Page 1 of The Three of Us
Chapter 1
Carly
Thirty-one and still single. According to my mother, she of the ‘nab him and marry him before you’re twenty-five’ generation, there must be something wrong with me. Either I’m trying too hard and putting men off, or I’m not really trying at all.
I’m sure, in another life, she would have made a very passable Mrs Bennet, desperate to marry off a string of eligible and not so eligible daughters before they ended up on the shelf. At least I’m the one and only daughter, but even so, Jane Austen has a lot to answer for!
If I would just get my head out of a book and pay more attention to my hair. Deal with the frizz and maybe add some highlights to my natural, and rather boring, mousey mop.
If I would just stay away from my usual pints of cider and sip at something smaller and more ladylike, preferably while gazing up all dewy-eyed at some man, leaving just a hint of cleavage on show so he can see what he’s missing, although, of course, I must never give it to him. Not until I have the ring on my finger anyway.
If I could just be more… girly, then, in Mum-speak, I will have cracked it. I’d have a husband in the bag, and in my beautifully made Laura Ashley-clad bed, in no time at all.
If only it were ever that straightforward, or that simple.
Exes. There have been a few, I have to admit. Some who have got as far as the meet-the-parents milestone, some I would never have dreamed of taking anywhere near. The odd one-night stand too, whose names I’d struggle to remember the morning after, let alone now, but the less my mother knows about that side of my life the better. She may be only just turned sixty but there’s something very old-fashioned and traditional about her. Gran was the same, so it must be in the blood, God help me. All jam-making and aprons and little lace doilies on the dressing table. Mum’s a bit of a worrier too, and an even worse one in the last few years, since she lost Dad and has had to take on all the worrying for two.
Okay, she’s right that my success rate with men has not been all it could be. But, in my defence, none of them have been what I would call husband material. But I let them all slip through my fingers, according to Mum. And now look at me. All her friends’ daughters, and quite a few of their sons, are settled, spoken for – and there’s me, like the last unwanted doll in the shop, still perched firmly on the shelf. It would never occur to her to lay the blame at the feet of any of the men I’ve had the misfortune to know, either biblically or otherwise. I’m just too critical, apparently. I expect too much.
He’s too plain? ‘Looks aren’t the be all and end all, Carly,’ she says. ‘And looks soon fade anyway. After all, they can’t all be Richard Gere, can they? A few wrinkles, a receding hairline, a bit of a belly are to be expected as time passes.’ No, it’s dependability I should be looking for, according to her. A good steady job. And if he’s not already successful, then at least he should have prospects. Someone who’ll work hard to build a career, pay the bills, and who’ll keep his whatsit in his trousers when he’s away from home. She wanders off into some tale about Auntie Sybil and Uncle Harold and how she should never have taken him back after all that business with his secretary, but I choose not to listen. Maybe he loved his secretary. Maybe he married the wrong woman. Who knows?
He’s too boring? ‘Your father could have bored for England,’ my mother says. ‘Especially once you got him started on mortgage rates or pest control or cricket, but he knew how to mow a good lawn, and look at how nicely he decorated the hall.’ I know she doesn’t mean it. The glint of tears in her eyes tell me that she would give anything to hear him talking about those pesky aphids, or even all that unintelligible leg before wicket stuff, again. She misses him a lot more than she’s prepared to let on. As much as I do, and probably a whole lot more. She found her perfect man and she’s trying her best to make sure I do the same. It’s just that her idea of perfect isn’t quite the same as mine.
So, I’ve set my sights too high, it would seem, turning away perfectly decent men just because they fail what she regards as my impossibly unrealistic compatibility test. But I know it’s just that I don’t actually fancy them. That’s the real reason why. Because there’s no chemistry, no spark.
Spark? When I try to explain, she stares at me in disbelief at the very mention of the word. ‘What’s a spark when it’s at home? Wait too long for a spark and there’ll be nothing left to burn,’ she says, or words to that effect. I’ve left it all terribly late and I should now, it seems, despite me being too silly to realise it, be out there grabbing at any half-decent, run-of-the-mill bachelor who shows the faintest glimmer of interest in me, before someone else gets there first, before the pool is empty and all that’s left for me to pick from are the ones every other girl has already rejected. The way-too-old, the mummy’s boys, the pig-ugly or, God forbid, the divorcees, back for a second bite of the cherry, with kids and maintenance payments and vicious ex-wives and all sorts of other accompanying baggage.
To listen to my mother, I’m at the last chance saloon and have been ever since I turned thirty. The clock is ticking. Let’s face it, she’s desperate to be a grandmother, and who provides the sperm is hardly more than a detail.
Which is exactly why I decided, right from the start, not to tell her about Jack. Never to tell her about Jack.
Not to tell her that he was quite possibly the best-looking man I had ever seen and that, for the last five years, I have been secretly comparing every man I meet to him, and not one of them has come close.
Not to tell her that he comes from some out-of-the-way Norfolk village nobody’s ever heard of and that he grew up on a farm. ‘All those big boots and baggy overalls,’ she would tut, ‘and just think of the mucky fingernails and where they might have been!’ How can she say that, with Dad always being so caught up in his beloved allotment and bringing clods of earth and the hint of manure into the kitchen on a pretty much daily basis? ‘No, no, that’s different,’ she would say. ‘Growing veg was a hobby for your father, not a job. He was a bank manager, Carly. Never forget that. Respected. Looked up to.’
