We broke later for coffee and some of Mrs. James’s flapjacks. Mrs. Treadgold sidled over to me as I tried to avoid having my bottom pinched by Mr. Mansell, which was tragically like a Benny Hill sketch in very, very slow motion. “I saw you, you know,” she said, in a half-whisper, “being dropped off tonight.”
“Oh, right.” I took another bite of flapjack.
Her carefully coiffed grey bob bobbed. “I’m just so pleased for you.”
“Well, yes, it’s nice not to have to get the bus.”
“I meant your young man. He looks nice. Very”—she rolled her eyes and the hair, which wasn’t her own, tootled about independently—“shaggable.”
I nearly inhaled my flapjack. I wasn’t sure which shocked me most, the fact she thought Piers was my boyfriend or the fact Dead Air had obviously corrupted her vocabulary. “Er, actually that was my ex’s stepson.”
We were interrupted at that point by Mrs. Searle, who was nominally in charge, calling us to the table. But Mrs. Treadgold had time to whisper, “Your young man is your stepson? Ooh, Alys, you’re so naughty.” Then, lowering her voice even more, “I really admire you, you know. You don’t have much, but”—she stared down at the impressive cleavage the green dress gave me—“you certainly make the best of what you have.”
Maybe I should have explained and told her that Piers was only after my advice rather than my body. But then I saw her whispering to Mrs. Munroe and decided to float on my laurels a little longer. Maybe I should choose The Female Eunuch as my next book.
The five of them stood at my back like a parental multiplicity when Piers came to pick me up, shuffling each other aside for better views. Although I suspected Mr. Mansell just wanted a close-up of my legs as I clambered into the yellow Porsche, with Piers obviously trying not to laugh.
“What?”
“Nothing. Where d’you want to go? For a drink? I thought maybe that little winebar in Coppergate? They do great food too, if you’re hungry.”
“I’m fine.”
“Alys.” He turned to me, sluicing his hair off his face with long fingers. “You didn’t eat when you got in. You must be starved and I’m offering you food, what’s with turning it down?”
“Yes, you’re right. I’m sorry. It’s—never mind.” I couldn’t really explain that being bought a meal made me feel uncomfortably beholden. Anyway, this was Piers. I was supposed to be doing him a favour, wasn’t I?
It was five miles to the bar in Coppergate. I know this, because I stared at the speedometer all the way, counting down every two-wheeled curve, every airborne bump and had very nearly converted to any religion that would have me by the time we arrived.
“Okay, Alys? You went a little quiet back there.”
“When I get my nails out of your upholstery, I’ll let you know.” Carefully I climbed out of the low door and tried to adjust the skirt of my dress so that it wasn’t showing my knickers.
“I’ll drive slower on the way back.” Piers locked the car with a flourish of a remote device. “I wouldn’t want you not to enjoy the experience.”
I suddenly felt rather warm. “You mean you wouldn’t want me to have an ‘experience’ all over the inside of your car.”
“You get sick in cars?”
“Never, before tonight.”
“Riiiight.” Piers led the way. The bar was filled with a weeknight crowd of hardened drinkers all trying to pretend that Monday was the new Saturday.
Piers sat down, then ordered wine. He looked a bit twitchy, distracted. Nervous.
“So. Are you going to tell me what your problem is? Apart from that truly nasty shirt you’ve got on.”
“I—what’s wrong with it?” He opened the bottle of wine and slopped a major portion of the contents into two glasses, catching my eye and grinning wildly. Almost every pair of female eyes in the place was swivelling towards him, although that could have been the car-crash fascination of the skintight Liberty print shirt.
“Okay,” he said carefully. “Here’s the thing.” He stopped and began twisting the glass between his hands, slopping the greenish-yellow liquid around the sides. “Nah. It’ll be cool. No need to stress you with all the crap that’s going down.”
“But—” I looked across the table at him, the outline of his face seemed to waver, all eyes and hair.
“I guess I thought I wanted to talk about it. Now I’m not so sure. Do you want to order food?”
