Читать книгу Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday - Cathy Kelly - Страница 17

Coffee was Suki’s drug of choice these days. A silky Colombian macchiato with a hint of soya foam from the small coffee shop down the block. She’d pick up a cup to go and then take it out to the porch at the back of the house. Once a fine, albeit small, clapboard house owned by a local potter, it was prettily decorated and had several storm lanterns hanging from the porch roof. There was also an old peeling swing seat with a cushion that probably pre-dated the last ten political administrations, but it was the perfect place to sit in with her coffee and smoke the first of her ten cigarettes of the day.

The radio had forecast a fierce nor’wester that morning, and in the jungle of a backyard, the skinny trees shivered in the wind. Gardening was not Suki’s strong point.

Compared to the old cottage she’d got in the divorce settlement from Kyle, the view was nothing to speak of. There, she’d looked out over the fine sand of the beach, watching as the waves rolled over driftwood. She used to collect interesting pieces of driftwood; they complemented the pale blue of the cottage walls and blended nicely with the various bits of nautical paraphernalia Kyle’s mother’s decorator had added to the cottage when they’d first moved in.

In this house, with its wallpapered walls and mustardy cream paintwork, the driftwood looked dirty. It was all a matter of setting.

Another difference was the skyline: no Richardson had lived within hailing distance of the neighbours for decades. Neighbours were what poor people had. The rich could afford glorious isolation, and their cottage had been suitably solitary, the only one on the beach.

Here, on the edge of a small estate in Falmouth, Massachusetts, she had another line of houses behind hers. Rather than look at them, she stared up into the sky as she blew smoke out and sipped her coffee. It was a good time of the day for thinking.

Today, she needed to get groceries, pay some bills online and progress a little further with the book.

It wasn’t moving.

‘Do you write all the words?’ a woman had said to her at a cocktail party once. This had been back in the days when Suki had felt loved by the world, so she had merely smiled kindly and said, ‘Yes, I write all the words.’

Today, she’d have been less kind: ‘No, the Word Fairy comes in the night and does them. I just read them through in the morning to make sure she’s written enough. By the way, you need to go back to your village, ’cos they’re an idiot short.’

The Word Fairy wasn’t working at all these days.

Growing up in Ireland, she’d never been a morning person except in the summer holidays, when shafts of morning sun would slant in through the holes in the curtains in her bedroom. Sometimes, Suki would get a cup of tea from the kitchen – summer was the only time Avalon House wasn’t arctic – and then climb up the back stairs to the third floor, where a window led out on to the ersatz Norman battlements. Nobody but she and Tess ever went up there. Suki used to scatter her cigarette butts everywhere, until Tess brought up an empty baked bean can and it became the ashtray, occasionally emptied when it was overflowing. They had dragged two old cushions up to the window and on nice days, she and Tess could sit in comfort, hidden from the world, and gaze down from their lofty position at the top of Willow Street. They could see the comings and goings of Avalon, could see the line of caravans in Cabana-Land and the rocky spur to the right where children loved to explore in the daytime and where young lovers liked to make out at night.

Suki liked being near the sea. There was a claustrophobia in being land-locked. Sea and trees, they were her lodestones.

The beach at Avalon was so beautiful, the curve of the sand on one side, tailing off to a tiny cove covered with smooth rocks that shimmered in the sun. Valley of the Diamonds, it was called.

Once, a boy had taken Suki there. She hadn’t let him go all the way, whatever he told his friends. Suki Power was lots of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.

Cigarette finished now, she made her way wearily upstairs to her office.

The office was really a glorified cupboard. Two years ago when she bought the house, the realtor had enthusiastically described it as ‘the nursery’. Suki had shot him an angry look at this description. Did he seriously think she was looking for a place to settle down and raise a family at her age? But the realtor was, she realized, a self-absorbed young man who was operating on auto-pilot, trotting out the same spiel whatever the house, whoever the client:

… through here the kitchen/diner, and look, an original wood-burning stove! And upstairs, conveniently placed next door to the master bedroom, a nursery!

She no longer walked into the tiny room and thought of it wistfully as the nursery. Even though she railed against older mothers, there was still a tiny place inside her that mourned her own childlessness.

