Pippa's Cornish Dream

by Debbie Johnson

  It was, in an icky-yucky-how-can-you-fancy-my-brother way, kind of sweet.

  Scotty still asked for Ben occasionally, especially when he was upset at some major disaster, like stubbing his toe or forgetting his line in the school assembly. But it was less frequent and less vocal and less often accompanied by howling tears and snot storms. Lily and Daisy still pined a little and Pippa knew when they were talking about him – because they did it in their old “secret” language, huddled in the corner of the kitchen, looking shifty. Even at their age, they’d picked up enough girl savvy to know it might upset their sister if they did it in the open.

  The journalists had, slowly but surely, taken “no” for an answer – made so much easier by the fact that he was very obviously not there, and had, in fact, started to do a few interviews in advance of his book coming out. She was no longer news and was able to return to normal.

  Huh. Normal, she thought, squelching through the mud in her wellies, fresh milk sloshing in its bucket. As normal as she ever got, anyway.

  Her last meeting with Mrs Dooley had gone well, apart from one brief interlude where she insisted Pippa looked “less than herself”, and asked several piercing questions about her health and state of mind. It had felt uncomfortable, even more so than usual, and she knew exactly what she was getting at.

  She’d lost weight – there was way too much room in her jeans these days – and seemed to have somehow…deflated. Life hadn’t exactly been a laugh a minute before, but after? It was, well, grim. Every day felt like a slog. Every night seemed to last forever. She was tortured by dreams in the same way she had been for the year after her parents died: terrible dreams that told lies; dreams about being with him, being happy, feeling the touch of his lips on hers, hearing the sound of his voice, lying safe in his arms.

  Every time it happened, she woke up in a momentary glow of contentment – until reality hit and the world tumbled back down around her shoulders. It hurt, more than she could ever have imagined something as trivial as lost love could. For the first time, she started to think there might be some truth in the concept of “a broken heart”.

  Summer had been tough – kids off school, all the cottages full. Having to service Honeysuckle every time guests left, swamped with memories, the ghosts of lovers past. The toilet had even blocked again and she fixed it in floods of tears, chiding herself for being so stupid.

  So, yes, Mrs Dooley had a point. But what could she do about it? It’s not like she wasn’t trying. She wasn’t wallowing or deliberately visiting him in her nocturnal subconscious – it just happened. She’d assured the concerned case worker that everything was fine, bluffed her way through it until Mrs Dooley couldn’t continue to probe without being downright rude.

  Sadly, she wasn’t the only one. Patrick was obviously worried and spent an unhealthy amount of time calling home – often drunk, which was reassuring at least – to check up on her. He’d even enlisted Mr Jensen, who repeatedly phoned and asked her for help she knew he didn’t need. She’d call round with a box of tea bags for him and then discover several boxes stashed in the kitchen cupboard when she put them away and one time he’d begged her for a lift to the doctor’s because his car was out of tax – and yet funnily enough, when she’d glanced in the windscreen, it had two months left to run.

  It was a conspiracy. They were all ganging up on her and she didn’t especially like it. She knew their intentions were good – Mrs Dooley, Mr Jensen, even Patrick – but it made her feel like a victim, someone who needed to be cosseted and cared for and treated with kid gloves. And as she’d spent the last three years being the one who held the thread of their strange-shaped little family together, it wasn’t a role that sat well with her.

  Now, though, with Patrick gone, the kids in school, and no more guests for a fortnight, she felt like she’d welcome a bit of cosseting. Or a bit of distraction at least.

  Because the package that had arrived in the post yesterday had had a similar effect to unwrapping one of those cartoon bombs with a lit fuse sticking out of it. And she had nobody – bar the less-than- chatty SpongeBob – to talk to about it.

  The postman had smiled and chatted as she signed and she hadn’t really given it much thought. Suppliers often sent her catalogues to look at or samples of the sumptuous holiday-home decor she could buy if she ever had two sixpences to rub together. She’d assumed it would be that – some chintzy country-curtain swatches or a glossy set of back copies of travel magazines she could never afford to advertise in. The kind that Tregowan Lodge used.

