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Molly stays for just a moment too long on the threshold in front of Jane’s open apartment, only half concerned that this is a new level of voyeurism even for her. Partly she stays because, sweet mother Mary, it’s exhausting lugging round a pregnant belly and waddling everywhere. She’s past her due date and right now, she wants the little demon inside her to find its way out pronto. Obviously, not at that very moment. Even for Molly, who has streaked and skinny-dipped and generally has very little self-consciousness, that would be awkward.
No, mostly she stays because it takes her a good five minutes to work out if the woman macking on a complete stranger (albeit a very well dressed stranger, though he looks a little too uptight for Molly’s own taste) really is Jane Amelia Hayes, her best friend of ten years who, in those ten years, has probably never been kissed in the way that Mr. Cardigan is kissing her now.
Damn. Mr. Cardigan can kiss. Molly checks herself when she finds her own head tilted to get a better look at his lip action and some small part of her is grateful that Baby (as yet unnamed, which has a fair amount to do with rejecting ‘Colin’ every time Jane has suggested it) kicks to remind her of her own, less exciting and more hormonal reality.
No one who can kiss like Mr. Cardigan should be wearing a cardigan, in Molly’s profound opinion.
Not that Jane and Lover Boy have any idea she’s there, of course. There’s too much lip movement and too many wandering hands for them to pay the slightest bit of attention to her, so she breathes deeply and readies herself for the death waddle back to her apartment. Bloody babies. Bloody pregnancy. Bloody broken condoms.
Molly’s got half a mind to text Jane and tell her to avoid pregnancy at all costs, but Jane’s phone is in her back pocket, probably set to vibrate as usual, and Molly doesn’t think the two of them need anymore encouragement.
-
Jane has never been more aware of how chintzy her apartment décor is then when she wakes up the next morning to find Henry, hair all mussed and in yesterday’s wrinkled shirt and boxers, walking quietly round the bedroom, bending down to look at the title of a book or lightly touching her ornaments. His right hand stretches out to touch a photo frame holding a picture of Jane and her mother, and Jane blushes at the memory of exactly what those fingertips can do to her. The bedframe creaks when she shifts slightly, trying to cover her reddened cheeks, and Henry turns around slowly, a smile softly curving his lips and creasing his eyes.
“Sorry,” he says and now he’s facing her, Jane can see he hasn’t buttoned his shirt up quite right and the unequal neckline is doing funny things to her. “I didn’t mean to wake you. I was just curious.”
Half of Jane’s attention is focused on bed hair and raccoon eyes and the traumatic possibility of terrible morning breath; and the other half on how her own Mr. Darcy (a real one, not the cardboard cut-out of a nearly-headless Colin Firth) is standing almost within touching distance. He looks like a boy, so much younger and more at ease than Jane has ever seen him in the few short weeks she’s known him for. She’d thought he looked happy at the theatrical, professing his love for her while holding a plastic shield with his lines Sellotape’d to the back, but yet again she’s reminded of how little she truly knows about him.
And she loves that.
-
They go out for brunch and to buy clean clothes, seeing as Henry had taken the next flight he could out of Heathrow. More than once, Jane has to pinch herself when she sees him picking out shirts and underwear in the Gant store when she’s seen him in nothing but Regency dress for almost the entire time she’s known him.
The worst moment comes at the till, when Henry pulls out his black American Express card. Never mind the fact that he’s obviously wealthier than Jane had ever thought, what really gets her is that the man standing in jeans and loafers, an iPhone sticking out of his back pocket, is the same man who played croquet and rode a horse in breeches and a top hat.
“What’s so funny,” Henry asks when Jane gets the giggles, and she says,
“Everything.”
Hesitantly, still afraid she’ll pull away, he wraps an arm around her shoulders and kisses her softly, politely, until Jane promises silently that she won’t disappear again; and then the sales assistant has the good grace to look away from the couple in love in the middle of the shop floor.
-
Henry comes clean over brunch, a full English for him with "dish water" instead of tea, and croissants and orange juice for Jane.
