I’d arranged to meet Robyn for a rare, snatched drink after work. I saw so little of her in those days, less and less it seemed. Sophie was already a toddler by then and Cat was expecting the twins, so she was always keen to get home.
I arrived before her, of course. I found myself a tiny table tucked away in a corner and was half reading my book, half watching a group of three women, when I realized a man was smiling at me. A slow smile of approval, full of promise. He was standing at the bar on his own. I checked around to see if the smile was meant for someone else, then back at my book. The next time I looked up, he smiled at me again. He looked a bit older than me, with a large leonine head, a broad nose, tawny hair that curled over the back of his collar, a strong jaw and clear blue eyes. Handsome too, ridiculously so. A lock of hair fell across his face and he brushed it out of his eyes. I reckon he’s an actor, I thought, an actor who specializes in period dramas, a natural at playing a crowd, he’s got that confidence about him, the smile of a man who knows he’s the best-looking male in the room. Then Robyn arrived. Behind her back, as she bent over and kissed my cheek, he grinned at me and shrugged his shoulders apologetically, Just missed my chance.
The next night I went back. I told myself I didn’t have any particular reason to hurry home, which was true enough. He was there again, standing at the bar, but if he clocked me coming in, he didn’t let me know. I found my seat in the corner and took out my book, Great Expectations. I hooked a stray piece of hair over my ear and propped my chin on my hand. Then I read.
The next thing I knew he was standing in front of me.
“If this was a blind date,” he said, “I’d be looking for the girl who said she’d be reading a trashy novel”—I held up the book to show him the cover—“or, indeed, Dickens, one of the great classics. I’m impressed. Jamie Casteele,” he said. “May I?” He didn’t wait for a reply. “Let me guess, you’re a visiting professor of comparative literature swinging through London to give a TED talk at UCL.”
It was almost impossible not to warm to his wicked grin. “Nothing like that,” I said. “I just wanted to read English at university.”
“You wanted to. So you didn’t.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
I took a breath. “I wasn’t in a good place.” I was going to leave it at that, but Jamie waited in silence, giving me a look of such patient concern that eventually I added, “My little sister disappeared. Snatched, I mean. She’s been gone twenty years.”
“Jesus. I’m sorry to hear that.”
I hadn’t expected him to be so kind. A thing like a large, smooth stone appeared in my neck, painfully huge. I couldn’t speak.
Jamie paused, then said, “How do you move on from a thing like that? God, it must be hard.”
I couldn’t answer that. The truth is, I’d never moved on. I’d never returned to finish my A Levels or gone on to uni, even though both my parents had told me I should. I hadn’t had a career, just a series of jobs. I hadn’t had a lasting relationship either. I’d dated over the years, of course I had, but things had never worked out. And it had always been me who’d ended things, me who’d made the decision that something intangible wasn’t quite right. I was a master of self-sabotage. I longed for a family, but I’d never got to the point where that was even being discussed. And time was running out.
“Here,” Jamie said, “give me your hand.” His was large, and warm. He held my fingers in his. He took a pen from his top pocket and wrote a number on the back of my hand. His head was bent close to mine, as if we were sharing a secret. He was so close that I could see the individual hairs bedded into his chin. His hair smelt clean. He wore a blue tie, and his pink shirt was crisp and expensive-looking, City clothes. Underneath the number he wrote jamie in capital letters that lifted and dipped across the bones of my hand.
“Ball’s in your court,” he said. “Call me.” His smile was open, sincere.
Two days later, we had our first date.
***
At forty-one he was five years older than me, with the easy confidence of a man who had his life pretty much set up the way he wanted: a nice car, a big group of friends, a career as an ambassador for Pearl River Wines that took him all over the world. He was easygoing and had a huge sense of the ridiculous. On dates I found him expansive, generous and irreverent, with a boyish charm he knew how to work. Watch and learn, he’d breathe, as he moved forward to beguile a waitress into giving us the best table in the house.
“I love an upgrade,” he told me in bed late one night. “It’s kind of like a secret challenge, working out what I can bag for free.” He laughed then, pulling me toward him and growling in my ear, “You should see me when I don’t get what I want.”
I’d never before met anyone who seemed so utterly at ease with life. I liked his jokes, his confidence, his spontaneity, even the artless way he swore. He didn’t care one jot that I hadn’t been to university. Neither had he; his own school career was far more checkered than mine.
