Woman Last Seen(10)

Being with him is easy. These last six months have been refreshingly direct and purposeful. We have not played games. There are the boys to think about—games would be callous. The four of us left the hospital together. We shared a cab home. Relieved that Seb was glued back together. The thought it could have been worse traveled with us in the cab. It turned out that we lived only ten minutes apart from one another. As I climbed out of the cab, he thanked me for everything I’d done and asked, “Would it be all right if I call you tomorrow?”

“I’d like that.”

And he did call. He invited me over for tea. “The boys have been asking after the nice lady who helped,” he told me, I guess making it clear that it was them who wanted me rather than him. He wasn’t the sort who would want to give the wrong impression. This wasn’t a date. It was fish fingers and chips, served with peas that were chased around the plate but hardly eaten. I was offered a choice of apple juice or water to drink.

“Sorry, I made the mistake of promising Oli he could choose what we’d eat,” said Mark as he apologetically put the plate in front of me. It was a noisy and disjointed evening. Mark hardly managed to get a sentence out uninterrupted but somehow, I still managed to find out more about him than I ever discovered about the closed and secretive men I’d dated in the past. Mark told me he had a sister who lived in Chicago, America, parents who live York, England. His best friend was called Toby and they’d been mates since secondary school, he went to university in Brighton, he dreamed of owning a boat but had never actually sailed anything other than a dinghy. He was a landscape gardener, which explained the tan and muscles, he admitted his business was struggling a bit because of juggling childcare since his wife got sick and then died.

“People have been great. Frances’s parents live in the Midlands. They offered to move here but it was too much to ask of them. They need to stay near their friends in Frances’s childhood home—I mean, they lost a daughter.” He shakes his head. “Her sister, Paula, has been very good. A big help. She’s North London.” People think losing a child is the worst thing that can happen in the world. I glance at the young boys—who are absorbed in trailing Lego cars through apple juice puddles and therefore not listening to our snatched and whispered conversations—and wonder if the worst thing in the world is losing your mother. I suppose it depends on the age of the person who dies. It isn’t a competition. Grief seeps everywhere. “Her friends from the various baby groups have been very kind. They’ve done a lot of pickups and drop-offs but there comes a point when everyone has to get back to their own lives.” He shrugged. Not self-pitying. Just a fact. He dug out a pea that Seb was trying to put up his nose, he reached for the kitchen roll, mopped up the apple juice, refilled Oli’s water glass. “Tell me about you? What do management consultants do exactly?”

I realized he needed a change of subject. Talking about death is exhausting, even for the bereaved. I started to tell him about efficient supply chain management, integrated IT systems and maximizing efficiency with human resource. He laughed and told me I sounded like a corporate brochure, but he wasn’t mocking, he was kindly, interested. “Tell me exactly what your day looks like. Talk me through it.”

So I did. Blow by blow. Each telephone conversation, the endless research behind the presentations, which I sometimes don’t get to present anyhow because someone more senior takes the credit. I told him about the long hours and weeks being sent away from your home. I told him how intense it gets with the people on your team, how we’re like a family for a few short months, living in one another’s pockets, but then, when we are seconded elsewhere, we might never speak again. I confessed that it is a little lonely, working in this nomadic way.

Mark listened carefully, asking the type of questions that proved as much. “Wow, I’m so impressed. I just couldn’t work in an office. I’d go mad. But I’m always so in awe of people who get their heads around business stuff,” he laughed, good-naturedly. It was refreshing. Often, I have to play down my work because some men are threatened by a woman with a higher earning capacity than theirs. “Do you enjoy it?” Mark asked, as though this was all that mattered.

“I do, on the whole. It is stimulating. It pays well, which is great because it means I can treat my mum to the odd holiday. We grew up just the two of us, so I still sort of feel responsible for her happiness a lot of the time. And her bills. Earning well goes some way toward helping with that.”

I don’t know what made me admit this. Normally I go out of my way to hide my mother’s neediness. Mark just nodded. “That’s kind of you. Do you travel abroad at all with work?”

“No, mostly in the UK. There are opportunities to transfer to overseas offices, but that’s never appealed to me. Well, again, my mum.” I shrugged. “UK travel is disruptive enough. I haven’t bought my own place. I suppose I could afford something but it’s more of a question of where do I put down my roots?” I realized that I might just have confessed to waiting to find the right man to help me make the decision about the right place and so I hurried on. “I’m gunning for a senior manager role at the end of this year. If that promotion happens, a decade of hard graft will have been worth it.” I wanted to ask what Frances did for a living, if she worked out of the house, that is, but there is no reason to assume she would because she had two young boys. I held back because I thought it might seem impertinent.