Page 47 of Between Us

‘Sorry, sorry,’ said Roisin as her spike of terror subsided.

‘I’ve only got another hour or so to do,’ Cormac said. ‘Nice trip?’

‘Yeah, thank you, not bad.’

‘Fella not with you?’

‘No, already in the air,’ Roisin said apologetically. ‘Hollywood calls.’

‘Amazing. Just amazing.’

Cormac was a huge fan ofSEENand had importuned Joe for a good forty-five minutes about it when he’d come round to spec the job.

Ordinarily Joe might’ve been irritated at the unpromptedRadio Timesinterview, but Cormac’s fandom was so sincere and thoroughly informed that he ended up revelling in it.

Roisin wished she could say the same about the lack of privacy in her home right now.

‘I’ve secured that good and tight, ’cos you don’t want to be wearing it as a necklace,’ Cormac said, gesturing up at the colossal wheel of modern chandelier that Joe had lobbied to have hung over the dining table.

‘Haha. Too right,’ Roisin said.

She dumped her luggage inside the doorway in the open-plan space, muttering brightly about ‘leaving you to it’, and fled upstairs to the bedroom, where the door could be safely closed.

Roisin sank down on the bed, holding her phone, staring morosely at the wall.

She’d thought agreeing to workmen in on a Sunday, paying time and a half, was stupid when Joe had set Cormac on, but Joe relished being Lord of the Manor and insisted they embark on a programme of renovations.

There was a framed photograph of them on the bedside table, next to a Boston fern. Like all photos of the candid and very flattering genre, it both caught a real moment andcanonised a glamorised, aspirational one. A truth and a lie at the same time.

They’d been at a wedding of a school friend of Joe’s in York a year ago and the photographer had supplied hundreds of images after the event, roaming around capturing the guests unawares. The couple, Jim and Liddy, had sent this one on.You look like a pair of movie stars!They were listening to the speeches, Joe’s elbows balanced on the back of his chair in relaxed pose, his mouth half open, laughing at something being said, the expression lifting his cheekbones and making his eyes crinkle. Roisin looked beatific-angelic with a halo of Grecian braid. She was in fact mid-evening tired-pissed, leaning her head for support on Joe’s shoulder rather than, as it looked, in devotion.

The day for them hadn’t been a roaring success, despite the dice-throw luck of creating such a portrait. Joe was surly at being around ‘back in the day’ people ‘he no longer felt he had much in common with’.

She remembered Joe doing up his tie in the hotel room, quotingThe Sopranos: ‘“Remember when” is the lowest form of conversation.’

Roisin wanted to turn the picture to face the wall to stop it laughing at her, yet she didn’t dare. She’d forget she’d done it and Joe would walk in from the red eye, see it, and think it was a pointed act of aggression.

Roisin thought of Meredith’s hug. She wanted to howl, explode into tears, and yet, thanks to Joe’s arrangements, which now felt like a clever form of oppression, she couldn’t risk it. She couldn’t emerge with puffy face, sniffing, when Cormac knocked on the door to say he was leaving.

Roisin unlocked her phone as mindless reflex. She listlessly scrolled to the flight tracker app that she used to feel connected with Joe as he crisscrossed the world. It told her he was currently somewhere over northern Canada.

He’d not messaged her from the airport waiting lounge, she noticed. But then they’d moved beyond casual interactions; anything he said now would bear the weight of history. She could see why he’d opted for nothing.

Nevertheless, she couldn’t help herself. Roisin scrolled to his name in her contacts list and saw:

Last seen today at 10:48

Several hours after they parted on the Benbarrow House lawn, then, there were others to talk to. He’d been messaging right up until boarding his eleven a.m. flight. Who? Work? Probably. Could it be personal? Would he have conceivably got himself a business-class complimentary drink and rung his best mate, Dom, to tell him she’d broken up with him? Joe’s pride wouldn’t let him, she felt fairly sure. Not while it was raw.

Or … what if he was contacting another woman? Roisin had a sensation like she had stepped onto a moving walkway and misjudged its speed. She was being whipped along, trying to keep pace.

Roisin wasn’t used to feeling like this. She could honestly say that, as far as she knew, Joe had never given her cause to be jealous. Part of the reason his admiration of Gina was so unthreatening was because Roisin had never felt it crossed a line or hinted at inappropriate interest.

Yet your partner always hasthat one friend …

She wasn’t sure the thought of Joe entangled with a mystery woman made her feel jealous, exactly, either. It was more like fear of the unknown and disorientation of uncertainty. Perhaps these were the preliminary stages required before you could get jealous.

Or, had splitting up with her boyfriend of nine years on the same weekend his sex series aired sent her a little crazy? That sounded likely.

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