Who's Afraid of Mr Wolfe? (30 page)

Jack went into the house and Ellie followed, feeling dizzy because she couldn’t take a full breath. When Edith wandered off to the kitchen, leaving Jack and Ellie standing very close to each other in the hallway, Ellie automatically looked down at the carpet.

‘You’re doing that carpet-staring thing again,’ Jack said.

‘Sorry.’

He coughed. ‘This is for you.’ He pushed the carrier bag at her and walked off to the kitchen.

She heard him asking Edith how she was, how the Scrabble was going, what she was having for her tea. He sounded amicable, relaxed.

Ellie opened the bag and looked inside. It was her dress, the one she had been wearing that first evening in Jack’s flat. She felt unable to think. It couldn’t be that dress: it had been ripped so badly across the front that she had thrown it out.

Jack was back. ‘It’s the same size as the last one, I think.’ He stood watching her and then strode back into the kitchen. A warm feeling welled up in Ellie’s chest. He had bought her a new dress. Did that mean something? Surely that meant something?

He was back again. ‘Well?’ was all he said.

At that moment she needed to feel his skin against hers so much that she reached out her hand and ran it tenderly down his face. Immediately his eyes looked hard and he jerked his head away. This time when he returned to the kitchen, you could see how angry he was with every step.

Ellie felt as though he had punched and winded her. She waited to see if he was going to come back and then went upstairs and hung the dress in her wardrobe. What had just happened? She caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror: hair awry, eyes huge and worried-looking. This was what he was doing to her.

When she came back downstairs, Jack was sitting in the garden with Edith, drinking a beer.

This was worse than him never coming back at all.

She placed both of her hands on the work surface and pressed down, expecting the tears that had been threatening all day to fall, but there was anger instead, rolling and turning inside her. What had she done to be treated like this? Why give her something with such bad grace and then look as though her very touch was repugnant? All she had ever done with him was be herself and it obviously wasn’t bloody good enough.

She set about cooking the salmon, dividing the two large pieces so that they would now feed three, and steaming the vegetables. Every now and again she moved to the window to watch Jack chatting to Edith. He was laughing at something she had said and Ellie felt betrayed. It was ridiculous, she was jealous of her great-aunt.

When they sat down to eat, Ellie gave it one last go and tried to ask Jack how he had been. He glowered at her as if she had asked him if he’d ever had piles. After that she gave up, and if it had not been for the fear of upsetting Edith, she would have picked up her plate and launched it at him. As it was, she left it to Edith to try to string together some kind of conversation. By the time they had finished the strawberries and cream, it was obvious that even Edith was struggling. She got up slowly and Jack stood up too.

‘Ah, dear boy,’ Edith said, patting his chest, ‘such lovely manners.’

Ellie couldn’t help giving a little snort and Edith speeded up her exit, pleading some prior social event at the pub that was news to Ellie and probably to the pub as well.

When she had gone, they sat with the dirty plates in front of them. The air was heavy with the smell of the honeysuckle on next door’s fence, and a bee was fussing around the flowers. It would have been lovely if all Ellie’s nerve endings did not feel as if they had been rubbed up the wrong way. She was so sick of this grumpy wall of testosterone. If Jack wanted to tell her it had all been a horrendous mistake, why didn’t he do it? Why string out the torture?

‘I think you had better go, Jack,’ she said, even though every part of her was screaming out for him to stay.

‘I don’t want to go,’ he shot back.

‘Well, you could have fooled me.’

‘Why? Why could I have fooled you?’

‘Because you’re acting like a bad-tempered jerk again.’

‘I gave you a new dress.’

‘You can have it back.’

Jack looked exasperated. ‘That’s pretty ungrateful.’

‘I’d like you to go now, Jack,’ she said, standing up. ‘I’ll go and get the dress. You can take it away with you.’ She paused, trying to hang on to her anger, which seemed to be disappearing with every word. ‘I don’t want you here
again. It’s too … too unsettling. You’ll still be in New York when I get back to work, won’t you?’ She saw Jack nod. ‘Well, that will give me a few days to get back to normal. Get sorted. We’ll never mention this again, Jack.’

She left the garden and went upstairs. It had been a good parting speech, except that she hadn’t meant a word of it and now she was really struggling not to bawl her eyes out.

