State We're In (43 page)

Then he called Zoe.

Dean didn't know where to start with Zoe. He had yet to tell her that he'd left their father dying, that he hadn't been there at the end because she was right, there was no comfort or consolation to be gained from Edward Taylor. Should he tell her that they had two sisters they hadn't previously known about? He had no clue as to how Zoe would greet that news. Anyway, he found that what he wanted to talk to her about was the woman he'd met on the plane. The woman he'd trusted enough to share their terrible past with, the woman who had just left his apartment in an unfair hurry, leaving a huge gap.

He couldn't trust himself with any of those subjects, so he passed a few moments asking after the children, pretending to take his usual interest in their small but wonderful achievements with footballs and crayons; he asked after Zoe's health, her husband and her dog, but she knew him too well. ‘OK so why have you really called? Is he dead?'

‘Maybe. Don't know,' he replied, somewhat abashed by her bluntness but not really surprised by it.

‘You didn't stay with him?'

‘No.'

‘I'm not going to the funeral when he does die, if that's why you're ringing.'

‘It isn't. I feel the same. You were right, there is no happy ending for us there. Our relationship with our father is what it is.'

‘Not much.'

‘Exactly.'

‘I'm sorry.'

He wanted to hug her. ‘I'm sorry too.' They both knew that they were sorry that they'd had a spat, and more, they were both sorry there had been no resolution.

‘That's not why I called, though.'

‘So, why did you call?'

‘It's a long story. Do you have time?'

‘For you? Always.'

Dean held nothing back. He told Zoe about meeting Jo on the aeroplane. He explained that she'd irritated him with her naivety and her ridiculous, ill-considered plan to stop her ex-boyfriend's wedding because she thought he was her last chance at happiness. He told her about the fun, impromptu shopping spree, the hot dog meal at Millennium Park, the jazz band playing in the background, and about the surprisingly warm evening that had oozed through his bones and seemed to exist especially for them. He then admitted that he had not been able to allow Jo to embarrass herself by stopping the wedding.

‘I mean, it would have been an enormous mistake.'

‘I see.'

‘So I turned up at the hotel and pretended I was her date. But it didn't matter, because she'd worked it out herself. She'd decided it wasn't the right thing. She knows all about doing the right thing. She's very moral. Very sweet.'

‘I see,' Zoe repeated.

Then he told her about the adulterous mother, the gay father and the salsa dancing.

‘I never had you down as a salsa dancer.' Zoe did little to hide the amusement in her voice.

‘You know me, sis, I'm prepared to try anything once. So then we …' He paused. How was he to explain it?

‘Had sex?'

‘Several times.'

‘There's more?'

‘There's Ferris wheels, candy-floss sharing and mini-golf playing.'

‘You
like
her.' Zoe pronounced the word in a way that was as laden as the hand luggage of a passenger on an easyJet plane. She sounded in equal parts incredulous and delighted.

‘Don't rush ahead.' Dean told his sister how he had revealed the details of his mother's death to Jo. Zoe was breathless with delight and exhilaration. ‘Wow, Dean, you don't just like her, you've fallen in love with her.'

He didn't deny it; he just stated flatly, ‘She's gone.'

‘Sorry?'

He brought Zoe bang up to date with the morning's events. Zoe was astounded.

‘You don't think you've just been served, do you?'

Dean thought of all the times he'd made quick exits from various women's apartments, not waiting for breakfast or a debrief because he simply wasn't that into them. He felt momentarily guilty, the sands shifting beneath his feet, but despite his discomfort about his past form, he did not think he was being served a cold dish of karma. ‘No, I don't think so. At the risk of sounding arrogant, I'm pretty sure she was really into me.'

‘Maybe it was because you told her about our mother. People get freaked out about alcoholism and suicide and things,' said Zoe matter-of-factly. They did, she knew it.

‘She wasn't freaked out. She was really sympathetic. But not in a do-gooder way.' Both siblings hated do-gooders and knew there was no greater condemnation. ‘In an extremely sincere way.'

