Читать книгу The Country Escape - Jane Lovering - Страница 7

We sat in the kitchen, with Gabriel holding a tea towel to his bleeding nose and occasionally dabbing at the incipient black eye where his glasses had impacted. I’d just about stopped apologising to him and offering him ice, but it was touch and go.

Luc had pulled out a chair at the little table and was sitting with his legs outstretched. Comfortable. Settled in.

‘So, Katie,’ he said, his French accent sounding exotic in the confines of the little stone-flagged room. ‘You moved all this way, huh? To this…’ and he threw his arms wide, indicating presumably the poverty of my kitchen. ‘I never thought you could live this way in such a…’ he groped for an epithet ‘… a backwater.’

Gabriel had flinched at the outflung arms, which had resulted in more blood. I handed him another tea towel. This was horrible. No, this was beyond ordinary horrible and into Game of Thrones horribility. All we needed now was a dragon; we’d already got the blood and the psychopath.

‘You lost the ability to comment on my life when we divorced.’ I threw Gabriel an apologetic look. I really didn’t want dirty laundry to be spread out in front of this perfect stranger, but I didn’t feel I could ask him to leave when he was seeping bodily fluids into my Laura Ashley finest linen weave. ‘How is Mariette, by the way?’

It was a low blow, but the quickest way I could think of to sum up the break-up of our relationship. Yes, I was the cliché, the wife left for a younger, prettier and more successful woman. Although, in my case, I didn’t bear Mariette any grudges, more a kind of sideways sympathy along with the knowledge that she wasn’t the first, and would, undoubtedly, not be the last of Luc’s ‘conquests’.

‘She is very good, thank you.’ Luc was dressing twenty years younger now, I noted. Slim chinos and a collarless grey shirt, his hair smooth and still dark, damn him. I found new grey hairs every day, but then I had to deal with Poppy. ‘I came to see our daughter.’

‘She’s at school. Obviously.’

Gabriel looked as if he was trying to fade into the background, despite the blood. He kept looking behind him towards the kitchen door, as though he wanted to make a break for it. I didn’t blame him. This was awkward, with a capital A.

‘Term has started already?’ Luc did the Gallic shrug, which didn’t surprise me. We’d been together for nearly fourteen years, and for most of those, plus the year after we’d separated, he’d had a daughter whose comings and goings had regularly bemused him. Luc had been so busy doing Luc that he’d never had the brain-space to contemplate the fact that Poppy might need new clothes, a regular schedule or, in fact, food.

‘Last week. We spent a week moving in and then she started at the local school.’

‘And what year is she, now?’

‘Year Ten. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but…’

Luc looked at his watch. ‘Ah. Maybe, then, I will come back later.’

‘I’d prefer it if you rang before you came, next time.’ I threw another glance at Gabriel, who looked as though he was desperately trying not to listen in, and Luc misread the look.

‘Of course! You will be wanting to start your new life.’ Another arm-fling, taking in Gabriel this time, who now had taken his glasses off to pat gently at his swollen eye.

‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I do. You’re welcome to see Poppy any time, of course you are, she’ll be over the moon, but—’ How did I sum it up? That I couldn’t have this glamorous Frenchman wafting in and out of my life any more, trailing his string of disappointed girlfriends and his trust fund. I was glad he’d met Mariette and decided to settle down. It might mean I knew where he was for more than a fortnight. ‘We aren’t together any more, Luc. It’s just Poppy.’

Luc stood up and Gabriel flinched again. ‘Well, I go. I will call Poppy, maybe I will see her tonight.’

‘I’ll tell her you came by.’ I stood up too, trying to shuffle him towards the front door.

Luc paused, looking out of the kitchen window. ‘There is a horse out there,’ he observed.

‘Patrick,’ Gabriel and I said together, him slightly muffled by two layers of tea towel.

Luc raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you said our daughter would be a horse person over your dead body?’

