‘You don’t have to say it,’ Jo interrupts. She doesn’t want the pity. ‘It won’t make any difference, but thanks for your concern.’ She smiles.
Beth raises her eyebrows as she nibbles at the sandwich, staring at Jo. ‘I was just going to say that I really admire your flair for making something amazing on a budget,’ she continues, unfazed.
‘Oh.’ Jo shrugs and swallows, even though there’s nothing but the taste of guilt in her mouth. ‘Thank you.’
‘Where did you train?’
‘London,’ Jo says. ‘It’s where Margot and I met. After our course, we moved up to the Midlands and started Sew Perfect.’
‘That’s cool,’ Beth says, chewing. She stretches out in the sun – her legs clad in cream flares, feet in scuffed brown ankle boots. ‘Respect to you both.’
Jo unwraps her bagel, taking a bite. Eating, she has decided, is easier than talking.
‘And look, I know I haven’t known you that long, Jo, but Margot told me about… about you know, and I just wanted to say—’
‘You don’t have to say anything, Beth,’ Jo says with her mouth full, knowing it was coming. She holds up her hand in a stop sign, smiling. ‘Really.’
She’s just being nice, Jo. Give the girl a break. It’s hardly her fault your husband didn’t come home from work. And not her fault it’s almost a year since the first prickles of concern that afternoon had swollen into a full-blown fever by the next morning. When are you going to accept that he’s not coming back, that he didn’t want you? Jo shakes her head, trying to silence the voice.
‘So, remind me again where you worked before you joined us?’ Jo asks, quite used to changing the subject. It was Margot who interviewed Beth a couple of months ago, saying she was just what they needed to move their little business forward.
‘I was at college,’ Beth says. ‘And before that, I was a teaching assistant.’
Teaching, Jo thinks, feeling the pang in her heart. Will was a teacher, she wants to say but doesn’t. Somehow, everything always comes back to Will. A teacher and an actor. When he wasn’t ‘resting’, she thinks with a smile. How he hated people saying that. Will never rested. He had one of those minds that never stopped, audible even when he was sleeping.
‘Ah yes, that’s right,’ Jo replies, recalling what Margot had told her about their new employee. ‘Local, wasn’t it?’ Jo asks, thinking the bagel actually tastes good.
‘Just south of here,’ Beth goes on. ‘At a little village school. My daughter is a pupil there and it was easy for childcare, you know, to be able to work school hours. Hardly my dream job, but when she was old enough to do after-school clubs, I did a dressmaking course at college, and here I am. Working my way up stitch by stitch. Oh, and now that her dad’s not being an idiot, he helps out more with childcare.’ Beth accidentally spills some Marie Rose sauce on her pale jeans. She wipes it but makes it worse.
‘I’ve got some Vanish back at the workshop,’ Jo says with a wink. ‘It removes everything.’ Even blood, she thinks, just as her phone rings again, making her jump as she answers it.
‘You’re coming,’ Louise says. ‘Seven o’clock at mine, or else.’ And she hangs up. Disappearing as if she was never there.
Two
‘You know what you need?’
Jo stands there, her hand outstretched to Louise, the fabric of her vintage velvet kimono quivering in time with her shaking arm. Little flutters of pale pink and black. Me and Will, she’d thought when she’d seen it at the flea market a couple of years ago. She’d had to buy it and Will loved her in it, especially with skinny jeans, her high boots. He couldn’t keep his hands off her.
‘Earth to Jo…’
‘Sorry,’ Jo says, taking the glass of wine.
‘Fucking hell. Drink up. Stay over. Bed’s made up.’ Louise clatters the bottle back into the fridge.
‘I—’
‘What you need is a holiday. And random sex while on holiday.’ She stands squarely in front of Jo, hands on her lower back, the way pregnant women do. Behind her, Jo sees Archie stirring something at the stove, hunched over the pan, meticulously adding a measure of this, a pinch of that as if he’s performing an operation. The extractor hood hums noisily. Jo’s eyes flick to him for help, but he’s not looking. Likely not even listening.
So Jo sips her drink, silently squaring up to Louise with the briefest of smiles, knowing that she won’t hear her when she says that no, she doesn’t want a holiday without Will and she certainly doesn’t want sex with a stranger. No holiday is right for her without Will. What she needs is a holiday from her thoughts. What she needs is her husband back.
‘Can’t afford one,’ Jo says, perching on a bar stool. Managing alone is tough, but her nose is still just above the waterline, though none of the work they’d started on the house is completed, and the car still needs new tyres. And the bodywork needs sorting, she thinks, a chill running through her. Despite her best efforts, the balance on the credit card she’s had to take out gets worse each month.
In contrast, Louise and Archie’s trendy warehouse apartment is all aluminium and rusty iron girders. High ceilings with exposed pipework and doors with trendy, waxed paintwork add to the designer look. Original parquet floors are littered with huge patterned rugs, and expanses of wall are painted in the darkest grey with empty, chunky white frames hanging in clusters, almost as if she and Archie have no history to display in them, no fond memories to share. Just the grey showing through.
Will and I have history to display, Jo thinks. Oh, how much history we have! We could fill those frames with laughter and memories…
Louise is particular about her apartment, doesn’t put just anything on show. ‘Statement pieces only,’ she once said. ‘My interior designer said the space can take maximum impact so we shouldn’t clutter it with, well, clutter.’
The apartment (‘flat’ seems inappropriate, Jo has always thought) cost them a fortune but Louise had said it was ‘future-proofing’, explaining, with a hand on her belly, that they could be there for many years without the need to move.
‘Space for several kids and top schools close by,’ she’d said, as if she’d had the foresight to map out her future with only good things in it, whereas Jo had not. ‘Plenty of room for when Speck is born,’ she’d said after finding out she was pregnant. Her bump was hardly a speck any more, but the name had stuck. Unlike her and Will, when the time had come Louise and Archie had had no trouble conceiving.
Though Jo, as she glances through the full-height Crittall glass walls making up one side of the kitchen, can’t imagine a child frolicking in the courtyard garden. Can’t even imagine a baby in a pram out there, let alone felt-pen walls or ice-cream sofas.
‘Garden’s looking good,’ she says, wanting to divert from the subject of holidays. Though it’s more Amazonian jungle than kid-safe haven, Jo thinks. And no room to kick a ball. It’s all philodendron and firepit. Painted wrought iron and Aperol spritz. Jo imagines a snake winding its way down the glass, its tongue flicking in and out.