“Oh! My address!” I force a laugh. “Oh yes! Of course! I remember now. I… err… I typed that in while we were talking, remember?”
“No, actually, I can’t say I do.” Rafe doesn’t look convinced. “But then I was very drunk. Look, Cleo, I’m really sorry about yesterday. You didn’t catch me at my best. I’d had some bad news and, what can I say? I hit the Jack Daniel’s.”
“And the Stella and the wine,” I shoot back. I won’t forget that scene in a hurry. The drawing room had looked as though somebody had ransacked Oddbins.
He nods. “I drink too much. I know that and believe me I have tried not to, but sometimes things just get too much, you know? And that’s the only thing that helps.”
“No it isn’t!” Alex yells. He leaps up from the stairs where he’s been slouched listening to our conversation and shoves past me until he’s staring right in his brother’s face. “Drinking isn’t helping, you stupid bastard! It’s making it worse!”
“Brr, it’s chilly here.” Rafe pulls his scarf more tightly around his neck and buries his hands in his pockets. Then he smiles at me, a slow sexy smile that lifts one corner of his mouth. Goosebumps rise on my arms – and not from the cold, either. Suddenly I’m nineteen again and on that railway platform. It’s the oddest feeling.
“I’m doing this all wrong, aren’t I?” he says softly. “Listen, Christmas Girl, I’m really glad you left your address because it’s given me the chance to return your hat and apologise for behaving so appallingly yesterday. I was kicking myself once you’d left. I’ve waited years to find you again and when I do I turn into a tit.”
“I found you,” I point out, and in my head I hear Susie groan. If my best friend were here now, apart from having a meltdown because a bona fide rock star was at my house, she’d be telling me to bat my eyelids and enjoy every minute because Rafe Thorne is “sex on a stick”.
Well, sex on a stick or not, he can flipping well grovel. He did behave appallingly.
“Of course; you found me.” His lips twitch as though he’s laughing, but then a more serious expression settles across that sharp-cheekboned face and he exhales slowly. “I’m so sorry, Christmas Girl, if it wasn’t the reunion you’d expected or hoped for. But I’m not that boy any more than you’re that same girl. Things have happened to me since then. I’ve changed–”
I nod. “Yeah, me too.”
He holds up a hand. “I’ve changed, but there’s one thing that has remained the same for all this time, one thing that I’ve always trusted, and that’s my memory of meeting you. It’s never altered.”
Well that’s just great, given that Rafe’s totally shattered my memory of that snowy Christmas meeting. Seeing him again has only proven to me what a load of twaddle love and romance really are. He’s no romantic hero after all: he’s just a guy with a guitar, a dead brother and more baggage than Heathrow’s Terminal Five. Thank goodness I’ve not been wasting my time dreaming about him but have been busy building a career. A career that I can’t wait to get back to once this lunacy is over. Mental note to self: ring Professor Hamilton as soon as possible and find out when the interviews are.
“Do you still think about it?” Rafe asks softly when I don’t reply.
I do, but I’m starting to wish I didn’t. Some things, unlike artefacts from ancient Egypt, are better left buried in the past.
“It was a very long time ago,” I hedge.
Rafe stares at me and then shrugs. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right. It was.”
An awkward silence falls. We’re both a decade away on the station. Snow is falling like soft feather kisses on my cheeks, and he’s just a heartbeat away. I don’t think I’ve ever felt as close to anyone as I did to him that night. Isn’t it funny how things can change? Funny and so very sad.
“Well, thanks for returning the hat,” I manage eventually.
“That’s no problem. Look, let me at least buy you a drink to make up for yesterday – a coffee, obviously,” Rafe suggests swiftly when he sees my dubious expression. “Please, Cleo? I’m sorry I was so ungentlemanly. I know you were only trying to help.”
Rafe has no idea just how much I’ve been trying to help. My entire life is falling to bits because of it.
“Go on,” urges Alex. “This could be the one chance we get.”
“Please?” Rafe blows on his fingers and pulls a pleading face. “It’s freezing standing here, and if these fingers drop off my career as a musician really is over. Let me at least warm up while you make me grovel.”
I laugh in spite of myself. “You haven’t grovelled nearly enough.”
