Читать книгу Under an Amber Sky: A Gripping Emotional Page Turner You Won’t Be Able to Put Down - Rose Alexander - Страница 18

Chapter 8

The day after her chance meeting with Darko, Sophie awoke and looked around her bedroom with fresh eyes. The snow was gone already, as if sucked back into the sea and the mountains. It had left behind it the hopeful fresh green shoots of new growth and days that, albeit slowly and almost imperceptibly, were getting longer.

She lay in bed and scrutinized the room – or what she could see of it from behind the high end-board. Her cleaning had been perfunctory to say the least, the worst of the grime gone but that was it. High above her, in all four ceiling corners, spiders’ webs drifted in an impalpable breeze. The window surround was grubby from half a century of hands leant against it, the paint on the walls cracked and crazed with age. She needed to take the house – and herself – in hand.

Throwing back the covers and leaping out of bed, she dressed quickly and made coffee, which she drank whilst tapping a pencil against her teeth and intermittently making additions to a new list. She had no car but she could get to the DIY shops on the road to Budva by bus and then call a taxi to get home.

Just a few hours later she was back, loaded with a stepladder (the taxi driver had raised his eyebrows at that one but not as high as a London cabbie would have done, and had obligingly fitted it in by collapsing one of the back seats), pots and pots of paint in various hues of white, brushes, cleaning fluid and cloths plus a hammer, nails, and various other tools she thought might come in handy.

She dumped it all downstairs, an area that had never been used for habitation but, in common with tradition in the area, was only for storage. She had been told that these konobas kept a constant temperature all through the year – hence their suitability for storing everything from dried meats to grains and wood. Stepping inside today, however, it felt more like a freezer than a storeroom. A howling draught whipped around her ankles and the wind rattled the aged wooden shutter slats. It smelt musty and unused, unloved.

The house had two sets of double doors to the street outside, one pair slightly wider than the other. The right-hand ones were the main entrance and Sophie had never even tried to open the ones on the left. But on close inspection of them now, she could clearly see where one of the doors was hanging off its hinges. She eyed it, appraising the nature of the problem and what she might be able to do about it.

It needs rehanging, she told herself, knowledgeably. She imagined Matt standing beside her, agreeing.

Yup, he nodded, sagely.

‘Maybe a couple of nails here.’ Sophie scratched her fingernail along the broken slat that was causing the problem.

You’ll have to loosen it up first, before you can straighten it, came Matt’s voice again.

‘You’re right,’ she concurred, peering closely at the problem area. Then stopped short, realizing she was actually speaking out loud, talking to an imaginary Matt and thinking – believing – that he was answering. She really had been alone for too long. Wasn’t talking to yourself the first sign of madness? She looked around. The huge stone blocks the house was built of stared blankly back at her. Or perhaps of sadness, she thought to herself desolately, the hammer hanging dejectedly from her right hand.

The idea that she could fix this ancient door herself suddenly seemed laughable. The wind blew again and it rattled and shook. The hammer fell from Sophie’s hand and landed with a sharp thud on the floor slabs. But then Matt appeared again, smiling encouragingly. Come on, Soph, he said. ‘Give it a go. You never know what you can do until you try.’

Picking up the hammer and straightening her shoulders, she tied back her hair with the band she had around her wrist and squared up to the door again.

‘Right then,’ she said, purposefully this time, intending to be heard, even if only by the old walls. ‘You’ve got me to deal with now.’

Five minutes later she’d managed to actually get the door open but had come face-to-face with the fact that she was unlikely ever to be able to get it closed again unless she managed to shore up the most badly damaged part. Bracing herself, she tried to lift the heavy, cumbersome deadweight of slatted wood into the right position, but once there, she could not let go without it falling back again. This meant that she couldn’t possibly get to it with the hammer and nails to fix it in place.

Struggling and cursing, her arms and back aching with the physical demands of what she was doing and her mind grappling with the mental challenge of trying to come up with a solution to the problem, she was oblivious to anything going on around her.

