The Things We Need to Say Read online

  Fran still can’t find any words. She knows from bitter experience that there is nothing she can say that will help anyway. She reaches out and puts a hand on David’s shoulder, he flinches slightly but doesn’t move away. After a while he looks at Fran.

  ‘My wife and I struggled afterwards, like you said your husband and you are doing now. It’s understandable – of course you’re struggling. But you must keep talking to each other, keep communicating. Most importantly keep touching each other, hugging, you know.’ He pauses again and Fran tries to gather her thoughts, well aware of how badly she and Will communicated after Oscar’s death, how little they spoke, how every time they did it descended into an argument, until the day he finally had enough. It had been months before they touched each other again.

  So long that Will had found comfort somewhere else, with someone else.

  ‘We didn’t talk you see, or hug. She tried, my ex-wife, she tried to get through to me, but I shut myself down. In the end she had an affair; she left me. She remarried and has two daughters now. All I have is yoga and even you know that isn’t enough. Not really.’

  Fran stares at David, the parallels in their lives suddenly apparent.

  ‘Human touch is very powerful,’ David goes on quietly. ‘It’s important, like love. It can help you heal.’ He stops then, blushing. ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, standing up. He always stands up when he’s uncomfortable. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I just felt I needed to say something.’

  He starts to walk away but Fran calls him back.

  ‘David,’ she says. He turns to look at her and she stands too.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘I really mean that. Thank you.’

  *

  It’s gone midday by the time the taxi drops Fran off at the Placa de la Imperial Tarraco. The sun is searing and the cab is heading off again before Fran realises she is on the opposite side of town to where she needs to be.

  Nausea lurches in her stomach and she spots the green and white sign of El Corte Ingles and suddenly craves another Tarta de Manzana and the air conditioning of the shopping centre.

  Sitting on a bench in the shade ten minutes later, the sugar and apple is starting to make her nausea subside. At this rate the baby will be born clutching an apple tart, she thinks with a smile, her hand automatically covering her belly protectively, even though there is nothing to see there yet.

  If the baby makes it to term, another part of her brain interrupts.

  Her track record of carrying to term is terrible, but she has been shocked by the intensity of her feelings for this baby. She can’t remember ever wanting anything so badly. Not even Oscar. She wants this baby whatever happens, with or without Will.

  This could be the baby that saves their marriage.

  But it could be the baby that finally tears them apart.

  She thinks about David and what he said to her that morning. She suddenly sees David’s strange standoffishness and intensity in a completely different light. David makes a lot more sense now.

  She doesn’t want to end up like David.

  Determined to do something for herself she wipes her sticky fingers on a napkin and heads off down the Rambla Nova which, according to her map, seems to be the right direction for the Roman remains. The sun seems to be getting hotter and the crowds heavier so as she gets to the roundabout, she looks for a quieter road. She sees one named the Carrer St Francesc and turns into it, seeing it as a sign, Francesca being her name.

  From here she can finally see the sea and knows she’s definitely going in the right direction. The Romans built their city, the capital of Roman Spain, by the sea and Tarraco, as they called it, became the largest Roman port in northern Spain.

  As the Carrer St Francesc turns into the Rambla Vella it starts to get noisier, busier and full of motorbikes – the reverberating sounds and the overpowering smell of diesel wash over Fran leaving her feeling exhausted and overwhelmed. She has to get off this street before she starts to panic, but she can’t seem to find a way out.

  She is almost at the point where she doesn’t think she can go on, where she thinks she might just lie down on the hot pavement and cry, when she spots a shady side street and ducks into it for a moment.

  And suddenly she is in the most beautiful medieval square which, according to her map, is called Placa de la Font, and is surrounded on two sides by rows of cafés and restaurants, some no doubt owned by Amado’s “cousins”. Above the restaurants are several floors of apartment buildings, each with Juliet balconies and painted different shades of blue and yellow and pink.

