Eight Perfect Hours by Lia Louis
Chapter Thirty
‘Hi, this is a message for Noelle Butterby. This is Ruth at Jerome’s College. We’re calling everyone who left their details on Facebook and otherwise to let them know the rescheduled time capsule event will go ahead as planned on the eleventh, to coincide with our open evening. The event starts at seven p.m. We hope to see you there.’
Theo stands in his dark, closed shop dressed in a checked shirt and bow tie and his jet black hair is combed over to one side in a quiff. He looks like part Teddy Boy and part barista.
‘Theo, I’ve never seen you in your canape delivery get-up. I love it.’
‘And I love yours.’ He grins at me. ‘Noelle, you look perfect.’
‘Do you think?’ Nerves dance in my belly. I’m wearing a red midi wrap dress, with a pleated skirt that I saw on an Instagram influencer I follow. She’s tall like me, has big hips like me, and I’ve never bought anything via Instagram before, but I knew I had to. I used the money I earned from Steve and Candice’s wedding and the second I put it on, I felt like I could stand a little taller. This dress is the sort of thing I’d dream of wearing, in the future. The dress of my daydreams – something the future Noelle Butterby would buy when her life had begun. But what’s the use of anything, if it’s always so far in the distance, you can never quite put your hands on it?
Charlie appears behind the counter, Petal in her arms.
‘Fuck me.’ She whistles. ‘You look out of this world. Like – why do I feel like I’m going to cry? God, I actually am. Elle, you look way too good to be delivering posh twats their bloody olives and fat lumps of cheese.’ She grimaces in Theo’s direction. ‘No offence, baby.’ Then she looks at me. ‘Elle, do you really think you should go? I love that you’re going for this but – I don’t really understand what this is.’
I’d felt the same after I’d said it, and on the walk home, I went over and over in my mind, the conversation with Helen, and the fact I’ve known this whole time there was something that didn’t feel right about Ed and me. The way I’d sit in that little flat with him and feel like I was in someone else’s world – intruding or something. But now I don’t think it was the flat. I don’t think it was bad décor like that bloody splodged glass bowl he kept his peanuts in either. I knew something wasn’t sitting right. I knew. My heart did, before my head caught up. I think Ed did meet someone in America. I think she’s waiting for him, in Virginia. And us – well, maybe that’s why I want to go to the party. So I know what it was. So I can look at him, standing in that house without me, and know that there is no Ed and Noelle. There hasn’t been, for a long time.
When I got home, I was relieved to find Ian sitting on the sofa with Mum. He’s been around a lot lately and both of them, both Mum and Ian have seemed happier. Mum even talked yesterday, of going to lunch at a new café in town that Ian keeps raving about. ‘Perhaps we could get a takeaway first,’ she said, and Ian beamed and said, ‘What a good idea,’ and I had to stop myself grabbing her by the shoulders proudly, and dancing with her around the living room.
I’d sat opposite them, on the armchair, and as new, fresh anger bubbled beneath my skin, I’d told them everything about Ed, and it felt so good to open up – to lean on my mum, to not have to be the pillar for once. I cried, which I did and didn’t expect all at once. I didn’t want Ed any more. But that didn’t stop me feeling used, or something. Something to be picked up, tried on like an old coat.
‘And you think she’ll be there?’ asked Ian. ‘This woman.’
I nodded. ‘Yeah – and I think I need to see it with my own eyes. For closure.’
That’s the thing – my world’s been stuck for a while, and I think Ed knew it. He thought he could come home and ‘turn back the clock’, as if I’d been waiting for him all along. And I guess in a weird way, it worked for me too, stepping back in time, to safety, old routines.
‘I think I want closure,’ I say to Charlie now, as she pats circles onto Petal’s chubby little back.
‘But if Ed has a girlfriend—’
‘He won’t tell me, Charlie. I’ve asked him. And – it just seems obvious to me now.’
‘But why do you need to go there––’
‘I want to see it, Charlie. I know it sounds mad or unhinged, but I feel like I need to go there, to that house, to the McDonnell’s. To see him there, without me. To feel it, to – say goodbye. I want to let go. And I don’t think I ever have let go. Of much at all, actually.’
Charlie looks at me sadly, the corners of her eyes crinkling. ‘I get it,’ she says. ‘My therapist Alan, he always says if you can physically do something to move on – write a letter and burn it or something, or actually have the person or thing in front of you – then there’s more chance of really dealing with something. Releasing it …’
We pack up Theo’s little van with the canapes and Theo checks and double-checks the amounts before he closes the doors. Charlie follows us out and kisses Theo goodbye, who gives Petal and Charlie matching forehead kisses.
‘That dress.’ Charlie grins at me, then gives a wink. ‘Go show those old stuck-up crones what Noelle Butterby is made of. And whatever you do, have a drink ready to throw over him. Posh people love a drink-throw. Invented it.’ And I see a glimmer of Charlie Wilde, then. That girl who would meet Daisy and me from college, her hair the colour of Easter egg foil, slinging her arms over our shoulders and whispering, ‘The guys in this place look dull as fuck.’
