The Sound of It

By Alison Jean Lester

When Su, a divorced mother of one daughter, falls in love with Jeremy, a widowed father of two sons, they want to build a life together, but neither of their houses in Worcester is big enough for a family of five. They decide to build a dream house in farmland outside the city, in which to live happily ever after. For sound designer Su, it's an opportunity to create an embracing home and heal past wounds of betrayal and loss, while failed entrepreneur Jeremy sees a chance to impress his overbearing father.

But what happens when financial misjudgements cloud the horizon? What happens when some family ties grow strong and others don't grow at all?

The Sound of It looks at blending a family, when expectations are high, dreams are big, and the Internet is very dangerous.

 

Reviews and Praise

An honest and gripping look at parenting, step-parenting and later-in-life love.
Adele Parks, #1 bestselling author

 

An absorbing and powerful novel about blended families, love and betrayal.
Louisa Treger, author of Madwoman

 

I've never read anything quite like it. Hilarious, desperately sad, and utterly compelling. An extraordinary and extremely readable novel.
Fiona Mitchell, author of The Swap and The Maid's Room

 

Lester paints a fascinating picture of the trajectory of a modern relationship in this mesmerising novel. This sensitive, clever and, above all, believable portrayal will have you gripped from start to finish. Highly recommended.
Kerry Hadley-Pryce, author of The Black Country

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bench Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838112462

Book preview

The Sound of It

PRAISE FOR THE SOUND OF IT

An absorbing and powerful novel about blended families, love and betrayal.

LOUISA TREGER, AUTHOR OF MADWOMAN

I’ve never read anything quite like it. Hilarious, desperately sad, and utterly compelling. An extraordinary and extremely readable novel.

FIONA MITCHELL, AUTHOR OF THE SWAP

Lester paints a fascinating picture of the trajectory of a modern relationship in this mesmerising novel. This sensitive, clever and, above all, believable portrayal will have you gripped from start to finish. Highly recommended.

KERRY HADLEY-PRYCE, AUTHOR OF THE BLACK COUNTRY

An honest and gripping look at parenting, step-parenting and later-in-life love.

#1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR ADELE PARKS

ALSO BY ALISON JEAN LESTER

SHORT STORIES

Locked Out: Stories Far from Home

NOVELS

Lillian on Life

Yuki Means Happiness

Glide

MEMOIR

Absolutely Delicious: A Chronicle of Extraordinary Dying

THE SOUND OF IT

ALISON JEAN LESTER

Bench Press

Copyright © 2022 by Alison Jean Lester.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

For permission requests, write to the publisher via the www.benchpressbooks.com contact page.

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ISBN: 978-1-8381124-5-5 (Paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-8381124-6-2 (epub)

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Front cover image and book design by Andrew Gurnett.

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Published by Bench Press

www.benchpressbooks.com

CONTENTS

Two Houses

Transition House

Grand Design

Acknowledgments

About the Author

TWO HOUSES

‘Shall we sell both houses, then?’ Jeremy Markwick-Low asked his girlfriend, Su Watkins, at her kitchen table. ‘Or just one?’

Only four months into their relationship, things were moving quickly, and neither of them had found any reason to put on the brakes. They were talking about building a house together.

‘Show me the spreadsheets again?’ said Su.

Jeremy loved how much Su enjoyed being shown his spreadsheets. There were two for planning – land purchase and house build – and one for financing both. She said they looked like scaffolding to her. A grid to build a dream on. She said that when he typed things in it sounded like tiny hammer blows, ‘nailing things in place for us.’

Spreadsheets weren’t usually Jeremy’s modus operandi, but Su didn’t know that, and she didn’t need to know. The more she asked to see them, the harder he worked on them, and the more he realised they were in fact the key to success. If only he’d known that earlier in his life, he wouldn’t have been such a disappointment to his father. Still, if he’d succeeded with the Italian pork-product importing or the classical-concert-finder app or the energy drink, he might not have met Su. So now he had his chance to rise in everybody’s estimation, including his own. This chance, to build a strong relationship and a beautiful, modern, energy-efficient home, felt like a better one than all his previous ideas combined.

