‘Do you get the impression Huw’s desperate to make sure there’s a family living next door to him?’ He grinned. ‘Seems as if he’s not averse to trying anything to stop me selling the land for development or something like a caravan site. Even a spot of matchmaking.’
Coralie was glad that, pulled up, the collar of her tweed jacket hid at least part of her face. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, squirming. ‘He’s not very subtle, is he? We’ll just have to make up some excuse, won’t we?’
‘No.’ Gethin rubbed his jaw. ‘Think of Huw’s feelings. He genuinely believes he’s doing everyone a favour. He’ll be racing back to the farmhouse now, drumming his fingers whilst someone at The Cabin trots off to find an appointments book they never need, because, hey, when was the last time there was a rush for tables at any restaurant round here? Think of how foolish he’ll feel if he thinks we’ve seen through him.’
Coralie stared at him with new respect. Some of the stories circulating in Penmorfa suggested that Gethin Lewis’s sole concerns were for himself. She silently wondered if she’d fallen into the trap of believing the gossips.
‘You’re right.’ She nodded. ‘I think poor Huw feels a bit like a spare part during the winter, anyway. He’s been a bit grumpy since Potato Day.’
She heard Gethin choke back a laugh.
‘He set up an all-day workshop on all things potato after reading up about successful winter events at other nurseries,’ she went on, unable to hide her own amusement. ‘It was a terrible failure. Hardly anyone turned up apart from our poet, Wilfie, who wrote a Potat-Ode to celebrate the occasion.’
‘Only in Penmorfa,’ said Gethin who was shaking his head at the thought of it. Even in the fading light, she could see the big smile on his face when he stopped and stared at her. ‘I’m grateful to you, Coralie, thanks for saying you’ll come to dinner with me.’
Coralie smiled down at her boots and started to think that, possibly, she could get through an evening with Gethin Lewis without too much trouble after all. She could even feel the faint stirrings of her appetite returning. Then he ruined it by speaking again.
‘Just as well you reminded me how prickly Huw can be. I’ve got to keep on the right side of him because he’s my last hope of getting a builder. And the sooner I get a builder, the sooner I can decide what to do about the cottage. Maybe then I’ll finally be able to put Penmorfa behind me.’
Chapter Seven
‘Why not keep the cottage as a holiday home?’ Coralie asked once the waiter had taken their order. Far from being as humble as its name suggested, The Cabin was a rather splendid pastel-coloured Georgian building up at Abersaith. Once a run-down bed and breakfast, new life had been breathed into it by its current owners: a woman who had been a runner-up on a TV cookery programme and her husband, a former professional rugby player.
The revamped hotel, described on its website as cool, chic and classy, was another sign of a rising tide of gentrification creeping across the once-forlorn town. To Coralie’s surprise they were far from being the only diners; maybe Huw was right to anticipate a stampede of food tourists?
‘Holiday? I don’t have time for holidays,’ Gethin said, topping up her glass. Coralie reminded herself that just because she was feeling nervous didn’t mean necking a strong Shiraz in double-quick time was a good idea. She had offered to drive, not least because it would have given her some control over the evening, but Gethin had raised an eyebrow and told her he liked a more comfortable ride. She assumed it was a reference to her van rather than some frank over-sharing.
‘I’ve got my hands full at the moment trying to be in two countries at once. I can’t see it ever being any kind of home for me,’ he said, the look in his deep blue eyes growing wintry. ‘With all the trouble the old place is causing, it might have been easier if I’d just let it fall down.’
Coralie thought about it. Maybe all his memories and sentiment were invested elsewhere? ‘Alys told me their farmhouse used to belong to your family.’
He shrugged and she felt a pang of recognition and involuntarily leaned a little closer; that show of indifference hid a few raw spots.
‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘My parents ran it as a dairy farm, but milking a hundred grumpy, smelly, enormous animals all determined to kick you to kingdom come was never my idea of fun. Good luck to Alys and Huw, they’re welcome to it.’
