‘Bloody hell! In her tiny cottage? Where’s he sleeping?’ Jimmy blurted, and then suddenly coloured. ‘I mean - if he’s in the living room, his feet will end up in the kitchen.’
‘I know. I’ve told her to get rid of him.’
‘I thought you usually needed a couple of bouncers to get rid of him.’
‘You’re not joking,’ Kristen shook her head in annoyance and watched as Jimmy grimaced. She could see that he was remembering something unpleasant.
‘If I ever catch him touching you up again -’
‘Jimmy!’ she warned, not relishing the idea of an argument first thing in the morning. ‘It’s sorted. Now leave it,’ she said, secretly pleased that her man would defend her honour.
‘I’m going to be out most of today,’ he announced, shuffling across the kitchen in a pair of red tartan slippers which made him look about eighty. ‘And most of tomorrow too. But I’m all yours come Friday night.’
‘What do you mean?’
Jimmy turned and grinned at her. ‘What do you mean what do you mean? For crying out loud, Kris, it’s our anniversary!’
Kristen’s mouth dropped open again. She’d remembered it a few days ago and then, with the recent office goings-on, she’d plain forgotten about it.
Jimmy walked over to her, extended a hand under her chin and pushed her jaw up until her mouth closed. ‘And I’ve got a surprise for you,’ he whispered, tickling her ear with his mouth, his unshaven face gently grazing her cheek.
‘What is it?’
He frowned. ‘Do you think I’m going to go spoiling it, now?’
‘Come on - just a hint!’
‘No! You’ll find out soon enough. Now get to work, before the boss lays you off for a week too.’
‘So what are we doing today?’ Daniel said, leaning up against the sink.
‘I hadn’t made any plans,’ Claudie said honestly, hoping the sink wouldn’t buckle under the weight of him.
‘Want to watch another film?’
‘Daniel, we can’t stay in and watch films all day.’
‘Why not?’ He stared at her with his intense blue eyes. Claudie instantly felt embarrassed. It was as if they saw right through her. As if he knew what she got up to when there was nobody around.
‘Don’t you think we should go out somewhere?’ she said, knowing that she didn’t want to spend the entire day trapped in her tiny place with Daniel. It would be too much. He was so like Luke that she couldn’t bear to think of the comparisons that she’d be likely to make. No, they had to get out.
‘Okay,’ he said casually, taking such a large bite out of his slice of toast that he almost ate his fingers in the process. ‘Where shall we go?’ he asked, his mouth crammed to choking point.
Claudie frowned, not quite knowing where to suggest. She didn’t have a car and Daniel had never owned any form of transport other than a motorbike. He’d had a whole series of them, all of them sold in moments of extreme poverty, of which there’d been quite a few.
She watched as he buttered another round of toast and polished it off in seconds.
‘We can visit Staithes, if you like,’ she suggested. But we’ll have to go shopping first.’
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I’m always up for a bit of shopping.’
To say Claudie took advantage of having Daniel in a supermarket with her would be a slight understatement. Where she usually bought one carton of orange juice, she bought a family pack of four. Where she usually selected four single potatoes, she chose a big economy bag. What would have had Claudie keeling over into the harbour with the weight, didn’t make an ounce of difference to Daniel. And he certainly had an air about him. He strode up and down the aisles as if it were his natural territory. The only man in Whitby stupid enough to wear a T-shirt in April. But he didn’t seem to feel the cold.
And he knew how to turn heads. With his great lolling walk, and arms the size of legs, the women of Whitby didn’t stand a chance. Claudie could see the way they looked at him: peeping at him from behind the Persil, batting their eyelids from behind the beans. Claudie briefly wondered if she should link arms with him in an attempt to fend them off, but she was finding the whole thing far too amusing to put a stop to it, and Daniel was obviously enjoying the attention. Claudie suspected it was because he was probably nothing out of the ordinary in London. It was hard to be special in a capital but, at eleven o’clock on a Tuesday morning in a Whitby supermarket, a six foot two guy with long jet hair and blinding blue eyes was like finding a Tiffany diamond inside a Christmas cracker.
