Page 3 of The Three of Us
I don’t speak. I’m not sure I would know what to say if I did.
‘Oh, my God, you did, didn’t you?’ Suze is getting all excited now. ‘You dark horse, you! So, how come we don’t know about this? I thought we told each other everything.’ She reaches across the table and tilts my chin up with her finger, so she’s looking right into my eyes, and then she just gently shakes her head. ‘You and the gorgeous Jack. Carly Young, you lucky, lucky bugger.’
Chapter 2
Jack
‘Oh, do stop moaning, Mol.’ Jack looks in the hall mirror and fiddles with his tie. ‘Yes, the flat’s a bit on the small side, but I can’t help it that London prices are so much higher than back home. It’s all we can afford for now, but we’ll get used to it. Enjoy it, even. This was too good an offer to turn down. I was stuck in a dead-end job in that dreary office. Moving here was the right thing to do. A no-brainer.’
‘There was always the farm. Your dad would have loved it if you…’
‘No. Farming’s not for me, Molly. You know that. And nor is village life, not anymore. And what would have happened long-term? When Mum and Dad decide to retire? When they die? Two brothers can’t both take it on, can they? End up trying to squeeze two families into one farmhouse? Let Richard have it, let him take it all on. The early mornings and the freezing cold winters, out in those muddy fields. It was okay when I was a teenager, glad of earning a few pounds after school, but a career? A way of life? No. This new IT job is what I’ve trained for, what I’m good at. And it’s my big chance, our big chance, to spread our wings a bit, enjoy city living, have some fun, before we vegetate.’
‘Vegetate?’ Molly rolls her eyes. ‘Living in Shelling wasn’t that bad, and you know it. You make it sound like it’s got nothing going for it at all.’
‘Well, has it? One pub, a church we haven’t set foot in since our wedding, a couple of shops and a bus that comes through twice a day. A population with an average age of… what? Sixty? It’s hardly the centre of the universe, is it?’
‘Of course not, but it’s friendly, and it’s quiet, and it’s safe. It’s home, Jack. Where our families are. Where we belong.’
‘We belong wherever we choose to be, Mol. People move all the time, try out new things, new places. Look, I’m going to be late if I don’t get going soon. Not the impression I want to make in my first week. And we’ve been through all this before, so many times…’
‘I know. It’s just… oh, I don’t know. There’s you going off to your exciting new job and I’m stuck here on my own, unpacking boxes. I don’t know anybody, Jack, and I don’t get the feeling it’s the sort of neighbourhood where people pop in and out of each other’s houses for tea and scones. What will I do with myself all day, every day?’
‘You’ll feel better when you find a job.’
‘If I find a job. The only thing I know anything about is baking.’
‘Then bake! Make us a nice flat-warming cake, one of your famous lemon drizzles, and then go out for a walk or something. You never know, there might be a lovely little bakery just round the corner, crying out for staff.’
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Or do what you should have done ages ago. Work from home. Set up a little business of your own. Making wedding cakes, birthday cakes, all those fiddly little overpriced cupcake things that everyone suddenly seems to want these days. Put cards in shop windows, the local paper, get something online. I could build you a little website to get things started, and you can add photos and things as you go along. You’re good at cakes, Mol, just like I’m good at IT. And Londoners must want to eat cakes just as much as the people of Norfolk did. And they’ll probably be prepared to pay a lot more for them here too. Now, I really do have to go.’ He picks up the black leather briefcase his parents had insisted on buying for him as a leaving gift, even though there’s nothing in it but a sandwich and the newspaper he’s just lifted off the mat, kisses his wife on the cheek and closes the door behind him.
Jack Doherty loves London. He’s lived here before, when his old company sent him to work on a short secondment five years ago, in their big fancy glass-fronted offices near the river. He hadn’t quite done the full six months in the end. The company had secretly been in trouble before he’d arrived and, in the end, nothing he nor his colleagues could do was able to save it. He had managed to walk away with a small redundancy pay-out and a good reference, but having to skulk back home with his tail between his legs was not his finest hour. And although he’d found another job quickly, in an office in Norwich, it had only ever been a stopgap as far as he was concerned, a way of bringing in some money while he waited for his big break and a return to what he had been trained to do, and with a decent salary to match. There was only so much help he was willing to accept from his family, and Molly’s, although he was glad that together the two sets of parents had footed the bill for the wedding. Not that he would have opted for the huge affair it had ballooned into if he had had to pay for it himself. A small register office do and a meal in the Brown Cow would have been enough for him, but that was not the traditional village way, and certainly not Molly’s way.