Rafe plummets to his knees and looks up at me hopefully.
“Come for a coffee with me, Christmas Girl. Please? Look, I’m grovelling!”
“Please go for a coffee with him,” pleads Alex, dancing from foot to foot in a blur of red ghostly Converse boots. “Go on. Where’s the harm? And you promised you’d do your best to help.”
There’s a man kneeling on my father’s doorstep and a ghost begging me to take pity on him. Mrs Lewis from across the road is practically tugging her net curtains down in an attempt to see what’s going on. Even a couple of passersby are looking. “Say ‘yes’, love!” one of them calls. “The poor man’s bloody freezing!”
Oh great. Now it’ll be all round Taply in a nanosecond, and before teatime I’ll be engaged/pregnant/dumped depending on what juicy titbit takes the neighbours’ fancy. No wonder I live in lovely London where you can be completely anonymous.
“The man’s right. Please say yes,” Rafe continues, gazing up at me with beseeching violet eyes. “And say it soon!”
“You must be really desperate for a coffee,” I comment.
“No, it’s my knees! They’re killing me,” Rafe winces. “James Brown’s patellas must have been knackered. Come on, Christmas Girl, I’ll be stuck here until spring if you don’t give in soon.”
I can’t help it: I’m starting to laugh at him with this clowning around.
“Stop it, you idiot! OK, I’ll have a coffee with you. Just get off the step.”
Rafe springs to his feet with the lean, powerful grace of a panther. So much for bad knees.
He grins. “Phew, that was touch and go for a moment! I thought my caffeine fix hung in the balance.”
“Why do I feel I’ve been conned?” I grumble as I unhook my jacket from the newel post at the end of the banister. As I put it on I turn my back on Rafe and mouth at Alex, “You are not invited.”
He shrugs and winks. “Have fun. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t!” and when I look up from fastening my zip, he’s gone. Now it really is just me and Rafe and I feel oddly shy, which is crazy. It’s one coffee, in broad daylight and with a guy I once knew. There’s absolutely nothing whatsoever to feel nervous about. It’s not as though this is a date or anything. As if. Rafe Thorne dates blonde-bombshell models, not ginger Egyptologists.
While he waits patiently, I lock the house and hide the key in Dad’s usual place under the plant pot by the front door.
“And you told me off for my hiding place,” Rafe teases when he see this. “Fancy popping into the greenhouse and lobbing some stones about?”
“Believe me, if burglars try to rob Dad’s house they’ll think somebody got there first,” I promise him as we turn left at the end of the garden gate and head into the town. “I think he’s the only person I know who still has a cathode-ray telly and prefers the VCR to his DVD player.”
He laughs. “VCRs! My God, my brother and I used to drive our Nan wild taping bits of Baywatch over her EastEnders collection. In the end she hid her videotapes inside the piano cabinet. We only found them when my brother decided that he wanted to learn to play. The keys made the weirdest sound.”
“They played the Baywatch theme and then everybody started running down the street in slow motion?” I deadpan.
“Hmm, not quite Nan’s style, but Alex might have been tempted. He was always one for showing off.”
You have n
o idea quite how right you are, I think wryly as we cross the main road and join the path that follows the river towards the centre of town.
It’s a cold December afternoon and the sun has given up now, wrapping itself in layers of grey cloud; the river looks leaden. A group of ducks bobs hopefully by the bank just in case we have crusts, and a rowing four scoots past, the rowers’ breath rising upwards in clouds. Rafe slips his shades back down to cover his eyes, pulls a beanie hat out from his pocket and shoves it onto his head.
“I don’t want to be recognised,” he explains when he sees me looking. “I don’t go out much these days and when I do there’s normally some pap lurking to catch me at my worst. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve been splashed all across some scummy red top, so if it’s all right with you I’ll go incognito. Unless you want to be my new mystery redhead in tomorrow’s Sun?”
I shake my head, thinking of the lurid headlines I’ve read about Rafe Thorne while trawling the Internet to catch up on ten years of Thorne history. I think I’ll give the tabloids a miss. I don’t think it would do my academic credibility any good to be featured in them.
“So that’s why you were so angry with me and thought I was from the press?” I ask. “You really thought I’d come to get a story I could sell? Seriously? Do people really do that?”
