‘It’s a nice change from everyone staring because they think they own a part of me. I just need a break from all that, and although this may seem crazy, it does work, you know.’
‘I can’t really take you seriously with all that on.’
‘I’m glad I bumped into you,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking about our conversation last night and I wanted to say sorry.’
Lara shot him a warning glance, inclining her head towards Jack, who had her by the hand, pulling her towards the theatre.
‘Oh dear,’ Lara said. ‘I promised him we’d drop in on Marcus.’
‘Do you like ice cream, Jacko?’ Stephen bent so his eyes were the same level as the little boy’s.
Jack nodded and smiled, his freckles dancing up and down.
‘Well I’m going to take you and your mum to our local ice-cream shop: the best in the whole county.’
‘Wow!’ Jack said.
‘It’s called Pretty Fly Pie …’ Stephen told him as he got up. ‘And it is really something. My car’s over there.’ He pointed to a dented red Wrangler parked outside the theatre.
‘We have to drive?’ Lara said, thinking about her laundry.
‘Yep. It’s about ten miles thataway.’ Stephen pointed west.
‘And that’s local?’
‘Welcome to America.’
When they stopped by the house to pick up the child seat, Stephen rolled down the top of the Wrangler, much to Jack’s delight. Then they set off, the wind in their hair, out of the village in the direction that Lara had taken on her run. Instead of turning along the river once over the bridge, they went straight on, out into the countryside. They zigzagged steeply up a hill and down the other side, where they crossed a gargantuan, six-lane freeway on which they counted just three cars and one lorry. An empty gas station stood at the side of the road, dwarfed by an incongruous, thirty-foot-high illuminated Sunoco sign. Apart from a small trailer park, it was the first building they had seen since leaving Trout Island.
‘How much longer?’ Lara yelled over the roar of the Wrangler and the rush of the air. She was amazed Stephen’s wig had managed to stay on.
‘Nearly there,’ he said. ‘Look out for the pie.’
They took a right after the freeway bridge and crawled through a village that looked like a mirror image of Trout Island, different only in that it lacked the grandiose presence of the theatre building. They picked up speed and covered another couple of miles of the wilds until they came to a wooden cut-out of a giant winged pie.
‘Pretty Fly Pie …’ Stephen said, turning into a gravelled car park in front of a red-painted barn. Over the doorway, another sign proclaimed ‘… and darn dream ice cream’.
‘It had better be darn dream,’ Lara said. ‘It’s got a pretty heavy carbon footprint.’
‘Believe me, it’s worth every ounce.’ Stephen reached Jack out of his car seat. He went to put him down, but Jack clung to his neck. The three of them looked every bit the family as they crossed the car park.
The barn doors led them into a vast airy space, unexpectedly full of people sitting at mismatched tables and chairs, eating pie and ice cream. Some played chess on boards painted on the table tops; others pored over jigsaw puzzles. There was produce for sale, too – a wooden stall in the doorway bore a display of Pennsylvania peaches so ripe that the air tingled with their downy scent. A rack of baskets stood to one side, brim-full of sweet corn, the yellow kernels still dewy underneath the papery husks. There were piles of organic tomatoes of all shapes and sizes, and every sunset colour, as well as blueberries, tiny strawberries, basil, courgettes and peppers. To the back of the barn rows of wooden shelves offered honey, preserves, maple syrup and chopping boards made from local timber by someone called Wally Woodshop. Along the side wall, though, was the holy grail they had come in search of: thirty different flavours of home-made ice cream.
‘They make the ice cream and pies here, all the vegetables are organically grown round the back, and most of the other stuff comes from within twenty miles, so you don’t have to feel too guilty,’ Stephen said.
Lara picked up a peach and inhaled. It was almost liquid in her hands. Jack scrambled down from Stephen’s arms and made a beeline for the ice-cream counter. Lara found tears coming to her eyes, simply because this place was so lovely. She looked up at Stephen, who was watching her with a smile on his face.
‘It’s reet great ’ere, lass, in’t it?’ he said.
Lara put the peach down and looked around. ‘It’s perfect.’ She smoothed over the lurch his look had set in her stomach by joining Jack at the ice-cream counter to help him choose.
‘I want them all,’ Jack said, holding on to the counter, pulling himself up on tiptoe so he could see.
‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ Lara said, ‘but perhaps you could choose two?’
As she helped Jack make the difficult decision, she felt Stephen standing close to her.
‘Hey Sam, how ya doin?’ the plump man behind the counter said.
