The Country Lovers

by Walker, Fiona

  ‘That’s Ten and Eleven, surely?’ She looked away uncomfortably.

  Her phone buzzed on the table. He stretched across to mute it and turn it over. ‘No distractions.’ His hand had been inching towards hers on the sofa back, now the warm tips of his fingers ran to and fro across her nails. ‘You know, I don’t know anything about your marriage to Mack: how you met, how you got wed, what went wrong.’

  Her anxiety spiked instantly, making it hard to breathe. She tried to mask, watching his fingers, hypnotised by the rings on them. ‘You don’t really want to know about it, do you?’

  ‘You have to start getting used to the fact I want to know everything about you, Pax. I will never bore of hearing about you. As I keep telling you: talking helps.’

  ‘There’s really not that much to tell.’

  He laughed softly. ‘You are breaking Steps One, Two and Three there, possibly Four, definitely Five; Six and Seven less so, quite probably Eight and Nine, you’re decimating Ten and Eleven, and as for Twelve…’ He puffed out his cheeks and grimaced. ‘Blown it.’

  ‘What is Twelve?’’

  ‘Let’s get to that after you tell me about being married to Mack.’

  *

  ‘Darling, I have to get back to Kes,’ Ronnie told Blair, leaning from the kitchen into the breakfast room passage, just able to make out the glow of the screen.

  ‘Get rid of Austen.’ Blair was extremely suspicious of Bay.

  ‘I think he’s laying siege until Pax gets back. Either that or he wants to buy more land off me.’ She lowered her voice. ‘I’ve heard rumours that his marriage is finally coming unstuck.’ Lester had turned into a positive goldmine of scurrilous tittle-tattle.

  ‘Definitely tell him to sling his hook in that case.’

  ‘While he’s here, I have him where I can see him. He’s the last thing Pax needs.’

  She’d rarely confided much of home to Blair in the past, but now their strings had tightened through rapprochement, and she valued his advice. In the past week, their calls had been getting longer, often hours at a time. She’d happily live with him in her ear. His unguarded humour and blunt, matter-of-fact approach to relationships was her touchstone.

  ‘Ron, you’ve got to let her life happen. It’s not yours to put right. If she’s going to royally fuck it up, she’ll go ahead and do it.’

  ‘What if she’s even better at that bit than I was?’

  ‘You turned out all right in the end.’

  ‘You say the most romantic things.’

  It was hard to tell if the interference on the line had worsened or his deep, gravelly voice was more emotional than usual. ‘We found each other, didn’t we?’

  ‘We did,’ she smiled, knowing they were both incredibly better for it.

  *

  ‘Tell me about your relationship with alcohol?’ Luca guessed he might only have one crack at this before Pax clammed up and joked it off, too self-protective to see how much it would help her to share it.

  ‘You make it sound like we’ve dated, married, separated.’

  ‘Didn’t you? It was with you all the way, I’m guessing, starting when – fifteen, sixteen?’

  ‘Put like that… Yes, I got sloshed as a teenager like most of my friends; I just wasn’t as good at stopping as them.’

  ‘But you could stop?’

  ‘No choice. I had no money, especially after I left home.’

  ‘It was after you married you developed a problem?’

  ‘Yes, no. I mean, I was far more out of control before then. I was a disaster.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘You really don’t want to know all that boring rubbish about me, do you?’ She looked round awkwardly.

  The bar was all but empty, just two tourists chattering in Italian and scrolling their phones and, by the fire, Luca and Pax curled up on an oversized oxblood chesterfield that clashed beautifully with her hair. Knees drawn up, she asked every few sentences if Luca really wanted to hear this because it was terribly dull.

  ‘Yes I do. Stop asking that.’

  She told him reluctantly, her voice lower than ever. And as she spoke, Luca learned a history to Pax he’d never imagined, one that started to make sense of the secrecy and need for control, the desperation to appease. Having dropped out of school at seventeen to join her brother in London, she’d holed up in his student digs, initially acting as a glorified housekeeper, but soon falling in with a party set that eclipsed his student crowd: the club DJs and Chelsea-toff drug-pushers, trustafarians and art students.

