One Plus One: A Novel (17 page)

—

“Are you hungry?” Mr. Nicholls’s voice woke her from a half doze.

She pushed herself upright. Her neck had calcified, as bent and
stiff as a wire coat hanger. “Starving,” she said, turning awkwardly toward him. “You want to stop somewhere for lunch?”

The sun had emerged. It shone in actual rays off to their left, strobing a vast, open field of green. God’s fingers, Tanzie used to call them. Jess reached for the map in the glove compartment, ready to look up the location of the next services.

Mr. Nicholls glanced at her. He seemed almost embarrassed. “Actually, you know what? I could really go for one of your sandwiches.”

T
he Stag and Hounds B and B wasn’t listed in any accommodations guides. It had no Web site, no brochures. It wasn’t hard to work out why. The pub sat alone on the side of a bleak, windswept moor, and the mossy plastic garden furniture that stood outside its gray frontage suggested an absence of casual visitors or, perhaps, the triumph of hope over experience. The bedrooms, apparently, were last decorated several decades previously—they bore shiny pink wallpaper, lace curtains, and a smattering of china figurines in place of anything useful, like, say, shampoo or tissues. There was a communal bathroom at the end of the upstairs corridor, where the fixtures were an ancient green and ringed with lime scale. A small box-shaped television in the twin room deigned to pick up three channels, each of those with a faint static buzz. When Nicky discovered the plastic doll in a crocheted wool ball dress that squatted over the loo roll, he was awestruck. “I actually love this,” he said, holding her up to the light to inspect her glittery synthetic hem. “It’s so bad it’s actually cool.”

Ed couldn’t believe places like this still existed. But he had been driving for a little more than eight hours at forty m.p.h., the Stag and Hounds was twenty-five pounds per night per room—a rate even Jess was pleased with—and they were happy to let Norman in.

“Oh, we love dogs.” Mrs. Deakins waded through a small flock of excitable Pomeranians. She patted her head, on which a carefully pinned structure sat. “We love dogs more than humans, don’t we, Jack?” There was a grunt from somewhere downstairs. “They’re certainly easier to please. You can bring your lovely big fella into the
snug tonight, if you like. My girls love to meet a new man.” She gave Ed a faintly saucy nod as she said this.

She opened the two doors and waved a hand inside.

“So, Mr. and Mrs. Nicholls, you’ll be right next door to your children. You’re the only guests tonight, so it should be nice and quiet. We have a selection of cereals for breakfast or Jack will do you egg on toast. He does a lovely egg on toast.”

“Thank you.”

She handed him the keys, held his gaze a millisecond longer than was strictly necessary. “I’m going to guess you like yours . . . gently poached. Am I right?”

Ed glanced behind him, checking that she was addressing him.

“I am, aren’t I?”

“Um . . . however they come.”

“However . . . they . . . come,” she repeated slowly, her eyes not leaving his. She raised one eyebrow, smiled at him again, then headed downstairs, her pack of small dogs a moving hairy sea around her feet. From the corner of his eye he could see Jess smirking.

“Don’t.” He dropped their bags onto the bed.

“I bags first bath.” Nicky rubbed at the small of his back.

“I need to study,” said Tanzie. “I have exactly seventeen and a half hours until the Olympiad.” She gathered her books under her arm and disappeared into the next room.

“Come and give Norman a walk first, sweetheart,” Jess said. “Get some fresh air. It’ll help you sleep later.”

Jess unzipped a holdall, and pulled a hoodie over her head. When she lifted her arms, a crescent of bare stomach was briefly visible, pale and oddly startling. Her face emerged through the neck opening. “We’ll be gone for at least half an hour. Or we . . . could make it longer.” As she adjusted her ponytail, she glanced toward the stairs and lifted an eyebrow at him. “Just . . . saying.”

“Funny.”

He could hear her laughing as they disappeared. Ed lay down on
the nylon bedspread, feeling his hair lift slightly with static electricity, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

—

“So here’s the good news,” said Paul Wilkes. “The police have completed their initial investigations. The preliminary results show no obvious motive on your side. There is no evidence that you extracted a profit from Deanna Lewis or her brother’s trading activities. More pertinent, there is no sign that you made any money at all from the launch of SFAX other than the same share gains that would be made by any employee. Obviously, there would be a higher proportion of profit, given your overall shareholding, but they can find no links to offshore accounts or any attempt to conceal on your side.”

