Will he come and see us again?’
‘I don’t know. He’s very busy at the moment and then he has to go home to America.’
She pushed the hair out of his eyes, and was about to get up from the bed, when he said, ‘Mummy?’
‘Yes?’
He gave her one of his melting looks. ‘What do you think Mr Liberty is doing right now?’
‘Probably wondering what you’re doing right now.’
He seemed pleased by this thought. ‘Do you think so?’
‘Absolutely. You’re a hard boy to forget, Ned.’
‘Can we go back to Mermaid House to see him?’
She had known it would only be a matter of time before he asked her this question.
‘Don’t you like being here?’
He hesitated, as though not wanting to cause offence. ‘Mm … it is nice, but I miss Mr Liberty.’
‘Well, that’s not a bad thing. It means you care about people, and that’s good.’
‘It doesn’t feel good. It feels … horrible.’ His lower lip wobbled.
‘Oh, Ned.’ She lifted him out of bed and sat him on her lap. It wasn’t often he cried, but when he did, Clara knew it was with good reason. She cuddled his warm body against hers, but the tears had taken hold of him and there seemed no way to comfort him. Hearing the noise, Louise popped her head round the door.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, concerned.
‘A surfeit of good times, I think.’
Eventually Clara settled him by promising that they would ring Mr Liberty tomorrow morning so that Ned could speak to him. When she joined her friends downstairs, she sensed they had something to say to her: they had formed themselves into what looked suspiciously like a deputation.
Guy patted the seat next to him on the sofa. ‘Clarabelle, for once in your life you’re going to take the advice of your friends.’
‘And please don’t take this the wrong way,’ Louise said, ‘but quite frankly you’ve outstayed your welcome.’
‘Yes,’ agreed David, handing round cups of coffee. ‘So you can pack up your things and go. We’ve had enough.’
‘More than enough,’ said Guy. ‘If I have to hear one more word about Ned’s superhuman friend, Mr Gabriel Liberty, I think I’ll go mad.’
‘And as for the wonderful Jonah Liberty,’ said Moira, ‘well, please, is any man that perfect?’
‘Oh yes,’ groaned Louise. ‘If I have to eavesdrop on another of your midnight phone calls, I’ll die of envy.’
Clara stared at them confounded. ‘What’s going on? What are you up to?’
‘Get real, sister,’ laughed Guy. ‘You and Ned have done nothing but go on about Deaconsbridge. If we’ve heard it once, what a fantastic time you had, we’ve heard it till we’re ready to go up there and see for ourselves the Utopia you’ve discovered.’
‘But—’
‘No buts,’ interrupted Louise, with a warning finger. ‘If you hadn’t come back here to see Todd, you’d still be up there in the Peak District, wouldn’t you?’
Clara nodded. ‘Possibly.’
‘No possibly about it! Now, what’s stopping you from taking off tomorrow and seeing how the land lies?’
‘But why would I want to do that?’
Nobody answered her. They just stared at her hard. She knew she was being pushed into a corner, and that her friends wouldn’t let the matter drop until they were satisfied. She decided to humour them.
‘Look, the truth is, it has crossed my mind to do just as you’re suggesting, but—’
‘We told you, no buts!’
‘But, Louise, I’m worried if Ned and I do go back we might not want to leave.’
‘I’m sorry, call me a dumb old bloke,’ said David, ‘but what’s the danger in that? You’ve found somewhere you like, where you’ve made friends, and where there’s even the chance of you getting off with a real live man. Explain the problem.’
‘The problem is you lot! What would I do without you all?’
‘Oh, so we’re just here to be used, are we?’
‘Guy, don’t you dare try twisting my words. I meant, how would I survive without your friendship permanently on hand?’
Moira shook her head. ‘Poor excuse. We’re not having that one, are we?’
‘Certainly not,’ agreed Louise. ‘You left us behind in March without so much as a second thought. What’s different now?’
‘Are you trying to get rid of me?’
‘Yes!’ they all shouted together.
‘But this is different,’ she said, trying not to get carried away with their enthusiasm. ‘If Ned and I go back, and we find that we want to stay, what then?’
David sighed as if she was being particularly dense. ‘You’ll get a job, get Ned into school and find yourself somewhere to live.’
‘And if it doesn’t work?’
‘You come back here,’ Guy said. ‘But what would be worse, doing that, or knowing you were too much of a coward to try it?’
