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‘I shan’t see you for a couple of days, Dad, because I’m going to a nice hotel in the Dales for the weekend with Bruce. It’s my twenty-fourth wedding anniversary tomorrow. Next year we get all the silver, like you and Mum did. Do you remember? I sprayed my hair silver for your party and then I couldn’t get it all out for weeks.’
She willed him to respond with a facial tic, a bend of the finger, a blink – anything. But there was nothing. Just a breath in and then out again: life, without living.
Chapter 3
Shay picked up the satiny scrap of underwear, put it in the case, took it out again. She had shaved off a few pounds to fit into these knickers that she’d bought in the spring sales so she could take them with her, but suddenly she felt rather silly and a teeny bit nervous. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d worn such a blatant flag of availability, although there hadn’t been much point because she and Bruce hadn’t been intimate for months, he’d been totally off it. He hadn’t touched her in bed and on the couple of occasions she’d tried to initiate anything, he’d told her he was too tired and she’d respected that and not pushed it. He seemed to be working longer and harder for less and less return. Electricians were ten a penny these days, he’d grumble, and people seemed to want cheap prices before quality work.
She wished her best friend Tanya were still around because she would have opened her heart to her about it, asked her advice on what to do. Les would have made a joke of it, told her to jump on Bruce and not take no for an answer, but Tan would have been more sympathetic and constructive. Tanya, Lesley, Shay – the Yorkshire Charlie’sAngels, as Les’s dad used to call them. The three of them had been a tight, solid band since sixth form but Tan and Shay were just a little bit closer. Not even Bruce knew the full story of why Shay’s family had suddenly upped sticks to the other side of Sheffield when she was sixteen and he didn’t know anything about the year of her life spent in darkened rooms, hospitals, pill-induced sleeps and with doctors who couldn’t slice bits out of her brain with knives but tried to do it in other ways. But Tan knew it all. It had been three years since she died and Shay still struggled to believe she wasn’t there any more, that she’d never hear her voice on the phone again pretending to be a scam call or a dodgy salesperson. She was mad, bonkers, beautiful, loyal, fabulous and it was the finality of it that had hit Shay the hardest; that someone so alive and vibrant could somehow not be there any longer, that they would never meet again, that there was a hole inside her where only Tan could fit.
Shay lifted up the scrap of pants and stretched the sides. Once upon a time Bruce would have torn them off her with his teeth, but she wasn’t sure what his reaction would be this weekend. Their sex life sat like a big fat lazy elephant in the room, silently condemning. It was their anniversary and expectation hung heavy that they should indulge in more than a peck on the cheek and a ‘sleep well’. She felt not unlike a virgin anticipating her wedding night. They shouldn’t have let things get this far, become an issue as sensitive as a gout-riddled toe.
Shay’s thoughts were interrupted by the noise of the letterbox flap. She dropped the pants into her case, went downstairs and retrieved the post from the mat. Cards, judging by the stiffness of them. She ripped open the first with a smile at the large swirly writing on the front, unmistakablyCourtney’s hand. She took it out of the envelope and a spray of metallic confetti fell out with it. A sweet, traditionalHappy Anniversary Mum and Dadcard. Inside:
Shit card alert – this was all they had in Tesco. Happy Anniversary you two – hope you have a great weekend away, Lots of love and see you soon – Court xxx
Courtney never failed to send cards and they were never late either. Odd, considering how much her focus was on herself, that she had a real thing about cards: the choosing of them, the sending of them. But Courtney was a mass of enigmas and contradictions. She likened herself to a salmon, swimming upstream because her nature dictated it. But not even Mother Nature was infallible: the effort it took the fish to do that knackered them, ultimately destroyed them. But then, all mothers made cock-ups.
Another card from Great Aunt Freda whose handwriting became more spidery with every passing year. The last envelope bore the unmistakable loopy style of Lesley. Inside, a card with two swans on the front, their necks entwined, and the words: ‘Did you know that swans mate for life?’Once opened, a drawing of those swans bleeding as they pecked at each other, along with the caption,‘No wonder they’re so f***ing bad-tempered’.
It was a card that said more about Lesley and Morton Jagger’s marriage than hers and Bruce’s. Tan always said that if Les and Morton hadn’t rowed they would never have spoken to each other. Les moaned constantly about her husband, in fact she’d been threatening to leave him since their honeymoon. But despite her many whinges about him, they were still together twenty-three years on and were on coursefor Les to be nagging him about his shortfalls through to their diamond anniversary. It wasn’t Shay’s notion of an ideal set-up, but whatever happened behind closed doors was pumping plenty of oxygen into the lungs of their relationship to keep it going.
Short and sweet: ‘Love, Les’ and a single kiss. They hadn’t been in touch for ages. Too often, life got in the way of living, and after Tanya had died, Shay had been determined not to let that keep happening. Easier said than done, though, when you were snowed under with work and family commitments.
There was no card from Sunny; it might arrive tomorrow when she was away, but she had a strange feeling that it wouldn’t and that would be very out of character for him. She hadn’t expected him to come back and visit them every week, but since he’d left home to go and live with Karoline, they’d only seen him once in the last six months.
He’d texted a few times to check all was well and said that he was busy and would call in soon, but he hadn’t. Bruce said he had left his old life behind and was enjoying being in his new one and if she couldn’t accept that then she was just jealous that she’d been supplanted as number-one female in her son’s life, which was ludicrous because she wanted him to be happy with a nice woman like Karoline. She couldn’t rationalise why she felt just a teeny bit anxious about not seeing her son for such a long time, nor could she shake it off, it was just intuition. Just as her mother had blamed intuition for trying to press-gang her into jilting Bruce on her wedding day.
