‘In what way? Here, take Emmie, I have to put her bottle to warm …’
‘Of the way we treated you and Matt. When he is clearly so kind and loves you so much. What he’s doing for us, with the house – well, it makes everything so much better. I don’t know how to make it up to him, I really don’t.’
‘Oh, Mummy,’ said Eliza. ‘That’s easy. Just tell him what it means to you. He’ll understand the rest. He’s not nearly as – as difficult as he seems. I’m just glad he could do it for you. Now, I wouldn’t mind a drop of that whisky myself.’
She looked round at the scene, five minutes later, as Emmie sucked peacefully on her bottle and she and her mother downed rather large glasses of Adrian’s best single malt, and giggled.
‘If a health visitor came round now,’ she said, ‘Emmie would be taken into care. Alcoholic mother and grandmother.’
Chapter 29
She had been afraid that someone might beat her to it, have discovered it for themselves and set up some alternative deal. Or – of course – that it was not quite as she had thought, less perfect, less tailor-made for her purpose.
She need not have worried.
‘Miss Scarlett,’ said Demetrios, beaming at her as she walked into the foyer, the still blessedly small foyer, a wonderful sweet, cool contrast to the pelting heat outside. ‘How very, very nice to see you once more.’
‘It’s lovely to see you too, Demetrios. Are you both well, you and Larissa?’
‘Very, very well. Larissa is having a baby—’
‘A baby! How lovely.’
Would she ever be able to contemplate babies again without a catch at her heart?
‘Yes. Very soon, in three, four weeks.’
‘That’s wonderful. So – is she resting?’
‘Resting? No, Miss Scarlett, she is busy, busy in the kitchen, busy in the garden, I don’t know where she is not busy.’
‘Well, I’ll catch up with her later. You know why I’ve come?’
‘I do. And we think it is very, very good plan. We would like to join your club after all. If we may.’
They had been wary at first; afraid of losing their uniqueness, their personal running of the place.
‘Excellent. We can talk tonight.’
Over dinner in the vine-roofed veranda, watching the sunset, she chatted to them both, agreed terms, told them it would be for the following year.
‘I know most bookings are in January, February time, so there’s no point doing anything before then. You can go in my next little brochure, and – well, I’m sure you’ll get lots of people.’
‘Lots of nice people?’
‘I can’t guarantee it,’ said Scarlett, laughing, ‘but just let me know about any who aren’t and I’ll tell them they’re out of my club. Oh—’ she added, as a tall shadow fell across her view, briefly blotting out the sunset. ‘Oh, hello.’
The owner of the shadow looked at her blankly, and attempted a rather anxious smile.
‘I don’t think—’
‘Mr Frost. Good evening. Can we get you a drink? You remember Miss Scarlett, she was here last year at the same time as you. Excuse me. Larissa, can you get some vine leaves, perhaps, and some olives …’
‘I – well, of course, I—’ He looked increasingly bewildered.
Scarlett took pity on him, stood up, held out her hand.
‘Why should you remember? I was staying here, on my own, and so were you, but we overlapped by only one night. Scarlett Shaw.’
‘Ah. Well – yes, of course. How rude of me.’ He took her hand. ‘Mark Frost. How do you do, Miss Shaw?’
‘Please join me. I’m just chatting to Demetrios and Larissa.’
‘Oh – no, I couldn’t – that is, no I’m just passing – I—’
Since there was nowhere to pass from or to at the taverna, this was clearly a feeble attempt to escape; Scarlett felt quite sorry for him. He was so clearly excruciatingly shy, it would have been cruel to pursue the encounter. She would make her excuses and disappear to her room; but Demetrios had returned with a bottle of ouzo and four glasses.
‘There. We all drink together. Larissa will be back very soon. Mr Frost is building a house here, Miss Scarlett.’
‘Oh, so you are building it?’ said Scarlett, passing him the glass of ouzo, hoping it would help him feel better. She actually hated the stuff, sipping at it cautiously now so as not to offend Demetrios.