How dull was life going to be from now on without that body to hold? Without that complicated, taciturn, reckless man down there wanting her.

She took the dress from its hanger and shoved it back in the carrier bag. Why did he have to come round at all? Why did he have to keep reminding her how gorgeous he was, how he made her want to hold him and care for him?

Ellie took a deep breath and, turning to leave the room, walked straight into Jack. She stepped backwards and he caught her by the arm, ripped the carrier bag out of her hand and pulled her into him. Then he was kissing her hungrily and she could not help responding. The parts of her not preoccupied with feeling and touching and yielding sneered at how easily she had caved in again. But soon she was down on the floor with him and then wrapped around him as he hammered into her as though it was some kind of cure for his bad mood.

She lay there on the floor afterwards in a patch of sunlight, staring up at the open window. Way off in a
garden somewhere, children were giggling and shouting. Normal life was going on all around, but she didn’t know what it meant any more.

Was it normal to be lying on the floor with a man who obviously didn’t want to be here? With someone who seemed to be blaming her for something?

It would be so much easier if he told her what he expected of her.

She turned her head to look at him and saw that he had his eyes screwed up tightly as if he were in pain.

‘Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Jack, or is this how you normally conduct your relationships?’

The speed with which he got to his feet surprised her. ‘Relationship?’ he said with a deeply sour expression. ‘Oh, it’s a bloody relationship now, is it?’

That felt like another punch.

‘Tell me what’s wrong, Jack. Please.’

She heard him sit on the bed.

‘It’s nothing,’ he said. ‘Leave it. I’m a bad-tempered swine sometimes.’

Ellie shook her head. ‘No, that’s not good enough. You weren’t bad-tempered with Edith. You were all smiles and laughter with her. It’s me you have a problem with. Even when I made that joke about Anne Boleyn you acted as if you wanted to rip my head off.’

‘I said leave it, Ellie.’ His tone was sharp and he got off the bed and started to pick up his clothes. Ellie went back
to staring out of the window, and when she looked at him again, he was getting dressed.

‘I can’t leave it, Jack,’ she said. ‘When I think I’ve made some headway with you, when I think there’s something real under all this sex, you treat me like some kind of irritant.’

Jack went on knotting his tie, checking the ends of it were the right length as if that were the most natural thing to do when a naked woman was asking him to tell her what was going on in his brain.

Ellie did the only thing she knew would get a reaction from Jack.

‘Been anywhere nice recently?’ she said with a cheesy, earnest expression.

He didn’t disappoint her. His head shot up and he said tersely, ‘What is this, “get-to-know-Jack night”?’

‘No, only the normal kind of conversation that normal people have. Remember, you asked us earlier where we’d been today and now I’m asking you if you’ve been anywhere nice recently. Of course, because you’ve got some deep psychological problem with me, it’s bugged the hell out of you, but hey, at least you’re talking.’

She saw his shoulders rise and fall as if he were sighing, but he did answer her: ‘All right, I had a quick trip to see my parents, just overnight.’

‘Lovely. And where do they live?’

‘In a house,’ he snapped.

That was it. Ellie stood up, ignoring the way he was glowering at her from under his brows. She’d tried; she’d really tried to find out what was wrong and to make things better. How dare he come round here and treat her like a piece of meat. And how dare she let him. It was like he was only nice to her when he wanted to have sex. No, when he was having sex.

‘Tell you what, Jack,’ she said softly, ‘why don’t you simply pay me for sex? Why don’t we start being honest? You come round, pay me, we’ll have sex, and then you won’t have to do all that messy pretending that you think I’m a person worthy of your conversation. Even better, we’ll have sex first and you only pay me if you think I was good enough.’

Jack continued to keep his head down. No reaction at all. The tension between them was like some ugly, uninvited guest in the room.

Ellie bent down and gathered up her discarded clothes and then walked out of the room and went and locked herself in the bathroom to dress. Her limbs felt like they were someone else’s and she had to force them into her clothes. She turned on the cold tap, putting her wrist into the water and waiting for it to cool her down.

The cure for being obsessed with someone was easy. You got to know them well and then the mystery went. But what if the person you wanted to get over didn’t want to tell you anything? What if they insisted on remaining
a mystery? Managed to keep you hanging on with a perfect balance of disinterest and passion?