“That’s because there were none.”

“Also, the investigating team says that they have uncovered a number of accounts in Michael Lewis’s family’s names, which suggests a clear attempt to conceal his actions. They have obtained trading records that show he was trading a large volume immediately prior to the announcement—another red flag for them.”

Paul was still talking but the signal was patchy, and Ed struggled to hear him. He stood and walked over to the window. Tanzie was running round and round the pub garden, shrieking happily. The small yappy dogs were following her. Jess was standing, her arms folded, laughing. Norman was in the middle of the space, gazing at them all, a bemused, immovable object in a sea of madness. He put his hand over his other ear. “Does that mean I can come back now? Is it sorted out?” He had a sudden vision of his office: a mirage in a desert.

“Hold your horses. Here’s the less-good news. Michael Lewis wasn’t just trading stocks; he was trading options on the stock.”

“Trading what?” He blinked. “Okay. You’re now speaking Polish.”

“Seriously?” There was a short silence. Ed pictured Paul in his wood-paneled office, rolling his eyes. “Options allow a trader to leverage his or, in this case, her investment, and generate substantially more in profits.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

“Well, the level of profits he generated from the options is significant, so the whole case moves up a gear. Which brings me to the bad news.”

“That wasn’t the bad news?”

Paul sighed. “Ed, why didn’t you tell me you’d written Deanna Lewis a damn check?”

Ed blinked. The check.

“She cashed a check written by you for five thousand pounds to her bank account.”

“So?”

“So,” and here, from the elaborately slow and careful tenor of his voice, it was possible to picture the eyes roll again, “it links you financially to what Deanna Lewis was doing. You enabled some of that trade.”

“But it was just a few grand to help her out! She had no money!”

“Whether or not you extracted a profit from it, you had a clear financial interest in Lewis, and it came just before SFAX went live. The e-mails we could argue were inconclusive, but this means it’s not just her word against yours, Ed.”

He stared out at the moorland. Tanzie was jumping up and down and waving a stick at the slobbering dog. Her glasses had gone askew on her nose and she was laughing. Jess scooped her up from behind and hugged her.

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, Ed, defending you just got a whole lot tougher.”

—

Ed had only utterly disappointed his father once in his whole life. That’s not to say he wasn’t a general disappointment—he knew his father would have preferred a son who was more obviously in his own mold: upright, determined, driven. A sort of filial marine. But he managed to override whatever private dismay he felt at this quiet,
geeky boy, and decided instead that as he so clearly couldn’t sort him out, an expensive education would.

The fact that the meager funds their parents saved over their working years sent Ed to private school and not his sister was the great Unacknowledged Resentment of their family. He often wondered whether, if they had known then what a huge emotional hurdle they were planting in front of Gemma, they still would have done it. Ed never could convince her that it was purely because she was so good at everything that they never felt the need to send her. He was the one who spent every waking hour in his room or glued to a screen. He was the one who was hopeless at sports.

But no, against all available evidence, Bob Nicholls, former military policeman and later head of security for a small northern building society, was convinced that an expensive minor private school, with the motto “Sports maketh the man,” would maketh his son. “This is a great opportunity we’re giving you, Edward. Better than your mother or I ever had,” he said repeatedly. “Don’t waste it.” So at the end of Ed’s first year, when he opened the report, which used the words
disengaged
and
lackluster performance
and, worst of all,
not really a team player,
he stared at the letter as Ed watched uncomfortably while the color drained from his face.

Ed couldn’t tell him he didn’t really like the school, with its braying packs of mocking, overentitled posh boys. He couldn’t tell him that no matter how many times they made him run round the rugby field he was never going to like rugby. He couldn’t explain that it was the possibilities of the pixelated screen, and what you could create from it, that really interested him. And that he felt he could make a life out of it. His father’s face actually sagged with disappointment, with the sheer bloody waste of it all, and Ed realized he had no choice.

“I’ll do better next year, Dad,” he said.

Now Ed Nicholls was due to report to the City of London police in a matter of days.

He tried to imagine the expression his father would wear when he heard that his son—the son he now boasted about to his ex-army colleagues (“Of course I don’t understand what it is he actually does, but apparently all this software stuff is the future”)—was quite possibly about to be prosecuted for insider trading. He tried to picture his father’s head turning on that frail neck, the shock pulling his weary features down even as he tried to disguise it, and his gently pursed lips as he grasped there was nothing he could say or do.

