can do.’
‘You carve pumpkins?’
He flashed me a dark glance. ‘I was brought up in rural Dorset with appalling eyesight and half the local boys tracking my every outdoor movement. I’m a dab hand at anything you can do indoors in front of your family.’ He looked at my collection of knives. ‘Using these, I’m surprised you haven’t cut yourself to ribbons.’
I held up the hand not embracing the tea. Several soaked plasters adorned my fingers. ‘I have. I didn’t think it would be so difficult!’
He winced. ‘Don’t you have pumpkins in London?’
‘Yes, but I always bought them pre-carved from a lovely artist who lived in our block. Poppy was usually at parties, so we just used them as a table centrepiece.’
Gabriel shook his head. Then he took off his jacket, rolled up the sleeves of the black sweater he had on underneath, and bent close to a so-far untouched pumpkin. ‘Get me an apple corer, a citrus peeler and a black marker pen, stat,’ he said. ‘We’ll have this man on his feet again in no time.’
I fled down to the kitchen and pulled out the cutlery drawer. The apple corer was right at the front; we’d eaten a lot of apples since moving here. The citrus peeler was right at the back, behind some other exotic devices that I’d only brought here because I’d bought them and I was damned if Luc’s new girlfriend was going to get custody of them. Then I stopped, hand still delved deep among the pasta servers and steak tenderisers as the realisation hit me that Luc’s girlfriends had probably been in the flat quite frequently. I’d worked long hours during term-time, and Poppy had also been at school. Luc, floating about on the income from his family’s investments and wine business, had had all day to bring his current girlfriend home.
I wondered why I’d put up with it for so long. I’d tried, of course I had, but Luc had shrugged that particularly French shrug and rattled off something that even I hadn’t understood. And he’d been there for Poppy, for Christmases and birthdays, with lavish presents, and he’d taken her off to the family chateau for holidays. It was me that he’d let down.
‘Any sign of that apple corer?’ Gabriel’s voice came down through the floorboards. ‘Only I’m losing our patient!’
I realised my fingers were white on the carefully carved handle of my Harrods corer. Torn between wanting to plunge it into my husband’s congenitally unfaithful heart, and the realisation that we should have split up years before we actually did. That ‘staying together for Poppy’ had probably done more harm than good.
‘Keep him breathing, I’m on my way!’ I called back, and grasped the implements. Granny Mary must have got further inside my head than I’d thought, with her questions about why I had come to rural Dorset. She was right, of course. We could have bought another, smaller flat in London. Maybe not in as fashionable an area, maybe with more of a walk to the Tube, but we could have stayed.
My heart raced as I imagined London, and I found myself bent over the sink, feeling sick. Only the creaking overhead as Gabriel walked to the landing to shout down the stairs again pulled me back.
‘Oh, and if you’ve got any cobwebs down there…’
Cobwebs? The incongruity of the request jolted me out into the hallway. ‘Cobwebs?’
‘Yes, I just nicked my finger on this knife.’
With my armful of equipment, I went back up to my room, where Gabriel was standing holding his finger. ‘Your knives are dangerous,’ he said.
‘Cobwebs?’ I said again. ‘I think there are some in the bathroom. I try, I really do, but the spiders have squatters’ rights, apparently.’ I opened the door to the bathroom, glad that I’d had a quick tidy round when the film crew arrived. It wasn’t exactly acres of gleaming porcelain, but it wasn’t engrained or a floor full of dirty knickers either.
‘Ah, yes. Got one.’ Gabriel reached up and swiped down a small web that had been nestling blamelessly above the cistern. He wrapped it around the narrow slice that I could see at the base of his first finger, then looked at me. I was boggling.
‘Is this some kind of ancient magic?’
‘Don’t be daft. Spiders’ webs have this stuff on them that makes blood coagulate. A clean web will stop a small cut from bleeding.’ He waggled the finger at me. ‘See?’
All I could really see was a fine grey