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AUTHOR’S NOTE (#ulink_babe2550-e000-5493-ac24-9225f12f8299)
Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (M.E.) is a long-term (chronic), fluctuating, neurological condition that causes symptoms affecting many body systems, more commonly the nervous and immune systems. M.E. affects an estimated 250,000 people in the UK, and around 17 million people worldwide.
With so many different and fluctuating symptoms, no two people’s experience of the illness are ever quite the same. To tell Jess and Rupert’s story I have drawn on my own experience of living with M.E. for the last twenty years, along with the stories of the kind people who I have spoken to over the years (with permission).
For more information go to the Action for M.E. website – https://www.actionforme.org.uk/ (https://www.actionforme.org.uk/)
JUNE 2017 (#ulink_a52c5b8e-88ed-5aa9-859d-f63d2b65dadd)
1 (#ulink_4a6a696d-00d6-50fd-a755-8ac3694a9300)
JESS (#ulink_4a6a696d-00d6-50fd-a755-8ac3694a9300)
It was his laugh that I recognised first. That low rumble was as familiar to me as my own, even after nearly a decade. I was at the bar talking to Gemma when I heard it. I froze, the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. I watched as recognition dawned on Gemma’s face too. As she looked towards the space behind me, her eyes widened and her perfect eyebrows arched in surprise. She put her cocktail down on the bar beside her and slipped off her stool.
‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ I asked quietly.
She nodded.
‘We need to go,’ I said. But even before the words left my mouth, Gemma was halfway across the pub, and more than halfway to drunk if her swaying was anything to go by.
‘Oi, Tremayne,’ she shouted. ‘Long time no see.’
I must have turned around at the same time as he looked up. When our eyes met, I felt twenty-one again. I hadn’t seen Rupert Tremayne for ten years.
‘Gemma,’ he said, holding out a hand to steady her, smiling as he took in the tacky plastic veil and L-plates she was wearing. ‘I’m assuming by your natty attire that this is your hen night and you’ve found some poor fool to marry you.’ If he was surprised to see us, he didn’t show it. He acted as though he’d only been gone for a week, not a decade.
As he leant down to kiss her on the cheek, his eyes caught mine again. I knew then that I couldn’t avoid this, that I couldn’t avoid him. My stomach was twisting itself into knots of anxiety as he walked past Gemma, towards me. I felt as though the whole pub was watching us.
He stood in front of me, a foot taller than I was, looking down into my eyes. His blond hair was still a little bit too long, greying at the temples; the collar of his jacket was turned up. He looked the same but different – as though he had become slightly worn over the years. But his eyes were still the eyes of the boy I used to know. He didn’t speak, and my mind went blank, my mouth dry. Neither of us knew what to say.
‘Jessie,’ he said eventually. I couldn’t tell whether he was pleased I was there or not. Nobody had called me Jessie since he left.
‘I thought you were in America,’ I replied quietly, remembering the last time I saw him – walking away from me at Heathrow airport, leaving me with that strange sense of lightness on the ring finger of my left hand.
‘I came back,’ he said.
Gemma and Caitlin appeared then. They both seemed delighted to see Rupert. They’d known him almost as long as they’d known me – until he left.
‘Come on,’ Gemma said to him, pulling at his arm. ‘Your friends are joining us for drinking games.’ He was still staring at me and I saw the corner of his mouth twitch at Gemma’s exuberance. He never was the sort of person to play drinking games.
Gemma, Caitlin and I had known each other for nearly twenty years – twice as long as he’d been away. We met on the first day at our all-girls private school and we clung together for safety. They called us ‘new money’ because our school fees weren’t paid for by family wealth left over the generations – we didn’t have trust funds. Truth be told, we didn’t fit in at all, but at least we had each other. My school fees were paid out of the money my grandmother left when she died, Caitlin’s by her father’s accountancy business and Gemma’s … well, none of us were really sure where Gemma’s family got their money from – not then at least.
