‘So have you done anything about it?’ I asked, trying to lead him back to the real problem sitting atop a mango tree in his backyard.
‘No, I just put the letter away until someone came and helped me work out what to do – and here you are, Tallulah,’ he said as the tendrils came down through the window, and yanked me all the way back in.
‘I’d like to see it,’ I said, ‘the tree house.’
‘After you, Tallulah de Lovely,’ Frank said, standing up.
*
We went down through the garden and stood at the bottom of the tree, climbing the rungs then pulling ourselves up with the rope to the verandah. Ducking our heads through the doorway with the moon and the stars dancing over it, Frank asked me, ‘You remember it, Lulu?’
I breathed it all in.
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking that although I might have done it once, I would never let Frank Andrews down again.
‘Give me the letter, Frank,’ I said, ‘I might know someone who can help.’
Dropping in on Andrew on my way home to Willow, it became clear he had taken Duncan’s idea and run with it, producing a spreadsheet of costs and budgets, making detailed lists of each step that should be taken, and enjoying, I realised as I listened to him, every minute of it.
I had been back from Harry and Rose’s for a couple of weeks when Andrew called to say he’d drawn up some initial plans for the business and would like to meet with me, Julia and Will to go over a few points. We’d already had two meetings since I’d been home and I was beginning to think that Andrew rather liked coming to Willow, loosening his tie on the way over on the barge and talking about tide times with Walter Prentice and his boys. There was no doubt about it, there was something about those boilersuits that had every man I knew wanting to hide their clean fingernails in their pockets.
I was at the kitchen table waiting for everyone to arrive when Barney pricked up his ears and shot out the back door, letting me know that one of my guests was on their way down Avalon Road.
Will.
Julia would have received an enthusiastic greeting at the door, Andrew a few half-hearted licks, but for Will, Barney delivered the works. I smiled, thinking of Will on the path, seeing Barney barrelling towards him, putting out his hands to try to stop Barney from leaping up at him, and Barney placing his paws on Will’s chest to shout hello in Will’s ringing ears.
Still, you couldn’t blame Barney for wanting to knock the man to the ground.
Sometimes I wanted to myself.
Well, too bad – Will Barton was a good man, a decent man, a damn fine man if you wanted to put a point on it, and he deserved a much better woman than me.
I would not go near Will Barton if he was the last eligible man on Willow – which of course, not counting Paddy Stuart down at the bowls club, he was. (And Paddy, who was in his fifties, lived with his mother and was trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records for catching the world’s longest sandworm and so probably didn’t count.)
I looked out the window and saw Barney proudly bringing Will to my door, trotting just ahead of him on the path, every now and again swivelling his head around to check Will was still there, then swivelling it back again, legs prancing just that little bit higher.
‘Well, look who the horse dragged in,’ I said as they came to the kitchen door.
‘Lulu,’ Will said, trying to extricate himself from Barney – who was now looking at me from where his head was wedged triumphantly between Will’s legs – ‘call off the hound!’
‘I can’t,’ I said, filling a jug with some water, ‘I think he’s in love with you.’
‘Well, that makes one of you,’ Will said, slipping inside the door and deftly shutting it behind him, a whisker of a moment ahead of Barney’s bullet head pushing its way determinedly through.
‘So,’ Will said, leaning against the door, hands behind his back, ‘more meetings.’
‘Yes,’ I agreed, choosing to ignore his ‘that makes one of you’ comment, ‘Andrew’s a bit of a stickler for them.’
‘I’ve noticed.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘What?’
‘Coming here for them.’
Will put his head down, said something to the floor.
‘Pardon?’
‘I said I never mind coming here, not if I get to see you.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh?’
Will tilted his head to rest on the door frame, crossing his arms.
I had, of course, seen this moment coming, caught it in other moments between us, but I was still unprepared for that ‘Oh?’ and all that it carried with it.
But what to do about it? What to say to him, standing at my door with such a small word looming so large between us?
‘Will, I – look, the others will be here in a minute so it’s probably not a good time but I don’t think that you and I, if that’s what you’re, if that’s where you’re heading, well, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.’
‘Because you’re the Juniper Bay Wedding Shagger?’
I dropped the glass jug, just opened my hands and let it go, falling in slow motion to the floor, and we both stood there and watched it shatter on the flagstones, sending shards of glass splintering across the uneven ridges.