‘You sneaky dog, Guy Morrell. Nobody gets away with accusing me of cowardice.’ Smiling, she thumped him with a cushion. ‘I’m beginning to think that I would be better off living miles away from you lot.’
Louise grinned. ‘I think we’re getting somewhere. We’re wearing her down.’
‘Oh, you did that a long time ago. But be serious for a minute. Do you really think I should go back for the rest of the summer and see how it pans out?’
‘All you have to do is ask yourself, what have you got to lose?’
Louise’s question stayed with Clara as she fell asleep that night.
The only answer she could come up with was that she had a
resounding nothing to lose - but maybe everything to gain.
With her fondness for having everything organised, and every conceivable contingency catered for, Clara spent the following week planning. At no time did she let on to Ned what she was doing.
There was one important phone call she had to make, to her parents. ‘I just wanted to know how you would feel if Ned and I weren’t here when you came back from Australia,’ she said to her mother.
Her mother went very quiet and said, ‘Whatever decision you make, you know we’ll go along with it. We always have and there’s no reason why we would change now.’
‘You’re the best, Mum.’
‘I know.’
‘Wonderfully modest too.’
‘You would know, dear - like mother like daughter. Now, explain what you’re up to, but quickly, this call must be costing you a small fortune.’
After Clara had outlined her plans, her mother wished her luck and asked if Ned was around for her to speak to.
‘I’ll go and get him, but don’t mention anything I’ve just told you. I want it to be a surprise for him.’
The night before she planned to drive north with Ned, she met up with Todd one last time. His work was almost finished at Phoenix and he was due to fly home in two days.
They sat in the garden of the Kingfisher Arms once more, but Clara didn’t press him for details about the future. She had no right to do that.
‘I want to thank you for being so understanding,’ he said, ‘and for letting me see Ned. A lot of women wouldn’t have acted as
generously as you have. I’m more grateful than I can say.’
‘But I have so much more to be grateful for,’ she said. ‘I have Ned.
He means the world to me.’
‘I know he does. I can also see how much you mean to him. He’s a wonderful boy, you’ve done a fine job of raising him. I’m just envious and shamefaced I haven’t been there for you both when I should have been.’
There was an awkward moment when he brought up the question of financial support. ‘I’d feel a whole lot better if you’d take this, Clara.’ He handed her a cheque. Without looking at it, but knowing instinctively that he would have been generous, she passed it back to him.
‘And I’d feel a whole lot worse taking it. When you know exactly what you want to do about Ned, then we’ll discuss money. Not before.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said. Then looking faintly embarrassed, he asked, what did you put on the birth
certificate?’
She smiled and covered his hand with hers. ‘What do you think?
Your name, of course.’
He swallowed. ‘You always did play it dead straight, Clara. Thank you for doing that.’
They exchanged addresses and telephone numbers, and after
they’d drunk a toast to Ned’s future, Todd took her by surprise.
‘So who’s this Jonah I kept hearing about from Ned when he was trying to teach me to kick a ball?’
Annoyingly, she felt the colour rise to her face. ‘A friend.’
‘A special friend?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Ned seems quite taken with him. What’s he like?’
Driving back to Louise and David’s, Clara felt sorry for Todd. How complicated his life had suddenly become. He had arrived in England a happily married man with, presumably, few cares in the world, and he was returning home with the knowledge that he had a son. Not only that, he had an unexpected emotion to deal with. One that Clara certainly hadn’t anticipated.
Jealousy.
In his brief cross-examination of her about Jonah, he had clearly been troubled by the idea of another man forming a relationship with Ned.
Funny that Guy and David hadn’t undergone the same scrutiny.
For the last day or so, the weather had alternated between blustery showers and intermittent sunshine, but now it had settled again and the sky was blue save for clouds of fluffy whiteness that bubbled up then drifted away on the light wind that blew in from the west.
Standing in front of the mirror, Gabriel straightened his tie and admired his new blazer. He pushed his shoulders back, turned to the right, then to the left, and decided it wasn’t a bad fit. He was glad now that he had asked Caspar to take him shopping for some new clothes, and even more so that he had taken his son’s advice and chosen the single-breasted rather than double. Next he turned his attention to his hair. Again, Caspar had intervened and pushed him to have it cut dramatically shorter than he wanted. Grudgingly Gabriel admitted that it was a great improvement. It made him look younger, distinguished - with a dash of jauntiness, he liked to think.
He tilted his chin up, raised an eyebrow like Roger Moore did in all those old Bond movies and mentally declared himself a handsome devil.
