Chapter Forty One

Sorcha couldn’t begin to pretend that Jake’s phone manner was his strongest point, but even by Jake standards he behaved oddly when he finally did call. She was glad to hear from him, and said yes to meeting up before he’d got round to mentioning that some of the guys were going to be there too; and at the point when she had expected him to fall silent for about ten minutes, giving her a chance to reconsider, he had rung off. She was tempted to call him back and remind him that he didn’t drink, and suggest afternoon tea instead, but didn’t quite dare to.

On receiving a text from him the next morning, giving details of a members’ club in Notting Hill, she had sent Maggie a quick e-mail asking her to check the dress code. Maggie had immediately appeared in her office, suspiciously keen and eager to be helpful, asking why and when she was going there. On hearing that Sorcha had been planning on heading there straight after a client seminar that evening, wearing a suit, she found herself on the receiving end of a surprisingly stern telling off, and her diary miraculously rearranged itself to give her a two hour window early afternoon to go on an emergency expedition to the nearest department store. She was even given instructions as to what to buy when she got there, which made her wonder in a way that she had never wondered before about Maggie’s background. She usually dismissed her as a bit of an oddball, in part because of a fondness for gold pumps which was definitely weird in a woman over fifty, but she suddenly found herself wondering if she had missed something.

Inevitably, the seminar overran, and she had got collared by someone she didn’t know who insisted on trying to talk to her about something she knew nothing about. As she scrambled into her new clothes in the ladies, biting through one of the price tags because she didn’t have a pair of scissors with her to cut it off, she thanked her lucky stars that Maggie always left punctually at five and wasn’t there to tell her off for a second time in one day. As it was, she ended up painting her toenails with her sandals already on, and then using her office window as a mirror while she attempted to tame the worst excesses of her hair with the straighteners which lived in her desk drawer. The car which Maggie had insisted on ordering for her, despite Sorcha’s protestations that the central line would probably be quicker, ended up having to wait until she was sure that her toenails were no longer likely to stick to anything they came into contact with.

As she picked up her bag, and cast one last glance back in the window, a shooting pain hit her in the ball of her left foot. When she had bought the sandals she hadn’t really had time to think about whether she could walk in them or not, but as she went to leave she knew from the first few steps that she was going to be in serious trouble. The trouble was that she didn’t really have a plan B. She had no choice but to grin, bear it, and hope that she was going to spend the evening sitting down.

Jake started apologizing as soon as she arrived, which Sorcha found curiously reassuring: and did at least take her mind off her feet. He managed to say sorry several times before stopping to look at her and saying that he liked her top. It was a sheer, flowing black silk blouse over a lace vest which just about kept her decent and covered the worst of the scars. She had loved when she had tried it on, but she was less sure about it now that Jake was standing staring at it. She wished that she was quite a lot younger and wearing far fewer clothes, and was glad to settle into a dim corner of the bar with a vodka and cranberry juice and just sit and watch for a while.

They had been joined by Duncan, who was still wearing shades and still didn’t seem to know what to do about her; and by Mouse and his partner Catie. Catie seemed very quiet and distracted, but from the little she said that seemed to be more to do with a baby sitter than anything else. Mouse was wide-eyed and smiley, like a favourite small child, and he and Jake and Duncan seemed to bounce off one another like ping-pong balls playing off dodgems. They were telling tales against one another, of hotel rooms and near-misses and general bad behaviour, none of which mattered because it was all at least ten years ago; even Jake lit up, as he recalled his own misspent youth, before suddenly sobering up when he realised that Sorcha was watching him.

Mouse had assumed that Sorcha would join in the conversation once she had got used to the idea of being there: when she didn’t, he started worrying that she might be feeling left out and made a big show of trying to make her part of the gang.

“So then, which of us was your favourite?” She shrank further back into the corner, so he tried to reassure her, “It’s OK, we’re all friends, we won’t mind. Will we Jake?”

