‘It’s the house situation, too much work, the kids being around – it’s not the same as it was in the beginning.’ He did have the cheek to look guilty as he dropped that one, thought Lara.
‘It’s not the same as it was in the beginning?’ she echoed back at him. Calmly, even slightly amused. He’d rushed her into his house, thrown at her the child-care and the domestic duties which his au pair refused to do, gave her rubbish sex and then had the gall to say they’d gone stale. He had intimacy and attention on tap but he had still returned to Miss Spicy Sex. ‘James. It’s YOU who is at work all the time. It’s YOU who isn’t putting any effort in. And, in case you have forgotten, they’re YOUR bloody kids!’
God, if only her friends could see her now. May and Clare thought she had such a perfect set-up. They probably imagined she was passionately ravaged by a besotted James from the moment she walked in through the door at night whilst the children made ‘I love you, Lara’ cards in their bedrooms and Kristina busied herself in the kitchen cooking lobster. What would they say if they only knew the truth?
Lara’s adrenaline-fuelled composure crumbled just as surely as if it had been hammered with a wrecking ball. She turned back towards the front door and her fingers closed around the door handle to open it.
‘Ti— Oh God, I mean Lara, don’t go like this.’
He couldn’t even get her name right first time.
Lara opened the door then slammed it behind her so hard, she wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d felt the reverberations in Glasgow.
Chapter 18
Lara concentrated fiercely on the driving, occasionally wiping the unwanted tears leaking from her eyes. She didn’t want to cry. James didn’t deserve her tears. He had probably gone straight back upstairs and carried on where he had left off giving Tianne bloody Lee a good time. The whole Galsworthy family didn’t give a toss who they stood on to get what they wanted. James hadn’t got as far as he had in his career by having a selfless conscience, she should have known that. Top management had to have spare hearts of brick for when they needed to call on them.
‘Stop it, now,’ she told herself. ‘No tears. No more.’ She pressed her side where there was a real throbbing ache as if her heart were bruised from banging itself in frustration against her ribcage.
Pictures of Tianne writhing in ecstasy from James’s oral attentions tried to force their way into her head, but she drove them back. She could hear her phone ringing in her handbag and she knew it was him because she had assigned the tune ‘My Guy’ as his ringtone. She wondered if Tianne was still tied to the bed whilst he was dialling her number. She didn’t even contemplate answering it.
She parked around the corner from May’s house to reapply some make-up and check that her eyes weren’t even more bloodshot than she suspected them to be. Her phone rang again as she was putting her mirror back into her bag. She both didn’t want to hear his voice – and she did, very badly. He had bought her that phone. Stored in its memory were so many of his loving texts and photos of them together in her flat – before they got ‘stale’. She opened the car door, threw the phone on the ground and stamped on it hard with her heel until the damned ringtone stopped. Every stamp was accompanied by a primal grunt of anger. May’s elderly neighbour, Mr Wilkinson, walked his Labrador hurriedly across the road to avoid her. Then Lara took a deep breath, pushed down the rest of the tears that were threatening to spill out of her, and strode purposefully to May’s door.
At the sound of the doorbell, May checked her reflection, hoping she didn’t look as tired and drawn as she felt. Alas, she did. She opened the door and forced a big smile, throwing her arms around Lara. May didn’t want to let her go. Lara was the same build as May’s late mother: warm and small, and just for a moment May let herself believe that her mother was holding her, comforting her, telling her everything was going to be all right. She pushed Lara to arm’s length before the tears started falling again.
Lara needed that hug from May. She had been seconds away from crying on her tall friend’s shoulder when May pulled away. Both thought the other looked tired. Both thought there was no need to mention it – after all, they were tired, that’s why they were going on a battery-charging holiday
‘I can’t believe I am actually doing this,’ said May. ‘After all these years of not having a proper break.’
‘Well, you are,’ said Lara, picking up May’s case for her. ‘We all are.’
‘Are you okay to drive all that way during the night?’