He brought his laptop to the table and turned it on while Su cleared the breakfast things.

‘Last time we tried to talk this through we got distracted,’ Jeremy said, remembering how his embedded links to various pages of The Self Build Guide website had led to some laughter-filled lovemaking.

‘I’ll focus this time, I promise,’ Su said, sitting down.

‘You better had, as I really need your maths to do the calculations.’

The bi-fold doors were open. It was the end of June. Su turned her head to follow a pigeon speeding by.

‘Su?’

‘Sorry. I’m with you now.’

‘Okay, what could we get to rent this house or mine, minus tax?’

They did all the equations – selling both to provide lump sums; selling one to provide monthly rental income from the other; selling neither and increasing monthly income.

‘See?’ said Su when Jeremy had entered all the results into a new page of the finance spreadsheet. ‘They’re not difficult equations.’

‘No, not too bad. The decision will be, though.’

‘We’ll need tea, then,’ she said, getting up.

‘I’m leaning towards keeping one house to rent,’ Jeremy said while they waited for the kettle to boil.

‘Oh yes?’

‘The numbers look pretty good.’

Su smiled. ‘Is it really the numbers, or a feeling?’

‘Nothing wrong with feelings, is there?’

‘No. But then why did we do the maths?’

‘Touché.’

The kettle rumbled and clicked off. Pouring, Su asked, ‘Which house, then?’

‘The one we could sell for the most, no?’

‘But what if we could make more rent from that one?’

‘Oh, God, we need more numbers.’

‘Forget numbers for a minute. What’s your feeling?’

‘Keep this one.’

‘Why?’

Jeremy hesitated, then admitted, ‘Sentimental value.’

Su took the teabags out of the steaming mugs and tipped milk into both, then brought them to the table.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘We made love the first time in my bedroom, didn’t we?’

‘We’ve only made love in your bedroom.’

Her dress buttoned up from hem to neck. Jeremy put his finger on a button between her navel and her crotch. He felt the pull to undo it but hesitated.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ Su said.

‘Really?’

‘We won’t see each other again till Friday. Of course really.’

Jeremy stood up and Su took the finger that had been on the button and led him to the stairs. ‘Let’s do it quickly, though,’ she added as they hurried up. ‘Before the tea gets cold.’ They climbed onto the bed and Jeremy began unbuttoning her.

‘Before the tea gets cold? What are you like?’

‘Tea’s important,’ she laughed.

‘You’re right,’ he agreed, and yanked up her dress.

---

That was what he loved so much about Su, Jeremy mused as he settled himself in his car for the short drive to the other side of the Severn: she made him feel manly. It wasn’t just that she was so petite. She made him feel cool. He’d never felt comfortable yanking up a dress before, but with Su he could let himself go a bit, and it made her laugh, or aroused her, or both. He liked that he could be a bit more experimental with Su, a bit more forceful, even, although he would never get rough with her. What if she asked him to? Would he feel like it, even to please her? She’d have to tell him exactly what she meant, for him to be able to consider it.

He remembered the debacle with his late wife, Fabiana, a lazy Sunday morning when she was beginning to show her first pregnancy and he’d brought out a blindfold. She had looked at him aghast, her classically beautiful face suddenly turning ugly.

‘Don’t you dare,’ she warned.

‘Let me just—’ he said, smiling to cajole, twinkling his eyes not at all lasciviously, he was sure, but with fun.

She slapped his hands away and scrambled off the bed.

‘No, Fabiana, I had an idea—’

‘A terrible idea. I am not like your other women.’

‘What other women? No, I know you’re not. It’s not what you—’

Too late. She had left the room.