Rafe sighs. “You are young in the ways of the tabloids,” he says. Then the smile slides from his face and he looks bleak. “God, Cleo, you’d be amazed what people will do for a story or fifteen minutes of fame. Forget humiliating yourself on Big Brother; it’s far easier to sleep with a rock star and do a kiss and tell, or take a compromising picture on a mobile. I can’t trust anyone.”
“You can trust me,” I say. I glance up at him and when his eyes meet mine I get such a jolt it’s a miracle I don’t topple off the path and splash into the Thames. “You didn’t have to get so angry.”
“Cleo, I’ll be honest. I’d sunk the best part of a bottle of Jack Daniel’s the night before. I’ve felt better.” He gives me that crooked smile again. “Then again, I’ve felt worse. Much worse.”
“I’m sorry about your brother.” There. I’ve said it. I’ve mentioned the unmentionable. Maybe this is the part where I tell him Alex’s message, Alex whizzes off in a white glow and life goes back to normal? I can only hope.
“Hey, thanks, but it wasn’t because of Ally that I was drinking. Well, not directly anyway.” He pauses and fixes his attention on the water lapping at the riverbank, seeming suddenly fascinated by the river. “After Alex died I lost it, big time. It was my fault, you see.”
“No, that’s not true–” I interrupt, because hasn’t Alex told me enough times himself that it was just a silly row and an accident?
But Rafe doesn’t want to hear this.
“It was my fault. Please don’t insult me by pretending you know the facts. It was my fault my brother died and I have to live with that every day. That’s my punishment, Cleo, and that’s why I’m still here rather than at the bottom of that river. I deserve to be miserable after what I did to him.” His mouth sets in a tight line and his chiselled face is rigid. “I’m not excusing my behaviour yesterday but I am trying to explain it. I don’t suppose I was easy to live with either after the accident. My girlfriend soon had enough and I can’t really blame her. I was a bloody mess.”
I nod. I was the same when Mum died. If I’m honest it’s only been since last night that I’ve realised just how much of a mess.
“Natasha left,” Rafe says flatly. “Packed her bags and walked out without even saying goodbye. I lost it then and before long I was in rehab.”
I don’t say anything because I sense that there’s still more he wants to tell me. Instead, I watch the river flow by.
“I did OK. I managed to pull it back together. I poured the booze down the sink. I carried on. Then a couple of days ago I read that Tasha’s hooked up with some new boy-band lead singer. You know the ones: the latest talent-show wonders, who all look about twelve despite being in their twenties? Apparently it’s love, or so they’ve been busy telling OK! – in between giving interviews to all the newspapers, of course, and being papped non-stop. Natasha says she’s never felt like this before. It’s the best sex of her life too, apparently, which is a big dent in my fragile male pride. She’s also sold a big story on what life with me was really like. Shit, apparently.”
“Ouch.”
“Ouch indeed.”
As though by some unspoken mutual agreement we turn away from the river and into Taply. The town is well and truly prepared for the festive season. Brightly coloured lights are threaded like beads through the High Street, and the Christmas tree is up in the square. The shop windows have been sprayed with fake snow and rammed full of sparkly wares to draw shoppers in like mesmerised magpies. The coffee shop has a chalkboard outside boasting its seasonal menu, and Boots is crammed full of gift ideas and shimmering party make-up. The charity shops are in on the act too, with their Christmas cards and fair-trade gifts.
I have to admit defeat. I cannot escape Christmas. Oddly, though, I don’t feel quite as twitchy about all this as I usually do…
At the far end of the High Street stands the River Man Inn, Taply’s oldest pub and a magnet for tourists. With its late-sixteenth-century beams, tiny lead-paned windows and walls bulging as though they too have indulged on the ale and become paunchy over the centuries, this pub is ideal for smothering in Christmas decorations. Usually I find baubles and tinsel garish, but in here the decorations are tasteful and soothing. Greenery swathes the lintels and crowns the bar, white fairy lights flicker and a log fire crackles in the grate. Perhaps before I head back to London I could do something similar for Dad’s house.
While Rafe fetches the coffees I settle down in a snug window seat and watch the river as it flows towards London. I can hardly wait to go back there myself, but rather than wanting to flee as I have in the past I feel a lot more serene about being here. Maybe I’m even starting to make my peace with Christmas too.
