Doing the house up was Scarlett’s mother’s job. Joss was exactly what you’d imagine Scarlett’s mum to be like: loud, bossy, something of a narcissist. Liam met Scarlett’s father only once or twice during the eighteen months that they were together. Martin Jacques worked in the City and had a pied-à-terre in Bloomsbury. He was very thin and distant, with a plume of silvery hair and an almost constant twitch in his cheek.
And then there was Scarlett’s older brother, Rex, closer in age to Liam, awesome guy, right up Liam’s street, if a bit full of himself and loud on occasion, very much his mother’s son.
The Jacqueses loved Liam. He was made to feel one of the family, a part of the furniture. Joss always had a little job for him to do; a leaky U-bend that needed tightening, a kettle that needed rewiring, a car that needed to be taken to a garage for a service.And he was always happy to be that guy, the practical guy, the one who could be relied on to know how to reboot a treadmill or keep foxes off your lawn.
And then it all changed. Scarlett finished her A levels in June 2016, after which she and her family went sailing for most of the summer – Liam was invited to go with them but was needed at home because his dad’s back had gone. By the time Scarlett was back from her travels and Liam was back from the Cotswolds, there was barely a moment for them to spend together before Scarlett started her Fine Art course at Manton College. Liam meanwhile was still at Maypole House, retaking one last A level. Without their regular lunches together, without the times when they had free periods between lessons and sneaked into Liam’s room in the residential block to have sex or watch TV, without the sheer proximity of each other, the whole thing seemed to slide away from them, the easiness and the closeness, and towards the end of that first term, just before Christmas 2016, Scarlett took Liam to the Swan & Ducks and bought him beer and fish and chips and told him that it was probably best if they were just friends. And Liam shrugged and said, ‘Yeah, I kind of knew this was coming.’
‘Are you sad?’ she asked, her eyes wide, her bottom lip pinned down on one side by her teeth.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sad.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, grabbing his hand.
‘You don’t need to be sorry. You’re young. Life moves on. I get it.’
‘Am I allowed to change my mind?’
He laughed. ‘Only if you change it in the next fifteen minutes. After that, forget it.’
She dropped her head onto his shoulder and then looked up at him again and said, ‘I might just go AWOL without you, you know. I might lose the plot. I might … I don’t know, I might do some terrible things.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I mean it. You’re the thing that keeps me on the straight and narrow. You’re the rock. And I’m hacking myself off you. And I don’t know what happens after that.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said lightly. ‘I’m going to be right there.’ He pointed through the window of the pub across the common to Maypole House.
‘Yes, but …’ She trailed off and he saw something dark pass across her face.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing’s the matter.’ She forced an unconvincing smile and then they embraced for a while and Liam breathed in the smell of her and tried his hardest not to cry, not to show her that she was killing him.
Liam went home for Christmas. He was quiet, but nobody noticed because that wasn’t what it was like in his house. He had three brothers and a sister and now there were nephews and nieces and there were cows to be calved, fences to be fixed and bales to be shifted and by the time Liam got back to Maypole House in January he was almost over Scarlett.
Almost, but not quite.
After a few days back at school he decided to ditch his final retake. He’d only signed up for it so that he could be close to Scarlett and without Scarlett he was adrift in a school full ofpeople younger than him. He had the grades he needed for his degree at the agricultural college. He didn’t need to be there any more. He planned to leave Maypole House and go home to help his dad with the farm for a few months, but the day he was meant to be leaving, he got a call from Scarlett.
‘I need you, Boobs,’ she said.
She didn’t sound like Scarlett. She sounded different. She sounded hollow and scared.
‘What?’ he said. ‘What’s the matter?’
‘I can’t tell you on the phone. Can you come here? To the house? Please?’
Liam looked around his room, at the bags half packed, the empty bookshelves, the closing down of this chapter of his life ready to begin the next. He’d intended to hit the road by 6 p.m. and it was already nearly three. He sighed and he let his shoulders slump and he said, ‘Sure thing. Of course. I’ll be there in, like, a couple of hours.’
‘No, come now. Please. Come now!’
He sighed again.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘I’ll be there in ten.’
‘And what was it?’ Sophie asks now. ‘What did Scarlett want?’
‘Some kind of breakdown, I think,’ Liam replies. ‘She was shaking, foetal. Her mother sort of made out she was attention-seeking.’ He shrugs. ‘Maybe she was. I don’t know. But I knew I couldn’t leave her. I knew she still needed me. Told my dad I wasn’t coming home yet and moved in with her for a while. Then a vacancy for a classroom assistant turned up here at the school and I thought I could just do it for a few weeks, just to stay closeto Scarlett.’ He sighs. ‘And, yeah, here I still am, over a year later.’