Finding Hope at Hillside Farm

by Rachael Lucas

  ‘So the secret is you mustn’t roll the pastry too thin.’ Bron looks up, holding a pale disc of pastry in her hand. She places it carefully in the baking tin. Ella turns, watching Mac nod solemnly. She catches his eye and he winks at her, his eyes twinkling with amusement.

  ‘Would you like to have a turn?’ Bron bends down, clattering around in the kitchen cupboards, searching for more baking tins. He quickly leans forward, whispering in her ear. She feels tiny hairs rising on her arms in reaction to the words that whisper on her skin.

  ‘Let’s sneak away when she’s not looking.’

  He looks at her sideways, making her laugh.

  ‘Shh.’

  Ella suppresses a giggle. He turns, putting a hand on her hip, pulling her in close to him. All she wants to do is grab him by the hand, pull him upstairs, tear off his clothes . . .

  He drops a kiss on the top of her head, wrapping his arms around her. They stand for a moment as Bron continues pottering in the kitchen.

  ‘You young things aren’t the least bit interested in making these pies, are you?’ Bron turns around to look at them, her hands full of curls of green apple peel. She raises an eyebrow. Her sharp eyes are twinkling with amusement.

  ‘We are, look.’ Ella picks up the rolling pin and brandishes it in the air. He catches her hand from behind, spinning her round, unable to resist. He leans down, brushing a smudge of flour from her cheek, and kisses her. Ella blushes scarlet in front of her aunt, who bursts out laughing, pushing her long plait back over her shoulder.

  ‘For goodness’ sake. Get off with the pair of you. I need double cream.’ She reaches into her battered brown handbag, which lies on the kitchen worktop, pulling out her purse and handing Ella a twenty-pound note. ‘And pick me up a bottle of Irish Cream while you’re at it. Can’t have mince pies without it.’

  They pull on coats and mismatched found gloves from the dresser in the hall. As she opens the door, the blast of cold air sends Ella back to find the snowflake-printed red bobble hat she wears to the stables, balancing it on top of her dark curls before they head out into the darkness of the December evening.

  The cobbles on the narrow road are slippery with the beginnings of an evening frost and they step cautiously down the hill, passing the ancient timber-framed houses, their windows glowing yellow in the late-afternoon dusk. The air smells of the woodsmoke that curls up from the chimneys.

  ‘Come here, you.’ Ella catches the ends of his scarf, laughing at the wide-eyed look of surprise on his face. She pulls him into a gap in the laurel hedge outside the church. Reaching up, she feels the cold of his cheek against her face as she hooks her arms around his neck and kisses him. His fingers tangle in her hair, pushing the woollen hat backwards so it lands on the frozen cobbles beneath their feet. She feels his mouth curling into a smile against hers.

  ‘Lost your hat.’

  ‘Don’t care.’

  Her hand reaches around his back. She slides it inside the back of his sweater, reaching beneath the shirt, which is hanging loose, untucked as always. His skin is burning hot and her hands are –

  ‘Bloody hell –’ Mac steps back, bursting into laughter. ‘Your hands are freezing.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Ella looks up at him through innocently lowered lashes.

  ‘You are not.’ He reaches down, picking up the red hat and putting it back on her head, pushing back the curls that are caught half inside the collar of her winter coat. His hand strays down her cheek and his tone is teasing. ‘You’re not sorry at all.’

  ‘Not a bit,’ she says, catching his hand, trying to pull him back onto the street. ‘Come on, we’d better get to the shop before it closes.’

  He doesn’t move, an expression on his face Ella hasn’t seen before, and her heart thuds out of time in her chest.

  ‘I love you,’ he says, for the first time, and all time is forgotten as he kisses her again.

  Chapter Five

  Harry

  ‘I’ll have a coffee, please.’

  Harry, waiting to be served, loosened his tie. He twisted open the top button of his shirt with a sigh of relief.

