by Fiona Harper
There were around six people in the shop and they all stopped what they were doing and looked at him.
He felt decidedly uncomfortable as he headed for the rack full of newspapers. Had he turned green overnight or grown an extra head? What was up with these people?
As he bent to pick up his usual broadsheet there was a collective gasp.
Okay, that was enough. He stood up and turned around to face them, his arms wide. ‘What?’
Still, no one uttered a word but, one by one, they all looked at something behind him on the magazine and newspaper rack. Without turning round, he had a feeling that a trap door had opened underneath him and he was standing on thin air.
Slowly, he twisted round and scanned the display. The other villagers burst into motion and chatter, and more than one darted out of the shop without buying anything.
What the…?
He shut his eyes and opened them again, just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. There was a woman he knew very well on the front of one of the tabloids, looking grim and angry with her arms crossed. Only, it wasn’t Louise—it was Megan!
‘LOUISE GOT HER CLAWS INTO MY MAN’, the headline screamed in tall white letters on a black background. Below, were two smaller pictures, one a heart-shaped photo of him and Megan from the last summer holiday they’d shared together—graphically altered by putting a jagged rip between the two of them—and a headshot of Louise, taken from below, so it seemed as if she was looking down her nose at something.
He snatched the paper off the shelf. What the hell was Megan playing at?
What if Jasmine saw this? Or even her friends?
At first he was relieved that there only seemed to be three copies on display but, eventually, his brain kicked in and he realised that must be because the rest had been sold. He grabbed all three of them, marched up to the counter and threw a two pound coin down. He wasn’t about to wait for change.
‘You should be ashamed of yourself for selling such trash,’ he told Mrs Green.
She gave him a stony look. ‘Well, Mr Oliver, we all know Megan left a while ago, but you know what they say…’
Suddenly, he really didn’t want to know what the mysterious ‘they’ had to say about anything. He turned and walked towards the door. Mrs Green raised her voice, just so he wouldn’t miss her pearl of wisdom as he opened the door and exited the shop.
‘There’s no smoke without fire.’
CHAPTER TEN
WHAT a pity the old stable block had deteriorated so badly. Louise pushed gingerly at one of the doors. The building was huge—a double-height room with gigantic arched doors at one end, big enough to take a carriage or two. The low-ceilinged central section had enough stalls for one, two, three…ten horses.
There was a hatch in the ceiling above one of the abandoned stalls. What was upstairs? Those skylights in the steep slate-tiled roof had to be there for a reason. She was dying to find out. Or, at least, she was dying to think of something other than the email that had blithely pinged into her inbox earlier that morning, and pulling things apart and putting them back together again was a familiar displacement activity for her. Safe. Comforting. All-consuming.
In a corner she found a stepladder, obviously not authentic Georgian as it was made of aluminium. Still, it would do. She dragged it underneath the hatch and unfolded it, making sure the safety catches were in place.
She was up the steps in a shot and, when she pushed the hatch door, she was showered with dust and dirt and probably a hundred creepy-crawlies. Holding on to the ladder for support, she brushed her hair down with her free hand.
When she’d stopped coughing, she poked her head through the hole. Enough light was filtering through the streaky grey skylights for her to see a long loft, with fabulous supporting beams in the roof. She turned round to look in the other direction. Goodness, this must run the whole length of the stables. It was easily sixty feet long. Just think what a great space this would be if it was converted into a guest house.
Now she’d finished with the main house and the boathouse, she needed a new project.
Louise turned round and sat on the large, flat step on the top of the stepladder.
She already had a house full of rooms she didn’t know what to do with. What on earth did she need a guest house for?
‘Louise!’
That was Ben’s voice. A second later, he appeared in the stable door, breathless and dishevelled.
‘Up here,’ she called, her skin cold and tingling as he peered into the dingy interior. He spotted her and ran to the bottom of the ladder. How was she going to tell him? How did she prepare him for the poisonous taste of her world? He was going to hate her for this.
‘What are you doing…? Never mind.’ He held a hand out and she used it to steady herself as she descended the ladder. He looked unusually pale and serious, his mouth a thin line. Her heart began to stammer.
‘Ben? What is it? Is everything okay?’
‘No! Everything is not bloody okay!’ He pulled away from her, then marched to the door.
It was too late. He already knew. Just as she thought he was going to disappear out of the door, he turned and strode back towards her.
‘Louise, I’m sorry. It’s not you…I’m not angry with you, but I could happily throttle—’
‘Ben!’ He wasn’t making sense, and that really wasn’t like him. Cold horror dripped through her at the thought that something else—something far worse—might have happened. She swallowed. ‘Start from the beginning! Is somebody hurt?’
He looked at her, a confused expression on his face, then shook his head. ‘No. But…’He pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket and she was surprised to feel relief that her original assumption had been correct.
‘It’s Megan. She’s outdone herself this time and I am so, so sorry…’
‘Ben?’
‘I just went into the newsagent’s this morning and…well, there it was…and the whole village staring…’
She tried to make eye contact but he was talking to himself, reliving some memory more than he was talking to her. ‘Ben!’
