If I Never Met You: A Novel

“Your speech was really nice,” Laurie said to Jamie’s dad, as they sat with nightcap whiskies in the overstuffed, homely front room with the wood-burning fire, then winced at the cutesome inadequacy of “nice.”

“Thank you, Laurie. It was from the heart.”

“When are you going to tell them all?” Jamie’s mum asked him. This was the first time the cancer had been directly mentioned in front of Laurie.

“I might not,” Eric said, sinking back into his chair. “Let them read the news in the obit column of the Lincolnshire Echo and say: ‘That sneaky bastard!’”

“That’s not fair on me—they’ll be pestering me for the story for weeks on end,” Mary said. “It’ll take me an hour to make it across Co-op when I need a loaf of bread.”

“Yeah, you have to think of Mum here,” Jamie said.

“Oh God, even when you’re dying you don’t get out of the to-do list—Laurie, can you believe it!” Eric said. Laurie smiled and wished her heart didn’t feel so waterlogged that she found it difficult to match his lightness and be who they needed. She didn’t want Eric to go. The world could do with more Erics and fewer of other people.

“Ahhhh, it was good to see everyone, though. Mary, can you believe the size of Ronald Turner! Like a sea lion!”

There was some discussion about the unexpected obesity of Eric’s former boss, and then Eric said, “He’s an avid churchgoer, Ron. I wish I had faith. I wish I thought I was going to see Joe again.”

He glanced up at a photo on the cabinets to their right that Laurie hadn’t noticed until now, a barrel-bellied kid Jamie next to an older brother with a broad toothy grin, both in gray V-neck school sweaters and ties.

Eric raised his glass to it in a toast, and Laurie found herself desperately swallowing over and over to stop herself starting to cry. She didn’t look at Jamie or Mary.

A tear rolled down Eric’s cheek and Laurie felt shocked, despite herself, as she thought by now the Carters weren’t going to do conventional sadness. Jamie’s mum poured herself more whisky and Jamie put his hand on his dad’s arm and nobody spoke for a moment, because nobody could.

“Maybe I should join that religion that Tom Cruise is in—what is it, Scientology?”

“I don’t think there’s a Scientology church in Lincoln, Dad,” Jamie said. “You might have a Wagamama, but don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“It was a delight to have you there, tonight, Laurie,” Eric said, turning to her. “We’re very proud our son has convinced such an impressive woman to be by his side. I mean at this point we were so desperate to meet a girlfriend we’d have made our peace with Ann Widdecombe, but you’re really something special.”

“Dad!” Jamie said in outrage, as Laurie laughed heartily.

They said their good-nights and Laurie found it peculiarly awkward when they got to the bedroom. More so than she had at any time throughout the visit. Was it the near kiss? Was that a near kiss? She thought about Emily’s wisdom. Sooner or later, one or the other of you is going to wonder if you mean it.

She didn’t wonder that, but she did wonder if the line between things they needed to do and things they wanted to do for solace was getting blurred. Her mind kept spooling back to that moment, imagining them not being interrupted, imagining how it would’ve felt to kiss him and then claim it was part of the act. Laurie wanted to know what it felt like to kiss someone who wasn’t Dan.

It would’ve been too much, she concluded, to accidentally tap off and then not be able to get away from each other.

Sex was obviously out of the question with his parents sleeping yards away, but the thought of it was too much anyway. Laurie didn’t want a confused pity shag because Jamie’s emotions were in a tumble dryer, and him to sorely regret asking her here, and there to be another man she was desperate to avoid at her office.

They danced around the arrangements for going to bed, Laurie changing in the bathroom.

“I thought your dad did really well,” Laurie said quietly, once the covers were up to her armpits. “The atmosphere tonight was lovely.”

“Yeah.”

He was oddly clipped. Don’t make the almost-kissing thing weird, she silently begged. We can get past it if we pretend it didn’t nearly happen.

“You seemed to handle it well?”

“Mmm.”

She thought a further silence indicated subject closed, or Jamie nodding off, until he made a heaving noise that was unmistakably, a sob.

“. . . Jamie?” Laurie whispered into the darkness. She stared at the pattern of streetlights on the bedroom ceiling.

“Sorry, shit . . .” he said, trying to steady himself with a series of sharp gulps. Like someone trying not to hiccup by holding their breath. “Sorry,” he said. “You’ve come here to help me out, and now this . . .”

“Hey, don’t be silly.”

“I’m just . . . I’m not ready to live in a world that doesn’t have him in it.”

Laurie moved the pillow barrier out of the way and pushed her arms around him as he sobbed. She thought he might resist, but he wrapped himself around her.

“It’s OK to be sad,” Laurie said hotly, stroking his hair, his head resting against her chest. “You’re allowed to be really sad, and not apologize for it.”

