‘I don’t want to go home,’ she said quietly, as Mum shut the boot.
She flinched. ‘What, love?’
‘I don’t want to go back home,’ Tanzie said.
Mum glanced at Mr Nicholls and then she tried to smile, walked over slowly and said, ‘Do you mean you want to be with your dad, Tanze? Because if that’s what you really want I’ll –’
‘No. I just like this house and it’s nice here.’ She wanted to say, ‘And there’s nothing to look forward to when we get back because everything is spoiled and, besides, here there are no Fishers,’ but she could see from Mum’s face that that was what she was thinking too, because she immediately looked at Nicky and he shrugged.
‘You know, there’s no shame in having tried to do something, right?’ Mum gazed at them both. ‘We all did our best to make something happen, and it didn’t happen, but some good things have come out of it. We got to see some parts of the country we would never have seen. We learnt a few things. We sorted it out with your dad. We made some friends.’ It’s possible she meant Linzie and her children but her eyes were on Mr Nicholls when she said it. ‘So all in all I think it was a good thing that we tried, even if it didn’t go quite the way we’d planned. And, you know, maybe things won’t be so bad once we get home.’
Nicky’s face didn’t show anything. Tanzie knew he was thinking about all the money.
And then Mr Nicholls, who had said barely anything all morning, walked around the car, opened the door for her and said, ‘Yes. Well. I’ve been thinking about that. And we’re going to make a little detour.’
27.
Jess
They were a muted little group in the car on the way home. Nobody asked to play music, and there was little conversation. Even the dog no longer whined, as if he had accepted that this car was now his home. The whole time Jess had planned the trip, through the strange, frenetic few days of travelling, she had imagined no further than getting Tanzie to the Olympiad. She would get her there, she would sit the test, and everything would be okay. She hadn’t given a thought to the possibility that the entire trip might take three days longer than she had planned or that she would blow the budget in the process. She’d never once considered that they might need to stay somewhere on the way home. Or that she would be left with precisely £13.81 in cash to her name and a bank card that she was too frightened to feed into a cashpoint in case it didn’t come back.
Jess mentioned none of this to Ed. He was silent, his gaze trained on the road ahead, perhaps lost in thoughts of his father. Nicky, behind him, tapped away on Ed’s laptop, ear-buds wedged into his ears, his brow furrowed with concentration. Jess suspected there was some weird gadget of Ed’s that allowed him access to the Internet. She was so grateful that he was talking and eating and sleeping that she didn’t query it. Tanzie was silent, her hand resting on Norman’s great head, her eyes fixed on the speeding landscape through the window. Whenever Jess asked her if she was okay, she would simply nod.
None of it seemed to matter as much as it should. Because something fundamental had shifted in her.
Ed. Jess repeated his name silently in her head until it ceased to have any real meaning. She sat inches from this man, who, she now understood, was quite simply the greatest man she had ever known. She was only surprised that nobody else seemed to have realized it. When he smiled, Jess couldn’t help smiling. When his face stilled in sadness, something inside her broke a little. She watched him with her children, the easy way in which he showed Nicky some feature on his computer, the serious manner in which he considered some passing comment of Tanzie’s – the kind of comment that would have caused Marty to roll his eyes to Heaven – and she wished he had been in their lives long ago. When they were alone and he held her close to him, his palm resting with a hint of possession on Jess’s thigh, his breath soft in her ear, she felt with a quiet certainty that it would all be okay. It wasn’t that Ed would make it okay – he had his own problems to deal with – but that somehow the sum of them added up to something better. They would make it okay. He was the first person Jess had ever met with whom she understood the saying: They were just really good together.
She was afraid to ask him what any of this meant. She was afraid that she had rattled on for so long about how she didn’t need anyone, how she was quite self-sufficient, thank you, and how, what with her work and the two kids and the dog, there was no room for anyone else in her life, that he might have taken her seriously.
Because she wanted Ed Nicholls. She wanted to wake up with him, to drink with him, to feed him toast from sticky fingers. She wanted to wrap her legs around him in the dark and feel him inside her, to buck against him as he held her. She wanted the sweat and the pull and the solidity of him, his mouth on hers, his eyes on hers. They drove and she recalled the previous two nights in hot, dreamy fragments, his hands, his mouth, the way he had to stifle her as she came so that they wouldn’t wake the children, and it was all she could do not to reach across and bury her face in his neck, to slide her hands up the back of his T-shirt for the sheer pleasure of feeling his skin against hers.
She had spent so long thinking only about the children, about work and bills and money. Now her head was full of him. When he turned to her she blushed. When he said her name she heard it as a murmur, spoken in the dark. When he handed her a coffee the brief touch of his fingers sent an electric pulse fizzing through her. She liked it when she felt his eyes settle on her, something distant in his gaze, and she wondered what he was thinking.
Jess had no idea how to communicate any of this to him. She had been so young when she met Marty, and apart from one night in the Feathers with Liam Stubbs’s hands up her shirt, she had never had even the beginnings of a relationship with anyone else since.
Jess Thomas had not been on an actual date since school. It made her sound ridiculous, even to herself. She just wanted to show him.
She ached with it.
‘We’ll keep going to Nottingham, if you guys are all okay,’ he said, turning to look at her. He still had the faintest bruise on the side of his nose. ‘We’ll pitch up somewhere late. That way we’ll make it home in one run on Thursday.’
And then what? Jess wanted to ask. But she put her feet up on the dashboard, and said, ‘Sounds good.’
They stopped for lunch at a service station. The children had given up asking if there was any chance they could eat anything but sandwiches, and now eyed the fast-food joints and upmarket coffee shops with something close to indifference. They unfolded themselves, and paused to stretch.