“I didn’t know how you would react.”
“Well, you do now!” His words were grim. “You sent me in there blind. Not funny, Jasmine!”
Jasmine, who had never made a joke in her life, wondered why he might think it one. Desperate to explain, she said, “You don’t understand. All this means nothing.” She waved her arms around the trappings of the Grand Hall of the stately home.
“You live in a frigging mansion. Your father’s a Lord, for God’s sake. And you didn’t think to mention it? That’s not nothing!”
“But none of it is mine or ever will be mine. I’m just a lodger. I’m nothing.”
Petey had stopped, noticing her distress. He folded his arms around her. “You’re not nothing, Jasmine. You are the best in the world. Don’t let anybody ever tell you that you aren’t.”
Though Petey was sufficiently traumatised to want to avoid socialising with her kin again, he did not shy away from her. From that point on, with quiet unspoken agreement, they always met at his house, usually together in his room. It was in his room, in his double bed, lying on his towel, that Jasmine gave him her virginity, although his had gone missing a couple of years before.
Through all their years together, Petey was the perfect boyfriend. At the end of sixth form, they had made the transition, him to full-time work and her to university. She had watched as others ditched their homegrown boyfriends in the frenzy of making new lifelong acquaintances, but she was never tempted. Petey made the trips to see her uncomplaining. He understood if she had to work and abandoned him. He made friends easily and was seldom alone. Kind and thoughtful, generous with his cash, he was never too demanding or controlling.
Unlike others, she did not have a myriad of slights accumulated over the years she could lay at his door. She did not lust after another. She loved Petey.
Now, as she stands on the doorstep to his home and raises her hand to the doorbell, she is convinced he will make a brilliant father someday, despite never having had such an example himself. And he will be a marvellous husband. Just not hers.
Another Country
A couple of days after her breakup with Petey, Jasmine regrets being so hasty, for there are yet two weeks of the summer holidays to survive. Had she been more mercenary in nature, she might have postponed their split because she no longer had a sanctuary at his house and no way of avoiding her own family. But the long, idle days had allowed her to consider her future, particularly as she was about to enter her final year at university. She’d realised that when she graduated she would not be coming back to live at Larkford but Petey had never considered leaving. Once she had recognised she and Petey were on two irreconcilable trajectories, she felt she had to act.
Unfortunately, since the success of the scrambled egg incident, a bored Phoebe aided by her sidekick twin, Lily, has launched an all-out guerrilla war on Jasmine. Eleanor, the eldest sister, who has always acted to restrain the twins, has graduated from Oxford and dutifully joined the management team for the Larkford Estate. She’s gone for the working day. Anna, whose cutting remarks have always been equally distributed between her younger sisters, now seldom leaves the hospital in London where she is training. Her mother, to whom Jasmine reports each prank, merely tells her not to be so sensitive.
The two-hundred-year-old door to Jasmine’s room has a lock, but the key has long gone missing. It leaves her easy prey. Jasmine wishes to move through her life doing no harm and, indeed, intends to do good, but Phoebe can provoke a fury which leaves Jasmine trembling with the need to throttle her youngest sister. She has been vegan for years without it attracting any attention from her family beyond mild bemusement. Now she finds it weaponised against her. She would return to her room to find her glasses coated in a substance smelling suspiciously like goose grease, her cruelty-free, vegetable-oil soap swapped for a brand made with sheep-fat and tested on animals, and the most subtle attack of all, a host of beeswax candles burning, filling the air with a hint of honey.
It isn’t the vindictiveness of the pranks that breaks her; it is having no safe space. She cannot get out of the shower without checking the label on her towel in case it has been swapped for one with silk. While she sniffs her oat milk every morning, she has no way to check whether her fair-trade coffee has been replaced by one of the more rapacious coffee-growers. The uncertainty is more than she can bear. She knows Flora would offer her sanctuary, but Flora’s mum works for the Estate and Jasmine’s presence always makes her nervous. With one week to go, she decides on a tactical retreat and rings Sean.
From the first lecture of the first term in the first year of university, Sean had been her friend. Jasmine had arrived early and taken a seat in the middle row of the lecture theatre, carefully placed. Away from the disruptive slackers at the back, less under the lecturer’s eye than the front. She had watched in dismay as others arrived and sat either one seat removed, or one row removed, from her. A group of four girls entered, but they sat together and it was clear that their newly formed clique would be unbreachable. Still occupied in watching them, Jasmine had been startled by the heat of a male body dropping beside her.
“You don’t mind if I sit here, do you?” the lad said, pulling his backpack off his shoulder.
She turned, a little amazed someone had chosen to sit right beside her, but two years of watching Petey had given her some social skills.
A nonchalant shake of her head.
“I’m Sean,” he said as he pushed his glasses up his nose.
“Jasmine.” And then because she was not good at regional accents and truly was curious, she asked, “Where are you from?”
He smiled. “Hayburn.”
“Where’s that?”
He thickened his accent. “Up north.”
“That explains it. I’m not familiar with anything past Birmingham. Except the Lake District. I went there once with the school.”
Sean had laughed. “Oh, Hayburn’s nothing like the Lake District, believe me!”
“How come?”
“I don’t think anyone has ever booked a holiday in Hayburn. It used to be a mining heartland, but mining came and went. Now over a third of the kids in my home town live below the poverty line, unemployment is twice the national average and life expectancy is years less than for Londoners.”
“But that’s appalling! Why isn’t anyone doing anything about it?”
“No money.” Sean shrugged. “We’re trying, but the council can’t raise money from the locals because they’ve got none themselves. It has to come from central government and they’re a bunch of self-serving Tory wankers who don’t care about places like Hayburn.”