But she was beyond that ever becoming a reality. These days, the ‘nursery’ was more of an office-cum-torture chamber. The place where she went to suffer and stare at a blank screen, wondering how to fill the endless pages that stood between her and the next tranche of the advance from her publisher – money she needed so desperately.

When she emerged from the wasteland that had been her life on the road with Jethro, Suki had been broke. Not a penny remained of the divorce settlement from Kyle Junior; it had either gone up their noses or on her back, indulging a penchant for ridiculously expensive clothes, jewellery, cosmetic treatments to make her look younger. The pretty Maine cottage she’d been given as part of her alimony had been sold to pay the debts she’d run up, splashing money around, settling bar bills with bravado to show that she was a famous feminist writer and not just another groupie hanging around with TradeWind. Except that’s exactly what she was – another groupie.

What shamed her most was that she hadn’t come to her senses and walked out. She’d hung on until Jethro had tired of her and tried to pass her along to someone else.

The thought of that night still made her feel sick. The following morning, she’d packed her bags and gone.

Out of the ravages of all that, she’d tried to rebuild her life. One of the few old contacts prepared to return her calls was her agent, Melissa, who somehow landed her a two-book publishing deal.

The advance was about a quarter of what she’d got on her last contract, and that was for one book.

‘You’re lucky to be getting this much,’ Melissa had said with customary frankness. ‘I suspect they’ve agreed to publish your feminist politik book on the basis that, come the day you write the bestselling “I married into the Richardson clan, then toured with Jethro and TradeWind and came out the other side”, they’ll make their money back and then some.’

‘I’ll never write that story,’ said Suki quietly, thinking that she wasn’t entirely sure she had come out the other side of either of those periods in her life.

‘Never won’t pay the bills, honey,’ Melissa pointed out. ‘Keep it in the back of your mind. We can talk about it when you come to New York for our meeting with the publishers.’

Suki had no intention of devoting any part of her mind to that particular project. But in the meantime, another book had forced its way to the forefront of Suki’s mind: Redmond Suarez’s book on the Richardsons. If he lived up to his reputation and succeeded in digging out all her secrets, Suki knew she’d fall apart completely.

It was late afternoon when Suki finally admitted defeat, having deleted just about everything she’d written that day. She went down to the kitchen and found Mick, still wearing the T-shirt he’d slept in, the one with his band’s logo on the front. His eyes were heavy with sleep, as though he’d not long got up. Mick was muscular, tall and admiring – just Suki’s type. He was also, she had begun to suspect, more than a little hung up on her relationship with Jethro and TradeWind. She wondered if she was a trophy girlfriend for him: ‘I’m dating Jethro’s ex.’

Maybe not. But he was becoming quite proprietorial. Last night, when she’d told him she was flying to New York to meet with her agent and publisher, he’d immediately started dropping hints that he wanted to come with her.

It seemed he hadn’t given up, because his first words were: ‘We need a little vacation, babe.’

He was sitting at her pine kitchen table, studying Mr Chan’s Takeout Menu as if there was a possibility he would deviate slightly from what he always had, which was chicken chow mein and peanut noodles. Suki teased him about it all the time, but today she found his careful perusal of the menu irritating.

Neither of them had money for a ‘little vacation’. Any more than they had the money for takeout every damn night of the week. Mick couldn’t cook anything except barbecue, which he thought should be added into the Constitution as an amendment: ‘Every man should have the right to grill in his own backyard and down a few cold ones at the same time,’ he liked to say.

He rented a ground-floor apartment in an old house two blocks away and he didn’t have a proper outdoor grill, just a makeshift one that ruined at least half the food. His friend, Renaud, band drummer by night and tax accountant by day, had a propane grill, and a decent backyard to go with it.

Mick and Steve, the bass guitarist, liked to bitch about Renaud, saying he wasn’t a real rocker because he had a ‘civilian’ job. They were true musicians: they didn’t do day jobs.

Suki was expected to agree with this assessment, but the more the bills came and the more it seemed as if Mick was living off her ninety per cent of the time and contributing nothing, the more she envied Renaud’s wife, Odette, who had the money for facials, a personal trainer and perfect nails.

A month ago, Mick had moved a lot of his stuff into her house. Now he was subletting his apartment.

Suki knew that if they stayed together, she’d have to be the one who earned the money. Which was about as modern feminist as it got.