  ‘Actually, no.’ The woman standing beside him flicked him a shy glance and then stood a bit taller, clearing her throat. ‘Make that a mojito . . . in fact, make it a double one.’

  She pulled her purse out of her handbag and started rifling through it, muttering to herself.

  ‘I’m sure I had a tenner in here – oh God, I gave it to Joe for after school club . . .’

  There was a clink of ice as the barman paused in his work for a second and looked at her. Harry watched as she flushed with embarrassment and pulled an awkward face. Her linen tunic was almost the same shade as her cheeks – rose-pink, and crumpled, as if she’d been travelling for ages. She probably had – this place was the same as a hundred others just off motorways all over the country. The bars were full of consultants in suits that sagged at the knees after a long week of working away from home, the restaurants populated by table for one, please diners who knew the laminated menu offerings by heart.

  She was becoming more flustered with every second.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, turning the purse upside down and shaking it, quite hard, as if there was some money clinging on somewhere in the depths and she could scare it out. ‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any cash on me at all.’

  ‘You’re staying here, right?’ The barman looked at her, patiently.

  She nodded, messy tendrils of blonde hair falling loose around her face. She bit her lip and for a second he thought she was about to burst into tears. Her chin wobbled.

  ‘What’s your room number?’

  ‘Oh!’ She flushed even pinker and dropped her purse on the floor. By the time she’d scrambled off the high bar stool Harry had bent down, and – still halfway between the bar and the carpet – he handed it to her, looking up at her with what he hoped was a comforting sort of smile. She must’ve had a bad week. Her hands were trembling.

  ‘I’ll charge it to your room,’ said the barman when they stood up. With a few more deft movements he’d created a mojito worthy of a beach bar in Jamaica, which was all the more impressive given they were in a faceless chain hotel somewhere in Cheshire.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, taking a sip. ‘Ooh, that’s lovely. It doesn’t taste alcoholic at all.’

  ‘It’s double strength, like you asked,’ said the barman defensively.

  ‘I don’t mean –’ She began another round of apologies, and then stopped herself.

  ‘It’s room fifty-four. And thank you.’ She turned to Harry and gave him another smile. She was sweet, he thought, watching as she wended her way across the hotel foyer before tucking herself into a corner and pulling out her phone.

  The barman gave him a knowing look.

  ‘And a coffee for you, sir, was it?’

  Harry nodded.

  Half an hour later, having caught up on some emails from work, he closed his laptop and sat up, stretching his arms with a groan. Working hunched over the table in a hotel foyer wasn’t doing his back any good. He checked his watch – almost half seven. Maybe he could just grab his stuff and do a quick half-hour run in the gym to blow the cobwebs off. He rubbed his jaw, which was jagged with stubble. He’d left Paris at five in the morning, which was actually four their time, driven from Heathrow, stopped in at the Birmingham office on the way. Tomorrow he’d a meeting in Chester, and then he’d be heading home. Only it wasn’t home. He had to make his way to a village in Wales where Jenny, his mother-in-law, had shipped the whole family in some completely insane mission to rebuild their relationships. How the hell it was going to make any difference, he had no idea.

  ‘Hello again,’ said a slightly familiar voice.

  The woman from the bar stood for a moment, hovering by his table. She looked as if the alcohol had taken the edge off her day.

  ‘Busy day?’ she asked.

  ‘Busy week, more like.’ Harry shook his head ruefully. The p
rospect of the gym wasn’t appealing – he was completely knackered.

  ‘Me too.’

  She gave a half-smile and put a hand to the string of brightly coloured beads she was wearing. They hung almost to her waist.

  And then she took a breath, as if she was about to say something – but then stopped herself. It was a fleeting moment, but – he realized afterwards – there was always that split second before a decision is made that changes everything, where possibility crackles in the air. He always remembered a girl he’d locked eyes with on a tube escalator when he was seventeen. She’d looked directly at him and he’d wondered if he should jump off when the got to the top and follow her back down through the maze of tunnels and say hello. In a movie, of course, he would have. But instead when he got to the top he paused for a second, contemplating it, before a man with a briefcase knocked into his back and sent him sideways, and that was that.