  She’d opened it over her third coffee of the day, which she ended up wearing as soon as she realised who it was from.

  Cursing, she’d jumped up, grabbed some kitchen roll and started to mop up the mess, squelching the soggy paper down over the spreading puddle of steaming brown liquid before it had time to reach the pages of the book.

  The book that Ben had sent her. She knew it was from him because it had “by Ben Retallick” all over the front cover, which had allowed her lightning detection skills to piece it together. A hardback, the dust jacket all done in moody midnight blues and blacks, bare branches drenched in sinister moonlight. Fear No Evil, it was called. But she’d known that. They’d talked about his book, his writing, and she already knew how the story ended. Pretty much everyone died, apart from the hard-boiled cop and the feisty prosecution lawyer he’d fallen for. Cheerful stuff.

  She reached out with a scalded finger and poked it, as if it might come to life, or open up and unleash a Princess Leia-style hologram of a full-sized Ben Retallick. That, her nerves really couldn’t take.

  There was a note tucked inside the sleeve and she tugged it out gingerly. Without planning it – because really, who would plan to do such a lame thing? – she picked it up and sniffed it. As though over the several days and hundreds of miles that it had travelled, that tiny handwritten note would still somehow retain the scent of him.

  Unsurprisingly, it didn’t, so she resorted to more traditional means of communication and read the note rather than inhaling it.

  “Dear Pippa,” it started, “I thought you might be interested in this. Most of the follow-up was written while I was with you in Cornwall and will forever be associated with that time in my mind. Hopefully yours as well. This is an advance copy – the book will be launched at a party this Saturday in London. I’ve written the details on the back. I’d love to see you there, but if you’re too busy with Patrick, Lily, Scotty, SpongeBob, Harry Potter and Phineas and Ferb, I do understand and wish you all the best.”

  It was signed simply “Ben”. No love or kisses or XOXOXOs. Just Ben. Just Ben, who’d won her over that very first day by remembering all of those names and who still remembered them now. Just Ben. The man from the duck pond.

  And “just Ben”, she realised, was more than enough to shatter any attempts at calm she’d managed to fake over the last few months.

  Her initial reaction was panic, followed by anger, followed by sadness, followed by more panic. He made it sound so easy – “I’d love to see you there”. As though she could simply dump the kids, jump on a train and go to a posh London publishing party. As though that was even remotely possible in her reality.

  For a start, she’d stick out like a sore thumb in that kind of crowd. She had nothing to wear, obviously. And even more obviously – she couldn’t face him. Couldn’t bear to see him surrounded by his glamorous London friends, making small talk, flirting and laughing and possibly having full-blown sex with gorgeous crime thriller groupies on the book signing table…okay, that last one was a stretch, but still. The fact remained.

  She couldn’t.

  Chapter 17

  “You can, and you are,” said Patrick when he’d turned up on Saturday morning.

  “I don’t want to go, Patrick, and I wish I’d never even told you. It was a moment of weakness.”

  “It was a moment of drunkenness actually, sis, and don’t try to deny it. Made a pleasant change to be on the rec
eiving end for a change.”

  Pippa felt herself flush slightly at the accusation and wished she could argue the point – but it was true. Shaken and stirred – just like a Martini that James Bond wouldn’t drink – she’d cracked that night, after the kids were in bed and tucked in to the Christmas sherry that had been there for the last two years. It tasted vile and she probably had some kind of blood poisoning, but it had done the job. Temporary oblivion. Phones, she thought, should come with breathalysers attached.

  “Anyway,” said Patrick, “I think you actually do want to go. I think the fact you told me was your subconscious’s way of admitting it. You knew I’d come home – even I’m not so much of a waste of space that I wouldn’t. You’ve been miserable as sin since he left and I’m fed up of worrying about you. I know you did it for years with me, but I’m not as good a person as you are and it sucks.”