‘And we were trying to keep it secret, for the kids…’
She grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Ben!’
He stopped mid-sentence and stared at her.
‘I know.’
He blinked, then looked down at the paper in his hands.
‘Toby’s agent sent me an email. He has a press agency that deals with all his cuttings…’She shrugged and gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. ‘Seems the cat is out of the bag.’
The frown lines on his forehead deepened. ‘How can you be so blasé about it? Don’t you know what she said about you…about me? Don’t you know how she made it sound?’
Yes, she knew. She knew Megan had told the papers that she and Ben had been on the verge of a reconciliation when nasty old Louise had slunk up and stolen her man away. People would believe it. Even after it had come out that Toby had been unfaithful, the public had forgiven him and, somehow, there seemed to be an undercurrent that it had been her fault. She was too cold, too remote. Couldn’t give him what he needed.
Well, they were right about that. What Toby really needed was a good kick in the pants, but she wasn’t about to generate even more column inches for herself by being the one who provided it. She only cared about the smudged print on the paper if it affected how Ben felt about her, about starting something with her. Anything else was irrelevant.
‘Forget it,’ she said.
He stared at the paper again, then hurled it into the nearest stall. ‘I can’t!’
Louise thought back to her first really awful press story. It had hurt, cut deep. Nowadays she just ignored them. But Ben wasn’t used to this. In one fell swoop, his ordered, stable little universe had been set on its head.
Silently, she walked over to him and put her arms round him. He was shaking with rage. She kissed him gently on the cheek, on the nose, on the lips, until he th
rew his arms round her and kissed her back.
It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. He’d understand that eventually.
‘Ben,’ she whispered in his ear, ‘the only thing that matters is that I love you.’
He pulled away and looked intently at her, as if he were trying to peel open the layers and look right inside her head. ‘You do?’
She laughed. ‘Of course I do!’
He began to smile. ‘You never said so before.’
A blush crept up her cheeks. ‘Well, I’m saying it now—’She took a deep breath and let out a shout that would have scared the horses, had there been any left. ‘I love you, Ben Oliver.’
All of a sudden, her feet were off the ground and she was spinning round. Ben had grabbed her round the middle and was just twirling and twirling, all the time laughing in her ear. And then he kissed her, and it thrilled her to her very toes because this kiss was all about promises, about the future, about tomorrow.
When the euphoria wore off and her feet were finally on the ground again, his frown reappeared. ‘What are we going to do?’
‘Do? Nothing.’
‘Nothing.’ He repeated the word as if he didn’t understand its meaning. ‘What do you mean, “nothing”?
She shrugged. ‘As far as the press is concerned, we just don’t comment. Any response from us will just keep the story running.’
‘But I don’t want people to think those things about you. It’s not the truth!’
She silenced him with a kiss. ‘The reporters don’t care about truth. They care about the story—what’s juiciest, what’s going to sell more papers. The people who read that trash might think I’m a man-eating witch, but I don’t care. What we think matters—what we believe about ourselves.’
‘I know that’s true, but it doesn’t seem fair.’
‘But that’s how it is and we’ve just got to deal with it.’ She exhaled long and hard. ‘You might want to take Jas away for a few days, just in case people turn up wanting an interview or a picture. You’ve seen for yourself what some can be like.’
He nodded. ‘I could ring up my sister in Exeter. She’s back home now and could certainly have us for a few days, but you’ll be here…all on your own.’
She took him by the hand and they walked out into the bright December morning, the sun so low in the sky it hadn’t risen above the tops of the bare trees. ‘I can deal with this—I have done for more than a decade. It’s Jas who matters at the moment.’
He nodded. ‘She’s with a friend in the village right now. I’d better go and tell her we’re off on an impromptu visit to Aunty Tammy’s.’
Much as he’d like to wring Megan’s neck right this very second, there were some important issues they needed to discuss. He jabbed at the doorbell of her flat for a third time and left his thumb on the button so it rang loud and long.
Nothing. And any calls he made to her mobile were going straight through to voicemail.
Why? Why had she done this? Had she not thought what sort of effect this would have on Jasmine?
No, of course she hadn’t. Megan always thought of herself first and everyone else second. It had been her decision to end their marriage, her decision to leave Jasmine with him—saying she needed to learn to be a whole person herself before she could be a truly devoted mother—and now that he’d finally picked himself up and was moving on with his life, she was trying to sabotage that too.
Perhaps it was just as well he hadn’t caught up with her, he thought as he climbed into his car and slammed the door. Choosing to hurt Louise had been cowardly; she was an easy target.
He put the car into gear and made the thirty minute drive back to Lower Hadwell. By the time he got back to his cottage it was almost two o’clock and he was supposed to be packing, then picking Jasmine up at three. It wasn’t until he’d parked his car and walked round to the front that he noticed the figure on his doorstep. Megan was sitting on the low step, her face buried in her knees, drawing in jerky breaths.
