and then getting shot. That book will sell, if you write it quickly. Leave it too long and the moment will pass. You’ve got all this time at home. Use it.’
In the silence she saw the dawning of interest in his eyes. ‘Do you-really think I could?’
‘I know you could. Jake Lindley can do anything.’
‘No-no,’ he shook his head in agitation. ‘This isn’t “Jake Lindley”. I’m not sure he’ll ever be around again. It’s just Jake.’
She understood.
‘It was always Jake for me,’ she said. ‘I never much cared for “Jake Lindley”.’
‘But a book-I haven’t done a long project in ages- I work in soundbites now-’
‘Then stop working in soundbites and start having long, joined-up, thought-out opinions again,’ she said urgently. ‘Jake, you still have all that. You haven’t lost it, just mislaid it a little.’
She was gripping his hands, looking eagerly into his eyes, and at that moment she looked closer to the seventeen-year-old who’d first adored him than he’d seen for a long time. It was the haunting echo of that memory that made him say, ‘I’ll do it-if you think I can-even though my head’s full of cotton wool, so that I can’t think how to put two words together.’
‘You don’t have to write it yet. Just do a bit of research and work out the outline. You can sell that to a publisher first.’
‘You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?’ he said with a touch of admiration. ‘You’ll be wanting commission as my agent next.’
‘You bet I will!’
He almost laughed, and for a moment she thought she’d revived the spark in him, but then his face became drained again.
‘Kelly, this is crazy. I can’t embark on the long haul when it’s as much as I can do to struggle up out of the pit every morning.’
‘Forget the long haul,’ she said firmly. ‘You’re looking at it the wrong way.’
‘Am I?’ He was watching her closely, as if waiting for her to produce the key that would open the vital door.
‘Just think about the first step. When you’ve done that we’ll worry about the second step, but never more than one at a time. So you must decide what the first step actually is.’
She was looking at him, waiting for a decision, and he fought to clear his mind, which had become cotton wool again. The first step…the first step…
‘My notes,’ he said at last. ‘I need to go back over them-and tapes-things from the last few years-to refresh my memory-’
‘Good. Where are they?’
‘In my flat. I’ll have to go there-’
‘First thing tomorrow.’
It was barely dawn when she called a cab and they went to his flat together. But when they reached the front door she hesitated.
‘Would you rather I waited out here?’
‘Why should I want that?’ he said, puzzled.
‘You wouldn’t let me come here before, to fetch your clothes. You sent Olympia.’
‘Olympia’s never been here. A social worker attached to the hospital did it for me. I guess I just didn’t want you to see it.’
She began to understand when he opened the door. This was no home, but a soulless cage. One room to live in, one to sleep in, and nothing that spoke of the man who lived there. It was as though his real self had gone somewhere else on the day he moved in. He’d kept her away before because this place revealed too much of what had happened to him without her.
She looked up to find him watching her closely, asking if she understood the things that were beyond words. She smiled and squeezed his hand. As he began going through his shelves she passed on into his bedroom.
Here there was more bleakness. A plain bed, a wardrobe, a bureau. No ornaments, photos, mementoes. Nothing to remind him of anyone he’d ever known. Not even herself, she realised with a pang of disappointment.
Suddenly she couldn’t stand it a moment longer. She began pulling open drawers, seeking something, anything, to reveal his inner life.
And she found it.
It was all there together in the bottom drawer, starting with their wedding pictures. They were excellent, a gift from a photographer friend. There was the absurdly young-looking eighteen-year-old girl and the scrawny young man. She frowned at the sight of Jake. Where was the confident young god of her memory? Had he really been this slightly loutish-looking individual with the unfinished air? And his expression, full of adoration for the girl beside him? Why hadn’t she noticed that at the time? Perhaps because her own adoration had filled her horizons.
Over the years he’d taken his own pictures of her, and there was one where everything had come together perfectly. Focus, colour, pose were all brilliant, and in the centre was a girl, laughing with joy because the man she loved was giving her all his attention. Her head was thrown back and happiness seemed to pour from her. Jake had blown this one up and framed it to keep. And then he’d hidden it away in secret.
Now, she thought, she knew everything. But she was wrong. The drawer had two final secrets to yield. First was a pair of baby bootees, one larger than the other. Kelly stared at them a long time, wondering about this man whose heart was so much deeper than she’d suspected.
But it was the last item of all that made her cry: a blue furry elephant, his trunk knocked permanently out of shape on the day she’d thumped Jake with him.
Now she remembered him, that night in the park, saying, ‘It was definitely Dolph the elephant. I know because I-because his trunk was always wonky after that.’
He knew because he’d kept him all these years, grieving for the child they’d lost as deeply as herself, but unable to say so. And perhaps grieving also for those early happy days that had gone. She bent her head and her tears fell on Dolph’s fur.
She felt Jake’s presence as he sat on the bed beside her, and his arms went around her.
‘Don’t cry,’ he said. ‘You can give him to your baby. He won’t mind about the trunk.’
‘It’s not that,’ she wept. ‘It’s everything-we had so much and we lost it.’
He drew her close and she sobbed freely on his shoulder. Now it was his turn to comfort her, and he did his unpractised best.
‘I don’t know what you want me to say,’ he told her. ‘I never really did. Perhaps we never could have kept what we had. We were both so young, and I was clumsy. You had all those exam passes and all I had was “front” and “attitude”. I made them do a good job for me, but in the end they’re not enough. When you got pregnant I was so relieved. It gave me the chance to tie you to me so that you couldn’t escape. Not very nice behaviour, but I wasn’t a very nice character. Look at me-’ He’d taken up the wedding picture. ‘I was a bit of an oaf in those days. You were the best thing that ever happened to me, so I grabbed with both hands.’
‘I was-the best thing-you loved me?’
‘I’ve never loved anyone in my life as much as I’ve loved you. And I never will. All I wanted was for you to love me, and somehow I could never quite believe that you did.’
‘Love you?’ she echoed, astonished. ‘But Jake, I adored you. You must have known that. I positively hero- worshipped you.’
‘Oh, yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I knew you hero-worshipped me, but that’s not quite the same as love. It was quite scary. I kept waiting for you to discover that I had feet of clay. I reckoned you’d dump me when that happened. In the end you did, but I can’t complain. We had eight years, and that was more than I hoped for.’
At first she was too shocked to speak.
‘But-but it wasn’t like that,’ she stammered at last. ‘It was always me scurrying around in your shadow, afraid I was boring you. You achieved so much-’
‘Only because you told me I could. I was a bum. I had a big mouth and I could talk my way into jobs, but I usually talked my way out again because I annoyed people by being too clever by half. Then I met you, and you actually admired me, which nobody had ever done before. If my name was mentioned people used to say, “Oh,
