“You are able to be leaving your tiny horses tonight?” she asked, as though she suspected he might have one or two tucked into pockets or shoved under the sofa.
“Er. Yes.”
Florrie and Jacinta began a discussion about their relative outfits and the purchasing thereof. Florrie’s entire outfit would have just about made a nice belt for Jace, and the latter was wearing a purple silk number which made a noise like a cellophane-rolling plant whenever she moved. Leo carefully removed himself and came to stand beside me at the food table.
“Your daughter seems like a nice girl.”
“She is. Mostly. And Jace is all right, once you get the hang of her.” We looked at the pair of them chatting and comparing labels, Florrie so slim, Jace so large and sturdy, they looked like punctuation on legs. “I’m glad you’re here, Leo.”
I reached out and squeezed his hand. “So am I, Alys,” he whispered back. “But they are, you know, going to go away, aren’t they? So that we can talk?”
“Oh, yes. Wait until the food’s gone and you won’t see them for dust.” I ate another eclair to help things along. “What prompted this visit anyway?”
“Do I need prompting?” Leo picked at some nuts, watching Florrie and Jace still chatting. “I found that I could get away for a couple of days and—well—I felt that we had some talking to do. Things to discuss. About us.” He looked around. “Where’s the young chap gone?”
“I don’t know. I ought to find him. Knowing Piers he’s probably holed up in Florrie’s room smoking spliffs.” It was meant to be a joke, but from the way Leo rolled his eyes at me he’d clearly already marked Piers down as a crack dealer. I left him in charge of the nuts and went in search.
“What are you doing in here?” I found Piers in Florrie’s bedroom, stretched out at full length on the bed with his mobile pressed to his ear.
“Ssssssshh.” Piers waved a finger at me. “No, not you. Carry on,” he said into the phone.
“Oh, right. Just checking where you’d got to.” I pulled back and went to close the door, but he jumped up, waving an impatient hand at me to stay. Beckoned me over.
“Could you just say that again, please?” He gathered me up against him with the arm not supporting the phone, holding the tiny clamshell between us so that I could hear. “Just that last bit.”
The tinny voice at the other end of the mobile gave a sigh. “Your cat. Making a remarkable recovery. Quite astonishing.”
I gave a little squeak and Piers squeezed me closer, grinning. “Yeah, well thanks for letting us know. I’ll be in touch later about when we can fetch him home, yeah?” He flipped the phone shut with a casual twist of his wrist and slid it back into one of the almost invisible pockets in his suit. “Good news, eh, Alys? The vet had my card, so they called me. Hope you don’t mind, Grainger being your cat and all. Apparently, after you phoned this morning, he tried to dig his way out of a solid metal cage. Now they reckon he’s really on the mend.”
“That’s brilliant.” I tried not to think about the bill again. “It’s just so good. I mean, seeing him like he was, I didn’t think he’d…” An alternative future rose up and I blinked back tears. “It’s so good,” I whispered through the thickening in my throat.
“Yeah. Tomorrow we could go see him if you want.” Piers swivelled around so that he was facing me, still with an arm holding me in a half embrace. “I know they told you no visitors, but, hey, I’ll use my charm. Maybe we could make an evening of it, yeah? Catch a movie, grab a meal—”
“I don’t know. There’s—well, Leo’s here and…”
Piers let the arm fall. “Oh yeah. I forgot. This guy who’s really into horses. You and he—is it, you know? Kinda serious?”
“I don’t know what it is. But we get on, we’ve got a lot in common. Well, it’s not like I’m beating them off with a stick, is it? Talking of which—” I took a tiny step back. “I’m sorry I upset you. In the taxi.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Piers had an expression on his face that I couldn’t read. “I shoulda been flattered, I guess.”
“I didn’t know about Sarah. I’d assumed, which was stupid. Just because I don’t see you with a woman on your arm every five minutes, doesn’t mean you don’t have—girlfriends.”
“Oh, yeah, Sarah.” There was a deadness in his voice. “Well. You weren’t to know.”