Jeremy had dressed and sat in the kitchen, knowing Fabiana’s pregnancy made her ravenous. Eventually she stomped in, still in her voluminous nightdress, and wrenched the fridge open. On the top shelf lay the large platter of meticulously cut fruit, as exotic as he could find, under cling film. He had kept his purchases a secret, and had done all the chopping and arranging when she as usual had gone to bed early the night before. Papaya, mango, star fruit, strawberries, persimmon – he’d spent a fortune, but had enjoyed imagining getting Fabiana to guess what he was putting into her mouth. She craved fruit those days, and he craved a return to the intensity of flavours and scents of the early days of their relationship in Italy. Fennel, fresh shavings of Parmesan, rucola. . .

They shouldn’t have moved to England, he thought for the hundredth time, as he crossed the river. But then he wouldn’t have met Su. He thanked Fabiana silently for her premature death. When they’d thought she was pregnant a third time, he’d felt the walls closing in on him. Her emotional surges, once so exciting, now battered him, and she was at her worst when she was expecting. But the nausea, fatigue and dizziness had in fact been heart disease. She’d dropped dead on a Saturday morning like any other, alone, on the pavement between their house and the post office.

---

I met Jeremy’s two sons a month or so before we hatched the idea to build a house together, when he invited me in to his tall, narrow, late-Victorian home in St John’s for coffee after a Friday dinner out. Seven-year-old Ned was sitting on the sofa in his pyjamas, jammed up against the 17-year-old boy from two doors down. They were looking at a book together, Ned concentrating so hard that only the teenager looked up when Jeremy led me into the front room. ‘Oh, hi,’ said the teenager. Ned looked up at him and then at his father and at me, and I fell in love at first sight. He must look like his mother, I thought, as Jeremy said, ‘Hello there, Ned. Good book?’ and Ned’s cherry-red lips said, ‘Of course it is. It’s Star Wars,’ and Jeremy and the teenager and I all laughed. This made Ned look at me with interest. His eyes were large and brown and long-lashed, stereotypically Italian. There was a little hint of the beluga whale about his forehead below the thick crop of dark hair, giving him the whale’s combination of cuteness and knowledge. ‘This is my friend Su,’ Jeremy told him.

‘Oh.’

‘Su, this is Ned, and his friend Brian from down the road.’

Seeing his chance to be released, Brian stood up and shook my hand before turning to Jeremy. ‘So, can I go?’

‘Yes, yes. Thanks Brian.’ Jeremy reached for his wallet. ‘Come on, I’ll see you out.’

Ned looked back down at the book on his lap, paddling his feet, no longer relaxed.

‘Sometimes, in my job,’ I said, nervous, wanting to impress him, ‘I have to create the sounds for spaceships.’

Ned looked up again, feet suddenly silent.

I wanted to tell him everything about me. I wanted to tell him that I started creating sounds when I was little, not much older than he was, eight or nine, holding the telephone receiver earpiece to my mouth, changing the shape of my mouth to vary the sound of the dial tone or busy signal. Lots of children of my generation had done that, I’m sure, but few were likely to have brought a range of things to put between the earpiece and mouth to register the effect on the sound – cotton wool, waxed paper, cardboard of different thicknesses, a bunch of weeds my mother had pulled up from between the bricks of our driveway, a teabag. In high school I began spelling my name Su rather than Sue because I thought people would then keep the vowel sound short when they said it; I didn’t like it when they lingered there. By age 26 I was trawling for sounds for a living, appropriating them into my own language. They became parts of advertising jingles or were embedded into an ad itself, reinforcing its message, or its comedy. The public didn’t know my name, but thousands of people had laughed at the sound I created to represent the fleshly thoughts of a strait-laced spinster sitting on a piece of luxurious (but affordable!) furniture for the first time.

When Jeremy came back in the room Ned was still taking in what I had said to him about spaceships. I looked at Jeremy and was glad to see that he had noted Ned’s expression of curiosity. Then Jeremy consulted his watch. ‘Gosh it’s late,’ he said to Ned. ‘Shall we take Su up to meet Tom before bed?’

‘Okay,’ Ned said, and slid off the sofa with the oversized book under his arm, leading us out of the room. Jeremy let me go before him, and I climbed the stairs behind Ned. The happy way the boy’s small hips swung with each big step made me wish I’d had a second child. I would have loved more years in the presence of such innocence.