Much as he will always have a soft spot for his childhood home, being away from Shelling at last feels strangely liberating, as if he is back in command of his own destiny. No more talk of taking over the farm, no more living in his in-laws’ spare room while he and Molly save for a deposit on a place of their own, no more boring temporary job that he dreaded getting up for every morning. He knows he has more or less dragged Molly here against her will, but she will get used to it, he is sure. Well, she has to really, as the deed has been done now. They have packed up and moved. Escaped. He is happy and she will be too, given time. He passes a flower stall at the entrance to the Underground and tells himself, if it’s still open later when he comes home, he’ll buy her a bunch of something pretty. It’s the least he can do.
It’s his fourth day at Mandrake’s Insurance and he’s only just starting to figure out where everything is, and how it all works. It’s a big old building, nothing like the place he was at when he worked in London before. There’s a lot more wood than glass, for a start, with flaking paint on the walls, and box-like lifts, and tall oak doors, even just leading to the Gents, rather than the shiny escalators and stainless steel and sweeping Thames views he had begun to get used to and had found so impressive before everything had come to such an abrupt end. Still, he has a good feeling about his new job with the consultancy firm and his first placing here at Mandrake’s. If all goes well, he will only be working here for three months, to see this new finance project through, and then on to something else. Variety, responsibility, security, and all right here in London, where he wants to be. Jack feels happier than he has ever been.
‘Morning, Jack.’ A girl he must have met at some point in the last few days but whose name he can’t recall gives him a wide smile as he crosses the reception lobby and they both step into the lift. She is carrying a bundle of files and there’s lipstick on her teeth, yet he chooses not to embarrass her by telling her. He nods and smiles back, then leaves her to carry on upwards as the lift shudders to a stop and he steps out at the second floor.
His desk is boxed off, as they all are, by moveable half-height partitions that break the large open-plan office into smaller cubes, offering only a pretence at privacy, but at least his own little cube is near the window. He has a view, even if it’s only of the grimy buildings across the street. The desk is old and traditional, its top made of dark wood, dull and scratched and several inches thick, and it’s already cluttered with a collection of paper and pens, and a black-skinned banana he brought in on Monday and still hasn’t eaten. He sits down and immediately switches his computer screen on, opening up his emails before he’s even slipped off his jacket or settled properly in his seat.
‘Hi, Jack. Team meeting in Bob’s office in five,’ a voice calls from behind a partition somewhere to his left.
‘Thanks, Jane.’ He is slowly getting to know his colleagues’ names and Jane has made her mark by bringing him a coffee and a doughnut on his first day and giving him the office version of the grand tour, so at least he now has a vague idea of the lie of the land.
He tucks his briefcase under his desk and unlocks the top drawer to find a notepad he’ll probably need for the meeting. The photo is still in there too, a small square one in a cheap frame, a close-up of Molly, smiling into the camera, her straight blonde hair blowing in the wind, her suntanned arms wrapped around her parents’ old dog, Flossy. She has given him the picture to put on display, but so far he hasn’t done it. First, he needs to find out just what sort of place he’s working for. He wants to figure out what the others do. Whether they have photos on their desks, of wives, partners, kids, pets. Whether they make personal calls in work time. Where they go at lunchtime, and whether they go there together. What’s acceptable and what’s frowned upon. What will go down well at a place like Mandrake’s? Being seen as the kind of family man who goes home early on his anniversary and walks his dog at weekends, or a go-getter who stays till late to get things done and always puts the job first? He needs to work that out before he shows his hand, so for now the photo stays in the drawer.
Jack looks at his watch, the Omega his mum and dad gave him for his twenty-first, so reliable that he has never needed to replace it in the eight years it’s been a permanent feature on his wrist. A quality thing, built to last, a bit like his shiny new briefcase. He stands up and closes the drawer and heads for the boss’s office for the team meeting. He’s part of a team now, and his number one priority is to be accepted, to learn all he can about the company and his place in it, to learn to fit in, even if he’s only here for a while. Because nothing is going to drag him back to the farm or to some dead-end job he hates. Absolutely nothing.
Chapter 3
Molly
Molly pulls off the sticky tape, folds another empty cardboard box flat and stretches her aching back. She’s sorted out everything in the kitchen and the bedroom now, plates and cutlery, a toaster, a kettle, far too many glasses, assorted towels and duvet sets, some of it still in its original wrappings and untouched since the wedding, having been stored in her parents’ attic while it waited for a home to be absorbed into. And now she’s made a start on the less important stuff. The old CDs, the paperback books, the ornaments she doesn’t really like all that much but can’t bear to part with. She takes a long look at the big glossy wedding photo in its ornate silver frame, the one where she and Jack are shrouded in a fluttering cloud of multicoloured confetti and the only one that managed to capture them both laughing at the same time, and places it on the small shelf above the fireplace, edging it along just a fraction to make sure it’s exactly in the middle, and wiping it over with a duster.
‘Time for a break,’ she says out loud, although there’s nobody listening.