The House of New Beginnings

by Lucy Diamond

  Some time later, when she had finished, she looked at the clock and realized with a jump that it was almost midnight. This was the point at which a sensible person would call it a night, sleep on the whole thing and read it through with fresh eyes in the morning, before sending it off. But now that Georgie had finished her big peace-making gesture, she just wanted him to see it – and besides, she’d never been a very sensible person to start with. And so she saved the document and wrote a quick explanatory email as an accompaniment. Then, after a deep breath, she pressed Send.

  It was done, and there was no turning back. ‘Over to you now, Simon,’ she said aloud, closing down the laptop and going to bed.

  She’d been sleeping late in the week, now that there was no boyfriend getting up early every morning around her, and after the busy weekend and her long stint at the laptop, she slept soundly right through until nine-thirty when the buzzing of her intercom finally woke her. Oh my God, she thought, leaping out of bed in an instant. It was Simon! He’d read her Sorry magazine at midnight and driven all the way down here to throw his arms around her, and . . .

  ‘Parcel for you, love,’ came the distinctly un-Simonish voice through the intercom. ‘Needs signing for.’

  Bollocks. It probably wasn’t even for her, knowing Georgie’s luck, and she would have dragged herself downstairs in her dressing gown, scaring the postman into the bargain, for nothing. And she’d been right in the middle of a really good dream, too. ‘Just coming,’ she muttered ungraciously, making sure she picked up her door keys before she went down.

  It just went to show, you could be wrong about these things; far too pessimistic. Well, okay, so she hadn’t been wrong about scaring the postman, who couldn’t get her signature fast enough before scuttling away, but the mysterious tube-shaped parcel was for her. What was more, as she peered at the address label on her way back upstairs, she was pretty sure the handwriting was Simon’s. And all of a sudden, she was wide awake and running to get into the flat as soon as possible, so that she could find out more.

  Once inside, she scrabbled breathlessly to open the tube but Simon being Simon, he’d taped the ends down with brown tape so firmly that her nails were useless weapons in this instance and she had to pull out all the kitchen drawers in search of scissors. What had he sent her after weeks of silence? What on earth was in the tube? And oh help, how mortifying would it be, if it was something really horrible and fuck-off-ish when she’d just gone and sent her stupid Sorry magazine over to him the night before! Why had she been so impulsive? Why hadn’t she been patient and measured enough to wait and send it today instead?

  Once through the layers of tape, she wrenched the round plastic seal from one end of the tube and tipped the contents onto the kitchen worktop. A scroll of paper – some kind of architectural drawing, she saw, wrinkling her nose in confusion. For an awful moment, she wondered if he’d made some mistake, and accidentally sent her a job application or tender. But then she saw her name at the top of the sheet, the neat words in capitals: A HOUSE FOR US, GEORGIE AND SIMON, and her heart thundered into top gear at once.

  Smoothing the paper out and weighting it at each corner with two mugs, the bag of sugar, and her own elbow, she peered at the building he had drawn – a handsome, modern house – and read the notations he’d made.

  Our bedroom – east-facing so that we get the sun in the morning. Big enough for all your books.

  Writing room – for Georgie, with an actual desk so you don’t have to hunch over typing on the bed, plus loads of shelves to display all the magazines and books you’re going to write.

  Huge kitchen – for dinner parties and Christmases. Definitely big enough for a dog’s bed or two, as well.

  Living room – with open fireplace. For chestnut roasting? Maybe even sex. (Not at the same time.)

  Spare rooms – for friends staying over. Or children’s bedrooms?

  His neat writing blurred suddenly as tears filled Georgie’s eyes, because what he was describing, what he had created, was her perfect house. Her dream home, with all the things she’d ever wanted. And despite what she’d thought, he had loved her enough to notice each detail and record them in his mind.

  Sniffing, she wiped her eyes and then blew her nose, before noticing a last neat note he’d written at the bottom of the paper.