‘But there was no note?'

‘No. There was only …' Dean hesitated. ‘Eddie Taylor gave me his wedding ring.' He didn't know how to call Eddie Taylor anything other than Eddie Taylor to Zoe.

‘His wedding ring?'

‘From his marriage to our mother. He'd kept it all this time. It was in my jacket pocket and she found it.'

‘She was going through your pockets?'

‘For cash.'

‘For cash? Are you sure she wasn't just some con artist?'

‘No. I told you, she's sweet. And sincere.' Dean could clearly imagine Jo's slim fingers flicking through his wallet. He liked her fingernails. She wore them short, with clear varnish. ‘Very moral. I told you, she's truly romantic. In a good sense. You know, she really believes in that entire knight-in-shining-armour, true-love-conquers-all stuff. She was a little bit lost. I thought I'd found her. She wasn't stealing from me, she was probably going to buy breakfast, but then she found the ring and now she thinks I'm married. Can you believe Eddie Taylor has fucked this up for me as well? He's still ruining my life.'

‘I'm the last person likely to defend him, but I honestly don't think this is his fault. Not this one,' said Zoe. ‘Why didn't she wake you up to ask you about the ring? It's sort of her fault for jumping to the wrong conclusions.'

‘Yes, but she's a thirty-five-year-old single woman living in London; she's programmed to think men will be cheating.'

‘I suppose. I don't know, Dean, something about this doesn't add up,' mused Zoe.

‘There was one other thing.'

‘What?'

‘Last night, she told me she loved me.'

‘And what did you say?'

‘I pretended to be asleep.'

‘Oh, big brother, I am so proud of you.' Dean knew his sister was rolling her eyes in exasperation, as she often did when they talked about his romantic life.

‘It was all moving so fast.'

‘Not any more.'

‘I'm hurt that she could think so badly of me.'

‘Look at it from her point of view, Dean. A self-confessed commitment-phobe shags her senseless, ignores declaration of love and secretes a wedding ring.'

‘Put like that, it doesn't look good. What should I do?'

‘You know what to do. You have to find her. Explain you're not married, if that's what she thinks. You have to sort it out,' stated Zoe, applying her signature no-nonsense view of the world to this problem. It was this approach that allowed her to be a successful accountant, a faithful, loving wife and a devoted and reliable mother.

‘But if I fly across the Atlantic for her, aren't I sort of showing my hand? I mean, it's hard to come back from that position. I'm kind of all-in committing then, aren't I?'

‘I thought from everything you've just told me that you have committed to her.' Dean fell silent. Zoe sighed. It was a big sigh. It seemed to fill the thousands of miles that separated her noisy, cramped kitchen in Winchester, populated by her children's clothes, creative endeavours and noise, from his chic, neat but empty loft apartment in Chicago. ‘You just have to decide: do you love her or not?' Dean remained silent, although he was pretty sure his sister was hoping for a definitive answer. ‘You know, I hated the fact that you went to Eddie Taylor's bedside, but I thought it meant that you had learnt something.'

‘What was I supposed to learn?'

‘That you are capable of love, and that you deserve it too.'

T
he flight back to Britain from Chicago could not be more dissimilar to the outward-bound flight. Returning, I do not benefit from a lucky upgrade or, more poignantly, fascinating company, and there is no hint of misplaced hope or any sense of anticipation. Instead I am steeped in a solid feeling of utter devastation. How can it be possible that in the very weekend I finally understand what love is, and meet someone I believe might love me too, I also have the opportunity blasted right out of the sky? The unfairness and impossibility of the situation hits me with such a weight that I feel it physically; my lungs struggle to breathe. I'm crushed. I understand the true meaning of the flip expression. I'm trampled. Flattened. Compressed. Because I am certain I'm less without Dean. I'm smaller.

