by Jill Mansell
To the left of the village the protesters were already gathered at the site of the proposed new development, milling around the yellow bulldozers that stood ready, waiting to swing into action.
It was very much a last-ditch protest. The amateurish ruse of planting a rare breed of wild orchid in the path of the diggers hadn’t worked. Berenger’s had their planning permission and that was that. Basically, the new estate was going to be built but – the protesters were determined – not before the last drop of bad publicity for Berenger’s had been squeezed out.
Parking the Renault at the roadside where everyone else had left their cars, Liza joined the rest of the group. Sixty or seventy in total, they were a mixed bag, ranging from New Agers to Nimbys (those outraged members of the middle classes who don’t mind anything being built so long as it doesn’t happen anywhere near them, i.e. Not In My Back Yard).
The ground was dry and the sun blazed down, but all the Nimbys were wearing Barbours and Hunter wellies. The New Agers wore holey jeans and layers of jumpers in various shades of black.
Everyone pursed their lips at the sight of Liza in her dazzling peacock-blue shirt. She couldn’t have looked more out of place if she’d worn a ball gown in a butcher’s shop.
Alistair bounded over to her.
‘Going on somewhere, are we?’ Eyeing the gold chains around Liza’s neck, disappearing into her cleavage, he looked as if he were itching to tell her to do a couple more buttons up.
‘Lunch with Liberace, by the look of it,’ Liza heard one of the dreadlocked New Agers murmur, nudging his friend.
‘Sure you won’t be cold?’ asked Alistair.
‘I’m fine.’ Pointedly Liza shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘Sure you won’t be warm?’
‘I’m wearing three sweaters,’ Alistair told her with pride, ‘in case they try setting the dogs on us.’
Liza kept a straight face.
‘If they set any dogs on me,’ she promised, ‘I’ll tie their paws up with my necklaces.’
‘Hmm. I don’t know how you’re going to climb bulldozers in those heels.’ He glanced disapprovingly at her boots. ‘Alistair! I’m here, okay? Supporting the protest. I am not climbing up on any bulldozers.’
Alistair looked resigned. She wasn’t taking this seriously at all. Liza had turned out to be a major disappointment, he thought sadly. All the more so since she had truly been the woman of his dreams. He adored her, he simply didn’t understand how she could not be as concerned about preserving the environment as he was. Together, Alistair thought sorrowfully, they could have made an unbeatable team.
Still, she was the nearest to a celebrity they’d got and the press were kicking their heels waiting for the action to begin. Signalling to the chaps from the Evening Post who were eating Big Macs
– any excuse to wind up the vegetarian New Agers – Alistair steered Liza towards them.
‘They want a photo of you waving a placard. And make a point of telling them how committed you are to the cause,’ he instructed briskly, ‘despite your clothes.’
For ten minutes Liza answered questions put to her by the reporter, who sounded almost as bored as she was. Then it was the photographer’s turn. He spent ages organising Liza in the foreground with a motley crew of placard-waving New Agers behind her and the bulldozers strewn with banners bringing up the rear.
He was halfway through the reel of film – and startled to find himself already half in love with Liza – when the contractors rolled up in two filthy white vans and the carefully arranged group photo promptly disintegrated.
Within seconds, the bulldozers were swarming with protestors. Minutes later the police arrived.
Scuffles broke out. Alistair punched one of the bulldozer drivers on the nose.
‘Want to wait in my car, love?’ the Evening Post reporter offered, clearly worried about blood getting spattered on Liza’s silk shirt. But the photographer was waving his arm, beckoning her over. A group of the less nimble protesters were staging a sit-in, blocking the path of the rumbling bulldozers.
‘Come on,’ bellowed the photographer, ‘it’ll make a great picture!’
‘Do as he says,’ Alistair bellowed even more loudly, from his precarious position on top of one of the diggers. ‘Get over there!’
Liza hesitated. She didn’t really mind joining the sit-in. She didn’t even mind getting her leather trousers muddy. What did bother her was being picked up and carried away like a struggling beetle by the police ... and being photographed in that position.