Rupert and his friends joined our table, squeezing together in an already crowded pub. We never got around to any kind of game, drinking or otherwise, because as soon as we were all settled everybody started talking at once, trying to get to know each other, trying to understand how each of us fitted into the jigsaw of Gemma’s hen weekend. I couldn’t concentrate on anything other than the sensation of Rupert’s leg against mine. I felt like a teenager again, transported back to the long summer holidays we used to spend together in Cambridge when he was home from boarding school. It felt as though he had never been away.
I wondered how many years it had been since we were last all together, sitting around a pub table.
I listened as Rupert answered Gemma’s barrage of questions; I learned that he lectured in political history at York University, that he came back from America for this job. He didn’t tell me directly why he was here, but he knew I was listening.
Later, in the pub toilets, Gemma cornered me. Her eyes weren’t quite focused, her lipstick was smudged and her speech a little slurred.
‘He’s single, you know,’ she said.
‘Who is?’ I asked.
‘Rupert bloody Tremayne,’ she replied as she leaned over the washbasin towards the mirror to straighten her fake veil and fix her lipstick. ‘Who else?’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You’re welcome,’ she said.
‘For what?’
‘For finding out if he’s single or not,’ she went on. ‘He’s been single for years, since before he left America – which means things never worked out with Camilla after all.’
‘It’s none of my business whether he’s single or not,’ I said.
‘Oh come on, Jess, you know you never got over him. This is your chance to get under him again.’
‘Gem, I know you’re over the moon about getting married and I’m delighted for you, but it doesn’t mean that you get to matchmake. Even if I am the last one left on the shelf.’ I smiled. After Caitlin got married the same year that she qualified as a nurse, Gemma and I had always had a running joke about who would be the first of us to get married. I was living with Dan then, so we always assumed it would be me. It’s funny how things work out. I never thought being the last one to get married would bother me as much as it did.
We had turned thirty the previous year and not long afterwards Mike asked Gemma to marry him. Now we were thirty-one, Gemma’s wedding just a few weeks away, and I couldn’t deny that something had shifted – a feeling that I’d forgotten something, or something was missing. I wanted what Gemma had, what Caitlin had. I denied it of course, because I never thought it mattered to me. Since the day Rupert Tremayne walked away from me I hadn’t believed I cared. It turned out it mattered a lot – I was just too scared to admit it.
Gemma leaned towards me with a wink. ‘You must have seen the way he’s looking at you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s still there, isn’t it? That spark between you two?’
I didn’t say anything, unwilling to admit how seeing him again after all these years was making me feel.
‘Come on,’ Gemma said, heading back towards the bar again. ‘Once more unto the breach.’
‘Can you give me a minute?’ I asked. ‘I’ll be out soon.
Being near him again was bringing it all back, his thigh pressing against mine, the way he held his pint glass, the way he smiled. I didn’t want it brought back. I couldn’t face it.
Because Gemma was right – I never did get over him.
2 (#ulink_185afce7-e8b3-5981-ae3f-e53152318966)
JESS (#ulink_185afce7-e8b3-5981-ae3f-e53152318966)
When I came back into the bar, Gemma was trying to organise everybody to go to a nightclub with her. This was the most disorganised hen weekend I’d ever been to. Usually every minute of every day is micromanaged, from private Pilates lessons to shooting parties. But Gemma wasn’t one for timetables and agendas. She had announced that she wanted a weekend in York and off we all went without a plan, accompanied by some of her work colleagues. At least it took the pressure off Caitlin and me to organise anything specific.
I pulled Gemma to one side.
‘If you’re all moving on, I’m going to go back to the hotel,’ I said quietly. I didn’t want anyone else to know, to bring up the past, to fuss. I watched her brow furrow, her face suddenly serious and sober.
‘Are you feeling ill again?’ she asked. ‘I don’t want …’
‘I’m fine, honestly,’ I interrupted. ‘Just tired that’s all.’
‘Where are you staying?’ I heard Rupert ask. I wondered how long he’d been standing there, how much of the conversation he’d heard.
‘The posh hotel near York Minster,’ Gemma replied. I didn’t think it was any of Rupert’s business where I was staying.
‘It’s called the Minster,’ Rupert deadpanned, trying not to smile.
‘That’s the one!’
‘I’ll walk you back,’ he said, turning to me.