“The coffee machine isn’t on, so I got you a mulled wine and a Coke for me.” Rafe deposits the spoils of his trip to the bar onto the table and lowers his lean frame into the sofa opposite me. “Diet Coke, that is, not the powdery rock-star variety, just in case you were wondering.”
I hadn’t been wondering, but then as an Egyptologist I struggle to afford the dark-brown bubbly type of Coke, never mind anything else.
“I also got us some crisps.” He rips open a packet of salt and vinegar and smiles across at me. “Food of the gods.”
“Wow,” I say, reaching for my drink. “You certainly know how to show a girl a good time.”
It’s the wrong thing to say. A shadow flickers over Rafe’s face. “Apparently not.”
“Sorry,” I say hastily. “That was tactless.”
He shakes his head. “Hey, don’t apologise. It’s stupid; it’s not as though Tash and I were serious in any way, but when I read that interview it just felt like another kick to the guts. It wasn’t even about her, if I’m really honest.” He picks up his Coke and swirls it thoughtfully as though it’s a whiskey. “What can I say? All my good intentions were forgotten in an instant.”
“And so you drank.”
“And so I drank,” he agrees. “And when you broke in–”
“Let myself in,” I correct swiftly; I’m nipping this version of events in the bud. “I had a key.”
“Sorry, when you let yourself in, I wasn’t quite at my best.”
He pauses and as I sip my warm and citrusy mulled wine, I know we’re both seeing the same scene: the fusty drawing room, the empty bottles, and the figure slumped on the floor. Rafe runs a hand through his thick hair and shrugs.
“Look, I am grateful you cared enough to try and help, I really am, but what I actually want to know is what the hell you were doing there in the first place. I haven’t laid eyes on you in ten years, so why come back now? Why ignore all the interviews I gave and all the lyrics I wrote
about you, only to reappear at that particular point? What’s going on?”
This is it, the moment when I could take a chance and tell him everything. I’d be keeping my promise to Alex and setting myself free. It would be a win-win situation. Rafe would probably think I was a lunatic and want nothing more to do with me, but at least I could then walk away from the Thorne brothers, catch a train to London and slip right back into my usual life. It’s very tempting.
I glance across the table at Rafe, who’s observing me with the kind of intensity I usually adopt when I’m focused on my research, and my heart does a somersault and then starts thudding like a Samba beat.
What’s happening here? Why can’t I just tell him? I want life to go back to normal, don’t I?
“It’s complicated,” I whisper.
Rafe pulls a rueful face. “Isn’t everything?”
I teeter on the brink of telling him – sway a little, almost topple over the edge – but something holds me back. I take another mouthful of mulled wine. If in doubt, try Dutch courage is Susie’s motto, so maybe I should try it?
“I heard the song,” I say eventually, because this is true. “And I realised who you are.”
“Who I was, you mean.” He downs the Coke and I can tell he wishes it were a shot. “God, I’m a mess, Cleo, a bloody liability. What you saw yesterday? That drunken prick? The guy who drowns his sorrows in whiskey and passes out on the floor? That’s me now. I’m not the man you met all those years ago. He was young and full of hopes and dreams. He had everything ahead of him.” He thumps the glass down as though trying to slam his thoughts away. “He didn’t kill his brother.”
“You didn’t kill Alex. It was an accident.”
Rafe laughs, but it’s a bleak sound. “Yeah, on a technicality, maybe, but it was my going on at him about the band that made Ally jump out without looking. He was keen to sign a new deal and I wanted to take some time out. The fame thing? It’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Ally couldn’t believe it. He said we were on the brink of breaking the USA. I told him that I didn’t care. I wanted to stop. Jesus, Cleo, I was so tired. We’d been on the road for six months with the tour. I was sick of living out of suitcases. I just wanted a rest. Ally was furious. He said that I was throwing everything away and if I didn’t sign, he’d never forgive me.” He pauses, passes a hand over his face, and then carries on. “I told him that if he did sign the deal then it was over between the two of us; we were no longer brothers. He died believing that I meant that. So, you can say what you like but I know the truth. I may as well have been driving the car that hit him.”
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