you rather I didn't answer the phone then, Joe?’
The barb to her voice snagged against him and he thought, dear God, here we go again. But tonight it amused him more than it irritated him because it was – well, it was so Tess, really. And he could clearly envisage her in his hallway, her cheeks reddening with her silly indignation. It was tempting to wind her up a little more.
She listened hard to Joe's silence and wondered if she'd irked him and whether he might say, yes, Tess, don't answer my bloody phone.
‘I didn't mean it that way,’ she said.
‘I just thought I'd let you know I'll be back tomorrow.’
‘We were half expecting you last weekend.’
‘Things ran on.’
‘Good things?’
A flashback to Rachel's blow-job shot to mind. ‘Not bad.’
‘What time tomorrow?’ asked Tess. ‘Ish.’
‘Mid-afternoon, I would think,’ said Joe. ‘Ish.’
There was a pause.
Joe's coming back.
It was a concept privately welcomed by both. Tess thought of the beans on toast she'd had for supper – today, yesterday, probably the day before that too. Perhaps supper tomorrow would be different now. Proper. With wine. With conversation. And laughter. Joe just thought it would be nice to see her again.
‘Shall I – you know – have stuff in?’
‘Stuffing?’ But he knew what she meant.
She tried to sound casual. ‘Stuff – you know, fish, meat – for supper?’
She couldn't see him smiling; she could only hear the silence, which unnerved her. She wasn't to know that she hadn't over-stepped a mark, that over in Antwerp Joe was thinking to himself that he liked it that she'd asked. And that had she not, he liked to think he might have suggested the very same thing to her.
‘Sounds good,’ he said. He wasn't to know that suddenly she was in a knot as to whether there was enough in her purse – which she'd been keeping out of sight under her bed – to cover much stuff at all. ‘See you tomorrow, Tess.’
She wanted to keep him longer on the phone, to run away from her nagging thoughts to yak instead about the minutiae of her day. She could tell him how she'd enjoyed the Joseph Heller but not the Doris Lessing, that the downstairs loo was now a sunny yellow, that she'd worked out how to record from the television and had saved him a programme called Megastructures about a huge bridge somewhere, oh, where! oh, what was the bloody thing called! It's in Japan! She didn't want him to go just yet because then it would just be her in the house and another evening stretched ahead and made tomorrow seem a very long way off.
‘Bye then.’
‘Bye.’
She placed the handset back in the cradle thoughtfully and looked at the pens, all in a scatter, and couldn't remember which were for keeping. So she had to test them all out again. She saw that she'd doodled the word ‘Joe’ a number of times. She told herself it had been absent-minded scribbling, that if it had been Tamsin she'd just spoken to, she'd've written her name a number of times in a variety of colours and squiggles instead. But she certainly didn't want Joe seeing this. She'd be screwing it up and chucking it away.
Don't screw it up.
Don't chuck it away.
Well, the paper, yes. But not the thoughts released by his name.
She told herself to stop it at once. But then she reasoned that it was so quiet tonight – Wolf hadn't even piped up when the phone went and the pipes hadn't made a sound all evening. There was nothing on the box. Her eyes were too tired to start a new book. There was nothing to do but think about tomorrow. She was all on her own and that meant she didn't need to tell a soul what she was thinking. Deluded? So what! The little buzz was – nice.
Later, as she lay in bed still thinking about tomorrow, it crossed her mind whether to invite Mary to tea over the next few days. But she wouldn't – not just because Joe had never mentioned her so Tess oughtn't to interfere. She'd be doing nothing of the sort because actually she was looking forward to having Joe all to herself.
All morning, Em had been saying ‘wol’ over and over and Wolf had been careening around in circles, taking sudden bites at the base of his tail. Tess couldn't work out what Em was saying or why Wolf was doing this. She looked through his coat but could see only healthy skin, pink in places, grey in places. He continued to turn on his imaginary sixpence while Em implored wol at regular intervals.
‘Do you mean Wol-f?’ Tess pointed to the dog but Em continued to say wol.
‘Good God – Wolf, would you quit? You two need fresh air. Come on.’
For a girl born and bred in a city, Tess was not quite sure from where her belief in fresh air being the answer to all ills had stemmed. She'd never been particularly sporty, nor had long walks or the great outdoors shaped her childhood. Her memories of that time were of her parents’ emotional and physical inertia: her mother motionless, staring out of windows as if she could see no way out. Her father seemingly absorbed into the fabric of the armchair, Racing Post on his lap, racing on the television, telephone at his side. ‘It's a flutter – some men spend all Saturday at the bookies,’ he'd snap, implying they should be grateful for his company. How Tess had craved the house to herself back then. And now she has one.
She'd grown to enjoy living at the top of a hill and the physical exertion it demanded. She'd looked at herself in the bath the previous evening and had noticed how her legs were shapelier than she remembered. And she'd stood naked in front of the mirror and had liked what she'd seen. She'd felt the firmness of her limbs as she lay in bed, giving her thighs a squeeze, tensing and releasing her calf muscles, running her hands along her upper arms to feel the pleasing dip and rise of muscle definition. Sea air and steep hills were doing wonders for her health and physique, she decided. Negotiating West End crowds and having to share the recycled air on the underground never had.
‘Wolf, come. Now, you silly dog. Stop spinning. Let's get some fresh air.’
‘Wol!’
Down the drive, across the road, steeply down the divvety path to the Gardens. Daffodils that should be dead by now, a cheeky bluebell out way too early, a profusion of crocuses, bright primroses flirting at all who passed by. Occasionally, the fertile soil beneath certain trees encouraging ancient plants like wood anemone, dog mercury and toothwort. The buggy dinked and lurched over the uneven ground sending tremors up Tess's arms, but Em was too busy saying ‘wol’ to be bothered. Wolf was off foraging; Tess loved how convinced he seemed of his treasure trail despite always bounding back to her empty-mouthed save his huge lolling tongue.
Through the natural tangle of the woods, they came to a vantage point where they could look down onto the sudden and fantastically incongruous splendour of the fastidiously planted Italianate beds, all swirls and ogees and complex symmetry. The planting was rapidly covering the soil now and Tess thought how it would not be long until the flower buds, currently a scatter of multi-coloured beads, would be pulled by summer into full bloom. What are you? Tess
