‘Dick?’ She gave the same smile–shrug. ‘My love for Em soon made me realize that what I'd felt for Dick was just – well, it wasn't love at all. It was a crush. And hormones.’
But Joe wasn't smiling; he was still looking at her intently. ‘I didn't mean not having this Dick in your life – if you'll pardon the expression. I meant – your life. As a single mum. Do you find that hard, Tess? All this, on your own?’
Though Tess was quiet for only a moment, her silence was pronounced.
She wore the same carefully composed smile but her eyes now belied it, filmed by a sudden smart of tears which he could see she was fighting to control. Eventually, she looked up and nodded. ‘It is hard, Joe,’ she said. ‘Sometimes. I feel quite alone. Sometimes.’
He thought of her on the landing, enslaved by loneliness. ‘Yet you've come all the way up here – did you not leave a support network behind in London?’
‘Em is my family. And I might be stupid – but I'm strong and I will cope. Actually, it's a breath of fresh air up here – even if I have filled it with paint fumes.’
She was trying to lighten the conversation but Joe wanted to say, you're bullshitting, Tess. And he wanted to say, the thing is I saw you crying by yourself. And though he wanted to ask her what was making her cry, he really couldn't do that, could he. And therefore he couldn't very well say, Tess, don't cry on your own. And there were two reasons he couldn't voice any of these thoughts.
What could he do about any of it – not least because he'd be gone again tomorrow?
And who was she anyway? He had to keep reminding himself. Just his employee – that's how she saw herself, wasn't it?
Joe had to concede that any dynamic which had developed over the last few days, was tonight both heightened and limited by wine and time. He was off again tomorrow. Whatever he asked tonight and whatever she told him could have only temporary resonance. He told himself, you're pissed you idiot, so shut up.
Then he told himself he ought to draw on the ability he'd honed over the years to fade a woman into the background of his mind's eye whenever he left a location. Just as she really ought to fade into the background on the occasions he returned to this location. As his previous house-sitters had done without him even asking. The ones who'd asked him for a contract or the pack he'd prepared at the very least. This strange girl might be just another house-sitter, but she was currently doing the sitting at his table at his behest, drinking wine and giving compelling answers to questions he was kicking himself for asking in the first place.
She was a house-sitter who called his place home. Who'd filled it with a baby and constantly clean, line-dried washing. Who'd scrubbed out his cupboards and alphabetized his books. What was he thinking? He simply didn't know. But what he did know was that he was feeling more than he was thinking.
Think London, think London. He thought tomorrow couldn't come soon enough. He thought, I'll phone Rachel – she's always game when I'm in the city. He thought how tomorrow he'd be safely en route back to the way of life he'd cultivated over twenty years; feeling no greater link to London than he felt to France or anywhere else where he had a bridge and a girl.
‘Joe?’ He'd been lost in thought. ‘Tea?’
He cleared his throat but he still sounded hoarse from his long conversation with himself. ‘Please.’
The sound of the kettle busily boiling echoed the fast rattle of his thoughts. Ping. I'll take myself right out of her equation.
‘Maybe Dick'll make his millions, come back, swoop you up and take you to live with him on his ranch.’ (Joe decided that, just as he chose to call Em Emmeline, he'd be referring to her father as Dickle from now on.)
‘Dick? On a ranch?’ Tess baulked. ‘Dick's just a gorgeous, useless, beautiful, crazy dreamer. Even I can see that he's an utter waste of space.’
And, though Joe wasn't too keen on the swoon to Tess's voice, her conviction – heaped as it was with affection and generosity – made Joe quite certain that this Dickle was one area of her life that she really had worked out.
Tess awoke feeling she'd been deprived proper rest. Her sleep had been so busy, so detailed, so involving, that she woke assuming she'd overslept because it felt that her dreams had ensnared her for so long. But the clock said six o'clock and the light, filtering through a gap in the curtains but not making it far into the room, verified this. She knew she had around twenty minutes before Em would wake and these she spent bemused that after over two years during which sex hadn't really crossed her mind, let alone featured on her agenda, three men had infiltrated her sleep in explicit dreams.
She thought back over the details. Dick was in all of them wearing the same beatific smile he famously employed, along with touch, to override the need for much cogent dialogue. In reality, it had irritated her; in last night's dreams it had her fooled. She recalled Dick and Seb together in one scene; that she was running along the pier, coming across the two of them at the end, fishing. Buddies, it appeared. They turned to her and closed in on her and she wasn't entirely sure who kissed her first and who it was kissing her then, and whose were those hands on her breasts, in her hair, grabbing her bum.
Switching on the bedside lamp, Tess dipped into the John Irving paperback that she'd taken from Joe's collection. But drifts of the other dream soon distracted her. Dick again, but this time, Joe too. They weren't in Saltburn. They were crowded with her in the kitchen of the Bounds Green flat. The three of them, pushed against the units. An overriding sense of furtive urgency. Someone, Dick, Joe – she couldn't tell – lifting her onto the work surface. A mouth against hers. A hand between her legs. The feeling of a man's hardness rubbing up against her thigh. One of them taking her hand down to the bulge in his trousers. The feeling of flesh. Her softness. Their firmness. The wetness and the heat. Being about to come.
Tess frowned. She shook her head because she really didn't want to do any more remembering. She didn't want to think about it, because thinking about it was undeniably arousing. That her hand was absent-mindedly between her legs proved the point. The buzz, the release, the sexual attention bestowed on her in the dreams – but she could only chastise herself for being turned on. You should be appalled, she told herself. Because the conclusion to both dreams had been horrible, unimaginable.
Em fending for herself.
Em neglected.
A small distressed baby toddling off down the pier while her mother made out with a surfer and a musician. A tiny tot, alone in the sitting room of a rented flat in Bounds Green, crying while Mummy was having a threesome in the galley kitchen with a musician and a bridge builder.
Tess stared hard at the Loom chair with yesterday's clothes that would have to do for today. What a load of crap. She decided that analysing dreams was as ridiculous as heeding horoscopes.
Mystic Bloody Meg and Sigmund Effing Freud.
This made her smile though still she felt discomfited. If there was meaning to these dreams, what was it exactly? That her desires as a woman, a grown-up, were not compatible with her responsibilities as a mother? That she could be one or the other but not both? In reality she'd all but dispensed with the sexual side of her nature. In the dreams, she'd actively chosen to forsake being a mother. She had heard the baby, seen the baby, been aware of the baby in both – but her lust had ridden roughshod over all sense of maternal duty.
Only stupid dreams.
I am wide awake.
So why am I feeling so wretched?
Because it felt good. I forgot how good it feels to come.
Because it's been a long, long time.
She couldn't afford to consider that these long-dormant cogs, now starting to turn, had come not from dreams, but from events