Читать книгу Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe - Фиона Харпер - Страница 11

Louise watched Ben go. She kept watching until long after his tall frame disappeared round the side of the house into a tangle of grass and shrubs and trees that were now, technically, her back garden. Not that she’d had the courage to explore it fully yet.

She forced herself to turn away and look back at the greenhouse.

Was she mad? Quite possibly.

In all seriousness, she’d just given a man she knew nothing about permission to invade her territory on a regular basis. Yet … there’d been something so preposterously truthful about his story and so refreshingly straightforward about his manner that she’d swallowed it whole. Next time she’d have to frisk him for a long-lens camera and a dictaphone, just in case.

She’d left the greenhouse door open. Slowly, she closed the distance to the heavy Victorian glazed door, with its beautiful brass handle and peeling, off-white paint. On a whim, she stepped inside before she closed the door and stood for a few moments in the warm dampness. It smelled good in here, of earth and still air, but very real. She liked real.

The assorted plants lining the shelves by the windows really were quite exquisite. She’d never seen anything like them. Venus fly-traps sat next to frilly, sticky-looking things in shades of pink and purple.

She walked over to the little plant that the gardener had saved. She felt an affinity with this little plant, recently uprooted, thin, fragile. Now in a foreign climate, reaching hungrily heavenwards with an appetite that might never be satisfied. She reached out and touched the soil at its base. It did feel good. She pulled her hand away, but didn’t wipe it on the back of her jeans.

Near the door were the stubby, brown plants that had started to hibernate. Just like her. All those years with Toby now seemed like a time half-asleep. Her mind wandered to a photo of a famous actress who had graced the pages of all the gossip magazines a few years ago. She’d been snapped whooping for joy when the papers finalising her divorce had arrived. Since then she’d lost twenty pounds, received two Oscars and had been seen with a string of hot-looking younger men.

Louise frowned. Shouldn’t this be the time when she blossomed, came into her own? She paused for a moment, tried to search deep inside herself for the first signs of germination, but she was afraid she’d be waiting a very long time. She still felt numb inside.

She turned and exited the greenhouse, closing the door behind her and marched back down the path to her new home. Once the house was sorted, she’d feel better. She’d already talked to a team of decorators who could make her vision for this old house come alive. But what she really wanted more than anything was to find some pictures of how it had been in the past, so she could take the best elements of its history and mix them with her own unique stamp.

Surely there were photos somewhere she could look at? Once she’d had a cup of tea, she’d rifle through all the forgotten cupboards and attics of the vast old house and see if she could find a photo, or some papers—something—that would help her bring this house back to life.

Louise might still be hibernating, but she had a feeling Whitehaven was ready to wake up.

It seemed odd to have so much noise and movement in the house after a couple of weeks of solitary occupation and silence. The structure of the house was sound, but it needed a little TLC. The outside was worse than the inside, having had to brave a few winters high up on a hill above a salty tidal river. Nothing a little skilled work wouldn’t fix, though.

At first Louise stayed on hand to oversee the repairs and redecoration work. When she wasn’t needed, she hunted through the forgotten spaces of Whitehaven, looking for any clues to the house’s past. She found old newspapers and some electricity bills from a decade ago, but nothing that got to the heart of the lovely old mansion.

In the end she took refuge from the muddy boots, the endless tea-making, and took herself off down to the boathouse. That was also somewhere that could do with a bit of a spruce-up, but she’d already decided it was a project she would handle personally. If all those women on the decorating shows on telly could wield a paintbrush, then so could she. And, if she got it all wrong, then she would be the only person to see it, because this was her place, her sanctuary.

Louise wasn’t scared of a bit of hard work. She’d done plenty while she’d been raising her brothers and sisters and looking after her dad. But she’d felt trapped by it, as if it were a prison sentence stretching into the future. Cleaning up the boathouse was different. It was her choice, and she found that instead of being draining and weary, scrubbing down the walls and making every last inch shine was energising. She surprised herself with how long she kept going the first day.