Long after it smashed, we both kept looking at it, while I stood there and thought that if there was ever a moment I would choose to voluntarily disapanish, this was it.
Duncan, bloody, bloody, bloody Duncan.
‘He told you?’
‘No.’
‘Yes, he did.’
‘Well, he did, but only after I told him I knew the whole story anyway.’
I went to the cupboard, took the broom in my hands and began to sweep up the glass, methodically pushing its bristles deep into the floor, until Will was beside me, trying to take the broom from my grasp.
‘I think you’ve got it all now, Lulu.’
For some reason I could not let go of the damn broom, so we stood there with it between us, both holding it as if our lives depended on not letting it go.
Will smiled.
‘Unhand the broom, Lulu.’
‘No.’
‘I said unhand it!’
‘No – you.’
‘No – I said you.’
We started to laugh, Will and I, at the stupidity of it, and were still laughing when Julia came through the back sliding door.
‘I gave Barney the slip,’ she announced, ‘he’s most put out.’ She looked at the two of us, still holding the broom. ‘Been an accident?’ she asked.
‘I dropped a jug,’ I said, and her eyes went to the neat pile of glass on the floor.
‘So I see – was it a special one?’
I looked at Will Barton, who I did not deserve.
‘Not especially,’ I said, walking away.
*
After Andrew and Julia had finally left – a heavy, clumsy sort of meeting with Julia looking at me with a question-mark face and Andrew saying, ‘I really need everybody here to focus on this, people’ – I wandered outside to sit beside Will, watching the trawlers on the prowl out at sea. It was cool and still, no casuarinas whistling, and somehow, just the fact that everyone had gone had lessened the space between us.
‘I’m sorry you broke your jug,’ Will offered.
‘It’s all right.’
‘I shouldn’t have said that, Lulu, that Juniper Bay thing.’
‘Why not? It’s true enough.’
‘No.’
‘Yes it is, Will, you don’t know the half of it, you don’t know what I did.’
‘I don’t really have to, do I?’
‘Of course you do, if you want to . . .’ I looked out at the trawlers, at their spiky black outlines. ‘Well, if you ever wanted to take me on
.’
‘I’ll take you on, Lulu,’ he said, and I thought instantly of Harry and Rose, all those years ago.
That was the night Will told me about how he had come to Willow, how he had grown up there with his parents and sister before they had moved to the mainland so the kids could go to a ‘proper’ school. He had hated every minute of that, insisting on walking barefoot and finding bitumen and broken glass no match for the loose, grainy sands of the islands.
‘I was useless, Lulu,’ he said, ‘couldn’t get my bearings.’
His parents had settled in well – they were still ‘over there’, running a small hospitality hire office – and his sister Judy had a remedial massage practice on the mainland. She came to Willow now and again to get the kinks out of some of the islanders, backs bent over like the she-oaks that held them there.
Will had studied too, making a ‘half-arsed attempt at a Marine Biology degree’, and a half-arsed attempt at several relationships along the way. There had been a girl – of course, looking at Will, there was always going to be a girl – but it hadn’t worked out. He had taken her to Willow a few times, and although she had tried, he remembered, seeing her staggering across his boat, smile fixed to her face by the wind, it was, they had both realised, not going anywhere except in different directions.
‘What was her name?’ I asked.
‘Melissa,’ he said. ‘She’s married to a dentist now – three kids, all with excellent teeth.’
He had floated around for a while, working at his mum and dad’s office, in a boat design company, and in a pub, which was where he’d met Duncan McAllister.
‘I knew who he was, of course,’ Will said, ‘pretty hard not to really, but I also knew him from around Willow. He’d bought the house there a few years back and I’d see him every now and again on weekends.’
Duncan had been drunk, the bad kind of Duncan drunk, obnoxious, sweaty, leering at the female counter staff, spouting Joyce and mocking the bewildered drinkers around him if they did not sit, mouths agape, mesmerised by his words. I knew that Duncan well, and was not fond of him, the terrible things he’d say, then slink into the studio the next morning saying, ‘Don’t look at me, Lulu, I’m wearing my cloak of shame.’
It had been one of those nights that Will had met Duncan, and Will, recognising a fellow islander who had well and truly lost his sea legs, had called him a cab, and taken him outside to wait for it in the fresh air. ‘I know you.’ Duncan’s eyes had narrowed. ‘You’re from Willow, aren’t you? What are you doing in this cesspit of a city? You should wrest yourself from its clutches,’ Duncan had steadied himself to look straight into Will’s eyes, ‘and throw yourself back into the ocean, where we both know you belong.’
