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We took the wine and the ice cream back into the sitting room and I curled up on the sofa. My throat was a bit scratchy so I could kid myself the soothing ice cream was medicinal. Then Will said, ‘I think we should get one of these TVs, Rosie.’
‘In your dreams. We haven’t got that sort of money. If we had, we’d be living in a bigger flat.’
This was a sore point. Our flat was actually mine, and it was tiny, which is why I had been able to buy it. When Will – and all his stuff – moved in a few months ago the plan had been we’d try and save to buy a bigger flat together. But you know what it’s like, prices just keep going up and up … Money comes in. Money goes out.
I’m not quite sure on what. But we needed more space. We didn’t need a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of television.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said crossly.
Suddenly a row was in the air. Will had that slightly sulky expression that he has when he doesn’t get his own way. But then Caz came downstairs, holding a photo and giggling.
‘I was sorting out some stuff at my mum’s, Will,’ she said, ‘and I found this.’
‘Oh my God!’ said Will. ‘The outdoor activities week in Year Eleven!’
Oh yes. Will and Caz were in school together. They even had a bit of a fling at one time. About the time that picture was taken, long before I knew either of them.
Actually it was quite a funny photo. They must have been sixteen years old and on an outdoor week in the Yorkshire Dales – all climbing, canoeing and gorge walking. Caz was wearing one of those enormous geek-like cagoules. But she had the full make-up on – three different shades of eye shadow, blusher and lip gloss. Never a girl to let her standards slip is Caz.
In the picture she was gazing adoringly up at Will. Jamie snatched the photo from him. ‘I bet you were hell for the teachers,’ he said – and he should know, he teaches in the local comp – ‘sneaking off to the canoe store for a quick snog. They all do.’
Caz and Will looked at each other very quickly and almost blushed.
Caz grinned. ‘Thank goodness you don’t choose your life partners at sixteen,’ she said. ‘Bad enough working with you, Will, let alone having to live with you. Don’t know how Rosie manages it.’
‘With difficulty sometimes,’ I said, laughing. But I felt a small pang. I had fallen for Will the moment I’d arrived at The News, where he was already a senior reporter. He had to show me around on the first day and I knew, just knew, that he was the one for me. We were both slightly involved with other people at the time and as soon as we untangled ourselves, that was it. We were an item. It was as if we had always been together.
But we hadn’t. And Caz had known him since they were eleven years old. They had a past, experiences, memories, daft jokes I couldn’t share. And sometimes, just sometimes, I felt a twinge … of jealousy, I suppose. Silly. He was with me now.
Jamie and Will started playing on the PlayStation.
‘What about Leo and Jake then?’ asked Caz, passing me some wine. ‘I bet that will be a brilliant day.’
I laughed and started to say something to Will, but he was still gazing at that bloody television.
‘Look, Will, you’ve only just got your new car,’ I said. ‘That’s a nice new toy for now.’
‘Well, you’re the one who wanted to go to New York.’
‘And you’re the one who spent a fortune in Nieman Marcus,’ I snapped back. ‘How many cashmere sweaters does one man need?’ A bit of a cheek coming from me, I know, being no slouch in the cashmere sweater department myself.
Things were getting snippy.
‘Children, children,’ said Jamie. You can just hear him with Year Seven, though at school he probably wouldn’t have the lager can in his hand.
‘Have you not thought,’ Jamie went on, ‘that perhaps if you didn’t buy new cars and fly halfway across the world for a long weekend and a shopping habit, you might just be able to buy a bigger flat, or even a nice little house? Unless, of course, you don’t really want to. And your subconscious is telling you to spend your money on fun and toys instead of being grown-up and sensible and salting it away for your future.
‘Strange, isn’t it,’ he went on, ‘that the only people in our group who are getting married are Leo and Jake? Takes a pair of gays to set the rest of us loose-living reprobates a good example.’
‘Me, I don’t see the point of being married,’ said Caz. ‘We’re fine as we are, aren’t we sweetie?’ she said, patting Jamie’s knee. ‘We don’t need a posh frock and a piece of paper. It might be different if we wanted kids, I suppose. But Jamie sees enough of kids in work. He doesn’t want to come home to them as well.’
‘But what about you?’ I asked.
‘Not a maternal bone in my body,’ she laughed. ‘Anyway I’d be an absolute disaster as a mum. I’d probably leave the poor little bugger’s pram outside the pub. No, my unborn baby should be very grateful to me for keeping it that way.’
Jamie looked baffled. ‘I always thought girls wanted to get married. You know, waiting for their knight in shining armour to come along and sweep them off their feet, rescue them from dragons.’
‘We can fight our own dragons, thank you,’ I said.
‘See?’ said Jamie laughing to Will. ‘This lot have made us redundant. Out of work dragon-slayers, park your charger and hang up your plumed helmet.’
