‘Because I’ve met somebody,’ she said at last, the confession surprising herself.
‘Who?’ Alex said, the word exiting his mouth faster than a bullet.
‘You don’t know him,’ Nina said, thinking it best to be vague.
‘Is that what all that texting was about in the warehouse?’ he asked and Nina nodded. ‘I thought so. You had a silly big grin on your face.’
‘I did not!’ Nina protested.
‘You did,’ he told her. ‘When did you meet him?’
‘Not long ago,’ she said.
‘So it’s not serious, then?’ Alex said optimistically.
‘Alex—’
‘Okay!’ he said, raising his hands in defeat. ‘I get the message.’
They stared at one another, their eyes duelling.
‘I’m sorry,’ Nina said at last. ‘I really hope we can be friends.’ She bit her lip, truly meaning what she said. Alex was a wonderful guy and she sincerely hoped that she could have him in her life, just not in any romantic sense.
‘Friends isn’t exactly what I had in mind,’ he said and with that, he left the kitchen and marched down the hallway. The front door slammed a second later and the whole of the mill seemed to shake. Ziggy barked and Olivia yelped from the front room.
‘Everything all right?’ she asked, joining Nina in the kitchen a moment later.
Nina nodded. ‘I’ve got to get back to work,’ she said.
Dudley was sitting at his computer, his neck jutting forward at an odd angle as he guffawed to himself.
‘How’s the research going?’ she asked him. ‘What have you found out about clothes from the 1860s?’
‘What?’ he barked. ‘Oh, never mind about that. Come and see this – it’s absolutely brilliant!’
Nina approached his desk and cringed as she saw the site that Dudley had only recently discovered. It was YouTube.
‘Just look at that dog! Isn’t it the funniest thing you’ve ever seen?’
Nina watched as Dudley replayed the video of a Labradoodle jumping onto a bouncy castle and instantly deflating it.
‘Hah!’ Dudley laughed. ‘Just like Ziggy, eh? Did you know there are hundreds of these dog videos – thousands, probably.’
‘Yes,’ Nina said with a pained expression, wondering if introducing Dudley to the World Wide Web had been a wise decision.
Just then, her phone beeped. She looked down at it in the hope of another message from Justin, but it was Janey who’d texted.
How are you? x
Nina messaged back quickly, forwarding one of the photos of Bess that Justin had sent her. She’d had a few chats on the phone with Janey, who was in awe of the amount of attention she’d been getting since arriving at the mill. Now, the message that came back from her friend was:
Very cute, but send pic of the GUY. What’s he look like?
Nina sighed. She didn’t have a photo of Justin and, if she didn’t see him again soon, she’d be in danger of completely forgetting what he looked like. She thought, once again, about his last message and the solitary kiss that had accompanied it. Perhaps it was a typo, she thought. She texted Janey back.
He’s tall, fair-haired and handsome. And completely unpredictable. Help!
This was it, Dominic thought. This was Nina’s way of saying she’d made a mistake going out with Alex and that it was really him she wanted to be with. But he had to play it cool this time. He had to be in control of things and not behave like the tongue-tied idiot he’d been on Nina’s last visit to The Folly.
He’d taken a shower and had changed into a clean shirt – a dark collarless one with long sleeves that had slightly less paint on it than the others. He’d even combed his hair, although it didn’t seem to make any difference. He still looked like a slightly surprised scarecrow.
Finally, to calm his nerves, he had half a glass of white wine, but barely tasted the cold, crisp liquid as he drank it down. At least Alex wasn’t around to interrupt this time, he thought. He’d left Norfolk that afternoon and, as far as Dominic was aware, wasn’t coming back for a while. So, it would just be him and Nina, with only a canvas to come between them.
Resisting the urge to top up his glass for fear that he wouldn’t be able to hold his paintbrush straight, he left the tiny kitchen and darted around the room at the top of The Folly that he used as his studio. He’d brought up a large wooden chair, which his mother had found at a car boot sale. It was beautiful enough to warrant painting, but not posh enough to worry about paint being splattered on it.