  The energy in the square is so much more peaceful and tranquil than it was out on the street that it is hard to believe she is still in the same town, let alone a couple of hundred yards away. She takes a deep breath and smiles.

  She makes her way towards one of the cafés and sits down. She orders a pot of tea, leans back in her chair, and closes her eyes. The old Roman remains of Tarraco can wait; she and her baby need to rest for a while.

  The waiter has just delivered her tea to the table and she is considering asking him if there are any apple tarts when she hears it. It is like a voice from the past that has broken through the ether somehow – a name that shouldn’t be there. Something she hasn’t heard for fourteen years.

  ‘Frankie Sullivan?’

  It’s been a long time since anybody used her maiden name. Longer still since anybody called her Frankie. It’s a name that belongs to a different person, a different time. For a split second she can smell nightclubs and cigarette smoke, Aramis aftershave, and Camden Lock at three a.m. Suddenly, just for a moment, Fran finds herself back in London, the crowds, the anonymity, the press of bodies against each other on the Tube. For the first time in fourteen years Fran wishes she’d never left.

  ‘Frankie?’ The voice is closer now; she recognises it from years ago. ‘It is you, isn’t it?’

  She senses a shadow being cast over the table and opens her eyes, frowning at the man standing above her. She tries to place him and realises the smell of Aramis is more than a memory.

  ‘Jake?’ she says. ‘Jake Torreno?’

  ‘My God,’ Jake says quietly. ‘Frankie.’

  Fran can’t believe he is there in front of her after all these years. The last time she saw Jake Torreno – the man she shared five years of her life with – was the day of her mother’s funeral. He insisted on coming and, afterwards, had wanted to stay with her, help her sort things out before she returned to London. But she already knew she was never going back so she sent him away, telling him she’d follow in a few weeks.

  She never did.

  She stands now, suddenly, feeling like David again as she hears the legs of her chair scrape on the paving slabs and she nearly upsets her teapot. She feels Jake’s hands on her shoulders, so familiar, and he kisses her cheeks – left, right, left.

  She stares at him, and sees those dark grey eyes staring back. His hands are still on her shoulders and she steps closer allowing him to pull her into an embrace as though the last fourteen years have never happened. She breathes in the smell of Aramis and Jake – a heady combination she’s never forgotten. He’s still beautiful, if a little more careworn. She feels her stomach flip over. She never thought she’d see him again.

  Being held by Jake feels different to Will. Where Will is long and lean, Jake is strong, his muscles bulkier, more defined. He always felt like a brick wall between her and the world whereas Will is more of an equal. Jake feels different but familiar. Will already feels like a ghost – it’s been less than a week since she last saw him but it’s as though he’s disappearing. How easy it would be to stay here in Jake’s arms. Easier still if it weren’t for those two blue lines on the pregnancy test, like two invisible threads connecting her to her husband. Her cheating husband.

  The thought of Will and their baby pulls Fran back into reality and she steps away, holding on to the café table to steady herself. Here in this medieval square with the sun beating down, Wil
l’s betrayal feels as though it happened to somebody else – Jake is the reality, tangible and solid in front of her. The world shifts on its axis once more. If she could do it all again would she have walked away all those years ago? Did she have a choice?

  ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ he says.

  ‘You have!’ she replies, with a smile looking at his expensive linen suit, his gold jewellery, his neatly trimmed beard. ‘You’ve come a long way since that flat on the Archway Road.’

  He shrugs.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks.

  ‘I live here now,’ he says. She wants to ask more. She wants to ask what brought him here although she suspects she already knows the answer to that and she wonders if he ever found the father he had spent his life looking for. There was something about him that suggested he hadn’t. Fran was well enough acquainted with loss to recognise it in other people.

  ‘What brings you to my beautiful city?’ he asks, interrupting her thoughts.

  ‘I’m leading a yoga retreat.’

  ‘Of course you are! My little hippy.’

