“Not one that you’d recognize. I’ve got a mother. Although I suppose she might dispute that description of herself.”
He was looking at her quite steadily. “Poor you.”
“‘Poor you’ nothing. I’ve been very lucky living with the Holdens.” She had said it so often.
“The perfect family.” He was smiling slyly.
“The perfect mother.”
“God. I don’t know how you survived
that
for ten years.”
“You haven’t met mine.”
For some reason they both found this hysterically funny.
“We should be very understanding. She has many crosses to bear.”
He was watching an oil tanker. It traversed the horizon at the exact point where sea and sky met. He let out a long breath and lifted his legs onto the bench. Stretched out, they reached all the way to the door. She could just see a glimpse of his ankle; it was brown, the exact same shade as the inside of his wrists.
“How did you meet her?” she said eventually. She wasn’t entirely sure where it had come from.
“Celia?”
She nodded.
He shuffled his feet. Reached down to rub at some wet spray marks on his pale trousers. “By chance, I suppose.
We have this apartment in London, and I’d been staying there with my mother while my father went to the Caribbean to look at some farms. She likes to stay in London sometimes, catch up with my aunt, go shopping. You know the stuff.”
Lottie nodded, as if she did. Under her feet Mr. Beans strained gently at his leash, keen to continue his walk.
“I’m not a great one for towns, so I went to my cousin’s place in Sussex for a few days. My uncle’s got this farm, and I’ve stayed there ever since I was a child because my cousin and I, well, we’re nearly the same age and he’s probably the closest friend I’ve got. Anyway, so I’m meant to be back in London, but me and Rob, we go to the local pub, and one thing leads to another, and it’s a little later than I intended. So I’m sitting at the station waiting, because there’s only one train left into London, and I see this girl walk past.”
Lottie felt her chest tighten. She wasn’t convinced she wanted to hear this any longer. But there seemed no safe way of stopping him. “And you thought she was beautiful.”
Guy looked down at his feet and half laughed. “Beautiful. Yes, I thought she looked beautiful. Mostly I thought she looked drunk.”
Lottie’s head shot up.
Guy raised a finger to his lips. “I promised I wouldn’t tell. . . . You’ve got to promise, Lottie . . . She was absolutely rotten. I saw her weave past the ticket office, where I was standing, and she was giggling to herself. I could see she’d been to some kind of party, because she was all dressed up. But she had lost a shoe, and she was holding the other one in her hand with her little bag or whatever it was.”
Above them the rain beat thunderously on the roof. Where it hit the ground in front of them, it splashed up into the hut, making Mr. Beans jump.
“So I thought maybe I should just keep an eye on her. But then she went into the station waiting room, and there were these guys there in uniform, and she sits down with them and starts chatting away, and they’re obviously loving it, so I thought maybe she knew them. They all seemed like they knew each other. I thought maybe they’d all been to the dance together.”
Lottie’s mind was reeling with the thought of what Mrs. Holden would say at the picture of her daughter drunkenly engaging servicemen in conversation. It also explained why she hadn’t brought her satin slingbacks home; she had told Mrs. Holden that a girl from secretarial school had stolen them.
“And at one point she sits on this guy’s lap, and she’s laughing and laughing, so I figured she must know him, and I walked away, back to the ticket office. And then—it must have been about five minutes later—I hear this shouting, and then a woman’s voice shouting, and after a few minutes I think I should probably take a look, and—”
“They were attacking her,” said Lottie, for whom this story was beginning to ring some bells.
“Attacking her?” Guy looked puzzled. “No, they weren’t attacking her. They had her shoe.”
“What?”
“Her shoe. They had this pale pink shoe of hers, and they were dancing around holding it up so that she couldn’t get it.”
“Her shoe?”
“Yes. And she was so rotten that she kept bumping into things and falling over. And I watched for a minute, but then I thought it was pretty unfair, as she obviously didn’t know what she was doing. So I stepped in and asked them to give her her shoe back.”
Lottie stared at him. “And what did they do?”