  Boyfriends had been easy to come by. ‘The hair did all the work,’ she explained self-effacingly, ‘especially with arty types who get off on the Pre-Raphaelite thing. The quieter I was, the better; it just added to my brooding muse. And I was quiet. I was just heartbroken. I thought I’d never be happy again, which made me the perfect artist’s companion. We’d sink bottles of tequila and absinthe, fantasising we were latter-day bohemians. I took any tab or toke I was offered because it helped me forget Bay.’

  He watched her lips move as she explained that her brother’s crowd soon seemed too square and rah, so she’d moved out, landing in a squat with a boyfriend who sold vintage records. Luca adored the way her mouth curled when she spoke, the open-heartedness with which she couldn’t help speaking.

  ‘It was full of musicians and street artists and performance poets, lovely people.’ Her eyes warmed up at the memory. ‘I thought I knew what I was doing, but I was a mess underneath, and there were a lot of drugs. We were raided regularly. Granny and Grumps had no idea, thank God. I couldn’t hold down work or a relationship longer than a few weeks. Then a distant cousin got me a job temping at a swanky architecture firm. Mack was the in-house structural engineer there.’

  She’d pulled the hair back from her face and was twisting it tightly into the crook of her neck, her fingers white-knuckled.

  ‘I’d caught my boyfriend in bed with someone else, things were really awkward at the squat. The architect’s office had a shower and even a gym. One day after work, I hid in the ladies until everyone had gone home and then slept on the sofa in the directors’ suite. I felt safe and warm for the first time in months, so I did it again the next night, and all that week.

  ‘Mack rumbled me when he stayed late after work one evening. He could have had me fired on the spot, but instead he took me under his wing. He explained that his marriage was breaking up, so he understood what it felt like to be a bit lonely and lost. He invited me to be his lodger, rent-free. This bit’s quite boring – shall I skip past it?’

  ‘No, I want to hear it. You were his lodger…’

  He sensed her discomfort but could no more let it drop than when asking a horse like Beck to explore new pasture, aware his every urge was to bolt back to the stable.

  She picked at a cushion, looked up at him with the big hare eyes then away at the fire. ‘He let me have a room in his house – his wife had left, taking the kids. It was so sad, their toys everywhere. I’d come back to the stud or stay with friends at the weekends when he had them to stay. He cooked amazing meals and told me all about architecture and history. He nicknamed me his pet tramp.’

  Luca winced. Grooming you, Pax. He was grooming you. ‘Go on.’

  ‘I thought he was the kindest person I’d ever met. It was down to him that the firm spotted my potential and offered to sponsor me through college so I could get qualified. I loved the restorations they did. At home with Mack, I just read and read. He had hundreds of books about architecture, I was like Belle in Beauty and the Beast.’

  ‘And Mack was the beast?’ he asked carefully, realising that Pax had unwittingly gifted herself to a Svengali.

  ‘Not to me, not at first. I mean yes, he had a pretty fierce reputation at work, and his wife was slinging all sorts of allegations about unreasonable behaviour and bullying, but he was sweet to me. He hardly drank and never at home, he ate healthily, worked out and soon I was doing all that too. He changed my life compl
etely.’

  ‘By controlling it completely for years.’

  ‘Not back then.’ She looked angry, needing to believe it.

  Luca checked himself. ‘When did you become a couple?’

  ‘Not for almost a year. I was trying to get him Internet dating, can you imagine? I wrote his profile for him on Match dot com – Good-looking, sporty Scot late thirties, into travel, architecture and fine dining WLTM slim, independent female twenty-five to thirty-five. I had no idea he felt that way about me.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Nineteen.’

  He tried not to wince. ‘So how did you get together?’