‘That ain’t the way to do it, luv.’

For a moment she thought it was the imaginary Matt who had responded, but a Matt reborn as a native Londoner with a strong estuary accent. Her heart beating in double time, she swung rapidly around and came face to face with a real person in the shape of a bald, stocky bloke who was standing right next to her. Shocked out of her skin, she let go of the door, which promptly slumped back down, lopsided and resentful.

The stranger smiled sardonically. ‘I said, that ain’t going to work.’

‘I heard what you said,’ retorted Sophie, not entirely sure why she was feeling so abrasive. There was something in his tone – something that said here’s a woman attempting to do a man’s job; that means I can patronize her – that had immediately put her back up. ‘I just didn’t expect you to speak English.’

‘Some people don’t call what I speak English.’

The pair stood there looking at each other for a few moments, silently, as if squaring up for a fight. And then Sophie emitted a burst of laughter at his sublime riposte. ‘Touché.’

‘Nope, not me, luv.’ The man put his hand to his bald head and tapped it. ‘This is all me own.’

Sophie stared at him, then shook her head, mystified.

‘Touché, toupee … OK, it’s a really bad pun …’

The next outbreak of laughing doubled Sophie over. ‘Oh my God, that was absolutely terrible,’ she gasped. ‘So bad I didn’t know what on earth you were on about until you explained and then …’ Guffaws overtook her again.

The bloke grinned. ‘Frank,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘And yourself?’

‘Sophie.’

His handshake was brief but forceful.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, automatically.

‘The pleasure is all mine.’ Frank pulled himself up to his full – which wasn’t very tall – height and looked at the collapsed door. ‘So, what seems to be the problem?’

Having briefly explained what she was attempting, between them they managed to get the door upright.

‘You really need an electric drill and screws for this,’ grunted Frank, breathing heavily with the exertion. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve got one, lurking among all that stuff in there.’ He gesticulated with his head, as both of his hands were full, towards Sophie’s purchases of the morning.

‘You suppose right,’ she sighed, pulling a sorrowful face. ‘I didn’t even think of buying one – I wouldn’t know how to use it anyway.’

Frank’s silence indicated that he couldn’t find any reason to disagree with this assertion.

‘Get your old man to do it, luv. That’s what my missus always used to do, until she found that my mate had a more powerful one.’

Sophie was silent for a moment as she took this remark in. Was he really being lewd or did she just have too vivid an imagination? Or a dirty mind? Frank’s face emerged from behind the door and she caught the expression on it. No, she had not been imagining it. She couldn’t stop herself smiling broadly again.

‘This is getting silly now,’ she commented, dryly. ‘Feeble jokes and sarcasm are one thing, but innuendo –’ She avoided addressing the issue of why her ‘old man’ wouldn’t be able to help.

Frank chortled from deep within his throat, a sound that was as forceful and brief as his handshake. ‘Sorry, luv, I’ve worked on building sites since I were fifteen and it’s hard to change the habits of a lifetime.’

He hammered a few nails into the doorframe.

‘But it’s true that my wife did leave me for my mate, and also true that he did have a higher voltage power drill than me. She didn’t go because of that, though.’

Frank dangled the hammer from his hand as he began to examine his handiwork closely. He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate on the leaving-wife saga and Sophie didn’t ask. That was another thing she had got out of the habit of over the last few weeks and months – being interested in others, wanting to find out about them.

Before, she had always been curious, especially about people and their families. Relationships fascinated her and she was almost alone among teachers in enjoying parents’ evenings, relishing the opportunity to see the students with their mums and dads, or occasionally their grandparents or older siblings, which often proved so revealing.

‘I think you need a new lock.’ Frank had been absorbed in his inspection of the door but now he peered inside, up the ramshackle stairs to the bare, wide hallway above and the rickety door that led to the garden. His eyes wandered back down to the paint pots piled up in the centre of the floor, alone in the emptiness. ‘Not that there’s much to lock up.’