Even more, she surprised herself by arriving early the next morning again—flask of tea in hand, and a book to read when she took a break—ready to start again. Halfway through the morning she turned her attention to the fireplace. It was a Victorian design: cast iron holding tiled inserts with a wooden surround and a firestone cut into the floorboards. She decided to take the thick layer of dust off first, then she’d be able to work out what kind of cleaning materials she could use on the tiles without damaging them. She didn’t want to rub the hand-painted blue flowers off their white background with one pump of cleaning spray.

This wasn’t normal dust, she realised, as she passed the duster over it. It didn’t fluff and fly off like normal stuff. It seemed to be welded on. She rubbed a little harder, trying to dislodge some of the stubbornly clinging dirt, trying hard not to think about what the ingredients might be to make it stick that way.

She must have been rubbing harder than she’d realised, because suddenly the second tile down in the vertical strip of four gave way and her hand hit the wall behind. Her heart pounded. Had she broken the tile? If she had, she had no idea if she’d ever be able to match it again. But she hadn’t heard a crashing noise, just a dull clang as it had fallen down behind the tiles below it. She moved closer to the fireplace and dipped most of her forearm down into the hole. Her fingers reached and flexed trying to find a hard ceramic edge. Perhaps she could just balance it back in place until she found some glue to repair it?

Louise’s fingers closed around something, but it wasn’t fired clay.

It was paper. And a leather binding.

It was a book.

What on earth was it doing inside the fireplace in an out-of-the-way spot like this? Hardly a conventional bookshelf. Could it have fallen down the back?

She stood up and checked the surround. No. It was fixed securely against the plaster wall. Frowning, she knelt down again and reached inside the square hole once more. Carefully, she pinched the book between thumb and forefinger and tried to pull it out. The hole the fallen tile had left behind was too small, but she found she could slide the next tile down out of its spot easily, and then the book was freed from its dusty prison.

She blew on it, and instantly started coughing. Regular dust, this. It flew up into her face straight away and clung to her hair the moment the air moved around it. She grabbed the duster and gave it the once over, then wandered over to the window to get a better look.

There were no markings on the outside and the tan leather cover was soft. She took a moment to stare at it before she opened the cover and looked inside. Her heart-rate tripled when she did so.

This wasn’t a novel or a child’s picture book. Elegant blue ink filled the pages. Hand-written sentences. Dates and times …

This was a diary.

Louise closed the cover and walked out onto the balcony.

Should she?

This was obviously someone’s private thoughts. She now realised it hadn’t got behind that fireplace by accident. It had been hidden. But there was one very likely candidate as to the author and Louise was burning with curiosity to find out if she was right. She sucked in a breath, looked to the sky, said a silent prayer for forgiveness, and opened the cover again.

The beginning of the diary was tame—starting in January, as new diaries often do—and detailing Laura’s glamorous life: rehearsals, parties, dinners at nice restaurants with other famous people. It all seemed so wonderful, but as Louise read on, she couldn’t help feeling as if there was something missing.

She sighed. Laura Hastings, with her ice-blonde hair and classic bone structure, had always seemed like the perfect woman to Louise. She’d loved her films as a child, used to watch them with her dad in the afternoons when he hadn’t been feeling well. And for some reason, Louise had never even considered that Laura might have struggled with her seemingly perfect life, just as she had with hers. How odd.

Of course, it had been the same for her. Of course.

So Louise read on, reading not just the words, but interpreting the spaces between them, what was not said as much as what was said, and it brought a whole new sense of connection between herself and the previous owner of her home.

And then Whitehaven was mentioned … and the boathouse …

Louise sank even deeper down into the chair, forgetting completely about grime and dusters and pulled-apart fireplaces. And when Laura met Dominic, she pressed a palm against her chest and it stayed there as she read the next handful of entries.

26th June, 1952

Dominic and I have been spending a lot of time together. The nature of our job means there’s a lot of time hanging around, waiting. And even when we’re working we have a lot of scenes together.

He talks to me. Really talks to me. In a way Alex has never done.

