‘No—er—Tess—’ he called after her as she went inside, but she ignored him.
‘Hi,’ said a friendly-looking person behind the counter, wiping her hands on a tea towel. ‘Can I get you anything?’
She was beaming in a welcoming way which made Tess, less than two hours off the train from London, instantly suspicious of her. ‘Just looking, thanks,’ Tess replied repressively and turned to the shelves.
‘They’ve got some good stuff in here,’ Adam said, in a low voice. He swivelled round, so they were both facing the shelves. ‘Nice pasta, and the vegetables are fresh. They get them from George Farm, it’s a good arrangement.’
‘I love cooking,’ Tess said. She sighed with pleasure.
‘How long are you staying at the pub for?’ Adam asked her.
‘Till I find somewhere,’ Tess said.
‘You should have stayed with me,’ Adam said. ‘It’s ridiculous, you paying to stay there.’
‘I didn’t—’ Tess began, then she stopped. ‘That’s so sweet of you.’ She patted his arm, touched and grateful for the presence of him, and shook her head.
‘That’s OK,’ Adam said, still in a low voice.
‘Why are you speaking so softly?’ Tess said. She turned back to the counter. ‘Perhaps I should get some—’
‘Adam?’ said the friendly girl eagerly, her pale face lighting up. ‘I thought it was you. Hi—hi there!’
‘Hi, Liz,’ said Adam neutrally. ‘How’ve you been.’
He said this not as a question, more from a need to say something. Tess watched this exchange with dawning understanding.
Liz wiped her hands on her tea towel again, beaming with pleasure. ‘It’s good to see you! I wondered where you’d been.’
‘Ah—ah.’ Adam took a step back, and Tess smiled wryly, looking at her feet. Just like the old days; nothing had changed. She knew what was going to happen next.
And it did. ‘This is Tess,’ Adam said, putting his arm around Tess and squeezing her shoulders. He kissed the top of her head. ‘Tess, this is Liz. She’s from London too.’
‘Actually, I’m from Nantwich,’ Liz said. ‘But I live here now. Moved down here last year.’ She held out her hand bravely, smiling a little too enthusiastically. ‘It’s great to meet you, Tess!’
‘Yes,’ said Tess, shaking her hand. ‘You too.’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’ve just moved back and it is great to catch up with people like Adam,’ she said woodenly. ‘Because he is my oldest friend. And is like a brother to me.’
‘Right! Right!’ Liz tried and failed to hide her pleasure at this news, and stared at Tess with something like adoration. Adam, meanwhile, glared at his oldest friend with something like loathing.
‘So—’ Tess went on, evilly, getting into her stride. ‘It’s great to meet you. Are you two—’
‘That wasn’t fair,’ Adam said a couple of minutes later, as he bundled Tess out of the shop, having guilt-bought far too many overpriced deli items and leaving Liz smiling pleasantly behind them.
‘It wasn’t fair of you to do that to me, the old routine again,’ Tess said firmly. ‘Or to that nice girl. I remember you and your ways, Adam. But poor Liz doesn’t know about you.’
‘What about me?’ Adam said tetchily.
‘That the main reason you work at the Feathers is to pick up women,’ Tess told him. ‘And that you should be in the tourist guide as a well-known landmark.’
‘I only slept with her a couple of times,’ Adam said, ignoring this.
Tess hit him on the arm. ‘“I only slept with her a couple of times,”’ she mimicked, crossly. ‘God, men. You think that means it doesn’t mean anything! Oh, you are so useless. She’s mad about you! She’s been waiting for you to call her!’
‘Well…’ Adam said. ‘I bet that’s not true. I mean, I like her, but—’
‘Oh, I know, you can’t be bothered to actually talk to her, after you’ve shagged her,’ said Tess, and it came out sounding angrier than she meant.
‘Don’t split your infinitives,’ Adam said, brightly. ‘Call yourself a Classicist?’
‘It’s not funny,’ Tess said. They walked down the road towards the pub and after a pause she burst out, ‘God, sometimes I really hate men.’
Adam glanced at her swiftly, and was silent for a moment, then said, ‘So, er—have you heard from Will?’ He patted her arm. ‘Don’t hit me again. I’m serious. I’m sorry about you two, I thought it was all going well.’
‘I thought so too,’ said Tess. ‘I was wrong, obviously.’
‘Do you know why…’ Adam began, and trailed off.
‘Yeah. He’s seeing someone else.’ Tess said. Adam nodded. ‘Someone called Ticky.’
‘I don’t know what that means.’
Tess gazed up at the thick white January sky. ‘No, I don’t either. Except I hate her.’
‘You see, just like a girl,’ Adam said. ‘You should hate him, he’s the one who did you wrong.’
‘You sound like Mae West,’ Tess said, trying not to sound miserable.
‘I mean it. I never thought he was…’ he trailed off again. Tess nodded, and shoved her hand through the air in a ‘I know, I know’ gesture. Adam had met Will a couple of times and she had come to accept—so she told herself—that there were some people with whom Will was not destined to get on. Adam was one of them. He was too ready to laugh, too ready to take the piss out of Tess; they knew each other too well, perhaps, for Will ever to be the third side of the triangle.
Will had not been a laugh-a-minute. Indeed, that was one of the things that Tess had originally liked about him. Here she was, this poverty-stricken teacher, frittering her twenties away in South London pubs, wearing too-short skirts and drinking Pernod and Black, her only claim to cultural superiority being that she taught Classics (though bribing bored fourteen-year-olds with a bloodthirsty description of the Emperor Nero’s brutal murder of his mother Agrippina as a back route to telling them about the fall of the Roman Empire did not necessarily indicate the highest levels of academic achievement, she knew). Their friend Henry, whom Tess knew from university and Will from school, had introduced them at a birthday party. It was a hot summer’s day and Tess was wearing a shirt dress which emphasized her curvy form; her eyes were sparkling, her thick dark hair shining, and she had a tan, having just returned from two weeks in Greece with Fiona, another friend from university.
Will had been impressed with this clever, pretty girl and—height being a sensitive issue with him, since he stood less than five foot six inches high in his shoes—what he particularly loved was the way her tanned face looked up to his, her blue-grey eyes smiling at him, as she described her holiday. He had barely listened as she talked, and so he never heard that they were staying in an all-inclusive resort, and to his question, ‘Did you go to Mycenae?’ never heard the answer, ‘Well, we went to a karaoke bar called Mycenae Mike.’ He merely smiled as she chattered, wondering how easy the promising shirt dress which revealed just enough of her breasts would be to remove.
Three dates did it; by then Tess, who had been rather unsure about him at the beginning, since he was so unlike her in so many ways, had fallen for his adept flattery, and by Christmas she was head over heels in love with him. For the first year all was wonderful; Will liked the fact that she was a little different from his usual (tall, thin, blonde, posh) girlfriends, and Tess for her part liked the fact that he was a little different from her