A Most Desirable Marriage Read online

  ‘OK. By “not much progress”, what do you mean exactly?’

  Jo let out a short laugh. ‘About fifteen thousand words.’ she lied fluently, knowing she should care more, both about the lying and about the fact that she’d actually written barely fifteen hundred. But she found it didn’t seem important. Maggie was silent for a moment.

  ‘Are you stuck? Or just unsettled . . . what with all that’s been going on for you.’

  ‘Sort of both. But it’s still three months till the deadline.’

  ‘Six weeks. End of the year.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Jo . . . are you OK? Should I be worried?’

  ‘Frances won’t get to it till the end of January though, will she? She never reads them immediately.’

  ‘But it’s still important you deliver on time. We don’t want to risk her cancelling it because you’ve missed the publication slot.’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Do you need more time?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so. It’s only fifty thousand words. I can do that in six weeks, I have before.’

  ‘Right.’ Her agent was trying to sound relieved. ‘Well, let me know how it’s going, will you?’

  ‘I will. Promise.’ Jo took a deep breath. ‘I’ll get something to you by Christmas, so you can look through it before we send it off.’

  After the call was ended, Jo just sat there at the kitchen table, her stomach churning. She had no idea what she was going to write. The existing story outline was somehow foreign to her now, the whole thing about bisexuality, about Lawrence really, seemed like a nasty taste in her mouth. How was she to invent a sympathetic character around a subject she just wanted to forget? But write it she must. I’ll start tomorrow, she thought, and slowly made her way upstairs and lay down under the duvet, pulling the covers snug round her head.

  *

  When Jo finally sat herself down in front of the computer and read what she’d written, she found the words, few as they were, sounded flat, rote and uninspired. No Young Adult is going to read any further than page one, Jo thought, and deleted the whole lot. She had been true to her word and this Tuesday morning she had forced herself out of bed earlier than usual, stripped the bed, tidied the room, cleaned up in the kitchen, made herself a cup of coffee and retreated to her study and the document that should have been a nearly finished draft of her next book.

  Even her young hero’s name was wrong: Jake. Won’t do, she thought, searching around for the right one, something sensitive without being feminine, strong, definitely not trendy – a likeable name, but class-neutral. She flicked through one of the boys’ names sites on Google. The name had to be up to date, no Martins or Mikes or Daves. And it struck her, as she plumbed the Zacs, Oscars and Lukes, that it was pretty insane, a woman of her age thinking she could get inside the head of a modern-day teenage boy. But she’d done it in the recent past, and successfully too. Bobby, she thought. A good name. Then the appealing face of the boy who had killed himself flashed across her mind and she dismissed it quickly. Robbie, maybe?

  The cursor winked at her: in out, in out. The page read: ‘Chapter 1’ in an authoritative way. Nothing. And then she suddenly found herself crying, as if the document had somehow upset her with its blankness. The tears were followed by panic, a sense of unreality, as if her body were collapsing, falling inwards as she sat there in her ergonomic chair. Like a person who has died and not been found for weeks.

  And who would find her if she had? None of the men in her life, that’s for sure. Her father dead, Lawrence defected, Nicky insulted beyond comprehension – an open wound that she tried not to think about – Travis far away and gone across the sea. Only Cassie and Donna remained to care, and Cassie was busy rebuilding her own life among the pigs and bolting lettuces. For a while Jo didn’t move, the dark screen the only witness to her distress. It was a while before the tears gradually began to falter, then stop, as if she had come to the bottom of a deep reservoir, simply run out of tears. Everything went very still, her mind empty, almost peaceful. Just me. The words floated across her brain, testing her. Just me. And the more she heard them, the less they seemed to frighten her. Just me . . .

  She had no idea how long she sat there, almost in a trance. But eventually, the breath began to fill her lungs again, her spine straightened. And she found her fingers reaching out for the keyboard, almost with a will of their own. They hovered above the letters, pausing for a moment as if waiting for the off at the beginning of a race, then began moving fast and sure. Letters, words, sentences which became paragraphs began to appear on the previously blank document, her hands apparently channelling words that she herself was unable to hear.