I think about my marriage now and wonder why we got together. It seemed so perfect at the time—like a fairy tale ending. Industrial heir marries movie princess. But I wonder now if I just got caught up with the glamour and the whole idea of us. I know that’s one of my faults, acting impulsively, getting carried away in the emotion of the moment.

I try to tell myself that’s what this is with Dominic, but I don’t really believe myself.

Alex doesn’t see me the way Dominic does. I think, to him, I’m just another trophy he’s collected. He likes the best of everything, you see. And I was flattered that he thought I was the best. But I hadn’t realised that once he’s got that object he’s had his eye on, that he locks it away behind glass and then moves on to the next conquest. I’ve tried not to think about what that might mean when it comes to other women, and I’ve never even caught of whiff of scandal about him, but still …

No, that’s horrid. I can’t blame my husband for things he hasn’t done, because I’m feeling guilty about having feelings for someone else. That’s too low.

Alex is a good man, really. He’s just rather distant and … I don’t know. I don’t know what’s wrong with him—except that he isn’t Dominic.

And Dominic trumps Alex in every way. I know he feels something for me. I can see it in his eyes, the way I find him looking at me across the set a thousand times a day. Where Alex is a good man, Dominic is an extraordinary one. We talk, we sit together, but he won’t take it any further. I want to hate him for being so principled, but I find I can’t. If I were his wife, I wouldn’t want him any other way. I don’t want him to lower himself to something he isn’t for me. I don’t want to make him less, when I feel he makes me so much more.

But when we have scenes together—scenes where Richard and Charity get close—I know it isn’t acting. I know he’s drinking every moment in, saving it up, like I am. It’s taking the film to a new level. Sam hardly says a word when we have our scenes. More than once we’ve got an important moment down in one take.

I wrote that something magical would happen here at this house this summer, didn’t I, and it has.

I met Dominic.

But I also know I’m making the film of my career. Something that will last long after I’ve grown old and ugly and no one will want to watch films with me in them any more.

Thank you, Whitehaven. I don’t know how I am ever going to repay you.

Louise closed the diary and walked back into the relative gloom of the boathouse interior. She stared at the book in her hands, hardly able to comprehend what she’d just read, what she’d just found.

This was Laura Hastings’ diary! And obviously written the year she’d filmed A Summer Affair here. This was … it was … amazing. She felt as if the house had given up one of its secrets, trusted her with it. She hugged the book to her chest until she realised it was leaving a dusty imprint on her front, and then she carefully wiped it down with a soft, clean duster.

And what a romantic story.

At least, it seemed like one from the outside. But Louise knew all about how glamorous and exciting things could seem when you read about them, when it was a whole different ball game to live through them. Part of her ached for the young Laura Hastings, too.

She’d always seemed so perfect on the screen, had always been one of Louise’s icons. Who wouldn’t fall for that ice-blonde hair and those big, sparkling blue eyes? Laura Hastings had always looked so poised, so in control. She wondered if anyone had had any idea of the inner turmoil underneath the movie star surface.

She flicked back through the diary again. The entries seemed to be sporadic. Sometimes they were days apart, sometimes months. Sometimes there were gaps of a few years.

She carefully replaced the book in its hiding place and slotted the two tiles back into place. She discovered the one she’d pushed through would sit very nicely in its spot, held gently by the cast iron surround, as long as no one applied undue pressure to it. As she hid the book again, made everything look as it had before she’d made her discovery, she tried to wrack her brains about what had happened to Laura after her heyday.

She made films into her forties, but then she’d just quietly faded away. Must have lived here for some time and died an old woman. Louise was shocked to realise she didn’t even know if Laura had lived here on her own or if she’d been married. And if she’d been married, who had the husband been? Alex, still? Or Dominic?

She could ask Ben, she supposed, but he seemed to be a little tight-lipped about the previous owner. And, anyway, the diary wasn’t huge. It wouldn’t take too long to read it and find out for herself.

Louise frowned. She didn’t want to gulp it down in one sitting—it was too beautiful for that. Maybe she’d just read a little bit each week, ration herself. Then she could make the magic last for months. She had years to uncover the rest of Whitehaven’s secrets, so maybe she could be patient about finding out about Laura’s too.