It's Not You It's Me

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ALLISON RUSHBY

Having failed at becoming a ballerina with pierced ears (her childhood dream), Allison Rushby instead began a writing career as a journalism student at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Within a few months she had slunk sideways into studying Russian. By the end of her degree she had learned two very important things: that she didn’t want to be a journalist; and that there are hundreds of types of vodka (and they’re all pretty good).

A number of years spent freelancing for numerous wedding magazines (‘Getting on with your draconian mother-in-law made simple!’, ‘A 400-guest reception for $2.95 per head!’) almost sent her crazy. After much whining about how hard it would be, she began her first novel. That is, her husband (then boyfriend) told her to shut up, sit down and get typing (there may, or may not, have been threats of severing digits with rusty scalpels if she didn’t, but it’s okay, he’s a doctor).

These days, Allison writes full-time, mostly with her cat, Violet, on her lap. Oh, and she keeps up her education by sampling new kinds of vodka on a regular basis.

You can read more about Allison at www.allisonrushby.com.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Firstly, I’d like to praise the Goddesses for managing to put Karin Stoecker in the right place at the right time, and Tess for e-mailing to tell me that she was. It’s nice to know that good things do come out of gossip!

Thanks to Karin, Sam Bell and Margaret Marbury, along with the gals of the RDI NYC team, for showing me a good time worldwide. Strangely enough, all the restaurants I went to served excellent gelati and I was left wondering if my dessert reputation had preceded me.

:-) to all my Web-site buddies who read this novel in e-serial form and had the good manners to beg for each new installment.

Danken Sie Gott for Heidi and Thomas who (I hope I got that right!) speak German. Also to Jeff Zalkind of www.worldofcrap.com fame for his “Learn to Swear in German!” page, which came in very handy because Heidi and Thomas aren’t rude-on-command kind of people.

Nibble, nibble to the literate guinea pigs. Again.

But, mostly, hurrah for David. For just hanging in there.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter One

I’ve got approximately forty minutes to spare in the airport lounge, even after I’ve done the obligatory pick up and put down everything in the newsagent thing, and the ‘Ooohhh it’s lovely, but I can’t afford it, duty-free or not’ faux shop. With nothing else left to poke and prod, I find the nearest café and order a skinny latte. I’m sitting, stirring the sugar into my napkin-ringed glass on autopilot, when I hear the announcement reverberate around the airport.

‘Could passenger Mr Jasper Ash please notify the nearest Qantas desk of his whereabouts?’ the voice booms. ‘Mr Jasper Ash—please go directly to the nearest Qantas desk.’

Do not pass go, do not collect $200, I think absentmindedly.

And then the name they’re calling sinks in.

Jasper Ash.

I stand up suddenly, to see if I can spot him. I can’t. Of course I can’t. It’s a big airport, and from the sound of that announcement he’s probably not here anyway. The other people in the café look at me as I frantically search the faces walking past. When I sit back down again I realise why they’re staring—jumping up so fast, I’ve spilled most of my coffee in my saucer and it’s run over and formed a puddle on the table.

Jasper Ash.

Now there’s a flashback.

‘Jasper Ash,’ I say the name to myself quietly, as if mouthing the words will somehow make this all seem more real.

It’s a name I haven’t said, or heard anyone else say, for some time. Mainly because it’s a name that doesn’t get a lot of use any more. Not now that he’s got a new one, that is. A new name. A new name for a new life.

I wonder for a moment whether it’s actually even him—the Jasper Ash I know. But then have to admit to myself that it probably is. It isn’t exactly a common name. And it’s pretty likely he’d travel under it—being his real name, it’d be the one on his passport. It’s not unlikely he’d be in an airport, either. I’m sure he does a lot of travelling these days.

A waitress comes over to wipe down my table for me, and I order another skinny latte as most of the old one’s now retreating to the kitchen in her soggy sponge. While I’m waiting for it to arrive, I can’t help but think back to the days of Jasper Ash.

