‘Wow.’ It had stretched his brain just to follow it all. He watched her drain her coffee and set the mug down. ‘I don’t know what to say … except that I’m truly sorry you’ve had to endure all this shit. What comes next?’
She shrugged, a world of trouble in her gaze. ‘One day I think I’m punishing Will for something he couldn’t help: falling in love with Renée. Next moment I hate him for letting me find out the way I did, for not keeping his attraction to her platonic until he’d reversed out of our relationship, for letting me be humiliated. Then I think I’m a horrible bitch … One day I suppose I’ll break the cycle and know what to do.’ She sighed. ‘Will’s last email said he wasn’t the love of my life.’
He digested that. ‘What do you think?’
She frowned out at the horizon, where the sea silvered just before it met the sky. ‘We had something built up over time, on respect and sharing. Matching intellects, similar backgrounds.’
He nodded understandingly. ‘I suppose Genevieve and I had all those things too.’
She frowned. ‘But she wasn’t the love of your life and so you didn’t allow yourself to be railroaded.’
‘True,’ he acknowledged gently. ‘She was manipulating things to get a greater commitment; I was manipulating them to avoid it. If I could go back and be more honest sooner, I would. I hurt someone I was very fond of.’
‘Fond of? She’d be hurt by that too.’ She fell to watching nearby fronds of Black Dragon Grass dancing in the wind.
Aaron looked at her hand in his. It was small with a smattering of tiny freckles, her nails neat ovals. She probably wore gloves for the jobs around Roundhouse Row that might break them.
‘I like your garden,’ she said suddenly. ‘When we were young, Alice and I used to say we’d have a garden centre one day.’
‘I didn’t know either of your interests lay in that direction,’ he said, accepting that she needed a change of subject.
‘They don’t. It was just because of our surnames – Moss and Nettles. Do you garden in winter?’
‘Some.’ He thought of a way to provide her with a reason to stay if she wasn’t ready to be on her own yet. ‘But it’s so restricted by the weather that I have a side business. Want to see?’
The sun caught her eyes as she glanced at him questioningly. ‘Sounds interesting.’
‘I think so.’ He went to the kitchen door and took down a key from a hook then led her to his workshop on the side of the house, switching on the light as they entered.
She halted as she saw the parade of glossy instruments on the wall. ‘Wow. Guitars! Lots of.’ Then she looked around at his woodworking machinery, the router, a couple of electric saws, a pillar drill, and all the hand tools on racks or stands. ‘You make them?’
‘That’s right. Some I make to commission, others I make for stock for anyone who wants to buy off the peg.’ He lifted one down from the wall. ‘I’ve nearly finished this. It’s a Fender-style Jaguar in mahogany, sprayed British Racing Green. The action’s a bit high. That means the strings aren’t close to the fretboard. Some people don’t like it in case when they’re bending a string it slips under another, but it’s less likely to buzz.’ He put it back and took down another. ‘I chose a natural finish for this one, so it’s clear-lacquered rather than painted. It’s semi-acoustic, which means it has a hollow body and doesn’t have to be plugged in to play. The body’s oak, the neck rosewood and the fretboard black walnut.’
‘You played well last night.’ Her pallor had warmed a touch.
‘I think it would be almost impossible to make guitars if I wasn’t at least competent. I wouldn’t understand what I could do or why I was doing it.’ He took her around each instrument, explaining which woods he’d used and where he’d got them, and that people often went for oak because it seemed a mark of quality but actually it was so brittle that it wasn’t his favourite to work with. He played a couple of scales on a semi-acoustic so she could hear the notes drifting onto the air. Then his landline began to ring.
She glanced at the extension on the wall of the workshop. ‘Don’t ignore it on my account.’
‘It’ll be my mum, probably.’ But when he answered the voice that came at him down the line was high-pitched and excited.
‘Uncle Aaron, I haven’t seen you for ages. It’s nearly dinnertime, Granny says.’
Aaron grinned at the indignation in the passionate little voice. ‘I had a lot of tidying up to do this morning,’ he fibbed. ‘Tell Granny I’ll be there.’ After a little more chitchat, he replaced the receiver, aware of a slight sense of disappointment that Clancy had moved to the door.
