Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [103]
“And me.”
“We’ll go into town tomorrow, get some Rough Guides. And we should check out flights.” She could hear the excitement in Ed’s voice. It would be so nice, traveling together. She’d always traveled alone. She might have hooked up with people she met along the road, and sometimes she traveled for a week or so with a group from a train, or a bar, or a boat. But eventually, she always broke away again and continued on her own path alone. It was what she did, to feel free. Now she could hardly wait to be traveling with someone.
“I better go home. See my family.” She hadn’t even spoken to them for ages, she realized. Lisa texted, checking in with her. She should make the effort. “Maybe next weekend?”
“Yeah.” He held her tightly. “I’ll miss you.”
“You soppy sod.” But she loved it.
March
Mark
It was a long time since Mark had been on a date. He’d only come on this one to shut Hannah up. He hadn’t expected to enjoy it.
She was divorced. She and her husband had split up four years ago. He had moved a hundred miles away. She had given up work when their children were born and never gone back, even when the youngest one—Hannah’s classmate Susie—was at school full-time. She said that was half the problem. She should have. By the time she realized that, it was too late, and the marriage was over. She didn’t blame her husband. She was retraining as a teacher. She felt a bit silly, having discovered something that she was so good at so late in life. She loved the teaching, loved feeling that she might be making a difference in a young life.
She told him this over a bowl of pasta and a bottle of Valpolicella at the local Italian restaurant.
She was a little too thin. Ash blond, with a modern, feathery haircut and green-gray eyes, she must have been very pretty when she was young. She was still attractive now. Well maintained and neat, but soft, too. He liked the faint lines around her eyes. She smelled nice. Her black sweater had little sequins sewn into it, and they sparkled in the candlelight. He wondered why her husband had stopped loving her.
Over tiramisu, she told him she’d been on a few dates since her husband left. Mostly set up by well-meaning friends, although she had, briefly, joined a dating agency. She was funny—self-deprecating and honest—when she talked about the application form she’d had to fill in, and the various unsuitable men she’d met. None of them had been worthy of a second date, apparently. One she had watched come into the pub, see her, and surreptitiously turn and leave. She said the woman who ran the agency told her that her age would be an advantage. She was post-menopausal, and so men could relax about her biological clock—she wouldn’t be desperate to entrap them into parenthood. She laughed loudly when she said that she’d wanted to hit the woman repeatedly in the head with a shovel. She had a warm laugh.
While they drank a cappuccino, she’d asked him, tentatively, about Barbara. She’d known her, just a little. Their girls weren’t really friends, but they had once sat on the PTA together for a couple of terms. He answered her gentle questions briefly and steered her away from the subject, which did not belong at their table.
He drank a grappa. She had the last of the wine. It seemed to him that it was a little more than either of them was used to drinking. He went to the bathroom and felt just a fraction lighter, giddier, than he could remember feeling.
She lived within walking distance of the restaurant, in the home she had been married from, and raised her children in, and been granted in her divorce and so, without discussion, they walked, even though his car was parked right outside. It was pretty warm outside for March.
When they reached the door of her small cottage—well maintained and neat, he noted with a smile—she was talking about council recycling policy, but he wasn