We drive away, Charlie waving, making Petal’s chubby little woolly-cardiganed arm do the same. A parent. A mother. And I realise I do want that. A little unit of my own, yes. But I want to make things happen. And not just someday. I’m ready for someday to be now.
Pulling up to Ed’s parents’ house is the most surreal experience. Everything looks exactly the same. The purple wisteria covering the biscuity brick, dangling above the front door in beautiful heavy cones, the old wooden Georgian windows and their pristine shutters. I remember the first time I came here. Ed’s rich, I’d thought. And then I felt myself shrink to a speck. I’m not sure I ever fully puffed up to full size again around them after that.
The gravel driveway is full of cars and a huge, black and bright purple Harley Davidson that screams ‘midlife crisis’, but Theo parks up on the road outside. He loads canapes into a trolley, as I watch from a distance, people standing and talking in the amber glow of Ed’s parents’ high-ceilinged living room. I can’t see Ed yet, but I know he’s inside. Nerves churn in my gut as Theo locks the boot. No. No, I need this. I need to walk into that house, standing tall, completely myself, and I need to stare everything in the eye. If someday is going to be now, then I have to stop being afraid. We are supposed to let go of things. We are supposed to make room for new. Things are meant to change. Say yes, panic later.
Theo and I follow Helen’s emailed instructions to go round to the back of the house. She always did this when they had barbecues. Guests at the front, family and any sort of ‘help’ as she put it, round the back, like ugly cattle, hidden out of sight. In the vast back garden there’s a wet sheen on the neat, trimmed grass, and I almost slip and lose the tray of food in my hand. And of course Helen is right there, looking at me like a cat who’s just puked on the kitchen counter.
‘Oh.’ Her eyes are wide, a hand at her chest, holding a champagne flute in the other. ‘Noelle,’ she says tightly.
‘Mrs McDonnell,’ smiles Theo. ‘I have for you the best canapes and the best extra pair of hands.’
I look down at the single tray of slightly squashed miniature quiches in my hands and at the huge case of food Theo is holding and see Helen’s eyes do the same. ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m the help. Where would you like us to put them?’
‘If you both just come through and arrange them on the platters on the counter. Then you can leave.’ When she says that part, she’s looking at me with eyes that I’m sure are part laser beams.
We follow her inside, into the huge farmhouse-style kitchen. It smells the same – vanilla bean and lavender reed diffusers in every alcove, pot-pourri, last night’s garlic. And there isn’t a thing out of place. Absolutely nothing has changed. And yet: everything has.
Helen stands guard at the kitchen door as a woman in chef whites checks and checks again, something in the oven that smells like baked chicken and red wine, and I can hear the din of voices and laughter and Rat Pack songs playing on a stereo. The same music. The same thin, white crockery, the same golden chandeliers, the same everything. And yet as I stand here, in the kitchen, arranging canapes on a huge white ceramic platter, I don’t feel it, like I used to. The speck. They are just people, like me. I might not have money or doctorates or trips to bloody Borneo planned, but they are just people. I never had to fit in. I’m not a puzzle piece trying to find its place and I never have been. These are just people, and these are just bloody platters purchased from John Lewis and Helen is just a bored old professor with grown-up sons who have flown the nest.
‘Nellie.’
Ed stands in the kitchen doorway, in smart trousers and a sky blue shirt, the top button open. He looks pale and surprised.
‘Hiya.’ Helen eyes us both nervously as if we’re a horror show that’s about to start.
‘Hi, Theo.’
Theo nods at Ed. ‘You all right, mate? Hope you don’t mind that I brought some help.’
Ed laughs nervously, then glances at his mother, eyes wide like a small boy in the teacher’s office. ‘N-no, no, not at all.’
There is deathly silence for a moment – well, nothing but the sound of Theo peeling back the cling film, and the woman in chef whites opening and closing the oven as if she’s doing it only to give her hands something to do because even she feels this is awkward.
Something wordless passes between Ed and Helen, and then she disappears, the kitchen door closing softly behind her.
‘Nell, can we …’ Ed gestures with a tilt of his head to the outside, to the McDonnell’s huge back garden, black and frosty through the huge patio doors.
‘Yep, all good,’ Theo says, looking up from the platter. ‘I’ll take it from here.’
The grass crunches under my heels and we walk until we’re several metres from the house. I can hear the trickling of the fountain behind me, of Ed’s parents’ pond. Helen used to call it the lake, and they’d all laugh, Ed and his brothers, and make fun of her. ‘I know pond doesn’t sound as good, Mum,’ Tom would laughingly say, ‘but I’m sorry, that’s what it is. A bloody big pond with a fountain stuck in the middle.’
‘What are you doing here?’ Ed asks, a chuckle in his voice, but it’s one of disbelief, of ‘what’re you bloody playing at, Nell?’
‘Is your girlfriend in there?’ I blurt.
‘What?’
‘Your girlfriend,’ I say. ‘The one waiting for you, in Virginia.’
‘I …’ He reaches a hand behind his neck then, and scratches. He gives me that sideways wince, and I think he’s going to pull some smooth line out of his arse, but then his eyes close as if surrendering. ‘So, Sam told you.’
