A Home in the Sun

by Sue Moorcroft

  She sat down at the kitchen table. ‘Do you live here, Caleb?’

  He slid two slices of bread into the toaster. ‘On and off, while I’m deciding what to do with myself.’ He paused, glancing at her as if struck by a thought. ‘Is it OK for me to stay here with Dad? It’s not in contravention of the landlord’s rules, is it? It’s just for a while.’

  Blowing on her coffee, she tried to sound reassuring, but felt duplicitous, knowing she was going to ask this pleasant young guy to leave, along with his dad. ‘We have a standard assured shorthold tenancy agreement – there might be a clause that states Mr Leblond should give me the opportunity to veto any long-term guests or co-tenants.’ ‘Mr Leblond’ sounded overly formal but she hardly felt that she knew Adam and on the odd occasion they’d communicated he’d always signed himself with his full name.

  ‘Oh. Right.’ Caleb pulled a conspiratorial face. ‘I don’t want to screw things up for Dad. I’ll push off to Mum’s if I have to.’ So whoever Caleb’s mother was, Adam Leblond didn’t live with her.

  Caleb reminded her of Kieran. She felt her lips curve into a small smile at the gangly young man, the easy grin, the air of finding everything doable. ‘It mainly matters that the house has been looked after.’

  He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Oh sure, you know what Dad’s like.’

  ‘Not really,’ Judith said. ‘A friend arranged the tenancy while I lived abroad.’

  His eyes lit up. ‘Where have you been living?’ Without waiting for a reply he went on, ‘I’ve just done my gap – Thailand, Cambodia and Australia. Dad had kittens if I didn’t email for a couple of days while I was in Cambodia. Australia was cool. So cool.’ He began to bombard her with stories about hostels and working in kitchens to pay his way, employing the vocabulary of his generation: ‘cool’, ‘crazy’, ‘wicked’. She wondered whether to tell him that she’d been around his age in the seventies, when the same words had peppered her conversation. She kept waiting for him to throw in ‘groovy’ or ‘fab’, to talk about living on a kibbutz, the icon of freedom in her teen years and not attained because she’d sensibly gone to college.

  They were interrupted by the rapid rhythm of feet descending the stairs.

  ‘Here’s Dad.’ Caleb promptly vacated his seat as if he’d only been keeping Judith company out of good manners.

  Adam Leblond jumped the final two steps and then swung along the hall. He looked as if he’d come fresh from the shower, his damp hair combed back from a face pink from shaving. His brows were two straight lines, as if he looked as if he spent a lot of time squinting into the distance. He was more wiry than she remembered, quick of movement, flesh taut over his jaw and cheek bones. He wore a plain black T-shirt tucked into black trousers.

  Caleb passed him in the doorway, carrying his toast with him. ‘See you later.’

  After a flash of a smile in his son’s direction, Adam Leblond looked at Judith and frowned. ‘Sorry, I was reading in bed.’ His eyes were piercing, alive. His hair receded a bit at either side at the front. Faint diagonal lines on his forehead cut across horizontal ones when he frowned.

  ‘It’s me who should apologise. I should’ve phoned and made an appointment. I’m Judith McAllister.’ It wasn’t worth reminding him that she had been Judith Morgan, in the fifth year when he’d been in the upper sixth. If he’d ever known her name, he would surely have forgotten by now. Automatically, she extended her hand.

  He recoiled. Hesitated. Then withdrew his right hand abruptly from his pocket, displayed it for an instant before shoving it back. ‘I don’t, really.’ He half-smiled.

  ‘Oh!’ Her heart hopped in shock at the glimpse of his hand. Pink flesh had closed over where his first three fingers ought to have been, a yawning gap between his little finger and thumb. Oh, poor Adam! She flushed hotly that she’d embarrassed him with her attempt to shake hands. ‘Sorry. I didn’t know—’

  Compassion for her discomfort flickered in his eyes, darker grey than his son’s, one corner of his mouth lifting. ‘It’s relatively recent. Are you here to inspect the house?’ He leaned back against the door jamb. ‘It’s OK if you want to. I expect Caleb’s room’s a tip, but it’s just clothes on the floor and stuff.’

