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‘Let go of the door, Greg.’
‘I’ll take you home.’
‘The door.’
‘Okay, then, I’ll call a taxi.’
‘I can find my own way home. Let go of the door.’ Jess had to get out of there. Couldn’t bear to look at him and see everything that she’d lost. He looked the same, but inside he was so very different.
He let go of the door and she pulled it open, almost stumbling out of it. She didn’t hear it close behind her, but she didn’t hear his footsteps either. She was alone, all the way to the high street, and then every step of the way home.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
HE HAD TO find some kind of viable solution to this. It was obvious that things weren’t going to work between Jess and him, she’d flung everything he’d offered her right back in his face. They’d have to come to some sort of agreement, though, for the baby’s sake.
‘This is it, then, Jess.’ He had been talking to her all evening as if she was there, trying to reason with her. He knew that she wasn’t going to budge and neither was he. ‘This is the end of it.’
He re-read the email he’d written to his solicitor. If he and Jess couldn’t work things out between them, he’d pay for someone to advise and represent her, and it would be a matter for the lawyers to negotiate. It wasn’t the way he’d wanted it, but it looked as if wanting and getting were two entirely different things these days.
The cursor hovered over the ‘send’ button. This was the only way forward. No regrets and no more conversations with her when there was nothing here but empty air.
‘Goodbye, my love.’
He clicked ‘send’ and his laptop responded with a tone, signifying that his email was on its way. Greg flopped back onto the sofa. In the morning he’d wake up and realise that he’d done the right thing.
A Future Christmas…
It was like a waking dream. Greg’s heart was still beating hard, as if he had fought his way out of some cloying danger, which he couldn’t remember but which still clung to him, like a broken cobweb.
It was Christmas Eve. He was walking across the fields to his mother’s house, the warm glow of the windows beckoning him home. Outside a horse-drawn carriage clattered past on its way into the village, and when Greg looked through the front window of Rosa’s house it seemed perfectly natural to find a scene that looked like something from a Christmas card—a blazing fire, a Christmas tree and four figures dressed in Victorian costume.
Jess sat by the fire, talking to his mother. A little to one side Ted sat in a chair, watching a boy of about three play with a hoop and stick. Greg noticed, with some surprise, that Ted seemed to have acquired a set of side whiskers, along with his frock coat and starched collar.
He focussed on Jess’s face. Pink cheeks in the firelight, small hands
folded in her lap. A sudden jolt of longing transfixed him to the spot, leaving him helpless and begging for some release from this. He had no idea whether Jess would respond to him differently in her new guise, but he didn’t care. Just to touch the elaborate folds of her dress. To hear the silk rustle as she moved.
This wasn’t right. He was just dreaming. He’d read the slim volume that Jess had given him from the library, and this was the kind of thing that happened when fiction combined with fact in the unconscious mind. Greg had heard about cognitive dreaming, and wondered whether he could change things, make them a little more realistic.
With an effort of will the picture merged and morphed into something different. Jess, in front of the fire, dressed this time in jeans and a warm sweater. She looked tired, the way any mother of a young child would. But where was his child? Greg craned against the window to catch sight of him.
He wasn’t there. For the first time Greg realised that he was freezing cold, his silk business suit doing nothing to keep out the snow and the biting wind. All the same, he had to try and find his son. Working his way around to the kitchen window, he peered in.
He was there, with his grandmother, helping to make mince pies. Covered in flour, he was laboriously fashioning pastry circles with a plastic cutter. Greg found himself grinning. The boy had something of himself about him, dark hair and olive skin. But his face was that of an angel. Jess’s face. Large hazel eyes that seemed to effortlessly combine intelligence and mischief. The way he laid his work out so neatly, his tongue trapped between his lips in concentration. He was just like his mother.
Ted appeared at the back door, stamping the snow from his wellingtons and throwing off his coat. The boy ran to him and he swung him into the air. Then Jess, at the kitchen doorway, smiling, happy. Or at least that was the way it seemed. By some preternatural sense that the dream afforded him, Greg knew that the smile was just for show, and that the single tear she brushed from her cheek wasn’t one of happiness.
Greg was starving, freezing, right outside the window, but no one seemed to notice. He tried to tap on the pane but his arms were suddenly heavy. Looking down, he saw wide metal cuffs, soldered tightly around his wrists. Chains binding him.
He had to get them to see him. Had to make them know that he was home at last. He knew that Jess would welcome him. He could sit by the fire with her and warm himself. Watch the light from the flames sparkle on the baubles on the tree. He would give everything he had in exchange for just five minutes, to hold her and his son and tell them both that he loved them.
The need was so great that it felt like a living, breathing thing. Greg made a lunge for the window, but found himself dragged backwards. Something was pulling him, back across the fields. However hard he tried to struggle, however much he instructed his sleeping mind to change the course of the dream, he couldn’t. He fell, and felt the frozen ground, sharp against his face. Rolling over, he managed to get a glimpse of where he was being carried to so inexorably.
The glittering, ice-cold, steel and glass of the City were growing closer and closer. Looming over him, blocking out everything else. Greg tried to look back towards the old farmhouse, which currently housed everything that he cared about. But he couldn’t.
Twisting, fighting with his bonds, roaring with frustration, he started to fall.
Greg landed on the polished wooden floor, banging his head on the coffee table on the way down. There was something digging in his ribs and on closer inspection it turned out to be his laptop. He cursed, disentangled himself from the power cable and looked at the clock on the mantelpiece.
