He let her have a quiet moment to her thoughts before he steered away from the obviously still painful subject. 'Why move to Kirkton?' he said. 'You could have gone anywhere. There's a whole wide world out there.'
'It was Rebecca's idea. She'd already made the break and was settled here and knew I would have just rotted away in that grubby little town all on my own. After Dad's funeral, she made it quite clear she wanted me to move up here and live with her, to leave the whole sorry lot behind and start afresh. She threw me a lifeline and I grabbed it with both hands…and here I am.'
'And are you happy here?'
'As happy as I can be living with Rebecca.' She smiled wistfully. 'God knows she would try the patience of a saint, but she's my little sister and I love her. And I owe her...a lot.'
'So that's how she talked you into standing in for her when she hurt herself,' he said. 'Emotional blackmail?'
She laughed. 'Sort of, but now I'm here it's not so bad.'
'And what about me?'
'You're not so bad either.'
The couple fell into a routine of sharing morning coffee at the kitchen table. Every day at eleven o'clock by the chime of the grandfather clock in the hall, when Nat was home and if she didn't have to be out running errands, she called him to join her.
'What kind of work did you do?' he said, carelessly dunking a biscuit into his coffee. Part of it broke off and fell into the mug. She pulled a face of disgust as she watched him fish the soggy fragment out with a spoon, suck it off and wash it down with a mouthful of coffee. 'Waste not, want not,' he said. 'You were saying...about your work.'
'It wasn't very interesting.'
'Tell me anyway and don't skimp on the details.'
'I was the personal assistant to a hospital consultant for over fifteen years.'
'What department?'
'Emergency medicine.'
'Now that must have been exciting? All that blood and gore and...stuff.'
'Not really. I had very little contact with actual patients. For the most part it was a wearisome slog through mountains of paperwork and filing - bloody hard work for very little reward. Personal assistant, private secretary, general dogsbody…stick whatever label you like on it. You think of it, I did it…and a lot of things I shouldn't have. Some of them were barely legal.'
Nat's eyebrows rose in fascination. 'Care to be more specific…?'
'I'd rather not. Let's just say he was not a nice man and it was a day's work to keep him on the straight and narrow long enough to not actually kill anybody, and we'll leave it at that.'
'That's tough, and probably not what you signed up for.'
'No, it wasn't.'
'It's heartening to know I'm not the only difficult employer you've had?'
She sniggered. 'You think you're hard work? Believe me, there'll never be anyone else quite like him. He was arrogance and rudeness personified, with no respect for personal privacy or property and had a chronic case of wandering, clammy hands.'
'So why stay?'
'Bills don't pay themselves.' She sat back in her chair. 'Do you know what hurt the most? After everything I did for him, all the rules I broke and the risks I took? He didn't even bother to say goodbye on my last day. No phone call, no message, not even a cheap bunch of dying flowers from the petrol station. The ungrateful bastard was too busy playing golf to make the effort.' She put her hand to her mouth. 'I'm sorry. There I go with my potty mouth again.'
'Don't worry about it. I'm sure he deserved it,' he said. 'Just out of curiosity, how do I measure on your troublesome employer scale?'
'So far, you're not even giving it a nudge.'
'Hmmm,' he muttered and gave her a sideways look. The inscrutable deadpan look on her face said it all. On pain of death, he was on no account to try to improve his score.
Not wanting to appear too intrusive into Megan's privacy, he waited two more days before he made any more personal enquiries. The opportunity arose whilst he was sitting at the table waiting for her to serve him his lunch.
'Is there anyone special in your life at the moment?' he asked.
'Do you mean a man?' She snorted. 'No chance! I don't have the time…or the energy.'
'I noticed you're wearing a ring.'
'So are you, it doesn't mean anything.' She realised her blunder as soon as the words left her lips and glanced round at him. 'I'm so sorry, that was very insensitive.'
'It's alright,' he said, yet already his right hand had protectively covered his left ring finger and the gold band thereon.