  Caleb returned briefly into view, moving from the front room to the stairs, four CDs clamped in his hand. ‘You were supposed to tell her that I was living here, Dad.’

  ‘Oh!’ Adam Leblond flushed. ‘It didn’t occur to me. It’s only Caleb, he’s my son, a guest. It’s not as if I’m subletting.’ He was still frowning.

  ‘That isn’t the reason I’m here.’ Her face felt hotter and hotter. All they’d done so far was to make one another awkward, one apology countered with another. His obvious concern for his responsibilities as a tenant made her feel sheepish. She was here to chuck him out of his home, for goodness sake. A deep breath. ‘Could we talk?’

  ‘Of course. In here.’ He led her into the room that was lounge at one end and dining room at the other. Her grey-blue carpet was still on the floor but he’d added inky damask curtains, a charcoal suite and ivory wallpaper. Everything in the room was functional; no occasional tables or ornaments cluttered the gaps. An Apple Mac computer, large, brand new and looking state-of-the-art was hooked up in the same alcove where she used to stand her rather more elderly PC.

  Despite its spare style, the room felt welcoming and lived in. A neat pile of glossy magazines stood on the floor beside one chair, and two empty beer cans beside the other. ‘Caleb,’ he explained, as he gathered the cans into his left hand. ‘I’m sorry. You’ve caught me on the hop.’

  She flushed anew. ‘I shouldn’t have called unannounced. But I came home from Malta yesterday, and I need to discuss something with you.’

  His tidying ceased. He straightened, bright eyes suddenly wary. ‘You come home yesterday; you call on your tenant today? Sounds like a problem.’

  His lightning perception forced her into a blunter approach than she’d prepared for but she made herself hold his grey gaze and speak calmly. ‘I’m afraid so.’ Fumbling, she extracted the envelope with his name on from her bag, and held it in both hands. ‘This is probably not what you want to hear but I must give you notice. I’ve left Malta for personal reasons and I need my house back.’ Her throat was dry.

  Slowly, he put down the cans and took the envelope, opening it awkwardly, holding it in his left hand while he slit the flap with the remaining finger on his right. He read the letter in silence, folded the page up and returned his gaze to her. ‘So I get two months’ notice? Two calendar months from today.’

  Wishing the news hadn’t made him look so bleak, Judith shifted in her chair. If she hadn’t been hoping to get him out without full notice she would have sent the letter by registered post and been spared this interview. She cleared her throat. ‘To be honest, well, I’d really like you out sooner. If possible. I could offer an incentive—’

  He laughed, grimly. ‘I’ve nowhere to go.’

  She pushed back her hair. It needed cutting and it was annoying her. ‘Neither have I. And it’s my house. I’m afraid I need it back.’

  He nodded, sinking into the armchair with the magazines beside it and regarded her narrowly. ‘But under the tenancy agreement I have two months.’

  ‘Yes, you do. But you haven’t precisely been sticking to the tenancy agreement, have you?’ She glanced up, from where thumping rock music was filtering through the ceiling.

  He did that half-smile again. It gathered the corners of his eyes into laughter lines and cut grooves at the sides of his mouth. It didn’t seem to mean that he was finding things particularly funny. ‘I don’t think a court would grant you early possession because I had my son to stay for a few weeks.’

  Court. She wouldn’t take such a trivial matter to court and he probably knew it. ‘I suppose not,’ she conceded, beginning to feel fatigued and strained. So much had happened in such a short time and now she was back in her own house and it didn’t feel like home. It felt like Adam and
Caleb’s home and she felt like a bitch for asking them to go. But she wanted to live in her house, not as a guest in Molly and Frankie’s.

  A silence. He frowned, pulling his bottom lip and gazing out of the window at cars passing in the street outside. ‘The thing is, Mrs McAllister,’ he began slowly. ‘The thing is that I’ve been having an awkward time. I had the accident where I lost my fingers and my marriage broke down. My wife got the house. The woman always gets the house, doesn’t she? I hate solicitors and all the nasty procedure of trying to shoehorn the opposite party out, demanding shares of the equity, her solicitor insisting the dog belongs to her even if the dog thinks it belongs to me. So I left when my wife asked me to, making things easy for her because we have a long history and we’re still friends. Foolish of me, on reflection, but I do tend to see myself as the guy who wears the white hat. I was relieved when Ian’s wife Melanie said she knew of a nice rental and now I’m happy and comfortable here.

