Читать книгу Sunshine on a Rainy Day: A funny, feel-good romantic comedy - Bryony Fraser, Bryony Fraser - Страница 11

There was only so much refusing they could do before someone got offended, so within half an hour, Zoe and Jack – minus Jack’s face mask (‘The air round here is so polluting, don’t you find?’ asked Jack’s mother, Linda; slim, groomed, tortoiseshell glasses pushed into her shiny chestnut hair) – were in a taxi with Jack’s parents. Linda had taken Zoe’s arm from the moment Jack had introduced her and hadn’t let go since. Graham, his father, said very little, pale and quiet in a pale, quiet shirt and corduroy trousers, merely smiling at her and giving her a muttered hello. Once they’d been seated at the restaurant Zoe realised that was probably the highlight of his interactions for today. Linda chose his food for him, reminding him that tomato soup never agrees with you this time of night, does it, Graham? and Maybe you should just stick to the garlic bread, Graham, and, Graham, I think you’d best have the lamb, after your trouble with the chicken last time. Zoe, on a student budget, skipped the starters and chose the cheapest thing from the mains, a three-bean salad. Jack chose the same.

‘So then,’ said Linda, settling her glasses on her face and tilting her head to one side. ‘When were you going to tell us about your new girlfriend, Jack?’

‘Oh, I’m—’

‘It’s quite—’

‘Do you go to the same college as Jack, dear?’

‘No, I’m way over the other side of town – I’m doing Chemistry.’

‘Ooh! A scientist! Well, that is posh. Isn’t that posh, Graham? Zoe’s going to be a scientist!’

‘Well, I hope I will. It’s a long way to go yet. If I do my Masters I’ve got another couple of years left.’

‘So Jack will have left before you’ve even finished?’

‘Mum, we’ve only just—’

‘Yeah. Yeah, I suppose he will. I hadn’t thought about that. We really only met just—’

‘My cousin’s son is a scientist.’

‘Mum, Stuart works in Boots.’

‘No, well, he started in Science, but decided he wanted to be more hands-on.’

‘He didn’t “start in Science”, Mum. He did a Science GCSE, which he failed.’

‘Oh, so now you know all your second cousins’ academic careers, do you? You can’t ever remember to send your Auntie Chrissie a Christmas card, and yet you can remember all her children’s grades?’

‘Mum, I’m sure he’s a really great … retail guy. But that’s not the same as what Zoe’s doing.’ He looked at Zoe, who was smiling at him with something like sympathy in her eyes.

‘Well, you know best, Jack, obviously.’

The starters arrived – garlic bread for Graham, crab terrine for Linda – and Zoe and Jack worked their way in silence through the complimentary bread basket while his parents ate, Graham in small mouthfuls, Linda spreading a single piece of toast with the crab terrine before sniffing it, wrinkling up her nose and putting it back on the plate.

‘Is it alright, Mum?’

She wrinkled her nose again, her mouth a disgusted moue. ‘I don’t think that crab’s any good, you know.’

‘Well, do you want to tell the waiter?’

‘Oh no, it’s fine.’

‘It’s not fine – if your crab’s off we should tell them. Get you another one.’

‘No no, if that one’s spoiled, they’re probably all off.’

‘Let’s get you something else then. Do you want me to tell the waiter?’

‘Jack, just leave it, I’m fine. I don’t need a starter. Once they bring me something else your mains will be arriving anyway.’

Jack took in a huge breath, slowly breathing out through his nose while Zoe squeezed his thigh under the table. He put his hand on hers and squeezed it too, his breathing becoming easier.

The waiter came over, went to take the plates away, but saw Linda’s was still full.

‘Are you – is this still going?’

‘No no! It’s fine, I just don’t want to spoil my appetite for my main course!’

The waiter looked baffled. ‘Was everything alright?’

‘Yes! Lovely! Thank you!’

Jack dropped his head down, closing his eyes. When the waiter had taken the two plates away, he said, ‘Could you not have told him, Mum?’

‘Well. I don’t know. Maybe the crab wasn’t spoiled. It just smelled a bit—’

‘Don’t say fishy.’

‘Well it did!’

‘Mum.’

‘You didn’t have to eat it, Jack. You wouldn’t have been the one with food poisoning.’

