Jojo Moyes - The One Plus One

He let himself in and realized he didn’t care that this would be the last time he came here. There was just a week left until he completed on the sale of his London flat. The vague plan was that he would spend the remaining time with his father. He had nothing planned beyond that.

The hallway was lined with boxes bearing the name of the storage company that had packed them in his absence. He closed the door behind him, hearing the sound of his footsteps echo through the empty space. He walked upstairs slowly, making his way past the empty rooms. Here and there he saw evidence of the storage men’s efforts: a stray roll of packing tape or an offcut of bubble wrap. But essentially the whole house was packed and otherwise empty. Next Tuesday the van would come, load the boxes and take them away, until Ed could work out what to do with his stuff. That was the problem with owning more than one property: what did you do with spare sofas, spare beds, when you were struggling to see how you would fit one lot into a one-bedroom flat?

Right up until then, he supposed, he had ploughed resolutely through what had been the worst few weeks of his life. If you had looked at him from the outside you might have seen someone grimly determined, sucking up their punishment. He had put his head down and kept moving on. Perhaps drinking a little too much but, hey, considering he’d lost a job, a home, a wife, and was about to lose a parent, all in a little over twelve months, he thought he could have argued that he was doing okay.

And then he spotted the four buff envelopes propped up on the kitchen work-surface, his name scribbled on them in ballpoint pen. At first he assumed they were administrative letters, left by the managing agents, but then he opened one and was confronted by the filigree purple print of a twenty-pound note. He extracted it, then pulled out the accompanying note, which said simply, ‘THIRD INSTALMENT’.

He opened the others, tearing the envelope carefully when he reached the first. As he read her note, an image of her sprang, unbidden, to mind and he was shocked by her sudden proximity, by the way she had been waiting there all along. Her expression, tense and awkward while writing, perhaps crossing out the words and reworking them. Here she would pull her ponytail from its band and retie it.

I’m sorry.

Her voice in his head. I’m sorry. And it was then that something started to crack. Ed held the money in his hand and didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t want her apology. He didn’t want any of it.

He walked out of the kitchen and back down the hall, the crumpled notes clutched in his hand. He wanted to throw it all away. He wanted never to let it go. He felt as if something in him was about to combust. He walked from one end of the house to the other, backwards and forwards, trying to work out what he needed to do. He gazed around him at the walls he’d never had a chance to scuff, and the sea view that no guests had ever enjoyed. He had never felt at home there. He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt at home.

The thought of it: that he would never feel at ease anywhere, belong anywhere, was suddenly overwhelming. He paced the length of the hallway again, exhausted and restless, still overcome by the feeling that he should be doing something. He opened a window, hoping to be calmed by the sound of the sea, but the shouts of the happy families outside felt like a rebuke.

A free newspaper sat folded on one of the boxes, obscuring something beneath. Exhausted by the relentless circling of his thoughts, he stopped and absentmindedly lifted it. Underneath sat a laptop and a mobile phone. It was such an unlikely sight that he had to think for a minute to work out why they might be there. Ed hesitated, then picked up the phone, turning it over. It was the handset he had given Nicky back in Aberdeen, carefully hidden from the casual view of passers-by.

For weeks he had been fuelled by the anger of betrayal. When that initial heat dissipated, a whole part of him had simply iced over, become glacial. He had been secure in his outrage, safe in his sense of injustice. Now Ed held a mobile phone that a teenage boy who possessed next to nothing had felt obliged to return to him. He heard his sister’s words and something began to open up, almost audibly, inside him. What the hell did he know about anything? Who was he to judge anyone?

Fuck it, he told himself. I can’t go and see her. I just can’t.

Why should I?

What would I even say?

He walked from one end of his empty house to the other, his footsteps echoing on the wooden floors, his fist tight around the notes.

What kind of a fool would forgive?

He stared out of the window at the sea and wished, suddenly, that he had gone to jail. He wished that his mind had been filled with the immediate physical problems of safety, logistics, survival.

He didn’t want to think about her.

