Alphabet Weekends - Elizabeth Noble [62]
It was a long time before she stopped trying to figure out what she had done.
You’d have thought damage like that would have made her so suspicious, so untrusting – surely it took some getting over.
But not with Patrick. He wasn’t like that.
He’d talked to her, that first day in the supermarket, even though she’d had Bella strapped to her chest. He’d joined the queue behind her, and made grocery small-talk. He’d put her shopping bags into the trolley for her so that she could push them to her car. He had a nice face. And she remembered it, the encounter as well as the face, because she had been so chuffed to learn that a man – a random, free-t hinking man – could still find her attractive. She could tell, of course – even through her sleepless fug – that he did. The middle-aged woman on the checkout, so bored with her job that she barely made eye-contact with most customers who passed her till, even she had noticed. Not threatening, not invasive, not dangerous in any way, but definitely interested. Smitten, she’d have said.
Lucy remembered it well enough to recognise him the next time they met at the supermarket. She was having a watery coffee in the grim canteen annexe, Bella asleep in her arms, when he passed with a tray and sat down at the next table. They smiled nervously at each other and Lucy ventured a hello.
He was interesting. Nice-looking, in a watered-down sort of way. His brother, Tom, was brighter, somehow, the same looks, but more vivid, and stronger. Tom’s hair was darker and curlier, and his eyes were darker, too, the lashes thicker. But she met Patrick, not Tom, and nice-looking was a good way to describe Patrick. With one long dimple, on the left cheek, that appeared only when he really smiled, as he had in the canteen when she’d said hello.
He always shopped on his way home from work, he told her. He wore a blue suit. She always shopped at this time because Bella was calm, she replied. He had to shop several times a week, he said, because he was a lousy cook, and couldn’t plan ahead. She shopped several times a week because she liked being out and about with the baby. Now that the weather was nicer she was walking, putting the shopping into the bottom of the pram.
The third time he said, ‘We have to stop meeting like this,’ as they passed in the aisle, but Lucy was being pursued by a grumpy woman with three rampaging children imprisoned, standing, in her trolley, grabbing to right and left for random goods, so they couldn’t talk.
Then he had sat beside her on the bench outside, and they had both eaten a Cornetto in the late-afternoon sunshine. He was in personnel management, he told her. That fitted. You would want to tell him things – he had that open sort of face, patient. He had loosened his tie and taken off his jacket. He leant back, after he’d finished his ice-cream, and sighed contentedly. They weren’t flirting, and he didn’t make her pulse race, but she had started to look out for him when she shopped, half expecting to see him round every corner.
By the sixth time, Will had left her. He had got home late one night, after she had fallen asleep, and she had stirred when he came to bed, acknowledging his arrival with a murmured hello and a perfunctory pat on his shoulder. But she was tired. The next morning, Bella slept uncharacteristically late, and Lucy woke, at first relaxed and refreshed, then almost instantly panicking. She ran to Bella’s nursery in time to see her daughter raise tiny arms to punch the air in triumphant wakefulness, and put her hand on her pounding heart, telling herself how silly she was to have worried, and feeling the calm descend once more. Will must have gone to work so she took Bella into their bed for a precious half-hour of raspberry-blowing and gurgling. When they got downstairs, she tied the baby into her bouncing chair and collected a clean bottle from the steriliser. The letter was propped against the tin of SMA, which was logical, at least. Bella was a hungry baby, he knew that, and needed two good shots of formula milk every day to