Christmas for One: No Greater Love (10 page)

‘No, a firefighter. You know it’s the only way I can picture him, in his uniform, either coming in from or heading out to work.’

‘That’s a nice memory to have.’ She considered what she knew about his death. ‘Was he caught in a fire?’

Edd stared at her, letting his eyes travel over her face and form. ‘He was killed in 9/11.’ He paused, letting this sink in. ‘After the first plane hit, they got the call and had just arrived when the second plane hit the South Tower. We know he was making his way into the South Tower when it collapsed.’

‘Oh my God.’ Megan stared at the book with the badge lying between its pages. ‘Edd…’ She shook her head, searching for the right words.

‘I don’t talk about it to most people.’

She smiled, acknowledging the compliment as he continued,

‘It’s strange for me. That’s the day that the whole of New York mourns and so my grief isn’t special.’

‘Does that make it harder or easier?’ she wondered.

‘Easier at first, I didn’t feel alone because there was so much support, I could feel the love and thoughts of everyone in the city, the country all pulling together. We got messages from all over the world. It was incredible.’

‘But now?’ she asked.

‘Now, I sometimes feel like shouting that I know it’s everyone’s tragedy, but he was my dad!
My
dad and I lost him and only I know what that feels like. Does that make sense?’

She nodded.

‘Like I said, it’s not something we talk about often, but every New Yorker carries it around in a little pocket just below their heart and once in a while we let it out, release the pain and sadness and then we tuck it away again, so we can get on with everyday life.’ He looked up at her. ‘I think that’s why I can talk to you about it because you weren’t here, you don’t have your own version of the day. It makes it easier somehow.’

‘I’m glad.’ She beamed. ‘What’s your first treasured thing?’ she asked buoyantly, changing the pace and tone of their conversation.

‘Agh, I never tell that on a first date.’ He lifted the sheet over the bottom of his face and batted his eyelashes, feigning coy.

Meg swung her legs from the side of the bed, taking in the spacious room. It was dominated by the grey metal window frame and its metal blinds, which had been raised to reveal the sprawl of New York below. The bed was a large wooden frame on the floor. There was very little furniture, bar a tall, slightly battered red metal locker unit standing against an exposed brick wall, with cubbyholes and numbered cupboard doors. It looked like it would be more at home in a stinky changing room. And there was a clear Perspex console table on which someone had neatly lined up bottles of aftershave and hair oil. Above the unit on the wall hung a huge flatscreen TV.

She wandered to the window in a bit of a daze. Closing her eyes, she exhaled, hating this morning-after feeling. She wasn’t used to it. Her bare feet stuck to the wooden floor. She gave a long, loud, open-mouthed yawn and jabbed with her index finger as she mined the corner of her eye to remove the sleepy dust, coloured black with eyeliner. She was fastidious about removing her make-up before falling asleep and wasn’t used to the sticky feeling of her lashes. She was certain she looked like Chi Chi the panda.

Leaning against the wall, she peered through the window as she ran her fingers through her thick, wavy hair, twisting it into a bun, from which it instantly unwound to hang down her back in a shiny blonde curtain. The view was semi-industrial. Immediately opposite sat a square red-brick warehouse with worn writing on the side in a three-dimensional font: ‘Mortimer Inc., Import and Export’. Meg was drawn to the bottle-green fire escapes that criss-crossed the building like laces. To the left was a more modern block, obviously converted from the original warehouse into apartments as many of the windows boasted window boxes and all manner of curtains, blinds and shades. Meg turned her head left and right: in every direction she could see nothing but rooftops and reflections, with a small bend of blue water in the distance between two buildings, and the city skyline stretching all the way to the horizon. ‘Where are we?’ she asked.

‘We’re on East 12th, Greenwich Village.’

‘Oh, sounds interesting!’ She smiled.

‘It’s very upscale.’ He raised his eyebrows.

‘Blimey. Better be on my best behaviour then.’ She stood upright and gripped the window frame. Any position other than horizontal when your blood was still one-third alcohol was not a good idea. The last thing she wanted was to be sick in this gorgeous man’s apartment.

‘Can I get you some coffee?’ The proximity of his voice made her jump. Edd leant on the doorframe in his tartan PJ bottoms and slipped his arms into a top with a black and white image of a smiling young man on the front. Meg stared at his T-shirt. Edd looked down and smiled, pointing at the toothy grinning face. ‘This is Yogi Berra.’

