by Gemma Fox
It had felt like he was claiming her back for himself, taking her back from Patrick and motherhood and all the things that had separated them, and she had wept with relief as they lay in the dark, thinking it would be all right, thinking that they could make it work, thinking that at last she was home.
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘But I didn’t know what your little game was then, did I?’
‘My game?’ she gasped. ‘What little game?’
He carried on as if she hadn’t spoken. ‘You tricked me—this is what you wanted, isn’t it, Leonora? Your nice little house, and your cosy little family. Well, I’ve got news for you…’
‘No.’ She shook her head, covering her ears with her hands, not wanting to hear what he had to say, hurt and anger making her eyes fill with bitter tears. ‘You were the one who wanted a family, Gareth, that’s what you said—all that stuff about having kids and dogs, and rabbits in the garden—please, Gareth—please. Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘What time will you be—’
The door slammed tight shut on any answer, not that she thought there would be one.
And now Gareth was gone all over again, the cruel ghost slipping through her fingers just as the real man had, and why was it that it made her feel so pitiful? How was it that he had taken all the power with him?
Once she had found whereabouts the village was, Leonora padded barefoot upstairs and put Burbeck House into a search engine on one of Gareth’s precious computers and worked out the best route. She scrolled down and read the directions, heart sinking as she did. Whichever way you looked at it, Burbeck was miles from anywhere. It wasn’t going to be easy getting there without a car. It wouldn’t have been easy getting there even with one. Bloody man.
‘And, anyway, what sort of job do you think you’re going to get at night with a degree in Art, for God’s sake? No one in the real world gives a shit about what you think about Botticelli. You’ll end up filling shelves in a supermarket, working behind a bar in the pub. Cleaning offices…’
She blanched; Gareth’s voice had followed her upstairs like a wraith.
‘I don’t mind doing any of those things. Maybe I could find something part time during the day. Other people do it,’ Leonora said, aware of how defensive she sounded.
He looked her up and down. ‘So they do, but the trouble is that that little pinko gallery job you had before you had the kids wouldn’t keep us in biscuits after the childcare costs had been taken out. Your trouble, Leonora, is that you live in a fantasy world.’
‘I could paint again,’ she said.
His expression told her everything; there was no need for a single word.
Leonora bit her lip and stared down at the map, trying to shut his voice out.
A taxi was totally out of the question and the train would be tricky, but not impossible—lots of changes and still a taxi ride at the other end. It would be hard with the kids. There wasn’t a coach service that ran within twenty miles of Burbeck and, besides that—once she had seen Gareth, once she had had her say, what would happen then? What would they do? Did she truly expect it would all come out right? That Gareth would want to come home with them?
Trembling, Leonora scanned the notes she had made after talking to Diana’s husband, trying to make sense of what she’d written. In a sterling effort to be as helpful as possible he had read everything out and she had made an equal effort to write it all down. Times of arrival, times of departure, things to bring, what to wear, schedules and then further down a scrawled note about the performance for family and friends on Sunday afternoon.
Leonora stared at it: ‘Family and friends are invited to a rehearsed read-through on Sunday afternoon, followed by tea,’ and as the words settled an idea formed—maybe there was a way after all. If there was someone else going to Burbeck House from close by, or even not so close by but passing, then maybe they might be prepared to pick her up and take her and the children as well? It had to be worth a shot.
She just needed to talk to Diana. Leonora picked up the phone on Gareth’s desk and tapped in the number again.
After a second or two Gareth appeared to remember Carol was there, watching him and he said hastily, ‘I’m sorry, I’m hogging the spotlight. Why don’t you tell me about what you’ve been up to? Diana tells me that you’re a gardener now and have got a fleet of hoaryhanded sons of the soil hanging on your every word. Shades of Lady Chatterley?’
‘I bet Diana didn’t say that at all and besides, the Lady Chatterley thing was the gamekeeper not a gardener,’ Carol said. ‘And I’m interested in how life has been treating you since we last met.’ She wanted to know about him, all about him, but Gareth wasn’t going to be so easily swayed.
