With an effort, Aaron turned away to join another conversation. Sometimes being the elder brother meant protecting Lee for all he was worth or helping him when he was at rock bottom, but right now it meant leaving him to interact with someone who’d never done him any harm but nonetheless was a connection to bad memories.
As the evening slid into night, the light from the kitchen spilling onto the patio, Aaron found himself in an awkward conversation with Genevieve. ‘Shall I go upstairs and pick up the stuff I left here? Or come another time?’ she asked, her eyes guarded.
Aaron tried to say the right thing. ‘Whenever suits you best.’
‘If you don’t care one way or another I’ll come back another time, when there isn’t half the village here to stare.’ She tossed down the last of her wine and muttered, ‘Bye.’ Before he could protest, she stalked off around the side of the building and into the night.
Nettled at how he seemed to have ended up in the wrong, he drifted over to the furthest corner of the garden, looking out into a darkness punctuated by the winking pinpricks of boats running under lights.
‘So Lee has a child?’ He didn’t need to turn to know who had spoken. He’d been aware of Clancy as she crossed to join him, her jacket fastened now, her hands in its pockets.
Behind them the party continued. Mick, Nick, Rick and Jordy were getting raucous and gales of masculine laughter rang out on the summer night. ‘Yes – Daisy,’ Aaron said. ‘She’s four.’
Her voice was stiff. ‘So somewhere in the second year after Alice left, Lee fathered a child. Despite his broken heart?’
‘They’re the basic facts,’ Aaron agreed carefully. He turned towards her, seeing the wariness on her face. He touched her hand, letting a couple of their fingers link. It felt important that he make contact, as if that would keep her there, listening. ‘When he was living alone in Northamptonshire, isolated from his family, friends and Nelson’s Bar, he did see women. Why shouldn’t he? Women like him. Alice had crapped on him.’ Mentally, he heard Aunt Norma sniffing, ‘Don’t say crap!’
‘Beth was a woman he saw for a couple of months,’ he continued, ‘but she got pregnant. It wasn’t what they’d expected but they had a go at making a family for the baby. It proved a rocky road. Beth never located her maternal side and when they split up she wanted Lee to have Daisy. He’s a good dad and he found a childminder and fought to keep her and his job.’
He paused, hoping she’d join the conversation.
‘Sounds hard,’ she conceded, after several moments.
‘It was,’ he agreed. She hadn’t unlinked her fingers from his. It made him think of another summer night in a different garden, when all his senses had been tuned to Clancy, the shape of her against him, her heat, the shoulders and neck laid bare by a summer top. With an effort, he brought his mind back to the present. ‘He decided to come back to Norfolk in time for Daisy to begin school here. He’ll get his own place when the sale of his house in Northants goes through.’
For several moments, Clancy said nothing. One side of her face was visible in the light streaming from the house, the other in shadow.
‘I expect it looks strange from your perspective,’ Aaron went on, encouraged that she seemed to be weighing his words. ‘You probably think I’ve made too much of Lee’s fragility. I can only tell you how hyper-aware we all were of him questioning whether life was really worth the effort it takes to live and that we saw Daisy as someone for him to live for. Then—’ he flicked a glance behind him to check nobody else was within earshot ‘—he said he wanted Daisy to know us all properly in case anything ever happened to him. We were terrified all over again. That’s why we’re hyper-protective of him, however faint a threat something seems.’
He waited. He’d opened his heart in a way he hadn’t really done to anyone apart from his parents. Not Genevieve. Not a single one of his friends.
The wind ran its fingers through Clancy’s hair. She was wearing make-up tonight, mascara and professional-looking eyeliner, and he thought it was the first time he’d seen it on her since she’d arrived in Nelson’s Bar. She was beautiful without make-up, but with it she was much more sophisticated. He thought about her life in London and imagined her going out to swanky venues with her entrepreneurial colleagues and the unknown Will. In evening dress he’d bet she looked stunning. Perhaps even more stunning than she did biting her lip now and staring at him.
Aaron didn’t get cities and why people wanted to live on top of one another like in a hive or a nest. But when he’d first met Clancy he’d been entranced by her city gloss, the things she talked about. It was lust or infatuation, a crush in other words, but it had given him a week of cloud nine, euphoria. Before it crashed.
