She moved round to the side of the vehicle so that she could see his face. ‘Mrs Crowther at the shop said you rent out some property in the village.’
She hopped out of the way as he backed out, grasped the front of the car and began to rock it. When he’d inched it forward he tucked himself back under the bonnet again, made an adjustment with a screwdriver and straightened up.
‘I do, but I’ve nothing vacant. Sorry.’ He wiped his hands on a well-used rag.
Cleo’s hopes settled back towards her boots. She sighed and shifted the boxes uncomfortably in her arms. Even though they were empty, the rigid edges dug into the crooks of her elbows. ‘Mrs Crowther thought one of your tenants had just left.’
He nodded. ‘Cleared off owing rent and left a disgusting mess behind, presumably the result of a party and several people being very poorly. The key money didn’t even cover the cleaning company costs. So I’ve pretty much decided to sell.’
‘Right. I see.’ She bit her bottom lip hard to stop her disappointment showing. She could’ve used a bit of luck. Her voice sounded thin as she said thanks and goodbye.
She was walking away when she heard him call after her, ‘Got a problem?’
She turned back. He was in the driver’s seat now, looking at her through the windscreen. She trailed back to stand in the open doorway. ‘A bit. I need somewhere to go, quick, and I want to stay in Middledip.’ The engine coughed into life. The car vibrated then settled down.
Ratty’s eyes stayed on her face, although his tilted head suggested he was listening to the engine note. ‘Live up Port Road, don’t you?’
She nodded, swallowing the lump in her throat.
‘But you’re moving on?’
She nodded again. ‘This week, preferably.’
He switched the ignition off and on again, listening. ‘Just you?’
It seemed a kind way of asking if she was leaving her husband. ‘’Fraid so. Well …’ She hesitated, felt a sudden scalding of her face. ‘There might be a child. In a while.’
He raised his eyebrows. Easing out of the car, he tore blue paper towel from a roll on a wooden shelf, wiped his hands then rolled down his sleeves over tattooed forearms. ‘OK, you can have a look at the house.’ He called towards the rear of the garage, ‘Back in ten minutes.’
Two muffled voices shouted, ‘OK!’ from behind welding masks.
He strode off across the Cross and up Port Road.
Cleo beetled along beside him, wrestling with the light but cumbersome boxes, which the wind kept trying to snatch – until he took them off her. It was easier to talk, then. ‘Where is the house?’
‘Ladies Lane, just round the corner from where you are now. Will being that close cause trouble?’
‘Don’t think so.’ They crossed Church Close, passed 11 Port Road without comment and cornered into Ladies Lane. A real lane with no kerbs, just narrow unedged tarmac between hawthorn hedges and overgrown verges that would froth with cow parsley, come spring, but were now just dandelion and nettle.
Three ironstone long houses spaced themselves out along the left-hand side, facing a hedge and a ploughed field on the right, and Ratty made for the third. Two black gates, one wide for cars, and one narrow for pedestrians, fastened together. He unlatched the narrow side and Cleo followed him to the front door.
He dropped the boxes on the path and put an iron bootscraper inside to keep them from blowing away. ‘This is it.’ Two steps and they were under the porch and into a tiny hall with the stairs straight ahead. He opened the right-hand door. ‘Kitchen with cooker, sink, cupboards, washing machine.’
Cleo stepped in behind him, taking in plain wooden doors and drawers. The kitchen had a window at each end, the one at the back tiny. He rattled a locked door in the side wall. ‘That takes you through to the barn.’ Cleo opened cupboards and gazed at the kitchen table and two chairs. The floor was laid with lovely uneven quarry tiles; the walls were cream, the ceiling white and the beams black. The windowsills were broad enough to sit on.
The sitting room, the other door from the titchy hall, had the same two-window arrangement. The walls were pale pink. ‘Not my idea,’ Ratty observed. ‘Blame the last tenant.’ A cottage suite stood beside a small table and a tall lamp. A black wood-burning stove squatted in the centre of the long wall on a stone platform topped with a granite flag.
‘I’ve never used a wood stove.’
‘It’s easy.’
Upstairs, the bedroom was above the sitting room with a double bed, two wardrobes, a mirror, and a chest of drawers. ‘You’d need all your own linens, including bedclothes.’
