Page 147 of The One Plus One
Ed Nicholls straightened up, and looked her in the eye. His expression was both determined and oddly unreadable. ‘I’ll take you.’
It’s not easy driving four people and a large dog in a Mini, especially not on a hot day and in a car with no air-conditioning. Especially if the dog’s intestinal system is even more challenged than it once was, and if time constraints mean you have to go at speeds of more thanforty miles an hour with all the inevitable consequences that brings. They drove with all of the windows open, in near silence, Tanzie murmuring to herself as she tried to remember all of the things she’d become convinced she’d forgotten, and occasionally pausing to bury her face in a strategically placed plastic bag.
Jess map-read, as Ed’s new car had no built-in satnav, and tried to steer a route away from motorway traffic jams and clogged shopping centres. Within an hour and three-quarters, all conducted in a peculiar near-silence, they were there: a 1970s glass and concrete block with a piece of paper marked OLYMPIAD flapping in the wind, taped to a sign that said ‘Keep Off the Grass’.
This time they were prepared. Jess signed Tanzie in, handed her a spare pair of spectacles (‘She never goes anywhere without a spare pair, now,’ Nicky told Ed), a pen, a pencil and a rubber. Then they all hugged her and reassured her that this didn’t matter, not one bit, and stood in silence as Tanzie walked in to do battle with a bunch of abstract numbers, and possibly the demons in her own head. The door closed behind her.
Jess hovered at the desk and finished signing the paperwork, acutely conscious of Nicky and Ed chatting on the grass verge through the open door. She watched them with surreptitious sideways looks. Nicky was showing Mr Nicholls something on Mr Nicholls’s old phone. Occasionally Mr Nicholls would shake his head. She wondered if it was his blog.
‘She’ll be cool, Mum,’ said Nicky, cheerfully, as Jess emerged. ‘Don’t stress.’ He was holding Norman’s lead.He had promised Tanzie they would not go more than five hundred feet from the building, so that she could feel their special bond even through the walls of the examination hall.
‘Yeah. She’ll be great,’ said Ed, his hands thrust deep in his pockets.
Nicky’s gaze flicked between the two of them, then down at the dog. ‘Well. We’re going to take a comfort break. The dog’s. Not mine,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a while.’ Jess watched him wander slowly along the quadrant and fought the urge to say that she would go with him.
And then it was just the two of them.
‘So,’ she said. She picked at a bit of paint on her jeans. She wished she had had the chance to change into something smarter.
‘So.’
‘Yet again you save us.’
‘You seem to have done a pretty good job of saving yourselves.’
They stood in silence. Across the car park a car skidded in, a mother and a young boy hurling themselves from the back seat and running towards the door.
‘How’s the foot?’
‘Getting there.’
‘No flip-flops.’
She gazed down at her white tennis shoes. ‘No.’
He ran his hand over his head and stared at the sky. ‘I got your envelopes.’
She couldn’t speak.
‘I got them this morning. I wasn’t ignoring you. If I’d known…everything…I wouldn’t have left you to deal with all that alone.’
‘It’s fine,’ she said briskly. ‘You’d done enough.’ A large piece of flint was embedded in the ground in front of her. She kicked at some dirt with her good foot, trying to dislodge it. ‘And it was very kind of you to bring us to the Olympiad. Whatever happens I’ll always be –’
‘Will you stop?’
‘What?’
‘Stop kicking stuff. And stop talking like…’ He turned to her. ‘Come on. Let’s go and sit in the car.’
‘What?’
‘And talk.’
‘No…thank you.’
‘What?’
‘I just…Can’t we talk out here?’