‘Just fine thank you, Jim,’ Stephen said, putting on the gallant Southern accent he had used in the playground. ‘I recommend the sundae for the little guy,’ he said to Lara in the same voice. ‘The chocolate sauce is to die for. It’s on me, by the way.’
‘Why, that’s very kind of you, sir,’ she said, curtsying like a belle. ‘You seem to be a great connoisseur of the menu. Do you come here often?’
‘All the time,’ he said, and Lara thought of Stephen driving out here on his own, in his absurd disguise, and sitting and eating ice cream. Did he do a jigsaw to pass the time? Did he find a chess partner?
Eventually, decisions were made, and the patient, pleasant Jim got a fancy, scallop-shaped dish and doled on to it one enormous scoop each of cookie dough and peanut butter ice cream. He moved over to the back counter with a surprisingly balletic step and pumped two dollops of warm chocolate sauce on top.
‘Sprinkles?’ Jim turned to ask Jack.
‘Sprinkles.’ Stephen nodded.
‘There’s so much,’ Lara said, taking the dish for Jack.
‘Don’t worry,’ Stephen said, still in his American accent, ‘I’ll help him out.’
‘Any more for any more?’ Jim stretched his full lips into a cherubic smile.
‘I’ll have one of these.’ Lara pointed at the low fat, no sugar water ices at the far end of the counter.
‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘These are so much nicer.’ He waved his hand along the counter at the fuller, billowier tubs full of double chocolate, Hershey Bar, butter almond and maple fudge.
‘Go on, little lady,’ Stephen said. ‘You don’t need to watch your figure, surely?’
‘You old charmer, you.’
In the end, she settled for a cone of pumpkin on the grounds that she had never tasted it before. Stephen had strawberry cheesecake and toffee cookie crumble in a dish like Jack’s with maple cream on it.
‘I’ve tried them all now,’ he said, with some satisfaction.
While Stephen paid, Lara and Jack turned to find a table.
‘Oh!’ Lara stopped in her tracks. Coming through the doorway, hand in hand, their attention so wholly focused on each other they might have been the only people in the world, were Bella and Sean. He cradled her hand as she lifted a peach for him to smell. She pointed out the corn and he picked out a yard-high stem of basil, presenting it to her like a bouquet. It was almost a parody of young love, and for a moment Lara felt a stab of jealousy.
Then Bella turned to look at the ice cream and saw her mother and baby brother standing there, gawping at her.
‘Mum?’ she said. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘What does it look like?’ Lara said, licking her ice cream, which was beginning to dribble down the cone on to her fingers. It was delicious, a muted sweetness of pumpkin riding a little cinnamon on an almost powdery texture.
‘Ice cream, Bell. Nice,’ Jack said, scrambling on to a seat, already with more chocolate sauce round his mouth than he had in his dish.
Bella towed Sean up to their table. ‘Mum, this is Sean.’
‘I know. We’ve met,’ Lara said, smiling up to him. ‘I thought you were swimming in a pond.’
‘Well we were,’ Bella said. ‘But we started to get pruney, so Sean brought me here. Isn’t it cool?’
‘So you drove here,’ Lara said. ‘I hope you wore a seat belt.’
‘Hi, I’m Bella, Lara’s daughter?’ Bella reached across her mother and held out her hand to Stephen, who had joined them and was wiping the chocolate from Jack’s face. He took her fingertips, then leaned over and whispered something in her ear. Bella’s eyes widened as she stood back and looked at him. Then she smiled. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Now I see it.’
Stephen held his finger up to his lips.
‘Hey, “Sam”,’ Sean said.
‘You know?’ Bella turned to her boyfriend open-mouthed.
‘I thought only James, Betty and that Trudi knew?’ Lara said to Stephen.
‘Well, Sean sort of rumbled me round at the farm once. But he’s a good kid. I’d trust him with my life,’ Stephen said in a low voice.
‘And you have every reason to,’ Sean said seriously.
‘I wish I’d known. You don’t know how much it hurt not telling you,’ Bella said to Sean. Then she turned back to look at Stephen’s disguise. ‘Too weird.’
‘So: do you kids want to treat yourselves?’ Stephen said more loudly, now in his Sam voice. He reached in his wallet and handed them a ten-dollar note. ‘Go on, guys. It’s on your Uncle Sam.’
‘Thanks, Sam,’ Bella said.
