‘You did ask me to ring so presumably you didn’t think it was such a bad idea at the time,’ she said, though less brusquely than before.
‘Yes. I mean, no.’ He tried to gather his scattered wits. ‘What I mean is, I’d really like to talk to you.’
‘Talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not in the market for a relationship, or anything like that.’ Her voice carried a heavy note of warning. ‘You need to understand that.’
‘I do, and it’s fine.’
‘But do you? Understand? Because if you think…’
‘Yes, yes, I do. I get it. Totally,’ Morgan said, wondering if he’d ever ‘got’ anything in his whole life.
What the hell had he been thinking, writing that stupid note and passing it over secretly as if they were twelve-year-olds in the middle of a maths lesson? And why, if she was suspicious about his intentions – and who wouldn’t be? – had she bothered to respond? She must already think he was a nut-job. Morgan listened to the silence at the other end of the phone, a silence that seemed to go on for ever. The phone felt huge in his hand, swollen with its own importance.
‘All right,’ she said eventually. ‘I’m not sure why you’d want to, but let’s do it.’
Chapter Six
Layla walked along the river path, veering left and right to avoid the Saturday morning procession of kids on bikes. The wind swooshed through the trees, ripping apart the ragged curtains of the willows, pitting the surface of the brown water and ruffling the feathers of a pair of swans sailing along with the flow. Her hands were buried in the pockets of her hooded top, the zip pulled right up to her chin. She wished she’d worn her parka instead.
It was an omen, the grey, cold day. She shouldn’t be doing this. It was all wrong. It wasn’t too late to turn around and make a run for it. He wouldn’t be able to contact her; at least she’d had the presence of mind to phone him from the anonymity of the hotel reception.
He hadn’t been as she’d expected on the phone. Without an audience – she’d assumed he was alone when he took her call – she’d expected a line of well-versed patter, a confident spiel designed to have her eating out of his hand. Instead, the awkward, clipped conversation had turned everything on its head and she’d ended up feeling as if she was the one doing the asking. As a result, she’d been unintentionally curt, but it hadn’t seemed to put him off.
Nervous as hell she might be, but there was an element of challenge in what she was doing. Whether she was challenging herself or him wasn’t clear.
She reached the café and the kiosk. The two pleasure cruisers were moored by the jetty, a string of rowing boats rocking on the water behind them. The café was busy but the kiosk was deserted; the boats wouldn’t be doing much business on a day like this. The path curved, following the bend in the river. Layla walked on, and suddenly, right in front of her, was the boathouse he’d described.
At some point in its past, the building with its A-shaped roof had been painted white, now weathered to silver-grey. The bare dark wood showed through in places where the paint had peeled away in ragged folds, like skin after sunburn. A life-belt, once red, now faded to a muddy pink, hung loosely from the wall by a fraying rope. The door to the boat storage area had slipped in its frame so that one corner dipped into the water; it looked as if it hadn’t been opened in years.
Stopping on the path a short distance from the boathouse, she looked up at the row of blue-framed windows for signs of movement but saw only the swaying branches of the trees reflected in the darkened glass. The place seemed deserted.
Then a door opened on the upper storey and there he was, beckoning her towards the steps. ‘Hey, come on up.’
Layla crossed the patchy grass and stopped by the steps. Morgan smiled down at her, rubbing his chin. He looked pleased to see her, but a little uncertain, as if, now she was here, he didn’t quite know what to do with her.
She swallowed her own nerves and helped him out. ‘The café, you said?’
‘The café, yes. I’m not quite ready, though.’
Layla walked up the steps, feeling the treads bow slightly under her weight. In other circumstances, she would have suggested that she wait at the bottom, but Morgan’s quietly unassuming manner told her there was no need for caution, or if there was, it was a risk she was prepared to take.
