Page 11 of The Three of Us
I shake my head. ‘No. Still the same old Carly. I’ve moved out of my mum’s, sharing a flat with a mate, but otherwise I’m still living the same old life! Hanging out in pubs, reading a lot, seeing my mum at the weekends. No man, no kids. Still waiting to meet Mr Right. My own Mr Darcy! Not that I’m in any hurry.’ I look away, for fear of blushing. It doesn’t happen often, but this is one occasion when I’m afraid it just might.
‘I’m surprised. I felt sure someone would have swept you off your feet by now, and whisked you down the aisle!’
‘I’m not sure all that marriage and family stuff is all it’s cracked up to be. You should see Rosie and Syd these days. Happy as Larry, but struggling a bit moneywise, I think. They never did get over to Oz to visit his parents. Other priorities got in the way. You heard they had twins?’
‘No!’
‘Yep! A boy and a girl, just a few months old, and yet to meet their Aussie grandparents.’
‘To be honest, I haven’t really stayed in touch with anyone from back then. I should have done, I know. Especially Syd, after he let me sleep on his sofa for weeks on end. Maybe I should have come down for their wedding, and invited them to mine, but it’s a man thing, isn’t it? We don’t do friends the way you girls do. But twins, eh? Wow!’
‘Yep. Hard work, and loud too. Very loud! But how about you? How’s married life? Do you have any kids yourself?’
‘God, no. Too soon for all that. We’ve only just moved here. New job, new flat, and still finding my feet. Well, our feet, I suppose I should say, although I don’t think Molly’s too keen on London life. Not yet, anyway.’ He stops talking and turns his attention to opening his sandwich, a dollop of mayonnaise oozing out and just missing his trouser leg as he quickly holds the whole thing out over the side of the bench. A big fat pigeon swoops down instantly but soon waddles off again when it discovers nothing but a gloopy breadless splat on the path. ‘Come on, eat up. Our little feathered friend here is looking most disgruntled.’
I laugh at his choice of vocabulary. ‘Can a bird be disgruntled? More like just plain greedy, if you ask me.’ I tear open the wrapping and take a bite of my roll. Cheese and pickle. I don’t much like pickle, but I start to eat it anyway. We sip at our coffees, now they’re not so hot, and I realise I have no idea what to say next. It’s hardly the moment to pronounce my undying love, is it? And I really don’t fancy hearing any more about his wife and how much she does or doesn’t want to live in London. Let her leave if that’s how she feels. And leave him here, for me.
He puts his coffee down on the ground by his feet and opens his briefcase, pulling out a heap of papers, but he doesn’t make any attempt to start reading them.
‘Do you ever think about that night?’ he says, suddenly, as if he can read my thoughts.
‘Which night’s that?’ He could be talking about something else entirely, for all I know, and I need to be sure before I make a complete fool of myself.
‘Carly…’ He turns to look at me, moving what’s left of his sandwich over onto the wooden arm of the bench, so there’s nothing in his hands, nothing between us. ‘You can’t have forgotten. I know you haven’t. It was…’
‘It was what? Special? Magical? A mistake?’
‘Yes, all of those things.’ He reaches for my hand but I pull it away, immediately wishing that I hadn’t. I want to touch him so badly. ‘But it couldn’t happen, could it? We couldn’t let it. Not with the wedding and everything. You do understand that?’
I nod. I can feel the tears starting to well up, the tears I have probably been holding in for the last five years, but I have to stop them. He mustn’t see how I feel. He had been fair about it all back then, and totally honest. He hadn’t made any promises. Well, not to me. Only to her.
‘Wrong time, wrong place…’
‘Wrong man?’ he adds, peering at my face.
‘No, Jack. The right man. Definitely the right man. But someone else got there first, didn’t she? I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do this.’ I stand up, my food falling from my lap and signalling a mass pigeon stampede around my ankles.
I’m making a spectacle of myself, I know I am. Stumbling about and saying the first thing that comes into my head. I’ve already said too much, and it’s time to cut my losses and leave. Only, he should know, shouldn’t he? This could be my last chance, my only chance, to tell him how it was for me.
And so I do.
‘That night was very special to me, one of the most important of my life, ridiculous though that probably sounds to you, as nothing really happened, did it?’ I find myself staring at my shoes, and at the last of the pigeons still pecking determinedly at the remains of my bap, now little more than a pile of mangled crumbs. My voice drops almost to a whisper. ‘But I think it’s best, in the circumstances, that we just keep our distance again now. We’ve managed it for years, but we’ll just have to try a bit harder now we work in the same place, won’t we? I don’t have a lot of reasons to come up to the second floor…’
‘You know where I’m working?’
‘Not too tricky to work out, as you’re in IT. That’s where they’re based.’ I swallow hard. The last thing I want is for him to think I’ve been stalking him, that I’ve already been up and found out exactly where his desk is. ‘Anyway, I should go. I’m sure the last thing your wife would want is you having lunch with another woman, especially one from the past, who she knows nothing about. I assume she doesn’t…’
‘Of course not. There was no reason to tell her. Not that there was anything much to tell.’
‘No, you’re right. Nothing at all. Okay then. I’m going back to work now. It’s been nice seeing you again, Jack. I’m glad you’re happy.’ Has he actually said he’s happy? He has to be, he has to have left me for the right reasons, made the right decision, or the last five years without him have all been for nothing. I lost; she won. It’s as simple as that. What was I thinking, trying to engineer some sort of secret meeting, working out some crazy plan to get him back? It’s not going to happen. It can’t. He’s married, and I don’t get mixed up with married men, especially happily married men. I have to back off, stay away, let him go, once and for all.
I start to walk back along the path, forcing my feet to take me away from him and, when I turn, he’s just sitting there, staring after me. ‘You’d best read that report now, before your meeting,’ I say, my voice as level and businesslike as I can make it, as my heart pounds away, nineteen to the dozen. ‘And thanks for lunch.’
Chapter 9
Jack
Jack had never expected to see Carly Young again. In fact, wrapping up the memory of that time they had briefly shared together and shoving it away in a box somewhere at the back of his brain has worked pretty well up until now. He has to admit that the lid has eased itself off from time to time, allowing just a glimpse of a memory of that night down by the river, but the feelings that come with it are best pushed aside.