I could tell her that Jack wore a suit these days and worked in an office, but I don’t even know if that’s true anymore. He went back there, didn’t he? To the village, and a life I know nothing about. He could be spending his days knee-deep in mud or with his arm up a cow for all I know.
I certainly couldn’t tell her that the sparks were flying so high the first time Jack touched my hand that I could have done with Dad’s super-duper lawn sprinkler, just to cool myself back down. Or that there was more chemistry brewing in the back bar of the Rose and Crown that day than in all the test tubes in my brother Sam’s favourite old toy chemistry set, multiplied ten times over. Light the touch paper and stand well back. Or is that what they say about fireworks? Come to think of it, there were a fair few of those flying about too.
If I close my eyes, I can still see Jack’s face as clearly as ever, can still feel his fingers as they interlaced through my own, in that instant instinctive way that nobody else’s ever have. Well, except Dad’s perhaps. There was always something warm and safe and wonderful in my dad’s big all-encompassing hands.
It’s his voice I find hardest to recall. I don’t mean Dad’s, which I’ve spent a lifetime listening to and will never forget and, as Mum has never found the courage to delete it from the answerphone message, I can still hear anytime I need to. No, I mean Jack’s. A voice I never had the chance to get to know that well, or to memorise forever. I have to think back, to something he actually said, bring the exact words into my mind first and then, if I’m lucky, the voice that spoke them will follow. I dread the day that doesn’t happen, when I can’t remember, when he becomes just a black-and-white photo of a man (not that I’ve actually got a photo of him, in colour or not, despite frantically searching through Facebook and Instagram and finding he’s just not there) and I can’t get him – the essence of him – back, if only for that wonderful fleeting moment.
Oh, Jack. How could you have done this to me? Started breaking my heart before I’d even given it to you? Before you even knew it was on offer?
It was all a case of bad timing. No, not just bad timing. It was bloody awful, couldn’t-make-it-up, terrible timing. The worst. Because the one really big thing I definitely cannot tell my mother about Jack is that, just three months after that firework moment that changed my whole life, he got married. To somebody else. Rings, bells, pageboys, her probably in some huge dress like an over-whipped meringue, carnations in buttonholes, and a cake almost as tall as I am. The whole clichéd shebang. It was all already arranged, planned, paid for, before we’d even met. A girl from his village. Someone he had promised to go back to just as soon as his six months working in London were over. Someone he cared about and couldn’t possibly hurt. And didn’t want to. Well, why would he? It’s like poor romantic Elinor Dashwood all over again, so heartbroken when she hears that her secret crush, Edward, has married his long-time fiancée Lucy Steele. Only that had been a total misunderstanding and he was still single, still hers, after all. What were the chances of that happening to me? Pretty much none, I reckon. Bloody Austen, with her false hopes and unrealistically happy endings.
Jack was the love of my life. We belonged together. I sensed it, felt it, just knew it, absolutely and instantly. Still do. If only he had felt it too.
Why was he taking such a huge step? He was young then, only twenty-four, just a couple of years younger than I was, and way too young to be tying himself down. There was time for all that, later, much later. Why couldn’t he have seen that? That he could wait, put it all off for a few years, until he was sure, that he still had a choice. But it seemed he had made that choice and had no intention of changing his mind. The trouble was, apart from turning up at the church and making a complete fool of myself (which, to be honest, right up until the day of the ceremony, I hadn’t completely ruled out), there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. So that was how it ended. How I lost Jack, my Jack, to the other woman, the woman who is now his wife.
But now, completely unexpectedly and right out of the blue, it looks like he might be back.
It’s a Tuesday in early August, a sunny day, and I have no after-work plans except to relax and enjoy a couple of drinks in a pub garden with my friends Fran and Suze, sharing a big plate of chips with both ketchup and mayonnaise on the side because we never can agree on which is best, and a good old gossip. And most of that is about Rosie, once a stalwart member of the gang and now swallowed up in so-called domestic bliss, which roughly translates as being buried up to the eyeballs in crying babies, soggy nappies and never-ending piles of dirty washing. Living what my mother would regard as the dream life, but for me the jury’s still out on that one.
From the moment Rosie had told us she was expecting twins, we’d lost her. All she could talk about was morning sickness and stretch marks and antenatal exercises and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, when the time came, we had to hear all the gory details of the actual birth too. The gas and air, the pain, the stitches, her husband, Syd, turning a ghostly shade of white and almost hitting the floor.
That was three months ago, and since then… no booze, no sneaky fags, no girly shopping trips (unless ordering feeding bras and extra-large knickers online counts), no fun at all. It was like a perfectly normal girl who had spent the last fifteen years or so with a drink in one hand and a mascara wand in the other had suddenly been taken up into a flying saucer by aliens and returned looking pretty much like the same person but utterly, utterly changed. Like she’d had some kind of irreversible motherhood makeover. Maybe that’s why those sci-fi films always seem to call it the mother ship.