  One more thing to consider: location. I’ve been offered a new job in Reigate, about 40 miles from Brighton, so we could stay in the south, if you want to. Alternatively, my old firm in York is expanding, and they’ve asked me to come back so we could start over in Yorkshire, if you’d rather. Or, of course, we could go somewhere completely new together. I don’t care about the geography, though, to be honest. I just want to be with you, George. You’re my home. Sorry I lost the plot for a while. You were right – I haven’t been a great boyfriend but I want to try again, if you’ll let me.

  PS Sorry too if you’ve been trying to text. Managed to leave my phone behind in Trowell services like a plum. Have got a new phone – number below.

  Now she really was weeping. Proper, ugly crying, the sort that would have Simon running for the hills if he could see her now. She was his home, he’d said. He’d designed them a house. And after all her stressing about his interview in Harrogate, it turned out he’d applied for a job down in Reigate instead. She couldn’t take everything in.

  Their olive branch messages had crossed, she realized, wondering if he would have seen her Sorry magazine yet. And actually, wasn’t this how a relationship was supposed to be, both of them trying to put things right at the same time, both of them reaching out simultaneously, saying, Wait, can we talk? I made a mistake.

  Feeling joy pirouetting inside her, she grabbed her phone and dialled his number immediately. He answered on the first ring, his voice hesitant. Nervous, even.

  ‘Hey,’ she said happily, still sitting there at the kitchen table in her pyjamas, the design of their house spread out before her. ‘I got your house.’

  ‘I got your magazine,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, George. I’ve not handled this very well.’

  ‘It’s fine, I’m sorry too. I missed you.’ She leaned back against the chair, feeling nothing but relief that they were having this conversation and that she was filled with certainty now that everything was going to be all right. ‘We can sort this out. When can I see you?’

  ‘I’m glad you asked,’ he said. ‘Because I was thinking . . . tonight?’

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Two months later

  ‘Ready to roll, boss?’ asked Natalya.

  ‘Let’s do it,’ said Rosa, adding a last drizzle of olive oil to the final plate. ‘Starters coming out!’

  It was August, and a warm evening at Rosa’s Supper Club, so the café doors were wide open to let the soft sea breeze blow in for her customers. She had a full house tonight, and forty hungry people were out there, chatting and drinking. There was nothing like the buzz of a supper club about to begin to give her tingles.

  Back in June, after Angela had so forcefully closed down her tiny home-based dining operation, Rosa had been ready to quit, to forget the whole thing and resign herself to slaving at the Zanzibar hotel peeling carrots for the rest of her life. Right until Ned and Charlotte had knocked on her door with a proposition, that was.

  ‘Ned’s had an idea,’ Charlotte had said, the words bubbling out of her as if she was fizzing inside.

  ‘About the supper club,’ he’d said. ‘Why don’t you run it from my café?’

  It had been as easy as that one little question – to which there could only be one possible answer: yes, please. The arrangement suited Ned – who closed at six every evening anyway and could do with the extra income from renting out the space. The idea suited Rosa too – the café could hardly have been nearer her flat, for one thing, and the space was elegant and bright, and in a gorgeous seafront location. Big enough to fit in more diners, yet still small enough to maintain a cosy feel – plus, bonus detail, the café kitchen was
way better equipped than her own one.

  Once she’d contacted the people on her waiting list to alert them to the change of venue, she was off and running once more, the supper club making a seamless leap from home to café. In fact, the leap had been a fairly seismic one, with Ned advertising the evening on his chalk boards, which boosted her numbers immediately, so much so that he’d offered to lend her a second waitress, the keen-to-work-all-hours Shamira, for the first few weeks. (She was saving up for a flat with her boyfriend John, apparently.) Then, when the bookings reached thirty each week, Rosa had taken the plunge to hold the supper club on Thursday nights too.

  By July, the supper club had become so popular that Rosa had been able to hand in her notice at the Zanzibar. She’d learned a huge amount there and was grateful for the experience but she wouldn’t miss the exhausting summer wedding shifts, nor her bellowing boss. To her great surprise, Brendan had taken the news well, without throwing a single thing at her, and had actually turned up for dinner there at the café one evening, with his charming and very beautiful wife, no less. Even more surprisingly, he’d been polite and quietly spoken the whole time, complimenting her on her dishes with every course. He had even left a tip. (‘I think body-snatchers are in town,’ Natalya pronounced disbelievingly, biting down on one of the pound coins, to check it was real.)