“I told Alasdair that you were taking her down tomorrow. They’re looking forward to meeting her. She must be quite some woman if she’s managed to get you into something as stylish as that suit.” I looked him up and down again. “You look fantastic.”
“Fantastic, huh?” Piers sounded smugly pleased, then… “You told Alasdair what?”
“It’s only what you said. Only passing on what you told me.”
“Jeez, Alys. Sometimes you’re so fucking…”
“Alys? Is that you?” Leo’s voice made me jump. I pulled away from Piers and took another step back, so that I couldn’t feel him against me any more. “What are you doing in here?”
“Long story.” I was rubbing at my arms, as though my skin was chilly. “Let’s go find some more wine.” As I left the bedroom, Piers was standing in the middle of the floor twisting the rings on one hand. Staring down at the carpet with his features set, as though he was thinking hard and fast. Leo looked over his shoulder at him, and I noticed his expression change. “Is something wrong?”
Leo took my arm and guided me through into the kitchen, shutting the door behind us very quietly. “That man.” His face had slumped down into lines of weary seriousness, and he took his glasses off to rub at his eyes. “You and he—”
“The vet had phoned him about my cat. He’s at the vet’s—that’s the cat, not Piers, obviously. I thought he was going to die. But he’s not. That’s still the cat, you knew that, didn’t you? He’s up and about apparently.” I wondered even as I said it why I felt that I had to justify what I’d been doing.
“Never been very fond of cats.” Leo stared over my shoulder and then met my eyes. “Bit allergic. And there’s something about the way they jump at you. I knew there was nothing to worry about, but I can’t help myself, Alys. I’m sorry.”
“What were you worried about?”
“You and that man. You looked— Oh, it’s me, wrong end of the stick, misunderstandings, all that.”
“For goodness sake, Leo. He—there’s absolutely nothing going on between me and Piers! I’ve known him since he was seventeen,” I added, as though this made a difference, impatience boiling from every pore that Leo could even think, even remotely suspect that I would do anything behind his back. And with Piers?
“Yes.” Leo was still rubbing his eyes and now he’d extended the motion to take in his cheeks. I watched his whole face rising and falling like Eeyore on happy pills. “Baggage, Alys.”
“Baggage? I don’t understand.”
“From Sabine. I lost count of the number of times I watched her flirting with other men, whether it was to get their attention or to make me jealous, I never knew. It was almost as though she couldn’t stop herself. Like an addiction, a drug, do you know what I mean?”
“Oh, Leo.” I looked him square in the face. “Honest, cross my heart and hope to die, I was not flirting with Piers.” Looking into Leo’s beautiful green eyes as deeply as I could, I whispered, “I wouldn’t do that.”
Unfortunately, coming to sabotage my openness was the memory of Piers’s arm circling my waist. The feel of his body tight against me. My awareness of him so close. But surely that wasn’t flirting, was it? My eyes must have clouded, because Leo frowned. “What? What is it?”
“Nothing. Really, Leo, nothing.” Thankfully, I heard the telephone ring in the living room. “Perhaps we’d better go through. They’ll be wondering what we’re doing in here. And it might be a call for me.”
“One minute, please.” Leo started scrabbling about in the pockets of his jeans. “I wanted to give you…” he withdrew a piece of paper, folded
so many times it formed a small square, about the size of a matchbox, “…this to read. But, can I just ask. Will you let me leave the room before you open it? I’m a bit shy, I suppose, about these things.”
He took my hand, opened my palm and dropped the paper into it, then went out of the kitchen, leaving me listening to the sounds of my own party going on. Was this the poem? The paper had been so tightly folded that it seemed to weigh heavily against my hand. It felt cold.
On the other side of the wall, the whole decibel content seemed to drop. Was I being oversensitive or were they all listening to me? Was Leo in there with them? I began to unfold the paper between my fingers. As I did so, something heavy dropped away from between the creases, making me jump. Was it a beetle? I didn’t see it land, my attention was distracted by hearing Florrie, distinct through the wall and the silence on the other side of it, say, “I’ll tell her, yes.” I stroked the now-open sheet of paper smooth on the work surface and put myself into poetry-reading mode, letting my eyes run over the words arranged in sentence-like structures on the page.
