The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,46

an open-plan living area, where Gabriel was hunched at a table in front of the window. He’d got a magnifying glass set up and was doing something to some fabric underneath it.

‘What are you doing?’ I didn’t bother with greetings. Thea seemed to have taken the element of surprise and wrapped it around a brick.

‘Ah.’ He put the fabric down and swung the chair around to face me. ‘Right. This is my day job.’

‘I thought looking for locations for Keenan was your day job?’

‘No, that’s the job I do to keep Thea happy. She thinks I should get out more.’ He looked down at the pile of fabric on the table. ‘And right now I’m beginning to think she’s got a point.’

‘So, your day job is…?’ I walked a little further into the room, mostly because I was afraid I was going to fall backwards down the stairs.

‘I quilt. I make patchwork quilts.’

‘We sell them online.’ Thea made me jump; she’d come up behind me and I was glad I’d cleared the top of the stairs otherwise she’d have been standing several steps below me and it would have been sinister. ‘There isn’t room to display them in the shop. Show her, Gabe.’

‘I’m not sure…’ Gabriel and I said at once.

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Thea sighed. ‘Stop trying to out-polite each other. Look.’ She picked something up from a sofa back, where it had been folded. ‘This is what Gabe makes.’ She shook it and the material dropped out to reveal a full-sized double quilt in shades of blue. It had been stitched so that the colours blended, squares of turquoise fading into bright blue and then down into paler blue and then through to almost grey. It was incredibly beautiful.

‘Wow.’ I went over for a closer look. The stitches were tiny, almost invisible, and precise. ‘You made this?’

‘Mmm.’ He sounded as though he didn’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed. ‘Well, you know, it was either that or shark fishing, and I get seasick.’

‘They’re very popular,’ Thea went on. ‘Sell for a fortune. Mum and Dad were very keen on us crafting, weren’t they, Gabe?’

‘I actually think they just wanted us to do something with our hands rather than try to punch each other,’ he said.

‘But it’s beautiful.’ I was awestruck. Apart from sewing buttons on and mending the odd hem, my needlework days had consisted of once making a skirt at school and sewing up plaits. The memory of that made me twitch. ‘Really, Gabriel. It’s gorgeous.’

‘But hardly the butchest job in the world.’ His tone was wry. ‘Told you, the farmers’ daughters are just queueing up for me. I might not be able to throw a pig two hundred metres, but I can design a quilt to match your colour scheme.’

‘I’ve said, Gabe, you don’t have to be butch these days. Look at Toby and Mattie. Toby’s so beta male that he’s practically fallen off the alphabet, and Mattie adores him. Friends of ours,’ she added to me. ‘And he earns money making balloon animals. I think quilting is really masculine compared to that.’

‘Would you like to go up to the café for a coffee, Katie?’ Gabriel said, standing up so suddenly that his wheeled swivel chair rotated its way across the floor. ‘Anything to get away from my sister trying to make advanced needlework sound on a par with alligator wrestling.’

I was going to protest, but then I wasn’t overly comfortable with Thea standing so near to me holding the quilt as though she were about to throw it over my head and smuggle me out of the building. ‘That sounds lovely,’ I said, eventually.

Gabriel grabbed his big black coat from the back of another chair and swung it on, advancing on me so that I had to back my way down the stairs. We reached the shop floor, leaving Thea up in the flat, making chuckling noises as though she’d just set us up on a date.

‘Sorry about my sister,’ he said, leading the way out of the shop and up towards the hill that stretched up out of town and formed the main street between the road to Bridport at the top of the cliff and the sea. ‘She doesn’t get out of Steepleton much.’

‘Look,’ I said, stopping suddenly. ‘I feel like I upset you earlier today. You were telling me stuff and I… well, I sort of brushed you off and I shouldn’t have. It was rude of me, and I’m sorry.’

He