‘So you’re really going to cut every tie with the place where you grew up?’ Coralie twisted a corner of her neatly pressed napkin. Was it possible for anyone to walk away from their past? Hadn’t she tried to do just that? But, for every step she took forward, someone was always ready to remind her of what she’d left behind.
‘Look at everything you’ve sacrificed,’ her mother regularly lamented. ‘That salary!’
So where once she justified spending far too much on clothes for work on the pretext they were investment pieces, she now scoured eBay and charity shops for bargains. Hardly a sacrifice.
‘… Your old friends.’ Another of her mother’s favourite woes, forgetting that a day spent pulling a boardroom of directors back from a lemming-like surge towards organisational destruction hadn’t always left her feeling very sociable.
‘… Status.’
Coralie closed her eyes; she’d never felt comfortable with that slightly deferential attitude on the first day of work at a failing company.
‘You know you could go back to your old job at the drop of a hat.’
When she came to her senses and gave up playing at a new career being the subtext here. Her parents still hoped she would go back to ‘normal’, as if stress, burnout and dreading going to work was a good thing. But her moral compass had shifted irreversibly and her former values of what was right and what was wrong belonged to someone else.
She looked up again and found Gethin studying her face. ‘It’s easier to go when they don’t want you to stay,’ he said, quietly. ‘Over here, I get slated because my paintings are popular. In New York, they respect me for it.’
Coralie hoped a sympathetic nod would do. All that studied eroticism seemed a bit overworked and obvious to her; an easy way for lazy buyers to create a certain ambience or chosen because the colours matched the decor. Personally, she much preferred rootling through junk shop boxes for old frames or discarded prints to create something original for her walls. Even so, just because Gethin Lewis’s work was popular didn’t mean he lacked talent or wasn’t a master in his oeuvre.
‘People can say what they like about what I do because I’m doing it on my own terms,’ he continued, folding his arms and looking altogether too dark and brooding to be contained by the ordered constraints and austere lines of the modern dining room. ‘No one gives a damn about who you’ve been or where you’ve come from in a big city. They’re all too busy getting on with their own lives.’
There was a pause whilst the waiter arrived with their first courses. The more she thought about it, the sadder it seemed that Penmorfa was missing the chance to celebrate one of its own by allowing another country to take all the plaudits. And for all his show of indifference, surely Gethin must secretly wonder how long he would have to wait for recognition in his birthplace? Wasn’t a living, successful artist at least as valid as a dead poet? There was Alys trying to drum up enthusiasm to raise funds for a community space when, it seemed to Coralie, there was a fundamental breach between the village and Gethin crying out to be healed. Perhaps the money would roll in more quickly if the villagers learned to love their most famous son? The first mouthful of grilled goat’s cheese with honeyed fig was a rallying call to her jaded appetite, perking her up enough to put forward a suggestion.
‘Perhaps people in Penmorfa don’t feel they have a stake in your success? Maybe the perception is that it’s something happening in a glitzy art world that’s nothing to do with them?’
‘There’s nothing I can do about small-mindedness,’ Gethin muttered at a spoonful of spicy seafood chowder.
‘Ah, but maybe
if you were minded to give something back to Penmorfa the villagers would feel more inclined to share your achievements?’
‘To hell with that.’ He stopped to scrutinise her. ‘Like what?’
‘What do you think?’ she asked, sitting back. ‘Something more substantial than a set of mugs with a Samba print on them, obviously. I was thinking about a painting, of course. Something to hang in the new church hall, perhaps?’
‘Coralie?’ he said, setting down his spoon. ‘Have you even seen one of my paintings? I’m not sure that the good people of this parish would regard my work and the church hall as a good match!’
It was true, from what she’d Googled, there didn’t seem to be an article on Gethin Lewis that didn’t include the word ‘sexy’. Although the term was liberally applied to the artist as well as his work.
‘Couldn’t you just paint a landscape?’
‘Something that captures an authentic Welsh identity, I suppose?’ His dark eyes looked thunderous then, to her relief, he laughed. ‘Huh! The hard truth is that pretty ladies sell. The bleak imagery of moody skies, desolate hills and the realities of farming the land don’t.’