  Out came thoughts and feelings she’d skimmed over for a lifetime, things she barely understood: about her mad mother and her cold, unloving father; about the leering men hanging about the house; about Bobby; about her father’s sudden absence and a lost teenage looking after her selfishly distraught mother. About Lawrence and his inability to hear her, to take her seriously much of the time. And her denial that he had. About her loss . . . of them all.

  But these seemed to be words formed as her fourteen-year-old self. As if her development had not moved beyond that time when she was faced so starkly with the cruel reality of life. The text, which rapidly filled up the pages, sounded youthful, frightened, lost. She was writing from a place beyond her rational mind, ostensibly about her own pain, but the character – who had morphed from a boy called Jake to a girl called Tess without any conscious thought on her part – took on a life of her own, two lives in fact. One was the good, functioning teenager who looked after her younger siblings and her alcoholic mother. The other, angry and wild, who ran rampant with a gang of town boys getting up to all kinds of trouble related to sex, drugs and crime.

  And as Jo wrote, the two versions of Tess, at first so separate, gradually began to come together into one more functioning whole under the almost mystical auspices of her online mentor – a woman or a man, Tess never quite knows which – to whom she talks daily and who is her support and only reliable friend.

  Three days later, the word count now way beyond the fifteen thousand she’d pretended to Maggie she’d already reached, the outline firmly in place, she realized she had a book. Not the book she’d been commissioned to write, admittedly, but she pushed on nonetheless, knowing now that she couldn’t stop. If it didn’t work and Frances didn’t like it, she would just have to risk the consequences.

  She was sitting having a cup of tea at the kitchen table when her phone rang. She heard Travis’s voice with a sudden lurch of her heart. ‘Hi, it’s me.’

  ‘Hi, you.’

  ‘Thought I’d call and see how you’re doing.’

  Jo laughed. ‘I’m OK. Well . . . if I’m honest, a bit bloody manic.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘I’ve been on a loony writing jag. How’s it going your end?’

  ‘Yeah, pretty good. Met the director and the producers. Think it’s going to be OK, but I don’t start shooting for another ten days and I’m just hanging about right now.’

  ‘Miss you . . .’ Jo said into the silence.

  ‘God, me too.’ She heard him sigh. ‘Sure made me laugh, though, the way we said goodbye. It was like we were distant friends who’d bumped into each other on the station. Bye, see you around, must hook up, kinda thing.’

  She laughed. ‘We were so keen to pretend we didn’t mind!’

  ‘As if.’

  ‘That’s why I’ve been so focused. “Doing” stops “thinking”.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘Not really. Well, sort of. For short periods anyway. But it’s not all bad, thinking about you . . . in fact it’s positively pleasurable if you take away the fact that you’ve gone . . . completely gone . . . just upped-sticks and deserted me.’ Jo adopted a melodramatic tone, keeping the truth in her words from becoming too real for either of them.

  ‘Yeah, the leaving bit’s a bum
mer.’

  They both began to laugh, not because it was at all funny, just enjoying the contact, the sound of each other’s voices.

  ‘It’s been good talking,’ Travis said later, at the end of their long conversation.

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Take care of yourself.’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘Bye now.’

  As Jo put her phone down she had a feeling they wouldn’t talk soon, or perhaps ever. It was over. Like a mirage in the desert he had come into her life without warning, gone just as suddenly – shimmering, tempting, hardly real. She quickly put her mug in the sink, ran some water into it and hurried upstairs to bury any yearnings for Travis in another page full of text.

  *

  ‘Go away, Lawrence.’

  There was a baffled silence on the other end of the phone. ‘What did you say?’ her husband asked.

  ‘I said go away. I can’t be bothered listening to another bloody whinge about the house right now. Just leave me alone.’