Talk about undignified.
All eyes were on the tremendous struggle in progress. Since no one’s attention was on the road behind them, and the noise of the heavy machinery drowned everything else out, nobody saw or heard the dark-green Bentley purr to a halt behind the police van.
Liza was still torn between not wanting to look a wimp and not wanting to look a prat. Most of all she wished she hadn’t been feeble enough to give in to Alistair’s emotional blackmail. She could be playing squash now, she thought with longing, or at home working on ideas for the new food book she had just been commissioned to write.
Damn, thought Liza, even waiting hand, foot and finger on dipstick Dulcie would be fun compared with this.
‘Liza, will you stop faffing around and JOIN THE BLOODY SIT-IN,’ roared Alistair, kicking out at one of the contractors who was trying to grab his ankles, and pointing imperiously down at Liza.
I could just turn round and leave, she thought, willing herself to do it.
The next moment she jumped out of her skin as a weirdly familiar voice inches from her ear drawled, ‘Is he your boyfriend? I’m amazed, I didn’t take you for the kind of girl who’d let men boss you about like that.’
Chapter 22
Liza’s heart began hammering wildly in her chest. Kit Berenger was standing next to her, arms crossed, feet apart, sunglasses in place as he calmly surveyed the scene of chaos spread out before them. He was wearing black jeans, a black and white striped shirt and that familiar aftershave.
Had it occurred to her that he might turn up today, the final day of the protest?
Of course it had.
So far, Kit Berenger had seen her sweating and out of breath after an hour on the squash court, and in her eating-out frump of-the-year disguise. Now for the first time he was seeing how she really looked.
Liza couldn’t quite bring herself to admit that this was why she had taken such care with her appearance today.
‘He’s not my boyfriend,’ she said as calmly as she could manage, ‘I don’t let him boss me about, and since I’ll be thirty-two next week, I’m hardly a girl.’
‘Well, you’re hardly an ancient old trout.’
Was there actually a flicker of a smile playing around his mouth? Sideways on, and never having seen Kit Berenger smile before, it was hard to tell.
‘Anyway,’ he went on, his tone conversational, ‘what are you doing here, dressed up like a Christmas tree?’
Liza ignored the jibe. ‘Same as everyone else. Protesting.’
‘You don’t look much like a protester. You’ve washed your hair for a start.’
Before she could move, one hand came up and touched her blonde hair, idly following the line of the curve between her left temple and shoulder.
Liza shivered and looked up at him, but the narrow mouth gave nothing away. The eyes were still hidden behind black glasses.
‘My cousin heard from your editor, by the way,’ said Kit. ‘Loads of people wrote to the magazine defending the Songbird. Nearly a hundred letters altogether, saying you were out of order.’
‘Really,’ said Liza, who had written most of them. ‘They’re printing a selection in next month’s issue.’
‘Well, there you go,’ said Liza steadily. ‘Looks like I was wrong and you were right.’
He took off his sunglasses. Liza waited for another smart remark. But he didn’t say anything, just gazed down at her.
Alistair, meanwhile, was bein
g dragged down from his digger by a pair of sweating policemen, one thin, one burly, like Laurel and Hardy. Mid-tussle, he spotted Liza and a tall dark-haired boy making no effort to join in the protest.
‘Hey, you two! Get yourselves in front of that bulldozer, fast.’
Kit called back, ‘Actually, we’d rather not.’
The next moment, as Alistair disappeared beneath a heaving mound of navy-blue serge, Kit Berenger reached out and took hold of Liza’s hand. His strong fingers gripped her wrist.
‘What are you d-doing?’ Liza gasped, trying to snatch it away.
‘Taking your pulse.’ He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Hmm, fast. Very fast.’
This was even more humiliating than being hauled into a police van in struggling-beetle position, as was now happening to Alistair. Liza stared hard at the goings-on at the back of the van and pretended she hadn’t heard Kit Berenger speak.
‘Mine too,’ he went on, releasing his grip on her wrist and offering her his own. ‘Have a feel if you want.’