‘Yes,’ he said, clearly slightly baffled by her question, ‘yes, I am.’
‘I heard you were looking for somewhere to build,’ she said, ‘Demetrios told me, after you’d left last year.’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s correct.’
‘And – is it going well?’
‘Yes. Very well.’
‘How near completion is it?’
‘Not very near. They are only just starting work now. So—’
‘Perhaps tomorrow, Mr Frost, you could show the house to Miss Scarlett.’
‘Oh – I don’t think—’ He looked as if Demetrios had suggested Scarlett did a striptease.
‘No, no, Demetrios,’ she said quickly, ‘you know I’m leaving first thing. But are you staying here while your house is being built, Mr Frost?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am. Not all the time, of course. Just – just when I can get away.’
‘Of course.’
She smiled at him; he smiled back, very briefly, his whole persona transformed. He was, she realised, quite exceptionally good-looking in a kind of chiselled way; she had not properly absorbed that fact before, the height, the slenderness, and the floppy dark hair. What she had remembered were the unusually dark grey eyes looking warily out from the wire-framed spectacles. He was wearing a blue denim shirt with frayed jeans and washed-out-looking espadrilles; he was very tanned and when he did smile, his teeth were American-perfect. He could have been a film star.
‘So – where’s home?’
‘England,’ he said. Not a very detailed piece of information.
‘And you work in England?’
‘Yes. Most of the time.’
‘But – you obviously love Greece?’
‘Yes.’
Scarlett gave up. The thing about people as shy – or, to be precise, unforthcoming – as Mark Frost was that you couldn’t make any progress without asking endless questions, and that seemed, after a while, intrusive and impertinent.
‘Mr Frost found out about us through a friend,’ said Demetrios, as if reading her thoughts. ‘Is that right, Mr Frost?’
‘Yes. That’s right.’
‘His friend came here three years ago and he very kindly suggested Mr Frost came to see us.’
There was a silence; Larissa came back and started speaking very fast to Demetrios in Greek. After a few minutes, she stood up and beckoned to him to follow.
‘Excuse us,’ he said.
Left alone with Mark Frost, Scarlett felt quite panicky, then told herself she was being ridiculous and made one more attempt.
‘So, what do you do?’ she asked. ‘What sort of work are you in?’ Trainee Trappist monk perhaps?
‘Oh – I – I –’ there was a pause, then, ‘do research,’ he said as if suddenly alighting on an explanation.
‘Oh, really? Into what?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, I mean what sort of thing do you research?’
‘Oh. Oh, I see. Yes. Well – geography, I suppose you could call it.’
‘So – are you a lecturer?’
‘Not exactly.’
He poured himself some more ouzo, offered the bottle to her. She shook her head. ‘No thank you.’
Another silence. Then, ‘Filthy stuff isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I observed you not drinking it. I don’t like it either, only drink it to please Demetrios. Shall we …?’ He looked over his shoulder into the house and then, confident of not being observed, tipped most of the bottle into one of the pots of budding geraniums.
‘Probably kill the poor things,’
he said, ‘but better them than us.’
Scarlett looked at him consideringly; he suddenly seemed a different person. ‘Indeed,’ she said.
‘So – you must like it here a lot. To come back.’
‘I absolutely love it. I was afraid it wasn’t as special as I remembered, but it was.’
‘I always fear the same thing,’ he said, not sounding in the least surprised, ‘but it always is.’
‘You must like it very much,’ said Scarlett, ‘to be building a house here.’
‘Indeed,’ he said, and lapsed back into total silence. After a minute or two, she decided her book would be more interesting and stood up.
‘I think I’ll turn in,’ she said, ‘I’m leaving early.’
‘Ah. Getting Ari the Ferry out of his bed early. No mean feat.’
She giggled, surprised again at this flash of humour. ‘Is that your name for him?’
