It Could Have Been Her(67)

She turns off her screen and puts her phone back in her pocket. “Come on, boys,” she says, “let’s go back and get you all hosed down.”



* * *



Jane has lentil soup for dinner and a glass of prosecco that Shannon had left at the bottom of a bottle in the fridge. It’s virtually flat and far too sweet, but it gives her the gentle release she’s looking for before she can face ending the day. The boys follow her up to bed and take their usual places on her bed, Reggie in his own bed at the side, sighing heavily. It’s barely 9 p.m. and still light at this time of the year but she can’t bear to eke the edges of the day out in the gloom of the kitchen or the morning room. She pulls up Dexter’s last message to her on WhatsApp and starts to type:

Hi, beautiful. Guess what? Jasper is a filthy flasher. He’s also run away from the circus and nobody knows where he is. The circus was in—guess where???—when he disappeared—Little Belmont! Latest theory—Daisy came down from London to meet up with him. BUT—Daisy OF COURSE thinks Jasper’s her uncle. Strong possibility, according to other sources, that he might NOT be. Jessamine’s ex, the cheesemaking actor, says she told him she was infertile. In other words, Daisy might have been lured down to meet her uncle Jasper, who might not even be her uncle, but is, it seems certain, a pervert and an incredibly damaged, possibly dangerous individual. Anyway… I’m back in town on Wednesday for the day. Want to meet up?

Dexter replies immediately.

OMGOMGOMGYES.





chapter fifty-five


STUART, SEVEN YEARS EARLIER

Jessamine didn’t take the whole ear off, apparently. Just a “chunk.”

“I didn’t do it on purpose,” she says now, sitting on the edge of the bed, twisting a tissue between her thin fingers. “It was an accident.”

“An accident,” I say with a sigh. “Right.”

“No. Honestly. I only wanted to scare you. To hurt you. I didn’t mean to injure you. It was horrible. Really horrible. There was blood everywhere, Stuart. Literally everywhere. We had to clean it all up.”

I close my eyes and shake my head, just once. “Jess,” I say, “I think maybe I need to go to hospital.”

She shakes her head firmly. “No. It’s fine. Mum stitched it up. It’s fine.”

“It does not feel fine, Jessamine. It feels far from fine.”

My hand goes to the bandages, and she slaps it away. “Leave it,” she says. “Mum’s done a lovely job. Just leave it to heal.”

I stare at her imploringly. “Jessamine,” I say, “this is insane, you know that? I mean—what is this room? Is it the one with the big cabinet blocking the door?”

She nods. “It’s the old au pair girls’ room. We blocked it off. After the last one left.”

I feel a bolt of darkness pass through me. “Why?”

She shrugs, twists at the tissue again. “I don’t know. It wasn’t my idea.”

“So, you attempt to slice off my ear, knock me out, stitch me together at home, then—what?—you decide to unboard a weird blocked-off bedroom and lock me in it from the outside. Jessamine. What the fuck?”

She tuts and shakes her head. “You make it sound so weird,” she says. “It wasn’t like that. I got myself into a lather, I accidentally hurt you, Mum said not to take you to hospital because, you know, questions, so she looked after you. She was like an angel, actually, and then we decided to put you up here so you’d have your own space to recover in. I know I’m a handful, and I know sharing a bed with me can be a pain, so we decided to give you your own space. So this is yours now. Stuart’s bedroom. Just for you. What do you think?”

I sigh. She makes no sense, but then, Jessamine never does. “What time is it?” I ask.

“It’s ten o’clock. Ish. You’ve been asleep for nearly thirty-six hours.”

“So it was the night before, when I got home? When you attacked me?”

She shakes her head and purses her lips. “Yes. If you want to put it like that.”

“And Daisy, she’s been getting off all right? To school?”

“She has. I’ve been seeing her off.”

Jessamine doesn’t look hungover, I notice, and this coupled with the fact that she’s been up with Daisy in the mornings suggests that she hasn’t been drinking. Could this be the beginning of a new era? I wonder. Could it be that we have reached rock bottom and might now be crawling our way back to the surface?

I find a smile for Jessamine. “Good,” I say. “Thank you. Now, I’m going to have a shower. I can smell myself.”

“No,” she says, pushing my shoulder back gently with the heel of her hand. “You mustn’t move. I’ll wash you. Let me. Please. It’s the least I can do after what happened.”

Her eyes are wide and sweet.

What happened.

What did happen? I had dinner with my lovely girl, Blaise. I got home. Whack. Thirty-six hours later. Here I am. Jessamine is sober. Apologetic, almost. Should I be doing something? Or surrendering to it all? I’m tired. I hurt. I like the idea of someone taking care of me. For a change.

“OK,” I say. “That would be nice.”