She also knew that she’d never be able to mention the fact that she was the breadwinner, any more than she could tell Mick that his band was going nowhere.

Instead, she was expected to attend any gig they managed to get and stand at the side of the stage clapping and whooping over-enthusiastically. Anything less would upset Mick.

‘I don’t think you liked the show,’ he’d said once, early on, when Suki and Odette had been talking near the bar instead of frantically leading the applause.

‘I loved it,’ said Suki automatically, because that was what you did with performers. Only promoters and managers got to tell the truth, Jethro once told her. He’d been remarkably knowledgeable and clear-sighted about the industry, for all his drug-absorption.

‘Honey,’ she told Mick now, ‘New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.’

He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want boiled or fried rice?’

Manhattan had once been Suki’s favourite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that anything was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there – in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.

She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when Women and Their Wars was on the bestseller lists, and while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.

Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from the airplane window, she knew that another love affair was over. New York had moved on without her. Younger people with clear, unbroken hearts now stalked the glittering city. Strangely, this made her feel older than any line on her face did.

Her appointment with the publisher was at two and she was meeting her agent, Melissa, for lunch beforehand.

‘I’ll order something for us in my office, Suki. I’ve got a West Coast conference call at twelve. We won’t have time to go out,’ Melissa informed her when it was all being set up.

Suki knew what that meant: the Suki Richardson account made so little money, taking her out to lunch was no longer financially viable.

The old Suki would have raged about being treated badly.

The new Suki said ‘fine’.

She had a long way to go to become the goliath she’d once been, if she could ever get back there.

When the adrenalin was flowing, Suki felt a match for anybody: when she’d been on television all the time, when boys in Avalon had lusted after her, when she was Kyle Richardson’s wife, when she was with Jethro … But for herself, in herself, she didn’t know the last time she’d felt truly confident. That scared her like nothing else. If she could no longer fight, what would become of her?

The offices of Carr and Lowenstein had once occupied half of a suitably grand brownstone, but when they’d joined forces with a theatrical agency, they’d all moved into a glass tower. Suki spent the time in the elevator on the way to the forty-fifth floor fighting vertigo, a feeling which worsened when she stepped into the sheeny lobby, which was all reflective surfaces, to emphasize how high up they were. The reception had just-big-enough olive trees in planters in every corner and the silvery-green walls were massed with photos of the agency’s most famous and highest-earning clients.

In the Jethro days, he told her the record company people put photos of TradeWind on every wall of their office and played their latest album whenever they visited.

‘Flipped the switch to play another band as soon as we left, man!’ pointed out Stas, the band’s lead guitarist.

‘Sure did,’ agreed Jethro, unconcerned. ‘That’s business, nothing personal.’

Suki saw no photos of herself on the walls of Carr and Lowenstein. Not even an itty, bitty one. And it did feel personal.

The receptionist, a Cosmo-girl vision dressed in nude shades with Lincoln Park After Dark nails, didn’t bother to feign a polite smile as she took Suki’s name and told her to wait. The receptionist knew everything. Who was on the up, who was on the way down.

No picture on the wall and no smiles from Cosmo-girl. It all told a story.

Suki sat on a couch and felt the panic rise. Her career was over. She was broke. There was nowhere left to go and the most dangerous man in the dirty biography business wanted to write about her and the Richardson family. Suki didn’t want all the mistakes she’d made in her life turned into trash-biography horror. It would destroy any credibility she’d got left.

The terror which had been building since Eric Gold first told her that Redmond Suarez wanted to write the book exploded fully into Suki’s body.

‘Which way is the women’s room?’ she asked Cosmo-girl.

‘Straight down the hall and second left,’ said the girl with barely a flicker in Suki’s direction.

Tess would have introduced herself and made the girl smile, Suki thought. Tess was beautiful and yet she’d had that gift of being able to stop other women from hating her. Suki had never mastered it. Men loved her, women were wary of her.

Why was she thinking about Tess so much? It had to be all the worry over the book and how it all linked up. The past, Avalon, all the things she’d tried to forget, all the secrets.