Lara watched as they went over to the ice-cream counter. Sean showed the flavours to Bella, resting his hand on her waist so that she was close to him. The way Bella turned to him, the look in her eyes as she spoke, and the new shape her mouth took as she listened to what he said told Lara more than she wanted to know about just how far this friendship had progressed. She sighed as she finished off her ice cream. So soon after meeting, and with Bella so young. She was in deep – anyone could see that. Lara braced herself. The best she could hope for was that her daughter had her heart broken, or broke a heart herself. Anything else would be unthinkable, this young.
‘Remind you of anyone?’ Stephen leaned forward and whispered to her, in his own voice.
Lara bought a basket full of produce. She invited Sean and Stephen back to supper, which she had already planned to be pasta with fresh basil and tomato sauce, and local pecorino on top, followed by a Pretty Fly blueberry pie. After a moment’s hesitation involving an agonised glance at Bella, Sean accepted, but Stephen said he had to get back to feed his chickens. They drove back over the hill in convoy, Stephen with Lara and Jack in the lead, Sean and Bella following behind in his car, which Lara noted with relief was a sensible, not-too-old Nissan.
As they climbed the steep hill on the other side of the freeway, Lara remembered she had to stop by the laundromat. When they got back to Trout Island, she asked Stephen to pull over. She ran out to tell Sean and Bella, who had tucked in behind them, to go back to the house while she went with Stephen to pick up the washing.
As before, the laundromat was completely deserted. Lara got the buggy first, lobbing it into the back of the Wrangler. Then she went into the shed. The machine she thought she had left her laundry in was empty. Thinking she must have made another supermarket-car-park-type mistake, she checked all the others, but they too contained nothing but their shiny stainless-steel drums. She looked into the tumble dryers, thinking perhaps that someone had, with the best of intentions, moved her washing on, but there was no sign of it. And the plastic laundry baskets were all empty, too.
Perturbed, she looked for a phone number on one of the crude notices dotted around the place. They were full of misspelled instructions like
DO NOT OVERLODE THE MACHINES
, and
CHECK ALL POKETS BEFORE LODEING
.
CUSTOMERS ARE LIBEL FOR BLOKAGES
. Then she found a small, handwritten sign tucked down underneath the washing powder dispenser, which gave a contact
IN CASE OF MALFUNTION
. Lara scribbled the number on her arm.
‘Bastards,’ she said as she went out to the Wrangler. Stephen was sitting in the back, reading
We’re Going on a Bear Hunt
– which he must have got out of her bag – to Jack. ‘Someone’s taken all our washing. Someone’s nicked our laundry.’
‘That’s weird. Kids?’ Stephen said.
‘Or perhaps Olly or Marcus came and got it?’ Lara said. ‘Though I doubt that.’
‘Nasty lady,’ Jack said.
‘You’re right, Jack,’ Lara said. ‘Perhaps it was the nasty lady.’
‘What nasty lady?’ Stephen turned to face her.
‘Some idiot nearly ran us over as we came out here this afternoon,’ Lara explained as she climbed into the Wrangler. ‘But I’m sure it couldn’t be her. What would she want with all our clothes?’
‘What did she look like?’ Stephen moved forward into the driving seat.
‘I didn’t really see her. Sort of brownish, middle aged-ish. Angry. She whacked her car down the lane, nearly ran us over, swore at us then went in there.’ Lara pointed at the laundromat. Then she turned back to Stephen and noticed his eyes had darkened.
‘It’s my fault,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘No. What?’
He broke away and put his hands behind his neck, bowed his head and sighed. ‘Strange things happen around me,’ he said.
She put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Look, don’t worry about it. There’s probably some simple explanation. I’ll call this number when I get back,’ she pointed to the scrawl on her arm, ‘and I’m sure we’ll trace it. If someone in the village starts wearing Olly’s
Made in Brighton
T-shirt, we’ll have our man. Marcus will be cross about the Paul Smith shirt though. Oh damn,’ she said, remembering. ‘Your shirt was in there, too.’
‘Don’t worry about that. I’ve got hundreds,’ Stephen said. ‘But I’ll be sure to get your top back to you as soon as possible, given the reduced clothing situation.’ He started the engine. ‘I’d better get you back. Marcus will be home in a few minutes.’
‘You seem to know his rehearsal schedule very well,’ Lara said, putting on her seat belt.
‘I have my sources,’ he said, smiling.
He drove them slowly round the block to the house. Stopping in the street, he got out and helped Lara get her shopping from the back, then he lifted Jack out, detached the car seat and put it on the front deck.