The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,77

the far side of the room, convenient for coming in through the main house, but not much use if you came in the back way, so I took my coat off in the dark. I was in the process of hanging it on the hook behind the door, appreciating the still air and the smell of recent baking, when I heard the noise. A deep thump, from the door to the house beyond. Slow, scraping footsteps along the bare sanded boards. And through the half-open doorway, the image of a dark, hunched shape, pulling itself along the hallway wall, groping towards the unlit kitchen.

I was torn between screaming and arming myself. In the end I managed a little whimper and to close my fist around the only thing to hand, one of the scented candles that I’d bought in Bridport that were decorating the work surface. I’d raised it above my head – although what good it would do against a walking spectre I wasn’t sure; maybe I could patchouli oil and lily them back into the next world – when the groping figure slid into the room.

It stopped, flat against the wall, making flailing movements. I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to hit it, exorcise it or just lose control of all my bodily functions and run, and was contemplating doing all three simultaneously, when the dark figure spoke.

‘Where the hell is the light switch in this godforsaken place?’

It was Luc.

Embarrassment at my relief had forced me to make tea, and Luc and I sat at the table, on opposite sides, me with hands cupped gratefully around the warmth of my thick mug, whilst Luc stared into the rising steam from his Earl Grey, no milk and, to his evident dissatisfaction, no slice of lemon either. I’d rather facetiously offered him a piece of chocolate orange as the nearest equivalent, but he hadn’t even smiled.

‘So why were you sitting in my house in the dark?’ I finally asked him, when I’d had enough of admiring his fashionable new jacket and noticing the fact that his hair was definitely thinning on top.

‘You don’t lock the doors.’

‘That’s not really a reason, though, is it?’

‘And I could not find the light switch.’

I put my mug down rather harder than I’d intended. ‘Luc, this is my house. You don’t have the right to just come in whenever you feel like it, just because it’s not locked. Otherwise I’d have half the neighbourhood in here every day.’ I had a brief image of coming home to find Granny Mary happily installed in front of the log-burner and wondered if I shouldn’t start locking the doors more often.

He sighed a deep Gallic sigh. ‘Poppy, she is being a waitress!’

I waited, but I was obviously meant to know what he was getting at. ‘Yes, she is,’ I said carefully. Luc had always had a habit of having only half a conversation, convinced that I was filling my half with corroborating evidence and agreement, and he seemed to regard any kind of attempt at contradicting him to be beneath his notice.

‘Pah!’ His cup went down too now. ‘She cannot be a waitress! She will have a trust fund from Maman when she is twenty-five; she will not be waiting on tables! She ought to be finding herself a career, something that will use her talents, not serving cakes and tea to fat old women and their spaniels!’

I breathed carefully. ‘Two things, Luc. Firstly, she’s fourteen. Earning money as a waitress is practically a rite of passage; what she’s doing at fourteen is no indication of what she’s going to be doing for the rest of her life. And secondly, it’s nothing to do with us. She will do what she wants to do, and us trying to make her… oh, I don’t know, be an accountant or something, is not going to work.’

‘But if she thinks she will be a waitress she will not work hard at school!’ He practically wailed the words. ‘She will throw away her education for an apron and a way with muffins!’

His chair squealed on the tiled floor as he inched it closer to the table, elbows digging into the scrubbed pine with the intensity of his desire not to have his daughter fall into a life of menial tasks. It had been fine for his wife to perform them, of course.

‘Don’t you ever tell her she’s got a trust fund coming to her – that would be the death of