  ‘One weekend when he had his kids there, I went to a party with some friends and saw my ex there. I ended up going back to the squat with him. I texted Mack to let him know I was staying on there a few more nights – it was one of my college weeks, and the squat was only a tube stop away from my class. He went berserk, turning up on campus, then trying to get me fired at work, accusing me of taking drugs. When I went back to have it out with him and remind him that my life was my own, he told me he was in love with me. Just straight up. “I love you.” You can guess the rest. Blah-di-blah-di-blah.’ The cushion edge was being shredded now.

  ‘No I can’t. He told you he loved you, and did you feel the same way?’

  She rested her left hand on the table and looked at her fingers, long and fragile, their tips drumming like hooves, the rings her husband had given her on her middle one now. ‘No man had ever said that to me, not even Bay. After him, all my boyfriends had been…’ She looked at the fingers as they stampeded, and he could guess what she was trying to say. He’d been there enough years himself. Throwaway physical relationships that felt good at the time but left you empty.

  ‘They never lasted,’ she said carefully. ‘I was staggered, flattered, moved. I cried. Mack said he’d always look after me. Then he took me to bed.’

  Luca didn’t want to think about it. There’s nothing like a middle-aged man with a new plaything, he reflected bleakly.

  On the table the hooves had stopped galloping, the stampede sliding to a halt on a canyon edge. He saw she was dashing a tear away, jaw set, determined not to cry.

  ‘It was the worst night of my life.’

  ‘Did he hurt you?’

  ‘No, nothing like that.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s just that… I mean, I didn’t think I was all that experienced and he’d been married for years, but that’s when I realised… Do you really want to hear this?’

  ‘Only if you want to tell me.’

  The Italian tourists had gone, the bar unmanned. An old Coldplay track played over the speakers. Luca could see her mind working, sensed the unhappiness attached to what came next, truth’s tipping point trying to keep balance.

  ‘The sex was just awful,’ she whispered. ‘I remember lying in bed afterwards in shock, thinking is that it?’ She looked up at him, red bands of mortification streaking her cheeks.

  ‘Why did you stay with him?’

  ‘Because I thought it would get better. Because being young and naïve I thought I could teach him a thing or two. He loved me and I thought I would grow to love him back because I couldn’t love Bay any more, and I’d only ever loved Bay. I stayed because I felt sorry for him. And I stayed because…’ She put her hand across her mouth, looking away, tears threatening again. She shook them away, forced an ironic smile. ‘Because our son Oliver was conceived that night. He died, he was stillborn…’ She held up her hand, cutting off his next question. ‘And please don’t say “I’m so sorry”.’ She second-guessed sympathy now.

  Luca could only imagine the pain it must have caused.

  She was staring at the fire. ‘By then I was Mrs Forsyth. I’d walked into it willingly, even if it didn’t take long to realise that the sex was never going to get any better, and that my husband was a lot more controlling than other people’s. He didn’t like me behaving indecorously or spending time away from him or having my own friends. But slowly, over the years, I started making secret friends: Stolichnaya, Absolut, Glen’s, Tamova.’

  As she stared into the fire, her expression changed to one of incredulity. Luca waited, watched, knew that first taste of redemption as well as he knew the blissful slake of Scotch burning his tongue. She had got there. She’d mined the past to find its seam, just as he had sitting together in a car in a lay-by, believing he was lecturing her on how to avoid the path to ruin.

  He took her hand, running his thumb across her knuckles. ‘My poor angel.’

  ‘The one thing I was absolutely determined about was that I didn’t want to desert my marriage like Mummy had.’ Her fingers threaded through his. ‘Only now I have.’

  ‘And here we are.’ He turned her rings in his fingers, wishing their still being there didn’t bother him so much.

  She looked at them too. ‘Don’t let go.’

  She drew her hand back, slowly easing the finger out from the gold hoops, before looking up at him. It seemed ridiculous that it felt so intimate, the heat rising between them. Luca hooked the two rings on the end of his forefinger and handed them to her, and she smiled, dropping them in her bag without a second glance.