He said it as though it was a personal accusation. As though I’d spent all those years denying our daughter an experience from sheer bloody-mindedness, rather than the fact that London wasn’t exactly known for its acres of free riding space. Yes, there were riding schools, but…

‘He’s mine,’ Gabriel said nasally. ‘Just staying for a few days.’

Another Gallic shrug, as though Luc had forgotten all those arguments over what Poppy should be allowed to do. As though nothing I had said had ever been important or taken notice of. But then, here was a man who’d promised to love me forever. Who’d met and married me during my year in France where everything had seemed charmed and easy, whose money had greased wheels I hadn’t even known existed and whose charisma should have come with a health warning.

Gabriel and I sat in silence, listening to the rumble of Luc’s car engine as he slowly edged it around in the lane and headed back up the track towards civilisation and chilled Chardonnay. We stared at different parts of the room; my gaze was riveted on the crack in the deep enamel sink, he seemed to be finding the dresser on the opposite wall absolutely fascinating. The sun had moved out of the room now and the smell of damp was back. A few woodlice scurried busily across the stone floor, and I concentrated on those for a while.

‘Sorry about that,’ I said eventually. ‘My ex-husband and his lack of boundaries.’

‘It’s fine,’ came the muted reply.

‘How’s the nose?’

‘Um.’ The tea towel lifted. ‘It’s nearly stopped bleeding.’

‘I’m really sorry.’ The woodlice had shuffled off under the door to the walk-in pantry. I made a mental note to never keep anything that wasn’t in tins in there.

‘It was an accident.’ A cautious finger poked at the bridge of his nose. ‘It was, wasn’t it? I mean, you didn’t do it just to keep me captive here?’

‘Stephen King?’ I looked at him directly now.

‘Maybe. I read too much. Well, audio books, mostly. I’ve got a Kindle but it’s on about two words to a page.’ A bit of a grin appeared under the layers of cotton. His glasses were on the table and I could see again how thick the lenses were. ‘Eyesight’s not great.’

Without the glasses, and even with his nose swollen and his eye discoloured by the spreading bruise that the back of my head had caused, he looked model-like. Cheekbones like cheese wire and almond-shaped eyes that, in this now-shadowed room, looked almost black. Dark stubble outlined his jaw and highlighted his mouth. It seemed an awful shame to waste such good looks on me, who currently had as much desire to appreciate handsomeness as I did to take up deep-sea fishing. Which was none.

Luc was handsome. He’d also got an attractive accent. He was the kind of mistake I would only make once in a lifetime. Besides, for all I knew Gabriel was married, gay, asexual, violently insane and a narcissistic fantasist. I hoped, for his sake, that he wasn’t all of those simultaneously.

‘Well,’ I began. I didn’t know how to go about getting him out of my kitchen gracefully, particularly when I’d just broken his nose, given him a black eye and subjected him to Luc. ‘I ought to get on with, you know, stuff.’ I glanced at the bucket of now cold and scummy water in the corner where I’d been washing walls. I actually wanted a glass of wine and maybe a bacon sandwich, but felt that offering those to Gabriel would be tantamount to saying, ‘I’m a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who wants to work on a drink problem and gaining four stone in solitude and misery.’ So, I didn’t say anything.

‘What colour were you thinking of painting it?’ He was looking at the bucket too.

‘Not sure yet.’ Then, with some suspicion, because he was looking around the room again. ‘Why?’ I really hoped he wasn’t going to make me an offer to buy the cottage. Maybe he was one of those ‘house flippers’ from the programmes that Poppy liked to watch and then gossip about with her friends; where people bought derelict places really cheaply, did them up in a cursory fashion and then sold them on before the rampaging damp and lack of underpinnings became evident. And then I felt a bit insulted, because Harvest Cottage was nowhere near derelict. And had very good underpinnings. The damp was a question yet to be resolved.