At the top of the stairs, Ned marched ahead of us to the closed door at the back of the house and knocked. ‘What?’ came a voice. I felt Jeremy’s hands on my shoulders. ‘Daddy’s friend’s here,’ Ned shouted back.

‘Can’t stop now! I’ll die!’

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.

‘Playing something on his computer,’ Jeremy said, then called out, ‘Not a problem. We’re happy to stand here until you’re out of danger.’

When the door finally opened, I looked into eyes level with mine in a face that was spotty, embarrassed and grudgingly obedient. It must be so hard to be a boy of thirteen.

‘Hi,’ said Tom. He had Jeremy’s narrow face, and his hair colour seemed lighter than Ned’s, closer to Jeremy’s. The hall light wasn’t strong enough to give me all the details, but I suspected a soft proto-moustache. I said, ‘Hi there. I’m glad to meet you, but I’m sorry to bother you.’ One side of his mouth went up.

‘The Fortnite game?’ Jeremy asked, tall enough to have a view of Tom’s computer screen. ‘Fifteen more minutes.’

Tom nodded and stepped back to close his door.

‘Okay, Ned. Bedtime.’

Ned and I now followed Jeremy to the bedroom just before the master bedroom at the front of the house. I stayed in the doorway while Jeremy tucked Ned in. I’d have liked a peek in the master bedroom, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the pair of them. Jeremy was clearly a very loving, very practiced father. I’d never seen anything like it.

Once Ned was tucked in and we were back downstairs, Jeremy made us each a cup of decaf espresso. We took our cups to the front room and sat as close together as Ned and Brian had, and we kissed like teenagers as our coffees cooled on the carpet. I didn’t know if I was more excited by the kissing, or by the feeling that the encounter with Jeremy’s sons had gone well.

---

Jeremy met Caoimhe, Su’s 16-year-old daughter, on a Sunday afternoon two weeks later, in the kitchen of Su’s modest 1930’s semi-detached in Battenhall. Su had bought the house eleven years before, when she and her ex-husband, Sean, had separated and split their assets. Sean usually dropped Caoimhe home around five o’clock. Ned was at a playdate until six thirty, and Tom could be left alone. Jeremy and Su sat at her kitchen table looking out at the light fading in the garden, dunking ginger snaps into their tea. Jeremy pretended not to feel nervous by faking a sigh of contentment.

‘Through here,’ Su crooned when they heard Caoimhe open and close the front door.

The girl arrived in the doorway with a gym bag over her shoulder. Her hair was thick and gold, hanging in a heavy ponytail over one shoulder. She wore running tights and a sweatshirt. ‘Oh,’ she said, taking Jeremy in with steady blue eyes. ‘Hello.’

‘This is Jay,’ Su said.

Jeremy was still getting used to the sound of Su’s nickname for him, and it thrilled him every time she said it. Early in their relationship, he had admitted to her that he hated being called Jeremy. He hadn’t told her that he really wished people would call him Jez. Jezza. It wasn’t something you could ask people to call you; it just happened. Suddenly one day you walked into a pub where people knew you and ‘Alright Jezza?’ came with a slap on the back. Even if it were tongue-in-cheek he would have welcomed it, as he just didn’t believe ‘Jeremy’ was going to take him anywhere. It hadn’t so far. If people called him Jezza, perhaps he could be excused for not having made a success of himself by forty-five.

Walking along the river near the cathedral after a meal, opening up about his name, Jeremy had hoped that Su would suggest Jezza instead.

‘What don’t you like about Jeremy?’ she’d asked.

He wasn’t sure how she’d respond to his saying it was too posh, so he said, ‘The sound.’

‘Really?’ She said it a few times to focus on hearing it. ‘It’s a nice sound. Soft.’

‘Too soft.’

‘I see. What would you prefer?’

He couldn’t say it.

‘I suppose Jem’s not an option?’ Su offered.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Okay. Rocco?’

Jeremy laughed in surprise. Su made his heart sing like this at least once on every date.

