Fourteen

Natalie arrived on Willoughby Street at seven forty-two, a full eighteen minutes early. She had tried very hard not to be early. She had, in fact, tried actively to be rather later. But despite her efforts, fate had conspired for her mother to be unusually compliant, not to mention sober, a taxi to be stopping right outside her house just as she opened the front door, and the usual Saturday-night traffic nowhere to be seen.

Willoughby Street was a very short street. More of a dead end than a proper street, Natalie thought resentfully as she hovered on the corner. Willoughby Close, they should call it, or Avenue. It most certainly was not a street. A street would have offered a far greater opportunity for walking up and down, uncertain of your next move. Almost the only door on Willoughby Street, apart from the side entrance to a comic-book shop, was the main entrance to the flat where Jack was staying. A door just waiting for her to approach it, almost indecent in its obviousness.

Well, at the very least she could not be early, she decided, as she set off with a plan to take a brisk mind-clearing walk around the block. But her plan failed almost instantly as she found herself entering the Museum pub on the corner. She circumnavigated several tourists enjoying the authentic British pub experience and asked at the bar for a virgin mary.

“Sure you don’t want the vodka in it?” an authentic Australian barman asked her with a jaunty smile.

“Oh, I want it,” Natalie said. “I really, really want it, but I can’t have it. I’m breastfeeding and I try to keep my baby’s alcohol intake down to three or four units a day.”

He didn’t bother her again after that.

As she sipped her drink, Natalie realized that she was utterly unprepared for this moment.

She also realized that there was never going to be any time, at any point in the future, when she would be prepared for it. It was unpreparable for, if such a word existed, which she was fairly sure it didn’t. The thought, though, gave her a small sliver of comfort, a sense of friendly fatalism. What happened next was entirely out of her control. All she had to do was remember her promise to Freddie, not let her feelings cloud her judgment and make sure that she behaved with dignity and integrity.

It was the last part that she had worried about the most as she got ready earlier that evening.

Inevitably, Sandy asked her where she was going.

“Out,” Natalie said automatically. Sandy had been standing outside smoking several cigarettes in quick succession after an extended period without her nicotine hit. She had talked to Natalie between puffs through a tiny gap in the French doors.

“I just thought that as you are asking me to look after your son for the whole day, the very least you can do is tell me why,” Sandy said, hugging herself as if chilled, even though it was a fairly mild evening.

“Why do you think that?” Natalie said, rooting through her makeup bag for her eyeliner. “You came here to help me look after your grandson so I could have a break. I’m having a break.”

“Actually, that wasn’t the only reason I came back. I have a life too, you know, in Spain. Things I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Look, Mom.” Natalie paused, sitting at the breakfast bar, her compact hovering in midair, her eyeliner pencil millimeters from her lids. “I can’t do this now. I’m really, really grateful that you’ve had Freddie for most of the day and I know I’ll have to pay for it with emotional pain for the next ten years or so. But I have to go out tonight, it’s important. Now please come in and stop smoking for five minutes. You’re no good to me at all if you spontaneously combust.”

Sandy took one more deep drag of her cigarette before reluctantly stubbing it out with the toe of her slipper and coming in. She stood at the end of the breakfast bar watching her daughter carefully outline her eyes.

“You look lovely,” she said after a while.

Natalie nearly poked her eye out. “Pardon?” she said, dropping the pencil, which rolled off the marble counter and clattered onto the floor.

“You do,” Sandy said. “You look really lovely…are you meeting a man?”

Still stunned by the unprecedented compliment, Natalie was almost tempted to tell her mother everything. The urge to unburden the truth about the momentous occasion she was about to embark on was so great that she nearly couldn’t resist it.

But this was still Sandy she was talking to. Still the woman who told a boy Natalie once brought home from school that she had written that she loved him over a hundred times in her secret diary.

Just because at that moment she wasn’t half-soused and spouting a load of rubbish, it didn’t mean that she wouldn’t revert to type at any moment. Her seemingly spontaneous compliment was probably just a cunning trap to try to lure Natalie into divulging information that could later be used against her. All Natalie had to do was to think of how her mother had behaved around Gary (while quietly editing out her own behavior on that front) to remind herself what Sandy was really like. No, it was too dangerous to trust her with anything so important.