‘It is. Well, I discovered his name was Aristotle and I couldn’t resist it. I’m part Welsh, you see, and in Wales everyone is Dai the Baker or Jones the Fish. It came from that.’ He stopped and looked quite anxious, as if aware he had made too big a revelation. He’s afraid I’m going to start asking him about Wales, Scarlett thought. ‘Goodnight then,’ she said and saw the relief almost palpable on his face. He was a nutcase.
‘Goodnight,’ he said, standing up and shaking her hand formally, ‘safe journey.’
Her last thought was that in the right circumstances, Mark Frost could – just possibly – be quite fun.
‘I just – don’t like it. I’m sorry.’
‘But, Matt, why not? What’s wrong with it?’
‘He’s married for a start.’
‘Matt! He hasn’t seen her in years.’
‘And how do you know that’s true?’
‘Matt! For God’s sake. I don’t know, not for sure, but I trust him.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
‘Funny thing to say about your business partner.’
‘That’s not what I meant and you know it.’
‘Oh, Matt. Chill out. I’ve got an appointment, I’ll see you later.’
Driving into Chelsea, playing ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’ by the Stones very loudly, Louise smiled to herself. She did enjoy rattling Matt. And he was seriously rattled by the fact that she was having an affair with Barry Floyd. She would have liked to think he was jealous, but it was a less flattering reason: he felt professionally threatened by it. He thought they’d gang up on him. Which was pathetic really. She was too professional in the first place, and it stung that he might even consider it; and in the second, the partnership was much too successful to put at risk. Barkers Park was going up fast, WireHire were perfect tenants, making stage payments on the dot, agreeing to a bonus payment if the offices were finished ahead of time.
There was no way either of them would want to change the basis of any part of their working relationship.
Their personal one, however, had changed rather quickly.
‘I mean, I thought he was pretty sexy,’ Louise explained to Valerie Hill, who had become her confidante over the whole thing. ‘But I knew about Maura, of course—’
‘The wife?’ Valerie managed to convey a lot in those two words: that wives were asking for trouble and their husbands fair game if they weren’t keeping an eye on them, and were too complacent to worry about what they were up to.
‘The wife. Yes. But—’
‘Don’t tell me, in name only.’
‘If living with another man means in name only, yes. And don’t look at me like that, it’s true. They were married when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. She was in the family way, or told him she was, and then surprise, surprise, soon as they were married, she had a miscarriage. He said he walked straight into it. Well, you would at eighteen, wouldn’t you?’
‘I wouldn’t,’ said Valerie. ‘So then what happened?’
‘Well then, she did have three babies, over the next five years or so, but then when Barry came to London, she stayed behind and then started playing around, got very friendly with this farmer—’
‘Louise,’ said Valerie, ‘are you sure it wasn’t him playing around? He doesn’t seem too much of an innocent to me.’
‘Oh, no doubt he did too,’ said Louise. ‘I’m not that stupid. But now she’s living with the farmer over there, and …’
‘Don’t tell me they’re going to get a divorce.’
‘No, of course not. It’s not an option in Catholic Ireland. And even an annulment is virtually impossible unless you’re best friends with the pope. But a lot of people just do what Barry and Maura are doing and get on with their lives. He sends her money, of course, a lot, and besides, the farmer is not exactly poor as far as I can make out.’
‘And are you sure this is all on the level?’
‘As sure as I could be without going over there and checking it out for myself.’
The fact was that, in spite of her tough talking, Louise wasn’t entirely happy about getting involved with a married man. In the first place, she knew that, given the divorce laws in Ireland, it could never lead to anything permanent; and in the second, and more importantly, it was against her rather complex moral code. She really didn’t like girls who broke up marriages; in fact she disapproved of them quite strongly. She had grown up in a very moral culture that respected marriage and the family above all things; and she had struggled with herself considerably over taking the affair with Barry any further than their ongoing and very light-hearted flirtation.