In the women’s room, she locked herself in a stall, put down the toilet seat lid and sat. A Xanax for nerves, some Tylenol for the headache that was rumbling at the base of her skull and one of her prescription antacids to quell the bile that seemed to rise so easily these days. She washed it all down with her bottle of water. That all these ailments were stress-related didn’t pass her by, but Suki knew there was no easy fix when it came to stress. She was broke, so that stress wasn’t going away anytime soon. And the book …

The women’s room door slammed and Suki got up, flushed the loo loudly to imply she wasn’t in there taking cocaine – which she would have been, back in the day – and came out.

She slicked on some lip gloss and walked back up the hall as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Act as if, she thought.

Melissa Lowenstein was a tall, striking woman who favoured tailored pantsuits worn with a single large piece of costume jewellery. Today’s was a striking orange Perspex brooch on one lapel.

‘Suki, great to see you,’ she said, shaking hands.

Melissa didn’t go in for continental air kissing. ‘Gives some men the wrong idea,’ she’d told Suki once. ‘Kissing can make them think it’s fine to put a hand on your butt. Kissing blurs all the rules. So I keep it simple. No kissing anyone, no touching – and no messing if they overstep that line.’

Suki found this approach strange. She liked seeing the flicker of admiration in men’s eyes, liked using her sexuality as part of her personal arsenal of weapons. But it was different for Melissa, she realized: Suki was the talent, the performer, whereas Melissa had to do deals with men. Totally different.

At Melissa’s small boardroom-style table, lunch was set up for two: some deli cold cuts, bagels, salad and diet sodas.

They sat and helped themselves, even though Suki wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. The Xanax was kicking in and now she wanted a strong coffee, preferably a macchiato with foam, and a cigarette, then she’d relax totally. But instead she made up a plate of salad and poured herself a diet drink.

‘How’s the book going?’ Melissa asked.

Suki had already worked out how she was going to answer this.

‘Slowly,’ she said. There was no point in lying to Melissa. She was about to explain all the issues which were clouding her head: money worries, the damn Suarez book, and point out that if she was earning more money, then she could concentrate …

‘What’s wrong?’ rasped Melissa, bonhomie gone, suddenly looking panicked. ‘You’ve given the publishers the outline, Suki. That’s what they’ve paid for. Reuben is a big fan of yours, he turned down Women and Their Wars all those years ago and he still regrets it. That’s money in the bank for you, but the publishers won’t keep waiting for ever. Past glories have got you this far, now you have to deliver – on schedule. My ass is on the line with this. Your due date is in three months and they’ve had nothing so far. What’s going on?’

Suki could feel the hand holding the glass of soda shake at Melissa’s lengthy outburst. The fear rose in her again.

‘It’s Redmond Suarez,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book about the Richardsons. He’s interested in me. I’m so stressed about all of this, I just can’t write.’

The words, once blurted out, had the effect of making Melissa sit back and smile with relief.

‘Suki, relax, honey. This is good, better than good. This is a publicist’s dream. I get that you’re worried. Nobody wants a guy like that writing about them. Suarez is a sewer rat – but people are interested in sewer rats. No matter what he says, it will be good for your profile. A little of that high-class Wasp stuff can only do you good. Plus, Reuben is going to flip with joy. He’s always had a thing for the old Republican Mayflower types like the Richardsons and he’d like nothing better than to see them red-faced with embarrassment – if WASPS can go red, that is. Money can’t buy it!’ She beamed. ‘This is all good. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Melissa began eating her bagel again and Suki somehow found the strength to put her glass down. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat.’

Melissa flipped a switch on the desk phone and asked for coffee. ‘Hurry, Jennie, we’ve got to be out of here at forty after one to get to Box House by two.’ Then she turned back to Suki. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what have you heard about the Suarez book? Have you talked to the Richardson family about it yet? I presume they know? Bet they do.’

‘I haven’t talked to them,’ Suki said, ‘but they’ll know. They always know everything.’

That she knew for a fact.

By the time they got to Box House Publishing – another monolith of sheeny glass – Suki had drunk two coffees, plastered a nicotine patch on her arm in lieu of cigarettes, and taken another half Zanax. She was feeling no pain and the face she examined in her compact mirror was looking good. Tranquillizer-induced good, she knew, but that was fine. Who cared where the relief came from, right? She raked her blonde hair back from the widow’s peak in place of combing it, and applied more eyeliner and fire-truck red gloss.

‘Is Suarez interested in the Jethro years?’ Melissa asked as they went up in the elevator.