“Oh, they were pretty sarky to begin with. One of them was asking me if I fancied my chances. Ironic, really, given the result. And to be honest, Lottie, I was pretty polite with them, because I
didn’t
fancy my chances against three of them. But they were okay guys, really. Eventually they just threw the shoe at her and went off up the platform.”
“So they didn’t try to grab her at all?”
“Grab her? No. I mean they may have grabbed her a little when she sat on the guy’s lap. But not so as she got upset or anything.”
“And what happened?”
“Well, I just thought someone really needed to take her home. I thought she’d probably got off quite lightly, to be honest. But she was in such a state that she could easily have fallen asleep on the train, and I didn’t think it was a good idea for her to be alone . . . looking like that.”
“No . . .”
He shrugged. “So I took her back to her aunt’s place, and her aunt was pretty suspicious of me to begin with, but I left her my name and number so that she could call my mother and check that I was . . . well, you know. And then Celia rang me the next day to apologize and say thank you, and we went for a cup of coffee . . . and . . . well . . .”
Lottie was still too stunned by this version of events to absorb the implications of his last words. She shook her head.
“She was drunk? You looked after her because she was drunk?”
“Ah. But she told me the truth about that. She had thought she was only drinking ginger ale, but someone at this dance had evidently been slipping vodka or something in there, so before she knew it she was all over the place. Pretty bad behavior, really.”
“She told you that.”
Guy frowned. “Yes. I felt pretty sorry for her, to be honest.”
There was a long silence. The sky outside was now neatly bisected into blue and black, the sun already reflected in the wet road.
It was Lottie who finally broke the silence. She stood, so that Mr. Beans leaped happily out onto the path, ears pricked at the departing storm.
“I think I’d better go back,” she said briskly. And began to walk.
“She’s a nice girl.” His voice caught on the wind behind her.
Lottie turned briefly, her face tense and furious. “You don’t have to tell me that.”
T
HE OTHER LADIES HAD DEFINITELY DEVELOPED SOMETHING
of an air when she mentioned her morning walks. So Deirdre Colquhoun felt rather disinclined to tell them about her latest discovery, compelling as it had been.
No, Sarah Chilton had been rather curt when she’d mentioned Mr. Armand on Tuesday, so there was no reason at all she should tell them that for two mornings running now she had seen something she considered just as dramatic. The men didn’t seem to come anymore, so it had been rather a shock to see her, and Deirdre Colquhoun had had to pull her little opera glasses from her handbag to make sure it was actually the same woman. Wading into the waves, she had been, not seeming to notice the cold or anything, in that tight black swimsuit of hers, her hair all scraped back into an unfashionable bun. And even as she waded in, in a manner that Deirdre Colquhoun frankly found a little mannish, you could see she was sobbing. Yes, sobbing, loudly in broad daylight, as if her heart would break.
I
t was not the welcome Mrs. Holden had planned. That welcome had involved her standing pristine in her good wool dress with the matching belt, her two youngest children in front of her, as she opened the doors to welcome their visitors, the wealthy, cosmopolitan family to whom they were now going to be linked by marriage. That version had the Bancrofts pulling up in their gleaming Rover 90 four-door sedan (she knew it to be this model, as Mrs. Ansty had heard it from Jim Farrelly, who worked the desk of the Riviera Hotel) and her skipping out past an immaculate front lawn and greeting them both like long-lost friends—perhaps even as Sarah Chilton and one or another of the ladies just happened to be passing by.
In that version, the preferred version, her husband emerged behind her, perhaps placed a proprietary hand on her shoulder, the kind of simple gesture that spoke volumes about a marriage. The children, meanwhile, smiled sweetly, kept their good clothes clean, and held up their hands to shake those of the Bancrofts in a rather charming manner before offering to show them indoors.
They did not wait until two minutes before guests were due to arrive to reveal that not only had they found a dead fox in the road down by the Methodist church but they had scraped it up into a seaside bucket, laid it out on the floor in the living room, and, with the help of Mrs. Holden’s best sewing scissors, planned to make a fox fur from it.
