12
The next morning, Harriet walked into the kitchen to find a vision of domesticity: a plate on the island heaped with assorted pastries, a bunch of lilac stocks in a vase, the smell of fresh coffee, Radio 4 trickling out in the background.
‘Peace offering,’ Jon said, from a vantage point behind a newspaper at the far end. ‘There’s more than a cup left in the cafetiere.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, neutrally, and helped herself.
The stage management of the scene meant Harriet could only think of Lorna’s voice in her head. He bought you, and what’s more, he knew he was doing it.
‘Do you want any help moving? Two cars are better than one.’
‘It’s fine, I can manage,’ she said. ‘Thank you though.’
She hoisted herself onto a stool at the island and chose a bun that looked like it was wearing a toupée of grated cheese. It felt rude to decline Jon’s provisions and rude to carry anything out of the room, so she was stuck picking at it in the tense atmosphere, wearing the false-insouciant air of a teenager who’d come in well past curfew last night and certainly wasn’t going to mention it if her parents didn’t. As Harriet tried to chew silently, she considered that was probably the motive behind its purchase: forcing her to have breakfast with Jon. He no doubt meant well, but these minor manipulations were making her even more desperate to be free.
‘From the Bakehouse?’ she asked. ‘Really good.’
She nearly added she’d miss Roundhay then knew it would sound like a jibe that she wouldn’t miss Jon. She would miss Jon. Just not enough.
‘Harriet,’ Jon said after a minute or so, and she tensed, having suspected something was coming. ‘Can I say something?’
She nodded while chewing: yes, of course. And thinking: here’s the price of the baked goods.
‘I’m not proud of what I did with my family. Not telling them upfront, I mean. Or how I behaved last night. I’ve been quite shellshocked by our finishing, but it’s not an excuse.’
Pause.
‘On my deathbed, I won’t want any of this to be playing in the highlights reel. I’ve taken a step back and looked at myself harder.’
He smiled to indicate ‘joke’ and Harriet gave a reciprocal tight smile. She could feel a big fat but coming. Coming in the air this morning, as Jon’s hero Phil Collins almost had it.
‘I laid awake most of last night thinking about us, about what went wrong.’
‘… OK,’ Harriet said. Please don’t let this be another attempt to appeal her decision. She had empathy for Jon’s pain but no way to fix it.
‘The thing is – and not in a nasty way, I hasten to add – you think I’m a bit daft, a bit self-parodic. Or un-self-aware at least,’ Jon said. Harriet swallowed hard and opened her mouth to argue and he motioned for her to stop. ‘Let me get to the end. I know you do, most people do. It’s partly my own fault for actively giving that impression. It’s a protective layer I developed, I think. Being something of an apprentice Alan Partridge. But be careful who you pretend to be, you are who you pretend to be, and all that.’
He cleared his throat. ‘What I’m saying is, I know I can seem … straight-edged and even foolish, but I’m not.’
Harriet nodded, not sure what to make of this speech, what move it was in the game of break-up Battleships.
‘… Because I’m not stupid, I know there’s some part of you that you won’t let me near. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s to do with the loss of your parents, or why you’re so deliberately vague about most of your twenties. Or if it’s to do with that jewellery box you won’t let out of your sight.’
Harriet remained rigid and impassive, but her skin felt numb.
‘… But by keeping it secret from me – I don’t think you realise that it set me up for failure with you from the start. I wish you hadn’t. If you’d let me help, I would have done everything I could to help. For whatever reason, you wouldn’t or couldn’t allow me to try. I think it’s a huge loss for both of us. If you ever change your mind and want to talk, even if there’s no way back for the two of us, I’ll be there for you. Even if …’ Jon took a shaky breath, ‘Even if it’s some point in the currently unimaginable future for me, where either or both of us are with other people.’
Pause.
‘That’s it. That’s all I wanted to say.’
Harriet said nothing because she was fairly stunned by this and couldn’t begin to work out how to respond.
‘I’m guessing you want to go this week without a brouhaha, or speeches, so other than this one, I will respect that,’ Jon said, into the ensuing silence.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said eventually, in a slightly hoarse voice, wishing she wasn’t so dumbly inarticulate in these moments.
She could’ve contradicted Jon. He deserved better than her lies.
In the year she’d lived at Jon’s, in their two-year span together, Harriet occasionally felt somewhat Surrendered Wife about the fact that there’d been no way to stamp her personality on it. Everything was so top-of-the-range and European-brand lustrous in his detached residence that there was no reason or space to buy a stick of furniture, or a white good. (Or, to fit with the look: a brushed-steel good.) Their taste didn’t overlap: Harriet tried putting up some blue fairy lights and Jon had said it looked like ‘luminol for blood spray’ and taken them down. They had also given him one of his headaches, natch.