“Not a man man,” she said cagily. “A business contact. Alice asked me to step in. She’s got the collection to sort out for the show and it’s just a business dinner, that’s all. I won’t be long. You will stay sober until I get in, won’t you?”

Sandy sighed. “Well, don’t stay out too long,” she said. “I can’t promise anything after ten o’clock.”

Natalie tasted the thick and tangy tomato juice on the back of her tongue as she watched the clock behind the bar, waiting for what seemed like an eon for it to be eight o’clock. At last the hour hand clicked into place and she knew that every second that passed now made it one more second that she was officially late. It was a small gesture of rebellion, but one that made her feel a little better nevertheless.

She stood. She straightened her shoulders, she lifted her chin, and made her way to the place where Jack was staying.

“This is the moment,” she said out loud as her finger hovered over the buzzer. “This is it.”

Despite being prepared for not being prepared for anything, it turned out that what Natalie was least prepared for happened the minute that Jack opened the front door of the apartment.

He kissed her. And not just on the cheek.

He planted a kiss full on her lips. Not with tongues or anything overtly sexy, but a mouth-to-mouth kiss, after which Natalie could have done with some mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

“Hello, Natalie,” Jack said, as she tried her best to look nonchalant and unconcerned, as if attractive men threw smackers her way on an hourly basis. “I’m here.”

“You are indeed,” she said, catching her breath. “Sorry I’m late; traffic, you know.”

“You’re not late,” Jack said, as he stepped out into the evening and closed the door behind him. “You’re right on time—what were you doing, waiting by the door watching the clock?” He laughed but Natalie didn’t. And then Jack didn’t.

“I made a reservation at Alistair Little,” he said as they left Willoughby Street. “Is that okay?”

Natalie nodded and they paused on the sidewalk, caught in the difficulty of the moment. One thing was certainly clear. The instant easiness and spontaneous rapport that had once existed between them was now quite gone.

“Well, then, shall we?” Jack said.

They walked side by side on Great Russell Street, with that awkward gait of two people who did not know each other well enough yet to be able to walk comfortably down a street together. And it wasn’t surprising, considering that for most of the time they had spent together prior to this moment they had been horizontal.

“Looks like the weather is improving,” Natalie said.

“Mmm,” Jack replied. Small talk too, it seemed, would take a little while to find its flow.

The evening was clear, but an earlier shower had left a mirrored slick on the streets and roads, reflecting the lights of the city as they walked, not quite in step. Natalie kept her head down, watching the toes of her boots as she went, trying hard to think of how she was going to say what needed to be said. She decided that there was almost no way to say it, or at least only one way, which, though utterly obvious, seemed impossibly hard.

“I’ve missed London while I’ve been away,” Jack said suddenly, picking up her hand and tucking it through his arm as if he was determined to move their stilted reacquaintance on. “I suppose loads of famous people, poets and writers and such have probably said it a million times better, but it’s so full of life. Chockful to the brim with millions of heartbeats. Of course, it’s not as beautiful or as romantic as Venice, or as glamorous and slick as New York, but it has just as much style. It’s got this collective spirit. It’s…indomitable. Makes me feel glad to be alive.” He stopped for a second and looked down at Natalie. “Glad to be here with you. It’s good to see you, Natalie. It’s good to be walking next to you down the street, and I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit odd or awkward since we bumped into each other. It was just that I didn’t expect to see you there, I wasn’t prepared.”

He smiled at her and Natalie couldn’t help but return his smile, even though she wished she knew what it was he had to be prepared for. His smile, she noticed, was not quite the same smile that had charmed her as she sat beneath a Venetian sunset all those months ago. His face was even leaner now, his eyes less uncertain and more intense. It was as if he had lived through many experiences in the twelve or so months that had passed since she had seen him last. She would have been glad if this new, unknown experience that was etched on his face hadn’t suited him, but unfortunately it did. Never storybook handsome, Jack somehow looked stronger, more comfortable within himself—despite the tiredness in his eyes. He looked stunning; not a word that Natalie normally applied to men, but the only one she could think of when it came to Jack Newhouse. Stunning.