  Although this initial success was gratifying, Rosa was trying not to get too carried away. Running a supper club was always going to be easiest in the summer months when the hotels and guest-houses were full of tourists every week after all, and winter was sure to prove a much harder sell, when scouring winds came sweeping up from the sea. Still, with this in mind, she was already planning ways to keep her customers coming back week after week: some kind of loyalty scheme for local residents, perhaps, or doubling up to host wine tastings simultaneously or taking on private catering commissions . . . She’d figure it out, anyway.

  To make ends meet in the meantime, she was working a couple of mornings cheffing for Ned in the café, and baking cakes for him on a regular basis. So it was all good, really. Better than good. She was relishing every minute.

  ‘Good evening, everyone, I’m Rosa, your host, and here are the starters,’ she said, as she and her team went out with loaded plates. Although she did all the cooking, she loved coming out like this and introducing the food, as well as herself. The more informal and friendly she could make the evening, the better it seemed to go. ‘We have a sea-bass ceviche with pickled cucumber and lime, as well as a feta and beetroot salad for the vegetarians. There’s more bread too, so just help yourselves. Hope you enjoy it.’

  By day, the café was a space with lots of smaller tables for two or four, but for supper club evenings, Rosa arranged the tables into three long ones, each seating ten people. Out came the starched white tablecloths – she had bought a supply of second-hand ones from the Zanzibar – and out came the candles and flowers for decoration. She strung fairy lights around the walls and kept the doors open on warm evenings so that the sea breeze could waft in coolingly.

  Tonight they had a full house, and she recognized at least half the people present, as friends and diners who’d come along before. ‘Hello,’ she said, setting plates down at the first table. Jo and Bea were sitting at this one, along with Jo’s new girlfriend Izzy, and a friend of Bea’s, India, whom she’d seen a lot recently. Bea seemed a different girl these days – smiling, giggly, relaxed. She’d had a cool new asymmetric haircut that really suited her face, the bullying at school had stopped, and she’d found herself in a nicer friendship group too, thank goodness.

  As for Jo, she now sported a new tattoo on her ankle and was saving up for a winter holiday in Thailand. She’d carried on with her Live for today! motto, but, as she’d said to Rosa, she was also pursuing a Look after yourself for tomorrow! health kick as well following her hospital trauma, to which end, she’d persuaded Rosa to accompanying her to a seriously sweaty hot yoga session every Monday evening while Bea was at her dad’s. ‘The thing about nearly dying is it totally makes you want to live,’ she had said more than once, and she and Bea had gone off on lots of spontaneous camping trips over the summer, even popping in to see her evangelical parents in an attempt to rebuild a few fallen bridges.

  When it came to Gareth, his name had not really been mentioned by either Rosa or Jo since the attempted kiss, that drunken night back in June. She doubted Gareth was going to spill the beans on what had happened after she had rebuffed him, and she had decided, for the sake of her new friendship with Jo, that it was probably safest to say nothing either, to change the subject whenever his name popped up. But then the two of them had gone on for cocktails, post-yoga, earlier that week in a little bar on Western Road, and somehow the conversation had tumbled into Gareth’s direction before Rosa could haul it back. They had been talking about kissing, of all things, because Jo was drunkenly telling Rosa what a fantastic kisser her new girlfriend was. ‘On a par with Gareth, actually, who I’d always held up as this benchmark of excellent snogging,’ she’d said, laughing. ‘He is one hot pair of lips, that man, I’m telling you.’

  It was almost as if she wanted Rosa to confess, really. And sure enough, Rosa had found herself blurting out, ‘Yeah, I know,’ before clapping a hand to her mouth and saying, ‘Oh shit,’ in the next breath.