‘I’m fine. I can walk back to the hotel on my own.’
‘I know you can,’ he said, quietly. ‘But I’d like to walk with you.’
My stomach flipped.
‘I’d rather he walked with you too,’ Gemma said. ‘So that’s settled.’ As Gemma wandered off to organise a taxi, her veil slipping to one side again, he caught my eye and raised his eyebrows.
‘That’s settled.’ Rupert smiled.
‘I suppose it is,’ I replied. Gemma always was the bossy one.
‘Shall we?’ he asked, gesturing towards the door. As we began to walk away from the pub, he was so close to me I wanted to reach out and touch him, to draw him towards me, but I knew I shouldn’t. As if he could read my mind he held out his arm to me and I slipped my hand into the crook of his elbow. It felt so natural, exactly the way we’d walked together years ago. I’m not sure who pulled who closer, but it felt as though neither of us could resist the warmth of each other’s bodies. It felt as though we’d been waiting ten years for this moment.
‘It’s been a long time, Jessie,’ he said quietly.
‘Ten years in September,’ I replied. I wasn’t going to tell him that I knew the exact number of months, days, even hours since I’d watched him walk away from me at Heathrow on that unusually hot morning. ‘How long have you been back?’ I asked instead, before I was dragged back to that summer. I wasn’t ready to talk about the past yet.
‘Nearly three years.’
‘And you never got in touch?’ I asked.
He stopped walking then, so suddenly that a group of drunk students almost fell over us. One of them recognised him and started calling his name but he didn’t acknowledge them. Instead, he looked down at me, his gaze so intense it almost made me want to look away.
‘I didn’t think you’d want me to,’ he said.
I didn’t know how to reply to that. While Rupert had always been in the back of my mind, I had never really considered what it would be like to have him back in my life. But now all I could think of was the last three years and how we could have been seeing each other every day.
‘Besides,’ he said, looking away and starting to walk again. ‘You’re a hard woman to track down.’
That was true. And for him to know that meant he must have looked, probably more than once. I didn’t have social media or a website or a blog. There were no photos of me online. You wouldn’t find a thing – unless you knew who to look for, of course. Typing in ‘Jessica Clarke’ wouldn’t turn up much on me – that I knew.
The reason you won’t find me online is because I write for a living under a secret pen name. If you search for that name, you’ll find all sorts of things but none of them link back to me. I’ve been careful about that. I don’t even have a personal Facebook account anymore.
‘You could have looked for me,’ he said when he realised I wasn’t going to rise to the bait and tell him why I was so hard to track down. ‘I’m all over the internet.’
Again, true. His academic success was known near and far, but I’d stopped looking years ago. I didn’t think I’d typed ‘Dr Rupert Tremayne’ into a search engine since my first book was published.
‘How’s your mum?’ he asked instead, changing the subject.
‘She’s good,’ I replied, glad to be on more neutral territory. ‘She’s just published her tenth poetry collection, which is weirder than ever. I see her every day.’ I left out the fact that I see her every day because I live with her. ‘She sold up in Cambridge not long after Dad died and bought a flat in Highgate.’ Neither of us acknowledged that Dad had died just before Rupert left, but the words hung in the air between us.
‘It must be nice to have her close by,’ he said. He didn’t say anything about my dad. I used to think that Dad’s death was the catalyst for Rupert leaving. I used to think that if Dad had survived everything would have stayed the same. But I know now that life doesn’t work that way – nothing lasts forever. Even if Rupert had stayed, how would we have survived after everything that happened? Was that why his father sent him away? To protect him? Was that the real reason he went? I wanted to say something but I didn’t know how. Maybe it didn’t matter anymore.
‘And your mum and dad?’ I asked instead. ‘How are they?’
‘The same. Still in the house in Cambridge, still not really getting on.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Mel’s a doctor now though, lives in Sydney.’
I nodded, not really caring where his sister was or what she was doing. I barely knew Melissa – she was only three years older than us but it felt as though she came from a different planet. I don’t think I spoke more than a handful of words with her in all the time I knew her. I do remember the conversation I overheard her having with Rupert just before he left though.