  She was older than him, maybe forty at the most? Scandinavian colouring, bright blue eyes and prettily flushed pink cheeks. Most of the women he saw in the evenings in business hotels were dressed in functional, dark-coloured work suits. They carried briefcases like his and spent their evenings hunched over their laptops, waiting for the weekend to come.

  She was in a pair of dark, cropped trousers and her linen tunic didn’t disguise an hourglass figure. The neckline was low and he could see the beads hung between softly swelling cleavage – not that he should be looking, he realized instantly. He averted his eyes.

  She wore a plaited friendship bracelet around her wrist.

  He found the words – realizing as he did that they’d been inevitable since their meeting at the bar.

  ‘I was going to head upstairs, but –’ he looked down, briefly, fiddling with the button on his shirt cuffs, feeling for a second like his seventeen-year-old self – ‘d’you want to have another?’

  She beamed. ‘I would love to.’

  ‘I found a seat by the fire,’ she said, half getting up as he returned with the drinks. ‘Well, the fire – ish.’ She motioned to the artificial flames, which flickered safely behind a wall of thick glass.

  ‘Here you are.’ He passed the drink to her – another mojito, as requested, ‘but a single this time, please’.

  ‘I’m Harry.’

  She laughed. ‘Like the prince.’

  He nodded, taking a sip of beer. ‘Everyone says that.’

  ‘Sorry. It must get old pretty quickly.’

  ‘It’s fine, honestly.’

  There was an awkward silence, and they both took a sip of drink. He looked across the room, seeing another couple of workers who’d paired up for a drink laughing and chatting comfortably. At the bar, he’d seen a woman in unfeasibly high heels slip onto a chair alongside a couple of men who had announced they’d arrived for a conference the next morning. They were flirting pretty hard by the time he’d picked up their drinks and left.

  This was what happened, Harry thought, when you left a load of bored, lonely people in an anonymous, faceless, corporate hotel night after night. It was almost inevitable that anonymous, faceless, corporate pairings would be the result.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, putting a hand to her mouth. ‘I’m Lucy. Sorry. I forgot that bit.’

  ‘Hello, Lucy,’ he said, smiling back at her.

  ‘. . . And that’s why I’m here,’ she concluded, some time later.

  Harry watched as the couple who’d been sitting opposite him ordered another drink. They were on the same couch now, having started off on separate chairs. When the woman had returned from the loo she’d sat down, casually, as if it was completely natural or as if she’d forgotten quite where she was supposed to sit.

  The guy had now loosened his top button and discarded his tie, removed his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves to reveal tanned arms, in a clear attempt to make it clear that he might spend his days sweating over a hot laptop, but his evenings were spent on more physical pursuits.

  Harry didn’t suppose that the man opposite was listening patiently as his female companion explained in breathy gasps between sobs (mopped up with napkins from the bar with the hotel logo on) that she had run away from home, leaving her three children with her husband, because she’d discovered he was having an affair.

  Other people had hot, uncomplicated, anonymous hotel encounters. He, on the other hand, ended up being agony aunt to a middle-aged woman having a breakdown.

  Lucy blew her nose with a loud parp.

  ‘God, I’m sorry.’ Her eyes were red-rimmed, and her cheeks were streaked with the tracks of the gallons of tears she’d shed.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Don’t be.’

  ‘You’re so sweet and lovely.’ She reached out a hand and squeezed his knee. ‘If Marcus was more like you I bet he wouldn’t even have thought of doing what he’s done to all of us.’

  ‘I’m not really,’ Harry protested, thinking of the past.

  He wasn’t sweet or lovely – in fact, he was a complete shit. It served him right that he was here right now, and not – he watched the man across the room stand up – heading upstairs with a woman who had thrown caution to the wind for an evening.