Jake was looking as if he was wishing he was somewhere else, but Catie chipped in to save the day, casting shy but adoring glances across at Mouse as she did so.

“It really is OK. I mean, my favourite was always Marty. I thought only twelve year olds went for Mouse, until I met him. They just think it’s funny.”

Sorcha had no idea what to say, and could see that Jake looked as if he was stuck in one of his long and complicated mental loops: all she could do was fling herself on Mouse’s mercy, and hope he would carry on being smiley and nice.

“My favourite what?”

It was Duncan who replied, but even he seemed to be trying to be nice.

“Band member. All the fans always had their favourites, though it wasn’t usually me. I had like fifty fans, and they all had thousands and thousands.”

Sorcha thought for a fleeting moment of lying, but knew that this time she was unlikely to be able to carry it off. Instead she turned to Jake, who was sitting on the sofa next to her.

“I’m not actually sure I knew who you were, other than as a group, I’m afraid.” Jake bit his bottom lip, but didn’t seem surprised, “I was more of a Britpop girl. At least, I was until Tony Blair invited them all round to tea. Then I turned off the radio and decided to make some money instead.”

Mouse started to challenge her, saying that she must have known who Jeff and Marty were, but was drowned out by Duncan who leaned right across the table to put his head physically between her and Jake and say,

“But you do know he’s famous, right? Really, properly famous.”

There was a loud crash as Mouse rugby tackled Duncan back into his seat, and Jake started apologizing some more.

After a while, music started playing. There was a jazz singer, over the other side of the bar, alternating a few numbers with a DJ who spent the rest of the time talking to one of the barmen. Almost immediately the music started, Duncan seemed to start fidgeting: he drummed for a while on the arm of the sofa, and it looked as if he would have started drumming on the muddle of glasses and beer bottles on the table in front of them given half a chance. There was a group dancing over by the bar, and he soon leapt to his feet and went to join them, taking Mouse with him without really asking whether he wanted to come. As they headed over, Sorcha heard a woman scream: it wasn’t the kind of scream which implied that she was in pain, and it was brusquely curtailed into laughter.

Jake sat with Sorcha and Catie and watched them, still and calm and silent, before saying that he needed to check something and going to join Duncan and Mouse. Sorcha was becoming more relaxed, tucked away in the corner, and started chatting to Catie. It took her a while to get the hang of her, but in the end she was no different from the very pretty wives that some of her more shameless partners tended to accumulate. Once they had started talking, she started to get more interesting. She worked as an illustrator of children’s books, and had spent part of the day struggling to draw an owl looking cross, which made it a discussion which Sorcha would have happily spent time on.

They were rather rudely interrupted by Duncan and Mouse more or less dragging Jake back over to join them, and dumping him on the sofa next to Sorcha. The deal had presumably been that they would take an arm each, but given that Mouse was quite a lot smaller than either Duncan or Jake it looked more like Duncan was dragging both of the other two behind him. Having deposited their cargo, they immediately headed back the way they had come and took Catie with them. Sorcha knew that she had missed something, and Jake looked as if he was in pain.

“What’s up, Pet? Are you OK?”

He looked both stricken and apologetic, and could barely bring himself to look at her.

“I’ve been told I’ve got to dance with you.”

Sorcha suddenly felt slightly sick, and both feet twinged at once.

“Do you want to?”

Jake was staring at the teapot which he had insisted they find when he had ordered peppermint tea. The teabags were sitting in a saucer next to it.

“Dunno.” He realised as he said it that it wasn’t the right answer, and tried again, “Do you want to?”

“Not really, Pet. Everyone will look at us, and my feet are killing me.”

He looked across at her, with an expression which looked as if he was trying to do mental long division.

“But you’ll do it, right?”

She looked back at him, then across at the dancers near the bar. Duncan and Mouse were trying to pretend that they weren’t watching them. She held out her hand to Jake in such a way that she hoped that they could see it.

“How could any girl fail to respond to such a romantic request?”