We met—it must be almost three years ago now—because he was looking for a new place to live. He was going steadily crazy where he was at the time. The guys he’d been living with—all engineering students—were too noisy for him and constantly gave him ten kinds of crap about studying voice and piano at the Conservatorium. He told me once, later on, that when he read my ad in the classifieds of the Saturday papers he couldn’t believe his luck. A cheap share on trendy, hip and young Magnolia Avenue, complete with a river view? Right near the best shops, the best restaurants and within walking distance of the Conservatorium? He’d thought it was simply too good to be true.

Still, Jasper being Jasper, he didn’t ring early about the room, and it would’ve been almost three o’clock in the afternoon when he turned up on my doorstep already over half an hour late. I was actually surprised to see that he’d made it to the door. Half the people who’d made appointments to check out the room that day hadn’t even turned up. Well, that’s probably not quite true. Most likely they’d turned up, parked, seen the place and driven away at high speed. I’d expected that, though, because 36 Magnolia Avenue—Magnolia Lodge, to its residents—was a little, um, different from the rest of Magnolia Avenue.

Different. I laugh to myself with a small snort now, making the people seated at the few tables around me in the café look over again. Magnolia Lodge, different. That’s the understatement of the new millennium.

The thing was, the rest of Magnolia Avenue consisted of trendy little townhouses with big wooden decks, cosy braziers, remote garages and low-maintenance courtyards. Scattered in between these were dinky little cafés and shops that only ever sold one kind of thing—designer products for pampered pets, frozen life-on-the-go takeaway gourmet meals, five hundred kinds of scented candles, and so on.

Well, ‘and so on’ kind of stopped at Magnolia Lodge. Magnolia Lodge was tucked up right at the end of the street, hidden in the corner as if it were a decrepit old organ that was being rejected by the rest of the street’s sprightly young body. The fact of the matter was number 36 was not so trendy, not so hip and definitely not so young. It was actually more like a pensioner palace—a thirty-apartment block full of old people and…

…me.

The token young person.

Well, at least it was a politically correct apartment block.

I could see the ‘this wasn’t what I was expecting’, mouth hanging open, shocked surprise written all over Jasper’s face when I opened my front door. At another time I probably would have had a laugh about it and asked him if he was trying to catch flies or something, but the truth was I’d just about had it with finding someone to rent the spare room in my apartment for some extra cash. This was the third Saturday that I’d been ushering people around the place. And those were the polite ones—the ones who hadn’t done a runner when they finally found the apartment block behind all the shrubbery.

‘Hi, I’m Charlie—Charlie Notting.’ I stuck my hand out.

He shook it. A good shake that made me lift my eyebrows. It wasn’t like most of the soggy Weetabix handshakes I’d been getting in this doorway lately. ‘Jasper Ash,’ he said.

I invited him in and offered him a drink, which he declined. Instead, he just stood in the middle of the living room and looked around.

‘Not what you were expecting, hey?’ I got right down to it.

‘Never—’

‘Never even knew it was here.’ I finished off the sentence I’d heard from just about anyone who’d ever knocked on my front door. I tried not to sound too defensive as I said it.

He nodded.

‘Nobody does.’ I sighed then, wondering just how many more times I could do this before someone’s blood ended up on the carpet and I lost my bond money. ‘Would you really like to see the place, or are you just being polite?’

He turned and looked at me then, and I felt bad. I hadn’t meant to snap, but I’d just about got to the end of the line with this whole showing people around thing. This was my home. I liked it. And having several people every Saturday for three weeks in a row slag it off wasn’t my idea of a good time.

I think Jasper might have got what I was really saying by the tone of my voice, because he shook his head then. ‘Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice—the apartment. Just didn’t know the street went up this far.’

I started to warm to him a bit when he said that. This guy—Jasper—he was perhaps a bit nicer than the other people I’d shown through. He seemed sincere, anyway—as if he really did think the apartment was nice—which was a start. I took a deep breath in and tried to quell my nasty side. ‘Come on, I’ll give you the grand tour.’

