Miss You (30 page)

‘How old are you now, Tess?’ he’d asked, peering at my notes. ‘Twenty-four! That’s far too young! Having a genetic test has all sorts of serious implications . .
.’

Sometimes you don’t dare ask about scary things like ‘serious implications’ in case by saying the words out loud you make them more likely. So instead I’d asked,
‘How old do I need to be then?’

‘We’ll think about it again when you’re in your thirties and you’ve had a family. Enjoy life, Teresa! Don’t look so worried!’

‘That’s crazy,’ Shaun said. ‘If the test’s available, I think you should go back and demand it. What does Dave think?’

‘He says the doctor ought to know what he’s talking about,’ I said. ‘Which is probably fair enough.’

He hadn’t diagnosed my mother’s ovarian cancer, but she hadn’t gone to see him, so I couldn’t blame him for that. The nice female doctor had told me that taking the Pill
lessened my chances of getting that one, at least.

‘Have you told Dave about not wanting kids?’

‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Why?’

‘Because I know he’d say something like, “You say that now, but . . .”’

‘What if he said, “Tess, I don’t want kids either. I just want to be with you?”’

‘He wouldn’t.’

‘But if he did?’ Shaun stared at me.

‘I don’t know,’ I confessed.

But suddenly it all seemed much clearer.

On the final night, the three of us went to see Kevin perform in the ballet of
Romeo and Juliet
. He wasn’t Romeo, but he was Benvolio, who has a big solo dance in
the second act. Technically, Kev was on fire, but what I loved most was the natural, laddish quality he brought to acting the role, jeering and bantering with his mates Mercutio and Romeo. It took
me back to him and Brendan kicking a ball about in the garden at home, and it made me want to cry, because if Dad was there, he’d see that there was nothing effeminate about the dancing at
all and he’d be really proud of his eldest son. And I knew that, underneath, that’s the thing Kev still wanted most in the whole world.

I tried to tell him at the after-party, but it’s not the same, someone telling you, is it? Especially not your little sister.

He did wear a wig, by the way.

I’d never seen Hope so animated as when we got back and she was telling Dad and Anne about the trip. Of course, she had a different take on it from me, like the sound of
the subway trains coming into a station, which I hadn’t even noticed, and the way Americans pronounce ‘coffee’. She sang them songs from all the musicals and Dad didn’t
believe her when she said we went nine times, although he should have known that Hope doesn’t lie.

‘Who paid for all this then?’ he asked me.

‘Shaun got us house seats,’ I told him, knowledgeably. To be honest, I didn’t know whether that meant he paid or not, but it shut Dad up.

‘There’s something unusual about Shaun and Kevin,’ Hope suddenly said.

Just when I thought we’d managed to steer a safe course through
that
whole question.

I could feel the temperature in the room falling as my dad waited for the inevitable evidence of his youngest daughter’s exposure to mortal sin. He looked at me daggers.

‘They have their kitchen upstairs!’ said Hope.

Dave was talking on his mobile phone outside the restaurant, so he wasn’t aware of me approaching, and I saw him for a moment as someone else might see him. He was
wearing a plain navy polo shirt and well-fitting jeans and he looked really masculine and kind of hot. All the certainty I’d brought back with me from New York began to waver. Was I really
going to let this lovely man go on some vague hope that there was something better out there waiting for me? In New York, it was easy to dream, but this was my real life. Dave loved me and cared
about me, and that suddenly seemed so precious, I couldn’t think why I would gamble it away. Maybe all I’d needed was a bit of distance.

He looked up at the sound of my footsteps running towards him, and put his mobile phone in his pocket.

‘Wow!’ He did a double-take. ‘You look different!’

‘Do you like it?’ I did a little twirl.

‘It’s great,’ he said.

To be honest, I’d been expecting more than great.

We gave each other a quick, almost embarrassed, peck of a kiss. It had only been a week, but it was like we’d forgotten what to do.

At the table, I handed over the Yankees cap I’d bought him. He put it on his head, then took it off again.

‘So what do you fancy?’ He picked up the menu.

I wished we hadn’t gone for pizza because pizza in New York was so much better, and I found myself babbling on about it, probably because of jet lag.

