by Jan Ruth
Patsy’s salon was called, In the Pink, and occupied a prime position in the centre of the village. It was a three storey Georgian building, sandwiched between a boutique and a bank. Inside, it was richly decorated with a lot of expensive soft furnishings. Jack waited obediently in the little reception area. Patsy’s taste was evident in the silk covered Queen Anne chairs, the little bottles of oils and the wind chimes. Everything was so chic and understated, but it all served to make him feel clumsy and uncomfortable. Maybe it was something to do with female power, Jack thought.
Presently he was greeted by one of the staff. She was straight off the set of Footballer’s Wives, with her perfect tan, square sharp nails and white teeth. Her smile slipped ever so slightly when she saw him there, or was he imagining it?
“Oh hi Jack!” she said, “Patsy’s on the top floor.”
Cursing, Jack bounded up both flights of stairs, and burst into the little office. Tim almost swallowed his cigarette. “Jack, What are you doing here?”
***
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Midnight Sky - Chapter One
MIDNIGHT SKY
By Jan Ruth.
Opposites attract? Laura Brown, interior designer and James Morgan-Jones, horse whisperer - and Midnight Sky, a beautiful but damaged steeplechaser.
Laura seems to have it all, glamorous job, charming boyfriend. Her sister, Maggie, struggles with money, difficult children and an unresponsive husband. She envies her sister’s life, but are things as idyllic as they seem?
She might be a farmer's daughter but Laura is doing her best to deny her roots, even deny her true feelings. Until she meets James, but James is very married, and very much in love, to a wife who died two years ago. They both have issues to face from their past, but will it bring them together, or push them apart?
Chapter One.
Her biological clock had started it. Before it sounded its alarm, Laura had been perfectly content. Maybe she should have taken the battery out a bit sooner, but then it was more likely it ran on hormones and they could be tricky.
She drove much too fast along the M56, recklessly even.
The mobile phone on the passenger seat took message after message from Simon. She glanced at it from time to time, then finally switched it off and threw it on to the back seat, where it lay silenced, buried under sample swatches of wallpaper and fabric.
She was already running late because of their argument.
It hadn’t started as an argument; it had started as a discussion. Before she knew it, Laura was fighting her corner again. The discussion was all about family, to start with. It was different for Simon; he had loads of relatives, while Laura only had her sister. It was unfair of him to moan about her spending so much time with Maggie, when the demands of his ex-wife and kids was at times off the Richter scale.
The forty-minute drive from Chester into North Wales led her off the dual carriageway and through the tiny village of Rowen. She sped past The Farmers’ Arms; its smoky dimly lit windows just visible in the January dusk. Then she turned left at the crooked chapel, where her mother lay beneath the dark stars and the shadow of Cefn Bach. Laura shivered, but not with the chill of the evening. Although brought up a farmer’s daughter, Laura could never decide if it was habit or a desire to understand her dislike of it, which brought her back to her rural birthplace. It certainly wasn’t sentiment, and yet this time she felt an unexplained stirring of hope.
She was forced to slow down then and concentrate; the turning for Hafod House was easily missed on the narrow twisting lane. Seconds later, she was pulling up outside the Victorian property, where her elder sister Maggie lived, with Pete and their daughters. Before she announced her arrival, Laura opened the car window and lit a cigarette, but Maggie had heard the car and trotted across the forecourt, wearing a typical combination of tracksuit and a plastic apron with love spoons on the front.
‘Happy birthday!’ Laura said, but Maggie ignored this and peered sideways through the top of the window, ‘Where’s Simon? Is he coming on later?’
‘No. Sorry he’s got to work, bit of an emergency,’ Laura lied, grounding out the cigarette and avoiding her sister’s knowing eye.
‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Eleven is an odd number. I wanted him to meet the Morgan-Jones’. Could be loads of work in it for you. The brother took a lot of persuading to come at all.’
‘Well, they’ll just have to meet me instead,’ Laura said, and even managed to turn a bright smile in Maggie’s direction.
