David and Jen

Anna snorted, unhappily. They'd grown up together and at one time she would have said that she knew her sibling better than anyone else alive. Now that was no longer true.

***

Opening Negotiations

He alighted from the train and looked around for the exits. This station had an odd layout with the platforms down below and the concourse up above and it had been a while since he'd last been here. The place had had a bit of a facelift with fresh paint and detail in the tiling. He took the escalator up to the main hall and strode towards the exit, his footsteps echoing in the wide, open space.

It was late September and there was a nip in the air, a little reminder that autumn was waiting in the wings. Mid-afternoon on a weekday there wasn't much traffic about, just the bustle to be expected in a biggish city centre.

He surveyed the posters for the bands playing the City Hall. Mm, not bad but he could have his pick in London, leave work, get dinner, take in a gig, and still get a train home. Once he moved house, he would be on a direct line to London and things would be easier, even this journey.

Now, where was Ellis Street? Finding a map of the city centre he discovered it was about half mile away and presumably the Century Hotel would be somewhere along its length.

He caught sight of himself in shop windows as he strode along. He still couldn't quite believe the difference a little self-respect made. He felt taller somehow. The new suit and shirt were crisp, even after the journey from London.

Well, there it was; less a hotel, more a big pub with aspirations. Large glass windows and faux Victoriana features. He checked his watch, and he was bang on time. He walked to the door, slipped inside, and tried to see if he could spot her before she spotted him.

There was no sign of her. He sighed and guessed that all things considered, there was many reasons why she might not be exactly on time.

He made his way to the bar and was amazed to see an American IPA on tap. Things were looking up! Although at over 5% he was going to have to exercise restraint. He made his way to a window seat and waited.

About ten minutes later, the door opened, and Jen let herself into the pub. His heart gave a jolt. She was exactly as he remembered her. Pale oval face, dark eyes, wavy shoulder length dark brown hair, upright posture, slim in the bust and the hips. She was wearing a pale blouse and checked skirt with fawn coat on top of the ensemble. He didn't recognise the coat but then it had been quite a while since they had last seen each other.

Jen was sporting heels which clacked noisily on the wooden floor as she made her way to the bar where she stopped and surveyed the room. To his amazement her gaze slid over him, and she turned back to the bar to get a drink.

After buying a white wine, she made her way to one of the tables in the middle of the floor. David still couldn't believe she hadn't recognised him but there was no getting around it.

He stood and went to go over to her table and then stopped. She had her back to him, and he didn't think she would appreciate being startled so, somewhat awkwardly, he made his way around until he caught her attention.

She stared at him. "David?"

"Yes. Hello Jen."

"You're wearing a suit!"

She looked down. "And new shoes!"

"Uh, yeah."

He looked down at the Oxfords and then shook his head, this wasn't how this was supposed to go.

"Look, I'm over there, by the window. Would you like me to come here, or would you like to join me there?"

"You've had a haircut!"

"Yes, yes, enough about my appearance. Shall we?"

He stooped to pick up her bag and straightened up to find her still staring at him.

"What?" he exclaimed. "So I got a haircut, what of it? I am capable of looking after myself."

"But it's a nice one! Mrs Washington doesn't do more than the basics."

"That's because Mrs Washington didn't do it."

He scooped up her glass, turned and walked back to the window, put her bag on the table and took a long pull of his pint. Sitting down, he waited and after a few moments he heard her walking towards him.

Facing each other over the small round table, there was a moment's silence.

"How are the kids?" he asked.

"They're fine, although I think they're starting to wear on Dad a bit."

Thinking of his father-in-law, David grinned inwardly. He could only imagine how the old patriarch was handling it.

"Tilly at school?"

"Yeah. She's enjoying it, and it's lovely to have a bit of time with just me and Josh."

"You get any time to yourself?"

Jen eyed him. "Mum takes them for a bit to give me some peace but it's not the same."

Sensing a potential hazard, David tacked on to a new heading.

"You okay for money?"

"Yes, that's something I wanted to ask you, how are you able to send me this much? Surely you don't even have enough left for the rent?"

"I do and don't call me Shirley!" he quipped.