“I’ve never acted so rashly in my life,” he grins after a mouthful of bacon and hash brown. “I think that probably tops everything I did at university. I just knew I had to find you. I drove back to the house from the airport, changed out of those ridiculous clothes, and I wish I was joking when I say that I almost had to throttle your address out of my aunt. It was only when I was leaving that one of the maids came down with your sketchbook. Fortuitous, I like to think.”
Jane smiles over her juice, all too easily imagining the confrontation between Mrs. Wattlesbrook and Henry in the gaudy gatehouse. “I should think she was thrilled at the prospect of you hurrying over,” she says, and Henry rolls his eyes.
“About as happy as my department was with me taking my holiday time during the exam period,” he says, and sounds a little guilty saying so. Jane comes back down to Earth with a bump.
“So what happens now,” she asks and the atmosphere shifts abruptly. She can’t go back to her old job. Jimmy and the angry voicemail she got from her boss after she’d walked out won’t allow it, but what she knows is here and what Henry knows is on a different continent. “What’re we supposed to do? I don’t even know what you do really or where you live or what your life is like or who-“
“We sort things out. Together,” Henry says firmly, taking the small hand that’s clutching the side of the table in anxiety and holding it warmly.
He waits a moment, takes another mouthful and swallows slowly before speaking. “I live in Oxford, I lecture at the University. I go back to London when I can, at the weekends. My younger sister, Catherine, lives there with her husband and they’ve got a four-month-old son. I help with the Boat Club and the fencing. I travel sometimes to attend lectures and conferences, and I have more books in my house than I could ever possibly read. I am absolutely not a dog person and I’m turning 35 in November. And I love you.”
It’s all bigger and more complicated and more headache inducing than Jane ever thought love would be, but she finishes her glass of orange juice and tells Henry she loves him, too.
-
Two weeks later and Jane is back in England, still smarting a little at Henry’s insistence that he use his air miles to buy her ticket. She handed in her notice ten days ago and spent the last nine compiling a CV that might persuade someone in a different country to hire her. Not that she’s definitely moving, whatever Molly might say (when baby Jack gives her a moment’s rest. The name was Molly’s choice, definitely not her husband’s). It’s such a huge commitment and the last big thing that Jane committed to in her life turned round to bite her in the ass.
The taxi drops her off outside Henry’s house two hours late, and it’s grander than she ever imagined. It’s big and terraced, dark brick and Georgian in style, and the shiny black front door is more than a little terrifying. She knew he was rich, knew it was old money and he taught History purely for the love of it, but it's a lot to take in for a girl who wore nothing but Old Navy for a long, long time.
But she climbs the steps and rings the doorbell, and Henry answers in record time. He’s wearing his tortoise-shell glasses and the blue cardigan he wears when he’s exhausted and needs something comfy, and he looks like the home Jane has started to find in him. She hears Dean Martin playing in the background, catches a glimpse of a dark mahogany staircase and walls painted in duck-egg blue before she smells his cologne and feels his warmth and sees nothing but stars while her lips are otherwise engaged.
-
She insists on a tour while they wait for the Chinese to arrive and Henry, self-deprecating and abashed at first, has a glass of red wine in one hand and her hand in the other as he shows her around. Jane knows now, now that she can see the richly painted walls and the dark wood and the occasional gilded picture frame, why he loves the past as much as she does; why she always has the sense of him having just stepped into the twenty-first century from another time altogether.
She asks questions and he answers, but mostly they look instead of talking: her at the world and the person opening up around her, him at her. Just her.
It’s childish, but Henry insists, so Jane closes her eyes and listens to the sound of the door opening as best she can when Henry’s breathing is loud and she can feel his warmth.
“Ok, walk with me,” he says in a low voice and Jane smiles in spite of herself. She lets herself be pulled into the room and she knows where she is and what’s around her as all of her senses are hit at once. Books. She’s in a library and surrounded by books, and immediately Jane knows she’ll do anything on Earth with and for this man.
