The Great Allotment Proposal (9 page)

The only issue had been the heat. Guests unable to stand the glare had huddled under the umbrellas as they sipped their cocktails. Emily had drunk water all evening and for the first time ever she had slipped away mid-afterparty. Uninterested in dancing till the early hours. Uninterested in fielding anymore questions or dodging any more bullish cameramen. Craving her time alone in her house. Time when the builders and painters had gone and it was just her.

She went to the kitchen to get some water and then, gathering up all the layers of tulle in her skirt so it didn’t catch on the stairs, she wound her way up to the very top floor.

After moving in she’d done a complete tour of the house and found, to her relief, that the attic hadn’t been touched.

The wallpaper was just as it was when she’d left. Huge cabbage roses, pink on cream, tatty and torn in the corners. The floorboards were bare and paint-splattered. There were no curtains, just a view from the small windows out across to the river. She could see the yellow lawn, the lime trees and the very tip of Jack’s boat. She had asked Winston to help her haul a mattress up there and he’d been very confused as to why she’d want to sleep up in the tiniest room in the house.

‘Because this is what it should all be like,’ she’d said.

‘Bloody barmy,’ he’d replied and gone back to his painting.

Putting her water down on the stack-of-books bedside table, Emily lay down on the white Provençal quilt her mum had given her and stared up at the stars through the skylight. Exactly as she had done when she was younger. Escaping up here when it rained to listen to the sound peppering the glass. She felt completely safe, cocooned.

The only reminder of the evening earlier were the sequins on her silver tank top itching her skin where they pressed into the bedding and the pins in her hair jabbing into the back of her head, but she didn’t care. She was home. And if they wanted to say that this was a bubble. A fantasy. Then she didn’t care because it felt like the house itself was tethering her there. Wrapping itself around her and protecting her. She’d been flitting and drifting for so long that lying there on that bed felt like the greatest luxury of the evening so far.

When the doorbell rang, she didn’t move.

Her eyes rolled from one side to the other as she thought about whether to stand up or not.

It was half midnight.

Slowly she got up and went down to the first floor. From the main bedroom she could peer out the window and see who was standing on the front steps. The journey down from the attic had provided her with enough time to start panicking that it might be a murderer, so she kept the lights off and tiptoed to the window.

The floodlights were beaming wide across the garden when she looked down.

Below her Jack took two steps back so he was standing on the drive, tilted his head up and held his hand up in a wave.

When she opened the front door, Jack was standing with his back to her, his hands in the pockets of faded blue jeans. Emily was still wearing her huge sticky-out evening skirt and sequinned tank.

‘Wow. You look amazing,’ he said when he turned around.

‘Thanks,’ she said, frowning slightly. ‘What are you doing here? I don’t mind but it’s midnight.’

‘I know. Sorry, I just – I was just waiting for you to come back.’

‘Do you want to come in?’ she asked, standing to the side to let him pass.

‘Do you mind?’ he said, hovering where he was.

‘I wouldn’t have asked if I’d minded.’

‘Yeah but you don’t want to go to bed?’

‘With you?’

‘Ha-ha.’

‘I don’t want to go to bed,’ she smirked. ‘Come in. But I have to get changed.’

Jack waited for her in the kitchen. She showed him where the wine was and the glasses and darted upstairs to change out of her party clothes.

When she came back into the kitchen he glanced up from where he was opening a bottle of wine and stilled.

‘What?’ she asked, looking down at herself to see what was wrong. Her leggings looked OK, her grey marl T-shirt looked OK, her bare feet looked OK, if a little sore from her shoes.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You just look like…’ He paused.

‘Like what?’ she asked, confused.

‘I don’t know. Like you. Or like you used to – I don’t know,’ he said, muddled, then shrugged and went back to opening the wine.

Emily quite enjoyed seeing this tongue-tied version of Jack and, leaning against the half-deconstructed worktop, said, ‘Don’t I always look like me?’

‘Yeah but this is kind of like the you that I remember. Not that you didn’t look good when you opened the door. It was just a shock that’s all. Like suddenly being eighteen again. Oh god. I don’t know what I’m talking about,’ he added with a laugh and Emily sniggered.

‘They’ve ruined your house, haven’t they?’ he said after he poured the wine into two glasses.