She was stony faced. Oh dear, perhaps it was too early for humour but then his ability to see amusement in inappropriate circumstances had caused difficulties between them before.

He sighed. "I got a new job, and it pays rather better than the old one. I got a friend to work out how much I should be paying you and so that's what you're getting."

"You still have enough for fancy clothes though," Jen said bitterly.

"I have to look smart for the job. It's not an option. I thought you would prefer to see me look smart rather than turn up in jeans and trainers."

"I don't care what you look like!" she flashed back.

He met her gaze steadily and it was she that broke first. They were silent for a while.

Jen looked at David's suit. It was well tailored in a deep grey fabric. David had never been fat but now he looked positively sleek.

An immaculate white cotton shirt showed above the jacket collar and at the end of the sleeves with, good grief, double cuffs! And cuff links! The shirt was open at the collar so that he looked at one and the same moment both formal and informal.

"That's a smart outfit, though."

He looked down at himself.

"Yeah, it's nice, isn't it? Derek recommended a tailor and hinted that I should use them."

"Derek?"

"My boss." David grinned suddenly. "Bloody well should look good at over a grand!"

Jen gasped. "A thousand pounds! That's more than everything I have!"

"I told you, it goes with the job."

His insouciance grated on her.

"Meanwhile we're scraping by!"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" he said, hands up. "I'm currently sending you as much as I used to earn this time last year, so you are definitely not scraping by. Are your parents charging you rent?"

She clenched her fists; how dare he make this about the money!

"I give them something, but this is not about the money!"

David looked defensive. "But," he started.

"Shut up! While you're swanning around London, I'm looking after two small children and living on my parents' goodwill, wondering what the hell I'm going to do next, while Anna looks down her nose at me and lectures me on my life choices!" she shouted.

There was silence for a few moments and the barman came over.

"Is everything alright?"

David looked away and muttered something under his breath that sounded a lot like everything is very fucking much not alright.

"We're fine. Sorry about the noise, we'll keep it down," Jen said.

David put his hands flat on the table.

"Maybe this wasn't such a good idea," he said, and stood up. "I'll give you a ring in a day or two."

He turned and walked towards the door but before he could reach for the handle, he heard her trotting after him.

"David, wait!"

He paused, one hand on the door handle without turning round.

"David, I'm sorry! I have so much to say to you and I just ... I just got off on the wrong foot."

He looked over his shoulder at her and raised an eyebrow.

"Was it the shoes?"

Jen laughed. Drat the man, he always had been able to make her laugh! Oh, and God, did she want some company other than her family!

***

They sat down by the window again. One thing was still nagging at her.

"But David, how did you get the job? People don't just jump from what you were doing into something like that."

"Oh well, I, er, met someone."

Her brows drew down. He was being evasive.

"If we're going to make this work-"

He looked at her.

"Is that what we're doing?"

"Maybe," she said, firmly. "We have obligations. And Tilly misses you."

David doubted that. His old job and the bits and bobs he'd done to make ends meet had meant that he was often out of the house from before the kids were awake and then not back until they were in bed.

However.

"And you?" he said.

She looked down at her hands, at the wedding ring she still wore.

"I miss how we used to be, before the kids, before ... before I got so blue."

She ground to a halt and David's heart thumped in his chest. Slowly, tentatively, he pushed his hand across the table to close upon hers.

A couple of tears splashed on the woodwork to mingle with the glass marks and cigarette burns.

He reached into his inside pocket, brought out his handkerchief and offered it to her. Gratefully she dabbed her eyes and then inspected the clean white square.

"When in the world did you start ironing your handkerchiefs?" she exclaimed; then shook her head as if there were too many contradictory things in it.

Her gaze fell on his hand.

"Where's your ring?"

The previous week, after thinking about this meeting, some obscure impulse had prompted him to take it to a goldsmith's to be polished. David opened his wallet, unzipped the inside compartment, and retrieved the ring to place it on the table where it glowed, buttery and rich in the yellow light of the pub's imitation gas lamps.

She looked up at him hopefully and then, mercurial as ever, said, "But the job?"

Damn!

"How did you get the job, David, and who is the someone? Be honest with me, we can't have secrets. Not now."