‘Anything to start?’ He beckoned the waitress over.

‘No, thanks.’

It felt almost like our first date, when I’d been eager to impress but didn’t know what sort of thing he’d like to talk about. I’d promised myself that I wouldn’t
mention my plans to get a different job and write until I’d got a bit further, but it all came tumbling out.

‘A writing group?’ Dave repeated.

‘Just to see if I can.’

‘Why do you want to do that?’

‘Because I think I might find it creatively fulfilling,’ I said, a little bit prickly, like Kev.

‘You and your big words!’

The phrase seemed to echo between us.

‘Have you been seeing a lot of Doll?’ I asked, meaning, as in doing the plumbing for her new shop, but Dave had such an open face, I saw immediately that, one, he had, and two, he
thought I meant much more than plumbing.

‘You and Doll?’ I faltered.

I’d left a message on her answerphone to say we were back, but she hadn’t called immediately to get the low-down.

‘I’m so sorry, Tess . . .’

‘If I hadn’t asked, were you actually going to tell me, or were you going to carry on behind my back?’

‘It’s not what you think . . .’

‘How is it not what I think?’

‘It’s serious,’ he said.

He was right, because that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking fling. I couldn’t seem to work out whether that would have been better, or worse.

Everything felt a bit out-of-body, like being in a film whose script demanded that I should ask, ‘How long has this been going on then?’

‘Only this week. We’ve been working late, trying to get the new shop ready and—’

I held my hand up to stop him. I didn’t want to hear the details.

‘Only this week, and it’s
serious
?’ I imitated his earnest tone.

‘Doll and I have known each other years, though, haven’t we? Not that I’d ever thought it was possible . . .’

The implication being that any man in his right mind would want Doll over me. Thinking about sex, or whatever it was he was thinking about, Dave’s face broke into a smile.

‘For heaven’s sake!’ I shouted.

Then I couldn’t think of anything else to say, so I scraped back my chair and walked out, leaving him to pick up the bill.

Half an hour before, I’d felt so grown up with my new haircut and styling, but now, as I sat on the bus home, it was as if I’d gone right back to our first school disco, watching all
the boys dare each other to ask Doll to dance as if I didn’t even exist.

Doll’s big blue eyes froze when she opened the door.

She’d been expecting Dave, I realized. Had they agreed that he would report back after? Were they planning to sit there analysing my reaction, or rush upstairs and screw?

‘It just happened . . .’ said Doll.

‘How?’

‘You really want to know?’

‘Nooooo!’

She looked upset at the rawness of my anguish.

She touched my arm. ‘Come inside and we’ll talk.’

I batted her hand away.

‘What’s there to talk about?’ I asked bitterly.

‘Don’t make me choose, Tess!’ she whined.

‘Don’t you dare try to make out I’m the unreasonable one and you’re the hapless victim . . .’

‘Hapless?’

‘Unfortunate.’

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d be cross but I thought—’

‘What? That I’d give you my blessing?’ I was suddenly furious. ‘No problem, Doll, take my fiancé! Do whatever you want. You always do anyway. It’s always
take, take, take, with you, isn’t it? I’ll have this one, oh and that one, in both colours, please. Someone else’ll pick up the tab . . .’

‘You bloody cow!’ Doll retaliated. ‘What have I ever taken from you?’

‘My homework, my ideas . . . my bloody fiancé!’ I cried.

‘You didn’t
really
want him, though, did you?’ said Doll.

There was no answer to that, and she knew it, and her willingness to use privileged information gleaned from knowing me so well felt like the ultimate betrayal.

‘Don’t go! Please, Tess!’ She chased me up the road. ‘You’ll find your dream, I know you will . . .’

‘What?’ I rounded on her. ‘So you can take it away from me?’

‘That’s not fair!’

She stopped.

I marched on, half-expecting her to continue after me. But she didn’t. Nor did she come round to our house later.

We’d fallen out badly only once before, aged eight, for the summer term when Doll had suddenly announced that Cerise McQuarry was her best friend.

‘I think you’re better off without her,’ I remembered Mum saying.

That’s all very well, but I’ve got nobody now
, I told her silently.

‘Would you recommend parenthood?’ Marcus asked me.

