Since You've Been Gone

by Anouska Knight

  I could feel the ground, falling away at my feet.

  “It’s not what you think, Mum,” I said, leaving the table with the dishes.

  “How do you know what I think?” she replied.

  I sighed, knowing there was no point going toe to toe with her. I began firing water into the sink. Mrs Hedley had been right—the near-dead plant of hers sitting in my window was already undeniably perkier. Martha followed my lead, bringing more dishes over.

  “I’m only curious, Holly. I’d love to think that you’re making new friends,” my mother called, before sipping her wine. “He has a good job, I take it? What does he do? Where does he live?”

  I was not talking about this now.

  I hadn’t looked at Catherine since Ciaran had first walked in.

  “Don’t spook her,” Mrs Hedley said coolly to my mother.

  “I beg your pardon?” Mum asked indignantly.

  “Holly isn’t interested in all that nonsense. She doesn’t care for fancy pants and showboating. Don’t spook her.”

  “I think I know my own daughter, Mrs Hedley. And I think I know what is and is not in her interests.” My mother smiled coldly, before taking another sip. I plunged my hands into the hot suds, trying to blot them all out.

  “Holly knows what’s best for Holly. She’s a clever girl,” Mrs Hedley continued, calmly.

  “This crumble is delicious, Pattie!” Rob tried desperately before he received any more jabs for starting it. “Or did you make this, Phil?”

  “No, no!” Dad said, taking his cue. “Pattie’s the dessert queen. I think her secret is cinnamon. It is cinnamon, isn’t it, love?”

  Rob and Dad carried on defusing the conversation and when Martha’s soft voice joined in with theirs I hoped it would be enough to dissuade my mother. At least I hadn’t cried today. Today of all days, and that had to be good, right?

  The sinkhole slurped away the last few bubbles with a belch of air. A milky pale hand, more worn than mine, laid itself gently over my forearm.

  “For what it’s worth, Holly, I think he’s a nice boy,” Catherine said softly, “and I think that our Charlie would have liked him enormously.”

  chapter 32

  The number of items Martha included in Daisy’s day bag was inconceivable. The outfits alone nearly totalled double figures, leaving me slightly panicked that I’d misunderstood our conversation and Daisy was actually staying with me overnight.

  Daisy was flapping silent arms around happily in her Moses basket while I lay next to her on the chesterfield reading. In the yard outside the window, headlights too sleek and too low for the profile of Rob’s people carrier swung next to my van.

  He hadn’t called me since eating with us Tuesday. And I hadn’t checked that he’d made it home, either. But I’d thought about him. Non-stop, actually.

  I checked Daisy and got to the door before Ciaran’s knocking could set Dave off.

  “Hi,” he said, slowly making the porch.

  “Hi.”

  “I was just passing, and thought I might collect my eighty-two pence. Just so you didn’t think I was throwing money around.” The ghost of a smile on his lips.

  “How are the blisters?” I asked.

  “Better.” He smiled. “So anyway, the last two times I’ve visited you, you haven’t invited me in.”

  “You came in last time. And ate lunch with my family,” I said, still surprised by it.

  “Ah, but it wasn’t you who invited me in,” he said, dipping his head to one side. His smile faded with my quietness. “Holly, I don’t want to go, but if you ask me to I will.”

  I hated that. Hated the way he always put me on the spot. Hated the way he made me feel when his lips pressed into a hard line under eyes grown guarded.

  I didn’t want him to leave.

  I moved from the doorway, and let him in. Ciaran watched me close the door behind him. Minding my toes with his boots, he stepped forward and found my hand with his. A charge sparked through me.

  “I need you to know, Holly, Clara was a lifetime ago. Our meeting wasn’t whatever Penny implied it was.” If there was a lie in his voice, I couldn’t hear it.

  I shook my head. “It was none of my business, Ciaran. I made a fool of myself,” I said, knowing I should be fighting against his fingers, shouldn’t like the feel of them so much.