‘It’s time I went,’ she said, making a valiant effort at a casual smile. ‘Thank you for letting me use your Wi-Fi and for … listening.’
‘You could come to Mum’s with me for lunch,’ he suggested. ‘She never minds one more.’
‘No thanks,’ she said quickly. Then smiled apologetically. ‘This is going to sound so ungracious as you’ve been so kind, but I don’t want to go somewhere else I’m not wanted. Not today. I’d be awful company anyway. I’m going to go for a long walk and mutter to myself about the unfairness of life.’
‘OK.’ He’d feel much the same in her shoes. He busied himself with turning out the light and locking the workshop door. ‘If you want to stay here and use the Wi-Fi …?’
She screwed up her face. ‘Like to reply to Will? No thanks. Wouldn’t do to disturb the honeymoon.’ Then she managed a smile. ‘Thanks again. See you.’ Hands in pockets, she began to back off.
Aaron clicked his fingers to Nelson. ‘We’ll walk with you till I turn off.’
She shrugged, but hovered while he found Nelson’s lead and stopped him bouncing around with excitement long enough to clip it onto his collar. They walked together down Long Lane until they reached the turn to Frenchmen’s Way.
Aaron paused, but Clancy carried on walking. ‘Thanks again,’ she threw over her shoulder. Evidently, she wasn’t going to hang around long enough for him to re-invite her to lunch.
He watched her walking away, her chin at a defiant angle. If he hadn’t just witnessed the pain she’d gone through he would have thought that she was completely comfortable in her own skin.
Chapter Eleven
Almost a fortnight after the pizza night in Aaron’s garden, Clancy was still ordering herself, ‘Don’t think about Will and Renée’s wedding’ but it was like that game ‘Don’t think of an elephant’ when, of course, all you could then think about was an elephant.
An elephant would have been a relief. What had been floating before her eyes since she’d seen Mel’s Instagram account were the beaming faces of two people who hadn’t been able to wait to tie the knot. Will in an unfamiliar suit, Renée in an ivory silk dress, not quite a wedding dress but adequate when dressed up with flowers and an elaborate up-do.
It made Clancy remember her own wedding dress which was, presumably, still in Tracey’s spare room where she’d hung it so Will wouldn’t invoke bad luck by seeing it before the supposed big day. Cue hollow laughter.
The erstwhile plans for her emphatically-not-going-to-happen wedding taunted her. Cream bouquet and buttonholes, duck-egg cravats. Morning suits in pewter grey. Reception at the Gladstone Library in Whitehall Place …
Much better to think of elephants.
Two of the three holiday cottages were occupied just now, but the guests had gone off in their cars. She spent the morning mowing the lawns and was weeding the front patch at number four Roundhouse Row, deciding which were weeds and which were plants by drawing on her memories of helping Aunt Sally in her garden. She was enjoying the scent of damp earth, when Aaron’s cousin Jordy strolled up hailing her as if he’d known her for years. ‘Got a minute? I want to ask you something.’
Jordy seemed to wear a permanent cocky grin. Older than Aaron, his dark curly hair was shot with silver and shone as if he used an oily product on it. She’d liked his quiet wife, Anabelle, when she’d met he
r at Aaron’s, but hadn’t been able to snatch much conversation with her. Jordy had been so loud. Clancy straightened up, still holding her trowel. ‘Ask away,’ she said politely.
‘It’s Harry,’ he began, folding his arms and frowning. ‘My son, Harry Drew.’
‘I’ve met him,’ Clancy acknowledged cautiously. She wasn’t a parent and wasn’t sure whether Jordy was likely to complain if she said she’d seen Harry and his friend Rory cliff jumping and hadn’t immediately brought it to Jordy’s attention. She vaguely remembered a saying about it taking a village to bring up a child – which sounded ridiculous because surely a child ought to be brought up by its parents? – and wondered whether there was some Nelson’s Bar etiquette she’d transgressed.