‘Yeah, well,’ said Will, now quite drunk and getting stroppy, ‘maybe Leo and Jake have got something to prove. They want to settle down and play houses.’
Then, just like that, as if it wasn’t really that important at all, he dropped the bombshell that nearly destroyed my world.
‘As for me,’ said Will, ‘there’s not much point in tying myself to a house if I’m not going to be around long.’
I was so shocked I gasped, as if he’d hit me. ‘What do you mean? Where are you going?’
‘Well, nowhere at the moment. But I might do,’ he said, looking sideways at me. ‘I might go out to work in Dubai, or somewhere. Mate of mine out there says they always want English journos. Plenty of money, easy lifestyle.’
Dubai? This was the first I’d heard of it. ‘And is that what you want? Plenty of money and an easy lifestyle?’ I snapped.
‘Well, it’s what we all want really, isn’t it?’ he said, taking a gulp from his can and sprawling back into the armchair.
I was furious. I was also drunk, which didn’t help. And stunned. I had thought Will and I were pretty solid. Maybe even permanent. Wrong!
‘Look, Rosie,’ he put down his can, ‘I just mean …’
He was probably trying to be conciliatory. I wasn’t.
‘Forget it,’ I snapped.
‘Coffee?’ said Caz, very brightly. Just like the perfect hostess, only she staggered a bit and fell onto Jamie’s lap, which spoiled the effect.
‘No, no, I don’t want coffee,’ I said, angry and flustered and utterly wrong-bloody-footed, ‘I think I want to go home.’ I marched out into the hall, wriggled my feet into my boots and left.
Will came after me, and I didn’t know if I was pleased or not. I could hear his footsteps but he said nothing. His long legs meant he soon caught me up. He walked alongside me, matching his steps to mine, looking straight ahead. And we walked like that, side by side in silence all the way to the flat. My flat.
As soon as we got in, I turned to him. ‘Are you really going to Dubai?’
‘Who knows?’ he shrugged. ‘It’s just a thought, an option, a possibility.’
‘But what about me?’
‘Well you can come too, if you like.’ He hunched his hands into his pockets.
‘If I like? If I like? You make me sound like an optional extra! I thought we had a future together.’
‘Did you? Did you really?’ Those big brown eyes flashed and I didn’t like it.
‘And if you think we have a future together,’ he said, ‘why is it that all I ever hear is what you want? You want to work in London. You want the bigger flat. You bought the bigger sofa, without even mentioning it to me. You pay the bills and just tell me how much to cough up. Fine, fine it’s your flat after all, as you keep reminding me.’
I was stunned. ‘I don’t feel like that. I thought …’
‘What did you think? Come on, tell me, I really want to know.’
‘I was frightened,’ I said. ‘I didn’t want to be dependent on you.’
‘Why not? Don’t you trust me?’
‘It’s not like that. No. It’s nothing to do with trust. It’s just that … Well, I don’t know. We’ve never talked about the future, not really.’
And we hadn’t. We’ve planned holidays and weekends away but no more than that, not what you would call a proper, grown-up, till death us do part future. Maybe it was too frightening to contemplate.
‘Well let’s talk about it now. Come on, Rosie, what do you want? What do you want from me? From us?’
‘I don’t know.’ And that was honest. I had sometimes daydreamed of marrying Will. Not the big white wedding, but just being married to him, having him there all the time. He was the only person I’ve ever daydreamed like that about. The only one.
But I had never told him. Because there were times that the same dream could terrify me. The thought of being with just one person for ever. Well, it’s seriously scary, isn’t it?
And Will … well, he wasn’t exactly husband material. I mean, he was nearly thirty and he still acted like a big kid. Away from work all he and Jamie cared about was football and drinking and playing computer games and the bloody grand prix and flash tellies.
‘You don’t know?’ he repeated, still waiting for my answer.
I looked up at him. ‘Will, I love my job and I’m just beginning to get somewhere. I want to see how far I can go.’
‘Fair enough. You’ll go far, Rosie. We both know that.’ Full of angry energy, he was pacing up and down the tiny sitting room. ‘But I don’t know if I’m part of your plan. Frankly, Rosie, I haven’t a clue where I am with you. You want everything your own way.’
‘But it’s not like that …’ I was stunned, struggling to find ways of saying what I thought. And then he nearly floored me with his next question.
‘Tell me, do you see yourself having children?’
‘Hey!’ I tried to joke. ‘You can’t ask questions like that at interviews. Not allowed.’
Will wasn’t laughing. ‘I want to know.’
‘Well yes, since you ask, one day, probably,’ I said. I’d daydreamed about that too. A boy and a girl, with Will’s blond hair and big brown eyes. But not yet. Maybe I’d have them at some vague point in the future.
