Funnily enough, it was thinking about how Amy had treated Joe and Ben that gave rise to the strongest emotion – anger on their behalf. But if I wanted to temper it and calm myself down, I found that I could do so simply by remembering the fact that poor Amy was now living with Ant. Because how could anyone ever choose that? I wondered, even though, of course, I’d chosen exactly that myself.
Back home, I could analyse my feelings rather better, and I came to realise just how lonely I’d been. And I don’t mean lonely after Ant left, either; I mean before, when we were still together. Because though being alone hadn’t been easy, there is truly nothing that makes you feel more lonely, I now saw, than living with someone, spending your weekends and evenings with someone, who simply doesn’t relate to you at all. Spending your time with a partner who doesn’t even like you that much – a partner you don’t have any respect for either – that, my friends, is what real loneliness feels like.
Ben was now at ours five nights a week. Only on Saturday nights and Sundays did he and the girls stay at number 12, as we now called it. It was Joe who’d started referring to it as number 12, no doubt because it was less painful than calling his old house Amy’s place, or even worse, Amy and Ant’s.
Once I’d managed to lure Dandy back home – by switching to an inordinately expensive brand of cat food – our house felt like a proper family nest. I’d sit in the middle of it all with the cat on my lap, knowing that Joe was reading in the conservatory and the three kids were playing upstairs, and I’d feel ecstatic about the benevolent buzz of it all. I’d imagine how sterile and awful things must seem down at number 12, and allow myself to feel smug.
On Easter weekend we changed our routine, and the children went to number 12 for Friday and Saturday, so that we could leave for Whitby on Easter Sunday morning.
In order to avoid Ant’s wrath, I’d got into the habit of getting everyone ready with military precision, so I had to keep reminding myself that Joe was not Ant. ‘We’ll leave when we leave,’ he told me, and I wandered through the house gathering stuff together, murmuring, ‘We leave when we leave, we leave when we leave,’ while still expecting to be told off.
‘Can we stop on the way if we get hungry?’ I asked him, when our paths crossed in the hallway.
‘Of course,’ Joe replied. ‘I’m not gonna drive for five hours without a break, am I? We can stop any time you want.’
It was half past eleven by the time we’d bundled everyone out of the house, and it was after six when we got to Whitby. The journey had been entirely stress-free, had been fun even, with Joe and I chatting easily up front and the kids in the rear pulling faces at the occupants of other cars.
Joe’s dad’s place was pretty amazing. It was a four-storey Regency terrace, with three bedrooms on each of the upper floors. A faded plaque on the door said it had once been called The Waves, and an even more faded sign in the window still read No Vacancies.
While Joe’s dad made a pot of tea, Emma showed us around the house.
The ground floor was quirky and comfortable, if a little shabby with wear, while on the first floor were Joe’s dad’s bedroom, study and junk room.
The second-floor bedrooms, which included my room, needed a coat of paint, but were otherwise perfectly functional.
As Joe had decorated Ben’s top-floor room with a huge Spider-Man mural, that’s where all three kids wanted to sleep, so we moved some mattresses around and left them there to play.
It was a surprisingly warm, sunny evening – warmer than Corfu, they’d said on the radio – so once we’d drunk our tea, we went for a walk along the seafront and then down to the beach so that the kids could run off all their excess energy. As Amy had once described Whitby as ‘gritty’, I was surprised just how nice it all was. It looked more like pretty to me.
On the way back we bought fish and chips for everyone from a takeaway, and these we ate in the kitchen, straight from the paper. I loved the absence of fuss or formality – it really made me feel welcome.
Once the kids were in their top-floor bedroom – and I say bedroom rather than beds for a reason – Reg broke out the wine, Joe lit a not-really-necessary fire, and the four of us settled in the lounge.
Reg’s manner was warm but detached – he somehow managed the perfect balance of being attentive but not overbearing – and just from having met him, I felt as if I knew Joe better than before. Reg seemed to be the key to understanding why Joe was the way he was.
Emma was talkative enough to fill in any awkward gaps, chatting about a food bank she volunteered at, the unlikely characters she met there, and a trip she’d once taken to Japan.
Eventually the conversation turned in my direction, and Reg asked how I spent my days. I thought that was such a lovely way to ask the question, so much less guilt-inducing than the usual ‘What do you do?’ or, even worse, ‘What do you do for a living?’ questions that had always given me so much trouble when I’d not been working.
I told him about my job at the farm
