Truth Hurts

by Rebecca Reid

  Poppy managed not to laugh. She wasn’t entirely sure that Lola would even be able to pick her father out of a line-up. He’d spent about ten hours with her since she had been delivered by scheduled C-section three years ago.

  ‘Why don’t you leave them a note?’ asked Mrs Henderson.

  ‘Really?’ Perhaps Mrs H was hedging her bets, thinking that if Poppy and Drew worked out they’d be an addition to her dinner-party set.

  ‘Of course. They’re going to miss you,’ said Mrs Henderson, as if she had forgotten how this whole thing had happened. ‘Come with me. There’s a notepad in here. Drew – Poppy’s bag is in that room over there.’ She gestured at the tiny room where Poppy had been sleeping.

  Poppy followed Mrs Henderson into the side room that Mr Henderson had been using as a study. Mrs Henderson handed her a pad and a pen. ‘There you are. I’ll make sure they get it.’

  Poppy sat down and scribbled a note to each of the children, telling them how much she would miss them and how wonderful it had been to look after them. When she was finished she handed the pad back to Mrs Henderson, who had been standing and looking at her phone with uncharacteristic patience.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Poppy. ‘Genuinely. I hated the idea that I wouldn’t get to say goodbye.’

  ‘Of course. Now if you’ve finished, I presume you and your …’ She trailed off, dramatically unable to find the word to describe Drew. ‘… will be leaving.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Poppy, trying not to rock the boat, fully aware that Mrs Henderson could become a hurricane in a matter of minutes. ‘Thank you again.’

  ‘Oh, and Poppy?’ said Mrs Henderson. Poppy turned to see her standing like a spider in the middle of a web. She dropped her voice. ‘Enjoy it while it lasts.’

  Drew was standing in the kitchen with her suitcase. ‘Ready?’ he asked.

  Poppy nodded.

  ‘Catch,’ said Drew, throwing her the car keys. Poppy kept the surprise from her face and instead turned to Mrs Henderson, giving her a wide smile, refusing to show that her words had rattled her.

  ‘I’ll send someone to pick up my things in London,’ she said.

  Mrs Henderson did not reply.

  CHAPTER 5

  Poppy and Drew walked calmly out of the front door, and then legged it, wheezing with laughter, as soon as they were out of sight of the house. It took Poppy several attempts to start the car, but eventually it roared into life and she curved her hand around the gear stick, sliding it into first gear and putting glorious distance between her and Mrs Henderson. They sped through the warm air without speaking for a few minutes. Drew casually placed his hand on her thigh, saying nothing.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked Poppy after a couple of miles of curved road, sea on one side and mountain on the other.

  Poppy spotted a layby, where the tarmac gave way to a sandy hollow. She braked sharply and pulled in. ‘Here,’ she said.

  Drew looked nonplussed. ‘Here?’

  Before he could ask anything else, Poppy had twisted the keys in the ignition, climbed on to Drew’s lap and met his lips with hers. She kissed him hungrily, feeling him straining through his shorts.

  ‘You want this?’ he asked, undoing his belt.

  ‘You have to ask?’

  ‘Condom?’

  She shook her head. ‘I’m on the pill.’

  ‘No knickers,’ said Drew with a half-smile as she pulled her dress up around her waist.

  ‘No knickers,’ she replied as she pushed herself down and, without meaning to, gasped at the relief of having him inside her. She ground herself against him, moving entirely selfishly, wrapping her arms around his neck and squeezing her eyes shut. Drew let her take control, meeting her movements. He reached to stroke her nipples but seemed to notice her tense at his touch and dropped his hands back to her thighs, where he gripped her flesh. Poppy moved faster and eventually moaned as she came. Seconds later, clearly tipped over the edge by Poppy’s ecstasy, he gave a low whimper into her ear.

  ‘Fuck.’ He laughed as she untangled herself from him, tipping back into the driver’s seat.

  ‘Fuck,’ she replied, pulling her dress down. The familiar feeling of guilt was washing over her, forcing her to question how her face had looked, whether she’d sounded stupid, what he would think of her now. It was the same guilty feeling she always got after sex, as if she’d done something dirty and wrong.