‘Course I am. I prefer to drive at night anyway.’
‘Well, don’t blame me if I nod off,’ said May. ‘I’m absolutely knackered. I look it as well, don’t I?’ She forced lots of bubbly cheer into her voice.
‘You look fine to me,’ said Lara, but it wasn’t true, because May appeared to have aged five years since Lara saw her last. She looked as if she needed a much longer holiday than one of ten days.
The traffic was ridiculous across the city to Clare’s flat. They crawled along, never finding a cause for the hold-up even when they turned on the radio to check the travel news. May checked her mobile. Forty-eight missed calls from Michael had been registered but her phone had been on silent so she hadn’t heard a single one of them. She needed to think but everything was crowding her brain at the moment. She didn’t want to give him any opportunity to talk his way out of anything.
Clare was waiting for them on the doorstep of her flat, which was one of six stylishly converted from a beautiful old Georgian city villa two years ago. The façade said grand and stately, inside said hip and trendy. Clare had the bottom one in the right-hand corner which had a small courtyard garden that Clare, being Clare, had filled with brightly coloured pots of flowers.
‘I’ve been ringing you both but I couldn’t get a reply,’ she said, leaping forward to hug her before moving on to do the same to May.
‘I’ve broken my phone,’ said Lara, wondering how many more times James had rung and wishing now that she hadn’t crushed it. She wanted to hear what he had to say for himself. She wanted him to tell her she had been hallucinating, and she wanted to believe whatever crap he was going to tell her.
‘I’m not sure I could live without my phone,’ said Clare.
‘Mine is off and is going to stay off,’ said May, flicking the battery out of the back of hers. ‘At least, I’m going to have a damned good try this holiday.’
‘I’ve made us all coffees,’ said Clare, handing out plastic-topped containers. ‘Extra strong. I’m determined to stay awake and keep you company, Lara.’
‘Yeah, dream on,’ Lara said with a smile. ‘You’ll be asleep first, I bet you anything.’ On the doorstep she noticed a big square tin with a carrying handle next to Clare’s suitcase. ‘Is that cleaning stuff?’
‘Just a few bits,’ said Clare.
Lara and May both shook their heads whilst grinning.
‘Have you packed a lawnmower as well?’ said May.
‘No, otherwise I wouldn’t have had enough room for my steam cleaner,’ parried Clare, picking up her tin.
‘I don’t know why Lud hasn’t made an honest woman of you yet,’ Lara said as she wheeled Clare’s case to her boot. ‘I’ll marry you.’
‘Get to the end of the queue, love,’ said Clare.
‘I presume you’ve got your swimming costume?’ Lara closed the boot and they all climbed into the car. As well as her love of all things domestic, Clare was passionate about swimming. The gorgeous pool in Wellem spa had been the deciding factor when Lara was checking out its credentials on the net. She knew her friend would go nuts about the large crescent-shaped pool with the Grecian pillars and feature waterfall.
‘I would forget my own legs before I’d forget my cossie,’ replied Clare, clicking on her seat belt.
Lara took a long drink of coffee before putting the car into gear.
‘And we’re off,’ she announced.
‘Good riddance, London – at least for ten days,’ cheere
d Clare from the back.
May and Lara could have said goodbye to it for so much longer.
Despite all their plans to gabble their way through a catch-up in the car, Clare, as Lara predicted, was the first to drop off to sleep – within twenty minutes of setting off from her house. Then May followed, although she fought it because she did want to stay awake and chat to Lara so the journey wasn’t so boring for her. But her head was weary, exhausted from thinking about, and then from trying not to think about, Michael. She drifted off to sleep wondering what he would do when he turned up at her house tomorrow and found her gone.
Considering the late hour there was a surprising amount of traffic on the roads. That was good for Lara because it made her concentrate on the job in hand and kept her thoughts from drifting back to the scene in the bedroom. Ridiculously her brain seemed fixated on trivia: that the tie at Tianne’s left leg was the one James wore when he met the prime minister. And how very skinny and white James’s bum had looked from the back. She hadn’t realized how small his buttocks were.