‘Not sure,’ said Suki, unconcerned in her happy bubble. ‘Not yet, anyhow. Jethro’s people would have the lawyers on to him like a shot. It’s always hard to nail down facts with bands like TradeWind. The tabloid rumours are so wild, nobody cares what another biography would say. Jethro never speaks, never denies, never apologizes.’

She knew that from personal experience. When Jethro had moved on, she’d never heard from him again, despite their having shared a bed for more than two years.

Today’s meeting was with her editor, the marketing team and the cover department. They were all at least fifteen years younger than Suki and Melissa, but Suki tried to tell herself she didn’t care. When she’d started out as a writer, these kids were still in strollers. How could they know what she stood for with their talk of modern covers and what people wanted?

It turned out that they had heard about the Suarez book and everyone was pretty perky at the prospect.

‘It’s what people want to read, the inside story,’ breathed one particularly young girl in opaque pantyhose and a skirt so short she’d have been told she was ‘asking for it’ when Suki was young.

Suki had railed against the ‘asking for it’ mantra all her life. Women should be able to wear what they want, be what they want. But as she’d found to her cost, it hadn’t quite worked out that way. When you looked like you were asking for it, you sometimes got it – and that had the potential to destroy you.

Decades on, female politicians were still criticized for what they wore, though nobody would do that to male ones. Yet here were these young women with careers wearing clothes that seemed to say ‘one more inch and you’re at my crotch’.

Suki shook her head to rattle these crazy thoughts out of it and tuned back in. They’d moved on to the subject of e-books, blogging tours and the fact that Suki’s interesting past made her a person of interest to both the books and feature pages.

She continued to intermittently tune in and out until the meeting came to an end. Still in a Zanax-induced daze, she made her way back down to street level. On her way to hail a cab, she passed a gaggle of young girls wearing what looked to her like fancy dress costume: dark pantyhose, tight denim shorts, unflattering sneaker boots, long open shirts and skimpy stomach-baring T-shirts with writing on them. The clothes were not revealing as such, but they did, Suki realized, highlight the female body. Some guys laying cable watched the girls and Suki watched the men. She had never worn clothes like that when she was their age, but the body-conscious dresses and high boots she’d dressed in back then were designed to achieve the same result.

After the no-nonsense style of Melissa, who’d made such a statement, Suki felt almost shocked by the girls. And she was unshockable, wasn’t she?

In Women and Their Wars she’d written about female empowerment and the glass ceiling. At the time, it had been a hot topic. Not any more. Though the glass ceiling remained, no one seemed interested. Feminist writers had devoted entire books to topics such as body image, sexuality, the power of motherhood – and what difference had it made?

Young girls still chose clothes that would make men want to sleep with them. Older women wanted to have both a career and babies. Women of all ages wanted to look attractive to the opposite sex and not show any sign of growing old, ever. Nothing had changed at all.

Suki held out a hand to hail a passing cab. When it drew up, she saw her own image reflected in the windows: a woman with a nest of tousled blonde hair and full lips stained with red gloss. The perfect image of wanton sexuality.

In the back of the cab, she wiped the excess red off with a tissue.

The plane was delayed and she had to wait an hour at the gate with nothing to read but notes of the meetings and a magazine she’d bought that morning. She liked the empowering stuff and snippets about mindfulness or meditation. She didn’t do any of it; so far as Suki was concerned, reading about it was enough. The articles calmed her, as if the information was seeping into her bones.

One day, she promised herself, she would give this stuff a try. Maybe when the book came out and she had some money. Perhaps then she’d go to Avalon and spend time with Zach and Kitty. They were growing up and she was missing so much of it. She’d been close to Zach when he was younger: he’d been so sweet, so wise, despite being a kid. Suki had felt the warmth of both Tess and their father’s kindness in the boy and she’d adored being with him.

But she hadn’t been home for a long time. There were phone calls at Christmas and birthdays, but she knew he was slipping away from her. Once kids grew up, they moved on. She didn’t want to lose him. She still had time with Kitty because she was young.

Yes, when her book was done, assuming she managed to dodge the bullet with the bloody Suarez book, she’d go to Avalon and move in with Tess for a while. Practise yoga and mindfulness, meditate on the beach, stuff like that. She smiled at the thought.

Another delay announcement was broadcast, so she phoned Mick, who sounded grumpy when she told him that she was going to be home late.