We did the whole thing. The kitchen, the bedrooms, the two bathrooms, even the garage, despite the fact that Jasper didn’t have a car. Eventually we headed back inside and stood on the balcony overlooking the garden and, beyond that, the river.

‘Wow. Really is a river view, isn’t it? It’s magnificent.’

‘Yep.’

‘What’s that?’ He pointed at something down at the end of the garden.

‘Oh, that’s the shed. It used to be a boat shed, but the people who live here are mostly too old to be messing about in boats now, so they let me use it instead.’

‘What for?’

‘I’m a sculptor—that’s what I do. When I’m not waitressing to pay the bills and trying to finish off my degree, that is.’

‘You’re a slash person too, huh? Probably a good sign.’

I gave him a look. A slash person? ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ I hoped he didn’t have a machete stuck down his pants.

He laughed. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you. Just that everyone our age seems to be a slash person these days. Waiter-slash-actor, waiter-slash-writer, waiter-slash-artist. I’m a music tutor-slash-songwriter myself. A waiter-slash-sculptor-slash-uni student, yeah? That’s great. Never met one of those.’

I had to laugh when Jasper had finished explaining this to me, because it was true. Everyone did seem to be a ‘slash person’, as he called it, these days.

Personally, I was trying to cut my slashes down and just be a waiter-slash-sculptor by finishing off my last subject at uni—the last few credit points before they would finally give me my BA in Fine Arts. Finally. I’d stuffed around here and there, and left all the subjects I didn’t fancy but had to do till last. While I should have graduated last semester, there was one subject—a Modern History one—that I couldn’t quite seem to pass. Mostly because of the vast number of dates the subject required me to store in my brain. There was just something about dates and my brain that didn’t click. Anyway, this was my second attempt.

I was about to tell Jasper as much when there was a knock on the door. I went over to find that it was Mrs McCready, who wanted to let me know they were about to have high tea and a game of croquet on the lawn in a moment or two.

‘Wonderful,’ I said to her. ‘I’ve got a lovely tin of lavender shortbread that I’ve been saving. I’ll bring it down with me.’

When I closed the door and turned to head back to the balcony, Jasper had moved and was now standing facing me. ‘Lavender shortbread?’

I stopped in my tracks, right there in the middle of the living room, as I realised that my quelling-the-nasty-side thing obviously wasn’t permanent. It didn’t seem to matter how well we’d been getting along, talking about slash persons. All it took was this one little comment and a tiny smirk from Jasper to bring the past weekends rushing back at me, pushing me over the edge into shrew territory. I put my hands on my hips then and let it rip.

‘You know, I like it here. It’s a bloody great apartment for the price, and the people here are really nice. So what if they’re old? They care about each other, and that’s more than I can say for any of the apartments I’ve lived in before this.’ I paused for a breath. ‘God, I could have died in one of those places and no one would have known until the smell wafted out or someone’s cat coughed up my eyeballs. If you had any guts you’d come downstairs with me and actually have some lavender shortbread and maybe play a game of croquet. It wouldn’t kill you.’

Jasper just smiled an amused smile. He leaned back on the balcony, calm and composed. As if he owned it, really. ‘No idea what you’re talking about. Just never heard of lavender shortbread before, that’s all.’

I took my hands off my hips, uncertain. ‘Oh.’

‘I’ll play a game of croquet. Have some of that lavender shortbread too, if you’re offering.’

There was a pause. I cleared my throat. Cleared it again. ‘OK, then. Let’s, um, go.’ And I grabbed the tin out of the kitchen, trying to avoid his gaze as I passed by. Then, together, we trundled off downstairs.

Down in the garden, Mr Nelson was setting up the trestle table and the ladies of the Lodge were hovering around him, waiting to put their darling little china plates of miniature sandwiches and butterfly cakes onto it.

‘Here, I’ll give you a hand with that.’

