Not just the material things either. Every marathon run. Every mountain climbed. Every beautiful woman he dated. It was all a gigantic fuck-you to Peter, his father, the man who’d always told Will that he was useless.
But Will had still been unhappy, discontent, unfulfilled. Just like his father. As Will looked at Peter Hamilton, there on the cusp of life, his brutish, bitter future not yet written, he realised that he wanted exactly what Peter had wanted in that moment, frozen in time and captured by the wedding photographer.
He wanted to be loved. To love in return. Not to worry that love made you vulnerable because when you found someone who loved you, really loved you, it didn’t make you vulnerable. It made you strong. You had a partner, a co-pilot. Someone who had your back. Someone who had your heart too. Someone just like Margot.
Peter Hamilton would say that Will didn’t deserve a woman like Margot. That he wasn’t worthy of that kind of woman. That kind of love. But just because Peter wasn’t worthy of that kind of love, didn’t mean Will wasn’t too. He’d spent his whole life proving that he was nothing like Peter, so why stop now? Why not allow himself to have the happy ever after that would always elude his father?
Will put his head in his hands. Mary’s landed heavily on his shoulder, in what was meant to be a comforting pat. ‘It’s all right, lovey. Crying’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘I’m not crying,’ Will insisted, lifting his head so Mary could see that he was dry-eyed. ‘I’ve just had a breakthrough, as they say in therapy. Not sure why I paid seventy-five quid an hour to a trained psychotherapist for a year, when you’ve sorted me out in ten minutes.’
‘Seventy-five quid?’ Mary, predictably, was appalled. ‘Daylight bloody robbery. Now, enough of all this nonsense about not being good enough. You’re certainly good enough for a nice girl like that Margot. She’d be lucky to have you.’
‘I’m not sure she sees it quite like that,’ Will said with a sigh, because that was the flaw in his masterplan. He’d thought that he’d be the one to pull back if things with Margot started moving too fast, but she’d been the one to withdraw, to stop returning his messages, to turn her face from him like she didn’t want to look at him.
‘Well, she should,’ Mary said, like that was the final word on it. ‘Have you got any exciting plans for tonight?’
Will was thirty-nine, lived in one of the most vibrant cities in the world and was going to go home and spend the evening alone. ‘Not really, no.’
‘I’m going to order us a Chinese and you can tell me why Margot’s gone silent on the #TeamBlossom chat.’
‘Do I have to?’ Will asked without much hope of a reprieve, as Mary got to her feet to go to the drawer in the sideboard where all the takeaway menus were kept.
‘If you won’t think of yourself, then think of Blossom. It doesn’t do her any good if you and Margot aren’t on the same page,’ Mary murmured, her eyes fixed firmly on Golden Valley’s appetisers section. ‘Now, stop pulling faces at me and help me decide if we should get a quarter of crispy duck or a half?’
41
Margot
Can’t do our usual time for handover. Will meet you at 8 p.m. at the usual place. Margot
It was June twenty-first. The summer solstice. The longest day of the year.
Despite the fact that it was eight on a Sunday evening, a school night, the field in Highgate Woods was still crowded with people hoping for a little light relief, a gentle breeze, to cool the sticky heat. It hadn’t rained in forever and the grass was coarse and bleached. Dogs were slowly walked around the perimeter, while courting couples sat on the ground, heads close together. A large group, which had splintered off into smaller groups, was having a picnic to celebrate someone’s twenty-fifth birthday. Helium balloons of a two and a five swayed slightly, as the picnickers sipped Prosecco out of paper cups.
Margot never knew which direction Will would come from. Sometimes he appeared, a small figure in the distance, at the bottom of the field to walk towards them. Other times, he seemed to emerge out of thin air, taking the path that came out by the information hut, just a metre or so from where Margot was sitting on a bench.
Blossom had been quite frosty with her ever since the router incident, but this evening she’d deigned to climb on the bench and lean heavily against Margot. Her black dress would be covered in dog hair, but Margot was long past the point where she cared about that.
‘Hi,’ Will said, a sudden voice in her ear, which made Margot jump because she’d been scanning the bottom of the field.
Margot stared down at her pink polished toes. ‘Hi,’ she said, her voice a rasp, a scratch.
Blossom was up on her hind legs. With the added height from the bench she was just able to reach Will’s throat with her tongue.
‘Did you miss me? I missed you.’ Blossom always got the better part of him. ‘Nanna saved you some beef from Sunday lunch and said that I’m to give you a kiss from her.’
God, why did he have to make this so hard? She raised her head at last. Like Margot, Will was wearing black. Black T-shirt and black jeans. Though unlike her, he didn’t look like a superannuated old goth; with his Ray-Bans aviator shades and Neil Barrett lightning bolt trainers (hopefully not the trainers that Blossom had christened), he was the kind of man who got second glances. Not just from the gaggle of teen girls congregated on the benches opposite them, but from two sprightly older women walking a herd of doddery old pugs.
It would have been much easier if he’d cut himself shaving this morning or was incubating a massive spot on his chin. If his hair needed cutting and the back of his neck was cultivating a thatch (something Margot particularly hated) or he was wearing his lilac shirt with the blue check that didn’t suit him.
Not because Margot was shallow enough that any of those things really mattered, but because it would be some small consolation that she was doing the right thing in . . .
‘Shall I take Blossom, then? But first, I really wanted to talk to you. I’ve been doing some thinking. Lots of thinking.’
‘I’m sorry, Will, there’s no easy way to say this, but I don’t think we should see each other anymore. Not as friends, even. So, I’m also really sorry about this but I’m not handing Blossom over this week. Or any other week. I’m keeping her. Full time.’
. . . severing all ties.
Will’s mouth fell open. If he hadn’t been wearing shades, Margot imagined his eyeballs suddenly pinging out of his eyes on springs like in a cartoon.
‘What are you talking about? What do you mean not seeing each other anymore? And you’re not keeping Bloss. Don’t be silly,’ he said like it was just nonsense and he was shutting it down right now.
‘I’m not being silly, I’m being deadly serious.’ This was hands down the most difficult conversation Margot had ever had. But just because something was difficult was no reason not to plough on anyway. ‘It was always a pretty experimental idea to share a dog and it’s time to admit that the experiment hasn’t been successful. Look, can you sit down and stop looming?’
‘Can’t do anything right,’ Will muttered and he collapsed on the bench as if his legs couldn’t hold him up anymore, Blossom between them as she always was, until she jumped down so she could claim another dog’s abandoned tennis ball. ‘What is going on with you?’