‘I didn’t eat it because you didn’t offer it to me. If I’d thought you were basing your rejection of your seafood dish on it “smelling fishy” I would have made more of an effort to try it myself.’ Zoe squeezed his thigh again and Jack took a quick drink. ‘Sorry, Mum. It was your food.’

Linda blinked at him. ‘Thank you, Jack,’ she said, surprised. ‘I’m sure I’ll say something if there’s anything wrong with the main.’

Zoe gave Jack a tiny nudge, and he snorted into his glass of water. She smiled at Graham, who smiled absently back at her then returned to rearranging his napkin on his lap.

After a few moments, Zoe dabbed at her mouth with her own napkin, and said, ‘So do you get to see Jack much then?’ Under the bright restaurant lights, she was beginning to feel sweaty, as the aftereffects of the drinks she and Jack had shared with the pizza last night finally kicked in. She was also sweating with the realisation that she barely knew Jack from a broom in the corner, and she was wondering just how deep they were digging by sitting here and letting his parents think they was something stable and long term, when he was still listed in her phone as ‘Hot Barman’.

‘Well, you know how it is, Zoe, it’s a long way to travel when we’re all the way out east—’

‘In … Asia?’

Linda looked baffled. ‘No, dear, in Norwich. It’s quite a way for us to come to visit Jack here at university, and Graham doesn’t really like the journey. Do you, Graham?’ She looked over at her husband, who was staring into his glass, rattling the ice cubes. She gave a tiny sigh. ‘And whereabouts are your parents? Are they … Do they live in this country?’ Despite having spoken with her for the last hour, Linda’s voice suddenly became fractionally louder and over-pronounced for this final part of the question.

Zoe beamed at her. ‘Yes, they’re up in Leytonstone. North-east London.’

‘Right. Right.’ Linda looked confused again, unsure how to navigate a question which surely had been misunderstood. ‘Well, speaking of your Auntie Chrissie, her dentist told her that his sister has just been imprisoned in Saudi Arabia.’ She looked at Zoe, questioningly. ‘Not like … your … people—’

‘Mum, look, the mains are here!’

Zoe met Graham’s eye and wondered if he’d heard a word, he looked so disengaged; when his lamb was put in front of him he just gave the waiter a grateful smile and tucked in, eyes down.

Zoe looked at the bowl in front of her – brown beans mixed in with some green unknowables and some sad lettuce leaves – looked at Jack’s identical portion, then up at Jack. They both laughed.

‘Anything wrong, you two?’ Linda asked, a forkful of salmon en croute halfway to her mouth.

‘No, Mum,’ Jack said, scooping up some mystery salad. ‘Everything’s just fine.’ He nudged Zoe’s knee with his own under the table, and Zoe felt his body relax a little beside hers.

‘I suppose it’s nice to have a degree where you know what you’ll do with it afterwards,’ Linda said.

‘I should hope so – I’ll have spent long enough on it. Although sometimes people do change their minds and go into engineering, manufacture, even completely different subjects.’ Zoe nudged her three-bean salad around the dish. ‘I suppose sometimes you need to try things before you know if they’re right for you or not.’

‘I know, I know, I say this to Jack all the time! I mean his friend Iffy’s doing medicine, so he’ll be fine, but Jack! He can do this little art course, though God knows what it’s costing us—’

‘Mum, I pay for the course myself.’

‘But eventually the time will come when he has to decide how he’s going to make his living. If he wants to settle down and have a wife and a family, he needs to think about how he’s going to support them all, and stop lying around living this student lifestyle, waiting for hand-outs from the state—’

‘What are you talking about, Mum? I don’t get any state benefits.’

‘Not for want of trying, I’ll bet,’ she chuckled ruefully.

‘I … don’t …’ Jack looked at Zoe, wide eyed. She tried not to laugh.

‘I mean it though, Jack, you have to think about life after college. Don’t you think, Graham?’ Jack’s father was pushing his vegetables around his plate with great concentration.

‘I literally think about it every day, Mum. My whole course is geared around making us skilled and employable in our chosen fields.’

‘No, I mean, this is a nice hobby, maybe something you can take up again when you’re retired. But really now – shoe-making? Everything’s made in China, now, isn’t it? What are you going to do, ship some of their little elves over for your workshop?’

Her laughter was interrupted by Graham abruptly getting up and mumbling something about finding the toilets. Linda was obviously put out by having what felt like one of her favourite jokes interrupted.