‘Why don’t you go out for a session with Renaud?’ she suggested, like a mother suggesting a new toy to an irate toddler. Easier to have him sinking a few beers than waiting for her and getting annoyed.

‘I guess I could do that.’

The after-effects of the drugs and the energy she’d had to summon up for the day, had left her feeling exhausted. Suki kept her bag protectively close on her lap, wrapped a light shawl around her shoulders and let herself sink into the airline gate seat as far as its hard back would allow.

Jethro and the band had their own jet. There was no hanging around boarding gates when you were travelling with TradeWind. Her mind went back once more to that first time she’d met Jethro, that instant connection on the television show and then that kiss in his dressing room, after he’d thrown everyone else out, his hands holding her face so tenderly.

His music wasn’t the only lure for the fans; Jethro’s looks were a huge part of the appeal. Tall, almost menacing in his beauty, except for that wry, crooked smile; the jet black hair swept back from his forehead, and the Sioux bones he’d inherited from his mother defining the tanned face. He was so fiercely stunning that Suki had wanted to touch his face to see if he was real or if clever make-up had created those incredible shadows and high bones. But he wouldn’t let her touch him.

His was the only touch allowed. His hands on her body, feeling for her breasts under the silk shirt, making her not care who was on the other side of the dressing-room door or what they might think. Just wanting him.

‘No,’ he rasped, face buried in her breasts. ‘Not here – my hotel.’

‘I thought you had to fly to another gig?’ she said breathlessly, watching as he grabbed his jacket from a chair, checked the pockets for his smokes and took her hand.

But the jet could wait. There was time to go back to his hotel before they had to race off to Pittsburgh.

As they left the television studios, Suki felt the exquisite buzz of being with a man everyone recognized, a rock god at a time when there were many such gods. But Jethro wasn’t a man on self-destruct mode. Beneath all the stage make-up and tattoos, including a snake writhing up one arm and around his carotid artery, Jethro had more in common with Suki’s former father-in-law, Kyle Richardson Senior, than he did with his fellow rock gods. Like Kyle Senior, he knew precisely what he wanted and was hell-bent on getting it, no matter who got hurt along the way.

Surrounded by bodyguards in suits – otherwise Jethro said, nobody would be able to tell the bull-necked roadies from security – they were escorted to a black limo. Through the smoky glass, Suki saw the screaming fans held back by the barrier, and as the car pulled into traffic she leaned back, feeling safe, cocooned, special.

Jethro sprawled across the back seat and Suki, unsure now and wondering whether she had made a hideous mistake, sat nervously near the window. She could smell her own sweat through the Shalimar she’d drenched herself in that morning. Studio lights made everyone sweat and she pressed her arms firmly to her sides lest the inevitable wet patches on her amber silk shirt were visible.

‘Do fans turn up like this every time you’re on television?’ she asked, trying to ground herself in normality. She could still get out of this, this madness that had possessed her during that frantic kiss in his dressing room. Television made people crazy, it was well known. The studio lights, the notion that you were smiling into millions of peoples’ homes; it was all pure madness.

And then, to have someone like Jethro growl that you were the sexiest thing he’d ever seen …

She stole a glance at him, his roman profile staring straight ahead, jet black (dyed?) hair raked back from his high forehead. He must wear contact lenses, she decided, peering a bit closer because he wasn’t paying her the slightest bit of attention. Nobody’s eyes were that green; a lucent green like crystal from the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

‘You still thinking of backing out?’ he murmured without looking at her. He reached into a compartment beside him, took out a bottle of champagne and glasses, then deftly popped the cork with all the skill of a sommelier.

When he passed Suki her glass, the look of pure lust in his eyes made her feel all the heat and excitement come rushing back.

‘Just one,’ she mumbled. ‘I have a thing on tomorrow …’ She was babbling now, particularly as he slid across the leather seat to get closer to her.

‘Cancel it,’ he said flatly. ‘You’ll be in Pittsburgh tomorrow. With me.’

‘I can’t cancel it,’ she said, suddenly irked, despite the inky liquid pooling inside her groin. How dare he tell her to cancel something!