So, as Jack opened the door of the restaurant for her, she prayed to any passing god who might be listening, any guardian angel with nothing much to do in the vicinity, and just to be on the safe side the cosmos in general, to please, please help her deal with her attraction to this man. Because it seemed likely that only divine intervention was going to stop her from doing something she would undoubtedly live to regret.

Natalie wiped a tear from under her eye.

She could not stop laughing.

“It’s not funny!” Jack protested, although he was laughing too. “So there I was sitting next to this woman and she’s saying, ‘And I hear that Jack Newhouse thinks he a dead cert for the job. Do you know him? I don’t know who he thinks he is but he’s not even been working for the last year. He knows nothing about how the markets are now. I heard he’s a totally arrogant jerk. Have you heard that?’”

“Why didn’t you tell her that she was talking to Jack Newhouse?” Natalie asked.

“Well, because it was the interview waiting room and it started off being quite funny, and then just got more and more awkward as the conversation went on. I mean, after she had called me an arrogant jerk I think the moment to come clean had passed, don’t you?”

Natalie shook her head, her shoulders trembling with mirth.

“What happened?”

“I was praying that she would get called in before me,” he said with a fatalistic shrug. “But of course she didn’t. The secretary comes out and it was just me and this woman sitting there and the secretary smiles at me and says, ‘Mr. Newhouse, you can come through now.’”

Natalie’s eyes widened. “What did you do?”

“Well, I sat still for a second or two. I mean, it sounds stupid now, but I really didn’t want to embarrass this woman. She seemed pretty nice other than the vicious insults she had hurled at my good name, and a lot of what she said about me was true except for the arrogant jerk thing—besides, I think she found me rather attractive.”

Natalie rolled her eyes and sat back in her chair, eyebrows raised.

“I was being ironic,” Jack said. “Anyway, ‘Mr. Newhouse?’ the secretary prompts me again, and then it’s too late to do anything. I see the realization of who she’s been talking to dawn on the poor woman’s face.” He grimaced at the memory. “So I got up and said. ‘Really nice to have met you.’”

“And what did she say?”

“If my memory serves me correctly and it should do because this was only last week, she said, ‘Oh shit.’”

“Poor her!” Natalie said, knowing what it felt like to be mortified in public.

“Not that poor. It turns out she was right. My current knowledge of the markets is out of touch and besides they didn’t feel I’d fit into the company ethos of work, work, work after my—well, anyway she got the job.”

“Oh good,” Natalie said without thinking.

“Good!” Jack exclaimed good-naturedly. “Actually, it was good. I’m going to work at a much smaller place now. Running investments for rich private clients, you know, only millionaires and royalty may apply. It’s a really nice firm, all good people and they are into the whole life-work balance thing. Which is good. I’ve realized recently life is too short to spend most of it chained to your desk.” He glanced down and added casually as he looked back into Natalie’s eyes, “Now that I’m back in London for good.”

They smiled silently at each other as the waitress set their coffee down. Natalie wondered how this had happened; the evening hadn’t gone like she had planned or imagined at all. How, when she had so very many important and serious things to say to Jack, had the last two hours sailed by filled with delightful, entertaining, but ultimately meaningless chat? It was as if they had been making love in that Jacuzzi in Venice only last week. Actually no, it was different from that. It felt as if they had never been to bed together; as if they were two very different people from the pair who had met on the Tube over a year ago; as if this was a first date. At least, Natalie reminded herself, that was how it felt to her, not Jack, even if he was looking at her with what might have been a twinkle in his eye.

She knew she should tell him her secret now, but selfishly, childishly, dangerously, she didn’t want to. She was curious to see if that twinkle in his eye might ignite into something more.

If this was what Natalie had wished for, this time to spend with Jack to see if all the months that she had fought her feelings for him were based on nothing more than a pleasant daydream, she hadn’t expected to feel this way. What she had hoped for was confirmation that he was nothing more than a self-serving, narcissistic, egocentric seducer of women. But his warmth and charm were intact, if anything even magnified since the last time she had seen him. And what’s more, whether it was real or imagined, when she was with him she felt comfortable in her own skin. Relaxed and together on the very night when she should have felt her most nervous and terrified.