‘God, no, I’m just another geek, nothing special.’
‘Are you still in the theatre?’
‘On the periphery. I’m involved in IT for a couple of art projects, galleries, but how about you? Successful business woman, own company, double-page spread in the Sunday colour supplements—you didn’t ought to be so modest, Carol. I’m very impressed.’ To her astonishment, as he spoke Gareth lifted a hand and drew a finger down over her cheek. ‘You know you haven’t changed a bit.’
She stared at him. How could anyone say something like that and it not sound like a re ally cheesy line? ‘Don’t be silly,’ Carol said, torn between delight and feeling hideously selfconscious. Further up the table Adie and Netty feigned swooning and added mock vomiting. She could have killed them both. Easily.
Gareth seemed oblivious. ‘I’m serious. OK, maybe there’s a wrinkle here and a line there,’ he traced them with his eyes, ‘but you look very much like the Carol I remember.’
The Carol he had screwed, she thought ruefully, wishing for the first time that there had been some wine.
It was also very different then, when sex and all the things that surrounded it were mysterious possibilities and rumours, uncharted waters out beyond the shallows of a few embarrassed fumblings and a lot of urges that nobody knew the right name for. Certainly not like married sex, a chore that came between sorting the laundry and cleaning out the guinea pig.
Sex in the sixth form then was part of a whole unknown continent—something and somewhere yet to be explored. Sex and desire were noisy back then too, a bit like a loud hum or the insistent buzz of cicadas, that ran like an undercurrent to lots of encounters.
Sitting out on the veranda of the cricket pavilion, reading through a scene in the play, bathed in sunshine the colour of fresh lemons squeezed through a cloudy sky, Carol remembered it well. It had been very noisy, practically deafening.
She must have read the play through a hundred times since that first time in the pavilion with Gareth. The last time was earlier in the week, just before she had packed to come to Burbeck House, from a book that, like Miss Haze’s, was all neatly annotated, numbered and underscored. But even so, no matter how many times she read it, without fail it always took her back to that moment and that place and Gareth Howard. Hard-wired history, half a dozen lines in and she was up there on the playing field in the sunshine.
It was a warm day in early spring. Carol had stretched, and pulled up white socks, which were regulation school uniform whether you were eighteen or not, and looked across at him. Gareth was so close she could see the pulse in his throat and the merest trace of shaving stubble.
‘So where shall we go from?’ he’d said conversationally, flipping through the script. ‘How about act one, scene five: From the first time we’re together. Macbeth and Mrs Macbeth at home, weighing up the pros and cons of killing the king, because the three witches—’
A.k.a. Netty, Diana and Jan and the wart, thought Carol.
‘- told him that he’ll be king, and Mrs Macbeth has the perfect plan to help him on his way. So she’s not best pleased when Macbeth bottles out, and says so. That’s a bit later.’ He flipped through the script. ‘Act one, scene seven.’
Carol nodded and began to re
ad and then hesitated, marking where she had dried with a pencil so she wouldn’t lose her place. ‘The woman is a complete loony. I can’t believe Macbeth does what she tells him. Surely he must be able to see that she is nuts.’
‘Self-seeking and morbidly ambitious is what Mr Bearman told me, rather than barking and drooling,’ Gareth said, looking up from his own notes.
‘Right,’ Carol said, nodding in what she hoped was an intelligent way. She knew what barking and drooling were; morbidly ambitious wasn’t quite so obvious.
Gareth smiled at her. There was a funny uncomfortable little pause and the noise that sex and desire made got louder. Carol reddened, self-conscious at being with him and being so close to him.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I just thought that it might help. I wasn’t saying you didn’t know or anything.’
Carol managed a smile. ‘No, no. It’s OK—it’s not that, it’s just I’m finding it hard to get my head round the language. You re ally have to concentrate to make it make sense.’
He nodded. ‘Mr Bearman suggested we might need a line-by-line session to get the meaning. Most of it’s OK, it’s odd phrases that I don’t get but they throw the whole thing out totally.’
