The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,27
between coffee in a warm place, hell, warm coffee, and sitting around in the heat sink that is my cottage, while the invertebrates play kiss chase on the walls, I think I’ll take the coffee,’ I said, somewhat stung by his assumption that my eagerness was fake.
He stopped for a second. Just a momentary halt in closing the car door, but it was a hesitation in movement that I noticed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, quietly.
‘What for?’ I found myself very concerned with my car keys to avoid looking at his face. When I did glance at it, there was an expression I couldn’t read, something complicated and dark.
‘My sister’s always telling me to stop it with the self-pity. Sometimes I just genuinely don’t see – no pun intended, sorry. I get so wrapped up in myself, in the not knowing what’s going to happen, how bad it’s going to get, my own troubles, basically, that I forget everyone else has problems too.’ He held out a hand. ‘I’m a bit of a twunt sometimes, and having a disability does not excuse me. Sorry.’
I looked at his hand, then reached out slowly to take it. We shook hands. His skin was warm, his fingers long and careful around mine. ‘You heretofore have my permission to clout me a good ’un if I get all “I am the only person to suffer” again, okay?’
‘Can I use foreign objects? To clout you?’ I tried to sound light and jokey, but the inside of my mouth had gone a bit sticky. I realised this was the first time I’d properly touched a man since Luc. Okay, it was a handshake, not intercourse, but there was something intimate about that skin-to-skin contact and those fingers cupping my hand.
‘Up to, and including, loose bits of cardboard. No woks,’ he said. ‘Oh. Sorry again, for all I know you’ve been a domestic violence victim and I’ve just made light of – look, this is all going a bit pear-shaped, shall I shut up now?’
We slowly disentangled hands and turned our backs to the wind to walk up the slope towards coffee. ‘No violence,’ I said at last, quietly. ‘Luc never hit me.’
Gabriel twitched his head in my direction. ‘He’s a bit abrasive though, isn’t he? I mean, I could hear him, even through all the blood and the layers of tea towel – he’s used to getting his own way.’
‘He’s French,’ I said, and then realised that that didn’t explain anything. ‘No, that’s not fair. He grew up with an immense amount of privilege, his family own loads of vineyards and chateaux and stuff. He’s a little bit divorced from real life. And me, now, obviously.’ I grabbed the metal rail that ran up the middle of the road that ran vertiginously up the hillside. Another squall of grey rain blew through, dashing up the hill ahead of us. ‘He’s not a bad man. He just really wasn’t cut out for marriage and parenthood and all that, and we were too young when we got together to realise it. But I’ve got Poppy, and I wouldn’t have anything any different. Except,’ I thought, drawn to introspection by the gradient, ‘maybe a better heating system.’
‘What about you?’ Gabriel paused. He’d got ahead of me, clearly more used to scaling the heights of Steepleton than I was.
‘My mum was widowed when I was young. I grew up in London.’ This didn’t really answer his question and I knew it, but I really didn’t want him raking over my upbringing. ‘Boring, really.’
‘My sister and I grew up here.’ Gabriel stopped again and turned. ‘Mum’s got a B&B further up the hill and Dad used to fish until he started helping her in the business. It’s not such a bad place, once you get used to the hill and the wind. And if you like mackerel.’
We’d stopped outside the coffee shop that also seemed, inexplicably, to be an estate agency. A plate of scones nestled in the window alongside the property details of a house halfway to Dorchester and a sun-faded request for EXTRAS FOR FILMING. An ice cream wrapper accelerated up the hill past us on the stiff breeze and the air smelled of old seaweed and rain on ancient tarmac. Apart from the distant voices, the shushing of the sea and the howl of the wind past my ears, it was quiet.
‘Yes,’ I said, and then, more strongly, ‘yes. I’m getting used to it.’
Gabriel led the way into the