Hope’s heart missed a beat. ‘What are you on about?’ she asked, feeling a queasy sensation in the pit of her stomach, a sensation that had nothing to do with drinking too much.
‘It’s fine, really,’ Jasmine assured her in a stage whisper. ‘You don’t have to pretend you don’t know. I won’t say a word to Adam about it, I promised Matt I wouldn’t. I’m sure that Adam will go ballistic when he discovers Matt wants to take a year’s sabbatical but you have to pursue your dreams, don’t you.’ She got misty-eyed. ‘I’d love to move somewhere remote to write but I’d hate to be away from twenty-four hour shops. Won’t you mind?’
Hope recovered her composure. This was not the moment to say the notion of Matt taking a year out was news to her. She tried to look resigned instead of astonished. ‘Who knows what’ll happen,’ she shrugged. ‘The whole idea is very much aspirational right now. We love Bath and…’
‘Jasmine, time to go,’ announced Adam suddenly, looming behind his wife and putting proprietorial hands on her slim, golden shoulders.
With Jasmine and Adam gone, the party deflated. Betsey insisted to Dan she was tired and had to go home.
‘We should go too,’ said Elizabeth, reaching under the table for her handbag.
With the wisdom born of being slightly drunk, Hope realized that her husband’s colleagues weren’t so close to him as he thought. Their eagerness to party only lasted as long as the boss’s presence. When Adam was gone, so was the party spirit. But Matt didn’t seem to mind and waved everyone off with great bonhomie.
In the taxi, Hope sat quietly as they drove out on the Bristol road. Matt lay back against the seat with his eyes closed, his face expressionless now they were alone. As houses sped by, Hope worked out what she was going to say when they got home. It went against the grain to start an argument in the back of a taxi with the driver listening to every word.
The pieces of the puzzle had fallen painfully into place thanks to the artless Jasmine. Matt was dreaming up an enormous career change and Hope and the kids didn’t figure in his plans. Would she stay on in the house in Bath or move to London to be near Sam, Hope wondered in shock. She’d move, definitely, she couldn’t stay in the house where they’d been so happy. Correction; where she’d been so happy. Matt obviously hadn’t been happy or he wouldn’t want to leave it and her.
The children had been little lambs and the chocolate biscuits had been great, Elaine, the babysitter, said when they got home.
‘Good,’ said Hope absently, getting out her purse. Her hands were shaking, like an alcoholic’s before the first drink of the day. ‘Matt will walk you home.’
‘It’s only across the road,’ protested Elaine.
‘Better safe than sorry,’ Hope said. ‘It’s half twelve, you know. Time for the deviants of the world to emerge.’
‘In Maltings Lane?’ asked Elaine incredulously.
When Matt came back, Hope was sitting waiting for him at the kitchen table. Her hands were still shaking, so she put them on her lap and clasped them tightly together as if she was praying. Perhaps if she had prayed, none of this would have happened, she thought wildly.
‘I thought you’d be on your way to bed by now,’ Matt remarked, pouring himself a glass of milk. It was the longest statement he’d made in about a week.
‘Jasmine said a very strange thing to me tonight,’ Hope said evenly. ‘She said you were taking a sabbatical to live in the country to write a book – not this country was the implication. I just wondered when you were going to tell me of this plan and if I and the children were actually included.’
‘Ah.’ Matt sat down with her. ‘Too much red wine is a terrible thing.’
‘You mean Jasmine misunderstood?’ Hope could barely get the words out.
‘Not exactly,’ Matt said slowly. ‘I’m afraid I got a bit carried away and said too much.’
‘So it’s true.’ Her legs began to shake too with fear.
‘Hope,’ Matt wasn’t sure how to start but he knew he had to. Telling Jasmine had been a decision fuelled by too much wine but it had been a relief to talk about it with someone other than Dan. It was time to tell Hope. ‘It’s been a dream of mine for years and you know me, respectable family man, I’d never do anything wild or out of the ordinary, anything that would jeopardize our future but now I’ve got the chance and I thought, why not take a year out. I know that Adam would keep my job open for me – he’d have to, I’m the best he’s got,’ he added, proud of the fact.
‘But what about me and the kids?’ asked Hope, eyes wet and filled with terror. Was Matt drunk? Didn’t he care about them at all?
‘I mean all of us going away. You, me and the kids for a year. To Ireland; Kerry, in fact. Uncle Gearóid’s solicitor phoned me on Monday about the old house. I know it’s sudden but it’s like the answer to my prayers. I’ve been so down, Hope, so depressed and then he phones to say the house is officially mine. I haven’t been able to think of anything else all week.’
Hope’s whole body was shaking now; she could barely take in what he was saying because her mind was so befuddled with fear and anxiety.
Gearóid had been a poet who, over forty years before, had left his home in the UK for a small town named Redlion in Kerry, where he lived a bohemian life with gusto. Hope had never met him because he’d refused to leave his beloved adopted country to come to their wedding but he’d always sounded like a mad old rogue who pickled his liver and wrote bad poetry that nobody had ever wanted to publish. He’d even changed his name from Gerald to the Irish and unpronounceable Gearóid, which Hope still found impossible to say, no matter how many times Matt said it phonetically: ‘Gar, like garage, and oid like haemorrhoid.’
Matt had spent a few summers in Redlion as a child and still talked mistily about what a wonderful place Kerry was. But as Gearóid became more eccentric with age, he refused to travel to stay with Matt, who, in turn, never seemed to have the time to visit his ageing uncle. When he died, he left Matt everything; partly because he didn’t have any children of his own and partly, according to his solicitor, to annoy the other distant relatives who’d been hanging around like vultures hoping for a piece of property in a popular tourist destination in south-western Ireland. ‘Everything’ turned out to be a run-down house the solicitor imagined wouldn’t fetch much. Hope had assumed that Matt would simply sell the house. They could certainly do with the money.
‘Probate’s finally been sorted out,’ Matt explained. ‘The house is mine. And yours, of course. There’s a bit of land but only an acre or so. It all seemed much bigger when I was a kid. I thought he had loads of land. Anyway,’ he paused, ‘this is my idea. I’ve told you about the writers’ community there that Gearóid helped start up in the Sixties?’
Hope nodded, still looking shell-shocked, although Matt didn’t notice because he was fired up with the enthusiasm of telling her his plan.
‘It’s spooky because this is so coincidental,’ Matt went on eagerly, ‘but last week I read an interview with the novelist, Stephen Dane – you know the guy, he writes those literary thrillers. Anyway, he’s just sold a book to Hollywood. We’re talking millions, Hope. And in the middle of the interview, he mentioned that he wrote his first novel in Kerry, in Redlion, actually, in the writer’s centre. Don’t you see, it’s got to be a sign.
‘We’d both take a year out and go and live in Gearóid’s house. I’d write a novel. I’ve got one in me, I know it. Imagine it, Hope,’ Matt said, his eyes alight with enthusiasm, desperate to transmit his excitement to her and unaware of what she’d been thinking since his birthday, ‘we could be with the children all day. I could get some part time copy writing work and we’d live cheaply enough. We could rent out this place for a year and cover the mortgage. We