However, the amusement stopped when they got to the checkout. During the last few months, Claudie had slowly got used to shopping for one again. That had also meant budgeting for one. But today’s trolley load was three times the cost of her usual weekly shop, and Daniel obviously didn’t have any money on him. He was conveniently placing their goods into carrier bags when the till assistant said the amount, and Claudie was forced to use her credit card.
All the way home, she wondered what had cost so much. It definitely wasn’t the budget box of tissues which would probably disintegrate as soon as you threatened to sneeze on them, nor was it likely to be the dented tins she’d chosen in an attempt to save a few pennies. And she hadn’t even dared to look at the magazine rack.
It wasn’t until they were unpacking at home and Daniel surreptitiously placed the cans of lager and bottle of wine in the fridge that she realised. How had he managed to sneak those passed her?
‘Just a quick bite to eat before we go, eh?’ Daniel said, making free with one of the two loaves of bread before she even had time to think about putting them in the cupboard.
Claudie blushed as he winked at her, and watched as he proceeded to cover four slices of bread with a thick coat of butter. Who would ever have thought that this was Luke’s little brother?
Chapter 14
Claudie couldn’t think of a single thing to say to Daniel. They’d virtually covered all the normal topics of conversation on their short journey to Staithes and, now they were walking down to the little harbour, she couldn’t think of anything else to talk about.
Just what do you say to someone whose brother’s just died? There were no words adequate for the job. And what could he be expected to say to her? The only thing they’d had in common had been Luke. Yet the silence between them wasn’t awkward at all. They seemed perfectly at ease with each other, as if the grief they shared cemented them together in silent friendship.
They walked down the deserted street in between the rows of fishermen’s cottages. It reminded Claudie of a Western before a shoot out, it was so quiet. Did anyone live here at all?
‘The tourists haven’t arrived yet, then?’ Daniel laughed, as if reading her thoughts.
‘No,’ Claudie said, but, peering up at the sky, which had slated over, it wasn’t surprising. People didn’t visit Yorkshire before June if they knew what was good for them.
When they reached the beach, they stopped for a moment. The tide was out and they decided to walk over the damp sand. Claudie usually loved visiting Staithes. Although she saw the sea every day, there was something rather magical about this particular stretch of coastline. But today, it looked intensely sad, as if all its vibrancy had drained away. The sea was the same hopeless colour as the sky, and the sand looked washed out and unwell. The whole scene looked as if it should be tucked up in bed and fed hot soup and affection until it was restored to health. Perhaps they should have just stayed at home and watched old films, Claudie thought. At least there was plenty of colour in an MGM musical.
‘Claudie,’ Daniel suddenly said in a tone which made her panic; a tone which sounded pensive and forced. She could feel what was coming, and it was what she’d been dreading.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t seen you. You know,’ he paused, ‘since the funeral.’
Claudie stopped walking and gazed down into the sand as if she meant to bore a hole into it. Daniel stopped beside her and, for a moment, she st
ared down at his cracked leather boots speckled by sand. ‘It’s all right,’ she said calmly.
‘I meant to. It’s just - I didn’t know what to say.’
She looked up at him and nodded. ‘I should have called you.’
‘I don’t know where the time’s gone,’ Daniel said. It was the kind of statement that would have sounded lame coming from most people, but Claudie didn’t hear it that way. She knew what he meant. Time was doing funny things with her too.
She’d become obsessed with time since Luke had died. The first couple of months had been the worst. Time had tortured her with sleepless nights and endless days, and she’d kept on turning the clock back in her mind to when he’d been alive, desperately trying to work out what they’d been doing, and if they’d made the most of things. Had they loved enough? Lived enough? Could there have been more if they’d known how little time was left?