  “No, you didn’t,” he whispered. “I want it to be your business, Holly. I want you to care who I’m with. Because I care who you’re with, and I don’t want you to be doing this with anyone else.” His other hand found its way around my back, and the feelings that had burst from nowhere in the bakery started to stir.

  Don’t let him kiss you. I knew what would happen if I did. I knew where it would end, knew that my body already remembered him and would override my brain, not that I was convinced it would put up much of a fight.

  Ciaran leaned in towards my mouth.

  “Don’t kiss me, Ciaran, please.” I trembled.

  “But I want to kiss you, Holly,” he whispered. I could taste his breath. “It’s all I’ve wanted since I first saw you.” He leaned in to test the resolve he knew wasn’t there, and the stifled sound of gas, bubbling angrily from a little person’s bowels, killed the moment dead. “What was that?” he whispered against my mouth.

  “Daisy.”

  Ciaran stayed where he was while I slipped out from under him. Daisy’s flapping had become more animated, and like the coward I was, I scooped her up and wielded her like a chastity shield. Ciaran followed me.

  Daisy had made good on her threat.

  “Oh, Daisy!” I whimpered, taking in the devastation leaching over her pretty white suit. “I’m just going to go and get us cleaned up,” I said, carrying her past him. “Make yourself at home. You know where everything is.” I laughed. He’d put it all there, after all.

  “Good diversion, kiddo,” I whispered, kissing Daisy’s soft head.

  Back downstairs, Ciaran had taken his jacket off, and was sitting looking over the book I’d left on the sofa. “A hardcore necromancer dating vampire masters and were animals?” he asked, shaking the book at me. “That sounds...nice.”

  “It’s less far-fetched than tales of romance,” I said, sitting, my human shield still firmly in my arms.

  “So will Daisy be chaperoning all night?” he said, reaching over and stroking the soft down of her dark hair. “It’s just that I wanted to invite you out, and I don’t want this little lady to get jealous,” he whispered.

  “You still want to invite me out?”

  “Well, I think you’ll approve of this. It’s a double event, really. We’ve just won a very big contract, so it’s a chance to celebrate all the last year’s work that’s gone into pulling it all off. But primarily it’s an annual fundraiser the company throws, in my mother’s honour. We invite a lot of wealthy people to buy a table, and then raise as much money as we can for my mother’s favourite charities. It’s always a good event, black tie, so if you’re wearing those wellies of yours—which I think you looked great in, by the way—you’d better have a long evening gown to cover them.”

  “That sounds like a great evening, Ciaran. When?” I asked, mentally scrambling through outfits I didn’t own.

  “A week tomorrow. I’d really like you to be there with me, Holly.”

  He was the perfect gentleman for the rest of the evening. Rob and Martha came back earlier than they’d thought after they both missed Daisy too much to stay away from her. They could have had coffee with us, but Martha was eager to get out of our way for some reason.

  Ciaran would be driving, so we didn’t drink anything that wasn’t made with the kettle, and talked again into the late hours of
the night.

  “So your dad must be pleased, that you’ve successfully bought all that land? I caught it on the news,” I said, watching Ciaran across the sofa.

  “Yeah, I saw that.” He laughed. “Sometimes the press do actually put across something good for his image—very rarely for mine, though.”

  “That must be good to see. Him making a turnaround?”

  “It’s good to see him comfortable in the boardroom again. At his worst, he couldn’t be trusted anywhere near them. Even less so on-site. Working lunches became my obligation, with Fergal kept as often as possible either holed up with Mary at home, or on the golf course. It was the only pursuit he enjoyed for a while. Until he met Elsa, Ludlow’s mother, at the country club.”

  “They don’t seem like a very compatible pairing. Fergal’s quite fun, and she seemed quite...”