The loft was more spacious than she’d imagined from the outside. The white paint on the walls was intact, if a bit scuffed and grubby in places. Rush matting covered part of the bare wood floor. A trestle table was set up in front of the window overlooking the river. It contained a laptop, pens and a notebook. An old-fashioned leather-seated office chair sat in front of the table. The rest of the furnishings consisted of a small cupboard with a kettle and tea things on top, and a taller cupboard in the corner with layers of newspaper wedged underneath the front, presumably to keep it from toppling forwards. There was a large plastic container of water and some kind of oil heater. A rusty drawing pin secured an old calendar to the wall above the cupboard, its yellowing pages curling at the edges.
Morgan stood quietly, allowing her time to make her inspection before he marched up the table, spun round, and flung out his arms.
‘Welcome to my humble abode. Not literally, of course,’ he said, seeing her questioning smile. ‘There isn’t much scope for abiding, as you can see. I’m up here a couple of days a week, weekends usually. Working.’
He nodded towards the open laptop. She wasn’t sure if he was inviting her to take a look but she did anyway. While he seemed a bit embarrassed, he didn’t try to stop her.
‘It’s a story,’ she said, looking up from the screen. ‘Your story? You’re a writer?’
‘Well, yeah.’ Morgan turned a bit pink and shuffled his feet. ‘It’s kind of what I do here. At least that’s the theory.’
‘Are you famous?’
Well, he could be. Layla felt defensive in the face of Morgan’s laughter. Lots of famous authors wrote in all kinds of odd places, including squalid little sheds. Not that this was squalid, just basic, and sort of cosy, despite its bareness. She could see the appeal.
‘It’s nice in here,’ she said, deliberately changing the subject. ‘I like it.’
‘Do you? Good. So do I.’ Morgan rubbed his hands together and smiled.
‘Yeah. Smells a bit funny, though.’
She wrinkled her nose.
‘It’s linseed oil, from the boats. Still hangs about. I smelt it when I first came but now I don’t. I’ve got used to it, I suppose.’
He explained that the loft had been used in the past as the office for the boatyard, before the owners of the site developed it into a tourist attraction and put up a new office next to the café.
‘Which is where we’re heading now, right?’
It was starting to bother her slightly that he was making no move to leave, other than to shut down the computer and pick up his wallet. She didn’t know him, did she? The open face, the expressive eyes, the ready smile, they were all surface dressing. And yet the more she tried to dredge up an element of self-preservation and remind herself of the stupidity of coming alone to this hidden place on this hidden part of the river to meet a strange man without telling a single soul, the more reassured she felt. He was all right, this Morgan. She didn’t know how she knew that. She just did.
The room darkened. The sky beyond the window had turned to charcoal grey, the piling clouds a dramatic shade of purple.
‘It’s coming on to rain,’ Morgan observed unnecessarily, as the first fat drops hit the window.
He cast a concerned eye over her. ‘You’re not wearing much.’
‘I’ll be fine. We can make a run for it.’
They both turned to look out as the rain pounded the window, rattling the glass. It cascaded through the trees and sleeted down on the river, a mini-monsoon.
‘Or, we could stay here. I have tea, I have milk, I have sugar. I even have biscuits.’
He opened
the cupboard, brought out a round tin and held it up. It had toy soldiers on it.
‘Yes,’ Layla said, nodding. ‘Tea sounds good. Thanks.’
Morgan switched the kettle on. It crackled into life, loud in the sparse surroundings. Layla sat down in the office chair – the only chair there was – and swivelled gently to and fro while she watched, with some amusement, Morgan’s attempts to drop teabags into mugs without missing the mugs altogether. There was a tension in his shoulders, a sudden shyness in his smile as he stood, arms folded, waiting for the water to boil.
‘You don’t look very comfortable on that,’ he said, regarding her appraisingly as if she was an exhibit in a gallery. He held up a forefinger. ‘Tell you what…’
Turning on his heel, he went to the tall cupboard in the corner. It rocked as he opened the door. He put out a hand to steady it and dragged out a green and orange checked blanket, unfolded it and shook it out, sprinkling the floorboards with dust and a tobacco-like mix of dead grass and leaves. Spreading the blanket carefully over the rush matting in the middle of the room, he looked at Layla for approval.