‘No thanks,’ Liza replied faintly.
‘The thing is, there’s something I’ve been wanting to do rather badly for quite a while now,’ said Kit. ‘Is it okay with you if I give it a go?’
Liza could barely breathe.
‘Not if you’re going to slap my face.’
‘I don’t want to slap your face.’ He turned her slowly towards him, so there was no escaping the look in those extraordinary black-lashed, yellow-gold eyes. ‘I want to kiss your mouth.’
This, thought Liza, is ridiculous .. .
Then she stopped thinking because it was too late now to do anything, let alone think. Kit Berenger’s mouth came down on hers and Liza gave herself up to it, utterly helpless to protest.
Every nerve in her body was going zinnggg. She was only managing to stay standing because his arms were keeping her up. The knees had gone, the stomach had disappeared .. .
Just don’t stop, Liza silently begged him, willing the kiss to go on and on. Please don’t stop.
‘Bloody hell, it’s Kit Berenger,’ exclaimed the reporter, gazing in amazement at the scene confronting him as he made his way back to the car for a fag break. ‘Oi, Joe, over here,’ he yelled, beckoning frantically for the photographer. ‘Look who’s snogging Liza Lawson! Get a shot of this, for Chrissake.’
Alistair was still putting up a terrific struggle, resisting every effort to bundle him into the back of the police van. Hearing the journalist’s words, he twisted round and stared in horror at Liza who appeared to be clinging to Kit Berenger for dear life.
‘You bastard, take your hands off her this minute,’ roared Alistair. ‘Liza, what the hell d’you think you’re doing? Don’t you know who that is?’
In no time they were the centre of attention. The protesters had all stopped to watch. Joe was using up his last roll of film.
‘I always say you can’t beat a bit of privacy,’ Kit Berenger murmured against Liza’s mouth, his hand stroking the back of her neck.
When the Evening Post reporter had been eating his Big Mac earlier, a group of New Agers had hissed ‘murderer’ at him. Now, behind her back, Liza could hear them hissing ‘traitor’ at her.
‘I may not get out of here alive,’ she said, her voice still unsteady, her whole body quivering shamelessly with lust. ‘At least they’re vegetarians, they won’t eat you alive.’ A nightmare thought struck Liza.
‘Why did you do this, to make a fool of me?’
‘Come on.’ Kit half smiled down at her. ‘You don’t really think that. I did it because it had to be done. Before we both drove each other demented.’
Liza nodded. She could no longer deny it; the chemistry was simply there between them. It had been from the word go.
‘How old are you?’ she asked, needing to know the worst.
‘Twenty-three.’
‘I’m thirty-two.’ It sounded terrible. She had never been out with anyone younger than her before. Not even nine months younger, let alone nine years.
‘No you aren’t, you’re thirty-one.’
‘Only until next week.’
Kit grinned. ‘A week’s a long time in politics.’
The protest had by this time pretty much fizzled out. When the protesters’ attention had turned to Liza and Kit, the contractors had revved up their engines and got busy with the bulldozers, to-ing and fro-ing at surprising speed as they shifted great mounds of earth.
The police van, with Alistair’s outraged face glaring out of the tiny back window, bumped and jiggled its way across the churned-up ground on to the main road.
‘You must be joking,’ said Kit when the reporter from the Evening Post asked him for a quote.
‘Liza?’ The reporter looked not-very-hopefully hopeful. ‘She doesn’t have anything to say either.’
‘I think I’d better go home,’ said Liza, when they were alone again. She was floundering, unsure what was going to happen next. He might be nine years younger, but Kit Berenger had somehow automatically assumed control of the situation. If he were to bundle her into that dark-green Bentley of his, Liza thought with longing, and whisk her off somewhere – anywhere – to bed, she would willingly go.
‘I’ve got a heavy day too.’ Kit glanced at his watch – that ludicrous purple Swatch. ‘I’m already running late. Sorry,’ he smiled slightly as he led the way back to their cars, ‘if I’d known this was going to happen, I could have postponed a few meetings. You’d better give me your phone number.’