I do believe Dean was beginning to feel something for me. Something major and true. This is not another case of self-delusion, otherwise why would he have confided in me all the terrible details of his childhood and the loss of his mother? There was a flicker of a chance; more than that, there was hope for us. Not that any of it matters now. How he did feel, how he might have felt, is irrelevant, because the woman he hates most in the world – the woman who is indirectly but quite definitely responsible for his mother's death and all his childhood deprivation and devastation – is my own mother.

He would never be able to recover from that.

Walking away from Dean is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life. I feel I am paying for every single moment of my sunny childhood in this one terrible action. When I first realised that my mother was Eddie's lover, I tried to imagine a way we could get through this. I stood over Dean's bed and feasted my eyes on his beautiful body and wished, wished with every fibre of my being that things were different. That Eddie Taylor and my mother had never met. That Eddie hadn't decided to leave his wife. That Dean's mother wasn't an alcoholic. Any one of those things would have saved Dean from the terrible trauma of feeling eternally alone. And if none of that could be the case, then I simply wished that I'd never pieced it all together. Yes, I'm that shallow and selfish that I would have had Dean and my mother rub shoulders for an eternity, if only they could have done it in ignorance.

I briefly considered whether I could simply hide the fact from Dean. I'm certain my mother won't be in a hurry to tell everyone this latest gory twist to her grubby story, and my father, well, he's clearly very able to keep secrets. But I'm not. I could not betray Dean in that way. I respect him too much for that. He has been honest with me from the moment we met, and he expects truth in return. If I didn't reveal what I know, I can see what would happen. Inevitably, further along the line, when we were even closer, even more committed, there would be a moment of disclosure and he'd guess I'd known all along. I can't betray him in that way.

I considered waking him up and telling him who she is, who I am, but I didn't have the courage. I couldn't watch his vision of me disintegrate. Over these past few days I've seen real love shine out of his eyes. I know, the way I've never known before – even after spending four years with Martin – that this is
it
. This is what they all talk about. The elusive otherness. When someone makes you feel better and you make them feel better, when you trust one another and lust after one another. When the hairs on their arms are precious to you, fascinating to you, almost as fascinating as their stories and hopes and fears. I love Dean Taylor and he loves me. I was quite prepared to watch the exciting spikes of lust and new love settle into something more prosaic and comfortable in time, old love; I was looking forward to as much. But I could not watch the love in his eyes turn to loathing. He would despise me.

How could we sustain a future when every story I told him about my past would torture him? Every time I talked about picnics on tartan rugs, with bumble bees buzzing past my ear, he'd have to be thinking of the fly that settled on his dead mother's cold lips. If I talked about family days out visiting castles, energetically yomping up the hills in a playful competition to reach the ruins before my brother or sister, he'd have to be thinking about Zoe, who is so scared of the world that she wet her bed until she was a teen and still sleeps with the light on. And as for the stories about smudging my face against my mother's gingham apron, wiping off the jewel-coloured fruit stains, well, he'd be thinking about the day he chose to no longer clean up his own mother; the day they were first taken into care.

It's too uneven.

It's unforgivable. I can't be a constant reminder to him, not after he's worked so damned relentlessly and spectacularly to put it all behind him. I won't be the one who dredges it all up.

So I left the beautiful man sleeping. Accepting that this is true love after all. It turns out I was right all along. Oh yeah, they laughed at me, but I was right. With Dean I had the quickening pulse, the gorgeous butterflies and slackening in my body, and I had the steady stuff too: a sense of duty, loyalty, decency and friendship. The bit I wasn't aware of was the sacrifice. And so now I know and my chest has been ripped open.

As soon as I land, I call my sister and she tells me that Mum has given up on the spa; she was lonely among the pampered and preened even though she has often been comfortably counted among their number, so she is now staying at Lisa's.

‘On my couch?' I ask.

‘Actually it's my couch,' replies Lisa with a hint of exasperation. ‘But no, in fact we've given her one of the kids' beds. Charlie is sleeping in with us. Not that any of us are getting much sleep,' she adds wearily. ‘This whole business is so disruptive.'

‘Tell me about it,' I sigh.

‘How are you, anyway?'