“You look thoughtful,” Jack said, watching her as she sipped her coffee.

“You look lovely,” Natalie said out loud before she even knew it.

Jack shook his head, briefly running his palm over his short hair.

“Oh Jack, I’m sorry,” Natalie said hastily, seeing his acute discomfort. “It just came out. I didn’t mean it, it’s just the wine and I don’t know why I said it. I was trying to be funny, I suppose.”

Jack laughed loudly, making Natalie start. Well, at least he thought it was funny even if she didn’t.

“No one’s said anything like that to me for a while,” he said with a sheepish grin. “Actually, no one’s said that to me ever! And it’s been an…eventful year. It’s taken its toll, so what I’m trying to say is that it’s nice to receive a compliment.”

Natalie watched him. He seemed to mean every word he was saying and yet she knew that he had been chatting up Suze only a few days ago. A man who doesn’t think he has what it takes to attract women doesn’t try to chat up strangers in the street.

“It’s been eventful for me too,” she said quietly.

There was a long pause and then both of them spoke at once.

“The thing is—” Natalie began.

“There is something you deserve to know—” Jack said simultaneously. They both laughed nervously.

“After you,” Jack said, with an incline of his head.

Natalie thought about Freddie and how any other topic of conversation would be wiped clean off the board once she had told Jack about him.

“No, you go,” she said. “Please.”

Jack nodded, took a breath, and began.

“That day that I met you I had…”

Natalie’s cell phone purred into life in her bag, vibrating noisily against her keys.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized, thinking immediately of Freddie. “Do you mind if I take it? It might be…important.” She trailed off her excuses and her heart stopped when she saw it was her home number calling.

“Mom?” she said as she answered the phone. She could hear Freddie crying, screaming in her ear. “Mom!” she repeated.

“Now, I don’t want you to worry,” Sandy began, speaking loudly to be heard over the baby.

“What’s happened?” Natalie’s tone was urgent.

“Nothing much. I nearly didn’t call you at all, but then I thought you’d just get cross when you came home and found out so—anyway, hardly anything at all. Freddie just had a little accident, that’s all.”

“What!” Natalie exclaimed. She glanced at Jack and then stood up, walking out into the cold night air. “Mom, is he okay?”

“He’s fine! A bit upset but fine. I was changing his nappy and he—I didn’t realize he was so mobile, Natalie—the wipes had run out so I went to get a packet from your drawer and in the two seconds my back was turned, he rolled off the table. Cracked his little head on the corner of the drawers. Now, I’m sure he’s fine, he cried his eyes out and he’s alert and awake—but he has got a lump the size of an egg on his forehead. But I’m fairly sure he isn’t concussed.”

Natalie heard the familiar gasping snuffle that Freddie did when he was gathering his strength for another great howl. Just as it broke with an ear-shattering crescendo she told her mother, “I’m coming home—now.”

“Are you okay?” Jack asked when she got back inside the restaurant. “What’s happened?”

“My bloody mother,” Natalie said as she sat down, hearing the tremble in her voice. Then, perhaps more than at any moment since Freddie’s birth, she wanted not to have to tell Jack about Freddie but for him to simply know, so she didn’t have to explain the way she was feeling. If only he had always known, and they had had a year of evenings like this, in each other’s company, there to support each other. It was a pointless and childish wish, trying to conjure a different past that had already long been spent in other ways.

“My mother has had an accident at home, started a…pan fire. Nothing serious, she’s just a bit shaken, so I need to get back. I’m sorry, Jack.” As Natalie stood up, so did he.

She found her wallet in her bag but Jack put his finger on her wrist and said, “No, this is on me, I insist. Look, Natalie, I admit I didn’t want to see you tonight. But I am glad I did.”

He called over the waiter to alert him to the cash he had left on the table, telling him to keep the change. As they emerged into the night air, Jack spotted a couple across the street emerging from a cab. He sprinted over and reserved it for her.

“I’m so sorry,” Natalie said absently as he opened the door for her. “This isn’t how I planned it at all.”