  She’d forgotten how he used to call her that, how he used to tease her about all the yoga she did and the odd stuff she believed in. She thinks again about Will and how he never once teased her or judged her, just accepted her exactly as she was. Her legs suddenly feel as though they won’t hold her any longer and she sits back down at the café table.

  ‘Can I join you?’ Jake asks.

  She nods, her mouth dry. She gulps down her tea.

  ‘Black tea with lemon?’ he asks.

  She nods again, feeling foolish.

  ‘I knew you hadn’t changed, Frankie.’

  ‘Everyone calls me Fran now,’ she says, finding her voice. ‘Fran Browne.’

  She watches as his eyes flick down to her left hand, the rings on her third finger. They suddenly feel heavy on her hand, weighed down by sadness, failure, grief. Would life have been different if she’d gone back to London after her mother’s funeral? If Jake had bought her those rings? She looks up at him, their eyes meeting, and she sees that flash of sadness and loss cross his face again. Probably not, she thinks.

  ‘Where did you go, Frankie Sullivan?’ he asks softly, placing his hand over hers as if to block out the sight of the rings.

  ‘I didn’t go anywhere,’ she replies turning her head away from him but not moving her hand. ‘I just didn’t come back.’ She feels something where his skin touches hers, something she thought she’d left behind long ago, something she knows she shouldn’t be feeling.

  ‘You just drifted away, stopped calling,’ Jake says, his voice still quiet as though he is talking to himself.

  She turns to look at him again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I never meant to hurt you.’ She means it, but she had been hurting so much herself that she hadn’t realised how much she was hurting him at the time. She has seen that pattern of behaviour repeat itself with Will again and again with every miscarriage and after Oscar.

  Jake and Fran met in Freshers’ week. Everyone says that you spend the rest of your time at university trying to get away from the people you meet in Freshers’ week, but it wasn’t true of them. He’d been standing watching her – he always looked older than the rest of the students, stockier, more worldly somehow. He shaved his head even then, grew a beard that was significantly more than a few wisps. He always smelled of Aramis. He told her it reminded him of his dad – it was the only memory he had of him.

  ‘Let me buy you coffee,’ he’d said.

  Coffee had turned into pizza, pizza had turned into drinks, and drinks had turned into sitting up all night talking. He told her how his dad had left when he was small. He was Spanish and came from Barcelona and one day he was going to go to Spain and find him, bring him home.

  Talking turned into kissing, kissing into sex, and sex very quickly, surprisingly quickly, turned into love. Or what Fran thought was love. It had never come close to what she felt as she stood at the edge of the dance floor with Will at the Christmas party.

  After their first year, they lived together on Archway Road for four years – they graduated from that flat, got their first jobs. It was always full of empty wine bottles, laundry drying on any available surface, bits of Jake’s mountain bike. Fran thought she was happy, until she realised she wasn’t any more.

  ‘Tell me about your husband,’ Jake asks, changing the subject and moving his hand away from hers. Despite the heat, the back of her hand feels cold now it is exposed again.

  ‘He’s a lawyer. He’s at home doing his job while I’m out here doing mine. We live just outside Newmarket.’ Fran doesn’t want to talk about Will.

  ‘Is this retreat here in Tarragona?’ he asks. He pronounces it properly as though he’s lived here all his life.

  ‘No, it’s in Salou. Everyone else is in Barcelona but I wanted to see the Roman remains. You know what I’m like.’ She smiles, trying to lighten the atmosphere. She’d studied history and Jake had studied English. She’d dragged him around the British Museum every rainy Saturday and he’d made her read Dickens when she preferred romance.

  ‘Would you let me show you around?’ he asks gently, as though he’s scared she might say no.

  *

  ‘So, what do you do out here?’ Fran asks as they walk through the square towards the sea. She keeps a distance between them. She doesn’t want to accidentally touch him, to feel that sensation she shouldn’t be feeling.

