After Ever After (28 page)

And Fergus still isn’t home.

I’m staring at a tray of miniature chicken supreme vol-au-vents that Georgina has just unveiled before me with the kind of flourish that is usually warranted by turning water into wine or something.

‘I knew you’d be struggling with the catering, dear, so I thought I’d contribute a little bit.’

I try not to look at the twelve round turrets of flaky pastry and greyish mush, but somehow their lure is magnetic.

‘Well, thanks,’ I say lamely. In fact, my fridge and oven are both full right now of dozens of party-style buffet foods all bought courtesy of Marks & Spencer’s, all ready in under fifteen minutes, and all requiring no more of a struggle than removing the packaging before placing in a preheated oven, and these are just whatever the French word for a nibble is – after that I have a main course. I’m hugely proud of it. I had no idea you could get whole roasts prepackaged. Of course Georgina knows nothing about my chicken and my duck, so she’s still preening over her efforts.

‘I mean, I’d have done more, but I didn’t want you to accuse me of interfering
again
,’ she says pointedly through her fuchsia lipstick-framed teeth, and I wince. I was rather hoping she’d forgotten about that.

After Gareth left on Monday evening, everything else went downhill. To say it’s been a difficult week would be an understatement. In fact it’s been exactly the kind of week you don’t need to have in the run-up to an event where all the most important people in your life will be under one roof judging you.

When Fergus finally came home on Monday night it was almost eleven, and true to form Ella was up again and bright as a button, screeching for her daddy as soon as he got in through the door as if I’d been beating and starving her all day.

Fergus kissed me on the cheek and flopped on to the sofa with Ella.

‘Do you want anything?’ I asked him awkwardly, still a little fuzzy from the lager. Fergus had begun to heroically row the boat with Ella, pulling her back and forth on his knee.

‘No, I had a pizza at work. A cup of tea would be nice, or a beer if you haven’t already drunk it all.’ He smiled as he said it, and I wondered how I could explain that there wasn’t any left without having to mention that Gareth was here too.

‘Have a glass of wine instead,’ I said. ‘Lager’ll give you nightmares.’

When I returned a few minutes later, Ella reached out and grabbed the edge of my jumper, pulling me down to sit beside her and Fergus, smiling at us each in turn.

‘She knows, you know,’ I said to Fergus after a while, feeling strung out and tired.

‘She knows what,’ he said without looking at me.

‘That we’re fighting. She knows and she doesn’t like it. She hates it.’ I watched his profile in the hope that the best thing between us right now might help us find a way back into what was good about our relationship.

He put his palm on the top of her head, before blowing a raspberry on her cheek, making her giggle and shudder all at once.

‘I know she knows,’ he said. His face looked full and heavy with sadness. ‘My mum and dad were at it hammer and tongs for most of my childhood, and I knew about it, even when I was really little. I knew about it and I hated it.’

‘Were they?’ I asked him. I sounded rather more intrigued than was appropriate under the circumstances, but it was just that Daniel was such a self-possessed and quiet man that I couldn’t imagine him engaging in any kind of unseemly dialogue with his wife.

‘Oh yeah, they hated each other for years, for as long as I can remember until I was about ten, and then Dad left home for about two weeks. I don’t know where he went or who with to this day. But Mum went to pieces, guzzling the whisky and popping tranqs, the works.’ He half smiled. ‘It was like living on the set of
Sunset Boulevard
. I was left wandering about that big house making beans on toast for tea and telling the lads at school everything was fine and that my rugby kit was still dirty because our washing machine was broken. Eventually I had to tell a teacher, who phoned my mum, and then some aunt turned up from somewhere, and then the whole Irish family mafia kind of thing was set in motion and someone’s cousin found Dad and talked to him and about a week later Dad came home. They never talked about what happened, not in front of me, at least, and they were just different with each other from then on, as if they’d both realised how easily everything they had could have fallen apart. They really loved each other, still do, but back then they let everything else get on top of them and they forgot it.’

As he spoke he loosened his tie before pulling it off and dropping it into Ella’s delighted hands. ‘I don’t want that to happen to us, Kitty. I mean, I know I’m not very good at explaining how I feel, but I don’t mean to go on about sex all the time. I don’t know how to explain it. I don’t care if we never have sex again, just as long as you remember that you love me.’