Jasper, to my surprise, went straight over to help Mr Nelson out. When he was done, he introduced himself. I put my tin of shortbread on the now erected table and introduced him round to everyone else. Mrs Holland, who made the best cucumber sandwiches—buttered, without crusts, the secret was to use real butter, not the low fat, olive oil, canola-based stuff that seemed to be all you could get in the shops nowadays—Mrs Kennedy, who made the best iced tea, Mr Hughes, who made the best Victoria sandwich, and the two Miss Tenningtons—identical twin sisters—who weren’t the greatest cooks, but were always able to provide the best gossip in the whole building. We overlooked the fact that they made half of it up. It was still good gossip.

Introductions over, Jasper and I made ourselves comfortable in two low-slung deckchairs to watch the first game of croquet. We had to have those chairs—everyone else claimed their bones were too old to get out of them. When Jasper had watched long enough to work out what was going on, we played a game ourselves, highly unsuccessfully—the two Miss Tenningtons creamed us with their years of experience—but we had a great time anyway.

As we played, I got to have a better look at Jasper. I hadn’t really had a good chance before, during the tour of the apartment. And then, of course, after the lavender shortbread incident there’d been a lot of deliberate non-eye contact. But now I saw he was taller than I’d first thought. Very tall. Maybe six-foot-four? Thin too—but not in the too-skinny ‘my mother never fed me’ way—and very dark, with almost black hair and equally dark eyes.

The one thing I really noticed, however, was his manner. My God, but he was lovely. He was charming, in that fifties kind of fashion which you see only infrequently these days, in women or men. Not the kind of fake ‘let me open the door for you, my dear’ sleazy charm that makes hard-core feminists want to pull their armpit hair out in frustration and leaves the rest of us wishing we’d had the good sense to grow some so we could do the same, but the kind of charm that makes everyone around the person who exudes it feel good about themselves.

It’s a gift, that kind of charm. And it was a gift that Jasper was using in full force that day. He was laying it on thick—flirting shamelessly with the Miss Tenningtons, who tittered around coquettishly, loving every minute of it and vying against each other in the way only identical twins probably can for his attention. It occurred to me that with his looks and his manner he should have been Irish. Or a film star. One of the old ones. The proper ones, like Jimmy Stewart.

I stopped myself then, realising I was letting my imagination get the better of me. What was I going on about?

When the game was finished, Jasper and I sank back into our deckchairs with some iced tea and a plate heaped full of tiny cucumber sandwiches, a few butterfly cakes and some of the lavender shortbread, which was proving to be quite a hit.

‘So?’ I eventually said to him, mouth full of butterfly cake. ‘What do you think?’

‘They’re the best.’ He held up half of the butterfly cake he was eating. ‘This place, though, it’s a bit strange.’

‘What do you mean, exactly?’

‘Er, croquet on the lawn? Butterfly cakes? Cucumber sandwiches? Bit like being in the middle of a Miss Marple film, isn’t it?’

I understood what he meant then. All too well. I’d had the same thoughts myself for the first few weeks after I’d moved in. ‘Don’t worry, sooner or later you’ll hear Mr and Mrs Ruben in apartment 21 screaming at each other and throwing the crystal around and you’ll take the Miss Marple thing back. I did.’

‘Ah. So these are just the civilised people?’

I nodded and laughed as I dusted some icing sugar off one side of my mouth. ‘Pretty much. They’ve all got their secrets, though, just like everyone.’ I leaned in towards him then. ‘Mr Hughes, for example, has been having a rendezvous or two with Hilda Tennington. I’ve caught her sneaking out of his apartment a few times now.’

‘Really? Hilda? Sly old dog.’

‘Apparently he needs his eye drops put in for him.’ I nodded as conspiratorially as I could before I leaned back out and started talking normally again. ‘What I really meant to ask you about was the room.’

‘Oh. The room. I’ll take it, if that’s all right. Long as you can promise me I won’t be the one who’s murdered at the start of the midday movie.’

‘I think I can promise that.’

‘My piano? That’ll be OK too?’

‘It’s fine with me. It’ll be nice.’

‘What about everyone else? They mind?’