‘Right.’ Excitement was beginning to rise. She liked 3 Ladies Lane. And surely somewhere in the last few minutes, even if he hadn’t put it into so many words, Ratty had decided to let the house to her?
They moved across the landing. ‘Bathroom.’ he pushed the door and let her step in.
‘Wow! It’s nice in here.’
For the first time he smiled, as if he’d been reserving it until he decided whether he liked her. ‘Not bad, is it? I liked it, when I lived here.’ The glossy white of the big shower cubicle and the bath contrasted with the black tiles. Cleo admired the mirrors, heated towel rail and thick blue carpet.
Outside, he showed her the garage doors in the end of the single-storey part of the building. ‘This bit would’ve been for the animals, originally.’ They stepped inside. A pile of logs huddled in one corner of the oil-stained floor. ‘I used to keep a couple of cars here. You can use it for storage, garage, or both.’
Cleo walked out into the garden and frowned. ‘I suppose the tenant’s responsible for the upkeep of this?’
‘That’s about it. Of course, the tenant can keep on the lad the landlord presently pays to do it for three hours a week.’ When he smiled it was as if the sun came from behind a cloud. He showed her a bench made of split logs, twisted with age, where they could sit.
‘OK. If you want this place I’ll rent it to you. It’s a small house and it comes with the furniture as is, it’s got no gas and the heating’s oil, which is a pain if you don’t remember to order it on time.’ He suggested a monthly rental that was less than Cleo and Gav were paying for the house in Port Road. But of course she’d be paying this one alone. He looked very directly at her. ‘Before I sign anything I need to hear you say you can pay the rent and bills and you can keep the house nice. I’m responsible for any maintenance and repair, but the dust and fingerprints are all yours.’
She felt a sudden billow of happiness. She’d like to live in Ladies Lane, facing the flat fields. ‘I can pay that. And keep the place nice.’
‘And there won’t be any bother from your ex-significant other?’
She shook her head, her smile fading at the thought of poor old Gav. ‘He’s not like that.’ Or not often. She thought of the writing on the bedroom wall.
‘When do you want to move in?’
‘Straight away? I can transfer the first month’s rent and the key money to your account today.’
His blue eyes rested on her for several moments. ‘Fair enough – I’ll run an Agreement off on the computer.’ He offered her an oily hand and she shook it. She got the impression that the handshake meant more to him than the written Agreement would.
He dropped the keys into her hand. ‘Be happy.’
She sat on the twisted bench and watched him leave. Then she looked up at the house. She could be sleeping in her new bedroom tonight!
‘Well you’d better shape yourself,’ she said, aloud. ‘There’s a shitload of stuff to move and, from today, you’re officially single.’
In view of the pathetic state of her food supplies, she took herself off for lunch at The Three Fishes. With her boxes tucked under the table, she munched her way through a substantial Ploughman’s, mentally cruising through the rooms of what used to be her home to decide what to take.
Must be fair to Gav and leave the place reasonable for him. Newly bereaved, it would be ho
rrible for him to come back to a home stripped of all the best kit. It wasn’t going to be very nice in any case. She shivered. He might remain at 11 Port Road, they might be near neighbours, and she didn’t want him howling round the corner to claim custody of the teapot.
Breaking up a home was a big job and had to be thought hard about. But first …
… knickers drawer. She gathered up her boxes and made for home, where she fished out the flat blue box of the pregnancy testing kit and took it into the bathroom, tearing at the polythene with her teeth.
Chapter Twenty-One
There were two blue lines.
Positively positive. She was pregnant.
Even though it was what she was expecting, she trembled as she went slowly down and made coffee, sitting very still on the sofa, blowing and sipping, and thinking.
It was an hour before she stopped feeling sorry for herself and blotted up the tears tipping from her lashes.
She was too busy to sit around bawling; she had to move out. Boxes, bags, TV, stereo. In the car, round the corner, out of the car, into the new house. Back to the old house, begin again.
By evening everything was moved, somehow, anyhow, but the worst job was still hanging over her. Reluctantly, she picked up her mobile phone and sent a text to Justin.