  “The bitch? Yeah, she can be, but she’s not all bad. Fergal didn’t marry her for her warm personality. He was worried about me. About my behaviour. Even through the semi-haze of drunkenness, he kept tabs on me. He thought I was becoming reckless. That I needed a mother. So, after seven years of drinking too much, nearly losing the empire he’d built with my mother at his side, he felt that my...appreciation for the ladies, shall we say, was something to do with my emotional needs not being met.” Ciaran stretched his legs out on the coffee table.

  “Did he reach that conclusion by himself? It sounds like something a therapist would say.”

  “I’m not sure. Either way, Fergal felt he’d cocked up. So, he decided to take matters into his own hands, and rather rashly embarked on finding me a mother figure.”

  “And did marrying Elsa help? Either of you?” I asked, nestling into the back of the sofa.

  Ciaran took my feet, pulling them into the warmth of his hands. “Cold feet again,” he said, rubbing them back to warmth. “Elsa worked wonders straightening him out. She whipped him into shape. He even lost a few pounds. He still enjoys his tipple, as you’ve seen, but not nearly as much.”

  “So she was good for him?” I asked, enjoying the sensation on my toes.

  “I could see that she was good for him in some ways. Fergal, on the other hand, couldn’t see any goodness in her at all.” He laughed. “And then, it wasn’t long until Fergie forgot the whole point of marrying her in the first place—to keep us on the straight and narrow—and began misbehaving himself.” Ciaran shrugged.

  “Which is where the lovely Penny comes into it, I take it? Whatever keeps you warm, I guess.” Though I couldn’t imagine how ice personified could keep anyone warm.

  “In thirty years of marriage Fergal never strayed from my mother. But with Elsa, there was no love, nothing like what he’d had with Mum. He became lonelier than ever, and began to seek company in the arms of the women who would tell him what he wanted to hear.”

  “And that was?” I asked.

  “That he’s not an old man with a heart that can never be healed.”

  I thought about Fergal, and wondered how many people there must be in the world broken by love.

  “The shoes were for Penny, weren’t they? The shoes the cake was modelled on?”

  Ciaran pulled the sage throw from the back of the sofa and laid it over my feet. “Fergal’s no fool. He could have bought Penny those shoes from anywhere, but he chose to use Elsa’s favourite boutique. Fergie wanted to be busted.”

  “But, Penny? I mean, I know she’s stunning, and any man would want her on his arm, but...”

  “But she’s a bitch, too?”

  “Isn’t she? I’ve seen how she looks at you, Ciaran. She can’t love your dad.”

  “He knows that.” Ciaran smiled.

  “But how can that be enough?”

  “How do you think? Theirs is a mutually beneficial relationship. He knows she’s a gold-digger, and only with him because he’s the head of a big company with plenty of status.... He keeps her in trinkets and nice dresses—she makes him feel important. You know how it works. It’s happening in households across the globe.”

  “But what happened to loving someone for the person they are? Instead of what you can get out of them?”

  “Fergal will never love anyone like my mother. He’s not open to that. And as boss of Argyll Inc., he knows every woman he meets sees his value in money before anything else,” he said.

  “Well, that’s a real pity. He might find someone, somewhere. And Penny? Well, she should be looking for someone to love, too. It might cheer her up. How happy can a piece of jewellery make you at the end of the day?”

  “Not everybody thinks like you, Holly.”

  * * *

  All night we talked, like teenagers with all the time in the world. He’d never watched the sunrise, so just after seven, we took the throws from the sofa and went to watch the morning breaking over the waters of the reservoir. In those moments, before he would leave me again to think of him all day, Ciaran Argyll finally kissed me again. Long and gentle and true, as though the sun itself had reached right into me.

  chapter 33

  The cinema. I had not set foot in a cinema for years. Not since Charlie got us kicked out for snoring disruptively through a film. He had the affliction of movie-induced narcolepsy, and despite him being okay with missing the film after paying through the nose for a ticket, turned out the rest of the audience weren’t.