Stop worrying and finish your packing. The voice of reason in her head these days sounded just like Tanya’s.
‘Okay, I will,’ Shay answered it aloud. This weekendwas about her and Bruce for a change. There was no point in leaving everyone behind only to take them all with her in her head.
Birtwell Manor was a crumbly old mansion which had been converted into a hotel after the war. It stood in acres of grounds with cultivated gardens, a woodland walk and fishing rights attached to the bordering river, so said the online blurb. Shay had booked the grand Buckingham Suite with its surfeit of wood panelling, imposing four-poster bed and heavy red tapestry drapes at the windows which afforded a stunning view of the estate. Coming to places like this always reinforced to Shay that she was a country, not a city, girl at heart. She liked to have greenery, fields, rivers and farms on her doorstep. Bruce preferred the anonymity of bigger places; villages were always full of nosy bastards, he said. He’d been brought up in one and couldn’t wait to leave it.
There was a bottle of champagne waiting for them in a silver ice bucket and a tray of handmade chocolates. Bruce strutted around the space, checking out the en suite, testing the day-bed sofa in the corner for comfort, opening the wardrobes, poking about in the drawers, all the while nodding approvingly.
Bruce was a good-looking man, one of those enviable types who grew sickeningly more attractive with every crinkle to his eyes and those handsome genes had been passed down to their son. Sunny had his father’s mouth with its generous lower lip, the strong square jaw, the height and broad shoulders, but he’d inherited his mother’s dark eyesinstead of his father’s blue ones. Also, like his mother, his skin tanned when the sun merely brushed it, whereas Bruce had to work at getting brown. Father and son may have looked like each other, but in temperament, they were very different. Sunny was much more gentle in his manner and he had a kindness of spirit that hung around him like an aura. Bruce saw the world in blacks and whites, Sunny saw the greys. Sometimes Shay found herself wishing her son were less sensitive like her, more resilient like Bruce. It was a hard world and the Bruces fared better in it.
‘Let’s get the lid off this, shall we?’ said Bruce, pulling the champagne out of the bucket and tearing off the foil. She’d picked this place for him more than for herself, something old-grand, caviar and champagne, sophisticated and civilised. He would have liked the high life twenty-four-seven, she knew. If they ever won the Euromillions, he’d have put a down payment on a Ferrari as soon as he’d checked the Lucky Stars numbers. A soft pop as the cork jumped from the bottle, then a small wisp of gas escaped like a genie. Bruce poured it out too eagerly and the champagne frothed up and over the rim of the flutes. He handed one to his wife but it was she who made the toast.
‘Here’s to the next twenty-four.’ Shay chinked her glass gently against her husband’s.
‘Yep,’ he said and Shay found herself waiting for more words that didn’t come.
As Shay sat at the dressing-table mirror to put on her earrings, she watched Bruce behind her, checking himself in the full-length mirror with the thoroughness of James Bond before a mission. She liked that he had pride in how he looked. He’d gone a little metrosexual over the past year,because he’d definitely had his eyebrows attended to and those greys at his temples had been reversed. Personally, she thought both detracted from his handsomeness rather than added to it, but she hadn’t said so. Rather that than be like Morton Jagger, who wasn’t averse to using string for a belt and needed surgical intervention to remove his steel toe cap boots.
Bruce’s suit was black, slim-fitting, his shirt snow-white, shoes patent shiny. He was hot property, even more so since he’d cut out the fried bacon and egg breakfast sandwiches and pasty lunches and hit the gym a couple of years ago after one of his overweight mates, ‘Jabba’, had had a fatal heart attack at the age of forty-two. Bruce worked hard because he wanted to retire early and live somewhere sunny near a taverna and he wanted that retirement to be very long. They used to get holiday brochures and look for possible places where they’d settle, design their perfect villa on a notepad, though they hadn’t spoken about it for ages. Maybe tonight over dinner was the perfect time to reinject some energy into their joint project, she decided. It was also something for them, not about her parents, their children – just them.
I wonder how he’s aged.
The thought came into her head from an unseen direction and she felt the impact in her heart as it launched a trio of pounding beats. Twenty-nine years had passed since she’d last seen Jonah Wells and yet the memory of him was as clear and shiny as if it had been polished daily. She leaned on the door in her mind to keep him out; his boyish fresh scent, the dark chocolate colour of his hair, the bright hazel of his eyes, the press of his mouth against hers… none of it had any right being there; she’d had to bury everything: the sweet and the sour. She’d even picked her wedding datespecifically to stamp over that portion of her life, to give her something in June to smile about, to blast the shadows into oblivion with some sunshine. But the date never held up to close inspection because she could still see him there in the background, never quite disappearing because the roots were too deep to dig out; he would always be part of her.The sweet and the sour.
Chapter 4
The dining room of Birtwell Manor was textbook classic elegance. Ridiculously high ornamental ceilings with just the right detail of cracked plasterwork to suggest age and authenticity, upmarket shabby chic. The tables were dressed in crisp heavy white fabric with a satin sheen, the cutlery old silver. Shay wouldn’t have been surprised to see Hercule Poirot dining among them.
‘Blimey, this is a bit posh, isn’t it?’ said Bruce, not quite trusting the waiter who tucked him under the table, as if he expected him to whip the chair away at the last second.
‘We deserve posh today,’ said Shay, smiling at him because she knew she’d chosen well. For the next forty hours, Bruce could imagine this life was his norm and he’d play it to the beat. Once upon a time, their plans for their house in the sun were much grander and featured his and hers dressing rooms; his with rails of suits and shirts – all designer names and a secret compartment for his many Rolex watches. He liked ‘names’; it wasn’t her thing but she respected it was his.