‘He says you’re quite cool,’ Jordy said, settling himself comfortably on the front step. ‘Trouble is, the little bugger thinks he knows better than I do about university. He’s got a place at Leicester but he says he’s not sure he wants to go. But there’s not much here for kids. I want him to get to uni and meet girls. He spends a ton of time with young Rory but Rory’s not the brightest button in the box. You’re a smart cookie. What do you think?’
‘I don’t know either of you very well, so I’m not sure,’ Clancy offered apologetically, gazing at the crafty-looking man who’d appeared just as she’d been failing for the hundredth time to stop thinking about Will and weddings, the do-anything-for-love thing he’d crashed into with Renée. ‘Maybe Harry would rather get a job? He can always go to uni later.’
Jordy gave a short laugh. ‘Then why hasn’t he tried to get a job this summer instead of lazing about? His mother says maybe he needs a gap year but I think it might turn into a gap thirty years or so.’ His white teeth flashed. ‘You’ve been to university. I asked Aaron and he said you’d got a Master’s degree.’
‘Lots of people have,’ she assured him, slightly surprised Aaron had remembered something that had been mentioned in passing when she was talking to Genevieve about insurance. ‘I honestly don’t know what I can tell Harry. Or you.’
‘Oh.’ Jordy looked disappointed. ‘Only it causes a lot of acrimony between me and his mum. Won’t you even talk to him?’ He sounded injured.
‘If he has any specific questions I can help with, of course,’ she agreed. ‘But isn’t it up to him what he does with his life?’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you were footing the bill.’ Jordy sighed as he got up and said his farewells, leaving Clancy bemused but relieved that the meeting was over. She might mention it to Aaron when she saw him. If she saw him. Nelson hadn’t needed a dog-sitter for the past couple of weeks as the owners of the big house where Aaron and one of the Mick/Nick/Rick brothers were apparently creating a knot garden were in Nice for a month. Nelson was welcome in their absence.
She hoped Aaron wasn’t avoiding her because she’d been such a wimp that she couldn’t open the message from Will without someone there to hold her hand. Literally. He might be sick to death of emotional females after his break-up with Genevieve.
Clancy had moved next door to number five when Kaz from the B&B arrived. The sun had come out and she’d scraped her hair back in a butterfly clasp.
‘You’re here!’ Kaz beamed over the fence, the apples of her cheeks rosy in the sunshine. ‘I was just going to call at the Roundhouse and invite you for lunch.’
‘Um, what an unexpected pleasure,’ Clancy said tentatively, straightening up with a handful of bindweed. If most people invited you for lunch you could take it at face value but she’d found that when the inviter ran a commercial establishment you might find yourself paying £50 for an event put on by a business networking group.
Kaz looked taken aback at her tepid response. ‘You don’t have to but we thought if we gave you lunch at the Duke of Bronte we could pick your brains.’
Clancy, remembering that the Duke of Bronte was the real name of the B&B and feeling she’d sounded ungrateful said, ‘Sounds lovely. When were you thinking?’
Kaz looked at her watch. ‘It’s quarter to twelve so if we wander up there now we’ll be just right.’
Taken aback, Clancy gazed down at her jeans, a gentle shade of green at the bottom hem and brown at the knees. ‘I need a shower and—’
Kaz batted that idea away with a pshaw. ‘You always look gorgeous. Oli wants to meet you and he’s got to meet the bank manager at three.’ She didn’t actually say, ‘So look lively!’ but she made little beckoning motions and began to back down the garden path.
‘OK. If you don’t mind.’ Clancy shrugged. She couldn’t imagine going to lunch in London in gardening clothes but life was pretty informal in Nelson’s Bar. Also, in London, the nearest thing she had to a garden was a jardinière in the bay window of the lounge, a circle of black wrought iron supporting five pot plants. They’d found it at an antique fair during a weekend in the Cotswolds, a weekend of togetherness and laughter containing no hint that Will had once loved another woman hopelessly – more than he loved Clancy. And that one day that woman would reappear, so would the love, and Will would act on it.
She put away her gardening tools and turned her mind to enjoying the stroll up Droody Road, the tang of salt heavy on the air. Droody Road had a pavement as befitted the main road in the centre of the village and some of the larger rendered houses were painted yellow, blue or pink. A couple, quite imposing, were built of beautiful red brick, mellow in the sunlight.