  And she put the phone down and got on with her writing, barely giving him another thought. She was pinned to the computer from morning till night, and now, nearly three weeks after Travis had gone, she was nearing the last five thousand words of the book. It was virtually writing itself. It was only in her tea break that she finally got around to reading Lawrence’s texts – three separate ones sent over a period of a couple of hours that morning.

  First text: ‘Are you OK, Jo? I really need to talk to you. L.’

  Second text: ‘It’s not about the house.’

  Third text: ‘It’s v. important. Pls ring. L.’

  God, she thought. What does the man want this time? What can be so important if it’s not the house or money? She hadn’t even asked him for any money, not since she’d borrowed a small amount from Donna a month ago. She wasn’t spending much at the moment anyway. With a sigh she dialled his number.

  ‘Hi.’ Lawrence’s voice was frosty.

  ‘What’s up?’

  ‘We need to talk, as soon as possible.’

  He still sounded chilly and was obviously waiting for Jo to apologize.

  ‘OK, well, go ahead, I’m listening.’

  ‘Not over the phone.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Lawrence. Cut the cloak-and-dagger stuff. Just get on and tell me what the problem is. I’m busy.’

  ‘I don’t know what’s come over you, Jo. There’s really no need to be so offensive,’ he said. And she could picture his mouth pinched in that prudish way he had when he thought he had the moral high ground.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘If you must know, it’s Nicky.’

  ‘What about him?’ Jo was not in the mood to be given another lecture about her behaviour towards her children, not least because she was very upset by her son’s continued refusal to contact her. Since Travis’s departure she had texted or left messages for him on an almost daily basis, but he’d returned none of them. Cassie said he was being a ‘plank’, and that she should ignore him. But Jo was finding that hard to do.

  Lawrence could be heard taking a long breath.

  ‘Amber’s pregnant.’

  ‘Oh, God . . .’

  ‘But it’s not as simple as that. I’d rather talk to you face to face . . . if you can tear yourself away from whatever it is you’re doing.’

  ‘All right. Where?’

  *

  She went to the back of the café, where there were squashy armchairs and ordered a green tea as she sat waiting for her husband, her mind totally taken up with fictional Tess as she worked out the next sentence, the next paragraph.

  Lawrence gave her a curt smile as he sank his long body into the chair opposite.

  ‘Glad you could spare the time,’ he said.

  She ignored his huffiness. ‘Tell me about Nicky.’ It was only hours since Lawrence’s phone call about the baby, and she was having trouble getting her head around the fact that her son, still so young in her eyes, was going to be a father.

  He shook his head slightly, clearly bewildered.

  ‘Well . . . Amber’s ten weeks. And she’s adamant she doesn’t want it.’

  ‘And Nicky does?’

  Lawrence nodded. ‘He’s distraught that she’s even considering aborting it.’

  Jo frowned. ‘Didn’t she know she was pregnant before this? I mean ten weeks is pretty far gone.’

  ‘Apparently not. She doesn’t have periods very regularly, Nicky says.’

  ‘Probably because she doesn’t eat enough.’

  ‘Whatever . . . but Nicky wants us to talk to her, persuade her not to get rid of it.’

  ‘Us? As in, you and me?’ She paused. ‘He hasn’t spoken to me in weeks, Lawrence. It’s been really upsetting. All the messages I’ve sent and nothing back. Know how you must have felt with Cassie . . . but this is a godsend if it means we can be in touch again.’ She paused, hearing how that must sound. ‘You know what I mean . . .’

  Lawrence nodded. ‘He wants your input more than mine seemingly. A woman thing. But he feels awkward ringing you. I think he backed himself into a corner and now feels plain stupid.’

  Jo felt a flood of relief that her son needed her.

  ‘Do you think it’s a good idea, them having a baby?’

  ‘Well, that’s the thing. She’s so young – barely twenty – and . . . sort of childlike. I can’t imagine how she’ll cope with a baby to look after.’

  ‘And what will they live on?’

  They both stared at each other.

  ‘But it is our grandchild,’ Jo said softly.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Oh, God. I don’t know what I think. I agree Amber just doesn’t seem capable of coping with her normal life, let alone motherhood. And if she genuinely doesn’t want it . . .’