He realised he wasn’t angry with her any longer. If anything, he felt pity. How messed up must she be to think that selling her story to the papers would cause anything but a headache?
She stopped sniffing when she heard him walking towards her and raised her head to look at him. Her eyes were pink and her face was blotchy and puffy. He might feel sorry for her, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her off the hook completely.
‘Why, Megan?’
Her face crumpled, then she sniffed loudly again and wiped her nose with a crushed tissue. ‘I spent the last two years following my heart, trying to work out what will make me happy, what will fill the hole in here—’ She jabbed a finger at her chest.
Ben put his hands in his pockets. ‘Well, maybe you did the right thing in leaving me. You obviously weren’t happy, living here with me and Jasmine.’
She shook her head and rearranged the almost disintegrated tissue so she could use it for one last blow. ‘No, I was happy—sort of. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.’ She fixed him with her clear blue eyes. ‘Only I don’t seem to be able to work out what more is.’
Welcome to the human race, honey.
He nearly always had a small packet of tissues in his pocket—required kit with a child in tow. He fished a packet out of his jacket and offered them to Megan, but her eyes were glazed and she was staring off into the distance.
‘And then I realised—oh, about a month ago—that not only was I no happier than I had been when we were together, but that I was less happy. The grass truly wasn’t greener on the other side of the fence.’ Spotting the tissues, she reached up but, instead of taking them from him, she clasped on to his hand. ‘You’re a good man, Ben. And I was too blind to see that.’
She looked at him with large blue eyes and her breath caught in her throat. Oh, no. He had a feeling he knew what was coming next and he willed her not to say it. He pulled his hand away and stuffed the packet of tissues into her fingers.
‘Megan, we can’t go back. You don’t really love me that way any more, not really. And I don’t want to be with you by default, because you can’t find anything or anyone you like better. I deserve more too.’
She pressed her lips together and nodded and a fresh batch of tears ran down her face. She squeezed his hand. ‘Yes, you do. And I’m sorry for what I did. I suppose I got into a real state because I was…’ she struggled getting the next word out ‘…jealous.’ She gave him a weak smile. ‘It was pretty obvious, you know. The pair of you couldn’t keep your eyes off each other. Just…don’t let her hurt you, Ben. I see the same ache in her that I have inside me.’
No. Megan was wrong about that. Louise was stronger than she was. But he wasn’t going to stand on his own doorstep and discuss that right now. He reached for Megan’s hand and pulled her up to stand.
Sometimes his ex-wife could seem like a force of nature—a cyclone—twisting her way through other people’s lives and leaving destruction in her wake but, right now, she looked more like a frightened child.
He put his arms around her and gave her a brotherly hug. ‘We both deserve more, Meg. Don’t you forget that.’
She nodded and kissed him softly on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Ben. Jasmine is lucky to have a dad like you. And I think—’ she paused to take a shuddering sniff ‘—she ought to stay with you for the time being. I reckon I have a few things to sort out first.’
Relief washed through him. That had to be the most mature and sensible decision Megan had made in a long time. Perhaps there was hope for her yet.
Louise found herself back in the stables after Ben had left. She could tell an idea was brewing about this place, but she just couldn’t put her finger on it at present. There was no reason to redevelop this area, other than to keep herself from getting bored. But she sensed a need for a bit more logic in her plans. It was time to stop floating, to stop being pushed around like a sailing boat buffeted by the wind, and make some choices.
These stables had s
omething to do with it, she could feel it. She shook her head and muttered to herself. New Year’s Eve was the day after tomorrow—time to think about fresh starts and new beginnings. A shiver of happiness ran through her. Time to start a new relationship with a wonderful man who said he loved her.
She corrected herself quickly. That had sounded all wrong inside her head. They hadn’t been just words. It wasn’t just that he’d said it. Ben did love her. He did.
She walked round to the front of the house and took a few moments to look at the view down the river. This morning’s clouds had evaporated and the river now twinkled and the cool sunshine made the windows in far-off Dartmouth glint and shimmer. Through the haze, she could even see the chain ferry endlessly crossing the river, touching first one bank and then the other.
Inside the house, the phone started to ring so she dashed in the front door and grabbed it before the answering machine kicked in.
‘Hello, gorgeous.’
She had to prise the grin off her face to answer. ‘Ben.’
‘I just wanted to let you know that Jas and I have arrived at my sister’s.’
‘That’s good. Did you see anyone, you know, hanging around your house?’
There was a pause. ‘No photographers or anything like that.’
She breathed a sigh of relief.
‘Anyway, I’m also calling to ask you out on a date.’
‘A date?’
Ben laughed. ‘Yes, a date. It’s what men and women do when they like each other, and I’ve kind of taken a shine to you.’
‘Like dinner and a movie kind of a date?’
‘Not quite,’ he said slowly. ‘Perhaps it was fate that this all came out in the press. I’d wanted to ask you, but I didn’t think we’d be going out in public for a while.’ He paused. ‘Lord Batterham is having a New Year’s Ball at his home and I would like you to come with me.’