I leant into the curve of his arm and breathed in his scent in a few deep breaths. Ella pulled my hair companionably.

‘I’ll never forget that I love you,’ I said, smiling up at him, my head tipped at an acute angle dictated by Ella’s none-too-gentle attentions, and I made a silent promise to make that statement true. ‘Ouch! Or you, pickle.’ She lay her head on my shoulder and we all held each other very tightly for a moment before watching TV and drinking red wine long into the night until Ella eventually slept again.

When Fergus returned from putting her into her cot, he took me in his arms and held me quietly. I held my breath until I could muster up the courage and energy to speak again.

‘Would you really not care?’ I said suddenly into the companionable silence.

‘Not care about what?’ Fergus said into my hair.

‘If we never did it again?’ I wriggled in his arms so that I could look at him.

‘Would you care?’ he replied cautiously.

I nodded heartily. ‘Yes, yes of course I’d care. I love making love with you. I just seem to have fallen off the horse and I’m having a bit of trouble getting back in the saddle, sort of thing. But I know I will eventually … get back on the horse, and what’s more
love
getting on the horse and riding the horse – hard.’

Fergus laughed and held me tightly for a second.

‘Great analogy from Kitty Kelly, there. Was that in one of your magazines?’ I shrugged, glad to have made him laugh. ‘Listen, when I was banging on about intimacy earlier, this is what I meant. You and me together, talking and not talking, but together, close. I’d rather have this and no sex than emotionless sex neither one of us enjoys.’

I took his glass out of his hand.

‘Oh well, if you like all this sitting about staring into the gas fire nonsense, then you won’t be interested in taking me for a riding lesson right now,’ I said with my best sexy face. The sweetest smile that I’d fallen for in the beginning spread slowly over Fergus’s face and I drew him into my arms. In perfect silence and the darkness of our bedroom, we made love, half drunk and half asleep, companions and friends more than passionate lovers, but at least we were close and at least we had talked. It felt like a beginning.

When I woke up the next day he’d already gone, leaving a note by his side of the bed.

‘My mobile’s gone flat, call Tiffs if you need me,’ and he’d scribbled her number down quickly. Which meant he knew it, and probably off by heart. Despite hours of rationalisation, for the rest of that day until he came home I felt jealous and angry, and as soon as he got in we had another fight. Not about us, not about sex, this time, but about the washing machine. It’s a long story.

In the meantime I waited around for Gareth to turn up that morning but he never came. It was only after a call to Fergus and then a hunt through the
Yellow Pages
that I realised I didn’t have any kind of contact number for him. I couldn’t even remember seeing one on the side of his van. I remembered Daniel had recommended him to Fergus and I phoned him to ask for a number, but he said he’d heard of him through a friend and had never actually had the number.

‘It’s rather strange really,’ he said to me. ‘I can’t remember where I heard about him or how I got in touch with him in the first place, now I come to think about it.’

Gareth turned up on Wednesday as if nothing had happened, the heroic glaze I’d given him whilst whiling away many hours in his company considerably tarnished.

‘All right?’ He breezed in through the door with a quick glance up at a sky patched with clouds as he entered. ‘Looks like it might be a nice day.’

‘Where were you yesterday?’ I demanded, by way of a hello. ‘For a whole day I waited in for you and you never turned up. I do have a life outside this house, you know. If I’d known you weren’t going to bother turning up, I could have gone somewhere, done … something.’

He smiled at me a smile that said, ‘Yeah – like what?’

‘Listen, I’m your gardener, love, not your … not your bloody boyfriend.’ He didn’t respond with the abject apology or even the friendliness I’d been expecting after Monday evening, after everything. ‘And besides, I
did
tell you. I
told
you I was going away for the day to price up another job for after this one. I
told
you I wouldn’t get back from Luton until Monday afternoon. I
told
you last week.’

‘No you didn’t,’ I protested weakly, before remembering. ‘And when I saw you on Monday you said see you tomorrow, I remember!’

Gareth sighed and gritted his teeth. I was almost certain that he’d never said anything about having Tuesday off, but he was so self-assured and I was so all over the place that I couldn’t be sure if he did or not.

‘I don’t remember saying that. If I did, it was just a reflex, just because I always say it, it’s not a bloody promise!’ he told me angrily, and I found myself backing away from him, shocked by his sudden, sharp, aggressive edge. He caught my reaction and his face instantly softened.

