Quintin Jardine - A Coffin For Two

Jan put her coffee cup on the floor. (I couldn’t help it; I glanced down fleetingly to make sure that it wasn’t going to topple over and stain my carpet. Happily she didn’t notice.) She stood up and took a step or two across to stand beside me, to link her arm through mine.

‘Oz my darlin’,’ she said. ‘I’d never before been dominated by anyone in my life. That was why you and I were so great as youngsters. Neither of us ever dreamed of possessing the other. I never thought of you as my boyfriend or of me as your girlfriend. I was always Jan, her own woman. You were Oz, your own man, and I loved you.’

She squeezed my arm. ‘So with you, my pit prop, taken away, I looked at Noosh and me and I realised what I was. In that instant, it all fell apart. I waited until you and Prim were gone … I had Ellie and the kids to distract me until then … and I told Noosh how it was. She didn’t like it, and we had a row. I said I realised that she couldn’t change, so that was it.

‘I moved out and into the loft. Originally I just meant it to be for a couple of weeks, while I found somewhere else, but I like it here. How about selling it to me, once Noosh gives me my share of our flat? I don’t imagine that Prim will fancy me being your tenant on a long-term basis.’

I laughed. ‘There’s the shorter term question of how she’d feel about me sleeping on the sofa-bed tonight. But hold on, I’m still getting my head round this.’ I turned her towards me and slipped my arms around her waist. Her body, held gently against mine, was oh, so familiar. ‘You’ve no regrets? You’ve had no second thoughts?’

‘None. I’m Jan again. Like I said, my big problem now is what to tell my mum, how to tell her.’

I smiled at her. We were almost eye to eye, since Jan still had her shoes on. ‘No problem. Just tell her exactly what you’ve told me.’

‘Apart from the bit about you giving me a good shag every so often?’ she murmured.

‘That’s up to you.You’re your own woman again, remember. Here’s a thought, though. Dad and Auntie Mary are a team now. You should tell them together. I can promise you, based on long experience, that there’s no better listener than my old man.’

She thought about it and nodded. ‘You’re right. I’ll do it. Even the bit about you know what, if slightly watered down. Tomorrow, I’ll take you to the airport, and then I’ll head straight back up to Fife.

‘Thanks, darlin’,’ she said, ‘for being there yet again. Tell you this, if Mac’s a great listener, then the skill’s hereditary.’ She kissed me, like she had the evening before, at the airport. Without even thinking about it, I kissed her right back.

And then I kissed her again. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about anything, except Jan, that seafood stall in Crail once more, those harbour walls in Anstruther, coastal walks, and later times in the loft, when I’d be alone in the evening and the entry phone would ring.

We looked at each other, our eyes inches apart, the air between us smoking with memories. My heart was in charge now. I flicked an eyebrow as if nodding back in time. ‘Just now,’ I whispered, ‘about you and me. You said, “loved”.You used the past tense.’

‘Did I?’ she answered my unspoken question. ‘Then I meant “love”. How could I not? I’m Jan, and I haven’t changed.’

‘So where does this take Jan and Oz?’

I lay face down on the bed, my chin buried in my knotted fists, my eyes focused on a scratch in the headboard. Euphoria was dissipating as practicality took hold, and as I contemplated the scattered pieces of my so-certain future.

‘Not one step forward,’ she answered. ‘Not one step back. But, by God, it was good, wasn’t it.’ She lay beside me, her shiny brown hair tousled and fallen over one eye, the way it always seemed to after we had made love. ‘I like being a strong and independent woman again.’

Of course, the inevitable had happened.

I’ll never believe for one second that Jan had planned it that way. Still, we had kissed again, and it had taken on a momentum of its own, until the neat bows tying back the curtains had been slipped, and we were easing each other out of our clothing, as we had done on countless occasions over the last fourteen years.

Yet this was unlike any of those innumerable matings in the past. There was a maturity to it, a gentleness, a patience, on my part and on Jan’s, of which I had never been aware before, and maybe for my part never capable. It was long and slow and smiling and joyful, two old friends meeting again after believing they never would, until at last we climaxed together, as never before, Jan bucking and heaving beneath me and crying out, wide-eyed, in absolute triumph. Eventually, we had fallen asleep in each other’s arms, awakening hours later, still entwined.

I rolled on to my back and Jan slid on top of me, her long legs covering mine, propped up on her elbows with her hair falling towards my face.

I let my eyes roam. ‘Nice tits,’ I said, by way of morning conversation.

‘Nice love handles,’ she replied, taking a grip of my extended waist with her right hand and squeezing. ‘They’re new. I think I like them.’

‘Don’t,’ I murmured. ‘They’re going.’Her face fell, just for a moment, before she slammed her smile firmly back into place. ‘No,’ I said, hurriedly. ‘I meant I’ve started exercising again.’

‘Sure,’ she whispered, ‘but they are going, aren’t they? Back to Spain, to find out whether Gavin Scott’s Dali’s a fake or not.’

‘Aye, and to sort out a few other matters too. But let’s not talk about that.’

‘No,’ she said, lowering her lips to mine. ‘I’ve got other things in mind.’

Afterwards, as the gleam of orgasmic triumph in Jan’s eye began to soften once more, we lay in silence for a while, gazing up at the slivers of Monday morning sky which showed through the glass of the belvedere. The rain had gone, and the autumn sunshine was back.

I broke the quiet, reaching across and rubbing her nipple with the flat of my thumb. ‘You remember I had a long talk with Ellie, on Saturday night?’ I asked her.

‘Mhm.’

‘She told me that I should cut you out of my life, for your sake.’

‘Funny, that,’ said Jan. ‘She told me that I should cut you out of mine, for my sake. What did you say to her?’

‘I told her that you’d have to wield the knife for both of us. What did you say?’

‘I said …’ She paused, and looked up at the sky once more. ‘I said that you can’t cut your heart out and expect to go on living.’

I didn’t have a funny line to follow that. So I said, ‘Ellie cares about you and me, but she doesn’t really know us; like not really .’

She wrapped her arms around me again. ‘No. No one really knows you and me, except for you and me.’

‘Only,’ I cautioned her, ‘all of a sudden I’m not sure that I know me any more.’

Jan propped herself up on an elbow and looked down at me. On occasion she may fart quietly in her sleep, but I’ve never known anyone who looks, invariably, as beautiful as she does when she’s newly wakened in the morning.

She fixed me in the eye and spoke, slowly and deliberately. ‘In that case, Osbert Blackstone, the one and only true love of my life, the sooner you get back to Spain and find yourself again, the better it will be.’

I started to speak, but she put a finger across my lips. ‘No pressure. No demands. No ultimatum. I’m saying nothing other than this. For the first time I’ve made love with you in the knowledge that you were living with another woman. But it’ll be the last. I’ll always love you, and I’ll always be your best friend, but I can’t be your second best woman. You’ll always love me too, I know. But you have to work out how you want it to be. Like it’s been for the last few years, as best of friends … except without the occasional bit of the other … or like we were before that. Agreed?’