The House We Grew Up In (22 page)

He laughed at her, gently. She didn’t blame him. ‘I’ve got my own place, near the station in Cirencester,’ he said. ‘Overlooks the tracks, bit noisy, but I quite like the noise. I’d rather that than the noise of flatmates.’

She nodded emphatically, as though she, too, had known the hell of noisy flatmates. ‘And why did you come to the Cotswolds?’ She was using questions like tennis balls, hurling them at him too fast for him to get one back to her.

‘Well, I was in London,
of course
,’ he smiled, ‘and someone invited me to a house party out this way. Thought it was the prettiest place I’d ever been in my life, so I got straight on to the Internet and applied for every IT job I could find in the area.’

Beth was barely listening – she was too busy thinking of what to ask him next. ‘And where did you live, in London?’

‘Oh, well, you know,
everywhere
. North, south, west, not east. But pretty much all over.’

‘And whereabouts in Australia are you from?’

‘Tasmania. Hobart. You know.’

She did not know. She thought there might have been some connection with yachts. She smiled and said, ‘Oh, right. And how long do you think you’ll be staying here?’

Jason puffed out his cheeks and then exhaled. ‘Good question,’ he said. ‘A few months, at least. My sister’s getting married in December – I’ll head home for that and then take
a view on whether or not to come back. I’ll be taking stock of what I’ve achieved here, what I’ve invested in, balance it up with family, home, you know, that kind of thing, make a call.’ He glanced meaningfully at her.

She flushed and looked into her wine glass. ‘How old’s your sister?’ she asked urgently. She picked up her glass and drank too much, too quickly.
This was a mistake
. She imagined Meg and Bill sitting by an unlit rippling pool, abandoned inflatable toys floating darkly across its surface, drinking local wine from blue wine glasses, laughing together with their ‘friends’, about lovely, normal middle-class things. She felt awash with hate and sadness. She drank the rest of her wine without tasting it and realised that Jason had just answered her banal question about his sister and that she had not heard his reply.

‘You’re very different,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘when you’re not at work.’

‘Am I?’

‘Yeah. You seem less … a bit more … just kind of different.’

She smiled, rather defeatedly.

‘Can I get you anther one?’ he asked, eyeing her empty glass.

She eyed it too, staring into its depths, analysing her options. She could leave. They had had two drinks. It was nearly nine o’clock. She could claim tiredness and leave. Or she could stay. She could have another glass of this average wine and try to squeeze some more conversation out of the evening and go to bed tonight knowing that she had been on a date. That she had been ‘normal’. Or she could stay and drink more than another glass and wring something even more
eventful from the night: a moonlit walk, a drunken fumble, held hands, maybe even sex. She looked from her empty wine glass into Jason’s enquiring gaze and he smiled.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ he replied.

She narrowed her eyes at him, accusing.

‘Nothing!’ he said again. ‘Nothing. Just thinking how pretty you are. That’s all.’ She saw a pink blush stain his cheeks. It came and went in a moment. She felt her stomach roll gently at his words and at his embarrassment. ‘That’s sweet,’ she said, picturing Meg, so solid, so matronly. ‘Thank you. And yes. I would like another one. Please.’

He got to his feet. ‘Small? Big?’

‘Medium,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

She watched him again, heading for the bar, his body language showing another small victory. She tugged her skirt a little up her legs, showing her shiny kneecaps. She arranged herself into a nice shape.

She tried not to cry.

‘So, how did your date go?’ asked Vicky, mixing muesli from two separate jars into a large bowl and tipping a handful of raisins on top. ‘I didn’t hear you come in. I thought maybe you’d spent the night out?’ She accompanied her words with a big wide smile of vicarious delight.

‘No,’ said Beth, flopping down heavily on to the bench and putting her elbows on the tabletop. She pulled the sleeves of her cardigan up her arms and yawned. ‘I slept here.’

‘And?’

Beth sighed. ‘And nothing. We had a drink. We had another drink. We had another drink. We went for a walk.’

‘To?’

‘To his flat.’

‘Oh, where’s that then?’

‘By the station.’

‘Go on.’

‘We listened to music. We talked. I ordered myself a taxi. I came home.’ She shrugged and yawned again.

Vicky looked at her curiously. ‘So, a success?’