Henry doesn’t say anything, so Jane opens her eyes slowly and the reality of the room, like Henry in general, is so much better than the fantasy. Dark mahogany bookcases, smooth to the touch and earthy in smell, line the room; shelves upon shelves and books upon books, on anything and everything, and this library in Oxford is almost everything that Jane wants right now.
Almost.
Henry’s gone when she turns around and she can only imagine that the sinking feeling in her stomach, the sense of ‘oh’, must be how Henry felt when she’d left him that night at the ball, too lost in the fantasy to see the beautiful reality. Jane hears footsteps creak on the floor behind her and turns to see Henry with a bag of takeout in one hand and the rest of the bottle of wine in the other.
“Do you like it,” he asks in a low, quiet voice, and Jane can only nod. Henry smiles softly.
-
They eat the Chinese in a mostly contented silence, never quite touching until they’re loading the dishwasher in the techy, metallic kitchen that's quite at odds with the rest of the décor. Henry’s fingertips touch a sliver of exposed skin on Jane’s waist, and suddenly what’s been building all night can’t be bottled any longer, and there’s a mad frenzy of hands and lips and shedding clothes as the reality, once again, proves itself so much better than the fantasy. There are far too many stairs to even contemplate climbing, but they make it to the library and it becomes Jane’s favourite room for more reasons than just the books.
-
Jane finds three empty photo frames in the library the next day, and another two turned face down in the kitchen. Photos of Henry and a woman, both happy, both grinning at each other. Not his mother or his sister; the woman who ran off to Brazil with his friend while Henry was in Switzerland, Jane can only assume.
She puts the frames back and hopes Henry won’t notice they’ve been disturbed, but she turns around to see him leaning against the doorpost in a t-shirt and loose jeans.
“I’m sorry,” she says and reddens in awkwardness, “I just- I wanted to see why-“
“Amanda,” Henry interrupts, but he doesn’t sound cross. He never could be, not with her. “Her name is Amanda. We met at university. We were engaged for four months and I came back from lecturing in Switzerland to an empty half of a wardrobe. No note, just a Facebook check-in at Sao Paolo airport with my friend, Mark. Took the ring with her.”
Jane has nothing to say, no idea what she possibly could say, so she stands awkwardly until Henry walks over, tucks a lock of hair behind her ear, strokes her cheek with his thumb.
“I’m telling you because you deserve to know. I love you, Jane Hayes, and leaving was the best thing Amanda ever did for me,” he says and Jane takes the initiative, leans in and kisses him deeply.
“And I love you, Henry Nobley.”
-
Molly swears at her for a good fifteen minutes down the phone when Jane tells her of her plans, but this feels right and Molly, Jane knows, will be just fine. But there’s nothing else for her in Manhattan, and there’s everything in England for Henry. And honestly, there’s a lot here for her, too. In the same week, Jane applies for a position at the university’s publishing house, arranges the premature termination of her apartment’s lease, and meets Henry’s sister.
Four-month-old Xander is chubby and beautifully blond, and as Jane falls in love with the baby, Henry falls more in love with her, and Catherine starts to love the woman who’s made her brother so unutterably happy.
The journey back from London is quiet because Xander has made them think about the future, what happens beyond Jane moving in and how they’re going to divide the wardrobe and drawers.
“I-“, Henry starts as they get closer to home, but Jane cuts him off.
“I’m 30 and you’re nearly 35, Henry. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.” The longing for something that Jane never truly realised how much she wanted sharpens her tone. The slam of the car door on her side speaks volumes.
Henry opens an old, old bottle of red wine when they get settled in, and they drink in silence at the kitchen island for a long time. He opens his mouth to say something but can’t seem to get the words out, and takes his wine with him when he leaves. Jane hears the library door close behind him. She lets her head drop into her hands and tries not to think about Molly and Jack, and Catherine and Xander, but her cheeks are wet when she feels a warm hand rubbing her back in calming circles.
Henry continues until Jane swivels to look up at him, her face blotchy and her eyes swollen. That face, as it has done once before, breaks his heart.