He leaned against the bonnet of the Bentley and wrote the number on the back of a crumpled ten-pound note pulled from the pocket of his jeans. Liza, who couldn’t bear men with namby-pamby handwriting, was passionately relieved to see how assertive he was with a pen, not nancyish at all.
As he helped her into the Renault, his lips brushed hers, thrillingly, once more.
‘I’ll be in touch,’ said Kit.
My God, you’d better be, thought Liza, far too proud to ask when.
Chapter 23
‘Did someone slip something into my cocoa?’ Dulcie demanded with suitable drama two days later. ‘Am I hallucinating? Or is this really a photo I see before me in the local paper – on the front page, no less – of my friend Liza snogging with the enemy?’
Liza bit her lip, gazed out of the window and said nothing.
‘And you can turn that sodding answering machine off for a start,’ Dulcie went on, ‘because it isn’t fooling anyone. We know you’re in there. Dammit,’ she wailed the next second, ‘do you want me to die of curiosity?’
That, thought Liza, would be too much to hope for. Chewing her pen, she leafed irritably through the research notes she was amassing in preparation for her new book, a history of Mediterranean cookery.
‘Fine, I get the message,’ said Dulcie in a sing-song voice when it became clear Liza had no intention of picking up the phone. ‘But don’t think you can hide for ever. The minute I can walk again, I’ll be over. I don’t know what you’ve been up to,’ she concluded briskly, – God, now she sounded like Joyce Grenfell on speed – ‘but I’m jolly well going to find out.’
Dulcie rang off at last. Wearily, since the kitchen table might be awash with reference books but that didn’t mean she was getting a stroke of work done, Liza snapped the file shut and switched the kettle on instead. For the millionth time she compulsively checked her watch.
What a hideous day. The phone hadn’t stopped ringing, the poor answering machine didn’t know what had hit it. The story had even been picked up by a couple of the nationals; at lunchtime a call had come through from the Daily Mail, who were keen to include Liza in a feature on star-crossed lovers.
‘We’ve got a pair of besotted MPs so far – one Labour, one Tory – and a vegan who’s fallen in love with a butcher,’ the journalist explained with maddening cheerfulness. ‘The third couple were going to be Catholic-Protestant, but to be frank,’ she lowered her voice to a confiding whisper, ‘your story sounds much more fun.’
She gazed out at the tiny patio garden bursting with tubs of geraniums and petunias, and tried to remember if exam nerves, the real stomach-churning kind when you actually felt sick with fear, had ever been this bad.
Except with exam nerves, at least you knew when the exam would be over.
She shuddered as something alien sloshed into her mouth. Ugh, she’d forgotten to fish out the tea bag.
Uselessly Liza checked her watch again. Still only twenty-six minutes to five.
I’m a grown woman, she thought, willing herself to believe it. In four days’ time I’ll be thirty-two. I can handle this.
But the sick feeling showed no sign of going away.
Liza bit her lip. It was fifty-four hours since Kit Berenger had oh so casually said he would phone her.
It hadn’t happened yet.
Three times a week Pru drove Eddie to Bristol, to Elmlea House, a nursing home in Clifton overlooking the suspension bridge. While she waited in the car, passing the time with one of Dulcie’s eye-boggling sex-and-shopping paperbacks, Eddie disappeared inside the ivy-fronted building to visit his mother- in-law, now frail and in her late eighties but still mentally all there.
‘She’s a darling,’ he told Pru when she had commented – quite daringly, for her – that not many men would put themselves out as much as he did for their mother-in-law.
Eddie had simply looked amused. ‘It’s no hardship. We’re great friends. Anyway, I’m all the family she has left.’
Their regular trips to and from Bristol had proved the ideal opportunity for him to talk to Pru about his marriage. Simply and without drama, Eddie described Catherine’s bizarre mood swings in the early days, and the difficulties he’d faced trying to control her when neither of them had had any idea there could be an actual medical reason for it all.