So Ed made a decision. He would ask his lawyer to prolong the proceedings as long as possible. He would throw every penny of his own money at the case to delay the announcement of his supposed crime. But he could not go to that family lunch, no matter how ill his father was. He would be doing his father a favor. By staying away he would actually be protecting him.

Ed Nicholls stood in the little pink hotel bedroom that smelled of air freshener and disappointment and stared out at the bleak moors, at the little girl who had flopped onto the damp grass and was pulling the ears of the dog as he sat, tongue lolling, an expression of idiotic ecstasy on his great features, and he wondered why—given that he was so evidently doing the right thing—he felt like a complete shit.

T
anzie was nervous. She refused supper and declined to come downstairs even for a break, preferring to curl up on the pink nylon coverlet and plow through her maths papers while nibbling on what remained of the breakfast picnic. Jess was surprised: her daughter rarely suffered from nerves when it came to anything maths related. She did her best to reassure her, but it was hard when she had no idea what she was talking about.

“We’re nearly there! It’s all good, Tanze. Nothing to worry about.”

“Do you think I’ll sleep tonight?”

“Of course you’ll sleep tonight.”

“But if I don’t, I might do really badly.”

“Even if you don’t sleep, you’ll do fine. And I’ve never known you to not sleep.”

“I’m worried that I’ll worry too much to sleep.”

“I’m not worried that you’ll worry. Just relax. You’ll be fine. It will all be fine.”

When Jess kissed her, she saw that Tanzie had chewed her nails right down to the quick.

Mr. Nicholls was in the garden. He walked up and down where she and Tanzie had been half an hour earlier, talking avidly into his phone. He stopped and stared at it a couple of times, then stepped up onto a white plastic garden chair, presumably to get better reception. He stood there, wobbling, utterly oblivious to the curious glances of those inside as he gesticulated and swore.

Jess gazed through the window of the bar, unsure whether to go and interrupt him. There were a few old men gathered around the
landlady as she chatted from the other side of the counter. They looked at Jess incuriously over their pints.

“Work, is it?” The landlady followed her gaze through the window.

“Oh. Yes. Never stops.” Jess raised a smile. “I’ll take him a drink.”

Mr. Nicholls was seated on a low stone wall when she finally walked out. His elbows were on his knees and he was staring at the grass.

Jess held out the pint and he stared at it for a moment, then took it from her. “Thanks.” He looked exhausted.

“Everything okay?”

“No.” He took a long gulp of his beer. “Nothing’s okay.”

She sat down a few feet away. “Anything I can help with?”

“No.”

They sat in silence. It was so peaceful there, with nothing around them except the breeze rippling across the moors, and the gentle hum of conversation from inside. She was going to say something about the landscape when his voice broke into the still air.

“Fuck it,” Mr. Nicholls said vehemently. “Just fuck it.”

Jess flinched.

“I just can’t believe my fucking life has turned into this . . . mess.” His voice cracked. “I can’t believe that I can work and work for years and the whole thing can fall apart like this. For what? For fucking what?”

“It’s only food poisoning. You’ll—”

“I’m not talking about the fucking kebab.” He dropped his head into his hands. “But I don’t want to talk about it.” He shot her a warning look.

“Okay.”

“That’s the thing. Legally, I’m not meant to talk to anyone about any of this.”

She didn’t look at him.

“I can’t tell a soul.”

She stretched out a leg and gazed at the sunset. “Well, I don’t count, do I? I’m a cleaning wench.”

He let out a breath. “Fuck it,” he said again.

And then he told her, his head down, his hands raking his short dark hair. He told her about a girlfriend with whom he couldn’t think how to break up nicely, and how his whole life had come crashing down. He told her about his company and how he should have been there now, celebrating the launch of his last six years’ obsessive work. And how instead he had to stay away from everything and everyone he knew all the while facing the prospect of prosecution. He told her about his dad and about the lawyer who had just rung to inform him that shortly after he returned from this trip his presence would be required at a police station in London where he would be charged with insider trading, a charge that could win him up to twenty years in prison. By the time he’d finished, she felt winded.

“Everything I’ve ever worked for. Everything I cared about. I’m not allowed to go into my own office. I can’t even go back to my flat in case the press hear of it and I let slip what’s happened. I can’t go and see my own dad because then he’ll die knowing what a bloody idiot his son is. And the stupid thing is, I miss him. I really miss him.”

