On Monday she made herself a cup of tea, sat down at the kitchen table and called the credit-card company; she was told that she needed to up her minimum monthly payment. She opened a letter from the police who said that she would be fined a thousand pounds for driving without tax and insurance and that if she wanted to appeal against the penalty she should apply for a court hearing in the following ways. She opened the letter from the pound, which said she owed a hundred and twenty pounds up to the previous Thursday for the safekeeping of the Rolls. She opened the first bill from the vet and shoved it back in the envelope. There was only so much news you could digest in one day. She got a text from Marty, who wanted to know if he could come and see the kids at half-term.
‘What do you think?’ she said to them, over breakfast.
They shrugged.
After her cleaning shift on Tuesday she walked into town to the low-cost solicitors and paid them twenty-five pounds to draft a letter to Marty asking for a divorce, and for back payments in child support.
‘How long?’ the woman asked.
‘Two years.’
She didn’t even look up. Jess wondered what kinds of stories she heard every day. She tapped in some figures, then turned the screen to Jess’s side of the desk. ‘That’s what it comes to. Quite a sum. He’ll ask to pay in instalments. They usually do.’
‘Fine.’ Jess reached for her bag. ‘He has someone to help him.’
She worked her way methodically through the list of things she needed to sort out, and she tried to see a bigger picture beyond that small town. Beyond a little family with financial problems, and a brief love story that had snapped in two before it had really begun. Sometimes, she told herself, life was a series of obstacles that just had to be negotiated, possibly through a sheer act of will. She walked the length of her seaside town and she vowed that she would hide the full extent of her financial worries from the two of them. It was important that they were allowed to hope, to dream, even if she no longer would. If she could give them nothing else she could give them that. She stared out at the muddy blue of the endless sea, gulped in the air, lifted her chin and decided that she could survive this. She could survive most things. It was nobody’s right to be happy, after all.
Jess walked along the pebbly beach, her feet sinking, stepping over the groynes, and counted her blessings on three fingers, as if she was playing a piano in her pocket: Tanzie was safe. Nicky was safe. Norman was getting better. That was what it all boiled down to, in the end, wasn’t it? The rest was just detail.
If she said it often enough she might start believing it.
Two evenings later, they sat in the garden on the old plastic furniture. Tanzie had washed her hair and was on Jess’s lap while Jess tugged the comb through the wet tangles. She told them why Mr Nicholls wouldn’t be coming back.
Nicky stared at her. ‘From his pocket?’
‘No. It had fallen out of his pocket. It was in a taxi. But I knew whose it was.’
There was a shocked silence. Jess couldn’t see Tanzie’s face. She wasn’t sure she wanted to look at Nicky’s. She kept combing gently, smoothing her daughter’s hair, her voice calm and reasonable, as if that might bring reason to what she had done.
‘What did you do with the money?’ Tanzie’s head had become unusually still.
Jess swallowed. ‘I can’t remember now.’
‘Did you use it for my registration?’
She kept combing. Smooth and comb. Tug, tug, release. ‘I honestly can’t remember, Tanzie. Anyway, what I did with it is irrelevant.’
Jess could feel Nicky’s eyes on her the whole time she spoke.
‘So why are you telling us now?’
Tug, smooth, release.
‘Because … because I want you to know that I made a terrible mistake and I’m sorry. Even if I planned to pay it back I should never have taken that money. There was no excuse for it. And Ed – Mr Nicholls was well within his rights to leave when he found out because, well, the most important thing you have with another human being is trust.’ She tried to keep her voice measured and unemotional. It was becoming harder. ‘So, I want you to know that I’m sorry I let you both down. I’m conscious that I’ve always told you how to behave, and then I did the complete opposite. I’m telling you because not telling you would make me a hypocrite. But I’m also telling you because I want you to see that doing the wrong thing has a consequence. In my case I lost someone I cared about. Very much.’
They were both silent.
After a minute, Tanzie reached a hand round. Her fingers sought Jess’s, and closed briefly around them. ‘It’s okay, Mum,’ she said. ‘We all make mistakes.’
Jess closed her eyes.
When she opened them again, Nicky lifted his head. He looked genuinely bemused. ‘He would have given it to you,’ he said, and there was a faint, but unmistakable trace of anger in his voice.
Jess stared at him.
‘He would have given it to you. If you’d asked.’
‘Yes,’ she said, and her hands stilled on Tanzie’s hair. ‘Yes, that’s the worst bit. I think he probably would have done.’
36.
Nicky
A week went by. They caught the bus to see Norman every day. The vet had sewn up his eye socket where the eye had had to be taken out; there wasn’t an actual hole but it still looked pretty grim. The first time Tanzie saw his face she burst into tears. They said he might bump into things for a while once he was up and about. They said he would spend a lot of time sleeping. Nicky didn’t like to tell them he wasn’t sure anyone would be able to tell the difference. Jess stroked his head and told him he was a wonderful brave boy, and when his tail thumped gently on the tiled floor of his veterinary pen she blinked a lot and turned away.
On the Friday Jess asked Nicky to wait in Reception with Tanzie and she walked over to the front desk to speak to the woman about the bill. He guessed it was about the bill. They printed out a sheet of paper, then a second sheet, then, incredibly, a third, and she ran her finger the whole way down each page and swallowed visibly when it reached the bottom. They had walked home that day, even though Jess was still limping.
The town started to get busier, as the sea turned from mucky grey to glinting blue. It felt weird at first, the Fishers being gone. It was as if no one could actually believe it. Someone said that they’d gone to Sussex, not Surrey. Someone else said that Fisher’s dad had been arrested for aggravated assault in Northampton. Nobody’s tyres got slashed. Mrs Worboys started to walk to bingo in the evenings again. Nicky got used to being able to walk to the shop and back and realized that the butterflies he still felt in his stomach didn’t have to be there. He told them this repeatedly, but they refused to get the message. Tanzie didn’t come outside at all unless Jess was with her.