Neither, in the preferred version, did Dr. Holden announce that he had been called out to a sick patient and didn’t expect to be back before teatime, despite its being a Saturday and despite almost the whole of Merham’s being quite aware of the fact that his secretary, that redheaded girl who always managed to put a superior tone in her voice when she answered the telephone to Dr. Holden’s wife, was leaving town the following day to take up a position in Colchester. Mrs. Holden closed her eyes briefly and summoned up an image of her rose garden. It was what she did when she didn’t want to think too hard about that woman. It was important to think about nice things.
Perhaps most important, in the preferred version Mrs. Holden wasn’t also faced with three of the most miserable young people she had ever had the misfortune to encounter. Celia and Guy, far from being bathed in the soft glow of the newly affianced, had been decidedly surly and had barely spoken to each other all morning. Lottie, meanwhile, had hovered silently in the background, brooding darkly in that way she had. It really made her look most unattractive. And none of them seemed to care that she had put forth so much effort to make the afternoon go so smoothly; every time she jollied them up a bit, tried to get them to put a bit of a brave face on or at least give her a hand keeping control of the children, they would variously shrug, look at the floor, or, in Celia’s case, look meaningfully at Guy, her eyes glittering with tears, and announce that she “simply couldn’t be expected to be cheerful every darned day.”
“Now, I have really had enough of this, dears. Really. This place has an atmosphere like a morgue. Lottie, you go and make the children clear up that blasted animal. Get Virginia to help. Guy, you go and wait outside for the car. And, Celia, you go upstairs and brighten yourself up a bit. Put some makeup on. These are your in-laws you’re meeting, for goodness’ sakes. It’s your wedding.”
“That’s if there’s going to
be
a wedding,” said Celia miserably, so that Lottie’s head whipped around.
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course there’s going to be a wedding. Now, go and put some makeup on. You can borrow a bit of my scent if you like, perk yourself up a bit.”
“What, the Avon stuff?”
“If you like.”
Celia, looking momentarily cheered, raced upstairs. Lottie trudged mutinously to the drawing room, where Virginia was still shaking from her discovery of the road-kill and Freddie was lying on the sofa theatrically clutching himself and complaining that he would never, ever, ever be able to sit down again, ever.
Lottie knew what was making Celia so miserable, and it caused her equal measures of delight and self-loathing. Late the previous evening, as the storm receded, Celia had asked Lottie to come up to their room and once there, seated on the side of the bed, had confided that she needed to talk to her. Lottie knew she had flushed. She sat very still.
Stiller when Celia said, “It’s Guy.”
“He’s been really off with me for the past few days, Lots. Not himself at all.”
Lottie had been unable to speak. It was as if her tongue had swollen, filling the entire space within her mouth.
Celia studied her nails and then, abruptly, lifted her hand to her mouth and bit one off.
“When he first came here, he was like his London self, you know? He was so sweet, so caring. He was always asking me whether I was all right, whether I needed anything. He was so affectionate. He used to take me around to the back porch while you were all clearing up after tea and kiss me until I thought my head was going to spin right off . . .”
Lottie coughed, realizing she had stopped breathing.
Celia, oblivious, stared at her hand and looked up, her blue eyes brimming with tears.
“He hasn’t kissed me properly for four whole days. I tried to get him to last night, and he just dismissed me, muttered something about there being plenty of time later. But how can he feel like that, Lots? How can he not care whether he kisses me or not? That’s the kind of behavior you expect from
married
men.”
Lottie fought to contain the swell of something uncomfortably like excitement leaping within her. Then flinched as Celia turned toward her and in one swift movement threw her arms around Lottie’s neck and burst into sudden sobs.
“I don’t know what I’ve done, Lots. I don’t know whether I’ve said something and he’s just not telling me. It’s entirely possible—you know how I do chatter on about nothing and I don’t always think about what it is I’ve said. Or perhaps I just haven’t looked pretty enough lately. I do try and everything. I’ve been wearing all sorts of nice things that Mummy bought me, but he just . . . he just doesn’t seem to
like
me as much as he did before.”
She began to sob again, her chest heaving against Lottie’s. Lottie stroked her back mechanically, feeling treacherously relieved that Celia couldn’t see her face.