‘Rocco. Hmm. Rocco Markwick-Low. No. That’s not me either, is it?’

‘I don’t think that’s anybody, to be honest.’

‘I don’t know about that . . . Italian woman marries peer and bullies him into naming their son after her incarcerated Mafioso father?’

They laughed together. Fabiana had had trouble understanding jokes like this one, so Jeremy had given up telling them. Su’s laughter splashed rain on the dry roots of his personality.

‘How about Jay?’ she asked.

‘Jay’s perfect!’

‘Not too soft, not too hard.’

‘Right!’

‘So . . . I call you Jay?’

Jeremy couldn’t tell if Su would think he was immature if he said yes. And yet she looked willing to be complicit with him in this way. He knew complicity was a bond. He said, ‘Shall we give it a try?’ and blushed.

‘Okay, Jay,’ Su had said, and Jeremy had felt a little taller.

‘Hello,’ Jeremy said to Su’s daughter now, thinking, She’s beautiful; she must take after her father. He knew Sean was Irish but had never asked to see a photograph. Now he imagined him blond rather than red-headed. He appreciated the girl’s looks with no sense of disloyalty to Su. He loved Su’s face; it was absolutely right with his. Su’s face was a pretty face, an accessible face, surrounded by the kind of curly hair that looks best cut short but which she left long and unapologetically fuller on one side than the other depending on how she had slept.

‘Been running?’ Jeremy asked.

She nodded. ‘Six miles,’ she told her mother. ‘I’d better shower.’

‘Cup of tea?’ Su offered as her daughter turned to go.

‘No, thanks.’

They listened to her jog lightly up the stairs.

‘She runs with her father,’ Su said.

‘I see.’

‘Then they don’t have to talk.’

‘Ah.’

‘At some point she’ll be stronger than he is.’

Jeremy imagined the muscular father and daughter matching their strides. ‘He’s very fit?’

Su reached over and took his hand. ‘Too fit,’ she told him, and climbed onto his lap, pulling his arms around her back and pressing her lips against his ear. Even though her response was meant to be reassuring, Jeremy still pulled his stomach in. He was lean, but he wasn’t, what did they call it? Cut? He wasn’t muscular. She knew that, of course – she’d seen and felt his whole body – but he wouldn’t feel secure until he’d got the measure of the man himself. He slid his hands from Su’s waist to her buttocks, wondering how far they could go before her daughter was out of the shower. Su’s kisses made their way down from his ear then up to his jaw and the corner of his mouth. She scooted forward to press her groin to his and slipped her tongue between his lips.

‘Oh, God,’ he said, and dropped his forehead to her shoulder. ‘Stop.’

Su giggled, seeming to enjoy being such a devil, but broke pubic contact, and settled her cheek against his neck.

After they’d breathed together like this for a while, calming down, Jeremy said, ‘When we live together, we’ll never be alone.’ He felt Su nod.

‘Parents aren’t,’ she said.

---

At first, we thought that the neutral ground of a restaurant rather than one home or the other would be best for the children to meet each other, until Jeremy said that his boys would behave more naturally if they were in their own home, and Ned would be able to play with his toys if the grown-up conversation got boring. ‘How is that fair?’ I asked. ‘Wouldn’t Caoimhe be more comfortable meeting the boys on her turf, too?’

‘Yes, I know, but, actually, would she? She is very self-possessed. Seems to me she’d take it in her stride.’

I couldn’t help being pleased that Jeremy had noticed my daughter’s poise after such a brief encounter. It wasn’t fair to prioritize his boys, but when I imagined the various possible scenarios, I had to agree that an early weekday dinner at Jeremy’s seemed the least stressful. We also agreed that everyone should be required to make something, and then adjusted ‘make something’ to ‘be involved in making something,’ as Jeremy said that getting Tom to do much more than a little resentful chopping would be a miracle.

Caoimhe and I made a double batch of oatmeal biscuits and then a salad with all four colours of bell pepper in it. Caoimhe sliced the peppers into strips, pulling the knife slowly towards her across the bamboo cutting board. I knew that when she was