‘Look, I’m sorry. It’s just that I had a hell of a trip, shit loads of traffic, and I didn’t get back till late and then the neighbours’ bloody baby kept me up all night, and I keep thinking about … Well, sometimes you can’t get everything you want and it pisses me off. I shouldn’t take it out on you, though.’ He dropped a long-fingered hand on to my shoulder. ‘I did tell you, honest, but you’re so busy and all, what with running this place all on your own, you must have forgotten.’ He smiled then with the kind of delight little boys reserve for train sets and spiders. ‘I’ve got a van full of plants out there. If the weather’s going to be as good as I think, we can spend all day planting out? I’ll teach you Latin names.’

‘Really?’ I cried, almost forgetting my anger with him. Before I could even finish the cheer, a clap of thunder had shaken the sky until it opened, letting out a torrent of rain.

‘Just our luck, right?’ Gareth said with a complicit grin, and I let us be friends again. A friend, after all, doesn’t break any promises.

Five minutes later I’d made him a coffee and we both sat in the kitchen watching the rain.

‘It looks like someone picked up the Channel and just dumped it all in one go,’ he said bleakly.

‘I thought you country blokes were supposed to know about weather.’ I eyed him speculatively. ‘All that rain in Wales. I’d have thought you’d be able to sense it or something. Nice day my arse.’

Gareth lifted his chin and shrugged.

‘I grew up on the nastiest council estate in Cardiff,’ he said. ‘Not exactly what you’d call rural, but anyway, I’ll give it another go.’ He examined the thick low covering of angry cloud closely. ‘I reckon it’s going to rain for a bit yet,’ he said, returning his gaze to me with a wry smile.

‘So, if you grew up in a city, why are you a gardener?’ I asked him. It was a stupid question, but it was chucking it down with rain, and since his disappearing act yesterday I’d realised that while I’d let him into my home, my life and to a certain extent my head, I knew practically nothing about him.

Before answering me, Gareth looked at his reflection in the day-dark window for a moment longer, and I could see him weighing up his options. It was a look I’d seen before, but only ever in the mirror. It was the way I’d looked when I’d debated whether or not to tell everyone the whole truth about my mum.

‘Well, I always thought I’d join the army right from being a little lad, but when it came to it I failed the entrance exam.’

I kept my mouth shut and tried my best to look just half interested, but I honestly thought all you had to be able to do to get in the army was add two and two together and prove you weren’t psychotic. Or maybe you had to prove you were. One or the other.

‘I was gutted,’ Gareth continued. ‘Never thought of doing anything else, never bothered with school. I was just waiting to be old enough to enlist. So anyways, I knocked about on the dole for a while, did a bit of labouring and then a mate of mine got me into the TA and I loved it. For a while it became my life. I went on all the manoeuvres, playing soldier and all that, packed in my girlfriend Lauren because she was sick of me going away every weekend. I just hung out with the lads. It was good. I suppose I thought they were sort of my family.’ He sighed, pulling himself back from the memory and changing the subject. ‘Have you ever noticed that everyone, everyone you ever meet in the world, has a story to tell, a tragedy. All of us. Six billion people wandering around the planet bumping into each other, desperate to tell each other about the fucked-up things that have happened to us, not one of us really giving a shit about anyone else’s problems.’

I thought about the fucked-up things that had happened to me and decided that so far in life the only ‘good’ thing to come out of it is that I instantly trump everyone else with my own tragedy. It’s a story that instantly makes a ‘my boyfriend’s chucked me’ or a ‘my parents are divorced’ story look a bit lame.

‘Go on,’ I said, wanting to know if Gareth could trump me.

‘Anyway, my dad used to knock my mum around when I was kid, sometimes me, but mainly her.’ He said it casually as if he were describing cartoon violence. ‘And then he ran off with the local barmaid. Big fat bottle blonde, knocked her around for a couple of weeks and when she came running back he took off. I didn’t see him for years until one day I got home from a weekend’s orienteering and there he was, sitting in the front room eating chips. The first thing I said to him was, “Where’s my mum?” He nodded to the kitchen. I went in and there she was, sitting at the table, a black eye and a broken nose, two teeth out, trying to peel some sodding spuds to make him more chips. I don’t know, she must have been in shock, sitting there peeling spuds, bleeding all over the table.’