She could feel Jamie’s tears making her shoulder wet, and his hand gripped her waist tightly as he sobbed near silently, face buried in her neck. She squeezed him, to let him know he wasn’t expected to stop.

“There’s something I’ve never told anyone. I thought I’d left it behind, compartmentalized it. It’s been crucifying me since I got Dad’s news.”

“Do you want to tell me? I won’t judge you,” Laurie whispered into the darkness. The darkness helped.

“It’s about Joe. We were playing a game, a stupid game of chicken, running into the road, dodging cars. My parents know that part. What they don’t know is that I was taunting him, winding him up, saying I’d won.” He had to pause and gasp. “Saying I’d won the game. It was my fault. It was my fault Joe ran back into the road and got hit, Laurie.”

“Shhhhh.” She held him as his body convulsed again. “Jamie, you were a child. You could’ve just as easily died. You didn’t mean to hurt him.”

“Should I tell him? Dad? Before he dies? He should know, right? He deserves to know.”

“No, because he won’t care about that detail. He’ll care that his son who he loves very much is torturing himself. What I’ve seen of your parents show they want your dad’s remaining time to be about love and happiness, and not anger or recriminations.”

Jamie mumbled something that sounded like agreement.

“You have survivor’s guilt. I think you push yourself super hard to try to be both sons, to make them doubly proud.”

Laurie hadn’t known she thought this until she said it, and yet as she said it, she knew it to be true.

“But they’re already proud of you,” she added. “You’re enough as you are.”

Jamie hugged her tighter.

“I can’t begin to imagine how terrible it was for you. And your parents.” God, Jamie must have been with his brother, he must have seen it . . . ? The guilt he must have had to carry as a nine-year-old.

“It changed us completely. There was life before Joe was killed and life after. I think a lot of the pulling through my parents did was for my sake. They didn’t want my childhood to be a vale of tears.”

Jamie’s breathing steadied.

“I try not to think about it for the most part. That’s what living life is, isn’t it? Coping,” Jamie said.

“Yes.” God, yes.

“Thank you for what you’ve said. I mean it. I’m going to think about these words and try to remember them when things get shaky. If someone as intelligent as you thinks this, it can’t be completely wrong.”

He had too high an opinion of her brains, but let him find the comfort there.

“I really do.”

How had a lift breaking down ended with Laurie in a bedroom in North Hykeham, sleeping with and yet not sleeping with a colleague, consoling him about bereavements, both past and future tense?

It was so strange and yet the strangest thing of all was that it didn’t feel strange. For the first time since Dan left her, Laurie hadn’t thought about him much at all. If she could be helpful to Jamie in a time of need, it was therapeutic for her.

Something else dawned on Laurie. She understood Jamie at last. He hadn’t developed his self-reliant, streamlined, take no passengers persona because he was superficial, arrogant, and selfish. He wasn’t, as she’d assumed, playing life on the easy setting.

The world had dealt him an almost intolerable blow at a very early age and this constant forward motion, and refusing to care too deeply about anyone, it was his coping strategy.

“Lau . . .” Jamie said, mumbling. He wasn’t awake anymore, he was drifting off, sleep-talking. “I want . . .”

“What?” she said.

“I want to hold on to you.”

“Sure,” Laurie whispered.

Laurie wondered if he meant it literally, or as a statement of intent. She’d gently disengage right before she nodded off, she thought. Sleeping in someone else’s arms was one of those things that worked in movies and was uncomfortable as piss in reality.

Next thing she knew, she was waking up wound around him, the gray-yellow light of early winter morning creeping in under the blinds. It felt reassuring, and sort of oddly healing.

Laurie listened to Jamie’s heartbeat through his T-shirt and inhaled the faded scent of his aftershave, mentally reassembling where she was, what they’d done and said last night. She thought again about a traumatized nine-year-old boy, a vulnerability that reappeared now he was losing his father. Would Jamie push her away after this? Laurie had grown fond of him but she wasn’t naive; he hadn’t wanted her involved, it was necessity. If the situation was reversed, she’d not want Jamie to see her like this.

He stirred and blinked and stared at her in a moment of dumb incomprehension.

“. . . Morning.”

“Morning.”

She pulled away and sat up, self-conscious, smoothing her hair and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

“Did we . . . ?” he said, looking down at the bedclothes.

“No, we did not—how dare you!” Laurie said in an indignant, jokey half whisper.

“No, I didn’t mean that, of course not that. I meant . . .” Jamie gestured at their proximity. “All night? I’ve never done that before. I usually hate it.”

“Haha. Why am I not surprised? Do I get to say I taught you something new in bed?” She was letting her mouth run on in the uncertainty of what the tone between them was going to be today.