‘Picnic?’
Smiling, she got out of the chair and sat down, cross-legged, on the blanket. She watched Morgan make the tea while the room filled with a peculiar half-light and the hammering rain drowned out the sound of the rushing river.
It had seemed less like a picnic and more like a weird tea-drinking ritual as Morgan had sat facing her, mirroring her cross-legged position, two chipped mugs in front of them and the toy-soldier biscuit tin placed dead centre on the blanket.
They had talked about home and family, and school, and university, and work, and Morgan’s writing. They’d discovered a shared taste in books and, to a lesser extent, music. They’d talked about travel and holidays, realising with exaggerated delight that they’d both been in Spain in the same week in August two years ago, Morgan in Barcelona, Layla in Benidorm. Layla told him she’d love to work in a New York kitchen, in a proper high-end restaurant – Candy, an American friend from her course at uni, had given her the idea and it had crystallised into a real ambition.
At some point in the conversation she’d learned that Morgan had a girlfriend. He hadn’t made a big deal out of it, but he wouldn’t have needed to. Clearly, he had taken in what she’d said on the phone about not wanting a relationship; she was grateful for that. He had mentioned the name ‘Kate’ a couple of times, and when she’d asked casually ‘Is Kate your girlfriend?’ he’d said yes, she was, before continuing with a funny story about an incident with a fork-lift truck in a warehouse.
In the midst of all this, something indefinable had happened; a kind of connection between them, an extension, perhaps, of what had happened on the boat. She’d felt it in the boathouse, rising like smoke through the easy chat and laughter. She felt it now as she walked back along the riverbank, holding a shabby old black umbrella that Morgan found in the cupboard and insisted she take, although the rain had almost stopped by the time she left.
She’d imagined it, of course. The peacefulness of the boathouse, its scenic setting, the sense of isolation and the thunderous skies had all conspired to create an air of intimacy as they’d sat enclosed in a half-lit world that extended no further than the edge of a picnic rug.
She was tired from long, gruelling shifts at the Manor, and stressed because she was worried about Mum and Jadine, as well as the Morlands. Always the Morlands. No wonder her imagination had taken flight. Morgan was a nice guy whom she happened to strike up a rapport with, that was all. He might be a genuinely good person whose intentions were, as her mother would put it, entirely honourable, if a touch off-kilter. Or, bringing the girlfriend into the equation, he might not.
Well, it didn’t matter either way because she wouldn’t be seeing him again; the risk was too great. Already she had pushed herself a stage too far by agreeing to meet him in the first place. It may have been the start of a beautiful friendship – an unusual start, remembering the way they’d met – but friendship, nevertheless. And that was fine, if that was the way it turned out.
The problem was that as they’d sat in the boathouse loft and talked about innocuous things, she’d felt the protective layers she’d built up so carefully beginning to lift away, threatening to leaving her raw and exposed, and receptive, potentially, to the kind of feeling that could turn the world around in a heartbeat.
The kind of feeling she’d experienced with Harvey. The kind of feeling she would never have again, because she wouldn’t let it happen.
Chapter Seven
Harvey was a sportsman. Football, cycling, running, surfing, skiing – when he could afford it – and rugby, especially rugby, the numerous scars of which he bore with martyred pride. He couldn’t get enough of it. And he couldn’t get enough of Layla.
They’d met at the university Freshers’ Fair, held in a marquee on the campus. She was about to enter her final year and he was one of a group of newly-enrolled sports science students queuing noisily at the desk where Layla was helping to hand out free condoms and leaflets on sexual health, something he reminded her of incessantly and with great merriment during the course of their intense eight-month relationship.