The aftermath of an accident on the M1 added another half-hour to their journey, not that the others would notice. Clare was snoring softly in the back and May was fast asleep in the passenger seat, her head resting on the window. Lara was glad to be going away now. She would flush James sodding Galsworthy out of her system with lots of cool, clear water and fresh fruit. She would run from his image on treadmills and imagine Tianne’s face on a punchbag as she pummelled it. She would emerge from the spa holiday a fully purged and stronger person. Thank GOD she hadn’t sold her flat in Islington. Too bad it would be another three months before her tenants left it, though.
The satnav was telling her that she was on the home straight at last. Less than half an hour away from the postcode that she had typed in. However, the satnav was also telling her there were no named streets pertaining to the postcode, so she hoped she’d keyed in the right one. She was getting tired now. She wanted a hot shower and a hard scrub-down with a loofah and to fall into bed too tired to think – and hopefully too weary to dream.
She left the A64, as instructed by Brian Blessed’s voice, and headed down and up a twisty country lane which seemed to go on for ever. It was a good job there was a bright full moon ahead because there was absolutely no street lighting here and the roads were muddy and full of unfriendly hairpin bends. Her headlights picked up an old signpost and she slowed down to read it.
‘Useful,’ she commented to herself, seeing that all the letters seemed to have been scratched out. Only the last ‘em’ remained. She carried on until the satnav told her to take a right. This must be wrong, Lara thought to herself, driving down a road that seemed to be a fly-tippers’ paradise. Old mattresses and sofas lined the verges. This did not herald the drive up to a swanky – and very expensive – spa complex.
‘What the f—’ A finishing post showed up on the satnav and then Brian boomed a congratulations to her for reaching her destination – a destination which looked absolutely nothing like the Internet picture she remembered. This holiday cottage was made of old stone, whitewashed long ago, and now, with the aid of lots of honeysuckle clinging to it, had acquired a shabby-chic charm. It was a one-storey build with a neat grey slate roof and lots of tiny windows set in two-foot-thick walls. To the left was a small terraced garden with a bench affording a view of what she supposed, in the daylight, would be a cove. It might have had an old charm of sorts, but it was hardly the newly built log cabin she was expecting. And where were the surrounding cabins: Robin, Lark, Swift and Finch Cottages, not to mention the main manor house? She reached in her handbag for her phone to check the email confirmation, then remembered she didn’t have a phone any more.
She pulled on the handbrake and killed the engine. There appeared to be a note pinned on the door.
Miss Lara Rickman – key under mat.
It was too much to think there was another Lara Rickman expected in the area. This had to be the place, then. She was too weary to go looking around for the main complex.
Clare stirred in the back. ‘Are we here?’
‘Well, there’s the question. I think so.’
Clare leaned forwards and shook May’s shoulder. ‘May. We’re here.’
May stretched a crick out of her neck. ‘Thank goodness.’ Her eyes focused on the building to her right. ‘Ooh, that’s different to what I was expecting.’
They all made a stiff exit from the car.
‘I think they’ve given us the wrong cottage, but we’ll sort it in the morning,’ said Lara, picking up the key from under the mat. Nice security measure, she thought. This wasn’t looking good. Was God having a laugh with her life today?
‘What a lovely smell,’ said May.
‘Honeysuckle,’ replied Clare with a yawn. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’
The door creaked open and Lara felt on the wall for a light switch. It was an old-fashioned type – like a nipple. Like Tianne’s sticky-out nipple. The light revealed a large square room with a monster-sized oxblood leather sofa and chair in front of a huge stone inglenook fireplace. To the right of the room was a chunky pine dining table with a square wooden crate on it. The note attached to it read: Hamper. Lara unpacked the crate whilst May lumbered in with two suitcases and Clare went on a brief exploration of the bedrooms. Inside there was a waxed packet of bacon, a paper bag full of eggs, two large triangles of cheese, a home-made loaf, some soup, jam, butter, milk . . . There was nothing luxury about it. No champagne, no cocktail chocolates, no little jars with exotic-sounding French names. Lara huffed and knew that as soon as the morning sun was up, she was going to be having serious words with this spa hotel.