She turned the water off and heard a knock on the bathroom door.

‘Go away, Jack,’ she called, and started to clean her teeth. When she turned the water off this time, she heard him say something. ‘What?’

‘Scarsdove,’ he said through the door. ‘My parents live in a place called Scarsdove. It’s a market town between Leeds and Halifax.’

Ellie put her toothbrush back in the cup and kept silent.

Jack’s muffled voice came through the door again. ‘My sisters, all my family, they still live around that area.’

Ellie pressed her lips together.

‘Ellie, are you still in there? Ellie?’

‘What?’

‘Oh, I see. You’re not talking because you’re sulking again. Well, I didn’t have you down as a sulker.’

Ellie knew she was being played, but she couldn’t stop herself from answering back. ‘Really, that surprises me. Didn’t you tell Rachel I liked a good old sulk? Anyway, you’ve got a nerve. The man who looks as though he could sulk for Britain. Mr Granite-Faced Yorkshire Bastard himself.’

Ellie heard Jack laugh and it did that thing to her stomach that it always did, even through a door.

‘How many sisters?’ she asked.

‘Two. Older. They’re called Grace and Louise.’

‘I have three brothers. I mean they’re great, but a sister would have been wonderful.’

Nasty then nice, she knew that it was happening again, but the fact that he was actually confiding in her made her grin like an idiot.

Ellie heard Jack move, and the next time he spoke, it sounded like he was sitting down. Ellie sat down too.

‘Older or younger, your brothers?’ he said.

‘All older.’

‘Right.’

Ellie put her fingertips to the door as if she could feel Jack’s heat through it. ‘They must have spoiled you, your sisters, what with you being the baby and the only boy.’

‘A bit. When they weren’t getting me to run errands for them or teasing me, yes, I suppose they did.’

Ellie leaned her head against the door and imagined Jack as a little boy. She wondered what he had looked like before he grew into his nose.

‘So you weren’t brought up by wolves?’

There was another laugh. ‘Sorry to disappoint you.’

‘Wish my brothers had spoiled me. They always used to put me in goal or make me wicketkeeper. Or get me to keep an eye out whenever they were doing anything bad. And I was always the one they pushed forward to take all the flak. They said I could get away with more, talk my way out of it.’ Ellie put her cheek against the wood. ‘Must
be nice going back to the family home, going back to Yorkshire. We sold the house we grew up in when Mum and Dad died.’

There was a pause and she heard Jack move.

‘Both your parents are dead?’

‘Yes. Dad had heart problems for years, so, well, we were expecting it, but Mum got ill not long after he died. I think she’d been ignoring all the signs, concentrating on Dad. She died within a year of him.’ Ellie felt tears come into her eyes and that horrible lumpy feeling in her throat.

She’d had years to get used to her mum and dad no longer being around and now she had to cry in front of Jack. She was always crying in front of Jack. She didn’t know whether it was because he made her feel vulnerable or because she wanted him to comfort her.

She waited for Jack to say something gruff, something that would get her back to her original anger. She needed to start disliking him enough to see that this was going nowhere. He’d be nasty again in a minute and then ignore her for days, and God knew how he would treat her back at work. She had to start putting all this behind her.

‘Open the damn door, Ellie,’ Jack said. ‘You shouldn’t be alone and talking about this. You should have somebody holding you. Don’t stay in there being sad.’

Ellie stood up quickly, slid back the bolt on the door and Jack came in and without a word wrapped his arms round her. Ellie disgraced herself totally by blubbing all
over his shirt. When she looked up into his eyes, his expression was so kind that she felt she would tell him anything if he would only ask her.

Jack let her cry for a while and then led her by the hand back to the bedroom and sat her on the bed and began kissing her gently, starting with her mouth and telling her how beautiful it was. Every part of her body he kissed and told her why he particularly liked it. He started to undress her, gently, slowly, kissing every inch of her that he uncovered and she lay back on the bed and let him. It felt like being bathed in warm honey, and every now and then he would move back to her face and look into her eyes and murmur how much she turned him on, how he couldn’t get enough of her, how she made him want to hold and protect her. It made Ellie ache, but she could not have said where the ache was centred; it was simply a longing for him and for this moment to continue indefinitely.