She still couldn’t shake the idea that he was planning some kind of showdown, and as the tension rose during the afternoon she found herself toying with the idea of faking some kind of illness. When the doorbell finally rang just after half past seven she ran down the landing, trying to get to the door first and tripped on the loose carpet, twisting her ankle.
By the time she reached the bottom of the stairs, George was standing in the hallway wiping his hands on his stripy apron, and David was handing him a bottle of wine and a bunch of flowers.
David noticed her hobbling a little. “Are you OK?” Instinctively he moved to comfort her, then caught himself and stepped back.
Jean put her hand on George’s arm and bent down to rub her ankle. It didn’t hurt a great deal, but she wanted to avoid David’s eye, and the fear that he might have given something away in that fraction of a second made her feel light-headed.
“Is it bad?” asked George. Thankfully he seemed to have noticed nothing.
“Not too bad,” said Jean.
“You should sit down and put your foot up,” said David. “To prevent it swelling.” He took the flowers and wine back so that George could help her.
“I’m still in the middle of cooking,” said George. “Why don’t I sit you two down with a glass of wine in the living room?”
“No,” said Jean, a little too firmly. She paused to calm herself. “We’ll come into the kitchen with you.”
George installed them at the table, pulled out a third chair for Jean’s ankle, which she didn’t really need, filled two wineglasses and returned to grating Parmesan.
It was always going to be a strange occasion, whoever their guest was. George didn’t like other people in his kennel. So she assumed the conversation would be stilted. Whenever she dragged him along to parties she would invariably find him standing disconsolately in a circle of men, as they talked about rugby and tax returns, wearing a pained expression on his face, as if he was suffering from a headache. She hoped, at least, that David would be able to fill any silences.
But to her surprise, it was George who did most of the talking. He seemed genuinely excited to have company. The two men congratulated themselves about the decline in Shepherds’ fortunes since their departure. They talked about trekking holidays in France. David talked about his gliding. George talked about his fear of flying. David suggested that learning to glide might cure the problem. George said that David clearly underestimated his fear of flying. David confessed to a snake phobia. George asked him to imagine an anaconda in his lap for a couple of hours. David laughed and said George had a point.
Jean’s fear ebbed away and was replaced by something odder but equally uncomfortable. It was ridiculous but she didn’t want them to be getting on this well. George was warmer and funnier than he was when they were alone together. And David seemed more ordinary.
Was this how they’d been at work? And if so, why had George not mentioned David once since leaving the company? She began to feel rather guilty for having painted David such a bleak picture of her home life.
By the time they decamped to the dining room George and David seemed to have more in common with one another than she had with either of them. It was like being back at school again. Watching your best friend striking up a relationship with another child and being left out in the cold.
She kept muscling into the conversation, trying to claw back some of that attention. But she kept getting it wrong. Sounding far too interested in Great Expectations when she’d only seen the TV series. Being too rude about George’s previous culinary disasters when the risotto was actually very good. It was tiring. And in the end it seemed easier to take a backseat, leave them to do the talking and give her opinion when asked.
Only at one point did George seem lost for words. David was talking about Martin Donnelly’s wife having to go into hospital for tests. She turned round and saw George sitting with his head between his knees. Her first thought was that he’d poisoned everyone with his cooking and was about to vomit. But he sat back, wincing and rubbing his leg, apologized for the interruption, then headed off to do a circuit of the kitchen to ease a muscle spasm.
By the end of the meal he’d drunk an entire bottle of red wine and turned into something of a comic.
“At the risk of boring Jean with an old story, a couple of weeks later we got our photos back. Except they weren’t our photos. They were photos of some young man and his girlfriend. In the altogether. Jamie suggested we write ‘Do you want an enlargement?’ on the back before we returned them.”
Over coffee David talked about Mina and the children, and as they stood on the steps watching him drive away on a little cloud of pink smoke, George said, “You wouldn’t ever leave me, would you?”
“Of course not,” said Jean.
She expected him to put an arm round her, at the very least. But he just clapped his hands together, said, “Right. Washing up,” and headed back inside as if this were simply the next part of the fun.
26
Katie had had a shitty week.
The festival programs arrived on Monday and Patsy, who still couldn’t spell program, shocked everyone by knowing a fact, that the photo of Terry Jones on page seven was actually a photo of Terry Gilliam. Aidan bawled Katie out because admitting he’d cocked up wasn’t one of the skills he’d learnt on his MBA. She resigned. He refused to accept her resignation. And Patsy cried because people were shouting.
Katie left early to pick up Jacob from nursery and Jackie said he’d bitten two other children. She took him to one side and gave him a lecture about being like the meanie crocodile in A Kiss Like This. But Jacob wasn’t doing recriminations that day. So she cut her losses and drove him home where she withheld his yogurt until they’d had a conversation about biting, which generated the same kind of frustration Dr. Benson probably felt when they were doing Kant at university.
“It was my tractor,” said Jacob.
“Actually it’s everyone’s tractor,” said Katie.
“I was playing with it.”
“And Ben shouldn’t have grabbed it from you. But that doesn’t give you the right to bite him.”
“I was playing with it.”
“If you’re playing with something and someone tries to grab it you have to shout and tell Jackie or Bella or Susie.”
“You said it’s wrong to shout.”
“It’s OK to shout if you’re really, really cross. But you’re not allowed to bite. Or to hit someone. Because you don’t want other people to bite you or hit you, do you?”
“Ben bites people,” said Jacob.
“But you don’t want to be like Ben.”
“Can I have my yogurt now?”
“Not until you understand that biting people is a bad thing to do.”
“I understand,” said Jacob.
“Saying you understand is not the same thing as understanding.”
“But he tried to grab my tractor.”
Ray came in at this point and made the technically correct suggestion that it was unhelpful to hug Jacob while she was telling him off, and she was able to demonstrate immediately a situation where you were allowed to shout at someone if you were really, really cross.
Ray remained infuriatingly calm until Jacob told him not to make Mummy angry because “You’re not my real Daddy,” at which point he walked into the kitchen and snapped the breadboard into two pieces.
Jacob fixed her with a thirty-five-year-old stare and said, tartly, “I’m going to eat my yogurt now,” then went off to consume it in front of Thomas the Tank Engine.
The following morning she canceled her dentist’s appointment and spent her day off taking Jacob into the office where he acted like a demented chimp while she and Patsy inserted five thousand erratum slips. By lunchtime he’d taken the chain off Aidan’s bike, emptied a card index file and spilled hot chocolate into his shoes.