  “My subconscious? What the hell are you studying and what does that have to do with animal husbandry?” she snapped, angry with him. With herself. With the knowledge that he’d nailed it one hundred per cent. What right did he have to go all perceptive on her now, when she least needed it?

  “You and Ben have quite a lot to do with animal husbandry, if I remember rightly…now come on, get your stuff together and I’ll run you to the station. I know it’s hard. I know you’re scared. But you’ve been limping along for months now – don’t you think it’s worth a chance? You never gave up on us, Pip – so don’t give up on yourself.”

  His tone was harsh, but the words melted her into goo. She felt tears stinging the back of her tired eyeballs and knew he was right… Again. This was starting to turn into a very annoying habit of his, she thought, as she reluctantly packed an overnight bag. She had given up on herself. And she’d only been half alive for the last three months, like an electrical appliance on standby. Waiting for someone to come along and turn her on…she giggled at the wordplay and wondered if that sherry was still in her system. It probably had the half-life of a decade. She’d be drunk for years.

  She’d tried really hard to adjust, to keep calm and carry on. To go back to the way she’d been in the era she thought of as BB – Before Ben. To pick up the threads of her chaotic-yet-ordered life, and pretend he’d never existed, never hurt her as badly as he had. To fool herself and her body into believing that the busy-ness of everyday life in Pippa-land was enough to keep her occupied, keep her fulfilled.

  In reality, he’d never left her mind. He’d taken up a huge parking space in her heart and there didn’t seem to be any way of moving him on. So she had two choices. Plod through the rest of her life feeling like an extra from a horror film or take the plunge. Right now both felt equally as frightening.

  He’d made the first contact. He’d invited her back into his life. Now she had to be brave enough to take the next step, even if she felt about as brave as the Cowardly Lion before he bumped into Dorothy. It felt like having a lung transplant without the anaesthetic.

  By the time she was standing outside the restaurant – a mere six hours of public-transport hell later – she felt even worse. From an initial sense of resolve, she’d descended into a blancmange of self-doubt. What if he was just inviting her to be polite? What if he just felt guilty and wanted to say goodbye properly? What if he’d been seeing a therapist, who’d told him to find some closure?

  What if – and this was the one that killed her – he’d found someone else? It had been three months. Okay, she hadn’t met anyone, but that wasn’t surprising. The only new man who’d come into her life had been about seventy-eight and wielding a giant lollipop stick at the school crossing. The-middle-of-nowhere, Cornwall, was hardly dating central.

  But his life was different. It was big, it was glitzy, it probably involved non-stop invitations to Chelsea sex parties and floozies throwing themselves into his arms as he did his shopping in Waitrose. He was gorgeous, he was successful, he was kind of famous. He was, in every way, an “eligible bachelor”.

  Yes, she thought, staring through the windows of the restaurant to try and get a glimpse of him with his fictional new fiancée, he was probably taken by now.

  The nights were starting to draw in as autumn arrived, and although the air still felt warm, the skies were darkening around her. The street – tucked away in a part of town where the houses were all big and white and expensive – was bustling, people spilling in and out of cafés and bars, chatting and laughing and acting like the world wasn’t about to end.

  Inside, she could see dim lighting, moody decorations, waiting staff dressed in black and white walking round with trays of booze and the kind of nibble food that taunted your taste buds. There was a piano, a man in a suit playing it. Crowds of nicely dressed people talking and smiling around small tables piled high with copies of Ben’s books. Some of them were holding them up, examining them and discussing them.

  It looked like an alien moonscape to Pippa, standing outside in her best pair of jeans and a new top she’d found time to buy before she left. Okay, it had cost £9.99 from Primark, but it was new and it was the best she had. The little black dress had been a no-no – too big these days and also too laden with memories.

  Now, standing outside and not knowing if she’d ever find the courage to walk in, she felt ridiculously young and ridiculously scruffy and…well, just ridiculous in every way. This wasn’t her life. This wasn’t her world. And if the two collided, her head might literally explode all over the canapés.