We turned the corner in silence, neither of us knowing what else to say. Nothing could change the past and perhaps there wasn’t anything that could bring us back together again either. Perhaps you only got one shot in life, and if you messed it up – which we did, spectacularly – you didn’t get another.
York Minster was in front of us suddenly – the Gothic cathedral could be seen from all over the city and looked spectacular, especially at night, illuminated against the darkness.
‘I’ve seen it nearly every day for the last three years,’ Rupert said, staring up at its splendour. ‘And it still takes my breath away.’
I didn’t say anything. I just stood and watched him as he looked at the Minster. I wondered if this was just a one-off meeting, a moment in time when our paths crossed temporarily, or if it was something more. And I wondered if we were standing here outside the Minster to put off making that decision.
We crossed the road and stood outside my hotel. He let go of my arm and placed his hands on my shoulders. I looked up at him – I could hear him breathing.
‘I hope everything worked out well for you,’ he said.
‘You too,’ I replied. It felt like an inadequate response but I didn’t know how to tell him that nothing had worked out how I’d expected it to or that I struggled every single day but that despite all of that everything had turned out better than I could have imagined. Apart from one thing.
He shrugged ruefully and looked as though he was going to say something else, but he stopped, his hands still on my shoulders.
‘It’s been amazing to see you, Jessie,’ he said. It sounded final as though at any moment our paths would unravel and we’d each go our separate ways again. I wanted to bottle this moment and keep it forever.
And then he lowered his hands and smiled again before turning around. For the second time in my life I watched Rupert Tremayne walk away from me.
He hadn’t said goodbye and I tried not to think too much about how that made me feel. I’d spent ten years wondering what it would be like to see him again. I hadn’t expected such disappointment.
3 (#ulink_253dc279-7e20-555d-b7d3-0d1d40ff5bb8)
RUPERT (#ulink_253dc279-7e20-555d-b7d3-0d1d40ff5bb8)
He had dreamed of bumping into her again for years, of being given a second chance. He had always imagined them picking up where they left off, his life suddenly more joyful and fulfilled because of her presence. But when that second chance had presented itself to him he’d been overcome by fear – fear that she hadn’t been thinking about him, fear that she wouldn’t still be interested ten years down the line; what sane woman would? He had come across as awkward and aloof, and then he’d just walked away without a word, without asking for her number, without even saying goodbye.
It had been nothing like he had imagined and he wondered if that was why he had never tried harder to find her, knowing deep down that if he did, it would leave him disappointed.
Rupert bent down to clip his dog’s lead on to his harness. He’d never really considered himself a dog person until Captain came into his life. He didn’t know how he would have coped with the loneliness he felt in York without Captain.
It was a cold day for June, even for Yorkshire. The sky was blue but the wind blowing off the river made him long for the hot summers of Massachusetts. Jess was all he’d been able to think about since he’d realised who she was in the pub the previous evening. That and what a terrible impression he must have made on her. She had looked so glamorous and he had been dressed in scruffy jeans and an old jumper. At least he’d moved on from the football shirts of his youth.
He’d known she was at the bar long before she’d spotted him. He’d been sitting in his usual corner with a couple of colleagues – another uneventful Saturday night at the end of another uneventful week. There were times when Rupert wondered if his life was just passing him by, if work had completely taken over and all he would be remembered for were a few dry academic books that nobody read. Even his parents didn’t seem interested in his career anymore.
‘Here’s trouble!’ Rupert’s friend, Chris, had said to him with a wink and a nudge as the hen party arrived in the pub. He’d felt the energy change around him and it was Gemma he recognised first, her laugh, her exuberance – she’d always been a perfect counterfoil to Jess’s quiet homebody demeanour. It had taken him a moment to recognise the slim brunette with the red lipstick and the green eyes. It couldn’t be her, could it? But then she’d smiled at something Gemma had said and he had known. Nobody else could light up a room with their smile like that.
His initial instinct had been to run. He’d been waiting years for this opportunity, but how could he see it through? Real life was never like your imagination. What if she was dismissive? What if she was still angry? Worse, what if she didn’t recognise him?