  ‘And then you come along and say, “But it’s my house!” And it is. But you’re out of order – it’s my home. Until the twenty-first of August, in law, this is my home. It’s kept well, you’ve no grounds for eviction. You can examine every room if you want to, the empty beer cans are about the worst you’re going to find. Sorry, but I don’t feel too co-operative.’

  He twisted the letter over and over between the fingers of his good hand, the jerky movement the only sign of any agitation. He switched his gaze back to Judith, eyes gleaming with anger. ‘So if you’ve run back to England in a stress because you’ve had a row with your boss or been dumped by some man who doesn’t realise when he’s well off …’ He tossed down the letter. ‘Tough. I’m not inclined to roll over this time. Because the woman always gets the house, and I’m sick of it.’

  Judith clenched her hands. ‘I’m sorry to even ask it of you.’

  ‘Don’t be sorry. You’ve been refused.’ His tone remained calm, despite the anger in his eyes.

  She tried again. ‘I can offer financial compensation for the inconvenience. And the woman doesn’t always get the house. My husband kept the house … and I bought this one.’

  ‘Inconvenience? It’s a flaming liberty!’ He snapped his lips shut around his words as if regretting the letting of emotion. Then, more quietly as he seemed to realise what she’d said, ‘Sorry, if your husband got your marital home. But I’m not going to leave before I need to.’

  Her eyes began to burn. She blinked. He was right to be annoyed. She was out of order. She’d entered into an agreement with him and now she wanted to welch. He had every right to be cross and recalcitrant.

  But, oh, her heart was sore. She wanted to live with her own things, her own phone and computer, where she could decide whether the television went on and what to watch. Her own place where she could lick her wounds and recover from losing Giorgio. And this was her house!

  She sucked in a big breath and then let it out slowly, looking away for a moment to reassemble her expression so that it was closed and unemotional. She turned back to him. ‘Mr Leblond, would you … would you consider just taking my word for it that I had a pressing reason to come home, without me going into detail? That I’m in an emotional state that makes getting settled in Brinham and back on an even keel desirable?’ She noticed he was watching her mouth.

  Gently, he shook his head as his eyes flicked back to hers. ‘Sorry, Mrs McAllister.’ As his hair was drying it was lightening, becoming the chestnut colour she remembered, slipping down at one side.

  She closed her eyes for an instant and swallowed. The ticking of the clock on the wall seemed suddenly very loud. She opened her eyes and rose, hitching her bag onto her shoulder. ‘It’s not your business but you’re right. It’s a man.’ She saw a thought-so look fleet across his face. ‘He hasn’t exactly dumped me. But it doesn’t look as if there’s a future for us.’

  And, without warning, tears rose up and choked her.

  ‘Hell,’ he sighed.

  There were no sobs. The tears just sprang silently from her eyes and poured down her cheeks. Judith opened her handbag and scrabbled for a travel pack of tissues. She’d used a whole rainforest of them in the last couple of months.

  She pressed a wad of tissue against each eye in turn and sniffed inelegantly. Another jerky breath, and her voice came out through a throat that felt stretched like wire. ‘I’m staying with my sister but I need to be on my own or I wouldn’t ask you to start looking for somewhere else immediately.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeated. But this time he sounded as if he might mean it. He hesitated, and then asked gently, ‘You don’t think you’d be better off with your sister for a while? Rather than being alone?’

  Judith gave a strangled laugh through her tears. It was odd to be laughing and crying at the same time. It made her feel as if she might soon be flailing for whatever smidgen of control she had left. ‘She’s driving me nuts already. I don’t even want to look at food but she wants me to eat.’

  He laughed briefly. He’d forgotten to keep his hand out of sight and, wiping her eyes, she caught a glimpse of zig-zag lines across the palm like white lightning, new pink skin across the strange, shiny knuckles. He said, ‘But you do look as if you need to put on at least a stone.’

  ‘I know, I’m a scarecrow.’ She wiped her eyes and sniffed again.

  ‘Not as extreme as that. Perhaps a chicken carcass.’