‘Have you thought about using it as a location?’ The question was slow, although that might have been the amount of tea towel it was filtered through.

‘Yes. It’s a location for us to live in. I thought the boxes of stuff all over the place would be a giveaway.’

A quick headshake. ‘I mean for films.’ A pause while he looked at the blood again. ‘I work for the company filming down in Steepleton at the moment. They’re making a detective series, called Spindrift, just got the green light to go to a second series, and we’re looking for locations.’ Another quick look around the kitchen. ‘And this would be great. If you don’t do too much to it.’

A woodlouse outlier hurtled across the flags from the back door to the pantry and flung itself through the crack. The room was so quiet I could almost hear its legs scrabbling.

‘Do they… pay?’ I asked, slowly. Trying not to sound desperate.

‘Oh, yes. Depends on how long we need to shoot for, but, yep, they pay pretty well.’ He took his glasses off the table and slid them back on. ‘It’s got a good look. Unkempt.’ There was a patch over near the window where grass had grown in under the wall. ‘But picturesque,’ he added quickly. ‘And we need a location where we can film an entire storyline without being mugged by tourists. This is pretty isolated.’

Well. Money would be good. Luc was paying for Poppy, and the money from the flat had bought the cottage outright, but there would be bills I hadn’t foreseen yet. The cottage didn’t have central heating and, in Game of Thrones parlance, winter was coming. I didn’t have great hopes of the little wood-burning stove to heat the whole place, and the electricity tripped out if you plugged in more than four devices at once.

And I didn’t have a job.

‘I’ll leave you to think about it.’ Gabriel stood up. Indoors he looked taller; his head nearly rapped the beams. ‘You’ve got my number.’

‘I’ve also got the horse.’

‘Very true.’

‘Did you drive up here?’ I began to wonder. I hadn’t heard a vehicle before Luc’s, not since the early morning milker had dashed through on his motorbike on his way to the next valley.

Another headshake. ‘Walked. I don’t drive. Eyesight, you see. Not only can I not read a number plate at the required distance, I can’t even see the car the number plate is attached to.’

‘That must be…’ I tailed off. I had no idea what it must be like. Annoying? Or life changing?

‘It’s fine. You’re only two miles from Steepleton, if you go up over the cliff, and walking is a far better way to find locations than driving past. But, can I just ask for a quick tour? So that I can take a package plan back to HQ? Often we only use one room, but with this place – I think we could use the whole cottage.’

‘You want a tour. Of the cottage.’ I was desperately trying to remember if I’d picked yesterday’s pants up from the floor and whether my bedside reading looked suitably erudite. Had Poppy left shampoo and wet towels all over the bathroom? Was her room even possible to enter?

‘Just really quickly.’ Another grin. ‘I only want to get a general idea. I won’t judge, I’m not your mother.’

No, sunshine, you certainly aren’t, I thought, leading him slightly grudgingly out of the kitchen. He looked around the tiny hall, peered into the bare-floored living room, where our huge angular couch took up space like a dowager duchess in a squat. Up the stairs to the creaky landing, and a quick glance into my bedroom – where pants were not in evidence – and Poppy’s, which was ninety per cent K-pop posters. He ignored the bathroom, which was just as well.

‘It’s a lovely little place.’ I finally got him out of the front door. ‘If you give me the okay, I’ll put it forward. We would need to spend some time shooting here – we’ve got a storyline coming up about a serial killer, set to run through all nine episodes. I think this would make a great location for our killer to live.’

‘Well, I certainly won’t lie awake tonight worrying about that now,’ I said, slightly tartly.

He smiled, uncertainly. ‘Call it recompense for the broken nose. Oh, and don’t do too much work to the inside. We would need that slightly neglected vibe.’

‘Slightly neglected vibe,’ I muttered to myself, once I’d closed the door on him. Harvest Cottage wasn’t neglected. It was… it was… full of potential.

Even the woodlice laughed at that.