Jess digested this for a few minutes. He smiled bleakly at the sky. “And you know the best bit? It’s my birthday.”

“What?”

“Today. It’s my birthday.”

“Today? Why didn’t you say anything?”

“Because I’m thirty-four years old, and a thirty-four-year-old man sounds like a dick talking about birthdays.” He took a swig of his beer. “And what with the whole food-poisoning thing, I didn’t feel I had much to celebrate.” He looked sideways at Jess. “Plus you might have started singing ‘Happy Birthday’ in the car.”

“I’ll sing it out here.”

“Please don’t. Things are bad enough.”

Jess’s head was reeling. She couldn’t believe all the stuff Mr.
Nicholls was carrying around. If he had been anyone else, she might have put her arm around him, attempted to say something comforting. But Mr. Nicholls was prickly.

“Things will get better, you know,” she said, when she couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Karma will get that girl who messed you up.”

He pulled a face. “Karma?”

“It’s like I tell the kids. Good things happen to good people. You just have to keep faith—”

“Well, I must have been a complete shit in a past life.”

“Come on. You still have property. You have cars. You have your brain. You have expensive lawyers. You can work this out.”

“How come you’re such an optimist?”

“Because things do come right.”

“And that’s from a woman who doesn’t have enough money to catch a train.”

Jess kept her gaze on the craggy hillside. “Because it’s your birthday, I’m going to let that one go.”

Mr. Nicholls sighed. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help. But right now I find your positivity exhausting.”

“No, you find driving hundreds of miles in a car with three people you don’t know and a large dog exhausting. Go upstairs and have a long bath and you’ll feel better. Go on.”

He trudged inside, the condemned man, and she sat and stared out at the slab of green moorland in front of her. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be facing prison, not to be allowed near the things or the people you loved. She tried to imagine someone like Mr. Nicholls doing time.

After a while, she walked inside with the empty glasses. She leaned over the bar, where the landlady was watching an episode of
Homes Under the Hammer.
The men sat in silence behind her, watching it, too, or gazing rheumily into their pints.

“Mrs. Deakins? It’s actually my husband’s birthday today. Would you mind doing me a favor?”

—

Mr. Nicholls finally came downstairs at eight thirty, wearing the same clothes he’d worn that afternoon. And the previous afternoon. Jess knew he had bathed, though, as his hair was damp and he was clean shaven.

“So what’s in your bag, then? A body?”

“What?” He walked over to the bar. He gave off a faint scent of Wilkinson Sword soap.

“You’ve worn the same clothes since we left.”

He looked down, as if to check. “Oh. No. These are clean.”

“You have the same T-shirt and jeans? For every day?”

“Saves thinking about it.”

She looked at him for a minute, then decided to bite back what she had been about to say. It was his birthday after all.

“Oh. You look nice,” he said suddenly, as if he’d only just noticed.

She had changed into a blue sundress and a cardigan. She had planned to save it for the Olympiad, but figured that this was important. “Well, thank you. One has to make the effort to fit one’s surroundings, doesn’t one?”

“What—you left your flat cap and dog-haired jeans behind?”

“You’re about to be sorry for your sarcasm. Because I have a surprise in store.”

“A surprise?” He looked instantly wary.

“It’s a good one. Here.” Jess handed him one of two glasses she had prepared earlier, to Mrs. Deakins’s amusement. They hadn’t made a cocktail here since 1997, Mrs. Deakins had observed, as Jess checked the dusty bottles behind the optics. “I figure you’re well enough.”

“What is this?” He stared at it suspiciously.

“Scotch, triple sec, and orange juice.”

He took a sip. And then a larger one. “This is all right.”

“I knew you’d like it. I made it especially for you. It’s called a Mithering Bastard.”

—

The white plastic table sat in the middle of the threadbare lawn, with two place settings of stainless-steel cutlery and a candle in a wine bottle in the middle. Jess had wiped the chairs with a bar cloth so that there was no moss left on them and now pulled one out for him.

“We’re eating alfresco. Birthday treat.” She ignored the look he gave her. “If you would like to take your seat, I’ll go and inform the kitchen that you’re here.”

“It’s not breakfast muffins, is it?”

“Of course it’s not breakfast muffins.” She pretended to be offended. As she walked toward the kitchen, she muttered, “Tanzie and Nicky had the rest of those.”

