there’s nothing wrong with that…’
‘You knew.’
‘It was endearing.’
‘Well, a pleasant distraction from when your pocket-sized blonde bombshells were being too demanding, at any rate.’
‘You had a schoolgirl crush and there’s nothing sinful about that,’ James told her with such sincerity that she itched to slap him. ‘But you’re young. I know you said that you’re only a few years younger than me, but in terms of experience we’re light years apart. Trust me when I tell you that in a year’s time you’ll have forgotten all about this. You’ll have met some nice lad…’
‘Yes,’ Jennifer parroted dutifully, wanting this entire conversation to be over so that she could go upstairs and bury herself under the freshly laundered covers.
He sighed and shook his head. This was a Jennifer he didn’t recognise. Gone was the smiling, malleable girl. Had he known that she had a crush on him? Yes, of course he had, although he had never openly addressed the issue. Now, for the first time, he could sense her locking him out. He understood but it was a strange sensation and he didn’t like it.
‘Your feelings for me are misplaced,’ he told her roughly. ‘I wasn’t lying when I told you that you want to enjoy your youth with boys who are uncomplicated and fun-loving.’
‘You make it sound as though I was looking for… looking for something more than just…’
‘A romp in the sack?’
Mortified, Jennifer shrugged.
‘You deserve a lot more than I could give you.’
By which, she thought, you mean that there’s nothing you’re interested in giving me aside from a peck on the cheek every now and again and lots of good advice about how to live my life.
He was being patronising and the worst of it was that he wasn’t even aware of it.
‘Don’t worry about me, James,’ she said with a forced smile, relieving him of the obligation to keep thinking about her feelings because he was a decent human being. ‘I’ll be fine. These things happen.’ Two steps back, putting distance between them. ‘I probably won’t see you before I leave.’
‘No.’
‘Of course I’ll keep in touch and I’m sure we’ll bump into one another now and again.’ One more step back.
‘You’ll be all right, will you?’
Jennifer chose to interpret this at face value and she looked at him with a polite, unfocused expression. ‘Of course I will. As I told you, the job I’ll be doing over there isn’t going to be substantially different than what I’ve done over the summer vacations. Naturally, I’ll be following through on a lot more and there’ll be a great deal of translating but I’m sure I’ll be able to handle it.’
‘Right. Good.’
‘So.’
James hesitated and raked his fingers through his hair.
‘Thanks for dinner, James… and I’ll see you…’
She remained frozen to the spot as he brushed past her, pausing fleetingly, as though hesitant to leave.
What did he think she was going to do? Jennifer wondered. Fling herself out of her bedroom window because he had rejected her? Was she so pathetic in his eyes that he doubted her ability to get over the slight?
The soft click of the front door closing signalled his departure and it was only once she was certain that he had left the cottage that Jennifer slumped.
She closed her eyes and thought of the excited girl who had bought a new outfit especially for her big date. She remembered her anticipation at having him all to herself over dinner. She had dreamt of seduction and of finally having this crazy crush of hers fulfilled. It suddenly felt like a million years ago and, although a year wasn’t long, it was long enough to say goodbye to that person.
EXCEPT one year became two, which became three, which became four. And in all those four years, Jennifer had not once set eyes on James. Each Christmas, she had contrived to bring her father over to Paris for the holidays, which he had loved. What had begun as a one-year placement, during which she could consolidate her French, had seen her rise through the company, and as she had risen so too had her pay cheque. She found that she could afford to holiday with her father abroad, and on those occasions when she had returned to England she had been careful with her visits, always making sure that they were brief and that James was nowhere in the vicinity.
He had walked out of the cottage four years previously and she had fled to Paris, her wounds still raw. She couldn’t imagine ever facing him again, and not facing him had developed into a habit. He had emailed her, and she had been happy enough to email back, but on the occasions when he had been in Paris she had excused herself from meeting him on grounds of being too busy, prior engagements, not well, anything because the memory of him gently letting her down remained, that open wound quietly hurting somewhere in the background of her shiny new life.
Except now…
She had nodded off on the train and woke with a start as it pulled into the station.
When she looked through the window it was to see that the flurries of snow that she had left behind in London were a steady fall here in Kent. The weather was always so much harsher out here. She had forgotten.
At six-thirty in the evening the train was packed with commuters and fetching her bags was chaotic, with people jostling her on all sides, but eventually she was out of the train and braving the freezing temperatures and snow on the platform.
She wasn’t planning on staying long. Just long enough to sort out the problems in the cottage, problems she had learnt about via an email from James who had been checking his house in his mother’s absence and had happened to walk down to the cottage to take a look only to find water seeping out from under the front door. Her father was away on his annual post-Christmas three-week holiday to visit his brother in Scotland. The email had read:
You can pass this on to your father, but I gather you’re in the country so you might want to check it out yourself instead of ruining your father’s fishing trip. This, of course, presupposes that you can interrupt your busy schedule.
The tone of the email was the final nail in the coffin of their enduring friendship. She had run away and, never looked back, and over time, the chasm between them had become so vast that it was now unbreachable terrain. His emails, which had been warm and concerned at the beginning of her stint in Paris, had gradually become cooler and more formal, in direct proportion to her avoidance tactics. It occurred to her that she actually hadn’t heard from him at all for at least six months.
In Paris, she could tell herself that she didn’t mind, that this was just the way things had turned out in the end, that their friendship had always been destined to run its course because it had been an unrealistic union of the inaccessible boy in the manor house and the childishly doting girl next
