Monday to Friday Man (26 page)

‘Jumping off a cliff,’ I suggest.

We both find ourselves smiling. I tell Guy about the arguments Jack and I had had about the weekends, his elusiveness, how he’d keep on using his work as an excuse. I tell him I wish I’d had the time to talk to his brother, Alexander, that night. I might have found out more about the real Jack, if he hadn’t interrupted us.

‘I don’t know, Gilly. He probably does need to work. These shows are full on. I’m not defending him,’ he quickly adds.

‘Or maybe I just have terrible taste in men.’

‘No you don’t,’ he says, gesturing to himself.

My telephone rings. I turned it back on this morning. Talk of the devil. ‘It’s Jack,’ I mime to Guy, who encourages me to take the call. Heart racing, I go into the other room.

‘Whatever you saw, Gilly, it’s not what you think,’ Jack begins. ‘Nancy was upset, things aren’t going too well for her, and I happened to . . .’

I cut him off. ‘I might be naïve, but I’m not stupid,’ I tell him. ‘I meant what I said last night. I want you to pack your bags and go.’

‘Gilly, please! Come on. I like you, you know I do.’

‘Really. You like me? So why are you kissing my sister-in-law?’

‘It’s just I can’t make the commitment you want. I sense you want more from me than I can give. Things are complicated . . . if only you knew . . .’

‘That’s fine. Just leave. I don’t want anything from you any more, except for you to go.’

There’s a hesitant pause before he says, ‘Where am I going to go?’

I laugh. ‘That’s not my problem.’

‘Gilly, I need my room, the show’s not over. I’ve paid rent. You can’t do this.’

‘I can do whatever I like.’

‘It says on the site it’s polite to give tenants notice.’

‘Well, if the site knew that you’d kissed Nancy, I’m sure they’d make an exception.’

Jack, for once, is silent. Until he says, ‘Gilly, please. Can’t we talk about this?’

‘No. Why don’t you ask Nancy if you can sleep with her?’

‘Now you’re being childish. Look, I want us to stay friends . . .’

‘Stay friends?’

‘Stay friends and remain civil. I’ll be gone by Christmas.’

‘Fuck off, Jack.’

I hang up.

I return to the kitchen. ‘He tried to make out nothing happened, that I’d got the wrong impression.’ I sit down. ‘He wanted us to remain friends! The stupid thing is we were never good friends in the first place, not like . . .’

‘Not like me and you?’

I bite my lip. ‘I told him to pack up his stuff tonight and get lost.’

‘Good. Time to move on.’

Our attention turns to the television, another gruesome attack in London.

‘Oh, Guy, I feel blue.’ I push aside my breakfast. ‘I hate Jack, I really do, I hate him . . .’

‘But?’

‘He made me feel young again. I know it sounds shallow, but . . .’

‘Right,’ Guy says, as if he’s plotting an idea. ‘There’s not just one Jack Baker in town. I’m taking you out.’

‘Where?’

‘It’s a surprise.’

‘Tell me. Go on.’

‘No questions, Gilly. Just put something warm on,’ he adds.

Guy clutches my hand as we skate across the ice rink, the Natural History Museum lit up by the Christmas lights twinkling in the trees. I wobble and stumble, laughing as I nearly fall over. I rush to the safety of the rails when a little girl in a bright-blue bobble hat and cream outfit pirouettes in front of me like a professional. ‘I just need to catch my breath,’ I tell him.

Guy raises an eyebrow. ‘We’ve only just started.’

I look at the other skaters, a whirl of vivid colours, fur hats and scarves, gliding round the ice rink, some more effortlessly than others. ‘I’m terrified I’m going to fall and someone will skate over my hands,’ I confide to him, ‘and chop my fingers off.’ I pull a scary face.

‘Don’t be such a wimp. You can do it.’ He grabs my hand and off we go. I shriek when he pulls me towards him, forcing me to go faster. Guy is a natural on the ice, but as for me . . .

‘Come on!’ he bosses me.

‘Slow down!’

As I gain confidence and momentum, I begin to enjoy myself, letting go of Guy’s hand and telling him I want to skate on my own. He moves on, then turns and watches me. A surge of adrenalin rushes through my body as the cold air blasts my face and I skate a full circle on my own, and then another . . . and another. This time round I try to catch him up.