Lorelei wafted into the kitchen then, in her antique silk kimono, her grey hair piled on top of her head, kohl smudged beneath her eyes. ‘Morning all,’ she said.

Beth stared at her as she stood in the doorway, making her entrance, waiting for Vicky to jump up and serve her. But Vicky did not jump up and serve her. Instead she said, ‘Morning, my love,’ took her own bowl of muesli and her mug of black tea and sat down next to Beth. ‘Beth’s just been telling me all about her date last night.’

‘It
wasn’t
a date,’ Beth protested.

‘Well, whatever. Your drinks, with a gentleman.’ She brought her arm around Beth’s shoulders and clasped her to her for a moment. Beth pulled away slightly.

Lorelei stood in the doorway looking a bit lost.

‘The kettle’s just boiled, darling,’ said Vicky and Beth could have sworn there was a hint of antagonism in her voice. Lorelei muttered inaudibly under her breath and shuffled across the flagstones in her lambskin slippers. ‘Where’s the green tea?’ she asked distractedly.

‘Where it always is, darling, in the blue jar, next to the normal tea. So,’ she turned back to Bethan. ‘Do you think you’ll be seeing him again?’

‘No,’ said Beth bluntly.

‘Oh. Really?’

‘Yes. Really.’ She watched her mother, flapping about hopelessly, the sleeves of her kimono dressing gown dragging through the sugar bowl, tutting under her breath.

‘That’s a pity. Why not?’

Beth sighed. ‘Because,’ she began, ‘he’s way too young. And he’s going back to Australia in December so there’s absolutely no point in me getting close to him.’

‘Oh, sweetness, I’m sure you could persuade him to stay, using your feminine wiles.’

‘I’m no good at persuading people to do things.’ After four years in love with someone else’s man, this she was very certain of.

‘Oh, Beth.’ Vicky ran her hand around the back of her neck and smiled sadly. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

Lorelei brought her mug of tea to the table and sat down with a ponderous sigh. ‘Where are the girls?’ she asked.

‘They’re with Tim.’

‘But it’s not his weekend, is it?’

‘No, but I thought it might be nice for us to have a quiet weekend together. Just the two of us.’

Lorelei shrugged and sipped her tea.

Beth wriggled slightly. There was a strange atmosphere in here. And she was completely in the way. She imagined that Vicky must have been quite disappointed when she’d heard
Beth walk into the kitchen this morning, hoping that she’d be in a strange man’s bed instead. She mentally planned a long run and an afternoon movie next door with her dad.

She’d get breakfast in the village, she decided. During her run. They did a good granola. Well, actually, it was a very average granola, but it was a good excuse to get her running gear on and get out of here.

She let her thoughts skirt around the details of the previous night as she jogged along the lane into the village centre. She did not want to dwell for too long on her own bizarre behaviour, the way she had suddenly, after her second glass of wine, started to flirt outrageously with Jason, she who had never flirted with a man before in her life. And, she could see quite clearly this morning, it would have been fairly obvious to Jason that that was the case. She saw herself in the corners of her consciousness, her elbows on the table, her hands cupping her face, her eyelashes going up and down like defective blinds, licking her lips, and then, oh, yes, after her third, or was it her fourth glass of wine, running her toes along his shins. She pounded her feet harder against the tarmac, wanting to shake the memories out on to the ground, like gravel from her shoes.

She reached the café, ‘
the best thing ever to happen to the village
’, according to Vicky who loved everything about the place from its piles of fresh newspapers and artfully arranged mountains of banana and oatmeal muffins to the handmade oven gloves for sale by the till and the trendy, apron-clad proprietor from Islington called Morgan, after whom the café was named.

She ordered her granola and berries and hid in a corner
with the magazine from the
Guardian
. She tried to concentrate on the letters page but her thoughts kept tugging her back to her mouth at Jason’s ear, telling him what she was going to do to him once she’d got him back to his place. She imagined her sour-wine breath all over his fresh young skin. She cringed at the thought of her choice of language. She could not, of course, know what he’d thought. He’d said, ‘
Let’s get you a strong coffee
.’ Which is what you say to someone who’s unpleasantly drunk. Nobody wants to sober up a fun drunk, do they? She remembered,
my God
, trying to give him a blow job in the pub car park, tugging at the fly on his jeans.