Kaz chatted nineteen to the dozen about alterations they were considering to the B&B and Clancy became interested, remembering Aaron intimating that he saw the B&B as an asset to the village. When they reached the stone building they paused to admire its gables and many windows, then Kaz seated Clancy on the lawn at a table with a pretty yellow parasol, saying, ‘Just popping in for sarnies and fizz.’
When she reappeared minutes later it was with a covered platter of sandwiches and a man in tow, who was carrying a tray. ‘This is Oli, my husband.’ Kaz beamed, which seemed her default expression, the breeze ruffling her brown hair. ‘He talked to Aaron at the village meeting and Aaron mentioned you’d worked for a rural organisation.’
Clancy waited for Oli to put down an appetising-looking bottle of Prosecco and three glasses so they could shake hands, thinking that Aaron seemed to have talked about her quite a lot at the village meeting, what with first Jordy and then Kaz approaching her for information. Probably people were curious about a newcomer to the village and some would have known Alice. She wished that she’d visited Alice when she was living happily in the village with Lee, but Alice had always wanted to come to London and as it meant a longer visit, Alice finding it easier to get away from Roundhouse Row than Clancy did from IsVid, Clancy had agreed. Lee had occasionally come for the day but would leave Alice while he returned – usually with an air of relief – to Nelson’s Bar.
‘So I thought perhaps we could have a chinwag,’ Oli pronounced, pulling the clingfilm off the platter and helping himself to two triangular sandwiches. ‘Has Kaz told you we’re thinking of extending?’ The fizz frothed into the glasses as he poured it, sparkling in the sunshine. ‘At the village meeting Ernie said we need a bigger bar and we’re wondering if we could extend it; whether it would be worth the capital expenditure. We’ve got a modest dining room and the outdoor space in summer, but if we have a bar, the locals would have somewhere to socialise all year round. We don’t want to miss a trick and let a proper pub move into the village.’ Oli’s thin hair kept lifting in the breeze, making him stroke it carefully back into place.
Clancy nodded, enjoying cheese sandwiches with a delicious chutney and gorgeous thick-cut ham with rocket.
‘So when Aaron said who you’d worked for,’ Kaz pronounced excitedly, producing a pad and pen from her pocket as if about to take an order, ‘we thought you might know about funding. Whether there are alternatives to the bank.’ Pen poised, she waited expectantly.
Oli looked at his watch as if hinting that time was pressing. ‘Or grants.’
&n
bsp; Evidently Clancy was expected to earn her lunch. She suddenly felt a fraud. ‘It was a rural charity. I didn’t work for it, it was just one of my clients. I only know a little bit and in the broadest terms. I think if you go to their website they’ll have lots of information about projects like village halls but the accent was on communities, the not-for-profit sector. I don’t know what help, if any, there is for commercial enterprise.’
With a frown, Oli took two more sandwiches. ‘But the village can’t afford a village hall. If we extended our bar it could be let out sometimes and be used for meetings and that.’
‘But you’d still own it. The profits would go to you.’ Clancy was sorry she couldn’t provide the answers Kaz and Oli had obviously hoped for. ‘I don’t know any charities that support rural businesses.’
Kaz and Oli looked so disappointed that Clancy felt sorry for them, though she was surprised that anyone in business could be as naive as they seemed. As if reading her thoughts, Kaz sighed. ‘This is our first time working for ourselves. Oli’s uncle owned the B&B and he didn’t have kids of his own so he left it to Oli in his will because Oli was the only one out of his brothers and sisters who stayed in Nelson’s Bar.’
‘Wonderful of Uncle George,’ Oli put in. ‘I was sick and tired of driving into King’s Lynn every day to work in a ghastly admin job. My company HR department was looking for people to take redundancy so I put my hand in the air and got a lump sum, which came in handy. The B&B had gone a bit downhill under Uncle George.’
‘What money’s left has to be looked after,’ Kaz put in anxiously.
Oli reached out and gave her a sudden hug. ‘Don’t look so worried. We’re not losing money or anything.’
A Summer to Remember Page 10