David pondered for a moment, wondering how much to tell her. If they were reconciled ... he found himself momentarily breathless that that had started to become a possibility. But even if they moved to a galaxy far, far away, there was still a tiny chance that this period of his life would surface and then what? Back to square one?

He decided on honesty, drew breath, and plunged in.

"Well, after Sally and the whole ... awfulness ..."

He paused; she was frowning.

"You want to know everything? Well, this is everything."

She looked nettled. "I don't want to hear anything sordid."

"But Jen, either you want to hear everything, or you don't. What's it to be?"

She snorted and then visibly steeled herself and gave a sharp nod. So that was going to be the way of it.

David launched into the story of how he had become the village gigolo while Jen's eyes got wider and wider.

"David! That's -- "

"Yes, I know," he interrupted, "Mrs Barrett-"

"Mrs Barrett! From the parish council!"

"The very same. She described it as an arrangement."

"An arrangement!"

"Jen, if you repeat everything I say, then it's going to take twice as long."

As he related the story of how, during the early part of the year, he had come to be servicing three of the parish worthies on a regular basis, her eyes became positively saucer-like.

"Is this how you were able to send me the child support?"

"Sure. It was either that or work myself into the ground, so I took Marjorie Barrett up on her offer."

He paused; thinking of Em, not Marjorie, not Mrs Barrett, and frowned.

"Anyway, at the end of May, the wheels came off."

"Oh God, did you get caught by the police? Have you now got a record? For immoral earnings!" she squeaked.

"Calm. No record, the police weren't involved even after I was beaten up."

"You were beaten up!"

"You're doing it again."

He smiled wryly. "Would you like another drink?"

She nodded and he made his way to the bar.

Jen looked unseeingly out of the window at the buildings opposite. Part of her was in turmoil at his news and another part found his mere physical presence disturbing, completely upending her rehearsed scenario. Her well-trodden arguments remained unvoiced.

Yet another part of her found comfort in the ease with which they settled back into familiar patterns. This was how they'd met and bonded of course, talking over drinks about subjects from the playful to the sober.

His ability to inject humour into any situation was one of his most attractive and maddening qualities. It sometimes made her think he didn't take anything seriously, but now she realised, it almost as if he were running two conversations at once.

As he made his way back to their table, she found herself seeing him in a fresh light. Had he always been this way? And she hadn't noticed? Or worse, discounted as flippancy his defence against hopelessness?

"There," he said, seated again. "Where was I?"

"You'd been beaten up."

He grimaced and told her about Nina Desai and the visit from Peter Morgan.

"But you weren't badly hurt?"

"Well, I was pretty bruised and there were plenty of questions at work. But things quietened down, Mister Desai had sent me a message and I heard it loud and clear."

He sighed. "Then things took a turn for the worse."

"Oh God, what now?" she exclaimed. What other revelations would there be?

"Remember the bust up with Phyllis? She didn't like being given the brush off and decided she would have a little revenge."

Jen's mouth turned down. "I don't like the sound of this."

"You've come this far, there's not a great deal more to tell. Do you remember Rosemary Ogilvie?"

"From the big house on York Road?"

He nodded. "That's the one. Phyllis talked to Rosemary; Rosemary rang me at work."

"At work! How did she find out where you worked?"

Jen's face grew grim. She knew a little of Rosemary's reputation. David had been swimming with sharks.

"With our surname? It wouldn't take much. Anyway, she found me and threatened me. She asked me to pay her a visit and, not to put too fine a point on it, blackmailed me into seeing her and her friends. Singly and in groups."

Jen's eyebrows rose into the stratosphere.

"That's when it stopped being Marjorie Barrett's arrangement and started being out and out prostitution, with Rosemary Ogilvie as my pimp."

"Dear God, David, you could have been prosecuted, or caught venereal disease! Thank God you were only beaten up!"

David wondered briefly why those two things were worse than getting a good kicking. Or which of the two Jen considered to be the poorer option and whether the notion that all three could have transpired had yet occurred to her.

"Well, I've been lucky. The bruises faded, I didn't have my collar felt, and I visited a clinic and got a clean bill of health."

Jen couldn't believe her ears. All this from the stranger across the table, who seemed to have emerged butterfly-like from her memory of the tired, bored, and frankly shabby individual who had waved them off on the train before Christmas.