It was too dark to tell, but she suspected that his ears had gone pink again as he took her hand and lead her across the bar. The group dancing seemed to part to let them in, but perhaps that was always what happened when you walked onto a dance floor. Almost as soon as they got there, the music seemed to change: Sorcha recognized the intro to “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing”, and muttered to Jake that it didn’t sound like his kind of music. As she did so, she saw Mouse giving them a thumbs up from behind the decks. She couldn’t tell whether Jake was finding it funny or not, but he stooped down to mutter back,

“Could be worse. Could be one of ours.”

His lips brushed the top of her head as he stood back up: she hoped that it was deliberate.

Dancing with him was easy. He had put his hands round her waist, and she had linked hers round the back of his neck, struggling to resist the temptation to play with the wisps of hair at the nape of his neck. There wasn’t much space, so they sort of swayed together. Sorcha half-wished for proper, old-fashioned dancing, where she would have been whisked around the room with her feet barely touching the floor; but she could feel her toes being pinched and pain beginning to spread from the balls of her feet up through the arches to her heels. She could also feel Jake, close to her and watching her. It was a very teenage sort of feeling, somewhere between fear and excitement with a hint of megalomania lurking at the edges.

If it hadn’t been for her feet, she could have stayed dancing with him for a very long time. As it was, he was enough of a distraction that she managed not to think about them most of the time, although when he eventually lead her back to their table the pain suddenly hit her. She surreptitiously glanced down at her feet, half expecting to see blood and shattered tendons trailing behind her. It was almost a disappointment that her toes barely even looked red.

The others left them alone for a while, and they sat together and watched the bar slowly empty out. Jake seemed happy to let Sorcha sit back against his shoulder, and she was more than happy to be there. At one point Duncan seemed to be doing something unnecessarily complicated with a very young girl wearing a stunning, tiny red dress, but he soon gave up and went to chat to the DJ instead. Mouse and Catie seemed to be glued together at the hip, and enjoying every child-free minute they could steal. A group of younger guys whose confidence levels were completely out of proportion with their charisma were making a nuisance of themselves at the bar. Jake half-stirred behind her to attract the waiter’s attention, before turning to get a sense of what she was thinking.

“Are you OK with this?”

Sorcha wished he hadn’t moved, and squirmed to try to get comfortable again.

“What’s not to be OK with?” She was deliberately not looking at him, “There is something about Duncan which makes me think that I’m on ‘You’ve Been Framed’ any time I’m within about fifty feet of him. Apart from that it’s fine.”

Jake seemed satisfied with the caveat, and let her settle back against him. She slumped down slightly, and he rested his chin on the top of her head. When the others rejoined them and said it was time to head off, Sorcha was horrified to glimpse Duncan’s watch and see that it was gone two. She stood up, before almost immediately sitting back down again. It felt as if someone had stuck kitchen knives straight through her feet. Normally when she wore impossible shoes she also got drunk enough that she felt no pain – she wasn’t used to the pain just getting worse as the evening wore on. The fact that she’d been drinking water for most of the evening suddenly seemed like a huge tactical mistake, but she couldn’t exactly tell the others that she needed to anaesthetize herself before she could manage to leave. Jake and Mouse seemed to be caught up in a discussion about taxis and the front door, and hadn’t noticed her Zebedee act: Sorcha took a deep breath and stood up again, taking a few very tentative steps before she dared breath out. She could just about block the pain from the balls of her feet, but the straps were also cutting into her like the wire on a cheese board: she could only hope that she would find a cab nearby.

Sorcha picked her way very tentatively through the bar area, trailing behind the others. When they got to the lift, she leaned against the handrail which ran along its back wall and gently flexed first one foot, then the other. The combination of pain and tiredness mean that she didn’t notice Jake watching her doing it, or shuffling himself between Duncan and Catie so that he was standing next to her. As the lift doors opened, Sorcha suddenly found herself being scooped up into someone’s arms without warning. She knew it was Jake: it felt and smelled like Jake, but she squeaked and struggled anyway at the general weirdness of not having her feet on the ground. He just held her more tightly, and told her to stay still unless she wanted them both to end up in a heap on the floor. She flung her arms round his neck to steady herself, and found that it made her feel surprisingly safe.