As his eyes held hers, she saw the sparkle return to them. Her fork trembled a little under such close examination and a trickle of honeyed syrup went straight down her cleavage.
It took every shred of Gethin’s self-control to make a pretence of studying his food when he would rather have leaned back and enjoyed the show, thanks to that accidental spill. Really, Coralie Casey was the kind of woman calories were made for; that dewy peaches-and-cream complexion, glossy cherry lips, the succulence of her body beneath that orange, silky dress. A cornucopia of curves, you could say, except it was probably better not to think about horns of plenty. Especially when he was having enough problems keeping his mind off fantasies about a warm finger, preferably his, dipping into that soft, inviting cleavage.
He’d been acutely aware of her from the moment the evening had started. Even when she’d turned to close her front door, he’d noticed how the light from her hall, spilling out into the lane, briefly illuminated her bright, piled-up hair, and an orange ribbon that clashed with her red coat. An alluring flame flickering in the dark, except he was old and wise enough to know not to play with fire. Of course, there was no harm in just looking.
Judging that he’d given her enough time to regain her composure, but returning his eyes to her face rather than looking for glistening traces of honey, he found her watching him thoughtfully.
‘We should be doing more to celebrate what’s unique about the village,’ she told him. ‘How can we build the community when we don’t even have a functioning community hall?’
Yeah, good luck with that, Gethin thought, paying more attention to her low, slightly breathy voice, with its Home Counties accent, than what she was saying. No matter how hard she tried, that pattern of speech would always mark her as an outsider in Penmorfa. One, he was willing to bet, who’d arrived in the village with a pre-conceived idea of the countryside almost entirely informed by magazines. Funny how there was never any mention of the stink of slurry on the fields in those glossy pages, or the sound of farm machinery working long into the June nights. Nothing about the kids getting trashed on Saturday night or the ones who hanged themselves because there was no hope for the future. Some idyll.
‘Coralie, I’m sorry, but you’re mistaking me for someone who cares about what happens in Penmorfa. I stopped feeling any attachment to the place many years ago.’
She dropped her gaze in apparent disappointment, but the arrival of the waiter turning up to fuss around clearing away their plates forced her to smile and make suitable noises about their starters. He didn’t blame her for trying; she was still in the honeymoon stage of her new life in the country. Perhaps all that enthusiasm would rub off on him, too? He was certainly in need of it; his productivity had slowed, although that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. No point in flooding the market. But he was occasionally aware of something else stilling his hand.
It wasn’t that he was intimidated every time he set a blank canvas on his easel. Nor did he feel a sense of trepidation whenever he picked up a brush. The problem – one that he would have shaken his head in disbelief at back on the farm – was that everything had fallen in his lap so easily. All the hurt and hunger that had once fuelled and inspired him simply didn’t exist anymore; somewhere along the line his grand passion had become nothing more than a pleasant pastime. Getting the work together for his forthcoming show had almost been a chore. What he needed was some reinvigoration, something to shake up his ideas.
‘Maybe I should paint you?’ he suggested and watched her head jerk up in surprise. ‘How would you like to be the star of the village hall?’
‘Paint Alys then,’ she replied without missing a beat. ‘She’s the Chair of the new Hall Management Committee. And she’s gorgeous.’
‘And married,’ he added, as his dish of Welsh Black beef arrived.
‘Excuse me, but I thought we were discussing a painting, not an elopement,’ she said, looking up from her fish and breaking into a smile.
‘Some husbands don’t appreciate another man looking at their wives that closely,’ he explained. Some girlfriends weren’t too thrilled about that kind of intensity either, he could have added. Whatever his girlfriends said at the beginning about giving him space to work, none of them were quite so understanding when it came to him being holed up in his studio with a beautiful woman.
‘Well, how do you know I don’t have a significant other?’
‘Rock doesn’t count,’ he told her, grinning to himself when her pursed lips confirmed his guess. ‘And no man in his right mind would put up with so much Doris Day,’ he added, laughing at her scowl.