The kitchen and the lounge were one big room and formed the heart of the cottage. There was no upper floor so all doors led off from this main room – six in total: a front and a side door, a bathroom and three small bedrooms.
‘Any preference as to sleeping quarters?’ asked Clare. ‘They’re just about all the same.’
‘Nope,’ said May. ‘Take your pick.’
‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ said Clare, picking the corner bedroom; it looked slightly smaller than the other two – and seeing as she was the smallest of them all, that seemed fitting. ‘I’m beat. Lara, what are you doing? Rest, woman.’
‘I’m putting these luxury items in the fridge then I’m off to bed myself,’ she replied, adding more than a splash of sarcasm to the words ‘luxury items’.
‘Come on,’ said May. ‘You must be knackered. Get to bed, Lara.’
A wave of tiredness suddenly hit Lara and she knew she needed to put her head down on a soft pillow.
May pushed her into the first bedroom. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘We can’t sort anything out now, it’s nearly two o’clock.’
Everything would have to wait until the morning.
The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
Chapter 19
Lara slept surprisingly well in the single bed with a very fat quilt tucked around her, until the sunlight peeping through the cream-coloured curtains woke her up at seven a.m. And though she hoped to drift off to sleep again, there were too many images from the night before waiting to torture her. She wondered what had happened after she had gone. Had James and Tianne carried on where they had left off after it was clear she wasn’t going to pick up the phone? Did Miss Brazilian stay the night in their bed? Did Tianne try to ring her to deliver all the delicious details of their illicit union, as she had with Rachel when she sought her out especially to brag to her that her James had been a naughty boy? That thought really hurt – because surely James would have known she would try to get in touch with Lara and make things even worse. Lara’s heart was clearly not as important as his knob. He hadn’t given a toss about her in all this, had he? Actually he had been giving less and less of a toss about her since she moved in. More and more it looked as if Keely’s observation was true: Kristina’s c
ut hours had indeed coincided with James’s rush to move her in. Lara had jumped through hoops for him out of affection and a genuine desire to help, and her reward was to be labelled ‘stale’.
Once again she heard in her head those delighted little whimpers of pleasure coming from Tianne tarty Lee’s lips and she felt hot tears of envy and pain rising to her eyes. She slapped her face to shock the tears into retreat then bounced out of bed and over to the shabby, cream-framed oval mirror on the wall to give herself a good talking-to.
‘Lara Rickman. You are not going to spend this holiday moping around after James tossing Galsworthy. You are going to have a good time with your friends as soon as this booking mistake is sorted out. Now do you hear me?’
The face that stared back at her seemed to have lost weight overnight. She hunted in her case for her make-up bag. It was time to brush the life back into her bouncy blonde hair, put on a façade and get ready to kick ass with the spa managers.
May had had a fitful sleep. She hadn’t had much problem drifting off in the squashy cosy bed, but then the dreams had started. She couldn’t remember much about the first one, other than that she had woken up crying because she had discovered that Michael was married to a very old woman with bright red hair and he idolized her. It had felt like hours before she got back to sleep, only to dream then that she had gone round to Michael’s house and found him happily married to a very pretty blonde. He opened the door, saw it was May, then his whole expression changed into something cold and hateful as he told her to go away and leave them alone. May saw them kissing just as the door closed. She had spent a lot of the night crying silently into her pillow. What he had done to her was beyond cruel. She would never let another man into her heart again.
She emerged from the bedroom hoping to slip unseen into the bathroom, but bumped straight into Lara instead.
‘Blimey, May, are you okay?’ said Lara.
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