  ‘So, Poppy,’ said Drew, doing up his belt. ‘What now?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, trying to sound composed.

  ‘You should probably pay that cheque in,’ he said. Was he about to tell her that he’d had fun but that he was done with her, that he wanted to drop her off in town?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, her voice bright. ‘Yes, I should. Is there any chance you might give me a lift to the bank?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said, sounding strangely detached. ‘You can drive if you like.’

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  The bank took ages, and the air conditioning was broken. The woman behind the window needed hours to decide whether she could do anything with this English cheque, but for once Poppy wasn’t angered by the slowness. Every moment that the ancient woman with the blue eye shadow in the creases of her eyelids wasted was longer standing next to Drew and feeling his body near hers, absorbing his confidence and imagining that she’d be able to wrap her thighs around his waist again.

  After the cheque was paid in they walked slowly back to the car. ‘Thank you for everything,’ Poppy said, her eyes on the tarmac.

  ‘You’re welcome,’ he replied.

  Poppy reached up and kissed his cheek, darkened with a little stubble. A weirdly formal thing to do, given that she’d been moaning into his ear a couple of hours earlier.

  ‘You know,’ he said, running his hand down the small of her back. ‘That cheque will take a few days to clear.’

  ‘Three,’ said Poppy. ‘The woman in the bank said three.’

  ‘If you wanted,’ said Drew, ‘you could stay with me for a few days. Just until it clears. So you can book your flight.’

  Poppy resisted the temptation to throw her arms around his neck. Three whole days together, three whole days in his world, just them and the house and the sea.

  ‘OK,’ she replied, smiling at the ground. ‘Just until the cheque clears.’

  BEFORE

  Jim was not impressed to hear that his wife had fired the sensible middle-aged nanny they’d chosen together.

  ‘Don’t you think I should have had some say in it?’ he asked, standing in the kitchen with his suitcase by his feet.

  ‘You were away,’ countered Caroline. ‘And the kids wanted her. They’re the ones who are going to be spending time with her, after all.’

  ‘And what about me?’

  ‘You want a nanny?’ Caroline stifled a laugh as she turned back to the kitchen counter. ‘Do you want a glass of wine?’

  ‘It’s not funny, Caro. A week ago, we’d agreed on a qualified professional who was going to be living out, and I get back and you’ve replaced her with a teenager who’s living in the spare room.’

  Caroline poured herself a glass of wine. The kitchen had been immaculate since Agnes had started. Maybe it was because she was young, maybe she was trying harder than usual, but that first day Caroline had come home to a clean kitchen, two kids in bed and one doing a puzzle at the kitchen table. Agnes might not have any qualifications but as far as Caroline was concerned, she was a fucking miracle worker.

  ‘She’s not a teenager. She’s twenty-one,’ Caroline said, pulling out a chair and sitting at the kitchen table. ‘And she has to live in because her family live in the arse end of nowhere.’

  ‘How do you know that she’ll be able to cope? The point of paying for this is that I can get on with work without the kids running in to see me every thirty seconds. I need someone who can keep them quiet and out of the way. You wouldn’t want them running into your surgery every five minu
tes and interrupting you …’

  It had been literally years since Jim had worked on a real project, so long that Caroline couldn’t help thinking that if he was so anti Agnes taking charge of the children, perhaps he could consider doing it himself rather than sitting in his study mucking about on the internet. But saying any of that might trigger one of Jim’s low periods, blocking him off from her and the kids for days, maybe even weeks. So she bit her tongue. ‘I know, Jim. She’s great with them – you’ll see.’

  ‘It’s easy for you – your work stops when you leave the surgery, but when you work from home—’

  ‘Easy?’ Caroline raised her left eyebrow. ‘That’s a new one.’

  ‘Not easy,’ Jim conceded, pouring himself a glass.

  ‘Easier than architecture?’

  ‘Oh Jesus, don’t start this.’

  ‘I’m not starting anything.’

  ‘I’m just saying, they can’t pound on my study door every time they bang their knee.’