He was pretty sure she’d react badly if he dipped his head and kissed her again now but that didn’t stop him wanting to, even a non-swanky, non-city boy like him.
A gusty sigh escaped her. ‘Thanks for helping me understand.’ A pause drew out. He could almost see her ordering her thoughts. ‘Did Lee never show what you call his “fragility” before Alice left?’
Aaron squeezed her fingers, pretty sure he knew what was coming. ‘He was always much moodier than the rest of the family.’ He went on even as she opened her mouth to speak. ‘You’re going to suggest that he might have suffered from depression if Alice had stayed, aren’t you? I guess we’ll never know for certain … because Alice left. And Lee fell into a deep black hole he’s never completely climbed out of.’
She nodded, slowly. Not long after that, she said her goodbyes and left, as if the little taste of the village social life had been enough.
Chapter Ten
Will
Want to be the one to tell you Renée and I got married yesterday. V quiet but I know my sis put pix on her Instagra …
Reading the partial WhatsApp message on the lock-screen of the silver iPhone in Aaron’s hand sent a cold, slimy feeling sliding down his spine. His fingers itched to tap the notification and read on but that’s what password protection and face recognition had been invented to prevent.
The phone was Clancy’s.
He’d been holding it last night when Lee had arrived and he must have slipped it into his pocket out of habit. Hooked up to his satellite broadband, the phone was still receiving this morning and it wasn’t until he’d seen that awful notification that he realised what he’d done.
So there went a lazy Sunday morning. He must return Clancy’s property.
And only a monster, having read the first part of that message, would shove the phone at her and run.
He went downstairs to let Nelson outside, while he thought. The garden was a mess of empty beer cans and bottles left by those people who evidently couldn’t be bothered to dump their empties in the box he’d provided. He gathered up the debris, grumbling under his breath. At least none of the bottles had smashed, a huge hazard for unwary paws.
Nelson sniffed around for pizza crumbs, bushy eyebrows twitching.
By the time Aaron had finished it was nine-forty-five. He tapped the home button on Clancy’s phone again and took another guilty look at the shitty beginning to the message Will had sent. It had now been joined by an iMessage notification from someone called Asila, her avatar a pretty Asian woman with glasses. Clancy, can you ring me ASAP, hon? xxx Will’s avatar was a well-groomed guy with stylish blond hair. Aaron pushed his fingers through his permanently ruffled curls self-consciously. He rocked an ungroomed look himself.
He put down Clancy’s phone and rang the Roundhouse landline. The ring tone sounded a few times before Clancy answered, sounding faintly puzzled. Probably she hadn’t given the number out. ‘Hello?’ she said, then, probably remembering that occasionally somebody telephoned to book. ‘Roundhouse Row.’
‘It’s Aaron,’ he said. ‘I have your mobile phone. I must have stuck it into my pocket after taking the photo of you and the sunset. Sorry.’
‘I thought that was probably what had happened.’ She gave a small laug
h. ‘In the Nelson’s Bar “not spot” I only use it for taking photos so I didn’t miss it until this morning.’
It was nice to hear her laugh but he had a feeling he was about to be a mood changer. He cleared his throat. ‘Um, thing is, I’ve got a silver iPhone too, so I tried to unlock it, thinking it was mine. It was only when I read the first part of a message on your lock-screen that I realised it wasn’t.’
‘OK.’ She sounded so unconcerned that she obviously wasn’t getting a subtext.
He had to be blunt. ‘The message is a WhatsApp from Will and it’s about something you need to know. Come up here and download the rest on my Wi-Fi if you want.’
Silence. Then he heard her take a long breath. ‘I’m guessing it’s nothing good?’
At that moment, there were few things he wanted less than to be asked to read what he could see of the message out. ‘You should read it for yourself,’ he said gruffly. ‘I’ll be in until about twelve-thirty, then I’m going to my parents’ for lunch. Come round the back. I’ll be in the garden or kitchen.’
‘OK. I’ll come up now.’