‘It makes more sense said aloud,’ Carol said.
Simmering away just below the stilted but apparently normal conversation, attraction and desire crackled and rolled like a summer storm, making the hair on the back of Carol’s neck stand up. Her tongue felt as if it was too big for her mouth and everything she said sounded either gibberish or totally inane.
She and Gareth were sitting side by side on a big roll of sisal netting that the school used for the cricket teams to practise in. She could smell him, feel the heat of him. It made her heart beat so loud that she couldn’t hear herself think.
‘So where did we get to?’ he said, glancing back at the script.
Carol could barely hear his voice above the roar of her pulse and the white noise of lust. ‘Halfway down page forty-two, Lady M, all outrage and fury because it looks as if Macbeth might be bottling out, “What Beast was’t then/That made you break this enterprise to me?”’
Gareth nodded. ‘She’s convinced he won’t go through with stabbing Duncan.’
Carol sighed. ‘Who could blame him?’ She stared at the page and then began to read, trying to find the tone for a woman hellbent on murder. She read haltingly—and on down the page until she got to, ‘“I have given suck, and know/How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me—”’ Blushing furiously, Carol looked up and realised with horror that Gareth was looking thoughtfully at the curves in her school blouse. It did nothing at all to help her concentration. She took a deep breath.
‘“I would, while it was smiling in my face/Have pluck’d my nipp—”’ She stopped dead, totally unable to carry on. Nipple was a word too far. She could feel Gareth’s eyes as hot as hands on her body, felt a great rolling wave of desire that almost made her choke, and froze. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled lamely. ‘It’s all a bit much—you know.’
‘It’s fine,’ said Gareth gently. ‘It is a big speech,’ and then, barely looking at the page, recited the line she had stumbled over: ‘“…would, while it was smiling in my face/Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,”’ all the while grinning from ear to ear.
‘The woman re ally was a total cow,’ snapped Carol, slamming the book shut, but they both knew that it wasn’t Lady Macbeth’s morals that were making Carol blush.
Sitting there under cover of the pavilion canopy, the air heady with the smell of sisal and sunshine and sex, Carol was horribly aware of the effect Gareth was having on her body and damned if, twenty years later, he wasn’t doing it all over again.
Across the table at Burbeck House he was still grinning, the face now much older but the expression almost unchanged. Carol shivered.
He tipped a glass of apple juice in her direction by way of salute and invitation. ‘I’m not sure I can face my rhubarb crumble. How do you fancy a stroll down to the pub instead?’
Before Carol could answer Adie leaned across and nodded. ‘Damn good idea, Gareth. I don’t know about you but I could murder a pint.’ As he spoke most of the student contingent on the top table rose as a body. It seemed that they were planning to protect Carol from herself. She got up, more from amazement than anything else, and as she did Diana caught hold of Carol’s arm and said, ‘Are you coming upstairs with me to get a jacket?’
Carol was about to say no, it was a beautiful evening, when Netty nodded on her behalf and between them they guided Carol—who was too surprised to resist—out of the dining room with all the efficiency of a police escort.
‘But it’s re ally warm out there,’ Gareth protested to their retreating backs, not that it made a blind bit of difference.
‘What is going on?’ Carol hissed furiously as Netty caught hold of her elbow.
Gareth watched their progress with interest and so, she noticed, did Fiona, who, before Carol had even reached the door, made her way back along the table towards where Gareth was sitting and slipped into the seat Carol had so recently vacated.
‘What is this about?’ asked Carol, finally shaking herself free.
‘Well, you can put your tongue back in for a start,’ growled Netty, handing Carol a tissue as they stepped out of the entrance hall into the warm night air.
‘What’s that for?’
‘To wipe the drool off the front of your dress.’
‘What do you mean?’ said Carol, instinctively looking down.
Netty shook her head. ‘You should be on a leash. That man makes me so angry. Gareth Howard was always a smooth operator at school. He’s got it turned up to boil tonight.’