He didn’t want to see her face every time he closed his eyes.

He would go. He would leave here, and get a new place, and a new job, and he would start again. And he would leave all this behind. And things would be easier.

A shrill noise – a ringtone he didn’t recognize – shattered the silence. His phone, recalibrated with Nicky’s preferences. He stared at it, at the rhythmically glowing screen. Caller unknown. After five rings, when the sound became unbearable, he finally snatched it up.

‘Is Mrs Thomas there?’

Ed held the phone briefly away from himself, as if it were radioactive. ‘Is this a joke?’ he said, putting it back to his ear.

A nasal voice, sneezing: ‘Sorry. Awful hay fever. Have I got the right number? Parents of Costanza Thomas?’

‘What – who is this?’

‘My name’s Andrew Prentiss. I’m calling from the Olympiad.’

It took him a moment to collect his thoughts. He sat down on the stairs.

‘The Olympiad? I’m sorry – how did you get this number?’

‘It was on our contacts list. You left it during the exam. I have got the right number?’

Ed remembered Jess’s phone being out of credit. She must have given the number of the phone he’d given to Nicky instead. His head dropped into his free hand. Someone up there had quite a sense of humour.

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, thank goodness. We’ve been trying you for days. Did you not pick up any of my messages? I’m calling about the exam … The thing is, we discovered an anomaly when we were marking the papers. The first one contained a misprint, which made the algorithm question impossible to solve.’

‘What?’

He spoke as if reciting a well-worn series of statements. ‘We noticed it after the final results were collated. The fact that every single student failed the first question was a giveaway. It wasn’t picked up on initially as we had several different people marking. Anyway, we’re very sorry – and we’d like to offer your daughter the chance to resit. We’re doing the whole thing again.’

‘Resit the Olympiad? When?’

‘Well, that’s the thing. It’s this afternoon. It had to be a weekend as we couldn’t expect students to miss school to do it. We’ve actually been trying to reach you all week on this number but we got no response. I only tried you the one last time on the off-chance.’

‘You’re expecting her to get to Scotland in … four hours?’

Mr Prentiss paused to sneeze again. ‘No, not Scotland this time. We had to take the space available to us. But looking at your details I see this might work out better for you, seeing as you live on the south coast. The event is scheduled to take place in Basingstoke. Are you happy to pass the message on to Costanza?’

‘Uh …’

‘Thanks so much. I suppose these things are only to be expected in our first year. Still, one more down! I only have one more entrant to reach! The rest of the info is on the website if you need it.’

An almighty sneeze. And the phone went dead.

And Ed was left in his empty house, staring at the handset.

Jess had been trying to persuade Tanzie to open the door. The school counsellor had told her it would be a good way to start rebuilding her confidence in the outside world, as long as she was in the house. She would answer the door, safe in the knowledge that Jess was behind her. That confidence would slowly stretch to other people, to being in the garden. It would be a stepping stone. These things were incremental.

It was a nice theory. If Tanzie would only agree to do it.

‘Door. Mum.’

Her voice carried over the sound of the cartoons. Jess was wondering when to get tough with her on the television-watching. She had calculated last week that Tanzie now spent upwards of five hours a day lying on the sofa. ‘She has had a shock,’ Mrs Liversedge had said. ‘But I think she’d feel better sooner if she was doing something a little more constructive.’

‘I can’t answer it, Tanze,’ she called down. ‘I’m standing here with my hands in a bowlful of bleach.’

Her voice, a whine, a new development these last days: ‘Can’t you get Nicky to open it?’

‘Nicky’s gone to the shop.’

Silence.

The sound of canned laughter echoed up the stairs. Jess could feel, if not see, the presence of whoever was waiting at the door, the shadow behind the glass. She wondered if it was Aileen Trent. She had arrived uninvited four times over the last two weeks with ‘unmissable bargains’ for the children. She wondered if she’d heard about Nicky’s blog money. Everyone on the estate seemed to know about it.

Jess yelled down, ‘Look, I’ll stand at the top of the stairs. All you have to do is open it.’