‘I’ve only just moved in,’ retorted Sophie, defensively. ‘It’s – well, it needs a bit of work.’

‘You’re not wrong there, gel.’ Frank stepped further inside and Sophie moved aside to make way for him before she realized that she hadn’t invited him in. He looked around, appraisingly, running his hand over the exposed stone walls. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket to investigate the roof beams, then, appearing satisfied with what he’d seen of the ground floor, moved towards the stairs.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I need to have a good look around if I’m to help you sort this mess out.’

‘I haven’t asked you to sort it out.’ All Sophie’s earlier goodwill deserted her and she felt rage flare up inside. ‘I don’t know if I want you to. Hell, I don’t even know you.’

Frank paused, slowly looking back over his shoulder in her direction. ‘Name’s Frank Savill, Savill’s General Builders and Roofers. No job too big or too small. I think you’ll find you need me.’

‘I don’t want help.’ Sophie’s tone was obdurate and reinforced by her body language, arms folded across her chest, feet wide apart, grounded. ‘I can look after myself – and the house – perfectly well.’

The expression on Frank’s face said everything about what he thought of that response. Sophie glanced down at herself, at her filthy torn jeans and tatty sweatshirt, and then at her house, taking in its air of neglect, the rotting stairs in the corner. She thought for a wild moment of making up an ‘old man’ who was about to come home and would not be best pleased to find a stranger there, but then thought better of it. Such a lie would only be found out and it was a bit primeval, really, to think she had to invent a husband when she already had a perfectly good one, if only he weren’t dead.

‘Well, maybe I could do with another pair of hands, just for a bit,’ she reluctantly conceded, at the same time as a wave of nausea struck her.

This strange man, this uninvited visitor, had made her think of Matt in a joking way. She could not believe she could be so callous, so uncaring. As she followed Frank around the house she became more and more appalled at her betrayal of Matt’s memory.

Back downstairs, Frank took a seat on the stone between the two front doors that Anna had dubbed the coffee stone, and produced from his bag two bottles of beer. Sophie, unable to articulate or even properly understand her distress, sank down beside him and wordlessly accepted the bottle he proffered towards her.

‘I’ve actually got a local builder coming round to see me tomorrow.’ It was not strictly true – all she’d done was ask Darko if he could recommend someone – but she couldn’t, at that moment, think of any other way to put Frank off, to get rid of him. ‘I know you mean well but I don’t know how it would work, to have more than one person on the job.’

She took a swig of beer.

‘Do you speak the language?’

‘Well, no.’ Sophie pursed her lips cautiously, her resolve wavering already. ‘But – I’m sure he’ll speak some English and he knows how to restore these old houses. I don’t want anything fancy; I just want it habitable. I can’t afford anything other than that.’

Frank shrugged and drained his bottle.

‘Well, luv, if you think a pretty smile and a heap of charm is enough to get you by, then good for you. But to my mind, you can’t do without me. I’ve been working in Belgrade for a few years, I can make myself understood in the local lingo, plus I can start straight away. You’re going to need new plumbing and electrics; I can see that already. All those rotten beams and floorboards need replacing, not to mention new plasterwork – and I haven’t even had a good look round yet so I should imagine that there’s a lot more of what we like to call hidden nasties lurking, awaiting discovery. All the methods you use have to be earthquake compliant. You get lots of tremors in these parts; I’m not sure if you’re aware of that, not as much as those poor buggers across the sea in Italy but still, enough to have to take notice of …’

As Frank elaborated on the myriad jobs that must be done, all of which Sophie was only too aware of, she found herself drifting away, to Matt and how she would have handed all this over to him, let him deal with it, left him to strike the bargains and so on. Now Matt wasn’t here and she had to take the lead. You can do it, she whispered internally to herself, incanting the words like a prayer. She had always thought that she couldn’t do it alone, that she didn’t know how. But maybe she could. Maybe she had just never given herself the chance because she’d never had to; but now she had to she would find that she was more than capable of rising to the challenge. She hoped so, anyway.