Chuckling, he turned his back on the mirror and left his room.
Enough of the preening. Time was of the essence. He still had lots to do. Ned and Clara would soon be here. He paused on the landing outside Val’s old room, then went in. With Archie’s help, he had had it spruced up for Clara. When he had mentioned to Archie that he wanted to have it redecorated, he’d said, ‘I know just the chaps you need.’ Turned out that Shirley from the Mermaid cafe had a son who, with a friend, had started up his own painting and decorating business and was looking for work. ‘You’d better be cheap,’ he’d said to them when they arrived on their motorbikes to give him an estimate. ‘Just because I live in a large house, don’t imagine my wallet is a bottomless pit.’
The following day they’d shown up in a wreck of a van with a ladder strapped to the roof. Dressed in overalls, they plugged in a large radio that belted out something that could never be described as music and got down to work, stripping off the old flowery wallpaper that had been there for more than twenty years and replacing it with a cheerful yellow paper that brightened the room.
Shirley’s son, Robbie, had explained to him that there was a range of bed linen to match the paper and border they’d used, so he’d instructed them to get that too. ‘Might as well go the whole hog,’
he’d said, handing over more money. They had transformed Jonah’s old room too, giving it a fresh new look that they swore blind would appeal to a small boy. They had worked quickly and tidily, and Gabriel was so pleased with the results that he thought he might get them to have a go at some of the other rooms. His own, perhaps.
Shirley had been a great help too. Funny, that - he’d only ever talked to her in the cafe when he was ordering his lunch, but she had been ready to lend a hand when he had mentioned the party he wanted to give. ‘You’ll be needing food, then,’ she’d said. ‘Want any help with that?’
‘I don’t want anything fancy.’
‘You mean you don’t want anything expensive, you old skinflint.’
She and Archie were somewhere downstairs. It was only a small party he was throwing, but he didn’t know how he would have organised everything if they hadn’t offered to help. He supposed Archie still needed to be busy. He’d had a tough old time of it recently, what with his wife leaving him and his mother dying, and Gabriel was looking forward to telling Clara that he’d more than risen to her challenge of keeping an eye on him. Under the guise of clearing out yet more junk from the house, he’d seen quite a lot of Archie, had found him an agreeable man, and he was pleased, if not a little amused, that he and Shirley were getting on so well. He knew, from first-hand experience, that it wasn’t good to be on one’s own too much. Having people around made things bearable.
And that was what he had wished for, that day at the Mermaid Cavern. He had tossed his coin into the pool and wished that he would have the pleasure of seeing Ned and his mother again. Because when they were around, life was infinitely better.
Downstairs, he found the kitchen empty. An appetising smell was coming from the oven, but apart from that, there was no sign of any activity. Like Clara, Shirley was a tidy worker and she put everything away after she had finished with it. She had been coming to Mermaid House for just over a week now to keep the place in order, and the arrangement was working well. She still had her part-time job at the cafe in town, but as she had said to him after Archie had come up with the idea, ‘We’ll give each other a trial run for a month. And this is what I’ll do for you. For six pounds an hour, I’ll keep your home sweet if you promise to keep your temper sweet. How does that sound?’
‘It sounds to me as if we ought to spit and shake on it before either of us changes our mind.’
So far she had been as good as her word. The rooms that mattered were as neat as a pin. He had no complaints at all.
The only gripe he had was that Dr Singh wasn’t around to see how smoothly he now had his life ticking over. He’d heard through Shirley that he had moved up to Blackburn. Or was it Bury?
Anyway, wherever he had beggared off to, doubtless he was poking his nose into some other poor devil’s affairs. Though, of course, despite his annoying interference, Gabriel was aware that if Dr Singh hadn’t been such a nuisance, he might never have formed the friendship he now had with Ned and Clara. Or be reconciled with Jonah and Caspar. He still had a way to go with Caspar: his elder son had yet to recover from the shock of Damson’s death. He was currently dividing his time between Manchester and Mermaid House, and though it was hard work having Caspar around, Gabriel didn’t want him to be on his own. The more time they spent together, the more alike Gabriel realised they were. Neither suffered fools gladly, both were as stubborn as hell and they each possessed a temper that could scorch asbestos. And while Caspar’s dandified arrogance and assumption that the world revolved around him would always infuriate him, Gabriel could, none the less, appreciate and admire his sharpness of mind. If only he would apply it to something more constructive than he had until now.