He grabbed a couple of cushions and placed them on the chair, angling them so that they looked aesthetically pleasing, remembering his mother’s words. ‘Don’t just have cushions on a chair in a slumpy lump. Make them sit up, straight as soldiers.’
Well, they were straight now, Dominic thought, looking around the rest of the room quickly for anything else to straighten. Women liked straight things, didn’t they?
‘Okay, okay,’ he told himself once he was quite sure everything was as perfect as a very messy artist could ever hope for. He returned downstairs and looked at the little clock on the wall next to a print of Monet’s garden at Giverny. It was about time. Sure enough, a couple of minutes later, there was a knock on the door. Dominic ran a hand through his hair and, hoping for the best, opened the door. But it wasn’t Nina who was standing there, but Faye.
‘Hello,’ she said in a small voice, her large eyes gazing up at him.
‘Faye?’ he said, his surprise evident in his voice.
‘This is strange, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘What are you doing here?’
Faye grinned. ‘As forgetful as ever, are you? I’m here for the portrait,’ she said, stepping into the room and gasping. ‘Oh, Dom! You’ve worked wonders on this place.’
‘The portrait?’
‘It’s so beautiful. I just love how you’ve left some of this flint bare.’ She ran her fingers over the knobbly black and white stone.
‘What portrait?’ Dominic asked.
‘Nina told me that you wanted to paint me,’ she said, not at all surprised at being questioned about her being there. Dominic had always lived in a world of his own and was apt to forget things.
Dominic watched as his former girlfriend moved around the room, looking and touching everything, and his mind worked overtime as he tried to fathom what was going on. Either there’d been some terrible misunderstanding or this was Nina’s strange way of going about matchmaking him with Faye. Either way, he didn’t have the heart to tell Faye.
Dominic closed his eyes and took a deep, steadying breath. What was it with people forever pushing him and Faye together? They’d broken up. They’d proved that they weren’t meant to be together. It was over, and that was all there was to it. Although he had to grudgingly admit that he’d found himself thinking of her more and more during the past few weeks. But that wasn’t strange really when you came to think about it, as it was impossible to avoid her when she was working at the mill.
‘I love this,’ Faye said, bending to examine a large canvas he’d painted the previous month of the barley field, its brilliant green ears fresh and luminous under the enormous dome of the East Anglian sky. ‘And this, too,’ she said, gazing in wonder at a smaller painting of a nearby wood from across a golden meadow of buttercups.
‘Faye?’ he began, clearing his throat. He’d better get this over and done with as quickly as possible, he thought.
‘Yes?’ She turned towards him and, once again, he was at the mercy of her clear gaze.
‘Shall we begin?’
Faye really was the most infuriating model. She wouldn’t keep still for a minute and couldn’t have held a decent pose even if he’d been paying her. The whole thing was a big mistake, Dominic thought, looking over his easel towards her as she sat rigidly in the wooden chair, her eyes staring somewhere over his right shoulder. As much as he wanted to confront Nina about the whole thing, he just couldn’t bring
himself to tell Faye what was going on – but the reality of having his ex in his studio was taking its toll on him and his mind kept spiralling back to the past.
‘Dominic – you’ll be partnering Faye,’ his drama teacher, Mrs Fenton, had barked during a Year Eight lesson. ‘Come on, now! Get into places.’
It had been one of those silly warm-up sessions where you had to place the palms of your hands against your partner’s and mirror their actions. Faye had moved her hands and Dominic had mirrored them. They’d smiled, giggled and … what? Fallen in love? Had it really happened so suddenly and simply?
Dominic had hated drama lessons, always wishing himself back in the art room with the quiet companionship of paper and paint. But something had happened that day in the wreck of the drama studio with its peeling walls and scuffed floor, and Dominic and Faye had been inseparable ever since. Well, until he’d gone to university.