When she arrived back at the table, Norman had flopped down on Mr. Nicholls’s foot. Jess suspected that Mr. Nicholls would quite like to have moved it, but she had been sat on by Norman before and he was a deadweight. You just had to pray that he shifted before your foot went black and fell off.

“How was your aperitif?”

Mr. Nicholls gazed at his empty cocktail glass. “Delicious.”

“Well, the main course is on its way. I’m afraid it’s just the two of us this evening, as the other guests had prior arrangements.”

“Teenager-heavy soap opera and some completely insane algebraic equations?”

“You know us too well.” Jess sat down in her chair, and, as she did, Mrs. Deakins picked her way across the lawn, the Pomeranians yapping at her feet. She held aloft two plates.

“There you go,” she said, placing them on the table. “Steak and kidney. From Ian up the road. He does a lovely meat pie.”

Jess was so hungry by then she thought she could probably have eaten Ian. “Fantastic. Thank you,” she said, laying a paper napkin on her lap.

Mrs. Deakins stood and gazed around, as if seeing the setting for the first time. “We never eat out here. Lovely idea. I might offer it to my other customers. And those cocktails. I could make a package of it.”

Jess thought about the old men in the bar. “Shame not to,” she said, passing the vinegar across to Mr. Nicholls. He seemed temporarily stunned.

Mrs. Deakins rubbed her hands on her apron. “Well, Mr. Nicholls, your wife is certainly determined to show you a good time on your birthday,” she said with a wink.

He glanced up at her. “Oh. There’s never a quiet moment with Jess,” he said, letting his gaze slide back to hers.

“So how long have you two been married?”

“Ten years.”

“Three years.”

“The children are from my previous marriages,” Jess said, slicing into the pie.

“Oh! That’s—”

“I rescued her,” said Mr. Nicholls. “From the side of the road.”

“He did.”

“That’s very romantic.” Mrs. Deakins’s smile wavered a little.

“Not really. She was being arrested at the time.”

“I’ve explained all that. Wow, these chips are delicious.”

“You have. And those policemen were very understanding. Considering.”

Mrs. Deakins had started to back away. “Well, that’s lovely. It’s nice that you’re still together.”

“We get by.”

“We have no choice right now.”

“That’s true, too.”

“Could you bring out some red sauce?”

“Oh, good idea. Darling.”

As she disappeared, Mr. Nicholls nodded toward the candle and
the plates. And then he looked up at Jess and he was no longer scowling. “This is actually the best pie and chips I’ve ever eaten in a weird bed-and-breakfast somewhere I’ve never heard of on the north Yorkshire moors.”

“I’m so glad. Happy birthday.”

They ate in companionable silence. It was astonishing how much better a hot meal and a strong cocktail could make you feel. Norman groaned and flopped over onto his side, releasing Mr. Nicholls’s foot. Ed stretched his leg speculatively, perhaps trying to see whether he still could.

He looked up at her, and raised his refreshed cocktail glass. “Seriously. Thank you.” Without his glasses on, she noticed now that he had ridiculously long eyelashes. It made her feel weirdly conscious of the candle in the middle of the table. It had been a bit of a joke when she’d asked for it.

“Well . . . it was the least I could do. You did rescue us. From the side of the road. I don’t know what we would have done.”

He speared another chip and held it aloft. “Well, I like to look after my staff.”

“I think I preferred it when we were married.”

“Cheers.” He grinned at her, his eyes wrinkling. And it was so genuine and unexpected that she found herself grinning back.

“Here’s to tomorrow. And Tanzie’s future.”

“And a general absence of more crap.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

—

The evening crept into night, eased by alcohol, and the happy knowledge that nobody had to sleep in a car, or needed frequent, urgent access to a bathroom. Nicky came down, gazed suspiciously from under his fringe at the men in the snug, who gazed equally suspiciously back at him, and retreated to his bedroom to watch television. Jess drank three glasses of acidic Liebfraumilch, went inside to check on Tanzie and take her some food. She made her promise she
would not study later than ten o’clock. “Can I keep working in your room? Nicky has the telly on.”

“That’s fine,” Jess said.

“You smell of wine,” Tanzie said pointedly.

“That’s because we’re sort of on holiday. Mums are allowed to smell of wine when they’re sort of on holiday.”

“Hm.” She gave Jess a severe look and turned back to her books.

Nicky was sprawled on one of the single beds watching television. She shut the door behind her and sniffed the air.