Monday morning, and Joel was running late. It had been over a week since the painful graveside meeting with Claire’s parents. As usual, their kindness to him made him feel more fraudulent then ever, and he’d felt too guilty to take Marion up on her kind offer of babysitting at the weekend. Instead, he’d asked Eileen Jones to do it, and then felt guilty that he was depriving Marion of seeing her grandson. His evening out at the local pub, the Labourer’s Legs, had gone a bit awry. In a moment of madness he’d agreed to go out for a drink with Suzanne Cawston, a cashier at Macey’s, who clearly fancied him, as well as feeling sorry for him. Why he’d said yes he didn’t know, but he found himself sitting in the pub with her, under Lauren’s scornful eyes, as she poured him a pint. Though she had never said anything, Lauren seemed to him to be the only person who disapproved of him dating other women – or was it that looking at her reminded him of Claire?
Joel quickly established he and Suzanne had nothing in common – at twenty-two she was far too young for him – and not wanting to be rude, had drunk far more than was good for him. After that he ended up having an embarrassing fumble in the dark, outside the pub – Suzanne’s comment ‘We can’t go home, my mum and dad are in,’ reminding him how little he should be doing this – before he made his excuses and fled back home. He ignored her plaintive cry of, ‘We will see each other again won’t we?’ as he made his way up the hill.
Sunday had been spent visiting his mum. He never mentioned these women to Mum. He suspected she guessed something of his private life but she never asked him, unless he brought it up first. He’d taken her and Sam out for lunch in a cosy restaurant in nearby Chiverton, where she lived in a warden-assisted flat, and as usual, she’d cooed over her grandson. It was only towards the end of the meal, she’d tentatively asked, ‘Joel, are you OK? Only you’re very quiet. I know last week must have been so hard for you.’
‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘More than fine. It’s been hard, but we’re getting through it, aren’t we, Sammy?’ And he tickled Sam’s chin, and ignored the hand Mum held out in front of him. He didn’t refer to it again, till he dropped his mum home, gave her a kiss, and told her she worried too much.
But later when he got home, and put Sam to bed, he’d had a whole evening to brood. As he sat alone sipping a whisky, idly flicking through the TV channels in the lounge he’d started decorating just before Claire died, and had still not finished, he knew that his mum was right to worry about him.
The house weighed heavily on him – what had once seemed an exciting lifetime’s project now felt like a burden. Without Claire to share the work with him, without her to give him something to aim for, restoring this old, falling down wreck of a house seemed a pointless exercise. His enthusiasm for restoring it had died with Claire. And as for the secret garden, which had excited him so much when he and Claire had first got here, he hadn’t been in it for months. Even his great great grandfather’s old writing desk (left to him with the house), which he’d started to strip down and lovingly planned to restore, sat abandoned and unfinished. He felt in limbo. Unable to go back, unable to move on. He was very very far from all right.
Matters didn’t get any better the following morning. Sam wasn’t being cooperative and he’d got porridge all down the top that Joel had just put him in. Joel had ended up shouting, and of course Sam burst into tears, which made him feel terrible. What kind of monstrous dad shouted at their seventeen-month-old? As ever the thought – what would Claire do? – floated in his head. He sighed, got Sam changed, and then himself when he realized that he was smeared with baby porridge. Seeing the time he raced to the car, strapped Sam in, and drove like the clappers down the hill to Lauren’s house.
He got on well with Lauren, and she’d been a fantastic source of strength to him after Claire died. She had been one of the few people he could face being around in those early weeks. She didn’t ask anything of him, or besiege him with questions about how he was doing, but was quietly supportive, and they had grieved for Claire together.
Their childcare arrangement (fortunately already in place before Claire died) was a good one, but he often felt wrongfooted when he was with Lauren. It was one thing to constantly be home late for an uncomplaining wife, quite another to face Lauren’s wrath for the hundredth time, when he’d got stuck working late. He did his best, and for the most part the small charity where he worked accommodated him, but his life was now full of tense compromises between work and home. He was always joking that he was like the wife of the office, always the one rushing home early for the children. And only now was he beginning to realize quite how tough things had been for Claire when she first went back to work.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, as he thrust Sam into Lauren’s waiting arms. The twins peeped mischievously from behind her, already in their school uniforms. How did she do that? Joel wondered. She had two of them, it wasn’t yet 8 a.m., and they were both spick and span and ready. Even after a year he still felt inadequate when it came to the domestic side of his life.
‘No worries,’ said Lauren lightly, but he knew her well enough to tell she was irritated. Though she generally showed him nothing but sympathy and kindness, Lauren wasn’t above putting him in his place from time to time. She had pointed out on more than one occasion that she wasn’t his slave, and he really needed to take more responsibility for things. She’d never quite said, ‘Just because Claire put up with you, there’s no reason why I should,’ but Joel sometimes felt sure it must be on the tip of her tongue, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should make more effort for Lauren. She was great with Sam, and filled the gap Claire left behind as well as she could. Joel never meant to take her for granted, but life was so overwhelming sometimes he leant on her a bit too heavily. Lauren loved Sam almost as much as he did. He was immensely lucky to have her.
Lauren sighed as she shut the door behind Joel. He could be so frustrating at times, it nearly drove her demented. He appeared to have no concept of time at all, or appreciate that her life didn’t just revolve around him and Sam. For the most part, Lauren felt really sorry for him – it was hard for him having to bring up a child alone, and she was sympathetic. But lately, she had also begun to feel resentful. She’d been left literally holding the babies and had had no choice but to get on with it. Everyone in Heartsease thought that Joel was an amazing dad and he was, but Lauren also knew from things Claire had let slip that he had been quite unhelpful when Sam was born. So while she was sympathetic to his situation, somehow she couldn’t quite shift her feelings of irritation.
‘It must be difficult for him, I guess,’ Claire would say, to Lauren’s annoyance. Much as Lauren had loved Claire, it drove her mad the way she constantly forgave Joel, when Lauren felt he was being so unsupportive. Claire. Lauren felt the loss of her friend keenly. The grief could still come suddenly like a deep punch to the stomach. Claire had put up with Joel’s vagaries because she loved him, Lauren should probably try and do the same.
But Lauren had found it difficult to cope with the scandalously short time it had taken Joel to start dating other women. Claire had barely been in her grave, or so it seemed, when Lauren had spotted him with the first one in the Labourer’s Legs, where she worked some evenings. True, on that occasion, Joel had been pounced on by Jenny Hunter, the village slapper, who’d been known to fell lesser men at five paces, so he didn’t have much chance. But Jenny had been swiftly followed by Mary Stevens, the Year One teacher at the village school, and Kerry Adams, who ran the chemist’s.
If she hadn’t known better – Joel had cried on her shoulder more than once in the early weeks after Claire’s death – Lauren might have thought he didn’t care about Claire at all. Only the other Saturday – a few days after Claire’s anniversary – Lauren had spotted him all over Suzanne Cawston. His behaviour exhausted her patience with him. If the boot had been on the other foot, Claire would never have done that, and Lauren felt indignant on her friend’s behalf that Joel should apparently have replaced her so lightly. But she didn’t want to fall out with him about it. Not only did she love looking after Sam, the bottom