It wasn’t that he’d met anybody else there and it wasn’t that he’d forgotten Faye. He didn’t even make an attempt to put her out of his thoughts, but his mind had slowly become filled with other things. He’d fully immersed himself in his work. He’d become obsessed by it – by the idea of making it as an artist. Every waking hour was filled with pushing himself forward, and many of his dreaming hours, too. He simply hadn’t had time for anything else.
His mother had been baffled and heartbroken when he’d told her they had split. ‘You can’t do that, Dommie,’ she’d cried at him. ‘You two were just so right for each other!’
But he hadn’t listened. He’d done his best to try to forget Faye after he’d broken up with her and as he’d become more and more engrossed in his work. He hadn’t replied to her emails or her texts, he’d dodged her phone calls, and he’d always managed to be out of the house whenever she called during the holidays.
Why? Why had he done that? What had he been so afraid of? He really couldn’t explain it, unless it was just the normal fear of a young man moving towards the inevitability of making a commitment to one person.
He looked at her now and it wasn’t the artist’s eye that gazed at her, but that of the boy who had mirrored those hand actions in the drama studio all those years ago. His mouth had gone quite dry as he mixed his white paint with a scrape of crimson alizarin and lemon yellow before running the knife through the mixture. He wouldn’t think about their time together – of trips to the north Norfolk coast where they would play hide and seek in the sand dunes. Nor would he think about those sweet Christmas kisses under the enormous bunches of misletoe that his mother hung in the hallway each December.
All those moments, all those memories, now seemed to belong to a different period in his life altogether. No, he wouldn’t think of them as his eyes moved across her face, over the hollow of her throat and down the plane of her chest. Faye. His sweet, loving Faye.
He shook his head and looked back up to her face. This was going to be a long session. A very long session indeed.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Back at the mill, Nina was reading an H. E. Bates novel in her room when her mobile beeped. She picked it up. It was a text from Justin.
You haven’t replied. See you soon? J x
There was a kiss again. That solitary little ‘x’ that was causing her all sorts of concern. She stared at it until her eyes hurt.
Busy at work she texted back.
It was a few minutes later when his reply came.
Not too busy for dinner? x
She bit her lip.
We’ll see she replied, not putting a kiss.
What was it she wanted from him, she wondered? He was making all the right noises and she genuinely liked him, and yet she was still holding back. Was it because she felt so raw and wounded from her relationship with Matt? Or was it the odd way he had left her in the garden that day? Something hadn’t quite seemed right about that and, if there was one thing she was sensitive to now, it was strange behaviour in men.
When she thought of the brief time they’d spent together and the laughter they’d shared, she couldn’t help smiling and hoping that they would see each other again. But, the more she thought about it, perhaps it would be best if they kept things casual. Dinner, she thought, might be getting a bit too serious too quickly. Perhaps they should share a few more dog walks first.
And, thinking of dog walks, Nina ventured downstairs, whistling for Ziggy who came belting out of the kitchen, skidding to a neat halt by her feet.
‘Is that you, Nina?’ Olivia’s voice called from the living room where she was watching a costume drama on TV.
‘Yes,’ Nina replied. ‘I’m just taking Ziggy out.’
‘Oh, thank you! I’m absolutely glued to the TV and just have to know if this young servant girl is pregnant!’
Dudley, who was sitting in his favourite armchair behind the Financial Times, grunted something.
‘Now, don’t you be so condescending. You want to find out just as much as me, I know you do!’
Nina grinned and left them to it. She opened the front door and headed out over the bridge into the fields, looking back over her shoulder at The Old Mill House. How beautiful it looked, in the evening sunshine, its white facade as bright as a pearl amongst the deep greens of the countryside. She felt as if she had been there forever and yet it had only been a few weeks. Even with the trouble she’d had with the two brothers, Nina couldn’t help feeling as if she’d really been accepted into the Milton family, something she had never felt before, even within her own small family.
