Chapter Twenty Eight

Emerging from Milton Keynes station the following weekend, Sorcha told herself that she was there simply because she needed to pass on to Jake the other potentially pointless pieces of information which she had gleaned from the call with the youth centre; and the only way she could safely do that was face to face. He’d suggested that she go up to Manchester with him for the weekend, and although it wouldn’t have been her first choice of destinations she was glad to get out of London. He had seemed very sure that she should just stay in his spare room, but she had got Maggie to book her a room at the Malmaison and printed off the details of the train times back. It didn’t need to be a particularly long conversation, and she wasn’t sure quite how long she would be able to tolerate his company without being driven to utter distraction by his complete and utter inability to get to the point of anything at all.

Sorcha had been surprised when he had said that he was planning on driving up; she distrusted men who liked cars. But when she had quizzed him, he had told her surprisingly bluntly that public transport just wouldn’t be safe. Her first thought had been that he was worried about being seen with her; but the explanation which eventually wandered along behind made it clear that in addition to the ongoing concern that Stephen Warren might attempt to shoot him, and the fact that his father had very recently disappeared from a public place in broad daylight, the police were concerned that he might also have a stalker. It would have been enough to make her wonder about getting out of bed: she tried not to think about whether he actually understood the danger he was in.

Milton Keynes was a way of avoiding the press scrum which was still camped outside his front door. It was at least neutral: she’d been there a few times as a student, to stay with a nice but useless boyfriend, who had collected her from the station in an old brown Volvo. He’d always been in the station foyer, pacing up and down as he waited for her. Under the circumstances it was unsurprising that Jake had stayed in the car instead, and had parked in the pick-up bay furthest from the entrance. She was briefly relieved to see him, before having a sudden moment of blind panic that getting into his car might be tantamount to walking into a shooting range with a target stapled to her forehead. She’d kept walking towards him, giving herself the kind of talking to which she normally reserved for the direst of corporate emergencies as she did so, and managed to climb into the car without looking as if she had just signed her own death warrant.

The first thing he did, which wasn’t exactly designed to put her at ease, was ask her whether she’d had any lunch. She actually hadn’t had any breakfast either, and hesitated before answering the question. She found herself presented with a rather complicated looking boxed salad, which looked as if it had come from the kind of deli which she would have found far too intimidating to actually go into. It was only slightly less terrifying than the thought of being shot, but she was hungry and managed to eat enough that Jake didn’t feel the need to start force-feeding her. He ate at the same time, saying little, and seemingly unconcerned by her presence.

The near-silence continued as they headed onto and up the M1. The sun was shining, and the sky an almost uninterrupted stretch of blue ahead of them. The warmth of the car meant that it didn’t matter that it was heading into autumn: it was like a cosy, protective bubble around them. A silent Jake, sitting beside her, smelling faintly of green tea and something citrusy, with his shirt sleeves rolled back so that she could see a tiny raised vein just below his left wrist as it lent on the steering wheel, was a very different prospect to the weirdly silent Jake on the end of the phone. She was in danger of starting staring again.

“What would you have done if I had refused point blank to eat anything?”

He glanced across, amused.

“I was just going to sit and eat mine, very, very slowly, and hope that you would just end up feeling that you didn’t have a choice.” The customary pause, “Although you would have had a choice, of course. I suppose I was kind of hoping to shame you into eating.”

Sorcha was glad that it hadn’t come to that, but knew it didn’t need a reply. She watched the fields rolling past the car window, and felt herself start to slow down and relax. For a while he seemed to be happy to let her drift off.

“The food thing, and you not wanting to eat: is that because food still smells strange?”

Jake was looking straight ahead at the road in front of him as he said it, and the question hit Sorcha like a slap round the face. It was a conversation she hadn’t even managed to have with Jane; but Jake’s approach was nearer the truth than anything Jane had come up with, and the safe, warm, cosy car- bubble made it seem like a perfectly reasonable conversation to be having.

“It’s not that I consciously don’t want to eat, pet – although I know you think I don’t. It’s just that everything suddenly tasted so strange after…” she couldn’t really call it an accident when talking to him, and was hunting around for an alternative phrase, “our little encounter.” She cringed at herself, but he didn’t seem to notice, “And sometimes I was hearing stuff when I ate as well. It made me almost afraid of it, I suppose.”

Jake was still concentrating on the largely empty road, and giving little away.

“So if you eat something like a curry, something quite strong, does that mean you’ll still hear it?”

“Not really. They ended up concluding that was mostly me imagining things, anyway, but it really doesn’t happen much any more. It’s more that I’m afraid that it might. Especially if it’s something that I haven’t eaten since… since then.”

“So you’ve been eating toast since May?”

She smiled as she leant back on the headrest.

“It’s not that bad, Pet, I promise. I’ve been trying to make myself eat lunch in the office when I’m there. And I could eat much worse things than toast.”

He glanced across at her, trying to convey a sense of sympathy before giving his concentration back to the road. Sorcha was surprised how vulnerable talking about it made her feel; but even more surprised that she was happy to feel vulnerable sitting next to him. It was a very proper, old-fashioned way to feel.

“You promise that it’s nothing to do with those pictures, that were in the magazines after, and everything? The not wanting to eat, I mean?”

The tone of his voice had changed: it had become more anxious. Sorcha was half asleep again, but this time the question came as much less of a surprise.

“Maybe a tiny bit, but it wasn’t really conscious. It meant that to start with I didn’t exactly worry about the fact that I didn’t want to eat much. Now it’s just a nuisance.” It wasn’t something that she had thought through, and she hoped that what she was saying was true. But he also wasn’t getting off that lightly, “It was definitely, one hundred per cent, the reason why I threw you out last weekend, though.”