‘Let me guess, he played baseball?’ She folded her arms.

Edd shook his head. ‘No. He
is
baseball.’

Meg smiled. ‘I see. Coffee would be great, thank you.’

She watched as he padded out of the room. Even at this early hour and after a night of drinking and little sleep, he still looked wonderful. His thick hair flopped and curled effortlessly in a way that imitators would take hours to perfect. His skin was tawny and blemish-free and his twenty-four-hour stubble only highlighted his white teeth and full, pouty lips. She felt her muscles tense as she looked at her own flat chest, bony feet and mottled legs, which today had taken on a rather bluish tinge. Without the benefit of her wine goggles, she realised that she had been punching above her weight the day before. Sucking in her slightly pouchy mummy tummy and trying to curb her embarrassment, she ventured from the bedroom.

The rest of the apartment was surprisingly small, tiny in fact. The bedroom was by far the biggest space. Edd’s taste and style were also apparent in the open-plan sitting cum dining room: more exposed brick walls, wacky industrial lighting and a slick grey glossy kitchen area in the corner. Meg glanced at the oversized chrome clock. It was 7 a.m.

‘Is this going to be weird today, working together after…?’ She ran out of words, as she wasn’t sure quite what ‘this’ was. What she did know was that she was heading back to London tomorrow and this was just a little fling, a diversion.

Edd was at the sink, inserting a stainless steel tube of water into a complicated, industrial-looking coffee machine, the only appliance on the work surface in the immaculate kitchen.

He turned towards her and shook his head. ‘No, not at all. It’s only as weird as we make it. We are just friends, right? New friends, admittedly, who simply had a couple of drinks and fell asleep.’

‘Do you do second base with all your friends?’ she asked from behind lowered lids.

Edd laughed loudly. ‘You don’t “do” second base, you “go to” second base.’

‘Sorry. Do you
go to
second base with all your friends?’ She twisted her legs together and leant on the counter top.

‘No! No, I don’t. Most of them are too stubbly and have beer bellies.’ He laughed as he collected two plain white china mugs from a cupboard and placed them in front of the coffee machine.

‘Just checking.’ She smiled.

‘God, we drank a lot yesterday, but I think it was probably justified. Things like that don’t happen every day, thank God. It was a shock, right?’

‘Poor Mr Redlitch.’ Meg felt a flush of guilt that she hadn’t thought about him until that point.

‘I know. Poor guy.’ He sighed. ‘I never ever drink during the week, it’s my rule.’ Edd grinned at her over his shoulder.

‘I hardly drink at all, weekday or not. I’m practically teetotal,’ Meg countered as she toyed with her hair.
But I like drinking with you… And I did it because I wanted you to like me, wanted to be like every other girl who might have caught your eye. I wanted you to think I was cosmopolitan and outgoing and not scared. Lonely and scared.

‘Teetotal?’ Edd threw his head back and guffawed. ‘That’s funny. For a teetotaller you did pretty good. You must be like those vegetarians who give up meat at sixteen but continue to eat bacon, then eventually progress to chicken so that by the time they hit twenty they are ripping the leg off every cow that passes and slapping it in a bun. They think they’ve been embracing a vegetarian lifestyle when really they’ve simply been denying themselves what they crave.’ His eyes twinkled at her. ‘I think you are like that.’

She laughed. ‘I am so not like that!’

‘You were
so
like that last night. At one point I held up my hands – no more! And while I was in the bathroom you ordered Flaming Russians, two each!’

‘I don’t even know what a Flaming Russian is!’ Meg covered her eyes with her hands, cringing. ‘You must think I’m terrible.’

‘I do. I really do.’ He nodded vigorously. ‘I think you are one of the most terrible human beings I have ever met.’ He stared at her, his expression suggesting the exact opposite.

The delicious smell of freshly brewed coffee wafted from the machine and filled the apartment. Edd poured generous amounts into the waiting mugs and walked over to the firm, pale silver sofa in the middle of the room. Meg followed him.

‘Nice cushions!’ She pulled one of the mauve pillows from the sofa and admired the floral sequin design. ‘Very fancy-pants!’

‘I hate them. Unnecessary sofa ornaments. They spend more time on the floor when I’m home—’ Edd checked himself and shook his head as he plumped down on the sofa. They sat sideways, facing each other, without any of the awkwardness that might have followed, being that they were new friends who were only half dressed.

