As it turned out, she was just eccentric. She’d left part of herself with Henry, in the skin-shrivelling heat of North Africa, and had never been entirely the same after, despite how jolly she appeared on the surface.
She never talked about him – it was too painful, and, no matter how much she’d travelled, she was too English to wear her anguish out in the open. But she’d told Joe, and together they’d raised toast after toast to their lost babies, and the lives they never got to lead.
He’d told her about the girl, too. About Jess, and their life together. About how clever she was, how brave, how he used to play that song to her – ‘Baby, I Love You’.
About the way that the accident had destroyed her light, plunged her into a darkness she couldn’t find her way out of. He talked about her in the past tense, saying she was OK now, repeating it several times as though trying to convince himself of the truth of it.
She knew, because she knew Joe, that he still hugely regretted not being able to fix her. He was a young man but an old soul, and he had a gift for fixing things. Leaky taps, awkward kitchen cupboards, lonely old ladies who wouldn’t even admit they were lonely. He needed to feel useful, it’s how he was constructed – as though he was always trying to make up for some perceived sense of uselessness, a seed of self-doubt that had been planted early by unkind hands.
Tonight, as the clock ticks towards midnight and the party roars around them, he follows her through the crowd, the librarian and the florist dancing to Tina Turner singing about Proud Mary, the poets sipping absinthe, the reflexologist using his cards to persuade the pretty young thing who works behind the bar at The Strawberry that the Lovers’ symbol he’s just turned over is about them, and this night.
Ada has an idea, a kernel of a plan. Joe likes to fix things. And she knows two people who need some fixing.
She leads him into the kitchen, through the dangling curtain of multicoloured beads, to the bowls of hummus and taramasalata and red pepper muhammara and the sink full of ice cubes chilling bottles of fake champagne. To Clara and Jennifer, holed up in a corner, hands entwined, faces damp from tears.
‘Joe,’ she says, smiling, ‘this is Clara and Jennifer. They have a problem.’
The two young women look confused, embarrassed, mainly sad.
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he says, as she knew he would. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’
And so the story began – the story of 2009, when Jennifer’s student visa ran out, and she was facing an unwanted return to her home in New Hampshire. The story of how she’d come to London for six months, studying Victorian literature at one of the universities.
The story of how she’d met a girl called Clara, and fallen in love. The story of a time before same-sex marriage was legal, and the story of a woman who desperately wanted to stay in the UK – and the man she met, one night, at a New Year’s party hosted by a mad old lady.
The story of how Joe and Jennifer met, didn’t fall in love, but did get married.
Ada leaves the three of them to talk, and as the drunken countdown to midnight begins, wanders back into the living room. The librarian is kissing the florist, and the barmaid is slapping the reflexologist, and she smiles. Tonight, this mad old lady has changed some lives after all.
Chapter 33
‘So it was a … marriage of convenience?’ says Michael, clearly relishing the phrase.
‘Indeed,’ replies Ada, grinning. ‘Joe might have been a handsome devil but he really wasn’t Jennifer or Clara’s type.’
She turns to me, holding my hand still, and says: ‘Did you think otherwise, my dear? Did you think he was happily wed and settled with someone else?’
‘I did,’ I whisper. ‘And part of me was happy for him, genuinely. But part of me …’
I leave the words hanging, because I don’t like where they lead. What a terrible thought – hoping, however stealthily, that someone else was miserable.
‘Part of you is human,’ responds Ada, squeezing my fingers. ‘Part of you is still that love-struck girl, seeing him for the first time. Part of you is still that grieving mother, yearning to put the pieces back together. Nobody thinks the worse of you for it, darling. We’re all imperfect creatures in one way or another. Now – what are you going to do next? What’s the plan?’
This, of course, is a big question. What do we do next?
‘I was hoping you could help us with that, Ada,’ I reply. ‘What happened to them? To Joe, and his … wife?’
‘Well, as I told Belinda here earlier, I can’t tell you where Joe is now. Believe me, I’d have led with that, and not saved it for a dramatic reveal. Did you know about the time he spent in prison? The thing with the dog, and that horrid man?’
I nod, and feel a wave of dread wash over me. I can’t help picturing him there – he hated being trapped. Hated being confined and controlled. It would have been one of his worst nightmares.
‘Well,’ she continues, ‘I have to say that changed him. He wasn’t quite himself after that. We had conversations about it, but he didn’t really open up – I think he was trying to protect me. He wasn’t in that place for long, although longer than he probably needed to be – but it had a tremendous effect. I’ve never been quite sure what happened to him, and of course not knowing was worse than knowing, because my imagination simply ran riot!’
‘I don’t think anything in particular would have needed to happen,’ I say. ‘Just being locked up would have been bad enough. He … he didn’t have an especially good childhood, and probably because of that, it was very important to him to be free. To make his own choices. To be the man he wanted to be, not the one that fate seemed to have carved out for him.’
Ada nods, and her dark eyes glaze with tears.
‘I know, dear – you’re right. The poor soul – he was such a good person, despite all of that. Just imagine what he’d have been if he’d had the kind of family who loved him and nurtured him. Anyway, we all rubbed along as usual for quite a while – technically he was married and living with Jennifer in the flat on the top floor, but in reality he was still in the basement. The girls got on with their lives, and we got on with ours.
‘One thing he did decide, though, was that it was time to let go of the past a little. That he would stop sending the birthday cards for Gracie. The year after, so October 2010, I suppose, he came here and we had a little tea party for her instead. He said he didn’t want to keep holding you back – that the cards turning up every year probably upset you.’
She looks at me with one eyebrow raised at this stage, and I know she is wondering about what happened – about why I’m here now, all these years later.
‘I didn’t know about them,’ I reply simply. ‘I was ill for a long time. My parents told me he’d left, and I never saw any of the letters or cards until my mother died recently.’
‘How awful,’ she comments, ‘of them, and for them, and for you. An almighty clusterfuck of misguided actions.’
Michael snorts at her use of the ‘F’ word, and I suspect he wishes Ada could adopt him.
‘So, moving on, things changed in about 2013, I think. Clara and Jennifer wanted to move to the US. Jennifer had finished her studies, and was working with postgraduate students. She was writing some book – I don’t know, the role of corsets in Gothic feminist text or some such thing – and was offered a teaching post at one of those old colleges on the east coast.