the UK, two of them still irritated that they had to come back from living in sunnier climes post-Brexit. He doesn’t ask about her mum, perhaps fearing another brow-creasing moment, so she volunteers the information.
‘My mum lives in Brighton,’ she says. ‘She loves the sea and the easy access to Gatwick Airport. She’s always off on her adventures.’ Did she roll her eyes as she said that? She does it almost unconsciously when she talks about her mum these days. Lily has often pointed it out, pulled her up on it.
‘Brighton’s cool,’ Alex says, cautiously, like he can tell there’s more to this whole thing. Perhaps she did roll her eyes; perhaps that’s how he knew.
‘It is.’
Jess, too, loves the sea, the sound of waves over pebbles, walks on the long promenade with the wind in her hair, the fresh sea water on the occasional hot day.She doesn’t get to go as often as she’d like. Her mum, even when she’s there, is busy. Knitting groups, walking groups, Scrabble club. When Jess was a teenager, she worried that her mum would bring home a boyfriend one day. But it seems that these days she’s too busy having fun to think about such things; maybe that was always true. Maybe, when Jess slept over at her grandparents’ or they came over to babysit, her mum reallywasat book club or meeting with friends to go to the theatre, as she claimed. It was easier to believe that then, but maybe it was also true.
Jess is enjoying talking to Alex. He’s a good listener, tilting his head slightly when she talks, looking at her intently, all of his attention on her. Asking good questions, like the one about her A Level Latin, which she deftly deflected, not wanting to go into the whole thing. Her dad was French, and part of her couldn’t help wanting to connect with him. French itself felt too much, though, too fraught. Too emotionally dangerous. What if she wasn’t any good at it? That would have been awkward and weird, like a denial of her birthright, a reminder of all she could have had: someone and something to grieve, when she’s never actually felt any need or desire to grieve – even if the absence of her father has shaped a large part of her personality. The dad-shaped hole – half of her genetics – is a fire, raging, dangerous. She has to keep it at arm’s length. Latin is that arm.
Alex shows the kind of thoughtfulness and emotional depth that she probably should have expected from someone who writes books like his, but she’s stillpleasantly surprised. It makes her want to tell him everything. About her mum, how Jess wishes she were more of a priority in her life. About her grandparents, how watching them get older and frailer breaks her heart and makes her worry about what life will be like without them; how she might need to be around a little more to care for them and for her cousin Ivy, whose dad is away a lot on business and whose mum has chronic fatigue and needs a lot of help. How, if she’s honest, the thought of being tied down, of not being able to jet off to adventures at will, scares her a little. She wants to tell Alex about Lily, and how Jess knows she’ll have to drum up enthusiasm when the day inevitably comes when Lily announces she’s pregnant – when, really, she wants them both to be young forever, free to stay up all night talking and eat a little too much cheese at their local wine bar and sunbathe on Greek island beaches and slide down mountains on their bums after attempting snowboarding. Usually, she’d prefer not to think about any of that; she’d rather talk about books and how much she loves her job, her plans for future book clubs and podcast interviews. But with Alex, she feels like she wants to talk about life in all its messiness. It’s a surprising feeling, especially after such a short time knowing him – like he’s home, like he’s a safe place.
But just as Jess is thinking this thought, she notices Alex’s attention wane, his eye flickering over her shoulder. There’s probably someone prettier than her on another table. She should have known this moment was too good to last or to be real at all, that the bubble she’s been in with Alex would pop eventually. She hadhoped it would take longer than a pub meal, but she probably should have known better.
‘Sorry,’ he says, breaking into her thoughts. ‘I don’t mean to keep looking over your shoulder.’
‘But there’s a really hot redhead over in the corner?’ She meant this to come over as light-hearted, as a joke, but she hears a bitterness in her tone that is unattractive even to her.
‘I’m not really into redheads, actually,’ he says. Maybe he meant this light-heartedly too, but it comes across as surprisingly serious.
‘A really hot brunette, then?’
‘I like blondes, actually.’ He makes eye contact as he says it and her stomach, traitor that it is, somersaults. ‘But no. Thereisa woman over there, and she keeps looking at me in thatdo I know you from somewhereway.’
‘One of your army of fans?’
Alex’s cheeks instantly redden. Jess had been joking, but now that she thinks about it, it makes perfect sense that there would be an army of fans out there, with social media pages dedicated to his dimple, blog posts dreamily describing having met him at a book signing. Godalming is close enough to London for literary types to live there, and certainly to visit – literary types and exactly the sort of industry insiders who know enough about the It books of the moment to recognise not just book covers but authors’ faces.
And then, suddenly, there she is, the brunette, materialising next to their table the way a waitressmight to recite the day’s specials. But alas, this is nowhere near as exciting.
‘Excuse me,’ she says. ‘But I have to ask – I mean, you really look like Alex Maxwell. You know, the writer?’
‘Ah yes,’ he says, turning on his flashiest smile, the one with the dimple. ‘I get that a lot.’
He’s deflecting, maybe. But also, Jess wonders if he’s prolonging the moment because he’s enjoying himself.
The brunette’s face stays frozen. She evidently can’t decide if he is joking or trying to put her off the scent. If he wants to be left alone.
‘So it’s not you?’
There’s a pause. Alex might be weighing up whether he wants to welcome in this interruption to their dinner, or whether he wants to send the brunette away as quickly as possible. Or maybe the pause is just for dramatic effect. It’s difficult to tell.