‘Come and get me,’ he calls.

A group of children sweep past me, one knocks into my back and I’m on my bottom. I reach for Guy’s hand and he pulls me up. I brush myself down and start again. ‘How come you’re so good?’ I ask.

‘Used to skate on the farm,’ he calls over his shoulder, ‘when the lake froze over. I loved it.’

Determined to catch him, I race forward and in my excitement lose my balance again, but this time manage to stay upright. I can’t stop laughing as I grab his arm as if playing tag in the playground. ‘Got you!’ I say.

He takes my hand and we skate round the rink once more, together. I don’t want to let him go. ‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘Oh Guy, this feels amazing. I feel ten again.’

For the rest of the day, we walk the dogs in the park and drink too much coffee. Late in the afternoon we drive in Guy’s clapped-out van to his favourite nursery just outside London because he needs to buy some flowers for a new job. Guy is a changed man when he wanders around pointing out to me the plants he particularly loves. ‘The names aren’t that important, Gilly, it’s what they look like,’ he says when I ask him what each one is. He tells me that he used to work in a nursery in his teenage years, loading up trolleys with geraniums and lupins, and that’s how his love for flowers started. ‘This client of mine, she’s into tapestry planting, so I need to find lots of different types and interweave them – it’s fun,’ he says.

On the way home Guy glances over at me, saying I’m quiet. He asks me what I’m thinking about.

‘How foolish I’ve been,’ I admit. ‘I thought something didn’t add up with Jack, but I kept on telling myself I was worrying too much, that I should just enjoy it, go with the flow. Even Dennis got it right,’ I murmur.

‘Dennis?’

‘Just someone,’ I say.

‘Right. Not going to even ask.’ He smiles, before adding, ‘You should always follow your gut instinct, it’s normally right.’

I nod. ‘I didn’t expect him to kiss Nancy.’ I stop, shaking my head, realizing how ridiculous it sounds. ‘But if I’m honest, I think I knew it wouldn’t work out between us. He was too closed off, too secretive, there was something wrong about him.’ Guy looks deep in thought. ‘What?’ I prompt.

‘Why don’t we follow Jack home tonight?’

‘Follow him? Why?’

‘You said it yourself. He was so shifty when you tried to talk to him about his private life and he never invited you to his place, so maybe he doesn’t live in Bath at all. Maybe he’s married and leads a double life.’

‘He’s not married.’

‘Let’s follow him,’ Guy continues, ‘find out for sure.’

‘No!’

‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘I’m having a night in. I’m not going to start stalking the man, Guy.’

‘Oh, come on, Gilly. Don’t you want to know if he really is who he says he is? It doesn’t matter if we discover there’s nothing weird about him, but at least we’ll know and then you don’t have to think about him ever again.’

‘I’m not sure I even care now.’

He’s not listening. ‘We should definitely do this.’

‘No, we can’t! This is crazy,’ I say. ‘Anyway, what if he sees us?’

Parked on the street outside my house, Guy and I watch Jack enter No. 21. Part of me thinks I should go in and face him. Maybe I’m a coward for not confronting him face to face. However, I said all I’d wanted to on the phone. I told him again that if I came home to find any of his belongings, I’d fling them out on the street. I’ve always longed to hurl a suitcase out of the window in a fury and see clothes scattering across the pavement. I didn’t get my chance with Ed.

Nancy is the one I’m more furious with. I want to kill her for betraying Nick and her children.

‘Shh, he’s coming,’ Guy says, hunched low in his seat like me. We see Jack leaving the house with his bag of laundry and suitcase. He zaps a button to unlock his convertible, tosses the luggage into the boot and revs the engine. Guy and I turn to one another conspiratorially. I nod. ‘OK, Agent Brown,’ he says, turning the key in the ignition.

Guy’s dilapidated white van struggles to keep up with Jack’s fast BMW. I continue to tell him this is an insane idea, that we are no doubt heading for Bath and all we’ll see is Jack entering his flat and then we’ll have to drive all the way home again and what a waste of petrol! Besides, I question whether his old van will make it both ways.