“Yeurgh” Jamie said, rubbing his neck, doing a little shudder as he heaved himself out of bed.

Oh, so that was it. Making it clear he regretted their intimacy.

“Why are you such a prude with me? Where’s the wild sex man of myth and legend, strutting around swigging Wild Turkey, in his Jim Morrison snakeskin trousers?”

Jamie turned, frowning. “Why do you have to constantly characterize me like that? How would you feel if I was all ‘lol Laurie with her one boyfriend’?”

Laurie opened her mouth, no justification came out. She felt slightly ashamed.

“Sorry,” Jamie said, “Sorry. That was morning me and you didn’t deserve that.”

He went for a shower and Laurie sat, hugging her knees. Jamie returned from the shower, dry clothes, wet hair, and said: “Laurie. I’m an unspeakable shit for snapping at you, after everything you’ve done for me. I hate myself right now. Please accept my groveling apology?”

Laurie smiled up at him. “No, you were right.” She paused. “The truth is, I’m terrified of the First One After Dan and it comes out as pushy bravado.”

She surprised herself by being this open. It suddenly felt better to share it than hide it. She’d seen Jamie naked, figuratively speaking, and she felt more able to expose herself.

“Why? I mean, why are you terrified?”

Laurie was embarrassed to say, but the urge to purge herself of these thoughts was greater.

“What if he thinks my body is off-putting, and the way I do sex is boring?”

Jamie laughed. “He won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the last man liked the deal so much he stuck around for nearly twenty years.”

“Hah!” Laurie said. “Thanks.”

“I don’t want to disappoint you, but us men, we’re not that different. There’s not that much variety.”

She was intrigued Jamie would say this. It was very off-brand. Wasn’t variety, not same-same, his whole raison d’être?

“That’s what my best friend tells me.”

“Was she the hair-flicking girl in the Ivy?”

“Yes! Hah. Emily’s not a hair flicker, she’s great.”

“That was a setup, wasn’t it? No way did she run into us.”

Laurie made a face. “OK, yes, but not a safety check-in. She was being a voyeur as she thinks you’re hot. ‘Yeurgh,’ as a man once said.”

“Imagine how foolish you’re going to feel when you realize she was right all along.”

Laurie barked with laughter. “When’s that going to be?”

“About an hour, if Mum gets the photo albums out. The nineties was a very strong decade for me.” He shaped his wet hair into a boy band middle parting and pulled a dim face.

Laurie laughed like a drain. She remembered watching him holding Eve in the palm of his hand in the Refuge; the lad knows how to turn it on all right.

“Can I ask you an embarrassing question?” he said, scuffing his hair back to normal with the heel of his hand.

“Sure.”

Jamie hesitated, and Laurie gleaned it was genuinely embarrassing to him, not some “oh gee shucks, this is awkward, can a penis be TOO big,” gambit.

“How do you know, when you’ve fallen for someone in a long-term, could marry, settle-down-forever sort of way? Please don’t say you can’t imagine life without them or similar, because I can’t imagine life without Hattie but I don’t want to marry her. Something that might give me real insight.”

“Oh . . . er . . .” This was a role reversal, Laurie feeling like the knowledgeable one. “Hmmm. It feels like a conversation that you never want to end, I suppose. A renewable energy source. You know how with some people you can’t get chatting off the ground? They’re hard work? Falling in love is the extreme opposite. Endless fascination. It’s effortless. A spark turns into a flame turns into a fire. That doesn’t go out. Unless you meet some leggy ginger whore specializing in Contentious Trusts and Probate.” She smiled.

“Endless fascination,” Jamie said. “OK.”

“Yeah. I mean, that makes it sound a bit like a one-on-one seminar with my brilliant old law tutor, Dr. McGee. Obviously there’s the part where you would gladly lick them like an ice cream in any place they asked. I would not lick Dr. McGee anywhere he asked.”

“Funnily enough, I did,” Jamie said. “Got a first, though.”

“Ahahahaa.”

“Why are you wondering what love is like? Do you want to know what love is, like Foreigner?” Laurie said.

“I might have . . . met someone,” Jamie said, meeting her eye, looking supremely ill at ease, eyes darting away again.

“Wow,” Laurie said, feeling an odd sharp heat flare inside her.

Ah, that text. The hasty phone flip. It made sense now. “After everything you said!”

“Yeah.” Jamie looked sheepish. “No one’s more surprised than me.”

“Hey—but you’re going to wait until we’ve ended our pretending, right?”

“Oh, definitely,” Jamie said. “The faking has to be over.”

As she walked to the shower, feeling stirred up, Laurie thought: Well, damned if I know what almost putting his tongue down my throat was about, then. Rotter. She disliked the fact she had a little ache, a pulse of envy for this unknown woman. Oh, to be loved like that again.