Page 45 of The Woman Who Said Yes

‘Oh, yeah. Yes, of course,’ he says quickly.

‘Ever been married?’

‘No,’ Sam replies. ‘We never were. Me and Theo’s mum, I mean.’ In the small silence that follows, he is conscious of Lucy’s quizzical look, and so he continues: ‘Bibi left us when Theo was ten. She moved to Thailand and that was that.’

‘Wow,’ Lucy murmurs, sounding mildly surprised – as if to say, that’s an interesting thing for a woman to do! – rather than shocked, as so many friends were when it happened. He’s been through all of that and is grateful to not have to go into it all now.

‘So since then it’s just been the two of you?’ Lucy asks. Deducing that she means in a general sense, and not that she expects him to detail every relationship he’s had since then – not that there have been heaps – he nods in the affirmative.

‘Yeah, pretty much.’

‘And your son, sorry, what’s his name⁠—’

‘Theo.’

‘Is Theo in touch with his mum?’

‘Yeah, kind of,’ Sam replies. ‘They speak now and then, but I think it’s petering out a bit.’

‘Well, he’s an adult now,’ she observes, which lands a little sharply. But she’s still his mum, Sam reflects. There’s no cut-off point for that. Sam’s own mother is still his mum, somewhere deep in his heart, even though she passed away eight years ago. ‘Did Bibi ever come back from Thailand?’ Lucy asks.

‘No,’ Sam replies, ‘and I don’t think she ever will.’ This is what he’s gathered, from the little he’s overheard from her chats with Theo – not that he lurks in the hallway with a glass jammed up against his son’s bedroom door. But it’s a pretty compact flat in a sixties block and actually, Theo’s voice doesn’t half carry. Sam has tried shutting himself in the living room with the TV turned up loud. But when the call has ended Theo has sidled in with a why-is-the-telly-blaring? face and grabbed the remote to turn it down. Sam could go out, but to suddenly vacate the flat precisely when Bibi calls would seem rather pointed.

In the early years, Bibi would fly back to the UK on an annual visit and Sam would deposit Theo at whichever friend’s flat she was staying at. There’d be an overly jolly, ‘Thanks, Sam! Come and pick him up on Sunday?’ as if they were sharing a gerbil, and Sam hated how embittered this made him feel. How Bibi referred to these visitations as ‘Mummy time’, and how he’d have to present it to Theo like some fantastic treat – being hauled across London to some far-flung flat where he’d have to sleep either in an unfamiliar spare room, filled with filing cabinets and dead computers, or on a lumpy sofa bed with his mother at fourteen years old.

Sam hated hearing himself saying, ‘It’ll be great, Theo! I’m sure you’re going to do loads of fun stuff,’ as if he were seven and apprehensive about joining the Cubs. But what other choice was there? To tell him, ‘I know it’ll be shit and make you feel weird for days – weeks, even – afterwards. But you’re going to have to suck it up?’ After that last time, Theo seemed to sink into himself and would barely communicate at all. It was like a terrible hangover looming over both of them, and Sam had started to wonder if it would ever shift.

To his surprise, and encouraged by Lucy’s pertinent questions, he finds himself sharing all of this, and admits that it’s probably for the best that Bibi stopped coming over after Theo turned sixteen. ‘D’you think he’ll move over there?’ she asks.

‘What, Theo?’ Sam tries to rein in his shock. ‘I can’t imagine it, no.’ Over my dead body, is what he means – although he has offered to pay for him to fly over there. For a holiday, that is, with a definite return date. Theo should at least have the option of seeing his mum, he’d decided. It was met with the same enthusiasm as if Sam had offered to buy him a wastepaper basket and the subject was dropped.

At Lucy’s suggestion, they go from the restaurant to a nearby pub that she knows. It’s packed and noisy with people shouting over thumping music, and they escape to the tiny whitewashed outdoor space at the back, and settle at a table there. To Sam, it seems like a perfectly ordinary pub courtyard – wooden benches and flowers in half-barrels – but somehow he seems to have stepped into another dimension in which time has compressed tightly like a ball of silver foil. They arrived at around 9.30 but somehow it is almost eleven already, and they have had several drinks, the evening having flashed by in a pleasant blur. ‘God, is that the time!’ Lucy announces, checking her watch.

‘I know,’ Sam says, equally surprised. ‘D’you have to go? Are you freezing?’ She arrived in a stripy top and jeans and a light blue jacket. But now, from her bag, an enormous red woollen scarf has materialised, and she has deftly fashioned it into a kind of upper body warming snug.

‘No to both questions,’ she says, laughing, and it surprises Sam how pleased he is to hear that.

They stay until closing time and at the Tube station they hug, about to head for different platforms. However, in the small pause that follows, Lucy surprises Sam by kissing him – not especially quickly, extremely tenderly in fact – on the lips. ‘That was a lovely night,’ she announces.

‘It really was,’ Sam says, a little discombobulated. ‘I had a great time. Thank you.’

Lucy flashes a wide, gap-toothed smile and says, ‘I’ll message you, okay?’ And then, before he can respond, she tosses a section of the red scarf around her neck, and rushes off for her train.

26

WEDDING COUNTDOWN: 17 DAYS

Andie

This time we knew Dom was coming. In fact, everyone is already installed around our favourite table when I arrive. There are hugs from all, including Niko and Tara, before I take my seat next to Sam. ‘You haven’t melted your outfit tonight,’ Eva observes.

‘No, just my brain,’ I tell her.

‘Hard shift, was it?’ Sam asks with a smile.

‘Just the usual mayhem and destruction.’ Using a paper napkin, I try to scrub the residue of sticky icing off my hand as Tara comes over and we order. Tonight, I’m determined to push all of the red flags about Dom aside and enjoy the evening for Eva’s sake. He seems relaxed and composed – there’s no insistence on ordering champagne – and surprisingly, he remembers that I work for a charity and asks about my day. I quickly tell him about today’s after-school Craft Club and how, out of the dozen kids present, only two were interested in constructing little houses from the bought cakes we’d supplied. Everyone else had wanted to cram their faces with fondant icing and cheap, factory-baked goods, and who could blame them?

Dom laughs dutifully, and as we all chat and eat and drink wine, I try to gauge what’s going on with Sam. I so want to ask him about Lucy, and how it was at her exhibition even though that was, what, a week and a half ago? And only a little daytime thing. Bringing it up now would bestow it with far too much significance, and also suggest that it’s been brewing away in my mind all that time.