‘Tell me about it,’ Emily sighed.

‘You need a new staircase.’

‘I know! That’s what I wanted you to build but instead you’re off doing, what was it you were doing?’ she asked, walking to the huge kitchen window and pulling it open so they could sit outside away from the garish building-site kitchen.

Jack followed her out to where she sat crossed-legged on the edge of the pool, the mosaic tiles glistening in the light from the kitchen. ‘I was building a giant Owl and the Pussycat boat.’

‘Why?’

He shrugged. ‘It was for a festival in Hyde Park. They wanted a giant floating dance floor on the Serpentine so we made them one. That’s what we do. That kind of thing.’

Emily bent her knees up and wrapped her arms round them. ‘Sounds amazing.’

He nodded. ‘Yeah.’

She took a sip of wine. The pool filter hummed. Even though the sun had set, it was still sticky and humid.

‘So go on,’ she said into the silence. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘I wanted to apologise for earlier. You were made to feel awkward and I didn’t want that.’

‘Oh god no, it’s fine. I shouldn’t have said anything. I didn’t know that you two had been married. I swear I wouldn’t have even brought it up otherwise.’

He nodded. ‘It was a long time ago. And, well, basically I wanted to explain myself rather than you hearing from other people. But…’ He glanced towards the water. ‘I don’t think I can just sit here and talk about it. It’s too much like Oprah.’

Emily snorted a laugh. ‘You wanna walk around the house, have a look at what they’ve done?’

Jack smiled. ‘Yeah, that would be good.’

‘Come on then.’ She jumped up and started to jog up the steps to the kitchen door. ‘Coming?’ she said, turning to where Jack was standing watching her.

He nodded. Then, when he walked inside and she pulled the door shut, he said, ‘I’m glad you’re back, you know. I like you. I’ve always really liked you, you know?’

Emily bit her lip and smiled. ‘I didn’t, but that’s good to know.’

‘Why didn’t you?’ he asked as they navigated their way through the kitchen rubble to the hallway.

‘Well because last I heard from you was some horrid letter saying that I did what you expected.’

Jack frowned. ‘You did do something I thought you would. Why is that horrid? It was nice. It was accepting it. I knew you wouldn’t wait. You needed much more than just me in the bloody Spanish desert. And you were seventeen. Why would you wait?’

She paused. ‘Because we really liked each other.’

‘Yeah, but imagine if we’d stayed together then? We wouldn’t be together now. Christ, I had to live in Spain for seven years to get my act together enough to do an engineering degree and tell my dad to sod off. And you…’ He paused for a moment as she led him into what had been the yellow room to look at the luminous pineapples. ‘Jesus, look at them!’ He walked over and ran his hand over the wallpaper and then winced at the fake video screen fire. ‘This is awful.’

Emily nodded, waiting for him to carry on with what he was saying but instead he went through the next door to peer into the stark white bathroom with the revolving colour lights.

‘What were you going to say?’ Emily asked in the end, unable to wait, as she leant against the doorframe. ‘About me?’

‘When?’

‘Just now.’

‘Oh I don’t know. Oh yeah. That, well, you were always going to be something amazing. You didn’t need Giles Fox for that. You could just see it in you.’

‘You think?’ She looked unsure.

He laughed. ‘Em, you kind of shine. There’s no other way I can describe it. You certainly wouldn’t have been happy living off-grid with me.’ He ran his hand through his hair and looked suddenly a bit embarrassed at what he’d said.

Emily was still focused on the fact he’d said she shone.

‘Shall we go upstairs?’ Jack said and as the possible connotations of the question kicked in, he shook his head with a smile and added, ‘Not like that – just to see – oh for god’s sake, let’s just carry on the tour.’

Emily walked ahead of him, pointing out the horrible staircase and the big ugly sauna in the spare bedroom as if on autopilot. Not only had he said that she shone. He’d said she could have done it with or without Giles. She’d always thought that Giles had been integral to her success. Integral to building her adult character. But perhaps she had built it on her own? Maybe she’d built it in spite of him? He’d said she was crazy when she’d quit show business. He’d said she was just panicking about the auditions drying up when she’d said she preferred being behind camera, that she wanted to go back to make-up, that that was where her instinct lay. He’d told her to sack her agent and to get another one, they weren’t pushing her hard enough. And when she had quit completely, he’d told her that the competition was too fierce to launch a cosmetics brand. He’d told her that she didn’t have the expertise or the staying power. Anything that took her outside the box marked Emily in his head he swept aside with a huge, Giles-esque sigh.