Two years ago, she’d remembered that they’d been house-hunting together. A year ago, they’d got engaged and were in the throes of planning their wedding. Just a year ago. How many hours was that? She’d worked it out once. The world had been complete then; a safe, comfy haven where unhappiness happened to other people, and death was a word you didn’t associate with those closest to you.
‘Your mother stayed with you, didn’t she?’ Daniel asked, breaking into Claudie’s thoughts.
Claudie nodded, noticing how Daniel had so aptly used the word mother instead of mum. It was something that Claudie had long acknowledged; that her mother had never ever been a mum.
‘She stayed for ten days, then she handed me over to Kristen,’ Claudie said, staring up at the cliffs which looked almost black today. ‘She wanted to get back to France. She’s useless anywhere else. And it was better that way, really. We’ve never exactly been close.’
Daniel shoved his hands in his pockets and kicked the heel of his right boot into the wet sand. ‘And you’re all right?’
Claudie turned to look at him. ‘Not many people dare to ask me that.’
‘I know what you mean,’ he confessed in a low voice.
‘In case the flood barriers break.’
He nodded, and, from the look of him, Claudie could see that it was something he’d had first-hand experience in too.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘what people can’t handle is the fact that I’m so quiet. I think they actually want me to explode or physically crumble in front of them. But I’m not like that. I don’t do public performances.’
Daniel’s eyebrows rose an inch.
‘Except at the funeral,’ she added, before he had a chance to mention it. ‘I’m told I rather let rip there.’
‘You don’t remember?’
Claudie shook her head. ‘Do you?’
Daniel nodded but didn’t say anything.
‘Oh, dear.’ Claudie had so desperately wanted to forget that day. As it was, it played in her memory like a movie projected onto a river; the individual scenes were all there but the pictures seemed to swim around as though she’d taken drugs. Perhaps she had. She remembered her mother had given her something before they’d left the house, but she’d thought they’d been paracetamol. There was no telling though. Her mother’s handbag usually rattled like an autumn poppy.
Claudie and Daniel walked over to the sleeping boulders under the cliff. It was a strange sight. Piles of black boulders, shiny as Whitby jet, and icy cold to the touch. Claudie trailed her fingers over one and felt herself shiver. Thousands of cold days must be locked away in these stone, she thought.
A lone gull pierced the silence with an agonising cry. Claudie looked up and followed its path across the sky, her eyes settling on the cliffs shielding the beach.
‘How high do you think it was?’ she said, her neck white and exposed as she craned her head back.
Daniel looked up at the cliff. ‘Much higher than that,’ he said, following her train of thought without the need for elaboration.
Claudie dragged her eyes back to the ground and, for a moment, she seemed to be counting the individual grains of sand on the beach.
‘It’s absurd,’ she said at last. ‘I mean, how can you be angry at a mountain?’ Her voice was cold, distant, as if it had been carried away by the gull.
She sat down on one of the boulders and Daniel sat next to her.
‘You never went with him, did you?’ She said it as a statement rather than a question.
‘Only once. But it looked too bloody dangerous to me.’
Claudie managed a little smile.
‘You’re coping really well,’ Daniel said.
Claudie shrugged. She didn’t want to tell him it was all an act really, and that she could behave really badly when she put her mind to it. Like the time Kristen had taken her shopping. That had been a close call. She could still see that packet of pine nuts trapped inside her prison-cell grip.
She’d been on the verge of something terrible that moment. If Kristen hadn’t come back and woken her, there was no telling what she might have done. Her mind had been on the verge of tripping over itself, and all because of a packet of pine nuts.
Luke had never liked pesto sauce.
‘It’s like snail’s bile,’ he said. ‘I’m not eating that stuff.’
‘That’s only the stuff you buy in jars,’ Claudie told him. ‘Come on, now. Get hold of that pan and heat it up.’
Claudie watched as he tipped the pale kernels into the volcanic orange pan, moving them around with a wooden spoon. She loved watching him cook: the way he rolled his sleeves up, enabling her to worship his forearms. She loved the silly way he tied her pinny around his waist, and she loved the way he always managed to burn something. Last time he’d cooked, he’d burnt their plastic spatula so that it now looked like petrified spaghetti.
