The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,49

Gabriel wasn’t looking at me. He was flexing his fingers, those long fingers that I now realised were honed by hours of careful, precise stitching.

‘There’s no such thing as the perfect childhood,’ I said briskly. ‘Particularly for teenagers. They are predisposed towards dissatisfaction – it’s the thing that drives them to leave home and do different stuff. I’d guess a perfect childhood isn’t always a good thing anyway – it’s going to be all downhill from there.’

I could see my hand, lying on the table. Compared it to his. My hand was soft from years of writing on whiteboards, typing up reports, soothing a child to sleep. I hadn’t really looked at my hands for years. I wondered when they’d got so pale and clean.

In my pocket my phone rang. ‘Sorry, I’d better take it. It’s Poppy.’

He inclined his head and carried on drinking the coffee, while Poppy informed me that she’d finished her shift in the café, and although Karen had said she could stay on she wanted to come home and do ‘stuff’ so could I pick her up?

‘I’d better bring her home. She’ll have homework. Although mostly she seems to be planning for the Halloween do. And I really ought to go back to make sure that Granny Mary is… well, I should make sure she knows where everything is.’

‘The crew are all up there. She’s not on her own.’

‘Then maybe I should be there to protect them from her. No, sorry,’ I added quickly. ‘I’m sure she’s lovely really, when you get to know her.’ I drained the rest of my coffee and pushed my chair back.

‘Granny Mary is the epitome of “what you see is what you get”, but she’s very kind and somewhere underneath her incredible collection of rock band T-shirts beats a heart of gold.’ He stayed sitting. ‘I’ll come over and check on her tomorrow. If that’s all right with you, of course.’

‘Well, yes, why wouldn’t it be?’

He gave me a very steady look from those dark eyes. ‘I was worried that I might have crossed a line during our previous conversation,’ he said. ‘And you might want to keep your distance.’

‘You’re coming to check on an elderly lady, not force your way into my bedroom.’ I picked up my bag and phone. ‘And no lines have been crossed, honestly. As for distance, well, sometimes that’s for the best, don’t you agree?’

When I left the coffee shop he was still sitting there, arms stretched across the table and his mug cupped between his hands. He didn’t move, as though his mind was focused somewhere else, and my last glimpse of him was rippled at the edges through the fogged glass of the window. Just sitting.

10

That night a wind blew in from the sea.

I lay in bed, with the windows rattling on the side of the house that faced the coast and the trees that lined the lane swooshing and sighing dramatically. I was almost sure I could hear surf booming off the base of the cliffs, but that could have been my imagination.

My bedroom door creaked open and a sliver of light from the landing hit the bed. ‘Mum?’ Not quite a whisper, not quite a normal volume.

‘What’s up, Pops?’ I struggled to sit up. ‘Can’t you sleep?’

‘It’s noisy.’

‘It’s just the wind. If you fold up some paper and shove it between the window and the frame, it stops the windows rattling.’

Poppy came inside, hesitantly. Luc had never allowed her into our bedroom at night, unless she was ill, and the habit of uncertainty had stuck. Even though, once she was over five, he was hardly ever at home at night. ‘I’m scared.’

Backlit by the swaying landing bulb, in her slightly too small pyjamas, she looked so young. On school nights she put her hair up into a bun to stop it getting tangled, but at weekends she slept with it loose, which made her look even younger. Fourteen. A hell of an age.

‘Do you want to come in with me tonight?’ I flipped the edge of the duvet back.

No second invitation was needed and she clambered in, taking a customary two-thirds of the bed, and eight-ninths of the duvet. ‘It’s just so dark!’ Still whispering, although we were the only two in the house and both, demonstrably, already awake.

She was right. I could almost feel the darkness pressing against the walls of the house, kept at bay only by the landing light, which I kept on at night to prevent me