She turned back to stirring the soup she was warming in a pan on the stove. 'I'm very happily divorced these past ten years, thank you very much. The ring is purely decorative. I've no time for men; selfish, conniving bastards every man Jack of them.'
'Aren't you supposed to say 'present company excluded'?' he asked. She looked at him askance and he nodded, understanding. 'Point taken.'
'It was my own fault for actually marrying one,' she said bitterly. 'That's three and a half years of my life I'll never get back.'
'What happened?' he asked.
'What always happens, he left me for someone else. He took everything I had, physically, mentally and emotionally and then he turned round and said he'd had a better offer.'
He watched with growing caution as she began to stir the soup in a dynamic figure of eight, flushing with hostility toward her ex-husband.
'That man really was the most manipulative, deceitful, faithless piece of shite that ever walked the face of this Earth. He was a vile, gutless animal who screwed every woman his shadow fell on and if I ever clap eyes on him again I swear to God I'll knife him.' She gave the large, metal spoon a vicious mid-air twist. 'I'll cut out his dirty black heart and shove it on a spike. And then for good measure, not to mention the sheer, glorious pleasure of it...' She jabbed the spoon savagely upwards. 'I'll ram a red hot poker up his arse!'
She banged the spoon on the side of the pan and Nat visibly recoiled at the loud metallic clang.
'Jesus!' he said, alarmed at the unexpected potency of her animosity, 'I hope you don't ever get that pissed off with me!'
'Don't you worry yourself,' she said smiling with all the serenity of an angel. 'You have a long way to go yet and I've calmed down a lot since then. If you piss me off, you'll know all about it, believe me.' She placed his bowl of soup on the table in front of him and picked up a heavy serrated bread knife. 'Bread and butter?' she asked, pleasantly.
He reached up and carefully removed the knife from her hand 'If you don't mind,' he said, 'I'll do it myself.'
Contrary to Rebecca's gloomy predictions, Megan found Nat could at times be fun to be around.
He often amused her with his dry, irreverent sense of humour and could become flustered by the simplest of tasks. Finding the end of a roll of sticky tape or folding up maps were his particular bugbears. To her these were so pitiable as to be comical.
'Don't just stand there, woman, help me with this fuc…blasted thing,' he pleaded when faced with an overly large and particularly uncooperative map that had draped itself over the whole of his desk.
'For Heaven's sake it's just a piece of paper,' she said in a manner she would use with a petulant child.
'Aye, it may well be,' he complained, 'but it's got a life of its own. It doesn't like me.'
'Don't be so silly.' She shooed him out of her way. A quick flick of her hand brought order to the crumpled mess and with a few deft movements, folded it back into its original form, not a crease out of place.
The triumph of single-mindedness over incompetence, she thought.
She held out the map, eyebrows raised in an unspoken, 'That wasn't so hard now, was it?' and he meekly took it from her.
Saying not another word, she turned on her heel and walked from the room, her lips pressed tightly together to suppress a smile. A faint, 'Thank you,' floated out after her.
Once out of sight she generated a grin so wide it almost split her face in two. Laughter welled
up and she let it go, not caring whether he heard or not.
Chapter 4
The day after his return from another business trip, Nat took advantage of a spell of good weather and spent an entire sunny morning washing and polishing his Range Rover.
Megan took his coffee out to him, but before handing it over, she took a moment to survey how carefully he wiped the cloth over the body of the vehicle. Anyone would think he was in love with that car, she thought. Talk about your proverbial pride and joy…
'You can do mine if you like,' she said, tipping her head towards her own means of transport. The tiny blue Citroën C1 squatted, mud spattered and rusting on the gravel.
He afforded it a fleeting glance, looked back at her and said, 'I don't think I'll risk it. It might just come apart at the seams under the weight of the bubbles.'
She chuckled at his witticism. 'You might be right,' she said and handed him his mug. They both stood and admired his massive vehicle.
OVERFINCH - With her finger, she traced each of the silver letters attached to the shimmering green bonnet. 'What does that mean?' she asked.