  She screwed up her eyes to see better through the window, taking one last glance before she left. Before she got the Tube to the cheap hotel she’d booked and raided the mini-bar, launching her new life as a lush. She’d tried to be brave. Tried to take the next step. But it was all too much. All too scary.

  She leaned into the pane, shielding her eyes as she squinted through. Maybe she’d get one little glimpse of him. One little glimpse to last the rest of her life.

  The door opened and the sounds of the piano and the chat and the world that wasn’t hers spilled out onto the pavement in a small aural wave. She jumped away from the window, leaving her breath smeared on it, like a guilty child caught sneaking a look at the Christmas presents.

  “Pippa?” he said, taking a hesitant step towards her. “Is that you?”

  Ben. Of course. How silly of her to forget that you could actually see through glass in both directions. She must have looked like a prize pillock for the last few minutes.

  “Um…yes. Who else would be out here sniffing the window pane?” she said, shuffling nervously, wishing the cobbled mews street would open up and swallow her whole.

  She looked up at him and her heart thudded so heavily, so slowly that she thought it might actually stop. Even in the shadows, she could see how amazing he looked, dressed in a sharp black suit and a brilliant white shirt, open a few buttons at the neck. His hair had been cut and no longer flopped over his forehead, but she could still make out the luscious dark waves and remember how they’d felt. His jacket accentuated the breadth of his shoulders and his legs seemed to go on forever, down to his smartly shined shoes. He looked like someone from a movie. Male lead, action hero, life-saving paediatrician, prize-winning scientist, all rolled into one. Just Ben, my arse, she thought.

  She, on the other hand, looked like a Victorian urchin about to go and ask for an extra bowl of gruel. God! Sometimes life just wasn’t fair.

  She took a step back, considering making a run for it. Simply turning around and legging it, as fast as she could, as far as she could. He’d never catch her. Not in those shoes.

  “Please, don’t go!” he said, reaching out and touching her arm. “Come inside. We need to talk – we both do.”

  No, she thought, I don’t need to talk. I need to escape and drink and pass out and wake up needing nothing more than a couple of paracetamol. But she didn’t fight him as he guided her through the door, keeping a firm grip on her hand, as if she was a nervous race horse and he was the whisperer. The door closed to behind her and
she found herself enveloped in that moody lighting, the sound of the piano, the low hum of chatter all around her.

  She stood huddled in on herself, as though if she tried hard enough and wrapped her arms tight enough around her own body, no one would notice she was there. Ben looked at her, so scared, so small and felt the heft of his guilt come crashing in. She’d lost weight. There were dark circles under her eyes that told him she hadn’t been sleeping. She was wearing a new top, with the price tag still hanging from the hem without her noticing. She was a shadow of the Pippa he’d first met, so vital and young and full of energy. He couldn’t imagine how much it had cost her, emotionally, to come here and see him.

  He’d done this to her. And now it was his job to fix it.

  “Pippa,” he said, suddenly aware of his own fatigue, his own nerves, “I need to tell you something. I need to tell you that –”

  He stopped as the door to the restaurant slammed open, shoved so hard it banged back against the wall with a loud thud. There was a sudden lull in the conversation as everyone turned around to see what the interruption was, such an impolite noise against the genteel backdrop.

  Like everyone else, Pippa looked up. Saw the door still quaking on its hinges. Saw the man who’d kicked it open – and recognised him as Darren McConnell, the man who Ben had attacked. Admittedly he didn’t have the bandages and the broken nose any more, but she still recognised him. A small woman followed him, dressed in a tube dress covered in sequins. She was trying to hold on to his arm, to restrain him, but he slapped her hand away.

  He steamed through the door and right towards them. A few people looked up and over, and Pippa saw other people’s faces pull the same expression of shock that she knew she was wearing as well. Next to her, Ben stood up, tall and tense, a deep frown crossing his forehead.

  McConnell was small – next to Ben, anyway – and he had to stand up on his tiptoes to get his face up close, his already ferret-like features contorted with sly aggression.