Oh, what the hell, I thought, swigging down wine. Good food, good wine and the company of a beautiful man. I mean, how serious could any problem suffered by a man with a platinum Am-Ex card actually be? “All right. If it’s not that important.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t important. I only said I didn’t want to talk about it right now, okay? Let’s just eat. Relax. You know, have fun. Talk. Know something, Alys? You never talk about yourself.”
“Er, maybe because I like my friends and don’t want to bore them into insensibility.” I helped myself to some more wine. It was rather nice, and getting nicer with each glassful.
“That is so not what I mean.” Piers leaned forward across the table. “I think—”
However, whatever it was he thought, he never got to tell me. A crowd of young, pretty people arrived at our table, friends of Piers, overanimated and dramatic. To his credit he tried to keep talking to me but two of the girls insinuated themselves between us. One of them sat on his lap and played with his hair while the other stroked his leg and drank from his glass. “This your mum, Piers?”
“No. This is Alys.”
“Oh, right.” The hair stroking went on until I began to feel uncomfortable and drank even more of the wine, without tasting it. The leg stroker turned her back, effectively blocking Piers from me and began slipping fingers between the buttons of his shirt.
He bent forward, looked around her chest at me and winked. “Hey, Alys. D’you want me to take you home?”
“Oooooh,” chorused the two girls. They gave me a kind of sneer-appraisal. “Sounds like your lucky night, Doris.”
“Alys.”
But they’d collapsed into giggles at the obvious ridiculousness of their suggestion and weren’t even looking at me any more. Piers was. And not even smiling. Just looking.
“Er, no, I’m fine here.” I pretended to toast him with my glass. No girls who looked younger than my own daughter and wore less clothes than the average domestic pet were going to drive me away from the first evening out I’d had in ages. “Maybe later.”
Later, and after many more glasses of wine, drunk to spite the girls who’d obviously wanted rid of me, I forced entry into my hallway. With the kind of thuggish enthusiasm typical to those who’ve had a night out which has proved a little too much for their systems to cope with, I collapsed through doorways. I ended up facedown on my bed.
“That was fun,” I said to the pillow. “Piers is nice to be seen out with.” A moment’s contemplation later I mitigated this with, “Bloody annoying person though. Buying all that wine. Making me drink it. And his friends are so rude.”
The pillow turned a cold, glittering eye on me. Grainger was drawing my attention to the fact that he was currently occupying this pillowcase and would I mind buggering off to be maudlin elsewhere because he had some serious bits of sleeping he wanted to catch up on.
Chapter Five
“You are looking very white still, Alys.” Jacinta’s voice boomed around inside my head as I attempted to sort books without bending down. “You must get in bed early tonight.” The shop bell jangled like tinfoil across my nerve endings and she looked at me expectantly. “Is your turn.”
“Oh, have pity on me, Jace, please.” I groaned, resting my forehead against the undisturbed coolness of the Jane Austen section. “I couldn’t sell anything if it was ‘Buy a Book or Die’ day.”
“Hmm.” Jacinta, decidedly lacking in sympathy, muttered, “It not pity you need, it man with big muscle.”
Honestly. First all I needed was “new clothe
”, now it was “man with big muscle”. What was she going to prescribe next? Liechtenstein?
My stomach gave a small lurch and I hastily started pulling books from the shelf to distract myself. A rogue Northanger Abbey needed a swift sort out before it tried to infiltrate Iain Banks on the rack below.
“It is a man.” Jacinta’s voice from the other side of the shelf made me jump, as did the sight of her face peering through the recently made gap. She looked disturbingly like a bird of prey when all her features were squeezed into the book-sized space. “He wants you.”
“Oh, if only.” I sighed. “Why does he want me?”
“He is not saying. I say you are not feeling bright today and that you have brought back your tea.”
“More information, Jacinta, than I think anyone needs. So he didn’t say who he was, or anything useful like that?”
“No. He is very pretty, you go see.”
“But I don’t know any…oh. Hello, Piers.” I tried to become unaware of Jace’s looming, pouting presence as I confronted Piers in front of the till. The thumping in my temples had worsened suddenly, but he looked perfectly cool. “Um. Do you want to buy a book?”