Jethro drank some of his champagne and then he was right beside her. His face with its hard lines was close to hers, and then his mouth was opening hers, and she could feel the coolness of his champagne coursing into her mouth. She’d heard of liquid kisses but nobody had ever done it to her before, and suddenly she pulled herself away, drained her own glass, then dropped it and pulled his face close to hers with both hands, and spilled a sliver of cold bubbles into his mouth. She could feel his throaty growl rather than hear it because they were so close, chest to chest, and it didn’t matter that she smelled of fresh hot sweat and Shalimar: he was the same, a raw animal smell and something musky and expensive.

He drained the last of his drink, then held the bottle to her lips.

‘Who needs glasses?’ he said, mouth closing on the soft curve of her neck.

At the airport in Martha’s Vineyard, she had to wait in line for fifteen minutes to pick up a cab.

‘You wanna share one?’ said a guy in a business suit in front of her. Suki sized him up; business man out of town for work, expense account dinner in front of him and a bottle of whatever he liked. Probably fancied a little fun on the way.

‘No, thank you,’ she said in her steeliest voice.

When the cab pulled up in front of her house, Suki got out slowly. The street was quiet, the way suburban streets were in winter, with most of the kids inside, no teams of laughing teens playing softball in someone’s front yard, no drone of a lawnmower or the bark of a small dog being walked by a gaggle of little girls who’d squeal with delight when the dog peed.

Suki shivered at the November cold and let herself into the house. She was cold a lot of the time now, apart from when she had the hot flushes and her core body temperature seemed to reach meltdown levels. She was fed up with this damn hormonal thing but she wouldn’t give in to it. No way, sister. She was going to beat it at its own game with agnus castus and the dong quai she got from the Chinese medical centre in town. Taking replacement hormones was like admitting it was all over: welcome to Cronesville. She would not do it. She was still young, still fertile, still beautiful.

The house had the appearance it always had when Mick was home all day. The sports pages of the newspaper had been dumped on the floor beside Mick’s recliner, which in turn, was facing the flat-screen plasma, an item she hadn’t wanted and which Mick couldn’t afford, but he’d got a loan from the bank for it. She could smell takeout from the kitchen and knew, without looking, that he’d have left the boxes on the table.

She resisted the impulse to tidy up. First, she needed to get out of her dressy clothes. Lord knew, she didn’t have many elegant clothes left. The designer outfits she’d once worn were all out of date and too small. This messiness with her hormones had thickened her waist, and she hated that.

Upstairs in their bedroom, she stripped off and pulled on her sloppy velour sweatpants and a GAP sweatshirt she’d once bought for Mick, not realizing that denim was his preferred choice in all clothing.

There was a note on the bed: Baby, gone for beers with Renaud. Might be late. Xx Mick.

She smiled at the kisses and the term of endearment. Baby. No woman who got called ‘baby’ could be turning perimenopausal. He loved her, and she loved him, even if he was the worst housekeeper she’d ever met.

Still smiling, she went downstairs, ignored the cartons on the kitchen table and poured herself a glass of chilled white wine from the fridge. On a hook by the back porch door were a few heavy rugs Suki used when she wanted to sit on the porch swing seat on winter nights. Snagging one, she went outside, wrapping herself up in the rug. It was nicer on the porch when she lit the candles in all the tiny storm lanterns, but it took ages and she was too tired. When Mick sat out with her, he made sure he had music playing, sometimes bluegrass, more often rock. For Suki, music just reminded her of the hurt she felt, so when she was alone, she sat in silence.

Closing her eyes, she let wine and nicotine sink into her. When she was a teenager, she’d sit out in the orchard in the evenings, sneaking a cigarette after dinner. Sometimes their cat, a small black creature called Raven, would join her, weaving around for attention.

Tess had rescued the cat from the woods one day, a tiny scrap of a thing thrown into a sack with the top tied.

Of course, they’d kept her. Nothing in pain was ever sent away from Avalon House.

Tess had saved the cat and named her, yet Raven had chosen Suki to be her beloved mistress. Suki was careless of the cat’s affection and that appeared to suit the cat just fine.

Raven was long gone now, buried with all the Avalon House animals in the tiny pet graveyard outside the orchard wall.

Suki’s eyes filled with tears. This was ridiculous, she thought, stabbing out her cigarette and then wiping her eyes with the back of her sleeve.

She kept thinking about home, about Tess, about Avalon, and it was stupid. Smart women didn’t look back, they looked forward. Right?