  She laughed as he held up his own hands, the rings a hotchpotch of love tokens and souvenirs, the Claddagh a gift from his ex in Canada that he’d hurled across more than one room. One by one, Pax took them off his fingers. Again they both caught their breath, glancing furtively around as though they’d stripped each other half-naked and might be caught at any moment. Then, putting their hands together, unadorned fingers briefly intertwined, they formed fists so they could dovetail their knuckles again.

  ‘Step Three,’ she repeated. ‘Trust.’

  ‘We’ve got to Five,’ he pointed out as their eyes locked together, brimming with gladness.

  ‘Remind me, what is Step Twelve?’

  ‘I think it’s going to feel a bit like this…’ And he kissed her.

  20

  Ronnie finally coaxed an exhausted Kes to bed, which he would be sharing with her when she came up a little later. But the novelty of it was giving him another energy spike and he wouldn’t settle. Every time she tried to creep out of the room, he thought up another excuse.

  ‘Gronny, I think there’s a spider…’

  ‘Gronny, can I have a glass of water?’

  ‘Gronny, my tummy hurts.’

  Trotting in and out, Ronnie hoped her uninvited guest would wake up and let himself out eventually. Having fallen asleep stretched out on the sofa with all four dogs on him, Bay was still downstairs. She hadn’t had the heart to wake him for the dogs’ sakes.

  ‘Gronny, I’ve dropped Rab C. and can’t find him!’

  ‘Gronny, when will Mummy be back?’ He was behind the curtains looking out of the window.

  As she settled him into bed again, she heard an engine outside and guessed it must be Bay’s car leaving. Phew. His company wasn’t something she felt entirely comfortable with. It wasn’t that she feared Bay’s seductive reputation – hers was far worse and they’d already chalked that adventure up to bitter experience – it was that she feared that he was going to pour out his anguished soul to her. Given he was shallow as a puddle, this would probably take all of five minutes, but she didn’t want to test it. He was still very sweet on Pax.

  His engine really was very loud. He needed to get it looked at.

  ‘Night, night, little cowboy.’ She backed out of the room, inching the door almost closed.

  ‘Gronny…’

  She looked up in despair, peeking in. ‘Yes?’

  He was behind the curtains again. ‘Why is a helicopter landing in the front field?’

  *

  Luca was laying waste to everything on the Chipping Hampton pub tapas menu that came with a v beside it.

  Watching him, getting used to the beauty of his new-found face, Pax found a smile impossible to shake. They were going to take this so slowly, they’d agreed. Kes came first. And
their sobriety. Trust took a long time. She’d already entrusted him with her biggest secrets. She’d never felt an instinctive draw towards anybody as strongly as she did now.

  She drank in the sight of him tucking back sweet potato fries, olives, garlic mushrooms and cauliflower bonbons, telling her he’d originally quit eating meat as a bet with one of his brothers, who still owed him a hundred euros. ‘He thought I’d never stick it, and it’s true I’d never starve for the sake of a lump of cheese, but it helps keep the weight off. We’re all porpoises in my family, which is tough when you ride horses for a living.’

  She loved the way he described the big, boisterous O’Brien tribe in Ireland, his eternal restlessness growing up, the healing skills his father had wanted to exploit to pass off lame horses as sound and make his chasers race faster. ‘Sure, he’s a terrible crook, but he’s not a bad man. He knows no better, like the fella in Canada I worked for. They’re all the same under the skin. Horsemen.’

  ‘Not like Horsemakers?’

  He smiled at her over a plate of miniature stuffed peppers, offering her one. ‘We need to feed you up.’

  She wasn’t remotely hungry, but she ate one to make him happy. It was delicious. She ate two more and polished off the sweet potatoes, sharing horror stories of her grandfather, the Captain, another old-fashioned horseman of questionable ethics and unflinching principle.

  Then she told him about her father and Lester.

  With each secret she shed, she saw a clearer picture of everything, like an oil canvas being revealed by a restorer after years of grime, over-painting and varnish. The colours were brighter, cheering and healing.

  Unable to stop herself, she told him about riding the cob the previous night.

  ‘I watched you,’ he admitted, taking her hand, both their fingers bearing pale stripes where rings had been.