‘Looks are deceptive. This baby can go quite fast when she wants to.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘You need to have more faith,’ Guy says, before asking me to open the packet of snack-a-jacks and ramming his foot on the accelerator.

As we’re driving down the M4, with only one car between Jack’s and ours, I tell Guy that I’ve had a lovely day. ‘Thank you for looking after me.’

‘Any time,’ he replies.

‘The thing is,’ I start apprehensively, ‘when Flora comes back we won’t be able to do this. I won’t be able to turn up at your door like some mad woman in the middle of the night.’ I smile. ‘I’ll have to find someone else.’ Right now I can’t stop thinking about how much I value being with Guy, alone, and how I can talk to him in a way that I could never talk to Jack, and not even Ed.

‘I know,’ he says quietly, as if he’s been thinking about it too.

‘Are you looking forward to seeing Flora?’ I ask, dreading the answer.

‘Yes,’ he says in a tone that encourages me to say, ‘But?’

‘Well, just between us, there’s this part of me that’s also loved being on my own. I can order takeaways and watch episode after episode of
The Wire
with a curry on my lap. I can do exactly what I want at weekends, I’m not being dragged to some wedding where I don’t even know the bride. I even enjoy the park now.’

‘I love the park.’

‘I love Trouble. In the past few months, she’s become . . . well she’s become
my
dog. I won’t like Flora taking over again, being her mistress.’ Guy glances over to me. ‘And then there’s you.’

‘Me?’ I shiver as I pull my cardigan sleeve over my hand.

‘What you said earlier . . . you’re right. We won’t be able to do this.’ He looks ahead, runs a hand through his hair. ‘I’ll miss it. I’ll miss you.’ He hits the steering wheel. ‘What is it about cars? They’re always a good place to chat, to tell people our secrets, aren’t they? Stick two people in a car and send them off to Scotland and they’re going to know each other pretty well by the end of the journey. Is it because there’s no escape? You’ve got a captive audience?’

I nod. ‘Partly, but I think cars are good places to talk because you’re looking at the road. You’re avoiding eye contact. It’s the same with dog walking.’

‘Dog walking?’

‘Yes. Think about it. You can say whatever you like, true or false, and the person walking by your side will never know the difference because you’re always looking ahead.’ I turn away. ‘Because the truth is in our eyes.’

‘You don’t talk much about Ed,’ Guy says, as I unpack the sandwiches and glance at the map. We have one more junction to go.

‘There’s nothing to say.’

‘Does it still hurt?’

‘Yes, but if I’m honest, I think it was more the way he did it.’ I reflect. ‘It was a shock. It’s hard to start over again, after a long relationship, but I know I’m not the only one. Maybe it was brave of him to pull out,’ I say. ‘Susie and Anna . . .’

‘I really liked them by the way,’ he cuts in.

‘Good. Anyway, they said he was a coward, but it takes guts, just as it takes guts to walk out on a marriage. To leave behind children must be heartbreaking.’ I look out of the window, thinking about Mum and how she could have done it to us. ‘Sometimes the easy thing is to do nothing, like I did with Ed.’ I confide to Guy that I think Ed and I became too comfortable, that perhaps our relationship had run its course. ‘We went on holiday,’ I tell him, ‘and all Ed wanted to do was sleep by the pool and read his book.’ We lost something, I know that now, I just didn’t want to acknowledge it was over. When I think about it, Ed had to deal with the wrath of my family and friends for months. He’ll always be blamed because he was the one that ended it, but Ed must have believed that we wouldn’t make each other happy in the long run. Now I think he was right, and I am to blame too. I only wish both of us had figured it out sooner.

‘Do you think it’s just as easy to fall out of love with someone as it is to fall in love with them?’ I ask Guy.

‘Possibly. Love is a weird thing. It has no rules, no logic or reason. You can’t explain it.’

‘So back to the dating game,’ I say with false cheer. ‘Tell me your worst date.’

‘My worst date . . . Christ, I’ve had quite a few. Oh, I remember! It was with this woman who was pushy and overbearing, to put it mildly.’ Guy indicates to move into the fast lane, only one hand on the steering wheel, the other holding his cold beef sandwich.