It stopped her in her tracks, her heart rate accelerating into a gallop. She would have known that sound anywhere. She didn’t need to look through the spyhole to know what she would see: a square-jawed face, possibly getting a little jowly now, salt-and-pepper hair, expansive ever-smiling mouth and dark, soulful eyes pleading for forgiveness.
She froze, not daring to move, willing him to go away.
‘Fitch, I just saw the light go off. I know you’re there!’ he called after another few moments, making her jump again.
Oh God, Jasper. The neighbours. Jasper. She didn’t want him hearing any of this.
She took a step back, onto a cracked floorboard. It creaked. She froze. He couldn’t have heard that.
But an immediate soft sound against the door, a hand perhaps on the wood, told her otherwise. ‘I know you’re there, Fitch.’ His voice was low, quieter, closer. He was talking straight through the door to her. So close. ‘Please. Please just open the door.’
Her heart pounded as she continued staring at the door, feeling rooted to the spot, flooded with panic. With his voice came so many other sounds, so many memories. She put her hands over her ears but it was no good. She couldn’t block them – him – out. They lived inside her head.
‘I just want to talk to you.’
She scrunched her eyes shut, willing him to go away. Just turn around and leave. She had made her feelings perfectly clear. She ignored every letter, every card, every text. He knew she would never open the door, she never did.
‘Please, Fitch. You can’t keep ignoring me for ever.’
But she could. She had done it for six years and she would do it for six more. And then the six after that, and the six after that . . . She waited, forcing herself to breathe deeply and slowly. He would go. Eventually. He’d have to. The freezing temperatures would drive him away, if nothing else.
‘Fine, then. I’ll do it here.’ She heard his sigh through the thick wood. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
She didn’t care. She didn’t care. She didn’t care—
‘Gisele’s pregnant.’
Lee’s hands dropped down from her ears, her eyes wide. She felt the floor tilt beneath her feet as the words settled like rocks in her stomach. Gisele was pregnant. She was surprised – and she wasn’t. This day had been bound to come. They had been married three years now; she was young. It made sense she’d want to start a family, to have his child.
Did he really think she cared? Was that what had prompted him to come and stand on her doorstep in these temperatures? Did he think it somehow made him a better human being, now that he was going to be a father? Wasn’t it rather too late for that? She felt herself harden, wet clay to concrete, anger to action. She turned away and walked back up the hall, up the stairs, his voice receding at her back, her heart hammering in her chest.
‘Please, Fitch, just let me come in. Five minutes, that’s all I’m asking . . .’
She walked into the vast open-plan kitchen and living area, drenched in light and sound. She turned down the dimmers slightly. Jasper was on his hands and knees on the floor, playing with the remote-control car his godfather Noah had given him, ‘just because’, a few weeks earlier. Star Wars was playing on the TV in the background, thankfully throwing out enough galactic noise to drown out Cunningham’s mournful pleas.
‘Hungry?’ she asked, walking to the cupboard and hoping a dinner she’d forgotten to buy ingredients for would miraculously emerge before her. She was what she called a cupboard cook, using whatever happened to be on the shelf – nothing was ever planned, rarely was it successful, but somehow she and Jasper got by on her strange concoctions. Jasper’s favourite was her sausage noodle bake, which never tasted the same, no matter how often she cooked it.
‘Starving!’ Jasper proclaimed dramatically.
‘Okay, well . . .’ she said, staring into the fridge like it was a maths equation. There had to be an answer in there somewhere. It might be only just after five thirty, but it was supper time, and their lives ran according to the clock of Jasper’s stomach. ‘Spaghetti arrabbiata?’
‘We had pasta at lunch.’
‘Oh well, that’s a first-world problem, my darling,’ she shrugged, reaching for the diced pancetta. ‘There are worse things than having pasta twice in one day.’
She put on a pan of water, rummaging in the cupboards for a ready-made tomato sauce and hoping she wouldn’t have to water down some ketchup like last time. Whilst the pasta cooked, she lit a fire in the baroque marble fireplace, and when dinner was ready, they went straight into a spaghetti-sucking contest. Afterwards, they shared a bath and then flopped on the sofa for some telly-watching before bed and a story. It was their usual Thursday night routine, and identical to the Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday routines too. Nothing ever changed in their lives because there was no need for it to. That in itself was a luxury, she knew. There were no potential ambushes to outfox on the way home; no bombs tearing through the sky as they cycled to the shops. Life here was quiet, repetitive and predictable. It was safe. It was everything she had promised to give him.
‘I love you, Jazz.’
‘I love you, mama,’ he said, the duvet tucked all the way up under his chin.
She stroked his cheek, feeling its padded velvety softness against her own skin, which felt so rough by comparison; she had spent too many years scrabbling through rubble to ever have the soft hands of TV advert mothers. ‘Give me a kiss.’ He puckered up his rosy lips and she planted a kiss on them. Her hands clasped his face for a moment as she marvelled at the miracle of him. He was the image of his father. ‘Sleep tight, little man.’
‘You too, mama,’ he said, his eyes burning intensely, anxiously.
‘I will, darling. Don’t worry.’ She tapped the end of his nose with her index finger and winked.
She navigated her way expertly over the scattered Lego – her newly domestic equivalent of crossing a minefield – and closed the door softly behind her. She stood there for a few moments, hearing him shift position onto his side and say something quietly to Ducky, his beloved cloth toy, before walking down the hall to her own bedroom. The bed was still unmade from the usual rush this morning but she didn’t bother making it now. What was the point, when she’d only be getting back into it to sleep again in a short while anyway?
She stepped out of her bathrobe and pulled on a pair of black loose trousers and a black jumper with a deep V; there was no point in putting on underwear at this time of night either. Twisting her damp hair into a rough bun, she padded barefoot back down to the first floor that housed her enormous kitchen and lounge. If the space was extravagant, its furnishings were not. She had spent most of her savings on the construction work when she had first moved back – the timber piles supporting the house had rotted and needed to be replaced with concrete ones, which had also meant replacing the lower-ground-floor parquet; and converting the first floor into one giant room across the front section of the house had been fiddly, ergo expensive, as the builders had had to take extraordinary care not to damage the intricate rococo plasterwork that trailed on the panelled walls and ceilings.
With the bones of the house intact, she had kept everything else simple – white walls, black free-standing kitchen units made for her by a carpenter friend of a friend. Mila called it ‘classic’, but it wasn’t her style that was questioned, just the scarcity of it. She didn’t have enough furniture, apparently; friends kept telling her she needed to get more stuff, but it struck her as somewhat grotesque to have extra possessions purely for the purpose of filling a space. She had sufficient chairs for friends to sit on, a large enough table for them to eat and drink at, beds for her, Jasper and mythical guests who never came to stay, a couple of sofas, some bookcases . . . really, what more did they need? They had ‘enough’ and she had lived for too long in too many places in the world where enough counted as a feast.