She looked at Frank, still opining about all the problems that simply had to be addressed in this ridiculous old pile she had landed herself with. He was right, she couldn’t possibly do the heavy work herself, even if she knew the first thing about how to go about it. There was no other builder waiting in the wings and she had been shrinking from the challenge of finding one. She called to mind one of her mum’s favourite phrases: Never look a gift horse in the mouth. It seemed that Frank was indeed that thing and so she should take advantage of his serendipitous arrival.

‘Something funny, luv?’ He snorted sardonically. ‘Not much to smile at that I can see. This is going to cost you an arm and a leg, getting this lot sorted.’

Sophie resolved to remain strong. ‘It can’t cost an arm and a leg because I haven’t got that much.’ She considered for a moment. ‘I can give you a forearm. Perhaps a calf. No more than that.’

Frank drained his beer and gave a hearty sigh. ‘You go and get us another beer,’ he instructed. ‘And while you’re at it, I’ll get my notepad out and start making some plans.’

‘OK.’ Sophie went back into the house to find her purse. She wobbled slightly on the uneven stones and realized she was a bit tipsy. It was so long since she had drunk alcohol. The sensation was pleasant, like floating, and she wanted more of it.

At the mini-market, she bought four beers and a couple of bottles of wine. Might as well get some stocks in while she was here, she reasoned. The shop lady, who had chestnut brown hair with an immaculate permanent wave, smiled as she always did and greeted her in Montenegrin. Sophie had already established that she didn’t speak any English, and together with Sophie’s incompetence in the local language that meant that meaningful communication of any kind was impossible.

Summoning her courage, she replied, tentatively, to the handing over of her change. ‘Hvala.’ She tried her best to imitate the way she had heard the word for ‘thank you’ said by locals but even to her own ears it came out sounding wrong. Despite this, the woman’s smile broadened.

‘U redu je,’ she said, followed by a further incomprehensible stream of unfathomable words.

Sophie hurried out, feeling further pangs of self-reproach as the doorbell clanged behind her. Her one word seemed to have opened the floodgates but surely the shop lady couldn’t have thought she had gone from absolutely zilch to near fluency in the few days since she last went in to buy some milk? But her enthusiasm was deeply affecting, proof of how much people wanted to be friendly, wanted to talk to her, and how grateful they were when she made the slightest effort. She resolved to try harder, despite the difficulty of this language that seemed so much more impenetrable than French or Spanish – which she also had never been any good at.

Frank seemed pleased with her purchases, examining her beer choices closely. She hadn’t been able to find the same one that he had produced but had chosen a few others, basing her choice solely on how much she liked the label, a technique that had never let her down before. Opening one of the bottles, Frank took a long swig.

‘Thirsty work, renovations,’ he said. ‘I’ve had a good look round and I reckon I can get started tomorrow. Here’s what I’ll need straight away.’ He handed her a page torn from his notebook. ‘Oh, and I’ll take the top bedroom on the left,’ he added, casually.

A shock of horror flooded Sophie’s body. She opened her mouth to protest, to express her displeasure at his assumption that he’d been invited to move in as well as to work for her, then abruptly shut it again. He might as well stay. There was plenty of space.

‘I’ve got me sleeping bag but I’ll need a mattress and a couple of chairs, please. Folding ones will do. And don’t worry about dinner. I’ll be going out in a bit.’

Laughing, partly in disbelief and partly in admiration of his chutzpah – she’d agreed to let him stay, not to be his personal cook and housekeeper – Sophie poured herself a generous glass of wine. To hell with it. She had a lodger whether she wanted one or not. She sipped the wine, the taste that had grown unfamiliar after so many months of abstinence bringing memories of happier times flooding back. In for a penny, in for a pound. She quite liked the idea of going to bed a bit drunk tonight.