  ‘You see Nicky thinks she does want it, but she doesn’t believe he does. And he doesn’t want to put pressure on her to keep it because he says it’s her body and she’s going to have to take most of the responsibility. So he hasn’t been totally honest about the fact that he really wants this baby.’

  Jo groaned. ‘I don’t see that we can intervene, can we? It’ll have terrible consequences if we take one side or another and then it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘But he’s desperate for our input. We can’t just walk away.’

  They fell silent again.

  ‘Maybe we should meet up with them. At least talk it through together?’ Lawrence said.

  ‘With Amber too? Would she do that? She’s never said a word to me, even on a good day. I get the impression she’s a bit intimidated by us.’

  ‘Really?’ He raised his eyebrows, a half smile on his face.

  ‘What do you mean? I’ll have you know I’ve bent over backwards to connect with that girl, but she never gives anything back,’ Jo retorted.

  Lawrence chuckled. ‘I’m sure you have. But you’ve got form, Jo, with Nicky’s girlfriends. Admit it.’

  ‘Ha! Loulou, you mean? You couldn’t stand her either, but you were such a creep you pretended you totally lurved her. Anyway, I was perfectly polite to her.’

  ‘Call that polite?’ They were both laughing now. ‘Remember the time she came round with Nicky and we pretended we had to go out and went upstairs to “change”, thinking they’d leave soon, and they didn’t and we had to actually change and go out, despite it being knackeringly cold and having nowhere to go?’

  ‘All she talked about was who she knew and what she’d bought. She hadn’t a brain in her head.’

  ‘And that voice!’

  Jo didn’t respond immediately. She’d been brought up short by the ease with which she and Lawrence had fallen back into their previous intimacy. It felt dangerous suddenly, like a slippery slope down which she couldn’t afford to slide.

  ‘So what are we going to do about Nicky and Amber?’ she said, anxious to get this meeting over with.

  ‘Shall I suggest we all get together, see what he says?’

  Jo sighed. ‘
I suppose. I hope the thing with Nicky won’t get in the way . . . I can’t have got many Brownie points with Amber over it all.’

  ‘It’s probably time you sorted it out anyway.’

  She glared at him. ‘I have been trying you know.’

  ‘OK, OK, wasn’t criticizing. I know how tricky it can be, remember?’

  ‘Yeah . . . sorry. But it’s stupid, especially as Travis is long gone.’

  His eyebrows shot up. ‘Gone? You’ve split up?’

  She wished everyone wouldn’t make assumptions about her and Travis. Words bandied about like ‘love’, ‘relationship’, ‘split up’, implied she and the American had been an item, something solid. But the Away-Day nature of what they had together – in some ways part of the charm – was not easy to explain. And although she feigned nonchalance now, she still missed Travis terribly. Not having him there to hold her sometimes felt like a physical pain.

  ‘We both knew it wasn’t an ongoing thing.’

  Lawrence looked as if he were waiting for her to continue. When she didn’t, he asked, ‘And you’re OK with that?’

  ‘Yes.’ She wasn’t going to discuss it with him, he wouldn’t understand even if she did.

  They sat in silence.

  ‘Can we meet at home . . . if Nicky agrees?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Of course,’ she said, getting up. She found she couldn’t sit there opposite Lawrence for one more second. He looked surprised. But there was still so much unsaid between them, which made these meetings like picking her way through a minefield.

  ‘Ring me when you’ve got a plan. I’m trying to finish my book so I’m around mostly.’

  She left him sitting there.

  On the bus going home her thoughts returned to her son and his girlfriend.

  Chapter 15

  6 December 2013

  Jo heard her daughter groan.

  ‘Bloody predictable if you want my opinion. She’s nobbled him, hasn’t she. I mean, how do you get pregnant these days by accident? Weren’t they using contraceptives? And why has she waited all this time to get rid of it if she really, really doesn’t want it?’

  ‘You think she’s playing some game?’