“I accidentally got expelled,” he told me one morning over breakfast, “twice, actually. Two different schools.” He grinned at me over his bowl of muesli.
“What did you do?” I asked him, a slow smile of amusement spreading over my face. It was still early days in our relationship, a time when all our conversations seemed to move fluidly between brilliantly funny and meaningfully intense.
“Racketeering, cheating, lying,” Jamie said cheerfully, “you name it, I did it. I was forever in trouble. I had yet to learn the noble art of not getting caught. God, my poor parents.” He squeezed my hand. “They’ll like you, though.”
I was amazed anyone could be so blasé about their bad-boy past, so open and frank. Also, just a tiny bit concerned. Oh, forget it, I told myself, people grow up. And Jamie wasn’t a clown; he had a serious side too, I knew that from the way he talked about conservation, his great love of the wild. He told me that one of the reasons he loved his job so much was that Pearl River Wines not only had vineyards but also owned a small private game reserve. It was mainly used to entertain their well-heeled guests, but Jamie got to stay there every couple of months, for free, whenever he went to Cape Town for work.
“How d’you even get a job like that?” I asked him. We were lying on his bed, flicking through an album of photographs he’d taken at the reserve. I stopped on an image of three lion cubs tumbling together in the long grass, the edges of their solid furry bodies glowing fire-red, backlit against a setting sun. “Wonderful,” I said.
Jamie shrugged. “Good luck, I suppose. Friend of a friend. I’d had loads of different jobs before that. I never really knew what I wanted to do with my life, to be honest.” He pulled a face and stuck his hands behind his head. “So many options out there: that’s the problem. And only one life to do all of it. God knows how you’re ever meant to decide on anything.” For a long time he stared at the ceiling, as if lost in thought. Then he said, “D’you like dogs?” I sat up, laughing, somewhat surprised by this abrupt shift in the conversation. “Mum breeds spaniels. Someday I’d really love a dog. A little Staffy or something, you know, from Battersea Dogs Home. Get a rescue.”
I smiled. We didn’t have dogs when I was growing up. My mother was always desperate for one—something small and cute, she’d said, a Chihuahua perhaps, or a pug, but my father said he questioned why anyone in their right mind would invite a pissing, crapping, germ-laden, bollock-licking, arse-dragging, flea-ridden animal to live under their very own roof; and, while we were at it, he didn’t much see the point of horses either, when cars were faster, less temperamental and didn’t leave their passengers stinking of shit.
“Sure,” I said, “I like dogs.”
I ran my hand through his hair. I loved that he loved animals. I loved too that he’d asked my opinion on that matter, and, even more, that his first choice would be a rescue. That was nice, I thought. It showed good character. That mix of sunshine and humanity reminded me something of Robyn.
I was drawn to him like honey.
***
Jamie was sharing a flat in North London when I first met him, renting a bedroom from Sam, an old school friend of his. It was an arrangement he’d made in haste, he said, not ideal, but a temporary measure until he got a place of his own. The year before he’d made something of an abrupt return from years of living in Cape Town. “Beating a swift retreat from my disastrous marriage,” was how he actually put it. His ex-wife, Melissa, was still there. He showed me a couple of pictures of her once, a smiling blonde on a sun-drenched beach.
“Why didn’t it work out?” I said. We were lying in his bed, late at night.
Jamie shrugged. “I wanted kids. She didn’t.”
Come on, I thought, there’s got to be more to it than that.
“Isn’t that the sort of thing you should discuss before you get married?”
“Yeah. No, we did. Melissa could be very”—Jamie paused, searching for the right word—“contrary. Don’t get me wrong, I did love her. She was sharp, adventurous, spirited…but she could be a bit—hell, I don’t know, tricky. Oppositional. The moment I said we should start trying for a family she said she’d changed her mind. Now she didn’t want kids at all. And, no shit, I promise you she was always like that: didn’t want the stuff she could have, irresistibly drawn to everything else.” He sighed, looking grim. “Did the same thing with me, I suppose, got bored with me the moment we got married. We lasted only eighteen months. Yet another catastrophe as far as Mum and Dad were concerned: not just a divorce but no grandkids to dote over either. God.”
He sounded so dejected that I took his hand and squeezed it. We stayed like that for a while. Finally, he rolled his head toward mine. “How about you?” he said. “Do you want kids?”
His words moved through me like the first shoots of spring, all my secret desires pushing to the surface. I smiled. “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”