“I don’t care,” he says simply and uses his thumb to wipe the tears away. “If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. We’ve done everything so quickly, I just- I just want to be with you, always, and if you want another mouth to feed and things don’t work out, then we’ll get a cat. I just want to make you happy.”
His words make Jane start crying all over again, but she promises they’re happy tears, and she stands up to wrap her arms around him and bury her face into his warmth. The movement of his hand jostles her, but when she looks up to tell him to stop moving, there’s a little velvet box in her face and an intense look in Henry’s eyes.
“Now is possibly the best and worst time to ask this,” he says and his voice is uncertain even if his eyes are blazing, “but I can’t keep stopping myself. Jane, will you-"
Jane’s nodding before Henry can get the rest of the question out, and when he beams in delight, it’s beautiful. He pops the lid open, but Jane wouldn’t have cared if it was the largest diamond that Henry could find. She’s kissing him, he’s kissing her and they promise each other that the tears are happy ones.
-
Four months later, Jane still isn’t used to the size or the weight of the rock on her finger. Not that it’s gaudy or obscene. It’s actually perfect for her, a white gold band and a beautiful solitaire diamond at the top, but the only rings she’s ever worn are tacky little ones she bought when they were vaguely in fashion, and this is quite a serious ring.
“I saw it in the window in one of the shops in the Burlington Arcade,” Henry had said when he’d finally had chance to slip it onto her finger, “and I thought of you.”
Now they’re wedding planning when he’s not marking prelim essays and she’s not copy editing, debating table arrangements and seating charts and whether it's better to have steak or sea bass. It’s hard to judge which of them is more exhausted. Henry from the marking and the lectures and getting up at 5am for his morning row; Jane from moving to a different continent and general lethargy. They’re both more irritable than usual and holes are coming through in the elbows of Henry’s blue cardigan. Jane can’t even bring herself to go for her usual morning run, and coffee just makes her even more irascible. She wakes to the sound of rain lashing against the window and misses being a floor and two doors away from Molly. She fumbles with the self-service machine in the supermarket because it apparently hates her American fingers, and misses the friendly cashier at her old store who always double-bagged because the first bag would invariably break.
Three things happen all on one Tuesday: Jane only just makes it to the bathroom in time to throw up, Henry comes home with a job offer, and the venue they’d chosen for the wedding phones to say they've double-booked themselves and can’t host their wedding anymore.
“They want someone with a focus on the Civil War. They want me, they specifically asked for me. And the pay’s better, much better,” Henry says as he paces around the kitchen that night, practically grinding tracks into the floor and with only half an eye on his frantically-typing fiancée. “But I mean, after everything, just upping and leaving doesn’t seem-“
“I’m pregnant,” Jane says, and though it’s only a whisper, it stops Henry dead in his tracks and he about-turns to look at her, wide eyed and his lips caught between curving into a smile and opening in shock.
“I’m two weeks late, I was sick this morning and I- I bought a test. Henry, I’m pregnant,” she finishes with a smile of disbelief. Before she knows it, she’s in Henry’s arms and when they finally break apart, each promises the other that they’re happy, that they’re crying happy tears. They’re happy.
-
Henry and Jane marry in a registry office two weeks later, with Catherine and her husband as witnesses and extravagant promises to make it all up to Molly when Jane next sees her. Two weeks after that, Jane's back on a cross-continental plane, with Henry next to her this time. They’ve shut up the Oxford house, put things into shipment or storage, and rented out the London flat.
Manhattan welcomes Henry, Jane and Bump back with sunny weather, even if it is nearly November. Their new apartment isn’t a floor and two doors away from Molly, but it’s the closest to a version of their house in Oxford that they could find, and life is perfect and they are happy.
-
Henry runs out of the Columbia lecture hall halfway through his lecture on the Long Parliament when he gets the phone call, and makes it to the hospital in time to hold Jane’s hand and to promise her, when two really become three, that he has happy tears running down his face.
They name their daughter Eleanor and when Henry asks if he has made Jane happy, she smiles and says,
“Incandescently.”