While he waited for her, he made coffee in his filter jug. He couldn’t usually be bothered but she’d asked for filter coffee at the Honeybee Café yesterday at lunchtime. By the time he’d grabbed milk and sugar and carried it out to set on the table with her iPhone, Nelson was doing his greeting dance in front of Clancy, who’d paused just inside the garden to fuss him.
Make-up free this morning, her face was pale and freckles danced across the bridge of her nose. She was wearing shorts; not the buttock-grazing kind but short enough to draw Aaron’s gaze.
‘Coffee?’ he offered, indicating the pot.
‘Thanks.’ As soon as she’d created her preferred concoction with milk and a half-spoon of sugar she picked up her phone from the table.
Aaron trained his gaze on the sea, blue and sparkling. ‘Feel free to go off somewhere to check your messages. You’ll get connectivity anywhere in the house and garden.’
‘It’s bad enough that I might want to be alone to read it, is it?’ But she came to sit beside him on the garden bench, parking the coffee mug beside her. Her hair blew against his skin and it felt like being stroked with feathers.
He knew she was about to be hurt and he couldn’t do anything about it. He revised his earlier reluctance to tell her what he knew. ‘If you want, I can tell you the little bit I accidentally read.’
‘No, I’ll …’ She dropped her gaze to her phone, regarding it as she might a venomous snake. Then she tapped and swiped at the screen, paused, and sat for several moments with her head bowed. ‘So you read that Will has married Renée,’ she said, her voice high and brittle.
He nodded, feeling almost sick on her behalf as she absorbed the blow. He hadn’t felt this bad for another person since Alice left Lee waiting for her in church.
Nelson came up and propped his big shaggy head on Clancy’s lap as if sensing she needed comfort.
Clancy stroked him behind the ears. Nelson’s eye half-closed in pleasure. ‘It was an impulse, apparently. Neither of them wanted to wait. He thought he’d better tell me. Didn’t want me to find out by seeing it on his sister Mel’s Instagram account.’
‘Shit.’ He winced. ‘I suppose he had to tell you but … well, shit.’
‘I certainly cut up rough when he kept me in the dark about accidentally falling in love with Renée so I suppose I can’t complain about him coming clean now.’ It was difficult to tell whether the noise she made was a giggle or a sob. ‘I think it would be a good idea if I checked out Mel’s Instagram and saw the wedding photos. Get all the pain over with at once. Would you mind if I sat here with you and did it? I feel a bit like a dog frightened by a storm.’ As if to demonstrate how that felt, Nelson whined.
‘I don’t mind at all.’
Clancy fumbled again with her phone, scrolling shakily until, judging by the way she froze, she discovered what she was looking for. After what seemed like a long time she turned the screen so that Aaron could see. ‘Renée looked very pretty.’ She gasped another of those half-hysterical giggles. ‘The last picture I saw of her was … accidental.’
Aaron took her hand, absolutely out of things to say. It seemed indecent to look as happy as Will and Renée did at the expense of the woman quivering beside him. The fair woman in the cream silk dress, beaming as she gazed adoringly at the well-groomed blond man from the WhatsApp message, wasn’t a patch on Clancy, in his opinion. Though conventionally pretty, she was insipid, not striking or vivid, like Clancy. Intelligence didn’t shimmer from speaking eyes; her hair didn’t shine different colours as she moved.
‘When it happened,’ Clancy said drearily, ‘it came as a total shock. I thought we were committed.’
‘Planning to get married does sound like a commitment,’ he observed, tightening his fingers on hers.
‘I suppose I was doing most of the wedding planning. All of it, really. Will must already have been dragging his feet but because I was so certain of the path we were on, I didn’t take it in,’ she admitted. ‘Then one day we’d scheduled a conference call. Monty and I were in a hotel after a meeting in Leicester, two people from the client company were in their offices somewhere and Renée, also from the client company, was with Will in his office at IsVid. She was the client’s in-house creative and they’d been working on video footage over the preceding weeks. I hadn’t met her. He hadn’t told me he’d once loved her from afar.’
When she paused, Aaron could hear only leaves stirring in the breeze and the hiss of waves breaking fifty yards below at the foot of the cliff. ‘He and Renée got close?’