I looked around at them all. Somehow, I didn’t think so. ‘Jasper, if I know them as well as I think I do, they’ll probably be knocking down the door to have sing-alongs. You’d better learn how to play “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square” before you move in. It’s their collective favourite.’

‘Easy enough. Then I’ll take it.’ He stuck out his hand for me to shake to seal the deal. ‘But only if you call me Jas.’

Chapter Two

So, Jas it was.

And after the ladies had made him polish off the few leftovers on the table we waddled back upstairs. I made sure we were out of earshot of anyone else before I told him the one and only condition of his moving in.

He could only stay till the end of the year.

I explained that it wasn’t personal or anything. None of us—the whole fifty-two, three cats and two illegal dogs—who lived in the building would be here this time next year. Because, in approximately eleven and a half months’ time, Magnolia Lodge was going to be demolished to make way for a swanky new apartment complex. One hundred apartments, a pool and a gym. One hundred apartments that you couldn’t swing a cat in, but would look like all the other hundreds of apartments and townhouses in the rest of the street.

Jas said this was fine, that he’d be finished uni by then and was planning on moving to Sydney when he was done.

He moved most of his stuff in that night.

Over the next six months or so, we got on brilliantly. Even better than I’d thought we would. Our lifestyles suited each other, for a start. When we weren’t at our crappy jobs—waitressing at a café for me, piano-tutoring at a kids’ music school for Jas—or at our separate unis, we were busy at our ‘real’ work.

I’d be sweating away down in the boat shed, welding together my latest piece of sculpture, or making my way to the dump to search for interesting pieces of scrap metal to use for my next. I was thinking about holding an exhibition in the middle of the next year. Meanwhile, Jas would be tinkering away at the piano, songwriting. Sometimes, if the wind carried to the boat shed just right, I could hear him playing the same bar of music over and over again, adding a piece, subtracting a piece, the song getting longer, in fact becoming a song, as the days passed. Our work was similar in an adding, subtracting, trying things out way that eventually led to an end product after a lot of sweat and a bit of good luck.

When we needed some time off we’d head to the local swimming pool, have a barbecue in the nearby park, or just take a walk. Once I took him to Byron Bay for a week, to visit my mother. He was blown away. Not a great surprise, because most people were by my mother and the things that surrounded her: by her house, which was wooden and built over five levels down a hill to make the most of the view; and by her own sculpture, which dominated every room and the front courtyard of the house and was made entirely of sandstone—not like my metal productions at all (to tease me she would call me ‘junkie Charlie’ because of my frequent scavenging trips). But mostly by her, with her booming voice and large-enough-for-a-whole-group-of-people personality.

The real surprise was the fact that she liked him back. Suffice to say that Mum didn’t get on with all that many people. She either liked them or she didn’t, and usually she’d tell them her verdict within the first five minutes of meeting them. Sometimes it could be quite embarrassing.

She told me on the phone, a few days after we left, that Jas would be very famous one day. She could tell by his aura. When I relayed this to him, Jas thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard, but he still called her back pretty smartly to see if, hopefully, she had any other nice big fibs to tell him.

Community life at Magnolia Lodge went along swimmingly too. Right from the moment he started flirting with the Miss Tenningtons on the lawn, Jas was a hit with the elders of the building. The funny thing was, after a few months of our living together, a rumour seemed to have passed around that we were married. We became officially Jasper-and-Charlotte to the people we knew fairly well, or ‘the nice young married couple in apartment 10’ to the people we knew only in passing.

One day, when we came home, there was an invitation under our door to my own wedding shower, organised by Mrs Kennedy in apartment 14. I went over, invitation in hand, to explain that we weren’t really married, but when she opened the door Mrs Kennedy and the three other ladies who were there planning the party were so excited I didn’t have the heart to tell them the truth.

It was a recipe shower, as it turned out, and I still have all the recipes in the scrapbook they gave me today. I don’t use the Miss Tenningtons’ mutton one very much—never, in fact—but the caramel fudge one from Mrs Holland comes in quite handy on rainy Sundays.