'That it has special added extras,' he said. 'What they call a bespoke vehicle.'
'Like what?' She caressed the front grille.
'Whatever I wanted - enhanced fixtures and fittings, wood fascias, fancy wheels…'
'Hmm…a car with wheels,' she murmured. 'Who'd have thought?' She moved around to the side of the vehicle. 'You haven't told me what it is you do that allows you to buy a fine motor like this.'
'I buy and sell land.' He quickly stepped up and swept his polishing cloth over where she had touched, wiping away any stray fingerprints.
'For what purpose?' She began to slowly circle the car, deliberately draping her hand on the bodywork. He followed her closely.
'For building on usually. It might be for a hotel or golf course, or even a shopping centre…'
She touched each of the letters on the personalised plate, NAT 50. He wiped it vigorously. '…sometimes it's just for investment. I own quite a bit myself. When the right buyer comes along I'll sell it on and make myself a nice fat profit.'
'A country landowner,' she said. 'You must be loaded.'
'I get by.'
She shielded her eyes and peered in through the driver's window at the plush leather and wood interior and the vast array of knobs and buttons. She could see his reflection in the glass as he hovered fretfully behind her, cloth at the ready.
'So there's plenty of money to be had in land then?' she said.
'More than plenty.' He polished her handprint off the glass. 'Don't you know the old saying about land, 'they don't make it any more'? Someone always wants to buy land. I find what they want and negotiate the best deal and get a commission. I can almost print my own cash.'
She ran her fingers over the swell of the wing mirror. 'So…what you're saying is…you're a glorified estate agent?'
He muttered under his breath as he buffed the paintwork. 'I hadn't thought of it that way, but I suppose you could say so.'
'I see.' She crunched her way over the gravel to the low garden wall, sat primly on it and sipped from her mug.
Satisfied she wasn't going to suddenly spring up and touch the car again, he gave the bonnet a final wipe over, pocketed the cloth and sat beside her. 'What's wrong with being an estate agent?' he asked. 'Didn't you bring any biscuits?'
'No, you already ate them all. And I'm sure being an estate agent is a perfectly decent occupation. I just imagined you might do something a bit more high-powered, that's all.'
'Like what?'
She shrugged. 'I don't know…banker, lawyer, something in oil. An international man of mystery maybe?'
He laughed. 'I'm not interesting enough to be mysterious and I'm certainly not international.'
She smiled. 'I don't know you well enough to know how interesting you are yet, so I can't judge. You know all about me, but you've told me next to nothing about yourself.'
'What you see is what you get. I have nothing to declare. Mr Ordinary.'
'Aw, come on, I don't believe that for a second. You must have plenty to tell. You have a whole lifetime of experience to choose from…tell me something shocking…something from your hidden depths…a secret from your past…'
His back stiffened and he sat upright, his entire demeanour suddenly changed. His grey eyes fixed her with a hard, cold stare and his mouth had drawn into a tight line. He leaned toward her and his sudden close proximity forced her to lean away and widen the gap again.
'Now you listen to me, woman and listen good, because I don't want to have to repeat myself,' he said, his voice low and tight with anger. 'As far as you're concerned, my private life is just that…private. It is absolutely none of your, or anyone else's damned concern so keep your nose out. It's not an issue to be gossiped about with your sister, speculated on with those busybodies down at the Post Office or discussed over the garden fence with the old trout next door. Do I make myself perfectly clear?' Megan, holding her breath, nodded. 'Now, get back to the work I'm paying you for, mind your own damned business…and keep your hands off my fucking car!'
Shocked into virtual speechlessness by the abrupt change in his temperament, she could only force out a fragile, 'I'm sorry…'
He wasn't interested in her apology, and she abandoned it. She got to her feet and strode quickly into the safety of the house.
After fifteen minutes spent brooding on the wall, he had calmed down. He took the polishing rag from his pocket and gave his car a final wipe over. Content with the standard of finish, he tidied the cleaning materials into the garage and went back into the kitchen. He put his dirty coffee cup on the sink drainer and washed his hands. From a respectable distance, Megan handed him a towel to dry them. As he took it from her, their fingers accidentally touched and she withdrew hers as if burned.