Dear Alys
I know that we haven’t known each other very long, and opportunities to be together have been few. However, I am totally and completely certain of my feelings in a way I never have been before, and since we share a depth of communication and understanding, I truly believe that we also share these feelings.
Since we last met I have thought long and hard over the best way to resolve our situation and find it impossible—I just want to be with you.
Please, darling Alys, would you marry me?
Love Leo
I stood totally still, as though I’d been shot and had yet to fall. I read the words over again, moving my lips as I searched for a rhyme scheme or structure. What—?
He’d proposed?
But…
But what? He’s attractive, sensitive, gentle. You reckon you don’t deserve this by now, Alys?
It’s so sudden. No, not sudden. More than that, abrupt. I hardly know him! We’ve spent only a handful of days together.
So? You’d barely known Alasdair’s name when you decided you were going to marry him, had you? Stability, Alys. Stability for you, and Florrie, and she seems to like him too. And remember the poetry…
But I hate horses.
Look, love. You’re thirty-six and, as Florrie so generously said, things won’t stay pointing upwards forever. Maybe you should stop agonising and go for it. After all, at your age you shouldn’t look gift horses in the mouth. Ha ha.
I shifted my weight and stood on something prickly. Without thinking I looked down and moved my foot to reveal a square cut sapphire, surrounded by tiny diamond chips set into a gold ring. Shit. Well, no way now I could assume it was a particularly unusual free-form poem. What should I do?
Half of me wanted to leap up and shout yes! But was that because it was Leo proposing, or because I’d actually got a proposal, and from a man who didn’t think football was better than sex because it lasted ninety times as long? The other half of me—the tiny, slippery half—was floundering. Why? Why me? What had I done to make him want me? What happened when he stopped?
Without knowing what else to do, I walked back into the living room at the same time as Leo came in from the bathroom. We tried not to meet each other’s eye. He looked poised, although whether it was for triumph or disappointment I couldn’t tell. Jace, Florrie and Piers were just standing. Did they know? Had he told them? Were they also waiting for me to say something?
“I…” I began, but Florence interrupted.
“Mum.” She sounded strained. “That was the hospital. It’s Mrs. Treadgold.”
“What’s happened?” And then I had a clear vision of Mrs. Treadgold’s faded blue eyes in that china-pale skin. She was ill. And I’d hardly noticed. “Shouldn’t they be calling her family? Oh God.”
Mrs. Treadgold had a son and a daughter, I knew that. And quite a lot else besides, Mrs. Treadgold being something of a chatterer where her family were concerned. Thomas was a veterinary assistant in Abergavenny, had a very nice partner called Dave but that was all right as long as he was good to Tom. Vivienne was a flight attendant currently on long hauls to Dubai, no plans to marry but happily seeing a pilot who was suspected of being married himself but no proof yet. And Mrs. Treadgold didn’t like what she’d done with her hair.
“Apparently she’s asking for you.”
“I’ll go now.” I felt a sudden pang of guilt, quickly stifled. I’d taken her advice, hadn’t I? Leo loved me as I was, I felt different when I was with him. I felt myself. “I’d better ring the hospital. Make sure I’m allowed.” I sat down and picked up the phone.
“Of course this is so.” Jace began bustling around. “I will be going to my home. Piers, you is to be taking Florence away, and you.” She flicked fingers at Leo. “Are you staying?”
“I don’t know.” Leo looked uncomfortable. “It’s up to Alys really.” I saw him glance down at my hands and wondered what he was doing, before it dawned on me that he was trying to see whether I’d put the ring on.
“Jace, don’t go. I need to talk to you.”
“You need to be doing other talking more.”
“I’m not going until I know what’s happening.” Florence sat herself down firmly next to me on the sofa. “Mrs. Treadgold is a nice old thing. I hope she’s not too poorly. She knitted me a rabbit once.”