Once in her room, Laura scanned through the messages from Simon, then deleted them all and cried in the noisy privacy of the shower. Why was he so stubborn? He was the same in his business affairs, but that was different, attractive even. Sometimes he only saw it from his side of the fence, but that was why they made such a good team. Laura always put the client’s feelings forward, and Simon saw the black and white business plan. Somehow they all came together in the middle, and everyone got a deal.
Dragon Designs was their joint venture. Five years ago, they had purchased a rundown riverside apartment in Chester, and with the help of Simon’s father, had transformed it and sold it for twice as much as its original worth. Encouraged by the property boom, they went on to purchase two more apartments in the same block, with the same success. Simon, more or less gave up his job as a surveyor to work alongside his father’s building yard, buying run down houses in the right area and getting them up to scratch.
Laura was the creative head of the team. It was her job to dress the finished shell, to use all her skills as a designer to give the property a new identity. Dragon Designs was born, and financially, they’d never looked back.
Peering at her reflection in the gloomy mirror, Laura dried her shoulder length hair. An almost natural dark blonde, helped along a little with subtle highlights every now and again, Laura was blessed with a classic face and a generally well-behaved complexion. Although it was slightly spoilt now with puffy brown eyes, she concealed the worst of it with carefully applied, mostly neutral make-up. Pleased with her appearance, but feeling unsettled and miserable inside, Laura knew she’d have to work hard to hide her angst from Maggie, and keep herself together enough to talk shop.
Simon was good at mixing business with pleasure, gently filtering in the right information, so subtle, the recipient didn’t feel pressured or monopolised. Laura had no such skill. She found her way into the impressive dining room, and the buzz of pride it gave her lifted her spirits. Designing and helping to furnish the dining room had been Laura’s gift for her sister’s thirty-ninth birthday last year. Laura had ripped out the sixties era attempt at modernisation, and restored it back to its original style, with cream walls, ornate cornicing and a rich mahogany floor. To complement all the dark furniture they’d found in local junk and antique shops, Laura had handmade the soft furnishings in a combination of powder blue, cream and white. The effect was quite dazzling, especially when there were logs roaring in the massive fireplace and the chandeliers lit up the silverware on the huge table.
Pete passed her a glass of wine. They exchanged the usual pleasantries, but Laura struggled to make conversation with Maggie’s husband. He had fairly set opinions about most things, and the only time he became animated was when the subject included football or council business. Dinner was late because Maggie was hopelessly disorganised with everything and Pete never offered to help. Well not properly, he always pretended he’d been thrown out of the kitchen and shambled in with a hangdog expression and another six-pack. Eventually though, Maggie materialised with the starters, and everyone took their place.
‘This is my sister everyone!’ Maggie said, loading Laura’s plate with prawn and olive salad. ‘I know she doesn’t look related to me because I’m fat and forty, and she is so obviously not.’
Everyone made polite laughter, and Laura made the usual token protest,
her sister was always running herself down, but Maggie wouldn’t be shushed, ‘She’s an interior designer so if you want one of those make-over jobs she’s your woman.’
After a few moments, the woman seated opposite Laura said, ‘I believe you did this room for Maggie; it’s just so beautiful. Really complements the house.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ Laura said, and pushed some food around her plate.
‘I’m Liz by the way, Morgan-Jones.’
‘Laura Brown. My sister said you had some cottages you wanted to renovate,’ Laura said, trying her best to be professional and not let the opportunity pass.
‘Well, I think so. Nothing this grand though,’ she said, glancing at the swag and tail curtains, then leant in more discreetly across the table. ‘I’m afraid my brother doesn’t agree with my plans, and he has the majority share in the business.’ She inclined her eyes to the left and Laura looked across the table at the exact second Mr Morgan-Jones did. He looked to have been in conversation with Pete, but met Laura’s curiosity with a blank stare. Liz said something about her brother being unsociable and the elderly male guest sat at Laura’s right butted in, ‘James is a genius, he’s allowed to be unsociable, if that’s how he feels.’