‘What do I do now?’ Luke asked.
‘Keep turning them until they’re golden.’
‘They’re golden now, aren’t they?’
‘They’re anaemic!’
‘You know I’m no good at this cooking lark.’
‘You’re brilliant,’ she said, leaning forward from her pan of boiling tagliatelle and giving him a kiss.
Pasta boiled, pine nuts golden, Luke stripped the basil plant whilst Claudie dressed the pasta in heaps of pungent cheese, mixing the whole lot together with lashings of garlic infused olive oil.
Five minutes of silent eating ensued.
‘This is once seriously sexy meal,’ Luke said, blue eyes haunted with lunchtime lust.
‘See! I told you you’d like it,’ Claudie smiled back at him. ‘What?’
He held her gaze. Her brown eyes locked with his blue ones.
‘Luke?’
‘Claudie!’ He was out of his chair and had grabbed her before she had time to work out what was happening. His kisses were hotter than chilli pepper, his fingers melting her faster than butter in a microwave.
Looking back, it hadn’t been a good idea. Tagliatelle had got everywhere, and Claudie swore her hair smelt of garlic infused olive oil days later.
‘You okay?’
Claudie shivered. She wasn’t in the kitchen at home with Luke, she was in Staithes on the beach with Daniel, and he was speaking to her.
Claudie nodded. She didn’t want to talk any more. Things were getting a little too close.
She rubbed her hands together. ‘Should have bought gloves,’ she said.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Daniel picked her hands up and cupped them between his.
‘You’re cold,’ he said.
‘You’re warm.’
He smiled and, for a moment, she thought she saw tears in his eyes, but perhaps it was only the bitter bite of the wind.
Sitting in silence, they stared out to sea.
Chapter 15
Simon knew that he was being followed. He quickened his pace, dodging the lunchtime workers, and diving into as many shops as he could.
She wasn’t very subtle. She’d make a terrible detective, he thought, wondering
where he could go to next, and how he could shake her off his tail. But maybe he shouldn’t even bother. God, he was so nice sometimes. Maybe he should just be bloody nasty and give her a piece of his mind. He contemplated this for a moment, idly picking up a packet of throat pastilles then placing them back amongst the toothpastes.
‘Excuse me!’ a stern voice arrested him. It was the shop assistant. ‘Can I help you,’ she said with the sort of voice that doesn’t sound helpful in the least.
‘Er - no, thank you,’ Simon said apologetically, stumbling out of the door.
He felt like an actor in a low budget thriller as he weaved in and out of the crowds, hoping Mandy wouldn’t be able to keep up with him. What annoyed him more than anything was her attitude. What did she expect from him? After years of turning her down, of going out with other girls, of living with another woman for two years, did she really expect him to suddenly fall in love with her? Unfortunately, Simon believed that the answer was yes. She had no scruples, no shame and, from what Simon had seen of her this morning, no bra on either.
There were some men in the office who would go for her obvious attractions, but Simon wasn’t one of them. He’d never been into the long talons, red lipstick, skirt so short and top so low that they almost met in the middle look.
As he took a sneaky glance over his shoulder, he could see that he was losing her now. Either that or she’d lost interest in trying to follow him. Perhaps it was because he’d mentioned he was meeting someone again, he mused.
‘The same girl, is it?’ Mandy had asked in between mouthfuls of chocolate digestive. She always had a packet of crisps or biscuits on the go, and her desk drawer would have been a haven for mice if there’d been room left in it for them to operate.
Simon had nodded.
‘What’s her name?’ Mandy had immediately asked.
Simon had sighed. ‘Now, it’s all to be kept very quiet.’
She’d nodded, but her nosiness had obviously got the better of her and she’d decided to do a bit of amateur spying. Very amateur, Simon thought bitterly.
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