The waitress – another Australian – brought her breakfast with a cheery smile and a tiny piece of apricot and vanilla tart they were ‘testing out’. ‘Tell us what you think,’ she solicited. ‘Chef’s keen for feedback.’ Beth smiled tightly and said thank you.

And Jason laughing and saying, ‘
Hey, hey, hey
,’ and pulling her up from her knees and tugging his flies back up and saying, ‘
Will you be OK to walk, or shall I call a taxi?
’

She couldn’t remember a taxi, not at that point in the evening. They must have walked. All through those dark country lanes. She spooned thick yogurt on to her granola. It came back to her. She’d felt herself young and girlish. She’d thought herself Bridget fucking Jones. She remembered twirling round and round, letting her skirt fill up, fancying herself a prom princess. She remembered him pulling her back to the kerb, laughing again, saying, ‘
You’re going to get yourself killed!
’ And there it was, proof, if it were needed, that there was nothing funny about Bridget Jones.

And then, a lift. Someone had given them a lift. Someone yeasty and woolly with a Gloucester bur. She remembered making off-colour jokes about Fred West. She remembered Jason apologising on her behalf. She could not remember what the driver of the car had looked like. In these awful half-memories, she saw him just as Fred West, even down to the brown jumper.

And then they were in Jason’s flat and she was trying to open his trousers again, trying to pull him on to the bed.
Urgh
.
God
. She tipped the berries on to her granola and angled a spoon towards it all, as though she had any intention of eating it, as though she would ever be able to contemplate eating again. And then she remembered biting his earlobe and him yelping. And all the while she remembered thinking of Bill. Thinking of him in his holiday bed. With his fat wife. And she imagined all the while that he was watching them, that this was all a show, for Bill. That she was a porn star and Jason was her co-star and that they were making porn. For Bill.

She’d done all that stuff.

Squeezed her breasts together. Made ludicrous noises. Asked to be fucked.

Christ
.

But Jason had not gone along with her plans. He had peeled her away from him and held her by her wrists and said, ‘
Stop. You’re drunk. You don’t know what you’re doing
.’ And she’d said, ‘
Oh, but I do. I know exactly what I’m doing
.’ And he’d said, ‘
Beth. Seriously. Stop it. I’m getting you a coffee
.’

The coffee had done the trick. Two thick shots of espresso from a little silver machine. Like a shot of adrenalin to the
heart. He’d offered to let her sleep in his bed; he’d sleep on the sofa. But she’d been adamant that she needed to go home. Sleep in her own bed. Be away from all this. So she’d sat sheepishly on Jason’s sofa, waiting for a taxi that never seemed to come. She could not now remember much about Jason’s flat. She never wanted to see Jason’s flat ever again. She never wanted to see Jason ever again. Her stomach lurched at the hitherto unacknowledged fact that she would be seeing Jason in less than forty-eight hours. That she would walk into her office on Monday morning, South Gloucestershire PA of the Year, and he would be there. In all his Antipodean, twenty-five-year-old glory. And he would know what she was really like. South Gloucestershire Weirdo of the Year. And she would know what he was really like. A totally decent man.

She would have to leave.

She would have to find a new job and a new place to live.

And it was all Bill’s fault.

She pushed away her uneaten granola and untested apricot tart and unread
Guardian
magazine and she left some money on the table and she plugged her earphones back into her ears and she smiled as normally as she could at the nice Australian waitress and she left the café and she ran. She ran all the way to the cemetery and all the way to her brother’s grave. It was a bright Saturday morning, busy and safe, not that she cared if she got raped. Not this morning. Bring it on. She was numb.

His grave was dusty and neglected. She ran her fingers over the engraved words:

Today was 12 April. More than twelve years ago. He’d be twenty-eight now. Older than Jason. How peculiar.

She tried not to think about that day. She’d spent twelve years trying not to think about that day. Maybe that’s why she was so weird. Everyone else had dealt with it. Meg had been so strong. Rory had been so angry. Vicky had been so practical. Dad had been so normalising. And Mum had just … well, Mum didn’t count. And no one – and she didn’t mean to feel sorry for herself – but no one had needed Beth. No one had even really noticed Beth. No, that wasn’t fair – Meg had noticed Beth. Meg had noticed that Beth had stopped eating, and said, in that patronising way of hers, ‘
I was the one who found him and I’m still eating. We’ve all got to stay strong, even you, Beth … even you
.’