Page 31 of The Happy Hour
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‘It doesn’t smell particularly soporific.’ Ash took off his jacket and put the slightly bedraggled kite on a chair. ‘It’s more... suffocating.’
‘Not a whole lot of difference between sleep and suffocation.’ Peggy grinned when he gave her a shocked look. ‘Coffee?’
‘I’d love one.’ This routine was so familiar now, the dread and shame creeping over him at his imminent, almost certain failure. He sat down and took out his phone, but he couldn’t send Jess a message to thank her for their hour, to ask if he’d imagined that brief brush of her lips on his cheek, because they still hadn’t exchanged numbers. Some further communication with her would have calmed his nerves, would have made this feel more possible.
‘I went to the heath with Jess,’ he called. There was nobody sitting behind the reception desk, but it always had a vase of fresh flowers on it. Today it was a bouquet of soft pink roses and carnations, their buds just beginning to open. It made him think of the cherry blossom on the trees in Greenwich Park.
‘I didn’t miss the kite,’ Peggy called back. ‘So that’s how you’re wooing her, eh?’
Ash smiled. ‘I’m not wooing her,’ he said, which was partly true. ‘We’ve just been having coffee together. I thought kite-flying would be fun.’
‘You could woo someone with your eyes closed.’ Peggy’s scoff carried from the kitchen. ‘Do you remember Miss Dennison from last week? She was wearing a purple jumpsuit.’
‘She turned up not long before I left?’
‘That’s right.’ Peggy brought him a mug brimming with frothy coffee and a packet of chocolate digestives. ‘When you’d gone, she asked if you were a hired actor.’
‘Anactor?What role was I supposed to be playing?’
Peggy put the mug and biscuits on the coffee table. ‘I think her exact words were...Surely thatgorgeous hunk of a man was here asa distraction? He took my mind off everything.’
Ash exhaled. ‘Where’s my actor, then? My distraction?’ He hadn’t meant to sound so bitter.
‘I’m here, and I’m not acting,’ Peggy assured him. ‘Besides, she only said that because you didn’t go through: just talked to me for a bit, then left. Are you doing that again today?’
‘Not today,’ Ash said firmly. ‘I’m going in.’
‘What’s changed?’ Peggy hadn’t sat down, and he assumed she was anticipating being called away.
‘Nothing really,’ he said. ‘I had a good time with Jess.Shetook mymind off everything for a while. And she made me see that...’ He thought of what she’d said about being adopted, and the sense he got that she felt as if she didn’t really belong. ‘She reminded me that things could be worse. That all this...’ he gestured around him, ‘that I’m lucky, in lots of ways.’
‘To have somewhere like this to come to?’
Ash nodded. ‘That he’s here, being looked after. That I had him at all.’
‘That makes sense,’ Peggy said softly. ‘But just because someone else has had it worse, it doesn’t belittle your experiences. You don’t have to be grateful for a bad version of something because you think it’s better than nothing.’
Ash dug a biscuit out of the packet. ‘It’s just good to get other people’s perspectives; realise what they’re dealing with. I’ve been so caught up in my own situation – my self pity – that it’s easy to lose sight of everything else.’
‘Jess has given you some insight, then?’
‘Insight, fun, laughter. She’s the best thing about Sundays, and I still look forward to coffee with Mack, even though it can be a sparring match sometimes.’
‘It’s turning into a three-coffee Sunday, then.’ Peggy laughed. ‘And you know, you wouldn’t have met Jess if it wasn’t for your visits here.’
‘I wouldn’t have met her if I hadn’t gone to explore the market,’ Ash corrected. He didn’t want to give what he was doing here credit for his life colliding with Jess’s. He had to keep the two things separate.
‘Fair enough,’ Peggy said. ‘So she’s your new favourite Sunday thing. She’s pretty?’
‘She’s beautiful,’ he admitted. ‘Beautiful and challenging. She makes me think in a way I haven’t for a while, as if I’m waking up from a long sleep. We’ve come up with this subtle superpowers idea.’ He grinned, remembering the way she’d turned in his arms when he’d come up with the affirmation about them, and insisted he let her have it. And then that kiss. As chaste as it had been, he’d felt it everywhere. He could power himself for days on the memory of it.
‘Subtle superpowers?’ Peggy repeated.
‘The amazing things you can do that won’t change the world, but will have an impact on you and the people around you. I made it to the heath without losing any coffee from those flimsy takeaway cups. Jess looks after people instinctively, so they feel safe and cared for, but I don’t think she sees it as a big deal. I thought she wasn’t going to turn up today, but it turns out she’d gone to help one of her friends at the market. Apparently she does it all the time.’
‘Intriguing,’ Peggy said. ‘What about me?’