‘This is the master bedroom. It’s the worst room in the house I think. That picture there, it swivels round and becomes a TV and look underneath the dust sheets.’ Emily pointed to floor and Jack bent down to have a look.

‘Oh my god,’ he said as he revealed the red leopard-print carpet. Then he stood up and looked around as if he was trying to find something. ‘Is this not your room?’

‘No.’ Emily shook her head. ‘I’m upstairs.’

‘In the attic?’

She nodded. ‘Wanna see?’

‘OK.’

They left the master bedroom and headed down the corridor to the little door up to the attic. As Emily turned the handle, she said, ‘So go on then, what happened with your wife?’

Jack breathed out in a sigh before he replied. ‘I think basically what I said would have happened to you if we’d stayed together. It was the wrong time of my life to get married. We met in Spain, she came with me to Australia where I finally did my degree. Which annoyingly proved my dad right – the maths was a killer and I wouldn’t have stuck at it at eighteen. A frustrating thing to admit, but…’

‘He went about it the wrong way,’ Emily said as they got to the top of the stairs and she pushed open the door to her room.

‘Yeah. He did,’ Jack said, and then paused on the threshold. ‘It’s exactly the same.’

‘I know. Isn’t it brilliant?’ Emily threw herself down on the mattress. ‘You can still see the stars. Look!’

Jack lay down next to her and looked up through the skylight. ‘You can still see the stars,’ he said, rolling his head to look at her profile as she stared upwards.

‘And after Australia?’ she asked, turning her head so her eyes could meet his.

‘After Australia we came back here, married. I did my thing. Built the boat. Built other boats. Built some really good commissions. Basically did what I liked. Ed had trained as an architect and we did some stuff together. I think, in retrospect, I was so goddamn afraid of turning out like my dad that I did whatever I could to be different from him and that meant not sticking to anything, or not anything in any way conventionally. I didn’t want to live like him. I would have done anything not to live like him. And unfortunately that actually meant I ended up treating Josephine exactly the same as Dad treated my mum. I completely ignored her.’ He turned his head so he was looking back up out the skylight before saying, ‘And suffice it to say, she left.’

Emily could feel that the back of her hand was right next to his. The temptation to reach out a little finger and touch his was almost overwhelming. But she kept her hand exactly where it was.

‘Did she and Ed have an affair?’ she asked.

‘No. No way. He was just the really good one who looked after her post-breakup. He took care of her. Listened to her. Did everything basically that I didn’t. And they totally deserve to be together. They’re a good match. Both really kind…’

‘You’re kind,’ Emily said.

‘I’m not kind, Em. Or at least I wasn’t kind, then. I was really bloody selfish.’ He leant up on his elbows and said, ‘But I suppose her leaving was a wake-up call to sort my life out. That’s why I left again. To give them some space and to go and do something useful. Went back to Spain. Went to Peru. Hey, is that my T-shirt?’ He pointed over to where Emily’s pyjamas were folded on a chair against the wall.

‘Is it?’ Emily asked casually, sitting up and looking over at the black Nirvana T-shirt that she slept in, knowing full well that it was Jack’s.

He looked back at her. ‘You sleep in my T-shirt. Well I never.’

‘Don’t read too much into it. I had no idea it was yours,’ she said with a shrug of her shoulder.

Jack laughed. ‘For such a good actress, one thing about you, Em. You’ve always been the worst liar.’

Emily turned away so he wouldn’t see her blush then stood up and walked over to the door, ‘Come on, we should go back downstairs. It’s hot up here.’

Jack stood up and followed her out, a self-satisfied expression still playing on his face.

As they walked down the stairs, Emily paused and said, ‘You need to talk to them. You need to tell them that.’

‘What?’

‘That they deserve to be together.’

Jack shook his head. ‘Nah. They know it.’

‘Of course they don’t know it. If they knew it, me asking earlier would have had you all cracking some joke about it. It’s in the air, Jack, and it doesn’t need to be. Not if you’re truly OK about it.’