  ‘Thanks a bunch.’ She tried a watery smile and he grinned suddenly and winked.

  But he didn’t offer her the house back. She had little choice but to leave.

  Chapter Five

  The Water Gardens were not so splendid now as when built in the late Victorian era. All the eight fountains of varying sizes were dry and the people of Brinham were left with just one algae-ridden, scalloped-edge pond. Either side, smaller ponds in the same design had long ago ceased to hold water and had become flowerbeds.

  The parks department had planted up the waterless tiers of the fountains with French marigolds and catmint to clash gaily with scarlet salvias and purple lobelia. The weedy grass around the beds and paths was mown and the benches thick with bright green paint, glossing over last year’s Baz luvs Katee and Northampton Town FC carved into the wood.

  The park made a pocket of colour just off the town centre; somewhere for office workers to eat their sandwiches on hot days or gangs of teenagers to hang out once they’d exhausted their money at the shops. Shoppers nipped through between town and the car park, a bare line in the grass where they cut diagonally across. And now, after the exhausting scene with Adam Leblond that had ended with her no nearer taking possession of her house, it made an oasis of peace where Judith could collect herself and wait for the redness around her eyes to fade.

  She’d charged her British mobile phone the evening before and now found a vacant bench and pulled it from her bag to ring Kieran, pushing the little rubbery keys with mounting anticipation.

  She got him straight away. He raised his voice over the happy background clamour of a pub. ‘Hey!’ he said. ‘I emailed you this morning. Isn’t this call on your English phone? Doesn’t that cost you loads?’

  ‘No, because I’m in the Water Gardens,’ she said brightly, making her voice level and serene. ‘I’m home.’

  ‘Shut up, shut up!’ she heard him yell into the escalating racket around him. Then, back into the phone, ‘What, the Water Gardens in Brinham? You’re in Brinham? How cool is that? I’m, like, in The Punch. Stay put.’

  He rang off and she folded the phone shut, waiting, her gaze on the old black iron arch with 1900 set into the wrought iron, commemorating that the gardens had opened a hundred and four years ago. Beneath the arch, a lane threaded into the town centre. Judith’s heart thrummed gently with anticipation. The Punch was a bar in the cellar of The Duke of Brinham Hotel on High Street. When she’d been a youngster it had been a popular venue for discos or parties. They’d tried to pretend it was just like the infamous Cavern Club in Liverpool.

 
Judith had been Kieran’s stepmother from when he was nine until he was eighteen – really important years. Such a little mouse he’d been when she first knew him, an unlikely son for big, bullish Thomas McAllister. While Tom made her the subject of an exciting, conspicuous courtship, Kieran and Judith quietly clicked; the little boy who’d lost his mother, the woman who’d never so far had the kind of relationship that went along with children appearing on her radar.

  Her gratitude to his late mother, the unknown Pamela, was boundless. She’d even felt guilty about her joy, as his father settled possessively on Judith for his second wife, to see Kieran dance with joy and demand to be allowed to call her ‘Mum’. Pamela’s death had gifted Judith a son, a dear little boy with an endless capacity for love.

  Tom was a big cattle rancher of a man, gruffly kind to Judith – in those days – and gratifyingly active in bed but on her wedding day Judith probably loved Kieran more than she loved Tom. She loved Tom, of course she did. But, oh, she did love Kieran! At thirty, it hadn’t mattered to Judith that forty-year-old Tom hadn’t been particularly keen on ‘starting again’ with a new baby. Kieran had been enough.

  During the marriage, she should have pushed harder for the adoption that would have given her parental rights. But whenever she’d brought the subject up, Tom merely pulled her into his arms and kissed her. ‘He is your son, he’s the first to say so. We don’t need any fuss in the court.’ And so Judith settled down to the novel position of mother.

  She remembered how much she’d loved it. Swimming lessons, football club, friends for tea, parties, school open evenings, new school uniform, bedtime stories. She’d invested herself in Kieran and mother had been more satisfying than wife. Tom had seen her as one of his possessions and it had caused friction.

  And when, after almost a decade of Judith being with Tom, Liza came on the scene, Judith was almost relieved. Tom’s betrayal had given her back her freedom.