As she stuffed her car with another black sack of her clothes on the day she left, Harriet was finally grateful for the fitted kitchen, fitted wardrobes, everything-from-Heals bachelor-pad sterility.
Much better not to be working out how to put a sofa or a bed into storage, to not be cramming a five-foot-tall fern into her Golf. It was pathetic really, but the fact virtually nothing here was hers felt like vindication that she was right to go. Or perhaps it was an indictment of her failure to try.
Harriet wondered if her subconscious was way ahead of her – it knew, long before she’d accept it, she’d never really be long-term mistress of Roundhay. Hold off on buying the Etsy knick-knacks, it must have whispered.
She could’ve done with Jon making himself scarce today but of course he didn’t, he hung around twitchily, waiting to make their final goodbye. He was the man who endlessly asked what she wanted yet somehow never thought about what she wanted.
As Harriet slammed the boot on her junk, he strode out onto the tarmac in his Penn State University sweatshirt and moccasin slippers, hands jammed in pockets. It wasn’t Jon’s fault that he was fast becoming an entirely alien creature to her, it was hers for messing with a boy from the right side of the tracks. Preposterous idea.
‘This is it, then?’
‘Think so,’ Harriet said, casting a look at her car, feigning to think he meant packing. It had been an effort, with her camera kit, but putting the seats down she had got everything in. She brushed her hair away from her face and tucked it behind her ears, tightened the band on her plait.
‘Will you give me a forwarding address for your mail?’
‘Sure. Easiest for me to message you with it,’ Harriet said.
Jon shielded his eyes against the intense June sun.
‘Feels like we should have some words befitting the occasion, doesn’t it. Not “see ya”.’
Harriet’s chest felt as if it had a concrete block resting on it. She’d not considered, until this second, what she should say in parting. Being a grown-up was so strange. In someone’s life and their bed constantly for two years, and then suddenly unable to offer them so much intimacy as a coffee.
‘We’ll see each other again,’ Harriet said.
‘When?’
‘Barty’s trial,’ she said, and this only raised a weak smile.
‘Should we shake hands?’ Jon looked like he was going to cry; Harriet prayed that he wouldn’t.
She stepped forward and put her arms around him, mumbling: ‘Take care, Jon.’
He gripped her tightly and clung on, pushing his face hotly into her shoulder. As they parted, Harriet was careful not to meet his eyes. She knew it was cowardly, but she rationalised that making this more excruciating helped no one, least of all Jon.
‘Goodbye Harriet.’
‘Bye.’
Her heart was blocking her throat as she pulled out of his drive and studiously avoided looking at the immobile figure in the rear-view mirror. Goodbye, Jon. Sorry I hurt you. Sorry our two years ended up only setting you back two years on the wife and mother-of-your-kids hunt. She didn’t mean that unkindly: he wanted that, and she wanted it for him.
As she drove to Meanwood, postcode punched into the satnav, Harriet remembered telling Jon she didn’t feel alone on that first date at Alfred.
Was it true now? Had it been true at the time? Her answers were: no, and probably not. Harriet had confused her refusal to admit to loneliness for not being lonely.
Who was she kidding? She was on her way to a house she’d never set foot inside before, at the wheel of a hatchback full of her worldly possessions, soul in transit. She gripped the wheel tightly, letting her nails dig into the plastic as she blinked back tears.
Maybe she was cursed to never belong anywhere. Orphan: a strange word wreathed in tragedy that belonged in old novels, a descriptor that Harriet steadfastly refused to apply to herself. Yet leaving one man’s house and moving into a stranger’s, she felt it. She let herself say it in her head: Mum and Dad’s. Imagine having a mum and dad to flee to. She genuinely couldn’t. The sentence sounded peculiarly foreign to her; it was a phrase she’d rarely had cause to speak aloud. She remembered finding court letters pronouncing her a minor bereft of the usual legal guardians.
Harriet shook herself out of the unhelpful wallowing. This was what was called a hard reset, that was all, and hard resets were hard. She had to shed her existential Freshers’ Week flu. Toughen up.
Perhaps her spell in Cal Clarke’s party-ready house, in which he never held parties, was going to be transformative. Perhaps the very meaning of her life was contained behind that tangerine door in Meanwood. She’d accept a working washing machine and a separate bin for recycling.