‘Yes, but not all the time, surely?’
Laura took in Liz’s outdoor complexion and the strong looking hands, no nails and the no nonsense outfit. From what she could ascertain, without staring, the unsociable majority shareholder was wearing a barely ironed shirt, with the sleeves pushed up; and favoured the same dark weathered look. Farming, or horses she thought. Great. Just about the most uninspiring combination she could possibly think of. She missed Simon’s clever banter. He would know what to say.
The downside of that skill was his ability to make her feel crushed; he could defeat her with his logic as if she were a business problem and it could all be subtracted away with a calculator. Well, this one wasn’t going to be solved with hard fact. Sometimes life happened without prior warning or planning, and that was when Simon struggled to cope.
Aware of staring at her plate, Laura speared a prawn and looked back at Liz.
‘What is it you do?’
‘Horses. Private liveries and teaching is the main bread and butter, and that’s mostly what I do,’ she said, glaring at the old gent, and then began to briskly butter her bread roll. ‘Anyway, I’m getting too old to be working outside. A menopausal woman shouldn’t be expected to stand shouting in driving rain.’
‘And, your brother, what does he do?’
‘James? Oh, a multitude of side-lines,’ she said with a tired smile, then added, ‘no, to be fair he looks after about forty acres of land. His real time is taken up with training and specialist teaching. Only he prefers the more dangerous stuff,’ she went on, ‘you know, horses destined to be shot because they’re loopy, or half dead. He loves nothing better than resurrecting a lost cause. All very commendable, but have you any idea how long these projects take? And then you can’t get rid of them because of their history.’
The man next to Laura vacated his seat and a woman with over-powering perfume slid into his place. ‘Excuse me but are you talking about Indiana Morgan-Jones?’ she said smoothly, wine glass tilting.
‘Why do you call him that?’ Laura said, unsure whether to laugh.
‘Because he has a big leather whip for one.’
Laura did laugh then, but Liz said, ‘Oh leave it out Carla! Laura this is Carla. She’s had about three hundred riding lessons with my brother, with the sole intention of seducing him.’
‘It’s true! He’s one of about, oh, let me see, two, eligible men of this parish. I’ve even bought a bloody horse off him,’ she said. ‘I’ve got thighs like steel and I can mount without stirrups.’
Liz rolled her eyes in Laura’s direction. ‘Carla is the queen of double entendre on the yard.’
The roast, minted lamb arrived with jugs of red wine jus, and Laura was a bit disappointed when Carla went back to her seat and the old man returned.
‘Help yourself everyone,’ Maggie said, plonking down huge silver platters of roasted vegetables between the candelabra.
‘For goodness sake sit down and start enjoying yourself!’ Laura said, but Maggie just wiped her brow with her napkin then flapped it vaguely at Laura’s glass. ‘I am, I am! Why is your glass empty? And have you met Liz? I’m taking Ellie up there for a riding lesson tomorrow, why don’t you come?’ she said loudly.
‘Could you?’ Liz said, unfazed by Maggie’s total lack of discretion.
‘I could take a look,’ Laura said slowly. ‘To be honest all the initial estimating is my partner’s territory.’
‘Oh, I only want ideas at this stage,’ Liz said, ‘you know, something to entice James round to my way of thinking.’
‘Did someone say entice James?’ Carla said.
*
After dinner, they congregated in the sitting room for coffee and brandy, and homemade truffles. From the safety of the sagging sofa, Laura had a better look at Mr Morgan-Jones. He was younger than Liz; borderline scruffy. Shirt half in half out of old Levi’s. He looked quite bored, leaning on the mantlepiece and trapped by Carla, and the old man, who was very animated and talkative. It appeared to be a conversation about horses jumping hedges, because the old man was making arching gesticulations with his hands and then trotting backwards and forwards to illustrate taking off and landing. He even bent his knees and might have swished his tail, had he owned one. When the old man went to get another drink, James sidled away. In fact he tried to leave the party more than once, but his sister herded him back in again.