She laughed, a hard, ragged sound. ‘Will somehow didn’t realise – or forgot – that the conferencing software was already streaming from his computer. Monty hooked us all up and there was this extraordinary image on the screen. It was like watching sex through a letter box. You could just see a segment of a man standing up, his trousers sliding down and a wo-woman’s legs over his arms.’ She started rushing her words as if she had to get all this bad stuff out of her head. ‘Monty started shouting at Will. The clients began to laugh, probably thinking some hacker had planted porn footage. But I knew what I was looking at. I’d heard Will’s voice – how could I not know? And the things he said to her were things he’d said to me! The clients laughed harder than ever. Then Renée started saying, “Oh, no! Oh, no!” as she realised they were visible via the conference software. And their laughter stopped like a flick of a switch. They recognised her voice and realised it was live, I suppose.’
‘Jeez,’ Aaron said helplessly, trying to imagine how shitty it had felt.
Clancy flashed a glance at him. ‘Monty apologised to everyone and ended the conference call. It’s a bit of a blur after that. Monty drove me back to London. I was in shock. Will met me at home and confessed to being in love with Renée. He was horrified to have hurt me but said he was relieved the lies and subterfuge were over. So shock number two: it wasn’t just a fling. We were both directors of IsVid, owned our apartment together, and we were supposed to be getting married. It was one hell of a heap of shit.’
‘I can only imagine.’ But so clearly that his heart bumped as if he’d experienced it with her.
Her voice dropped into a dull monotone. ‘I was in a daze. At the limit of what I could cope with, I suppose. Monty got to hear that the clients – other than Renée, no doubt – had found the story about the video-conference-turned-porn-flick too good to keep to themselves. Our conferencing software saved automatically and the clients had access privileges to any call they were party to. Someone there made sure the footage was shared. I suppose Renée could have asked her HR department to investigate but decided it might not work in her favour.’
A shudder ran through her and he wished he could think of something comforting to say. He passed her coffee, holding the mug steady until he knew she’d got it so it wouldn’t splash over her bare legs, though he wouldn’t have minded splashin
g the hot coffee over the absent Will’s lap.
‘So.’ She dragged out a sigh. ‘Worried, he said, about our image, Monty came up with the excellent idea of saying it had been me Will was … with. Will and I had plans to marry, so it would downgrade the incident. Asila and Tracey told him not to be a moron and I should have let them stop him. Instead, I lost my sense of proportion and put out an IsVid newsletter saying the woman Will Martin had screwed on the desk during a video conference had not been me.’
‘Oh.’ Aaron cringed for her.
‘Yeah.’ She sat up a bit straighter. ‘It wasn’t seen to be normal behaviour. The newsletter got on social media and IsVid was tagged. Asila and Tracey suggested I took time out but Monty went further and said he didn’t see how we could all continue to work together. And it wasn’t Will, the one who had messed up, who was to leave! It was me. Monty said Will had “kept his composure”. So that’s what was important? Not ethics and loyalty, not slaving to make the business a success? It was composure.’
He was still holding her hand. ‘Harsh.’
‘I don’t even remember everything I said now. I was distraught. Betrayed. I certainly didn’t keep my composure.’ With her free hand, she brought her coffee mug, still trembling, to her lips. ‘So I tied them and Will up in a financial knot. You could say I was protecting myself or you could say I was being a vindictive bitch. Then I told Will he could sort out un-planning the wedding and I left for Nelson’s Bar.’
Their clasped hands had somehow slipped down to her leg. Her skin felt chill, as if she’d gone into shock just telling him what had happened. ‘Are they still in the financial knot?’
Absently, she nodded. ‘I don’t know why they didn’t see the possible consequences before they asked me to “put the business first” by leaving it. The directors own equal shares and therefore receive equal dividends. I refused to sign a waiver so they have to keep paying me. Directors’ homes secure borrowing at the bank so Will’s in a tricky situation, as he has no alternative security. He suggested we sell the apartment to separate our finances. I said no. He asked that I sell out to Renée. I said no. Add to that: the others will have to raise the finance to buy me out and you see I left them in a right bloody mess.’
A Summer to Remember Page 9