The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,6

was one that would stay with me for a while.

We rounded the shoulder of the cottage, where the porch stuck out and narrowed the entryway even further. ‘I’ll hear from you soon, then,’ I said, turning to go into the darkness of the porch, and jumping backwards to smack Gabriel in the face with the back of my head when I realised someone was already in there, and there was a car parked outside the gate.

‘Hello, Katie,’ said a voice from the darkest recesses of hell and also my porch.

My ex-husband had come to visit.

3

We sat in the kitchen, with Gabriel holding a tea towel to his bleeding nose and occasionally dabbing at the incipient black eye where his glasses had impacted. I’d just about stopped apologising to him and offering him ice, but it was touch and go.

Luc had pulled out a chair at the little table and was sitting with his legs outstretched. Comfortable. Settled in.

‘So, Katie,’ he said, his French accent sounding exotic in the confines of the little stone-flagged room. ‘You moved all this way, huh? To this…’ and he threw his arms wide, indicating presumably the poverty of my kitchen. ‘I never thought you could live this way in such a…’ he groped for an epithet ‘… a backwater.’

Gabriel had flinched at the outflung arms, which had resulted in more blood. I handed him another tea towel. This was horrible. No, this was beyond ordinary horrible and into Game of Thrones horribility. All we needed now was a dragon; we’d already got the blood and the psychopath.

‘You lost the ability to comment on my life when we divorced.’ I threw Gabriel an apologetic look. I really didn’t want dirty laundry to be spread out in front of this perfect stranger, but I didn’t feel I could ask him to leave when he was seeping bodily fluids into my Laura Ashley finest linen weave. ‘How is Mariette, by the way?’

It was a low blow, but the quickest way I could think of to sum up the break-up of our relationship. Yes, I was the cliché, the wife left for a younger, prettier and more successful woman. Although, in my case, I didn’t bear Mariette any grudges, more a kind of sideways sympathy along with the knowledge that she wasn’t the first, and would, undoubtedly, not be the last of Luc’s ‘conquests’.

‘She is very good, thank you.’ Luc was dressing twenty years younger now, I noted. Slim chinos and a collarless grey shirt, his hair smooth and still dark, damn him. I found new grey hairs every day, but then I had to deal with Poppy. ‘I came to see our daughter.’

‘She’s at school. Obviously.’

Gabriel looked as if he was trying to fade into the background, despite the blood. He kept looking behind him towards the kitchen door, as though he wanted to make a break for it. I didn’t blame him. This was awkward, with a capital A.

‘Term has started already?’ Luc did the Gallic shrug, which didn’t surprise me. We’d been together for nearly fourteen years, and for most of those, plus the year after we’d separated, he’d had a daughter whose comings and goings had regularly bemused him. Luc had been so busy doing Luc that he’d never had the brain-space to contemplate the fact that Poppy might need new clothes, a regular schedule or, in fact, food.

‘Last week. We spent a week moving in and then she started at the local school.’

‘And what year is she, now?’

‘Year Ten. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but…’

Luc looked at his watch. ‘Ah. Maybe, then, I will come back later.’

‘I’d prefer it if you rang before you came, next time.’ I threw another glance at Gabriel, who looked as though he was desperately trying not to listen in, and Luc misread the look.

‘Of course! You will be wanting to start your new life.’ Another arm-fling, taking in Gabriel this time, who now had taken his glasses off to pat gently at his swollen eye.

‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I do. You’re welcome to see Poppy any time, of course you are, she’ll be over the moon, but—’ How did I sum it up? That I couldn’t have this glamorous Frenchman wafting in and out of my life any more, trailing his string of disappointed girlfriends and his trust fund. I was glad he’d met Mariette and decided to settle down. It might mean I knew where he was for more than a fortnight. ‘We aren’t together