He seemed relieved that she had finally admitted to being riled by it, while she felt guilty for having a dig. The pause lasted for several miles.

“The stuff they printed, in the magazines.” Sorcha was properly awake again, and was wondering when his vagueness was going to begin to annoy her. They both knew damned well that the problem hadn’t been magazines in general – it had been a particular edition of a particular magazine, albeit that the material had then been liberally reprinted. “I’m sorry. Really sorry, if I did say what they said.”

It wasn’t a conversation which Sorcha had prepared for: she was surprised that he even remembered it given everything else that had happened, and the thought of the photo made her feel sick. It would have been better to just leave it be; as one of those things which were just immutably, imponderably “out there”. Jake was trying to look at her while knowing that he needed to keep looking at the road instead: he needed her to say that it was OK, and her silence was unnerving him.

“I really don’t know what I said or did. It’s like one of those nightmares which wake you up without making sense. The more I try remembering it the less sense it makes. But I’m sorry, I really am.”

She wanted to tell him it was all right, but that wouldn’t quite have been true; and there was something about him that afternoon which meant that she felt that the truth was all she could give him. She wanted to touch him while she told him that he wasn’t forgiven, but could see that the gesture would be open to misinterpretation. Eventually, rather awkwardly, she rested her hand on his knee.

“Once it’s out there, it can’t be taken back though, can it? To be honest, even talking about it is like rubbing salt into wounds which I’m doing my best to ignore.”

Jake wasn’t quite sure which wounds she was talking about, but either way it still remained between them, like a wall without edges. He should have waited, and had the conversation when he could hold her; but as it was he couldn’t see that he was likely to get a chance to have it again. He put his hand over the hand which was still resting on his knee, and wished that he could look at her properly.

“If I said it, it wasn’t about you, though. Not in the way you think it was. I was horrified by what had happened, not by you.” She seemed to be pulling away, and he needed more than anything else to stop her, but he could barely get the words out. “I thought you were dead. I suppose I thought I’d killed you. I just needed to get away, for none of it to be happening, and I don’t know what I said: all I can really remember is being so, so scared. I’m sorry.”

Very gently, he felt her hand squeeze his knee. He waited until they were past a chain of three long, loose-sided container trucks, like the ones his Dad had used to drive, before looking across at her. There were two tear tracks down the side of her face: she muttered a “thank you”, and let him lace his fingers through hers. Relief radiated through him, and he felt himself welling up as well, although he managed to keep it together. Sorcha extricated herself, and went digging around in the bag which she had brought with her for a Kleenex.

“God, it must feel as if I ought to come with a flood warning at the moment. For what it’s worth I’m really not usually like this.”

He told her it was fine, and she believed him. The traffic was busier around the M6 junction, and although Jake wasn’t exactly a nervous driver the impression he gave was more of competence rather than ease. He concentrated on the road, while Sorcha tried not to concentrate on anything at all. She was afraid that if she started thinking about what he had said and how she felt about it, she would break the spell, and find herself sitting in an office with a moron and a heap of billing schedules again. She dozed, but had no idea how long or how deeply: it wasn’t a road she knew, and the sense of passing through a landscape while barely touching it added to the impression of being comfortably suspended, somewhere just outside reality.

“Can I ask you a question?”

He’d picked a moment when Sorcha was mostly awake.

“Another one?”

“That evening, when we met,” she didn’t know whether to be relieved or amused, that he didn’t seem to have found a sensible way of describing what had happened either, “what were you doing there? In the lobby, I mean.”

Even in the magic bubble, there was a limit to just how honest she needed to be.

“I was looking for someone.”

Jake recognised a brick wall when he heard one, and was curious. He was fascinated by the way that fate and chance worked as eternal, abstract concepts; but he also wanted to know more about her.

“Does someone know that you were looking for him?”

“I never said that it was a man!”

She slightly overdid the outrage, which Jake found both funny and slightly troubling, although he tried to make out that most of his attention was still on the road.

“And? does he?”

“I have no idea, pet. Turns out he was kind of busy at the time.”

“Busy? You were in the middle of a party, and he was busy?”

Jumping from a car travelling at about 90 mph down the middle lane of the M6 wasn’t the best option, so Sorcha knew she was going to have to find another way of deflecting his line of questioning.

“Look, pet. I know this is going to come as an enormous shock to you, but lawyers have sex too. Admittedly, we don’t usually get to play with the dancers and the models and the actors the way you guys do. We’re usually stuck with other lawyers: on a good day we might get to trade up to an investment banker, on a bad day we’ll make do with an accountant. It might not be for the long-term good of the human race, but it happens.”

Jake was alarmed at the direction which the conversation had taken, and was wondering what he had done to deserve it. Sorcha meanwhile realised that she had omitted one of the fundamentals of the mating rituals of the legal profession.

“Oh, and the guys always sleep with the secretaries. Bastards.”

This time, silence was exactly the response that she wanted from Jake. It meant that she had won. She settled back into the seat, and tried to wish the magic back; reckoning without Jake’s propensity to think a conversation to a standstill. Almost ten minutes passed before he decided to chance a response.

“So you were in the lobby looking for someone you work with because you wanted to have sex with him, but he was getting some action with one of the secretaries instead?”

Sorcha almost leapt out of her seat. She had gone a fetching shade of scarlet, and her face was screwed up like the soggy Kleenex which she had thrown back into her bag.

“Where the hell did that come from?” She made a few spluttering noises which didn’t quite amount to words, but was no calmer when she next managed to get a sentence out, “Who the hell told you about that?”

Jake tried not to behave as if he had just won the jackpot, and said a brief thank you to the sunshine and the road ahead.

"You did. Just now. I just wasn’t sure if I’d heard you right.”