Zoe sat a little closer to the table. ‘Do you get to go away much? On holiday, I mean? I think I quite fancy visiting China one day.’

‘Oh no, love, Graham couldn’t stomach somewhere like China. The food would just go straight through him. No, when we go away we tend to stick to what we like – a narrow boat around the Broads in April and a Greek island in September.’

Zoe could just picture them: Graham shadowing Linda silently as she, with bumbag and sunglasses on a neck strap, spoke loudly about pickpockets and Proper Cups of Tea as she crushed millennia-old religious sites under her comfortable walking sandals.

‘That sounds lovely. I’ve always wanted to go to Greece. What’s it like?’

‘Well …’ She thought for a moment. ‘The key is finding the right places to eat, I think. Once we’ve found a nice café with English owners, I can relax and enjoy my holiday. No offence, but I’m not sure I’d trust those Greeks to wash the dishes properly, if you know what I mean.’ She looked at Zoe meaningfully.

‘Thanks Mum, we’ll get on with digging out your hidden subtext.’ He looked at Zoe. ‘Would you really like to go to Greece?’

‘Yeah, I think so. I don’t know if there’s anywhere I wouldn’t like to go, to be fair. As long as it wasn’t on a Foreign Office blacklist, obviously.’

‘No erupting volcanoes then.’

‘Or actual war zones.’

‘Or will.i.am gigs?’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Zoe giggled. ‘It’s something for the Christmas newsletter, isn’t it?’

Linda perked up suddenly. ‘Oh, does your family do one of those too? Well, that is integration, isn’t it? I absolutely love doing them – I start drafting it in September, although Jack and Graham both rib me terribly. But I always say to them, if I don’t do it, it wouldn’t get done.’

‘And wouldn’t that be a shame,’ Jack said.

‘See what I mean, Zoe? People like it, Jack, even if you don’t. They want to know what’s happening with their friends’ children and spouses.’

‘Only so they can feel better about their own lives.’

Linda tutted at Zoe. ‘They never want to know about dinner parties and Christmas cards until there are no women around to organise it all for them.’

‘Mum, maybe we just don’t care about those things in the exact same way you do.’

‘Of course you don’t, Jack. But maybe you will. Maybe you’ll care when you’re seventy-two and haven’t seen another human being for a month because your wife has died and your children don’t call and you’ve never bothered to write a Christmas card or invite someone over for a coffee. Maybe you’ll understand then how important “those things” actually are to living in a society.’

There was a silence as Zoe looked more carefully at Linda, who was panting slightly with her strength of feeling.

Jack picked his napkin up from the floor. ‘That escalated quickly. I was only talking about those show-off Christmas letters, Mum. I didn’t mean we should all die alone.’

Linda picked at some imaginary fluff on one jumper sleeve. ‘Well. Maybe you don’t understand that the line between the two isn’t as black and white as you think. Maybe you don’t know everything quite yet, Jack.’

Zoe gently touched Linda’s hand on the table. Linda jumped. Zoe said, ‘We’re all the same, aren’t we, students? Think we know everything because we’ve been to a few lectures. My mum despairs of me.’

Linda smiled at her, a warm smile, the first Zoe had seen that evening, and put her hand on top of Zoe’s. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think there’s hope for a few of you yet.’

Just then, Graham shambled back from the toilets and slid into his chair.

Linda pushed her plate back and gestured to a waiter. ‘Right. Pudding, anyone?’

‘Alright. Yes, I wasn’t expecting to meet your parents, but no, it wasn’t actually as disastrous as it could have been. I mean, I didn’t have my chosen Meet the Parents Outfit on—’

‘You have a specific outfit?’

‘Flowery skirt: not too short or I look like I’m the cheating type, not too long or it looks like they’ll never have grandkids. Soft jumper: wow, look how approachable I am, low key and fluffy. Wedge heels: yes, I’m into aesthetics, but not in a way that would ever get in the way of my relationship with your son.’

Jack had his mouth open. ‘Wow, that’s … that’s awful. And brilliant. And awful.’

‘I know. But I just managed in this,’ Zoe said, gesturing at her jeans, t-shirt, leather jacket and battered trainers. ‘This is like the anti-Meet the Parents Outfit.’

‘And you still won them over.’

‘Did I?’ she said, with a disingenuous eyelash flutter. ‘Little old me?’

