‘No idea,’ Cate says. ‘Maybe it was written on something in his office. I don’t know.’
‘Hm.’ Georgia raises her brow dramatically and puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Well, have a nice Valentine’s night at the pub then,’ she says facetiously. She takes her empty plate to the sink, letting it fall loudly as she always does. ‘Anything good for pudding?’
Cate passes her the box of chocolate-covered honeycomb, then turns to face the kitchen window where she sees her face reflected back at her, the face of an older woman who looks just like her, a woman whose life, she feels very strongly, is heading down a dark, twisty path to somewhere she doesn’t want to be.
Her fingers find the handle of the kitchen drawer, the one where Roan’s mystery card is hidden. She pulls the drawer open, then shuts it again, very firmly, and leaves the room.
Roan doesn’t get back until well after eight o’clock. Cate calls him three times between eight oh five and eight fifteen but he doesn’t answer his phone. When he finally appears in the hallway at eight twenty, sweaty, almost gaunt-looking, he goes straight to the bedroom to shower in the en suite.
‘I’ll be five minutes,’ he shouts to her down the corridor.
Cate sighs and picks up her phone, passes a few moments mindlessly scrolling through Facebook. The card is still in the drawer. She still has not looked at it.
At eight forty, Roan is finally ready and waiting to go.
They say goodbye to the children who are both in their rooms doing homework, or at least doing something on their laptops that they claim is homework.
The air is damp and cloying as they head up the hill into the village and Cate feels her skin grow clammy. She thinks of reaching out to hold Roan’s hand, but she can’t bring herself to do it. These days, holding hands, like cuddling in bed or instigating sex or kissing on the lips, feels like an expression of approval, like stars on a reward chart, actions that need to have been deserved or earned in some way. To hold Roan’s hand now would be to suggest that they were still the same people they’d been twenty-five, thirty years ago, that she still feels the way she felt about him then, about them, but she can’t negate everything that has happened since then. She can’t pretend that none of it ever happened.
‘So,’ she says, ‘long run today?’
‘Yeah, well, I had a big lunch. I was making sure I had an appetite for dinner.’
‘Oh, what did you have for lunch?’
‘Big bowl of pasta, with some kind of creamy sauce. I hadn’t been expecting the creamy sauce but ate the whole lot anyway.’
‘At your desk?’
‘No, no, I went into town.’
His tone is light. There is no sign that there was anything untoward about his lunch in town, but her voice still comes out wrong, slightly high-pitched. ‘Oh, what was that for then?’
‘Just met up with Gerry. You know. From UCL? He wants me to run a first-year module for him next year in childhood psychoses. Three hours a week. A hundred an hour.’
‘Oh,’ she says, the strange darkness starting to lift slightly. ‘That’s amazing! Are you going to do it?’
‘Too right I am! Extra £1200 a month. That’ll pay for a decent holiday or two. A couple of new sofas when we move home. Plus I really like Gerry. And I got free pasta. So yeah. A no-brainer, really.’
He glances down at her and he smiles and it’s a great, great smile, free of any editing or hidden agenda. He had a good lunch with a good person and now has a good job that will provide them with a good holiday and some good sofas. She cannot help but return the smile in the same spirit.
‘That’s brilliant,’ she says. ‘Really brilliant.’
She wants to ask why he didn’t mention the lunch when they were talking this morning. She would tell him if she was meeting someone for lunch to talk about a job. But she bats the complaint away and holds on to the good feeling.
They reach the top of the hill and Hampstead village opens up to them like a dream or a film set as it always does. They find a pub down a cobbled alleyway with fires burning in the grates and dogs stretched out on gnarled old floorboards and although they’d said it would be an anti-Valentine night, Roan comes back from the bar with a bottle of champagne and two chilled glasses and they toast his new job, and their faces fall in and out of shadow in the light of a dancing flame, and Roan’s hand finds hers on the seat between them and he takes it in his and it feels nice, and for quite some time Cate forgets about the card in the drawer at home.
10
SAFFYRE
I was twelve and a half the first time I met Roan Fours.
I’d been cutting myself for more than two years by this stage.
I’d just started year eight and boys were becoming a problem.
All the attention, the look in their eyes, the idea of the things they were thinking, of the things they were saying about me to each other – I’d spent most of my childhood hanging out with boys so I knew what happened behind the scenes – was starting to make me feel tired, used, worn-down. I quite liked the idea of therapy, of being in a quiet room with a quiet man talking quietly about myself for an hour or so.
I’d been picturing a wild-haired guy in glasses, maybe a tweedy jacket, even a monocle. I had not been expecting a cool guy with eyes too blue and cheekbones too sharp and long, spidery legs in black denim that he crossed and uncrossed and crossed and uncrossed until you were almost dizzy with it. And hands that moved like some weird pale exotic birds whenever he wanted to describe something. And peng trainers. You know, really good ones, for an old guy. And a smell, of clean clothes, my favourite smell, but also of trees and grass and clouds and sunshine.
I didn’t clock all of this the first time I met him, obviously. When I first met him I was still a child and just thought he was kind of cool-looking, in a Dr Who kind of way.
He looked at a notebook for quite some time before he looked at me.
‘Saffyre,’ he said. ‘That is a tremendously brilliant name.’
I said, ‘Yeah. Thanks. My mum chose it.’
It’s totally a name a nineteen-year-old mum would choose for a baby, isn’t it?
Then he said, ‘So, Saffyre, tell me about yourself.’
‘Like what?’ Everyone knows you shouldn’t ask kids open questions. They suck at answering them.
‘Like, tell me about school. How are you getting on?’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m getting on good.’
Here we go, I thought, some bloke ticking boxes, filling in forms, going home to watch Game of Thrones and eat quinoa or whatever with his wife. I thought: This is not going to work.
And then he said, ‘Tell me, Saffyre, what’s the worst, worst thing that ever happened to you?’
And then I knew we were going to get somewhere. I didn’t know where yet, I just knew that I was at a point in my life when I needed someone to ask me what the worst thing that ever happened to me was, rather than ask me if their eyebrows were on fleek or if I wanted chicken or fish for dinner.
I didn’t answer him immediately. My head flooded. The obvious thing came first. The thing that happened when I was ten. But I didn’t want to tell him that. Not yet. He waited, a good minute or so, for me to answer. Then I said, ‘All of it.’