‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and get that coffee.’
… The day you left for boarding school I didn’t want to let you go. We stood outside your house, your father’s car packed up with your things, my arms wrapped around your waist, your chin on the top of my head. Even at eleven you were head and shoulders taller than me.
‘Come along, Rupert, please,’ your father said. I could hear the irritation in his voice. He was always impatient when I was around. Maybe he was impatient when I wasn’t around too, but I did feel that his impatience was reserved especially for me.
You pulled away, pushing your glasses up your nose and looking at me. I remember your eyes seemed bluer than ever that afternoon.
‘I’m still here, Jessie,’ you said. ‘Whenever you need me.’ But I knew I wouldn’t see you until the Christmas holidays and when you’re eleven the distance between September and Christmas seems enormous, insurmountable, impassable.
You got into the back of the car and your father pulled away, off to your expensive new school in London. It felt like you were going forever. It felt as though it was the end. You looked out of the rear window as the car turned out of the bottom of the road and you waved briefly. I felt as though I’d never see you again.
But life carried on much as it always had, even though you weren’t there. I moved up into the Senior Building of my all-girls school and I made friends who helped me keep my mind off you, who helped to fill the gaping hole you’d left behind.
Caitlin and Gemma were the only girls like me at school – my grandmother had high ideas about my education, but I don’t think she’d thought through how hard it would be for me to fit in. Caitlin and Gemma and I were ordinary – we didn’t have trust funds or long limbs and blonde hair and our fathers weren’t ‘something in the City’.
But they always saw me for who I was rather than as ‘Rupert Tremayne’s friend’ …
Even though in the end she hadn’t believed him, it had always been Jess. From the day he asked her to marry him in the school playground he knew. Admittedly, he didn’t really know what it was that he knew when he was six, but it was a feeling; a sense of the way things were meant to be. Even years later, after he’d left her standing at the departure gate at Heathrow airport, he had still known. None of the women he’d tried to lose himself in at Harvard could compare, not even Camilla – especially not Camilla. He’d always wanted them to be Jess and they never could be. He’d stopped dating completely in the end.
He could clearly remember the day he first realised his feelings for Jess had slipped from best friends to something more, something much more. It was the Christmas holidays before their GCSEs. Something about Jess had changed that winter; it felt as though she was sliding away from him. She was starting to have a life that he wasn’t a part of and she talked about the parties she had been to and the boys Gemma and Caitlin had giggled over, the boys they had kissed.
‘Did you kiss anyone?’ he’d asked, unable to hide the jealousy from his voice.
She’d shaken her head. ‘Not this time,’ she’d said with a grin.
He had wanted to kiss her then, but he hadn’t had the courage to do anything except think about what that would be like and it had taken him until the following summer to admit what was happening – that they couldn’t just be friends anymore.
He’d always thought he’d asked her too soon, that she hadn’t been ready for a relationship when she was sixteen. But she had known as well as he had that they had both reached the point of no turning back.
Over the last week, since seeing Jess again, Rupert had had to stop himself from tracking her down. He knew Gemma worked at Kew. It would be easy enough to call her, to find out where Jess was, what her phone number was. Gemma had seemed quite keen to push the two of them back together, had even told him Jess was single. What harm could there be in asking Jess if she wanted to meet for a coffee next time he was in London?
But he had pushed her before, when they were sixteen, and again, when they were twenty-one, when they were both lost in the grief of losing Jess’s father. He didn’t want to be that person again and Jess had made no move to get in touch with him. He tried to remind himself that walking away from her outside her hotel had been the right thing to do.
When the thick gold-embossed envelope appeared in his pigeonhole at work it had felt like a lifeline. Gemma had invited him to her wedding after all. He had thought she’d been joking when she mentioned it in the pub. He hadn’t needed to call her in the end because Gemma had given him a second chance. He knew this would be the last chance he would get. It was now or never.
I woke up on the morning of Gemma’s wedding feeling as though I’d been hit by a truck. Not today, I thought. Please not today.
Five years previously I had come down with glandular fever. I’d known other people who had had it, I knew that it could take weeks, even months, to recover, but for me something had gone wrong. The virus had triggered something else in my body, something worse, and had left me sick and weak for years. Up until a year or so ago I would wake up most mornings feeling like this – every bone in my body aching, my glands swollen, my head pounding. I knew when I stood up I would be dizzy and that everything I did, from cleaning my teeth to brushing my hair, would be exhausting; that every movement would feel as though I was walking through jam.
Over the years, the bad days became less frequent and I was able to live a more normal life – if going to bed at 9 p.m. and barely drinking or socialising could be considered a normal life for a woman my age. My thirtieth birthday party ended at 6 p.m. and the strongest substance imbibed by me was Earl Grey tea.
These days I still got tired easily and, towards the end of the day, the bone-aching weariness would return. But as long as I took my painkillers and my other medication I could usually manage most situations.
I lay in bed racking my brains, trying to work out what I’d done to trigger a flare-up like this. I knew the run-up to Gemma’s wedding – the endless hair and beauty trials, the rehearsal dinner, the dress fittings and the stress of the last-minute arrangements – would be exhausting, but I’d tried to get early nights, tried not to drink and tried to do the things that I knew helped me. Yet, despite my efforts the wheels had fallen off on the one day I needed them more than ever.
The only thing I could think of was that London was enjoying a brief heatwave and, although I loved the summer time, the heat could be a trigger for my symptoms – especially in an old hotel without air conditioning, when I hadn’t slept well.
I wasn’t going to admit, even to myself, that I hadn’t been sleeping well recently because I’d been up late night after night reading my old journals, poring over the box of photos, lost in memories of the past. And I wasn’t going to admit that my insomnia had increased along with my anxiety at seeing Rupert again today. My stomach churned with a mix of dread and excitement at the thought.
I took some deep breaths and tried to remember the times I’d had to battle flare-ups like this before – like when the deadline for my second novel was looming,