Jack pulled her close. ‘I don’t know how you did it, but yes, you did.’

‘Your mum’s not so bad. I don’t think it can be easy, living with your dad like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘He never talks! Ever! Does he? Or was it just me? I feel like the poor woman has to keep speaking just to fill that void between them.’

Jack stepped away. ‘Really? You think there’s a void between them?’

Zoe took his hand, laughing. ‘I don’t know. I’ve met them once, for one fairly odd dinner. You know them better than I do.’

‘I’d honestly never thought about it that way before.’ He looked up at her. ‘That maybe my dad might be hard to live with. I always thought it was my mum who was the difficult one.’

She kissed him. ‘Either way, we all survived the dinner, didn’t we? It might have been unexpected, but it wasn’t the apocalypse it could have been. Was it?’

‘My dad, when they left, actually said to me “She’s nice.”’

‘Wow, high praise.’

‘I don’t think you understand. That’s like Raymond Blanc saying your bouillabaisse is “quite tasty”.’

‘Because he’s such a connoisseur of women?’

‘No! It’s like Simon Cowell saying you’ve got a good voice.’

‘Because your dad’s made a career out of judging your girlfriends?’

‘No!’ Jack was laughing. ‘It just … it means he really means it. That when he says it, someone who never says much about anything, you must really have made an impression.’

‘A good one?’

‘Yes. He said you were nice, for god’s sake. Approval doesn’t come much higher than that.’

‘Well. I’ll make sure to put your father’s approval of me on my CV.’

‘And my mum’s.’

‘And your mum’s? Bloody hell, I did do well.’

‘You did indeed. But if there’s any chance you might be staying over again, please can we stop talking about my parents?’

‘Deal. Although now of course you’ve got to meet mine.’

They were both laughing, but there was a fraction of a second where both their laughs froze. Are we definitely doing this? thought Zoe. Is this it, now?

She gave Jack a kiss at the side of his mouth, and pulled out of his arms. ‘I’d love to stay another night, but I’ve got an early start in the morning. Thanks, though. I had a nice time.’

Jack offered a wonky smile, aware too of the oddness they’d accelerated into this evening. ‘Call me?’

‘I will,’ she said. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe.’

‘If I’m lucky.’

She opened his door. ‘Exactly.’

After she’d pulled the door closed behind her, Jack sat down. For the first time in his life, he could see his future ahead of him. And it looked pretty good.

On the bus home, Zoe looked at Hot Barman’s number on her phone. What was happening here? Yes, she liked him, yes, they seemed to have a nice time together, and yes, he actually seemed like a decent human being, but they’d known each other less than two weeks and she was talking about introducing him to her family? If nothing else, her sisters would eat him alive.

She smiled at the thought: that poor boy facing her three sisters. And her parents.

This was all too fast. She hadn’t ever felt like this with anyone else, this urge to be with them all the time, every day. She’d had the opposite – someone claiming all her time – and she didn’t want to do that to Jack. Tonight she’d had to make herself leave, despite every fibre in her body wanting to stay with him again. But she also knew that this was probably just lust, and she didn’t fancy getting burnt that way. She wouldn’t get hurt again. She was careful now. In a moment of certainty, frustrated by her urge to call him, she deleted his number from her phone: she would have to get over him now.

Still, it had been interesting to meet his mum and dad. She believed that everyone eventually grew into their parents in some form or another, and couldn’t help wondering what any future wife of Jack would have to look forward to: an unstoppable flow of empty small talk, or an impenetrable wall of silence as he slowly became a ghost haunting their lives. She shuddered.

It was one of the reasons she’d always dreaded the idea of marriage: you were bound to someone forever, no matter how completely different a person they became over the decades spent living with them. Her own parents had got round it by never marrying, but living in blissful sin, as they’d say to their four daughters (who thought nothing of their parents’ sin, but who’d wince and howl at the thought of their bliss).

Zoe quite liked it now, the bloody-mindedness of their refusal to marry in the seventies, and sticking with someone for years and years when no legal documents said you had to. It was touching in a way. But it had meant that for as long as she could remember – ever since she’d asked Mum if she could see her wedding dress, and Mum had sat her down and explained that she and Dad had never wanted to get married like everyone else – Zoe had learned that marriage wasn’t something that was for everyone. And while her head had taught her that lesson growing up, nowadays, her heart felt the same way.