Harvey had a great sense of humour, a bit silly and twisted at times, but he made her laugh and she liked that. That and his overtly handsome blond looks, his unbelievably perfect body, and the things he did to hers that made her feel as if she’d died and gone to Heaven. He wasn’t her type, he wasn’t her age – he was two years younger – and on the face of it they had nothing in common. He was, however, impossible to resist, and Layla didn’t even try.
By the end of that winter, she had her own collection of rugby scars. Shivering on the touchline with a clutch of other girls most Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, she acquired a hoarseness of voice from all the shouting, thread veins on her cheeks from the cold wind and a permanent cough that developed into full-blown bronchitis at least once every six weeks. But she didn’t care about any of that because Harvey Donohue was, if not the love of her life, then a very close runner.
Apart from Harvey, the person Layla spent most of her time with was Danni Morland, a student on the English and journalism course. Thrown together on the same corridor in the scuffed 1960s block – the first year halls of residence – they had spent their first week consoling and commiserating, and cooking up massive amounts of comfort food in the kitchen they shared with four other new students. And then they had come round to thinking that perhaps it wasn’t going to be that awful after all, and they’d gone out and started having fun.
In their second year, they moved out of halls and into a gloomy maisonette in a converted, crumbling Victorian villa, where they shared a vast bedroom and stuffed newspaper up the chimney and into the window frames to keep out the cold. The modernised terraced house they shared in their final year with three other students, all male, felt luxurious in comparison. They had a bedroom each, proper heating and a well-equipped kitchen which mostly they had to themselves; the boys merely passed through in order to empty the cereal packets, or pinch all the forks for mammoth takeaways that stank the place out for days afterwards.
The summer term began, their last, and already their lives were changing. A low level sense of panic hiked into being and rose to a crescendo when the exam timetables were published. Layla and Danni looked at the screen, then at each other, thinking the same. This was real; it was happening, whether they were ready or not.
They weren’t. Layla’s practical cookery exams were out of the way but there was a mass of revision to get through for the theory exams. Still, as long as she put in the hours and struck lucky with the questions, she should be just about okay. Danni, though, seemed to have a death wish where finals were concerned. She hadn’t read half the books she was supposed to for her English course – according to her, anyway – and crammed them in, night after night, in hugely indigestible chunks. By day, she tackled the rest of her revision in frenetic bursts of energy which did
her no good at all, because it was never long before she was off the case and onto one of an entirely different nature: a geography student called Nathan.
Danni’s unrelenting major crush on this guy had sustained a fatal blow when, after several dates and one ill-judged night of passion, he dropped her without warning or explanation. Danni was distraught – unnaturally so, in Layla’s opinion. It wasn’t like her to be so upset over a bloke, especially one she’d known for such a short time. Her calls and messages unanswered, Danni made regular reccies of Nathan’s favourite haunts, hoping to bump into him, but she never did. Layla was secretly glad. Rumour had it that Nathan had moved on and was busily souring the atmosphere behind the campus library loans desk while he worked his way through the coterie of young, pretty assistants.
Danni refused to believe a word of it, nor did she lose faith. Nathan was working his way up to asking her to take him back, she said, plucking another tissue from the box beside her bed. Arguing was pointless, even though there was no evidence to support this theory. Layla could only pray that Danni’s priorities shuffled themselves into the right order before any serious damage was done. Meanwhile, she did all a friend could do by way of offering distraction and comfort, and an endlessly listening ear, even though her patience had begun to wear thin in the end.
Unfortunately for Danni, Nathan was not her only problem; there was obviously some sort of ongoing argument with her parents at the time. Layla didn’t know the details because, unusually for Danni, she refused to talk about it. She only knew that Danni had returned from a weekend visit half a day early with a slam of the front door and an exaggerated cheerleader bounce, switched on at the exact moment she set eyes on Layla. It was impossible to miss, too, the unprecedented number of calls from home Danni fielded, and which she would either dismiss without answering or conduct fierce, back-turned conversations just out of Layla’s range.
Never Coming Back: a tale of loss and new beginnings Page 6
