‘Good,’ Joe said. ‘Ben seems to like me being here, anyway.’
‘Well, it’s convenient. It’s almost next door.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Joe said. ‘But I think it’s more just the atmosphere, really.’
‘The atmosphere?’
‘Yeah, you run a very relaxed household, don’t you?’ Joe said. ‘You’re really easy-going.’
I laughed. ‘That’s like my supposed good cooking. No one’s ever said that before, either.’
‘Really?’ Joe said. ‘That surprises me. Maybe you’ve just been hanging out with the wrong people.’
Joe’s deadline came and went. He handed me another four hundred pounds, and I increased the quantity of food that I cooked day by day until he seemed satisfied. He really did eat like a horse.
My moods were very up and down about it all. Some days – most of the time, in fact – I could convince myself that nothing was happening here. He was just a lodger, I told myself, and if other thoughts began to manifest, I’d arm-wrestle my mind back under control. Those thoughts – such dangerous thoughts – were still there, of course, lingering in the periphery of consciousness. But by staring steadfastly straight ahead, I could almost pretend they didn’t exist.
From time to time, though, specifically if I’d had a drink, I’d lose my steely sense of self-control and let myself think about what it was like living with Joe. Because the truth of the matter was that it was wonderful. After years of living with someone who never understood – or even cared to understand – anything I tried to say, Joe, it turned out, ‘got me’. He was interested in my views. He liked my cooking, he laughed at my jokes, and I at his. We both liked the seaside and walking in the forest. We both loved nineties Britpop and arty films but hated trashy TV. Joe encouraged me, almost daily, to think more deeply and to laugh louder, and in his company I couldn’t help but do so. When I was with him, I could hear myself being funnier and sexier and more interesting, even to myself.
The fact of the matter was that Joe was heavenly. I could barely believe it had taken me so long to notice.
But Joe’s qualities, Joe’s beauty, too, weren’t classical, I suppose. He wasn’t flashily generous in the way Ant had been, and he didn’t have chiselled features or perfect skin. His clothes weren’t the elegant suits that made Ant stand out in a crowd, but faded jeans with ripped knees and dusty builders’ boots. So, in a way, everything that was good about Joe fell outside my frame of reference. It was as if I’d been trained to look for the wrong things, and so had needed to learn how to think differently before I could see him. But here he was, grinning at me lopsidedly and scratching at the bristle of his beard. Here he was, hitching up his jeans unselfconsciously, and making me laugh by taking the mickey out of himself.
I began to imagine him staying for ever, though I couldn’t come up with any scenario that could possibly make that happen. His wife was just down the road with my ex – that was the only thing that linked us. His things and his family were waiting for him in Whitby, after all, while at mine he was living out of a backpack. Every clue indicated that this was temporary, and yet, and yet . . . I just couldn’t quite convince myself that’s all it was.
Time and again, I’d push all of this from my mind, and, for a day or two, I’d be fine. But then I’d come into the lounge and see his son seated on the sofa with my girls as they waited for tonight’s film to begin. Joe would be crouching down to light the fire, his builder’s bum peeping over the top of his jeans, and he’d look up at me and give me that lopsided smile and say, ‘I thought I’d light a fire. Make it cosy, like,’ and my heart would start to ache all over again. Because not only would it have been hard for us to look more like a family, we didn’t look like any old family, either. We looked like the family I’d always dreamed of. We looked like the family I’d never had.
Ben lived at ours almost all of the time. In fact, the only days he went with his mother were the days when Ant took the girls. If they were all doing something together – and quite often, it was something expensive that Ant had organised – Ben was happy to tag along.
I asked Joe one day why he thought Ben spent so little time with Amy. It seemed strange to me that he could get by without seeing more of his mother, and even stranger that she could accept it.
Joe shrugged, and smiled vaguely. ‘I think he just prefers it here,’ he said. ‘I think we all just prefer it here.’
By the end of March, I was feeling quite febrile about it all. On every other two-week anniversary, Joe had asked if he could stay on well before he was due to leave. This time we’d reached the thirty-first of March, and he still hadn’t said a word.
But the job he’d been working on was finished, this I knew – he’d gone over to pack up his tools that morning. So I was worried. Actually, I was more than worried, I was terrified.
I sat at the kitchen table all day, biting my nails and trying to imagine what might come next. Perhaps I should have said something, I thought. Maybe I should have given him some inkling about my feelings, and now I’d surely left it too late. But how can you tell your lodger you’re . . .
I couldn’t finish the sentence, even for myself. And was I? Was that really it? And if I named it, wouldn’t I be simply opening myself up to a fresh new world of pain?
Perhaps Joe had merely been
