I took the occasional chair, facing Jan as she slumped into the sofa.
‘Honest to god, love,’ I said. ‘I hadn’t a clue. I mean, your telephone number’s the same …’
‘It’s my business number, remember. I had it transferred the day I moved in.’
I sipped my coffee. It was still piping hot. ‘So what happened? Did Anoushka find someone else? I thought she doted on you.’
Jan shook her head, and turned her gaze away from me, looking at the glazed French doors which led out to the tiny balcony. ‘Noosh didn’t find anyone else, Oz. I did.’
I gulped. To my complete surprise, my old friend the hamster began to run around in my stomach. ‘Eh?’
‘I found me again, Oz. I found Jan.’
I stood up and walked to the doorway, almost forcing her to look at me. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked her, gently.
‘I suppose it was you leaving that made me look at myself. While you were here, I think you helped me cling on to my own self. The fact that you and I went back so far, and that I could still count on you, helped me to hold on to my own personality, and assert myself every so often.’
She must have caught a flicker at the corner of my mouth. ‘Oh, I don’t mean that you were here to give me a good shag if Noosh and I had a fight and I felt like really getting even with her.’ She laughed softly; Jan has a lascivious chuckle which for some reason always makes me think of brown sugar. ‘Yes, boy,’ she said, ‘I admit it, I used you like an old pair of gardening gloves.’ She paused, and her expression became earnest again.
‘But don’t you get the idea that I had turned to Noosh on the rebound, after you started to push me away. She seduced me, Oz, like I told you way back, and I loved it. The sex was great at first, ten out of ten. After a while it settled into a consistent eight, but that’s higher than most straight couples score. Satisfying and without risk. Nothing wrong with that, and I’m not being defensive in the slightest.’
I nodded. ‘Understood. So what happened, after I left?’
‘It started even before then,’ she said, ‘when I saw you and Prim together for the first time, and realised how it was going to turn out. It wasn’t like that when you had other girlfriends. I knew they wouldn’t last. This time, I began to feel alone, and I began to look at my relationship with Ms Turkel.’
She took a deep breath, and when she spoke again there was a momentary, and uncharacteristic tremor in her voice. ‘As soon as I did, I realised what I had become. She was the dominant partner. I was the subordinate. It may have been two names beside the doorbell, but Noosh saw us, in straight terms, like she was the husband and I was the wife. We split the overhead down the middle, but I was the housekeeper. From the start that went without saying. I had been able to live with it because I was earning good money, and contributing, able to tell myself that we were equals; but that wasn’t how Noosh saw it and that wasn’t what she wanted.’
Jan put her coffee cup on the floor. (I couldn’t help it; I glanced down fleetingly to make sure that it wasn’t going to topple over and stain my carpet. Happily she didn’t notice.) She stood up and took a step or two across to stand beside me, to link her arm through mine.
‘Oz my darlin’,’ she said. ‘I’d never before been dominated by anyone in my life. That was why you and I were so great as youngsters. Neither of us ever dreamed of possessing the other. I never thought of you as my boyfriend or of me as your girlfriend. I was always Jan, her own woman. You were Oz, your own man, and I loved you.’
She squeezed my arm. ‘So with you, my pit prop, taken away, I looked at Noosh and me and I realised what I was. In that instant, it all fell apart. I waited until you and Prim were gone … I had Ellie and the kids to distract me until then … and I told Noosh how it was. She didn’t like it, and we had a row. I said I realised that she couldn’t change, so that was it.
‘I moved out and into the loft. Originally I just meant it to be for a couple of weeks, while I found somewhere else, but I like it here. How about selling it to me, once Noosh gives me my share of our flat? I don’t imagine that Prim will fancy me being your tenant on a long-term basis.’
I laughed. ‘There’s the shorter term question of how she’d feel about me sleeping on the sofa-bed tonight. But hold on, I’m still getting my head round this.’ I turned her towards me and slipped my arms around her waist. Her body, held gently against mine, was oh, so familiar. ‘You’ve no regrets? You’ve had no second thoughts?’
‘None. I’m Jan again. Like I said, my big problem now is what to tell my mum, how to tell her.’
I smiled at her. We were almost eye to eye, since Jan still had her shoes on. ‘No problem. Just tell her exactly what you’ve told me.’
‘Apart from the bit about you giving me a good shag every so often?’ she murmured.
‘That’s up to you.You’re your own woman again, remember. Here’s a thought, though. Dad and Auntie Mary are a team now. You should tell them together. I can promise you, based on long experience, that there’s no better listener than my old man.’
She thought about it and nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll do it. Even the bit about you know what, if slightly watered down. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the airport, and then I’ll head straight back up to Fife.
‘Thanks, darlin’,’ she said, ‘for being there yet again. Tell you this, if Mac’s a great listener, then the skill’s hereditary.’ She kissed me, like she had the evening before, at the airport. Without even thinking about it, I kissed her right back.
And then I kissed her again. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about anything, except Jan, that seafood stall in Crail once more, those harbour walls in Anstruther, coastal walks, and later times in the loft, when I’d be alone in the evening and the entry phone would ring.
We looked at each other, our eyes inches apart, the air between us smoking with memories. My heart was in charge now. I flicked an eyebrow as if nodding back in time. ‘Just now,’ I whispered, ‘about you and me. You said, “loved”.You used the past tense.’
‘Did I?’ she answered my unspoken question. ‘Then I meant “love”. How could I not? I’m Jan, and I haven’t changed.’
17
‘So where does this take Jan and Oz?’
I lay face down on the bed, my chin buried in my knotted fists, my eyes focused on a scratch in the headboard. Euphoria was dissipating as practicality took hold, and as I contemplated the scattered pieces of my so-certain future.
‘Not one step forward,’ she answered. ‘Not one step back. But, by God, it was good, wasn’t it.’ She lay beside me, her shiny brown hair tousled and fallen over one eye, the way it always seemed to after we had made love. ‘I like being a strong and independent woman again.’
Of course, the inevitable had happened.
I’ll never believe for one second that Jan had planned it that way. Still, we had kissed again, and it had taken on a momentum of its own, until the neat bows tying back the curtains had been slipped, and we were easing each other out of our clothing, as we had done on countless occasions over the last fourteen years.
Yet this was unlike any of those innumerable matings in the past. There was a maturity to it, a gentleness, a patience, on my part and on Jan’s, of which I had never been aware before, and maybe for my part never capable. It was long and slow and smiling and joyful, two old friends meeting again after believing they never would, until at last we climaxed together, as never before, Jan bucking and heaving beneath me and crying out, wide-eyed, in absolute triumph. Eventually, we had fallen asleep in each other’s arms, awakening hours later, still entwined.