  But this week, I’d shared my first bucket of popcorn with Ciaran. He’d taken me to the cinema, and to the Mexican restaurant in Hunterstone that had made my mouth wet with hunger every evening as I’d left work, and the city theatre where he’d nearly fallen asleep watching the show; to the dog races of all places and then even to Atlas, where I had to admit, the food was incredible.

  The last week spending time with him had been beyond wonderful. Something was happening, really happening. Something long forgotten.

  When I asked Martha to help me find something for the charity ball, she’d burst into tears. Rob said it was her hormones, right before she’d punched him on the arm.

  Hormones or not, the dress Martha had found was incredible. If there was a dress that could make a fashion-appreciative girl out of me, this was it. The colours shimmered from gunmetal to pewter, reminding me of frost on the hedgerows where the light caught. The V of the neck decoratively dipped towards what Martha told me was an empire line, where organza the colour of stormy skies fell all the way to the floor. I loved this dress. Not only did three-quarter-length lace sleeves mean Martha let me off with the fake tan, an undertaking that was only ever going to end in disaster, but the length of the dress meant a reprieve from heels. Once I’d seen myself in the mirror, and fell in love with how the dress made me look, I found myself hoping he would, too.

  * * *

  On Martha’s insistence, and unusually little resistance from me, I’d spent all afternoon being preened and primped at her favourite salon.

  Toby had come to pick me up while Ciaran welcomed guests, laughing at me when I scooped up my beautiful skirts and ran through the drizzle to the passenger seat.

  “Hi, Toby!” I panted.

  “You know, you’re supposed to give me a chance to open the door for you, Holly. The back door, so you can arrive like a lady.”

  “Do you want me to get back out? Or climb over?” I offered.

  “Just buckle up, or you’ll get me into trouble.” He grinned. “Nice dress, by the way.”

  * * *

  The Grace Argyll Memorial Ball, affectionately dubbed Balls to Cancer by Fergal, was being held at Hawkeswood. The private road leading to the courtyard was filled with nondescript spotless cars, much like the one Toby had collected me in, all making their way in and out of the estate.

  I wasn’t the sweaty type but nervousness made me clammy. I wasn’t there yet, but on seeing so many cars, the tides of my excitement had
started to turn.

  “Toby, do you have any deodorant?” I asked, as we waited in the pull-in for the car ahead to pass.

  “I have deodorant for men.”

  “That’s okay, Tobe. Better to be safe than sorry.”

  “In the glovebox,” he said absently, nodding at the passing car.

  “Wow, Toby. That’s manly stuff!”

  “Yeah, Ciaran’ll be pleased you smell like a fourteen-stone driver.... He’s always had a soft spot for me,” he joked. “Right, now if I pull up here at the doors, you need to wait just one—”

  I’d already opened the door. “Holly!” he called as I stepped from the car and straightened my dress.

  “Yes?” I asked him, ducking to see him better.

  “Have fun.” He smiled.

  I playfully sniffed near my arm and grimaced before breaking into a grin. “I will!”

  Inside the lobby a waiter holding a tray of champagne flutes politely welcomed guests to the hall. I passed on the bubbly; that had been a lesson learnt.

  “Are you familiar with the manor, madam?” another gentleman enquired.

  “Not tonight.” I smiled at him.

  “Guests are currently enjoying canapés served in the drawing room, ma’am.” Cool. I knew where that was.

  “Would you happen to know the whereabouts of Mr Argyll?” I asked in my most ladylike voice.

  “Why, am heer, darlin’!” boomed a thick Scottish accent above me. “By God, lass, you turn out well with ah bit ah spit ahn polish.” I’d seen enough of Fergal lately that I wasn’t unnerved by his kilt, despite my previous encounter with it.

  He greeted me with an affectionate kiss on the cheek, bristling me with closely cropped whiskers.

  “Hello, Fergie. You look handsome tonight.”

  Fergal held his arm out and led me through to the other guests, swiping a glass of champagne on the way.

  “Am glad yeh came, lass. The boy’ll be pleased ta see yeh.”

  “Thanks, Fergal. I’ll be glad to see him, too.”