And then he smiled at her.

She’d seen him smile before, but never properly. Usually when he smiled it was a kind of apology for thinking or feeling something else, but this was the kind of smile that just lit you up from the inside when you saw it. It was a smile which changed the way the world looked: she had no choice but to smile back, and to keep on smiling, regardless of how tired she was, or how unsure she was about what exactly was going on. They smiled their way past the front desk, and then on past the doormen. The others didn’t really seem to notice.

As they stepped out into the night, Sorcha noticed the cold only fractionally before the wall of flash lights hit her. They were only slightly less alarming than they would have been if she had seen them face on, and she felt Jake tense and falter as well, before whispering to her to keep smiling, and pushing through the scrum with the help of two of the doormen. He deposited her in a waiting taxi without her feet needing to touch the ground, before climbing in next to her. Sorcha’s heart rate was behaving as if she’d just been suspended upside down in a roller coaster, and it was a struggle not burst out laughing.

“Do you think I should go back and tell them that my feet hurt because I hadn’t drunk enough?”

Jake was struggling to keep a straight face, too, although he was more wary.

“I wouldn’t if I were you. It’d just give them another shot at you.”

Somehow he pulled himself together, and leant over to kiss her. Sorcha was both ready and taken by surprise; but the cab jolted them apart on a bump in the road. Jake slid across the seat so that he was holding her against him, but decided against trying for another kiss. He was waiting for a reaction from her that didn’t seem to come, and he couldn’t quite tell why.

“I’m sorry. I hoped they would have given up and gone home. They weren’t even waiting for us, you know. One of the barmen told Mouse that they were there because they’d heard that Jude Law was there with a teenager, which was bollocks.” Sorcha didn’t respond, because she wasn’t wholly sure why he felt the need to say anything, “I hate it when you get flashes in your face and stuff, but then I hate having to go out through kitchens and basements, and getting in cars in back alleys next to the dustbins.”

Sorcha tried to look at him, but it would have taken too much effort. Instead, she cuddled up closer to him, and tried not to think too much about what was happening.

“It’s fine. Really, it is. You have nothing to apologize for, although you’ve been doing it all evening.”

Jake was fiddling with one of the cuffs of her blouse.

“Not even for the fact that I have a meeting at some stupid time this morning, which means I’m going to have to take you home and leave you there?” He hesitated, feeling that he needed to give her a better explanation, “It’s the guy Jeff thinks should be our new manager: I’ve got to go and see whether I think he’s OK. He didn’t think I should be out tonight, you know: that’s why he wouldn’t come.”

She didn’t need to know that Jeff had been particularly jumpy at the idea that he was seeing her at all: he hadn’t figured out whether that was something to do with Sorcha in particular, or just more of Jeff not understanding him. Sorcha woke up enough to slide back across the seat, so that she could see him.

“So you mean I didn’t need to spend the last half hour trying to figure out how to tell you that I have to be somewhere near Mansion House for a completion meeting at eight?” They smiled at one another again, in a muddle of tiredness and amusement and regret, “But why the hell didn’t you just get in a different taxi and go straight home? You’re heading in the wrong direction, you know.”

“I know. But at least this way I get a bit longer with you, and I know that you’re safe.” Sorcha wasn’t in the mood to fight, particularly not with him, hours after her bedtime, behaving like this, “I don’t usually sleep much anyway. Are you really going to be OK to get to something for eight?”

It was a perfectly reasonable question, which she really didn’t want to think about because she could barely remember what the transaction was about. She had a feeling that it was a client who didn’t usually let her get away with just sitting in the corner and nodding wisely while other people spoke, either. She smiled at Jake some more, just because it made her feel like she was glowing.

“I’ll be fine, Pet. I can do just about anything on lip gloss and Lucozade.”