‘Mm, I don’t know what goes on in your studio and I don’t want to know either,’ she said, quickly. ‘So you can forget about trying to gauge the size of my nose or deciding what colours to mix to match my teeth whilst we’re here and concentrate on your meal.’
He shrugged and picked up his fork, but now the idea had taken root, he couldn’t stop thinking about how he might portray her. For the first time in longer than he cared to remember, he itched to pick up his brush.
Paint them and forget them had become his mantra. Not one that he ever said out loud about the paintings or the women, admittedly. The intimacy of painting the beautiful women he met was a kind of exorcism; by the time he’d noted every freckle and mole, the hollow at the base of a throat, the bone structure beneath the skin, the infatuation was over. And every time he managed not to get involved, it stopped him turning into his father, who’d treated his mother more like part of the furniture with every passing year.
In the Summerhouse Café on the morning of the twmpath, Kitty looked up as Coralie came in.
‘Wow! It looks amazing in here!’ Coralie said, sounding genuinely impressed.
Kitty was pleased with herself for creating such a transformation with such basic accessories. Perhaps she ought to play fairy godmother to Coralie too, since today she was wearing what appeared to be a pair of men’s twill trousers with a striped cotton shirt and a pair of braces that strained either side of her ample chest. Whilst Coralie was beautiful enough to carry it off, it was the kind of look that women admired and men didn’t get.
Her dad had insisted that Gethin was renovating his father’s cottage to make it family-friendly, but her mam had said counting on Coralie persuading Gethin not to sell the place to the highest bidder was a bit much to expect from one date. For all Huw’s scheming, Coralie didn’t look like a woman celebrating her engagement. Neither was she wearing the dazed, satiated expression of someone who’d just enjoyed a few nights of vigorous horizontal romping. Kitty straightened a gingham table cloth. She might have been a bit envious of Coralie if she had.
Kitty, who had now given up any hopes of being whisked off her feet by a handsome stranger – and at the rate she was putting on weight he’d have to be quite a power
ful stranger – was a bit disappointed for Coralie who had clearly missed the boat. Drawing the raffle at this evening’s Valentine’s dance was Gethin’s last duty before flying back to America. Whilst Kitty admired Coralie’s entrepreneurial spirit, she couldn’t help feeling that, at pushing thirty, Coralie was wasting valuable time burying herself in the country, especially if she wanted to stand any chance of meeting someone who wasn’t already in a relationship.
She eyed Coralie’s outfit doubtfully. Perhaps she should offer to lend her one of her denim mini-skirts for the evening? Although there probably wasn’t enough stretch in any of her lacy tops.
‘I thought I was meant to be giving you a hand,’ said Coralie, ‘but it looks as if you’ve done everything. Has all the cleaning been done? Do you want me to check the loos?’
Such a waste, Kitty thought regretfully, Coralie was kind too, always ready to roll up her sleeves and pitch in wherever help was required. No wonder everyone liked her. ‘If you could just give me a hand with the bunting, that would be great.’ She might have imagined the briefest of glances at her stomach before Coralie quietly took over any work that required use of a stepladder.
‘Oh, it looks very romantic,’ Coralie said when they’d finished festooning the room with cheery bunting and strings of fairy lights. She nodded at the tables now dressed in their checked tablecloths and the flowers that Kitty had arranged in old French jam jars wrapped in raffia. ‘Have you done anything like this before?’
‘I worked for the Leisure and Events Manager in my last job,’ Kitty told her. ‘Being back here makes me realise how much I miss the challenges. Pity it was only a short-term contract. I was only the admin assistant, mind, although I did get to try the sample menus before some of the dinners. It’s amazing what you can pick up about organising large groups of people just by keeping your eyes open.
‘It’s a bit like being a nanny,’ she went on. ‘I was a bit intimidated by all the important business people at first and then my manager told me to imagine them as children. After that it was easy. So long as everyone was sat at the correct table with the correct menu in front of them and the vegetarians didn’t get tofu too often, everyone was happy. Well, most of the time.’ She grinned.
Move Over Darling Page 7