  ‘I don’t think that’ll be a problem,’ said Caroline with a little smile. ‘You should see them with her.’

  A knock at the kitchen door saw them both jerk their heads up. It would be Agnes, Caroline realized with dismay. How much had she heard?

  ‘You don’t need to knock,’ called Caroline towards the door. Agnes appeared from behind it, her hands balled. Caroline’s maternal instincts weren’t always up to much – the smell of newborn babies or the size of children’s shoes left her cold. But Agnes’s worried face made every motherly nerve in her body twinge. She watched her husband as he took her in. His face was still set. If he was swayed by her long hair and limbs, by her wide mouth and Disney princess eyes, he wasn’t showing it. Her friends would tell her that she was mad to bring someone who looked like that into their home. But Jim wasn’t clichéd enough to try it on with the nanny.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Agnes. Caroline had noticed how often she started sentences that way. She wanted to tell her to stop, that she shouldn’t apologize, that there were plenty of people in the world who’d walk all over her without an invitation, that it was madness to give them one. But perhaps she was already used to being walked all over.

  Agnes had moved in with just one suitcase and a tote bag. To Caroline, she had looked overwhelmed by her new room.

  ‘I just wanted to say that Jack’s watching a film and the others are asleep, so I was going to go out and grab something to eat.’

  ‘You don’t want to eat with us?’ Caroline asked.

  Agnes looked surprised. ‘I didn’t, uh—’

  Caroline caught Jim’s eye and gave him a look which said, in no uncertain terms: ‘Tell her she can eat with us, or else.’

  ‘Agnes.’ He smiled, offering his hand. ‘I’m so pleased to meet you. I’m Jim Walker. The dad.’

  She smiled, not quite meeting his eyes. ‘Nice to meet you,’ she replied. ‘Are you sure that you don’t mind me eating with you?’

  ‘We insist,’ said Caroline. ‘Glass of wine?’

  CHAPTER 6

  The sun was slipping into the sea as Poppy and Drew finished supper. Soon the pink-orange stains it had trailed across the sky would be reduced to inky darkness. It had been more than three weeks since the ‘three days until the cheque clears’ deadline had sailed past, neither of them saying anything. Instead they had settled into a blissful routine.

  Poppy spent most of her mornings on the sun-drenched terrace, sitting on the painted wooden chair, watching the sky change and reading one of the hundreds of books that lined the walls of the living room. In the afternoons, they’d go down to the beach and swim, Drew doing methodical strokes through the waves while Poppy kicked around in the shallows. Then they’d jump into the car and drive to the village, evening sun on their shoulders, and buy food and wine for that night. They never shopped for more than a day or two in advance, as if they were worried that this, whatever it was, had a shorter lifespan than the peaches or bread that they bought, as if anything more permanent might jinx the little world they had built. Every time one of their phones buzzed, every time Drew took a phone call, Poppy assumed it would all end. But somehow, after four weeks of paradise, it still hadn’t.

  Poppy stretched backwards, throwing her arms out and sighing.

  ‘I’m so full,’ she moaned. ‘I’m never eating again.’ She had roasted figs, drizzled with balsamic vinegar and honey, and served them with the burrata recipe she’d made for countless Henderson dinner parties but never actually got to eat. Drew had praised the food before it had even reached his lips, just as he did every time she cooked. He seemed somehow surprised that she wanted to make food, that she wanted to choose things at the market and bring them home and prepare them, rather than going out.

  ‘You said that last night,’ said Drew. ‘And if I remember rightly, the night before as well.’ He topped up her glass. They’d spent ages earlier in a little cave of a wine shop picking the perfect red wine. Drew had laughed when Poppy had told him that she knew it was expensive because it didn’t taste of anything until you swallowed it.