  Jo’s double-take would have been hilarious if Rosa hadn’t immediately been swamped with high-voltage guilt. ‘You know? How come? Oh my God. How did I not know this? Are you two an item?’ screeched Jo, gesticulating so dramatically that she almost sent her Sea Breeze sailing off the table. If anything, she looking thrilled, rather than toweringly angry, but all the same, Rosa still found herself cringing.

  ‘Um . . . Well . . .’

  ‘You dark horse! You sneaky so-and-so. How long has this been going on, then?’ Jo demanded, then peered at her. ‘Don’t look so worried! Is that why you haven’t said anything? God! He’s just as bad, I was only speaking to him this morning and he didn’t mention a word! Whoa. Wait till I tell Bea!’

  ‘Jo – no – it’s not like that. There’s not anything to mention, that’s the point: it was just a kiss. One kiss, and it was months ago now. We’d had a really good night and were quite pissed and . . . it happened. But I sort of . . . pushed him away, so . . .’ She twisted her glass on the table, leaving wet circles. ‘So that’s it. End of story. I’ve not heard from him since then.’

  Jo frowned, trying to process all of this. ‘Oh,’ she said. If anything, she seemed disappointed. ‘Seriously? Shame. I actually think you two would be good together. So . . . what, you didn’t fancy him, or . . . ?’

  Rosa bit her lip. She had thought about Gareth a lot since that night, replayed the scene in her head umpteen times. ‘I think you should go for it!’ her friend Catherine had urged when Rosa had phoned to tell her all about it.

  ‘Get over yourself! I thought he was quite fit!’ Meg had agreed on Rosa’s second agonizing phone call and Rosa hadn’t been able to answer, couldn’t quite put her finger on any problem that was holding her back. She’d only just come out of one bad relationship, after all, she reasoned to her friends. She wasn’t sure if she was ready to throw herself into anything new so soon.

  ‘Pffft,’ Alexa had said scornfully, when she got to hear about it. ‘You’re thinking about it too much. Just hurl yourself in already; it’s the best way.’

  ‘I . . . I do really like him,’ she said to Jo eventually, choosing her words with care. She remembered the glee of the website revenge mission with Gareth, how they’d laughed so much on those evenings, how she’d come to really enjoy his company, and trust him, too. ‘I think he’s a great guy. And it wasn’t that I didn’t fancy him, it just wasn’t the right time for me, that’s all. He took me by surprise.’ She drained the last of her Cosmopolitan, feeling as if she’d drunk too much and said too much for one night. Why did those two things always go together? ‘It’s hard, though. I think I might have hurt his feelings, which was the las
t thing I wanted to do.’ She spun her silver ring around her finger, an old nervous habit. ‘Also, I was worried about what you and Bea would think,’ she admitted. ‘Because pissing you two off was the second to last thing I wanted to do.’

  ‘Pissed off?’ Jo cried, rolling her eyes. ‘I’m not pissed off ! I would have been delighted for you – and Bea the same. Honestly – look at me – it makes no odds to me, Rosa. I’ve been dying for him to meet someone else and be happy, rather than mooching about on his own forever. It might finally rid me of my hobbling guilt that I ruined his life, too.’ Her green eyes were bloodshot from all the booze but still shone with sincerity. ‘I mean it. Go for it!’

  Four days later and Rosa still hadn’t quite decided what to do about the situation. He’d probably met someone else by now, anyway, she told herself; forgotten all about her. Maybe he was embarrassed about the lunging kiss full stop, and hoping she’d have put it from her mind. Or else he’d written her off as frigid, a boring old prude. Maybe she was a boring old prude. Oh, whatever. Sometimes the timing was off and people missed one another. Paths crossing, but moving on to other destinations. Besides, she was so busy with her new foodie career taking off that she probably wouldn’t have time for a relationship anyway.

  ‘Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!’ The starters were all but finished now, and she could hear Natalya and Shamira busily collecting up plates out in the café area. Meanwhile, she was back in the kitchen, putting the finishing touches to a rather fabulous Spanish fish stew she’d adapted from a favourite Moro recipe, with monkfish and saffron and almonds. It smelled absolutely heavenly.