By now Jace had walked completely around Piers, giving him the benefit of her Alpine-level cleavage and, for such a large woman, her absurdly pert bottom. Over his shoulder she was making lip-smacking faces in my direction.
“No, I wanted—just making sure you were okay. You seemed kinda tanked last night and we didn’t get to talk a whole lot on the way back. Worried that my friends might have, ah, upset you.”
Jacinta was now giving me thumbs-up signs with both hands and winking like a pantomime dame behind Piers’s back. “Well, as you can see”—I waved my arms in what was meant to be a look-how-fine-I-am gesture, but came across as though I was struggling to keep my balance—“I’m completely all right. Super, in fact.”
“Yeah, okay. Sure. Just thought I’d, well, you know.” Piers turned and almost collided with Jacinta who managed to wobble most of her assets in her attempt to get out of his way. “See ya.”
As soon as the door had shut behind him, Jacinta was in front of me, grasping me by both shoulders and squeezing until my clavicles squeaked. “Alys, you have a man! And such a man. So—lindo.” She burst into a torrent of Spanish, punctuated with occasional shakings of my limp form which might, in my fragile state, have proved fatal if Simon hadn’t walked in at that moment.
“Now, now girls,” he said evenly. “No need to fight.”
“She has a man.” Jacinta managed to make it sound accusing and her eyebrows, usually neatly pencilled arches on her brow line, became two brackets containing an outraged frown. “She did not tell me of any man.”
“It was Piers,” I said wearily. “He’s got some family crisis and I offered to help, that’s all. Nothing else.”
“Piers? Alasdair’s wife’s boy?” Simon looked puzzled. “But he’s about twelve, isn’t he?”
“Something like that.” My head was banging now, my brain felt like the last biscuit in the tin. “Look, sorry, Simon, but I think I’ve got to go home. I feel absolutely rubbish at the moment. Jace can cope, can’t you?”
“If you say.” Jacinta helped me find my jacket and held open the shop door for me. “He is very big boy for twelve,” she muttered in my ear as I left.
Chapter Six
I awoke some time later, in bed with a migranous headache and Theo Wood looming pixelatedly in front of my left eyeball. Shit. I’d meant to post him off to Isabelle Logan last night. I hadn’t accounted for getting rolling drunk and forgetting. I’d already admitted his presence to Simon, pretending that I’d taken him home by mistake, and had to face Simon’s upper-class tut at my carelessness. If things had gone to plan, Theo would have plopped through Isabelle’s letterbox by now.
I unstuck Theo from my cheek and wiped as much drool off his face as I could, before I groaned my way into a more comfortable position. Why on earth had I drunk so much last night? I turned onto my side and felt the bed dip as Grainger landed alongside me. He walked the length of my body to gurn toothlessly into my face before settling himself against my chest with a small purr of self-satisfaction and a smell like old anchovies.
I closed my eyes and let myself drift off into a pleasing half dream about Theo Wood in which he was reciting poetry to me in a breathless, love-struck voice, but woke again with a start of recognition at the sound of a key turning in the front door. Theo’s gentle exhalations of desire turned into Grainger’s fishy snores and the background sounds became voices. Florence and one other, male and young.
“Mum’s at work, so we’ve got hours,” and his reply, “Great! So, d’you want to do it in here then?”
I lay, frozen, somewhere between embarrassment and outrage. Okay, so Florence was sixteen, legally overage, but even so. I really didn’t think I could lie here and listen. But how could I reveal my presence and ever be able to look my daughter in the face again?
“I’ll get my equipment unpacked.” I heard the sound of a lot of zipping and lifting, before some heavy items thunked onto the living-room floor.
“Jesus, do you carry all those lenses all the time?” Oh, thank God and the patron saint of mothers everywhere. “Shall I sit over here? Is the light good enough?”
“Yeah, it’s fine. I’ll get the meter on you, just in case. D’you want to change?”
“Nah, this’ll be cool. Do a couple of shots, full length and a portrait, that’ll be fine.”
