The Love of My Life(45)

I delete it, and sink slowly into a chair. I use my phone to put something on the speaker called ‘Smooth: New Directions in Ambient Jungle’, so John can calm down.

Jill calls yet again, and this time I pick up. ‘Hey,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry but I can’t talk. Leo’s been reading my phone and he’s disappeared. Can I call you tomorrow? Are you all right?’

‘I’m fine. But I have to talk to you, Emma—’

‘I just can’t,’ I interrupt. ‘I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll call in the morning.’

You need to call me back tonight, Jill writes, straight away. It’s important.

I reply, I’ll call you tomorrow, I promise.

I stay still for a long time, until darkness swallows the room. Planes whine and drag across London, circling into Heathrow and Gatwick, and a fox topples a dustbin. The air cools, but my heart won’t slow.

I try Leo at 1.37 a.m. His phone rings out. I try again at 2.04. At 2.30, he messages, finally. Sleeping in the shed. Please

don’t come out. I need space.

I go to check Ruby is breathing.





Chapter Twenty-Six


LEO


The next morning I wake with a pounding head and a mouth full of sickness and regret. I have no idea how many pints I had last night, how many chasers after that. I do remember climbing over the wall so I could get into the shed because I couldn’t decide if I had actually left Emma, and I felt it would be wrong to spend the night elsewhere without making a proper decision. No matter what, I won’t just disappear on Ruby.

A trapped fly vibrates in a cobweb near the end of my dusty sofa, and outside John Keats is barking at the pond. I’ll have to go inside in a minute, but I have no idea what will happen when I see Ruby. I’m afraid I will just pick my little girl up and run out of the front door.

She’s mine. She has to be mine. For at least the first year of her life people would say to me, ‘Oh, she’s the spit of you! She’s gorgeous!’ and my chest would crack with pride. For the first time, I belonged to a unit. A real family, no secrets.

I think about Ruby’s soft hair, her stubby fingernails, that crafty little laugh. Then I think about Emma and Jeremy Rothschild and it’s so foul and wrong and unbelievable and preposterous that for a moment I really don’t believe it’s true.

But as I sat in the pub last night, before the alcohol smudged my memory and judgement, I remembered things. Emma’s baffling long-term hatred of Janice Rothschild. Her fury the other day when Jeremy complained about me to my editor-in-chief. And of course her Times. Years and years of them.

Emma lost her mother a day or two after birth; her father just before she sat her A-levels. His commando had been sent to what was then Zaire to help evacuate British nationals from Kinshasa, and he didn’t make it back.

Her father had been an unhappy man, she said, and mostly absent, but she had loved him, as any child does. A picture of him sits on our landing; the only thing Emma’s managed to put on the walls since we moved in. The loss of both parents has always seemed like a plausible explanation for her spells of sadness. But I began to wonder last night, with a downward drop of dread, if her Times were even real. What if they were an alibi, so she could go up to Northumberland and have sex with Jeremy Rothschild? Did she move Jill into our house when Ruby was born because she was afraid Jeremy would turn up to claim his daughter?

I swallow hard.

When I’m able to get up I open the door a crack, and am near-blinded by shafts of early sun. Spider webs glow on the ground like jewelled plates, broken only by paw prints. Soon the dew will be burned off and the day will reach full heat, full speed.

I pause again, uncertain if I’ll throw up.

John Keats is watching the pond with impatience, but bounds over happily when he sees me, as if he is used to me sleeping in the shed. I pull him back inside. ‘Jeremy,’ I say to him. ‘Jeremy? Do you know Jeremy?’

He beats his tail on the floor.

‘John. Where’s Jeremy?’

The dog, confused, excited, turns in circles. He has no idea, but he doesn’t like to miss out on a game.

I tell him we need to go inside. I stand up, but don’t move. I tell him to lead the way, but he starts jumping around, barking. I kneel down and hug him, which is the only way of stopping him once he’s overexcited.

It takes a while before he settles. I sit back on my heels, looking at him. ‘I don’t think I can do this,’ I admit. ‘I’m not ready, John.’ The only conversation I can have with Emma, now, is to confirm the details of her affair, and to tell her I can’t be with someone who has cheated on me, and I’m not ready for that.

I fight tears as I message Emma to say I need more time. I stick my head out of the shed. There is no movement in the kitchen; they must be upstairs.

That decides it. I give John a kiss, and sprawl heavily over the back wall, into the brambled alley that separates our gardens from those we back on to. Nobody ever uses this narrow lane, and the gate at the end has been locked for years. For the second time in twelve hours, I climb over it, only this time I’m watched by a delivery man, sorting through parcels in the back of an unmarked van.

‘All right?’ I say to him.

‘All right,’ he replies. In the distance, John Keats is barking again.