Jack held her forearm for a moment as she was about to get into the cab. “I’d like to do this again sometime.”

Distracted, all Natalie could think of just then was the sound of her son crying.

“Well, we’ll have to,” she said, as if the reasons were obvious.

“Then I’ll call you,” Jack said. “I do still have your number.”

“Okay,” Natalie said, and then the cab door was shut and the car was pulling away from the curb.

Freddie had stopped crying long before Natalie got home, Sandy told her.

“Oh my God,” Natalie said as she removed the damp piece of kitchen towel that Sandy had been holding to his forehead. “Oh my God—Mother, what did you do to him?”

She peered at the lump that was just over her baby’s left eyebrow. It was purple, pink, and tinged ith a greenish-blue all at once, and looked dreadfully sore.

“It’s a bump,” Sandy said, pouring herself what she assured Natalie was her first drink of a very long day. “All kids get scrapes and knocks and bumps. It’s the way they hurl themselves around.”

“Not eleven-week-old babies, Mother,” Natalie said sharply. “Funnily enough, when they can’t walk or talk or swing from climbing frames it is generally considered to be the responsibility of the adult to keep them bump-free.”

“It was an accident,” Sandy said, sipping a large vodka over ice. Natalie didn’t think that her mother was drunk, but she didn’t like the fact that as soon as she had arrived Sandy started drinking.

“Anyway,” Sandy went on after taking a gulp from her glass, “how many times have you left him for a couple of seconds while you’ve popped to get something?”

“Never!” Natalie exclaimed. She looked at her son, who was sitting up in her lap playing quite happily with her string of freshwater pearls. His eyes were bright and he seemed otherwise perfectly well cared for. Accidents did happen and Natalie knew he wasn’t seriously hurt. And she knew that if it had been her who had been looking after him when it happened, she’d have felt terrible and mortified, but she’d have been much more able to get past it because it would have been her mistake, her responsibility. But it hadn’t been her, it had been her mother.

“When I called, I didn’t mean for you to leave your date,” Sandy said, refreshing her drink.

“I wasn’t on a date,” Natalie snapped back.

Sandy sighed, her bosom rising and falling with the effort. “Look at him—he’s fed, he’s clean, and he’s happy.” She smiled, tucking one chin into another. “I had a lovely time with him, Natalie, it was a great day. And that bump—well, it was just an accident.”

“Story of your life really,” Natalie said, sweeping her son up and carrying him to her room. Once upstairs, she laid Freddie on the bed and looked at his bump again. It wasn’t quite as big and terrible as she had first thought. In fact, despite Sandy’s alarming assessment on the phone, it was hardly more than the size of a thumbnail. And as she gently applied some arnica cream to it, she supposed that many grandmothers wouldn’t have even bothered telling their daughters that such a minor injury had occurred. Her mother had told her because she knew that either way Natalie would be angry with her, and she had probably reasoned it would be better for her to be just angry with her about the bump, without adding withholding information to the charge.

And in a strange sort of way, maybe her mother had been that guardian angel she had prayed to earlier that evening. After all, Sandy had saved her from what was becoming a confusing and unpredictable situation. Her intervention had given Natalie breathing space to consider what she had once only wondered about and now knew for sure. Jack had done something more to her than get her pregnant in those few days.

He had got under her skin, inside her heart and her head. Perhaps if she hadn’t had Freddie, the feelings would have gradually ebbed away, or perhaps not. But either way she had been struggling with them ever since she met him, and one thing was certain: If she was going to have him back in her life in any capacity, these emotions were not helping.

And as for Jack? Natalie had thought that toward the end of their evening he might have wanted her, too, if not nearly in the same way. He hadn’t been pleased to see her, he’d almost run a mile when she’d bumped into him, and she had more or less had to press-gang him into agreeing to meet her. But eventually he had clearly made up his mind to enjoy the evening as best as he could, which might very well have included sleeping with her. If her mother hadn’t called, she thought that perhaps over brandy Jack would have asked her to go home with him. One more night, no strings, no promises, that was what he would have offered her.

The truly frightening thing was, she was sure that if it hadn’t been for her mother’s intervention, she would have accepted.