'I'm sorry,' he said. 'I shouldn't have yelled at you, but you overstepped the mark.'
She didn't look at him, keeping her eyes on the towel. 'I know. It was my fault. I wasn't thinking.'
He held it out for her to take. 'Don't do it again.'
She glanced up and met his eyes for an instant 'I'll try not to.' Immediately she corrected herself. 'I won't.'
'See that you don't.'
He clapped his hands loudly, startling her, and rubbed them briskly together. 'Now, is there any chance of some lunch? I'm famished!' he said, all trace of harshness gone,
She had now witnessed Nat's volatile temper firsthand and it troubled her deeply how easily a seemingly trivial comment could set off such fury. Rebecca had cautioned her it could happen, but she hadn't heeded the warning. In future, she knew, she would have to be more careful.
It's never a good idea to prod a sleeping bear with a sharp stick, she told herself.
She made a concerted effort to curb her tongue and become more observant of his moods, and soon became adept at spotting an impending change by the set of his face, his mannerisms or the tone of his voice.
Often she could turn him around with a kind word, careful attention and an encouraging smile. Other times she simply needed to stop talking, walk away and leave him alone. When his temper did get the better of him he was usually, but not always, apologetic and remorseful afterwards.
Despite her preparedness, Nat still managed to perturb her.
He had called her into the study one afternoon. She hadn't been in the room since her initial furtive survey of the house, but it looked different from how she remembered it. He had seemingly taken it upon himself to tidy up and move the furniture around.
He was now busily sorting books into a pile, and she stood quietly in front of the fireplace, waiting for her instructions. The only sound in the room, apart from the quiet thud of book being stacked upon book, came from the hypnotic ticking of the wood-cased mantle clock. It reached into the expectant silence and as it did, she allowed her eyes to wander around the revered study.
It was an odd mix of old and new items,
each contrasting the other. The massive, antique oak desk that dominated one side of the room carried Nat's ultra modern shiny laptop. The flat screen TV and satellite system looked out of place beside the wood panelled walls and the high stained glass window with its Victorian window seat cushioned in plush green velvet, in patches a little threadbare. A functional, high-backed office chair stood in stark black newness compared to his shabby brown leather armchair. The armchair was showing considerable age, and both it and its matching footstool had been almost worn through to the stuffing in places.
Against the walls, bookshelves groaned with books of all shapes and sizes, and where there was no more room, they stood piled on the floor.
With the room tidier, she noticed a piece of furniture she hadn't seen before. A cupboard, a little over five feet high and shaped like a narrow coffin of highly polished mahogany stood bolted to the wall. It carried a very sturdy lock and lurked in the corner of the room as if it didn't want to be seen. She was startled out of her pondering by the clock on the mantle unexpectedly chiming out the half hour. It was then her eyes lit on the elegant picture frame standing beside it. Its ornate body encased a colour photograph of a woman in her late thirties with long brown hair, hazel eyes and a soft, friendly smile. Her arms were hugged around the neck of a large white dog.
This must be his wife…what was her name - Joanna? She thought and out of the corner of her eye she became aware of Nat watching her as she scrutinised the picture.
'She's very pretty,' she said, and heard him breathe deeply.
'Aye, she…was,' he said, almost inaudibly.
'You must miss her.'
He touched his fingertips to the photograph, at the woman's cheek. 'That's a bit of an understatement. When she went she ripped my soul in half.'
He gazed into the woman's motionless eyes and Megan, never having seen a man's face so full of sorrow, genuinely thought she felt her heart move in her chest. You poor wretched man, she thought.
'Aren't you going to give me the usual platitudes?' he said, his eyes roving over the photograph. 'How about, 'I'm sorry for your loss', or 'what a terrible tragedy' and all that worthless nonsense.'
Saving Nathaniel Page 3