Thinking back to her own parents, she tried to imagine them sitting amiably in the same room together and just couldn’t. Her mother was far too volatile to sit contentedly in a chair in front of a costume drama, and her father – Nina stopped. She didn’t actually know anything much about her father. He’d always worked hard at his job as a salesman but, beyond that, she really didn’t know anything about him. The time he spent at home was chiefly spent alone in his study with his books and his computer, but Nina had no idea what he did in there for all those hours, and her mother had never seemed that interested, either.
Nina had often wondered why they’d had a child, because neither of them spent any time with her and they certainly never knew her growing up. If it hadn’t been for Janey, Nina might well have gone out of her mind, but her best friend had always helped her to laugh through the odd and awkward times at home.
‘Nobody gets on with their parents, anyway,’ Janey had told her, but Nina knew that wasn’t true – her times babysitting for the Miltons had taught her that. She’d watched them all together in what she called the happy tumble of family life. They genuinely seemed to like each other and Nina had found that so strange and wonderful that she couldn’t help but want to be a part of it, and now here she was once again – back with the Miltons.
She stopped for a moment – not because Ziggy had been pulling on his lead, but to watch a ghostly barn owl crossing the field beside her, its white wings silent. She loved it there and was dreading, absolutely dreading, having to leave at the end of the summer.
It was then that her phone beeped. It was Justin again.
Have to return to London. See you at the weekend? Love to Ziggy. J x
She looked along the path, the knowledge that Justin and Bess wouldn’t be appearing around the corner at any second saddening her.
‘Come on, Ziggy,’ she said, and the two of them walked towards the misty-blue banks of the river.
It was dusk by the time Dominic had finished. It had been the strangest few hours of his life, with thoughts and memories flying through his brain and getting in the way of his work. Like the time he and Faye had visited London and had wandered around The National Gallery together, marvelling at the masterpieces by Monet, Tuner and Van Gogh.
‘You’re going to be a great painter one day,’ Faye had told him, squeezing his hand as they had gazed into the joyous faces of Gainsborough’s daughters.
‘And you’ll be my famous model,’ he’d told her an
d she’d laughed.
‘I’ll hold you to that,’ she’d said, and here she was now in his room, sitting for him as if the years in between had melted away and they’d never been apart. As if he’d never ended things so abruptly.
Finally, Dominic decided enough was enough and put his brushes down.
‘Can I see it?’ Faye asked, stretching her arms high above her head as she moved towards the easel.
‘Do you mind if you don’t? It’s early stages at the moment. It’ll only disappoint.’
‘I’m sure it won’t,’ she said.
‘Please,’ he said, their eyes meeting. Dominic could feel a blush heating his face at her close scrutiny.
‘Okay,’ Faye said with a little smile.
They left the studio and went downstairs towards the door. He wasn’t going to offer a drink. They’d taken a five-minute break during the painting session and Dominic had felt uncomfortable – an awkward apology hovering on his lips for his behaviour in the past, but he just couldn’t heave the words out and so he’d fiddled about with his brushes, knocking into his easel at one point and then spilling tea down his trouser leg. He’d been relieved to get back to work.
‘Where’s your car?’ he asked.
‘At the mill.’
He nodded. ‘Do you want me to walk you back?’
‘It’s okay. I’ll be fine,’ she said, her eyes meeting his again. He looked away quickly. He couldn’t bear the intensity of her gaze.
‘So—’ she began.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said and she nodded. He watched as Faye walked down the little path, her feet kicking through the daisies, until she was out of sight.
Shutting the door, Dominic breathed a sigh of relief and went back up to the studio to view the evening’s work. There she was, with that sweet, gentle face, her eyes edged with anxiety and the lips seemingly poised to say something. They’d both been on the verge of saying something all evening, hadn’t they? And yet both had remained silent, getting on with the job in hand.
A Summer to Remember Page 20
