Page 21

TWENTY-ONE

Nick arrives late in the afternoon on Saturday.

He has, as always, brought flowers. The last ones are just beginning to die on the kitchen sideboard and Nina throws them away with a flourish, cleans out the vase, and refills it with fresh water while Nick stands and watches, leaning louchely against the kitchen counter, his arms folded across his chest, his large feet crossed at the ankles in desert boots.

He’s telling Nina all about his week and Nina is girlish around him, tipping her hair over her shoulder as she laughs at his jokes, a coquettish angle to her head as she tweaks at the flowers to get them just so, before Nick steps across her and takes over.

“Here,” he says, “you want the big ones here, the smaller ones there.”

“Never met a man who has thoughts about how to arrange flowers.”

“I used to work in floristry,” he says. “Back in the day.”

“Is that how you learned to gift-wrap too?” Ash asks from where she sits at the kitchen table, pretending to do something on her laptop.

“Indeed it is,” he says, turning to hit Ash with one of his amazing smiles full of teeth. “I can curl ribbons with the edge of a scissor blade like you wouldn’t believe.”

She smiles and turns her eyes back to the screen of her laptop. She wishes he’d stop being so fucking nice.

A minute later, Nick and Nina have gone to sit in the living room and Ash is alone.

She stares at Nick’s jacket where he’s left it hanging on the back of one of the kitchen chairs.

It’s black, a kind of zip-up thing with a high neck, woolen.

He was wearing it with a scarf when he arrived, which is now hanging over the top of it.

She doesn’t like the way he dresses, it’s all so proper and grown-up.

She’s not used to fifty-somethings who dress like grown-ups; all her parents’ friends dress like they’re thirty years old.

She hears laughter coming from the other end of the house and with a brief look over her shoulder, she steps quickly toward the chair and runs her hands deftly in and out of his coat pockets.

A tissue. A fifty-pence piece. A ballpoint pen.

A… She peers at it more closely, trying to work out what exactly it is.

It’s unrecognizable to her: a plastic circle with a cartoon of a ladybird on it, attached to a piece of blue nylon, with a plastic clasp at the other end.

She stares at it, and then quickly grabs her phone to photograph it before shoving it back in Nick’s coat pocket.

In his other pocket she finds something slinky and slithery.

She pulls it out and sees that it is a doggy poo bag.

She didn’t know that Nick had a dog. She wonders who looks after it when he comes over here to see her mother.

Just as she tucks the plastic bag back into Nick’s pocket, he appears and she jumps, grabbing hold of her heart with her hand. “Shit,” she says.

“Sorry,” says Nick. “Nina sent me for crisps. I didn’t mean to make you jump.”

“That’s OK,” she says. “I’m a jumpy person.”

She ponders his back as he leans down to the cupboard where he already knows they keep the crisps. She says, “You know when you worked with my dad? Back in the nineties? Did you ever meet his girlfriend?”

She sees him pause before collecting two bags of crisps by their corners and pulling them out.

He straightens and turns. His face is a picture of hard remembering.

“No,” he says. “No. I don’t think I did.

I mean, he must have had a few back then, a guy like your dad. So gregarious, such a live wire.”

“No,” Ash responds simply. “No, he only ever had two girlfriends. My mum was the second. He was still going out with the first when he met my mum. There was a messy overlap.”

Nick nods. “Right,” he says. “Well, he never mentioned her to me in that case.”

She nods, doesn’t say what she wants to say, which is that Jane was all over every element of her dad’s life back then, sat in restaurants where he worked, waiting for him to finish, came to meet him at one in the morning after his shifts, called him constantly on the restaurant phone, five or six times a night.

“How long did you say that you and my dad worked together?”

“Oh, only a few months, you know. Maybe not even that. I couldn’t hack it in the end. Your dad had the gumption for it. I just didn’t.”

He waves the crisps at her and taps the kitchen counter twice with his index finger before smiling, somewhat uncertainly, and leaving again.