  Drew had put on weight since she had been staying at the house. It suited him. He was still slim, but his hips were a little less angular now, and his face no longer drawn. The first time she’d stripped his clothes off she had been surprised by how lithe his body was, just skin and muscle, no softness at all. After a couple of weeks together, she had understood why. It was as if he wouldn’t eat unless she reminded him to, as if there was nothing reminding him to do so. The stirrings in her stomach which said ‘bread’ or ‘olives’ or ‘pizza’ didn’t seem to exist for Drew. She suspected, though she hadn’t asked, that back in London his life would consist of black coffee for breakfast, nothing for lunch and a client dinner in the evening, most of it left on the plate so that his mouth could keep convincing whoever he was talking to, uninterrupted by food.

  A silence settled. ‘I’m going to get fat if we keep doing this,’ she said, and then stopped abruptly. Any mention of time was forbidden. An unspoken rule that they’d both abided by, in case they broke the spell. ‘And then you won’t fancy me,’ she added, trying to distract him.

  Poppy sank her back molars into the soft flesh of her cheek, waiting for Drew to speak, wishing she could reach backwards and catch the words ‘if we keep doing this’ from the air.

  Drew got up and stood behind her, facing out over the sea and kissing her neck. ‘You could put on fifteen stone and I’d still fancy you.’ He gently bit her ear.

  He’d never kick her out, he was far too nice for that. But the summer would end eventually. They couldn’t stay here, driving the car around from wine shop to food market to ruined castle every day, cooking and laughing and drinking every night. This was a holiday. And what she had said had brought that reality into sharp focus.

  ‘What if we did keep doing this?’ said Drew, sitting back down.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What if we kept doing this?’

  Poppy sat upright, searching Drew’s face across the table, unsure what to say, unsure whether she had mistaken his meaning. ‘You want to keep seeing each other?’

  He nodded and she felt her lips pull at the corners.

  ‘For as long as you could put up with me, yes.’

  ‘How long do you have the house for?’ she asked, trying not to let the thudding inside her chest control her answers.

  ‘Until the end of the month,’ he said.

  ‘So forever until then?’

  ‘Well, then we’d go somewhere else.’

  ‘Together?’

  ‘I’d hoped so, yes.’

  ‘Like, boyfriend and girlfriend?’

  Drew took a steady breath. ‘Or, if you were interested, like husband and wife.’

  Poppy had been about to put her wine glass back on the table when Drew spoke. It fell the last inch and hit the table sideways, spilling wine over the scrubbed wood. She jumped up, stammering her apologies and grabbed at a napkin to mop it up.

  ‘Sorry
,’ she said. ‘That was so stupid. Sorry, sorry.’

  Drew came around to stand next to her and put his hand over hers, on top of the wine-soaked napkin. ‘Poppy,’ he said. ‘Stop.’

  ‘I just want to clean it up.’

  ‘If it’s too much – we don’t have to. It was only a suggestion. I know it’s madness. We’ve known each other less than a month. I just …’ He paused. ‘Forgive the crassness of the wording but I can’t help thinking that when you know, you know. And I realize that I’m a lot older than you, and you might not even want to get married, but I thought …’ He paused again, looking into her face, still so confusingly calm. ‘… I would ask.’

  Poppy searched his expression, the tension between his eyebrows, the tightness around his mouth. He slept horribly. She’d never told him, never admitted that she noticed it, but every night he twisted in the sheets, clearly a long way from peace. Poppy wasn’t stupid. She hadn’t reached adulthood without realizing that handsome rich men didn’t just stumble into your life, buy you dresses and then offer to marry you. There would be something. There would be a reason. Probably lots of reasons. She tipped her head up and kissed Drew’s lips.

  ‘Can I think about it?’ she asked.

  He looked relieved. ‘You’re not angry with me for asking?’

  ‘Of course not.’ She smiled. ‘I just need a bit of girl-chat. Can I borrow your phone to call Gina?’ Mrs Henderson had, unsurprisingly, cancelled the contract on her phone, which had been the one perk of her job. She would have to get a new one when she got back to England, but for the moment there was something freeing about the idea that no one could get in touch with her.

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘But we should get you a new phone at some point.’ He handed her his shiny black phone and she swiped at the display, marvelling not for the first time that he had told her his passcode. The last guy she had dated, Josh, still covered his phone with one hand after six months when he typed the code in.