But, she was beginning to find her single lifestyle unsatisfactory; she didn’t dream of a home and babies, but she was beginning to think she would like to have someone to share things with, not just her leisure time and her bed, but the contents of her head, her thoughts, her plans, her ambitions for herself, someone who understood her and what she was about. The only man who had ever fitted that brief was Matt Shaw; and he was clearly hopelessly in love with someone else – someone who just happened to be his wife and the mother of his adored child.
But she discovered on their very first date that Barry Floyd did fill the brief extraordinarily well.
He’d asked her out to dinner one evening, after they had been to a meeting at Barkers Park, and then made an unapologetic pass at her afterwards (‘You know, I fancy you absolutely, Louise, and I just get the feeling you might return the favour, and if you do, well, I wonder if you’d like to take it a little further’).
Not wishing to be a pushover, Louise had said that dinner was all well and good, and that yes, she didn’t find him completely unattractive, but she wasn’t sure how much, or indeed if at all, she wanted to take it even a little further, and that she didn’t approve of women who slept with married men; Barry said, his blue eyes dancing, that he couldn’t recall having mentioned anything about sleeping, all he’d had in mind was a second date.
‘You’re a liar, Barry Floyd,’ Louise said, pushing his hand from where it was resting on her knee, and struggling to ignore the effect it was having on the area just above it, ‘and you are married and don’t give me any of that rubbish about how it’s in name only, because I won’t believe you.’
‘So you’re just an old-fashioned girl at heart, are you?’ he said, and she said if not wanting to put a marriage at risk made her old-fashioned, yes she was.
They had a second dinner. It was even better than the first: just as much fun, but they talked more, about more serious things, the business, the future and, as the wine went down, their own hopes and fears. And he told her about Maura and the state of his marriage.
‘I make no apologies for how it sounds,’ he said, his blue eyes fixed very seriously on hers, ‘which is terribly corny and extremely unlikely to a hugely intelligent girl like yourself. But it’s true. I don’t know how to make you believe me, Louise, but I would give a great deal if I could.’
‘How great a deal?’ she said. ‘Your stake in Barkers Park?’
‘Oh, now, let’s keep
things in proportion, for the love of God,’ he said, laughing, and she laughed too; but afterwards, as she told Valerie, it was when she began to believe him.
‘If he’d said yes, I’d have known it couldn’t be true.’
She was not, however, prepared to make things easy for him.
‘So can we have a third date?’
‘I think I could agree to that, yes.’
‘And where would you like to go? Your choice.’
‘OK,’ she said, ‘let me see. Um – how about the Ritz?’
‘Well, that’s easy. I can certainly arrange that. Tomorrow night?’
‘Oh, you couldn’t arrange it by tomorrow, surely,’ she said, ‘there’d be the flight and all that sort of thing.’
‘The flight?’
‘Didn’t you realise, sorry, I meant the Ritz in Paris.’
He didn’t flinch. ‘Well now, maybe we should make it Friday instead,’ he said. ‘Because we probably wouldn’t get the last train home.’
He called her in the morning with a flight booked ‘and somewhere to stay, not the Ritz, I can’t afford that, not this year, next maybe, but a very nice little hotel on the South Bank. Two rooms if you like.’
‘Two rooms of course. This is only our third date. What sort of girl do you think I am?’
‘A very sexy one,’ he said.
Dinner at the Ritz was spectacular; back in the small hotel, Louise kissed him goodnight at the door of her room, and waved him off down the corridor. After ten minutes, she knocked at his door.
‘I don’t seem to be able to sleep,’ she said, ‘I wondered if we could have a bit more of a chat about Barkers Park.’
She arrived back in London dizzy with weariness, and extremely happy; and reflecting on the great foolishness of Maura Floyd. For the time being, she thought, she had found exactly what she had been looking for. And the time being was long enough for now.
She had been speaking the truth when she said she wasn’t looking for marriage; as far as she could see, it was a straight and fast road downhill to a place where even if you continued with your career, and earned as much or even more than your husband, he still remained in some mystical way the head of the household, and had to be waited on, fussed over and asked permission if you wanted to be away or even work late.
The Decision Page 36