Would like 2 talk. Could we meet? Suggest Fri night at Muggies. Cleo
Friday night at Muggie’s. Having spent half the week chewing it over, Cleo decided to go to Muggie’s alone.
Much to Liza’s disgust. ‘I won’t be in the way! C’mon Cleo, you don’t want to meet him on your own, he turned awkward last time.’ Her delicately arched eyebrows lifted in entreaty.
Cleo thought of the doorway, the shadows, Justin, his anger pinning her to the door while … She shivered. ‘I’d rather be alone this time, Lize. OK?’
‘It’s not OK, really. You need a bit of backup.’ Liza pretended to pout, but Cleo could read the concern in her sister’s eyes.
‘Not this time.’ Cleo gave her sister a quick, guilty hug. Thing was that, in all the soul-baring about her marriage, her affair, Gav’s affair, Gav’s infertility and consequent cover-up, Cleo hadn’t quite got around to telling her sister that she was pregnant. In fact, she had an old-fashioned idea about telling the father first; and it would be appropriate on a Friday night at noisy old Muggie’s, where it had all begun.
Cleo got herself a glass of fizzy water and hovered, watching the stairs. She waited. And waited. By ten o’clock she was uneasy. Justin hadn’t shown. She combed every section of the throbbing nightclub, peeping around every nook and nib and onto the dance floor.
Gradually, her heart turned to lead. He wasn’t coming. She tipped back her head and drained her drink, letting the ice chink-plop into her mouth. Last look round, big sigh, no Justin. Just when she’d been daring to let herself think of him, of his smile, daring to think, ‘I’m separated now. There’s nothing to stop me and Justin …’
Her palms got hot at the thought.
And then her heart jumped. There, at least, were the two platinum blonds Justin hung out with, slouching about in the no-man’s-land between the stairs and the bar. Relief! She wriggled her way between backs and shoulders, brushing shirts and catching handbags, trying to keep her eyes on the blond heads before they could move away. Maybe they’d have a message, maybe Justin had been held up.
She grabbed the forearm of the one she reached first. ‘Hi!’
He nodded, without showing enthusiasm at seeing her.
‘Martin, isn’t it?’
He nodded again. ‘And you’re the woman from the lake. Wet T-shirt.’
‘The married one,’ the other one, Drew, added.
She flicked her hair out of her eyes and tried her best, wide, smile, the one she used to begin her workshops, the one that made people she’d never met before smile back. ‘Do you know where Justin is?’
‘He’s –’
Drew butted in. ‘Justin who?’
Cleo stared, and they faced her, gazing back, hands in pockets, shoulders rounded. She opened her mouth and then closed it.
Surely she must know Justin’s surname? Of course she did! Didn’t she? She pummelled her memory. A hot, dark flush swelled up her neck. ‘Justin,’ she repeated, weakly.
Drew and Martin shrugged at each other, looked back at Cleo, carefully blank.
‘You know,’ she stammered. ‘Justin.’
‘Justin?’ They shrugged elaborately at each other again. ‘Justin?’
Theatrically, Martin clapped his hand to his head. ‘I know who she means – Just-in time!’
With a laugh, Drew fished theatrically in his back pocket and held up a condom packet. ‘Or, Just-in case?’
Martin produced his wallet. ‘Just-in it for the money.’
Drew gave Martin a mock shove. ‘Just-in the way!’
Martin stuck his finger in Drew’s ear. ‘Just-in ’ere.’
Drew crowed with helpless laughter. ‘Just-in the USA, not available in England. And all that mullarkey!’ So side-splittingly funny they were, they had to prop one another up.
Cleo shrank with humiliation, watching the blond bombshells shuffling off to the bar, still giggling. ‘Gits!’ She sent burning thoughts of revenge after them as she turned hollowly to the stairs. Might as well go home.
It had been a funny week. Cleo cleared her desk, dropping files and pads into drawers. She’d had to inform Nathan of her change of address, flushing at the palpable surprise flitting from face to face around the office. Worse, on Monday morning, taking a deep breath, she’d had to ring Gav at his dad’s house and give him the same information. That had been horrible.
The pause on the other end of the phone had been accusing. ‘You didn’t waste much time.’