‘You can’t go straight after being fed, it’s just rude.’
‘I’ve left the dogs outside.’
‘So what? They’re dogs!’
Eventually, he was presented to Laura.
‘This is Laura Brown of Dragon Designs,’ Liz said firmly, ‘Laura, this is my brother James.’
Laura scrambled to her feet. ‘Hi,’ she said, offering her hand. It seemed an age before he accepted. It was a reassuringly firm grip, but he couldn’t have cared less who she was or what she had to say. He had very dark, green eyes, like seaweed or olives. They were sad eyes, she remembered thinking later.
‘I’ve asked Laura to come and take a look at the cottages tomorrow,’ Liz said, throwing James a warning look.
He sighed, ‘Not tomorrow. I’m busy.’
‘She can still look!’
‘I’d rather it wasn’t tomorrow, that’s all.’
‘We need to get something moving,’ Liz hissed at him, ‘In case you’ve forgotten about the overdraft, we need to realise some capital instead of arguing about it. The cottages won’t go through another winter, and while we’re on the subject, another winter feed bill for those brood mares will cripple us. It’s a ridiculous situation!’
‘I’d rather not discuss this in public.’
Laura moistened her lips, ‘Then let’s discuss it in private, tomorrow.’
‘With you?’ James said to her. ‘I don’t need help to match up curtains and cushions.’
‘Is that what you think I do? Play house?’
Liz pursed her lips, ‘James, Laura runs a property developing company. Stop being so bloody patronising!’
‘Sorry,’ he said to Laura. ‘Now if you’ll both excuse me, I’m going home.’
They watched as he retreated across the room. He found Maggie, kissed her goodnight, and gave her a rare smile when she reciprocated. When all the other guests had more or less done the same, Laura sat staring into the struggling fire whilst Pete snored in an armchair. She could hear Maggie waving off the last of the stragglers at the front door. When her sister materialised, still wearing her plastic apron, she waved a bottle of something at Laura. ‘There you are! Nightcap?’
She didn’t wait for a response and began to pour vintage cognac into mugs because she’d run out of glasses. ‘All right, out with it Laura Brown,’ Maggi
e said. ‘Don’t try and fob me off, I know there’s something wrong, so out with it. You’ve had a row, haven’t you?’
‘I’m pregnant.’
At first her sister’s eyes lit up, then when she took in Laura’s expression, her face fell. Several beats passed before she spoke, ‘And…?’
Laura shrugged, ‘I don’t know. Simon is, well he’s already a daddy twice over, isn’t he?’
‘But not with you,’ Maggie said.
The previous day, when Laura had plucked up the courage to tell him, he’d been slightly incredulous, and then when he’d understood the mixed emotions on her face, he’d become steadily more frustrated, mostly by her lack of instant decision.
‘We agreed about the kids thing, when we first got together. You know the problems I already have in that department,’ he’d said, obviously panicked by the thought she’d turn into Alice, who used their children to great effect when she required something of him.
‘Yes, yes I know, but this is different,’ Laura had said. ‘This is ours.’
He’d paced about, anxiously. ‘So, you’ve already made your mind up?’
‘No... I just want us to talk about it.’
They hadn’t really talked about it; emotions were running too high.
Maggie said, ‘But what about you? How do you feel?’
‘Honestly? I don’t know.’
Laura saw the instant disappointment in her sister’s face and felt torn again, pushed one way by Simon, pulled back again by her sister. Maggie did her best to be impartial and supportive, but really she’d had too much to drink, and after all, it was her birthday; so Laura felt mean drawing her into a deep discussion. It surprised her really, how much she valued her sister’s opinion these days.
It was only since Laura had entered her thirties that they had begun to tolerate each other’s point of view and really communicate, even though they were almost opposite in every way.