Then there was this sexual super-hero who also seemed to be part of the cast. No doubt he'd ... enhanced that side of things, that's what men did, but even so.

"So how did you get out of that?"

"Jane. Jane Cranshaw. I met her through Rosemary, but she wasn't party to Rosemary's games. She took pity on me and introduced me to a friend of hers in London. On the strength of her introduction and the test results, Derek offered me a job in the City."

Jen was confused.

"What test results?"

Yet more things that had happened while she had been preserved in amber at her parents' house.

David explained how Misha Astani had sent him to the office on Fairford Street and how the results had persuaded Derek Cross that he might be worth a gamble.

"Oh yes, I remember you telling me on the phone."

David nodded and continued, "I've just finished my first month or so. It's fun, I'm really enjoying it, although the commute's a drag. Cycling in London's an education!"

Jen shook her head, it was all a bit much to take in, parish councillors, glamorous women, blackmail, City business, shady dealers, and their enforcers and such a lot of sex!

She looked at David, who had a small, slightly hopeful smile on his face.

"I don't know what to say."

"It's a lot, I know. I can hardly believe it myself sometimes," he said.

"Now, I've been talking about my adventures, what's been happening with you?"

"Oh, I haven't got anything to match that."

"I'd be concerned if you had!" he smiled.

"Should I be concerned about you, then?" she retorted.

His face fell and he looked chastened.

She spoke. "I need to think. This is a lot to take in and I don't know how I feel about any of it. I'll give you a ring in a day or two. Evenings okay?"

"After 9 as a rule. Although," he rootled inside his jacket and produced a blocky black plastic thing with a flourish. "I have one of these!"

"What's that?"

"Oh, it's very de rigeur in the City, it's a mobile phone!"

She gawped at it.

"Would you like the number?"

***

It wasn't until she was nearly home that she stopped and said out loud, "He cheated on me!"

A woman coming the other way glanced at her and tutted, "That'll never do, pet."

She patted Jen on the arm. "You give him what for."

Distractedly, Jen nodded and carried on walking, her mind turning over and over. The bastard! He'd spun that tale to her in the pub and she'd just swallowed the whole juvenile fantasy wholesale! Christ, what a mug!

Furious with herself and her husband, she stomped down the High Street until she caught her heel in the pavement and with a smart crack, it came away from the rest of the shoe.

Standing lopsidedly outside the newsagents, she shouted, "Now that's just bloody perfect!"

Walking the last half mile in bare feet, grim faced, seething with rage, she banged into the house.

Anna was standing by the kettle waiting for it to boil.

"I take it, it didn't go well," she said, without looking up.

"And you can fuck off and all!" Jen snapped, pushing past her sister into the hall.

"Wait, what?" she heard from behind her as she made for the stairs.

"Jen, wait, what happened?" Anna called after her as Jen ran up, two at a time, until she reached the landing and stopped in front of the door to her room.

The paint unchanged in twenty years, the carpet and wallpaper all just as it had been when she was a child. Back where she started from, in her parents' house, in the room she grew up in. Full circle. In a decade, she'd gone precisely nowhere. She fell to her knees and sobbed.

Anna ran up the stairs to find her little sister weeping; the sort of distress that gives no thought to pride or appearance. She knelt beside her and put her arm round her.

"Jen! Jen! What's wrong? What did David do to you?"

Jen buried her face in her sister's shoulder.

"Oh Anna, it's not fair!" she hiccupped. "He's got everything, and I've got nothing!"

Anna patted her on the back, consolingly.

"Was he horrible to you?"

Jen looked in her bag for a handkerchief.

"No," she sniffled.

"Then what?"

Anna was baffled. She'd always thought of herself as more pragmatic than Jen. Her sister would always be flying off the handle at something or other.

"He's got a nice suit and a good job and I'm back at mum and dad's! And Anna, I miss him! I miss him so much and I never knew it till now!"

The tears started again, and Anna held her as she cried.

Then Anna said, "Well, he hasn't got you, or Josh, or Tilly."

Jen sat straight and looked at Anna.

"What do you mean?"

"Why would he come all this way otherwise?"