We were both watching as my daughter Flora, wearing only a nappy and a pair of tiny pink jelly shoes, reached the water’s edge. She squatted down, with that amazing sense of balance that
toddlers acquire so soon after they’ve started walking, to scoop seawater into her yellow plastic bucket.

Marcus had invited us for Sunday lunch on the north Kent coast. As a weekend escape from his loft apartment in a converted mattress factory in Clerkenwell, he’d recently acquired a
converted fisherman’s hut in Whitstable. In line for a partnership at the big City law firm, he was able to live comfortably on his salary, while investing his eye-watering bonuses in cool
properties. He was indisputably more successful than I was, or ever likely to be, but I was already a father. There was never anything hostile about our unspoken competition, but it was always
there, as if we audited our lives by comparing them.

‘Unreservedly,’ I replied.

‘Doesn’t it stop you doing things?’ he asked, picking up a stone and skimming it across the water. We both watched, counting silently. One, two, threefourfivesixseven.

I was tempted to say, ‘We no longer have sex in the box when we go to the opera.’

But I knew that would cross the line between friendly one-upmanship and showing off.

I picked up a stone and skimmed it. Seven.

‘You kind of stop thinking that way,’ I said. ‘Your needs aren’t so important, not compared with your child’s.’

‘In what way?’ Marcus was trained to cross-examine the evidence.

Picking up another stone, then discarding it for not being flat enough, I searched for a precise illustration.

‘I always thought we’d go on holiday to Italy when I finally started earning, but it wouldn’t be much fun for Flora trawling round churches. To be honest, she’s as happy
here as she would be in some island spa in the Maldives,’ I added, which had been Charlotte’s idea of a suitable holiday destination until she’d properly imagined ten hours of
Flora on a plane.

‘No regrets, then?’ Marcus asked.

‘None,’ I confirmed, unsure how he’d react if I told him that my one regret was returning to work after the parental leave I’d taken in between switching my training from
hospital to GP surgery.

The creation of a warm and loving home had been much more rewarding than I’d anticipated. I’d enrolled in a twice-weekly mother-and-baby group, where we sang ‘The Wheels on the
Bus’ with our bewildered infants propped on our laps, making circles with their hands during the chorus. In the afternoons, I relished having the time to shop for fruit and vegetables as the
market stalls were packing up, introducing Flora to real items the Very Hungry Caterpillar ate. I made it my routine to cook Charlotte something delicious for dinner each day, and diligently
puréed organic produce for Flora when she started on solid food. When I brought along cookies that I’d baked to the mother-and-baby group, I became, in Charlotte’s words,
‘the darling of the yummy mummies’.

‘You miss your old friends, obviously,’ I conceded, wondering if that was what Marcus was getting at. This was only the second time we’d got together since Flora was born.

Nash was the only pre-baby friend I’d seen fairly regularly in the first few months because she’d had free time during the day to stroll round Battersea Park with me and the pram.
But now she’d landed a role in an American medical drama series, she’d gone to live in LA.

‘How’s the job going?’ Marcus asked.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Steep learning curve, obviously.’

It had been difficult for me entrusting Flora to another person, but it would have been mad not to finally qualify after having worked so hard. We’d hired Kasia, a Polish Philosophy
graduate, as our nanny. She didn’t have any formal qualification in childcare, but she was intelligent, responsible and keen to practise English, so Flora was now taken to lots of new
activities like baby gym and swimming. Charlotte was probably right when she said that I missed Flora much more than she missed me.

With no one else around and the lulling rhythm of waves breaking on the shingle, I was, for a moment, tempted to confide in Marcus that I hated general practice, but I decided not to out of a
kind of loyalty to Charlotte. She’d mooted the idea on the plane home from New York. Wouldn’t general practice be a more flexible career? Who could resist the new deal for GPs which
made the salary of the average hospital doctor look like peanuts by comparison? Wouldn’t it be far more cost-effective if I were the one to take parental leave? Unfortunately, the reality of
having to make decisions about a relentless stream of people I’d never seen before sometimes felt like a kind of nightmare. I spent far too long with each patient, which led to queues
building up in the waiting room, exasperated colleagues and longer hours than I needed or wanted to do.