‘Meaning what, exactly?’ snapped Carol, straightening her clothes.
Diana, busy picking her way along the path in dainty sandals, said, ‘I don’t know, Netty. I’ve spoken to him quite a lot just recently. He seemed very nice to me.’
‘In that case why did you help her grab me?’ growled Carol, rounding on Diana.
‘Because Netty told me to,’ said Diana lamely. ‘And anyway, I thought we were just going upstairs to get our jackets?’
Netty snorted and mimed slapping her forehead. ‘Give me strength. The bloody man was all over you like a rash. He’s looking to get laid, Carol; carry on where he left off the summer we left school. How much more explicit do you need this to be? You were like a lamb to the slaughter in there.’
‘I was not,’ she said.
‘OK,’ said Netty pulling out a cigarette. ‘It’s just that I’ve met a lot of guys like Gareth in my time and, trust me, you’re not in his league.’
Carol glared at her. ‘And you are?’
‘I didn’t say that; the man is a wolf.’
‘Maybe that’s what I wanted,’ Carol growled indignantly.
Netty stared at her and lifted an eyebrow. ‘re ally?’
‘We’re both grown-ups, Netty. We both know what we’re up to.’ Carol could feel her colour rising. Was she going to spend the whole weekend blushing? OK, so he had been flirting, and so had she. Was it re ally that important? And also—said a little voice in the back of her head—wasn’t that exactly what she had come to find out?
Netty didn’t look convinced.
‘You’ve barely spoken to him,’ Carol said crossly, trying to sound suitably outraged while making every effort to hang on to her dignity.
‘Oh, trust me, I didn’t need to talk to him. What he wanted was coming over loud and clear. You’d have to have been dead not to notice,’ said Netty, lighting up. For the first time in heaven knew how many years Carol re ally wished that she still smoked.
‘I don’t need a moral compass, Netty—I know what I’m doing. I’m nearly forty, for God’s sake. I don’t need you to tell me what’s right and what’s wrong. I can do what I like. You did this before—remember? Radwell High? Last performance of the season? Pulling me off after the show and giving me the lecture about being careful and not
getting myself hurt?’ Carol could feel tears prickling and was angry with herself. ‘What was all that about?’
Netty stared at her, expression unchanged. ‘Because I cared then and I care now.’
‘What if carrying on where we left off is exactly what I want? What we both want? What if that was exactly what I came here for?’ Carol could feel her temper rising, and besides, sometimes the best place to hide the truth is right out there in plain sight. ‘And you have to admit he is gorgeous.’
Netty shook her head. ‘No, he’s not gorgeous Carol. He is a predator. The man is a bastard. OK, so he is a charming, good-looking bastard, but he’s a bastard nonetheless. He’s got it written all over him; probably runs right through him like a stick of rock. He’s obviously on the make or the take or both. Trust me—I know these things.’
Carol was too angry and too hurt to speak.
‘But,’ said Netty, dropping an arm around her shoulder, ‘you’re going to do what you want anyway, and you’re my friend, and sometimes friends do daft things, and it doesn’t change anything, I’ll still love you, however stupid you are.’
Carol’s eyes filled up with tears. ‘Bitch,’ she sniffed.
Netty laughed. ‘You say bitch like it’s a bad thing.’
‘Where are we going?’ asked Diana, hurrying to keep pace with them.
‘Round the back to the fire escape—Jan and I found a short cut earlier.’
‘Which reminds me, where exactly is Jan?’ said Carol, looking back over her shoulder.
‘Talking to Adie, I would have thought,’ said Netty, taking a long pull on her cigarette. ‘There are a lot of things those two need to talk about.’
Carol stared at her. ‘Meaning what, exactly?’
‘Meaning just that. You’re not the only one who came here thinking about carrying on where they left off. We’ve all got a lot of history to clear up. You and Gareth, Adie and Jan—’
Carol stared at her, feeling she had missed something vital. ‘What about Adie and Jan?’ But it was too late. Netty quickened the pace.