‘Sorry.’ Why did she apologise? ‘I didn’t want you to come home and find out the hard way.’
The silence was longer and more despondent. The sigh before he spoke was huge. ‘Aren’t you being hasty? We both had affairs, they can be forgiven, it happens.’ Cleo heard the catch in Gav’s voice. ‘And I think that if you put yourself in my place about the Klinefelter’s and had any, any … compassion you’d understand why I hid it. Can you imagine how it was for me? Chatting a girl up, taking her out, to bed, falling in love, wanting to marry … just where do you interpose, “by the way, I have no sperm”?’
Cleo sighed back. ‘Immensely difficult, I agree – but you should’ve found a way. It was just dishonest. Infertility is a joint problem. I can’t accept that you decided on behalf of both of us that we’d live a lie. That was worse than the Lillian thing.’
He moved away from the subject of his infertility. ‘I’ve phoned Bob Chester and arranged to make my statement. Lillian has already made hers and, in my absence, been allowed back to work. I get to see a copy of her statement after I’ve made mine. So I’m coming home tomorrow, seeing Bob on Wednesday.’ He stumbled over the word ‘home’.
Cleo searched for something that might make his homecoming easier for him, trying feebly, ‘I could buy milk and bread to leave in your … the kitchen, if you like?’
His breath hissed. ‘I fucking don’t like! You won’t forgive me, you won’t stay – but you’ll do me a bit of shopping? Big deal. Haven’t you got any feelings left for me at all?’
Her side of the conversation could be heard by the whole office; so she didn’t point out that she no longer loved him and was definitely carrying another man’s child.
‘Sorry,’ she said again. Why hadn’t she simply bought the few essentials and left them in the kitchen? Putting the idea into words had rubbed his nose in the crappy situation. What a mess, what a jumble of guilt and regret. But the relief was there. The relief at being free topped everything.
On Tuesday, as she was staring blindly at her screen and wondering whether Gav had set off, Nathan came to her desk. ‘Tom’s taking a team-building workshop at an insurance company but he’s developed one of his killer migraines. You’ll have to rescue the
poor bloke, Cleo. He’s got a plan so you should be able to pick up where he leaves off.’
‘Give me the address.’ She was quite pleased. A workshop would distract her; stop her mind whirring about Gav, infidelity and infertility. Relieved, she grabbed her briefcase and rushed to the rescue.
Tom, white and disorientated, glasses in his top pocket, was pathetically grateful to see her, as much as he could see anything for double vision and flashes of colour. ‘Thanks, Cleo, I’ve had to leave the room twice to barf.’ He flipped his notes open. ‘They’re in four groups, each comprising three decision makers and an observer. This is the problem outline they’ve been given.’ He tapped the page. Sweat glistened suddenly on his upper lip. ‘Gotta go!’
Cleo watched Tom dash off, wrinkling her nose in sympathy, then turned back to her getting-restless group, junior management, eight men and four women, wearing suits and banging their ankles on each other’s briefcases. ‘Right,’ she began with a wide smile. ‘I’m Cleo Callaway, sorry to barge in on your party! We’ll start this activity while poor Tom suffers.’ They looked at her expectantly. ‘I’ll just plunge in as best I can, because you’re probably woefully behind schedule anyway. Can the observer in each group please identify themselves? Right, thank you.
‘What I’d like everyone to do is listen to the scenario I outline, then the decision makers in each group must confer and come up with the best solution they feel that the circumstances allow. OK?’ She helped herself to a plastic cup of mineral water from the nearby stand.
‘Here’s the outline: we have twelve people in a boat on a high sea.’ She mimed waves with her hands. ‘Far away from land.’ She shaded her eyes and pretended to peer into the distance. ‘Twelve, OK? These twelve are …’ Everyone snatched up their pens to jot down what they obviously recognised as the meat of the problem. ‘… A priest, a timber worker and his pregnant wife, a nuclear physicist, an SAS soldier and his wife who is not pregnant, a ferry boat captain, a rocket scientist, two miners, an engineer, and a carpenter. OK, everyone got that?’ A few moments while the slower people finished scribbling, then she continued, ‘Of these twelve, only seven can reach the faraway desert island and begin a new community.’
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