‘How long have you worked for Plum’s?’ he asked, cupping his coffee mug under his chin in a way that she found very attractive.

‘Four years.’ Meg sipped the restorative brew. ‘I lived with Milly and her cousin Pru first. I was going through a particularly rough patch and they really helped me out. And now I work for them.’

Meg wasn’t sure how much to share. It was hard to explain that as well as being her employers they were the closest thing to family that Meg had – well, reliable family. The only exception being her cousin Liam, who ran a car dealership in Lewisham that only just operated on the right side of the law. Milly had been there for Lucas’s birth and had earned a special place in her son’s heart as well as in her own. Having left school at sixteen without qualifications or a clue as to where her future lay, Meg never, ever took her very good fortune for granted.

She took a deep breath and mentally rehearsed how to tell Edd that her non-working hours were filled with Lucas, her heart, her anchor and her greatest joy.

‘I have a son,’ she blurted, a little louder and more bluntly than she intended, but there it was, out in the open.

‘You do?’ His eyes widened.

Meg nodded, unable to tell from his tone if he was shocked, disapproving or not that fussed.

‘How old?’ He tilted his head as though interested.

‘He’s four. He’s called Lucas.’

‘Lucas,’ Edd repeated. He sipped his coffee, keeping his eyes on Meg’s face. ‘Where is Lucas’s dad?’

‘His dad was Bill, my fiancé who died.’ Meg wriggled further into the sofa.

Edd lowered his cup. ‘Oh right! Sorry, Megan. That’s unimaginable. You must be a very strong woman to have coped.’

‘I don’t think I’m strong. Life has always just kind of happened to me without too much planning. My childhood wasn’t always easy and I learnt not to think much beyond the next day. And then I met Bill. And everything changed.’ She sighed. ‘Like seahorses, I didn’t know that someone like him could exist. He was Captain William Fellsley, an army officer who didn’t speak or act like anyone I’d ever known. He was smart and ambitious, but the most remarkable thing about Bill was that he loved me. Me! Of all the posh girls he could have picked, he chose me. I figured that if someone like that had picked me, then I must be valuable and special and once I realised that, I began living in the real world and not just existing with my nose pressed up against it.’

‘He sounds like a good guy. Losing him must have been awful.’ Edd raised his hand and let it fall at the understatement.

Meg nodded. ‘It was awful, but not for the reasons you might think. I found out some stuff after he’d gone that changed things.’ Meg toyed with the hem of the Yankees shirt. ‘He was seeing someone else, stringing us both along and, well, who knows what would have happened had he lived.’

Edd reached out and placed his hand on her thigh. ‘I’m sorry you had to go through that, Megan. All of it.’

‘No one calls me Megan any more. It’s Meg. If someone calls me Megan, I always think I’m in trouble or am being asked to fill out a form.’

‘Meg,’ he repeated.

‘Bill, that’s Lucas’s dad, had a friend called Piers. I saw him for a while. Couple of years actually.’ She pictured his kindly face. ‘He was lovely in some ways, but not for me. A bit too proper, always worried about what other people might think and a bit too connected to Bill for me to ever feel comfortable. He’s old before his time—’ She bit her lip. ‘That sounds mean and I don’t want it to.’

‘Old how?’ Edd chuckled. ‘Did he talk about the old days and smoke a pipe?’

‘No!’ She laughed. ‘But he did wear an old Barbour that might have belonged to his grandpa.’

‘Ah. Not a young man of fashion like my good self.’ He grinned.

Meg shook her head and thought about Piers’ frequent mentions of Bill and their mutual friends, their shared experiences. How he would continually ask, ‘How are you doing?’, assuming a doleful expression as he did so.

‘He made it hard for me to move on. So I moved on from him instead. I think I used him as a bit of a safety blanket, if I’m being honest. It was more like a habit, without any real emotion.’ She paused. ‘I’m not proud of that.’ This was the first time she had said this out loud to anyone other than Milly. ‘And I only admitted to myself quite recently that he wanted me to be someone that I wasn’t.’

‘Well, hey, we all know that story.’ Edd ran his fingers through his hair and stretched his long legs out in front of him, crossing his feet at the ankles. He rested his mug on his chest. ‘It’s the same for me, with Flavia. We met through a mutual friend and on paper she was brilliant. She’s a great girl, but there was no spark that makes you…’ Edd hesitated. ‘I don’t know how you describe it.’