I held my hand against my heart which was beginning to slow down and tried to stifle a giggle of relief. Florence was having her picture taken. She must have persuaded one of the school camera club to do the honours. It was my birthday in three weeks, so maybe this was intended to be my present. Well, it would make a change from the usual half a pound of Dairy Milk and a card bearing a joke which I didn’t understand.
He did seem to know his business, asking her to toss her hair back off her face and pretend to be looking out of the window. I wished I dared peep out at my daughter, posing and teasing yet with such innocence in her laughter and delight in her voice. It reminded me of listening to her playing with Alasdair when she was much smaller. I couldn’t wait to see the finished results.
When I heard her close the front door, I relaxed and picked Theo back up off the covers. His face looked a little bleary from my sleeping on him, but he still retained that saturnine expression which hinted at dark passion, proved by the words of his poetry. I plunged into his metaphors with gusto—this was a man who had known exactly where to put his alliteration for maximum effect.
I read on for a couple of hours, finishing the book, and stared at the face of the poet as dusk seeped into the room. Why couldn’t I meet men like this? Where were they all, the sensitive, artistic types with eyes which could pull the soul from your body? How come the only men I met thought that buying you two egg sandwiches and a Mars Bar made them irresistible? Next door the telephone rang, I heard Florrie answer and could only hope that she would have better luck in her relationships than I had. Hold out for one who’s out of the ordinary, I breathed in a silent wish for her. A man who wants to be your friend first and your lover second. Someone who knows you.
Florence came in, flooding the room with bright light and energy. “It’s Simon on the phone for you,” she said, then, “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”
“No reason.” I wobbled to my feet, jet-lagged after an unaccustomed afternoon away from the vertical. “Just wondering what kind of man you’ll end up with.”
“Oh, that’s easy.” She danced into the kitchen and closed the door, shouting “RICH” as she did so.
“Hello, Simon.”
“Alys. How are you feeling? Are you recovering?”
“I’m fine.”
“Good. Good. Ah. So you’ll be able to come back to work? Only, I need a favour.”
Florence had re-emerged from the kitchen and sprawled herself across the sofa with a magazine, obv
iously listening. “Simon, I’m not running any more consignments of crack across town,” I said, deadpan.
She simply raised an eyebrow and mouthed, “Oh, Mother.”
“I’m sorry?” Poor Simon was baffled.
“Never mind. What can I do for you?”
He had only assured Mrs. Logan that I would personally deliver her book into her hands within the week. I breathed a sigh of relief that I hadn’t already posted it. Simon really went for the personal touch.
“You know I can’t travel, Alys,” Simon said reasonably. “I’d be having panic attacks before the train left the station. And sending Jacinta wouldn’t be fair.”
“But what do I do about Florence? I can’t just hop off for a couple of days and leave her alone. She’s got school. Exams, that sort of thing. She needs me.”
“No I bloody don’t,” came the loving reply from the sofa. “I’ll go and stay at Dad’s.”
“It’s only for a couple of days. Train down, taxi to Mrs. Logan’s house, hand over the book. I’ll pay your expenses. Come on, Alys.” He took a noticeably wheedling tone. “You went to university in Devon, didn’t you? Wouldn’t you like to go back and have a look round?”
“I was at Exeter, yes. Briefly.” I tried not to look at Florence when I said this, but failed. She was sitting very still, carefully not reacting. “Oh all right. I’ll go.”
“Thank you. I’m sorry to be asking, but it is due to your carelessness that the book is at your flat.”
“Yes, yes, all right, I get that. I did apologise. It must have fallen into my bag from the pile on your table. I was going to post it to her, but—”
Thankfully Simon’s insuck of air prevented me from having to admit that I’d been out on the lam with Piers. “Post it? A valuable book like that? I’m surprised at you.”
You’d have been a lot more surprised if you’d seen me last night, I thought.
Chapter Seven
All the taxis at the rank outside Exeter station told me that they only did trips into the town and Charlton Hawsell might have been Ulan Bator as far as they were concerned. So farther onward travel was provided by a single-decker bus which smelled of damp paper towels.
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