‘I just think either you have sex and feel glad that you’re having all the sex –’
‘I wouldn’t feel guilty about having all the sex,’ said Fred.
‘Or you treat women like human beings and make sure you don’t have anything to feel guilty about. Or don’t even sleep with anyone, and treasure Mum’s memory until you’re actually ready to move on.’
His voice broke on treasure and his jaw tautened. We were used, by then, to the sudden stiffening of expressions, and an unspoken group courtesy meant that we each looked away until any potential tears subsided.
Marc’s voice was gentle. ‘Have you told your father how you feel, Jake?’
‘We don’t talk about Mum. He’s fine as long as, you know, we don’t actually mention her.’
‘That’s quite a burden for you to carry alone.’
‘Yeah. Well … That’s why I’m here, isn’t it?’
There was a short silence.
‘Have a biscuit, Jake darling,’ said Daphne, and we passed the tin back around the circle, vaguely reassured, in some way nobody could quite define, when Jake finally took one.
I kept thinking about Lily. I barely registered Sunil’s tale of weeping in the baked-goods section of the supermarket, and just about raised a sympathetic expression for Fred’s solitary marking of Jilly’s birthday with a bunch of foil balloons. For days now the whole episode with Lily had taken on the tenor of a dream, vivid and surreal.
How could Will have had a daughter?
‘You look happy.’
Jake’s father was leaning against his motorbike as I walked across the church hall’s car park.
I stopped in front of him. ‘It’s a grief-counselling session. I’m hardly going to come out tap-dancing.’
‘Fair point.’
‘It’s not what you think. I mean, it’s not me,’ I said. ‘It’s … to do with a teenager.’
He tipped his head backwards, spying Jake behind me. ‘Oh. Right. Well, you have my sympathies there. You look young to have a teenager, if you don’t mind me saying.’
‘Oh. No. Not mine! It’s … complicated.’
‘I’d love to give you advice. But I don’t have a clue.’ He stepped forward and enveloped Jake in a hug, which the boy tolerated glumly. ‘You all right, young man?’
‘Fine.’
‘Fine,’ Sam said, glancing sideways at me. ‘There you go. Universal response of all teenagers to everything. War, famine, lottery wins, global fame. It’s all fine.’
‘You didn’t need to pick me up. I’m going to Jools’s.’
‘You want a lift?’
‘She lives, like, there. In that block.’ Jake pointed. ‘I think I can manage that by myself.’
Sam’s expression remained even. ‘So, maybe text me next time? Save me coming here and waiting?’
Jake shrugged, and walked off, his rucksack slung over his shoulder. We watched him go in silence.
‘I’ll see you later, yes, Jake?’
Jake lifted a hand without looking back.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘So now I feel a tiny bit better.’
Sam gave the slightest shake of his head. He watched his son go, as if, even now, he couldn’t bear to just leave him. ‘Some days he feels it harder than others.’ And then he turned to me. ‘You want to grab a coffee or something, Louisa? Just so I don’t have to feel like the world’s biggest loser? It is Louisa, right?’
I thought of what Jake had said in that evening’s session. On Friday Dad brought home this psycho blonde called Mags who is obsessed with him. When he was in the shower she kept asking me if he talked about her when she wasn’t there.
The compulsive shagger. But he was nice enough, and he had helped put me back together in the ambulance, and the alternative was another night at home wondering what had been going on in Lily Houghton-Miller’s head. ‘If we can talk about anything but teenagers.’
‘Can we talk about your outfit?’
I looked down at my green Lurex skirt and my Irish dancing shoes. ‘Absolutely not.’
‘It was worth a try,’ he said, and climbed onto his motorbike.
We sat outside a near-empty bar a short distance from my flat. He drank black coffee, and I had fruit juice.
I had time to study him surreptitiously now that I wasn’t dodging cars in a car park or lying strapped to a hospital gurney. His nose held a tell-tale ridge, and his eyes crinkled in a way that suggested there was almost no human behaviour he hadn’t seen and, perhaps, been slightly amused by. He was tall and broad, his features coarser than Will’s somehow, yet he moved with a kind of gentle economy, as if he had absorbed the effort of not damaging things just from his size. He was evidently more comfortable with listening than talking, or perhaps it was just that it was unsettling to be on my own with a man after so much time because I found I was gabbling. I talked about my job at the bar, making him laugh about Richard Percival and the horrors of my outfit, and how strange it had been to live briefly at home again, and my father’s bad jokes, and Granddad and his doughnuts, and my nephew’s unorthodox use of a blue marker pen. But I was conscious as I spoke, as so often these days, of how much I didn’t say: about Will, about the surreal thing that had happened to me the previous evening, about me. With Will I had never had to consider what I said: talking to him was as effortless as breathing. Now I was good at not really saying anything about myself at all.
He just sat, and nodded, watched the traffic go by and sipped his coffee, as if it were perfectly normal for him to be passing the time with a feverishly chatting stranger in a green Lurex mini-skirt.
‘So, how’s the hip?’ he asked, when finally I ground to a halt.
‘Not bad. I’d quite like to stop limping, though.’
‘You’ll get there, if you keep up the physio.’ For a moment, I could hear that voice from the back of the ambulance. Calm, unfazed, reassuring. ‘The other injuries?’
I peered down at myself, as if I could see through what I was wearing. ‘Well, other than the fact that I look like someone’s drawn all over bits of me with a particularly vivid red pen, not bad.’
Sam nodded. ‘You were lucky. That was quite a fall.’
And there it was again. The sick lurch in my stomach. The air beneath my feet. You never know what will happen when you fall from a great height. ‘I wasn’t trying to –’