  ‘You really are lovely. You’ve listened to me banging on about him for hours –’ she blew her nose again – ‘and you haven’t spoken about yourself at all.’

  There hadn’t really been space to. He’d heard all about Marcus and how he’d taken to working away four nights a week and how he’d started off being lovely and charming and buying her extra presents and seeming jollier and kinder than normal, and how over the last six months he’d become more and more distant and withdrawn, glued to his phone (‘when he wouldn’t even have Facebook before’) and then – clearly consumed by guilt and shame – had confessed to an affair with his boss.

  So that was the story of why Lucy had run away.

  ‘I didn’t know what else to do. I thought I’d get my revenge on him by coming to one of these places and – and – and doing what he did.’

  He thought of her inexpert attempts to order a drink at the bar earlier.

  ‘So you were . . .’

  Lucy nodded, her eyes round. ‘I had sort of chosen you.’ She giggled.

  He didn’t quite know what to say. Random hook-ups had never exactly been his style in the past, and it looked like they weren’t in his future, either. It was probably safer to just stay single forever, given his history.

  Lucy took a large sip of her third drink. The ice had melted and it had been sitting in a slowly gathering pool of condensation that had dribbled down the sides of the glass and onto the table as she’d alternately raged and wept.

  ‘Ugh,’ she said, before drinking some more.

  ‘Perhaps I could get us a coffee?’ Harry made to get up and head for the bar. He watched the all-seeing barman polishing glasses, his eyes scanning the room. They must see all sorts of things going on in this place, night after night.

  She shook her head and pulled his arm, so he missed his footing and landed on the sofa beside her.

  ‘Oops.’

  She seemed a bit giddy now, as if pouring her heart out had lightened it, somehow.

  ‘Why don’t you get another drink?’

  ‘I—’ he began.

  ‘No!’ She stood up suddenly. ‘Ooh, that might’ve been all watery but it’s definitely gone to my head. I’ll get us one. I’ll charge it to my room. It’s all going on Marcus’s work account, anyway. He can blooming well explain that.’

  Lucy headed to the bar. Harry leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and sunk his head into his hands. This was not exactly the evening he’d planned. He had a difficult meeting first thing where he had to explain to a supplier why they were taking business in-house, and the sale of his parents’ house to arrange in the meanwhile, now that probate was sorted. His head was pounding.

  ‘I got you a mojito too!’ Lucy said cheerfully. She sat down with the two drinks. ‘I’m so grateful to you, Harry. You’re a prince
.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Sorry, couldn’t resist that.’

  He shook his head and laughed despite himself. Lucy was sweet, and this Marcus was an idiot. By all accounts they had a lovely life, with a cottage in Buckinghamshire, and a house full of children and dogs.

  The drink was disgusting – it tasted like too-sweet, alcoholic mouthwash. Plus it was full of pieces of mint leaf and the pith of a lime that had seen better days, judging by the half-dried slice garnishing the edge of the glass. He placed the drink on the mat. Perhaps she wouldn’t notice if he didn’t drink it.

  ‘So.’ Lucy turned to him, her head cocked to one side. ‘Tell me about yourself, Harry. Is there a Mrs Harry at home?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No.’

  ‘My goodness,’ Lucy raised her eyebrows. ‘But you’re so lovely and handsome. Why haven’t you been snapped up?’

  He took a breath. This conversation always went one of two ways. He either lied, which meant dealing with people trying to fix him up with someone lovely they knew who was just perfect for him, or he told the truth and had to go through the performance.

  ‘Are you divorced?’ Lucy continued probing, the rum having taken the edge off her natural politeness.

  He took a breath and paused, bracing himself for the inevitable response. ‘No, my wife died.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Lucy’s hand flew to her mouth. Her nails, he noticed, had been painted pale pink but half the varnish had chipped off.

  ‘It’s fine, honestly.’ He shook his head. ‘I mean – it’s not fine.’ It didn’t matter how many times he tried to handle this, he always managed to mess it up. ‘It was five years ago.’