  ‘Oh I have money invested in a few businesses, a couple of nightclubs in Salou in fact, but most of my time is spent running a sightseeing tour up in the mountains, in the National Park.’

  ‘What sort of sightseeing?’ Fran asks. She can’t imagine him as a tour guide.

  He smiles. ‘Bike tours of course!’

  ‘Of course!’ When they’d lived together he’d loved nothing more than taking his mountain bike out of London and getting away from it all for the day. She’d always tried not to get angry when he fixed the chain in the kitchen of their flat, getting oil everywhere, because she knew how happy it made him. It would be like asking her to move her yoga mat somewhere else.

  ‘I’m surprised you get enough people on holiday out here fit enough to cycle up the mountains though,’ Fran says.

  ‘You don’t, but with my tours you don’t need to.’

  ‘How do they get up there then?’

  ‘We take them up,’ he says proudly. ‘We take them and the bikes up in a van and then they cycle down, enjoying the mountain air, getting away from it all, that sort of thing!’

  ‘Genius!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  They walk slowly. Fran knows she’s setting the pace and feels bad that she’s holding Jake up but she’s so tired and hot that she can’t go any faster. The sun is strong and she pulls her sunhat down over her eyes as they walk out of a shady side street.

  And suddenly there it is – the Pretori i Circ Romans – the beautifully restored Roman circus, that had been built in the first century for chariot racing. Fran stops in her tracks staring at this part of an old world among the hustle and bustle of the twenty-first century.

  ‘Pretty spectacular isn’t it?’ Jake says quietly. ‘Sometimes you forget how amazing it is when you see it every day.’

  ‘Like growing up in Cambridge,’ Fran replies. ‘And forgetting to notice King’s College Chapel.’

  Jake smiles. ‘Do you want to go inside?’

  ‘What do you reckon?’ Fran grins.

  They walk around to the entrance where Jake speaks in rapid Catalan to the museum attendant and they walk straight through without paying.

  ‘Old friend,’ Jake says to Fran’s questioning face. Fran is beginning to understand that everyone in Catalonia is an old friend or a cousin.

  They wander through the vaults first, which would have run under the stands where the spectators stood, the roof of the vaults serving as a foundation for the stands. It’s an astonishing feat of engineering, amazing that it
’s still standing. It’s cool down here and Fran walks slowly, running her hands along the walls, marvelling at their age and wondering about the people who would have walked through here two thousand years before, on their way to their seats. When she looks up Jake is staring at her.

  ‘Still lost in the past?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere like this,’ she replies. ‘My husband isn’t much of a fan of old buildings and museums.’

  Jake doesn’t say anything, but just carries on walking through the ancient vaults. He leaves her to daydream, watching her as she reads the information leaflets and imagines what it would have been like to be here as the chariot races thundered past. After a while he gestures for her to follow him into a small room.

  ‘Lift or stairs?’ he asks.

  She looks at a sign that reads Praetorium Tower – it sounds as though there will be a lot of stairs.

  ‘Lift,’ she says. ‘I haven’t been sleeping well.’

  He doesn’t question it, but instead steps into the glass lift behind her. Just as the doors are about to close a German couple cram in as well and Jake steps closer to her, his body touching hers. The physical closeness of him almost overwhelms her, the years suddenly melting away again, and she feels a mixture of disappointment and relief when the lift expels them onto a sun-drenched rooftop.

  Jake walks over to one of the walls at the top of the tower.

  ‘This is the best view in Tarragona,’ he says sweeping his arms out to the side.

  And it really is. In one direction Fran can see over the rooftops of the city. It reminds her of the scene in Mary Poppins where the chimney sweeps are dancing, but with more sunshine. The streets slope upwards, away from the sea, towards the Cathedral which, Jake tells her, stands where the Roman forum used to be.

  In the other direction, framed by the sparkling blue of the Mediterranean, is the Roman amphitheatre, again looking slightly incongruous against the modern streets, the cafés, the endless rows of bougainvillea.