‘Sam? No,’ I say. ‘No, he didn’t. What does Sam know?’
Ed sighs, drags a hand through his hair. ‘We talked at the hospital. Just – bedside stuff, you know. His dad talked about his first wife and marriage and girlfriends and––’
‘You told him you had one.’
Ed nods slowly. ‘And I thought he might tell you – obviously, I didn’t know who he was.’ And now it makes sense. Sam’s iciness, his set jaw, their serious-looking words in the hotel lobby.
‘And if you had known who he was, what, you would’ve just pretended?’
‘Nell, I’m sorry––’
‘I asked you.’My words cut through the silence of the garden, and the fountain in the blackness trickles on.
‘I didn’t know how to say,’ Ed says woundedly. ‘It’s complicated, Nell.’
I laugh – it’s a titter, just like Helen’s. ‘Ed, even for you that is––’
‘We were engaged.’
The words land, as if right there, on the grass between us. Three little grenades.
‘We’re not at the moment. And she isn’t here. Claudia …’ Claudia. She looks like a Claudia. A Claudia, I think, as I look in through the Georgian double doors into the warm, high-ceilinged living room, would fit right in, in there. ‘And I don’t want to lie. I never did. But it isn’t over, Nell. We’re taking some time. She was offered a job at the same time as me, but in another state, in Virginia and––’
‘She’s a doctor?’
He nods, almost embarrassedly. As if he expects me to make fun, to call him predictable. A cliché. ‘Oncologist,’ he says. ‘And I know I should’ve told you. But it all sort of went wrong, you know?’
I shrug, say nothing.
‘Things happened all at once,’ Ed carries on. ‘We had an engagement party, she started booking stuff, then her dad, he gave me his mum and dad’s wedding bands and it all suddenly felt really real and – then Tom called me about the job. About coming home. And she didn’t want me to go, but I didn’t want to go to Virginia and so we sort of broke it off. A break, I guess. Then I came home, and I saw you, and everything was …’
‘The same,’ I add.
‘Yeah. And it was easy, in every way. To pretend that I never left. That things never got complicated, that things were how they’d always been. For a moment, I even thought maybe we could – I don’t know. Pick up where we left off.’
Raucous laughter bursts from the house and we both look over at it, looming and grand, behind us, watching us how it has so many times over the years, in this garden.
‘I don’t think we could ever do that,’ I say to Ed sadly. ‘Not really.’
‘No,’ says Ed. ‘No, I know.’
Because you don’t love who I am, I want to say. You love who I could be. The Noelle who leaves her mum behind, who doesn’t care deeply, who wants to study business, make loads of money, who wants to move away from this little town and buy big homes and work through that checklist. And I want to see the world, yes of course I do, and I want adventures, and I want my hobby to be my job. But I don’t want to leave my family behind. I don’t want to leave this town completely.
‘Is that why you never accepted me on Instagram?’
Ed looks at his feet, then at me, his face tipped to one side. His eyes close again, and he nods. ‘There’s a lot of photos on there. Of us.’
And it hurts. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t. And I don’t want to be with Ed. But regardless of how ‘done’ a relationship is, there’ll always be a small part of you – a small, whimsical part – that wonders what would’ve happened if things had been different. Would his Instagram be full of me, if I’d gone with him? Or would we have ended up here anyway, regardless, in this cold, dark back garden.
‘I’m so sorry, Nell,’ says Ed. ‘I should’ve been honest, when you asked me. But I saw your face in that moment and––’
‘I know you well enough to know that there was something.’ The fountain sloshes in the darkness, and the distant sound of cutlery chinks from the kitchen. ‘I just didn’t know what. And I don’t think I wanted to believe it. I’d missed you too much. And then there you were.’
‘I know.’
‘It was almost too easy.’
Neither of us speak for a while, and we both stand silently, our breath making clouds in the dark night. Then Ed gently takes my hands in his. ‘For what it’s worth,’ he says, ‘I loved you, Noelle. I was a goner, when I met you. I loved you instantly. That smile. That mad curly hair …’
Warm tears bud in my eyes as he twirls the end of a curl in his fingers and drops it. ‘And I loved you too.’
‘God, I know, Nell,’ he says softly. ‘I know you did. And we were good. For such a long time, we were so good.’
‘Were,’ I repeat, and Ed nods, and brings my hands to his mouth. He kisses them, one each. ‘Were,’ he says.
Music grows louder inside the house and laughter floats out from the open kitchen door. I see Theo’s silhouette, waiting in the kitchen, zipping up his coat.
I lean and kiss Ed’s cheek for the last time. ‘You better go in.’
Ed swallows, and doesn’t say another word. I wipe my tears quickly on the back of my hand. I don’t tell him I’ll text him this time. I don’t tell him I’ll meet him, maybe, for coffee by the station, after he finishes work. I don’t even ask him if he’ll be at the rescheduled reunion next week. Instead, I release his hands.
‘Bye, Ed,’ I say, and I walk away. I leave him there on the grass – my past, and my comfort blanket, the dark, starry sky above our heads our only witness.