It was time for me to go on the attack. ‘And what about you? Do you want children?’
‘Maybe, one day. Depends.’
‘Depends on what?’ I asked. And the Devil got into me, because I snapped, ‘On whether you can fit it in between the PlayStation and the plasma TV? Or another new car? You’ve got to be a grown-up to be a parent, Will, not an overgrown bloody kid yourself.’
Of course it all went downhill from there. We’d both had too much to drink and said too many things that shouldn’t have been said and that I’m not even sure we meant.
I called him spoilt, immature and childish, among other things. He called me a selfish, unthinking control freak, among other things. It didn’t get us anywhere. In the end I went off to bed and I could hear Will still crashing around the sitting room, impatiently flicking through the TV channels, until he finally went to sleep on the sofa. My new sofa.
And me? I lay in bed and tried to re-run the row. Did I really want to be married? Yes of course. Maybe. But now? Frankly, the thought frightened me. What if Will went to Dubai? What if I went to London?
What if?
My head was thumping. I hardly slept, and in the morning my head was worse … which is why when we got to The News on Monday morning – in Will’s car, in silence – I’d been hoping to crawl quietly to my desk and just plod through the day – but the editor, Jan Fox, known to all as the Vixen, spotted me.
‘Rosie! A word please!’
The Vixen was standing at her office door, eyes glinting, coppery highlights shining. In one hand she held a large sheet of paper, on which the perfect scarlet nails of the other hand were lightly drumming. It was not a happy drumming.
I realised that the piece of paper she was so obviously hacked off about was a proof copy of the next day’s feature page. A feature on childcare, one I’d written. My heart sank even further. Happy Monday.
‘Do you realise,’ she said, shooting me one of her fierce looks, ‘how incredibly young and silly this makes you sound? It’s written as though everybody in the world has a responsibility to look after children with the sole exception of their bloody parents.’
‘But I was just quoting from the reports and the government spokesman …’
‘Yes, I know you were,’ she sighed. ‘I just wonder about your generation sometimes. You must have had it easier than any other in the history of the world, and it’s still not enough, you’re still asking for more.’
I just stood there, waiting, longing to get to the Ibupro-fen in my desk drawer.
‘OK, I’ve marked up some ideas. Get that done. And then there’s something else I want you to have a go at.’
Just what, I found out at the morning conference.
The News Editor, Picture Editor, Chief Photographer, and others all crowded into the Vixen’s office, with mugs of coffee and piles of notes balanced on their knees. Will was there too, not looking quite as polished as usual. I don’t know if he was trying to catch my eye. I didn’t give him the chance. I just kept staring at the photos of all the old editors on the wall above him. George Henfield, fat and bald, Richard Henfield with his pipe.
We’d whizzed through the plans for the following day’s paper and much of the week’s ideas, but the Vixen was still talking. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Now what about The Meadows? It’s fifty years since the first families moved in and I think we should have a good look at it. At the time it was revolutionary, homes of the future, the perfect place to live.’
‘Bloody hell, they must have been desperate,’ muttered Will.
The Vixen, of course, heard him.
‘Will, you haven’t a bloody clue, have you?’ she said in withering tones, which cheered me up.
Will tried to score some Brownie points. ‘We’ve done quite a lot on the way the school’s improved,’ he said. ‘We’ve had a few interviews with the new headmistress who’s working miracles, Rosemary Picton, and we’re always doing picture stories there.’
‘Yes,’ said the Vixen briskly, ‘and I’m sure we’ll be back to her. An amazing woman. But, as you know, they are using one of the houses on The Meadows for a new reality TV series, The 1950s House, so we need a good look at why people were so pleased to move there. What it was like at the beginning. Why it went wrong in parts. Why other parts are flourishing.
‘We’ll want to take a good look at life in the 1950s. It could make a series of features, but I want some meat on it, not just nostalgia. The Meadows seems a good place to start.’
By now I’d finished gazing at the old editors and was working my way around the myriad awards that The News had won under the Vixen. Suddenly I heard her mention my name. I sat up and tried to take notice.
‘Rosie? Are you with us? I said I think this is something for you. If you wait afterwards, I’ll give you some contacts.’
She always had contacts. I swear she knew everyone in town, not to mention the country. As the others picked up their notes and went back to their desks, she scribbled a name for me.
‘Margaret Turnbull was one of the first people to move in to The Meadows, and she’s lived there ever since. Nice woman, good talker. And she’s actually Rosemary Picton’s mother. When you’ve met Margaret you might get an idea of why her daughter’s so determined to help the children of The Meadows. Anyway, here’s her number. She’ll get you off to a good start.’
With that she gave me an odd look. But her eyes, in that immaculate make-up, were unreadable. ‘I think you might find it very interesting,’ she said.