“Then it looks like you’re stuck with me too.” Piers sat in the armchair opposite, looking like James Bond’s younger, more disreputable brother. I wondered idly why he’d worn that sexy suit and bow tie.
“Do you want me to stay, Alys?” Leo was hovering, having opened the front door for Jace. “I mean, I can go, if it makes things easier for you. I could phone you.” He left the words for your answer unsaid, but I could feel the pressure building already.
“Yes, you might as well stay too.” As I said it I realised that I’d been ungracious and tried healing my words with a smile in Leo’s direction, but he’d already adopted a slightly wounded expression. “I’ll call the hospital and take things from there.”
The hospital refused to tell me anything since I wasn’t a relative, only that Mrs. Treadgold had indeed been asking for me, but was now sedated and couldn’t see anyone until tomorrow.
“You want me to drive you?” Piers asked after I put the phone down. I turned. There was something in his eyes which rolled my heart over. Maybe we looked at each other for too long because the next thing I knew Leo was inserting himself between us.
“I could take you.” Leo rested an arm around my shoulders. He couldn’t have spelled out she’s mine more clearly if he’d taken out a full-page ad.
“Yeah, but we were going out anyway. To visit the cat and, like, maybe do stuff.”
“I’ll get myself to the hospital, thank you both.” I stepped away from Leo, away from Piers. “It’s hardly a cross-continental epic journey. Now, Piers, Florrie, you go.”
Muttering about being left out, Florence picked up her trendy shoulder bag and shuffled to the front door, Piers trailing behind. At the door he flicked his eyes to Leo, who had his back to us, piling plates from the table on top of one another, and mouthed “I’ll call”.
I shook my head but he flashed me a smile, tossed, “Nice to have met you!” into the flat over his shoulder and shepherded his stepsister, trailing shoelaces, down the stairs.
Energy fell out of me through the soles of my feet.
“I’m sorry, Leo. I don’t think I’m going to be any kind of company tonight.” I slumped against the wall. “I feel completely exhausted.”
“I’m not surprised.” He came and stood in front of me, taking both my hands. “Do you want to talk?” He turned my hands over and examined them closely. I think it was an excuse to avoid my eyes. “It wasn’t a great way to spring a proposal on you, was it?”
Carefully, so as not to cause offence, I slid one of my hands from his grasp and used it to push my hair out of my eye
s. “I am going to need time, Leo. I mean, I’m assuming that you’d want me to move down to Devon, that you weren’t thinking of selling the stud and moving up here?” His horrified expression told me that this hadn’t even crossed his mind. “So I’d have to leave my job. And Florrie, her father lives here. She’d not see nearly as much of him if we moved south.”
Leo came towards me with new eagerness. “Yes, yes, I’ve thought about all these things. You could get a part-time job in the bookshop in Charlton. Isabelle knows the owners. I’m sure she’d put a word in for you. It’d give you plenty of time to learn all you need about the stud business. Florence could have her own flat in the house, a job down on the yard. And there are trains, Alys, if she wants to go and see her father or”—Leo seemed to swallow the words but they crept out anyway—“her stepbrother.”
The walls inched towards me. He’d thought it all out. From where I’d work, to where Florence would sleep. I looked up at him, into his face. There was no guile there, just a keen and loving enthusiasm.
“I love you, Alys.” Leo let go of my hands and turned away, talking to the opposite edge of the carpet. “I love you and I would like us to be together.”
“And I…” I wanted to say it, wanted to throw him the crumb of comfort he deserved but in the end what came out was, “…and I need time to think about things. Forgive me, Leo, if I seem to be messing you around but I really, really want to think carefully about this.”
“But you’re not saying no, are you?”
Say no? To a sexy man in possession of all his faculties, own teeth and hair, and a sizeable slice of Devonshire real estate? Who professed to love me, wrote heart-stoppingly beautiful poetry (although admittedly not to me) and who drove a car with a current tax disc? I’d have to be insane. “I’m thinking, all right?” I smiled. “A girl’s allowed thinking time. It’s traditional.”
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