The Banker's Niece 40: Decision-time

SPOILER ALERT

Don't read this chapter if you've not read earlier ones and are intending to do so

Jane puts the sheaf of papers back on the kitchen table and rests her head in her hands.

    It’s a shock to come back to the present, to hear the radiators creaking and feel the sun warming her through the French windows. She still has the taste of coffee in her mouth, and in her nose is her own scent of soap and clean clothes.

    Ever since she left her safe London life – no, ever since her father died – something inside her has been crumbling. The Berlin Wall she erected between her past and her present has been falling into disrepair and memories have flooded through the gaps. Up until now however she’s managed to keep them in her head. She’s heard them and seen them but she hasn’t done anything with them.

    At the same time she’s felt propelled. Decisions have made themselves. Surprises have ambushed her at every juncture, and nothing has turned out as she planned. 

    But all that has changed with Chris’s letter.

    She’s back with the same stark choice she faced nearly forty years ago when she first met Rick. What a joke. It’s almost cruel.

She stands up and goes over to the French windows, flinging them open and stepping outside.

    There’s still a chill to the air but the slush has vanished and all she can see in her garden is brown-ness: the plants are either dead or leafless and the grass is a bog. Even the birds having a noisy argument in the hedge at the bottom of the garden are brown. Even her view is brown.

    She’s angry with Rick, of course she is.

    Not only is the ruse disgusting, an insult to both her and Chris, but it’s stupid. It could so easily have gone so very wrong. It could have destroyed her. It would almost certainly have driven her away. After all, isn’t that what Rick’s affair with Chris did to her, all that time ago?

    One part of her wants to throw plates at the wall, to march round the room swearing and kicking chairs. It would be a relief. But another part of her can’t be bothered. It wouldn’t achieve anything. It would make her feel like a spoilt child. More importantly, it would be a waste of everything Chris has done.

    According to the tabloids (which she doesn’t read any more) and soaps (which she doesn’t watch), she and Chris should by now be slinging insults at each other, if not grappling on the ground. That’s how these stories run, according to them. But in Jane’s experience that’s never the case. If anything, women gang up against men. They support each other. After all, who else do they have?

    She’ll be forever grateful to Chris for coming to see her and including her in Rick’s machinations. It was a brave, selfless thing to do. It was the action of a responsible adult. It’s an example to her.

    What choice, however, does a responsible adult make in the situation in which Jane now finds herself?

She plonks herself into one of the wooden garden armchairs left behind on the terrace by the previous owner and which Jane should have put in the shed for the winter, but never got round to. Damp seeps through her trousers but she tries to ignore it. It’s not important at the moment.

    She could ring Sharon. After all, Sharon is privy to the secrets of the higher world, or so she would have Jane believe. She would know which action is best suited to the unfolding of Jane’s life-plan. Somehow though, she doesn’t want to do that, and that’s because she knows already what Sharon would say: ‘Ah, the Prince of Wands. I’ve been expecting him to reappear. Didn’t I always say that the two of you had unfinished business? Of course you must go and see him.’

    She wouldn’t listen to Jane’s objections: that it would reopen the most painful part of her life; that it could all go horribly wrong and Jane would lose even the good memories of her time with Rick; that there would be no love left between the two of them and so nothing for Jane to believe in any more; that he would be fat and ugly; that she would still be the same inadequate person and that everything would fall apart like it did before.

    Sharon would tap her finger on the table and exhort Jane to bypass the objections and use her in-tu-ition.

    But how do you recognise your intuition? How do you decide which of the voices in your head is the right one? In spite of Sharon’s exercises, she still doesn’t know.

    She bites her fingers and stares at the ground.

    A breeze ruffles the bare branches of her apple tree and a couple of dead apples thud to the ground. She discovered the tree laden with fruit when she moved in last September. She managed to pick some of it but the rest she had to leave for the birds. Maybe this year she’ll be more organised.

    If she's still here in the autumn.

    And with a flash of something like inspiration she realises that not all her choices have to relate to Rick. As Sharon says, no situation is black and white. There’s always a third option.

    So why shouldn’t she listen to the loud voice that has this minute joined the others and is telling her to get the hell out, to travel to the other side of the world – Australia perhaps - and make a true fresh start, not this bastard one in Devon. After all, she’s never had a gap year – they didn’t exist in her day – so why shouldn’t she have gap rest-of-life? She’s worked for it. She can afford it.

    She jumps to her feet. She'll race to the computer this very minute, before she starts to doubt, and do some research – into the cost of flights, estate and letting agents who might deal with her house, internet banking, insurance and the million and one other things involved in an extended trip, not to say move, to another country.

She charges up the stairs, buzzing like she does after a double espresso, but as she sits at her desk the phone rings.

    She doesn’t want to answer it. She’s already spoken to all the important people in her life this morning. The call can only be rubbish, or bad news.

    ‘Hello,’ she says cautiously into the mouthpiece.

    ‘Jane?’ says a trembling voice.

    ‘Yes,’ she says, her tone warmer. She thinks she knows who it is.

    ‘Jane, it’s Chris.’ She sounds as if she’s trying not to cry.

    ‘Yes?’ says Jane, her voice rising in pitch.

    ‘It’s Rick,’ quavers Chris. ‘He’s had a crash. In the back roads. You know what he’s like. Met a tractor head on . . . Air ambulance . . . Just this minute rung me . . . On my way now . . . Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital . . . May have to be transferred to Bristol . . .

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