The taxi had arrived, Will had put Duncan in it, and the next day Duncan had rung the pub and asked to speak to last night’s bartender.
‘Hello,’ Duncan had breathed into the phone, ‘are you the fellow who poured me into my cabbage last night?’
‘Yes,’ answered Will, ‘did you get home all right?’
‘Home?’ answered Duncan. ‘Oh, I didn’t go home, son, I went – well that’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to thank you for helping me out, buy you a drink – what’s your name?’
‘Will Barton – and that’s all right, Mr McAllister, you don’t have to shout me a drink.’
‘Duncan.’
‘Right, well, thanks, Duncan, but you don’t need to do this, honestly.’
‘I insist – what time do you knock off?’
‘Six o’clock.’
‘I’ll see you then.’
He had turned up right on time, bought Will a beer, sipped lemonade himself throughout their meeting and apologised profusely for any offence he may have caused the night before.
‘It really is all right,’ Will had told him, surprised that so powerful a man could be so obviously shaken by his own fault lines.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Duncan had answered him, ‘poor form, really. But enough about me – now tell me why you’re here and not messing about on a boat somewhere.’
So they had talked – well, Will had talked and Duncan had listened, and by the end of that conversation Will had found himself agreeing that yes, he would be interested in the deckie job going on Walter Prentice’s barge, and yes he wasn’t too bad with his hands, and he could probably help Duncan out with the renovation of the Willow Island Aqua Sports Association, which had, Duncan told him, very good bones.
‘So,’ Will had finished, ‘here I am – largely because of Duncan McAllister, I suppose.’
‘And I’m here entirely because of him.’
A ripple of a breeze lifted over us. Will shifted beside me.
‘Do you reckon we’re just like two puppets to him, Lulu? That he’s up there somewhere, sitting on a cloud holding one of those wooden cross things, you know, that they jerk the marionettes around with – just sitting up there pulling our strings and laughing his head off?’
I thought of Duncan, his maniacal grin, and nodded.
‘It’s entirely possible,’ I smiled.
Will put his arm around my shoulders.
‘I think he wanted us to be together, Lulu.’
‘I think so too,’ I whispered.
‘So,’ he said, drawing me closer, ‘what do you think about that?’
I thought it was probably one of Duncan’s better ideas. I thought I loved the feel of Will’s arms around me, the way I fitted perfectly beneath them. I thought I could just stand up, take his hand, and lead him straight back into the house.
Then I thought better of it, and wriggled out from under his arm.
‘I think just because you want something doesn’t make it right,’ I said, ‘and believe me, Will, I know.’
Will sighed, then told me what he wanted.
He had found those meetings with Andrew and Julia increasingly uncomfortable, particularly with Andrew referring to him as my ‘business partner’. Duncan’s idea of Will taking guests on fishing trips had expanded; he was now, Andrew said, ‘Water Sports Director’, in charge of fishing, kayaking, canoeing, sailing, teaching guests all of these skills as well as maintaining the boat shed and all the craft in it.
But Will did not want to be my ‘Water Sports Director’.
Instead, he told me how sometimes as he sat in his boat late at night, casting his line in the deepest part of the bend, he would look through the trees to my house, and it was all he could do not to dive into the water and make his way up the bank through the trees to my door.
‘That’s what I want, Lulu de Longland,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the trawlers as he stood up to go, ‘not very businesslike, is it?’
I had not realised you could see my house from the river, just the tip of it, Will said, and I thought that if that was right, then the reverse might also be true.
After Will had finally left that night, I went to the window to look, pressing my face deeply against the glass, but I couldn’t see the river for the trees.
Will’s words had rattled me, and although I hadn’t said anything, I thought if I could not find my own words soon, I would explode, just spontaneously bloody combust in frustration.
Duncan had told me once that’s how he’d like to go. ‘There are people, Lulu,’ he had said, his bloodshot eyes opening in wonderment, ‘there are people who actually spontaneously combust from the inside. One minute they’re there having a beer, and the next’ – Duncan had clicked his fingers and made a noise like an explosion – ‘everyone’s at the bar saying, “Where’s Lionel? He was here a minute ago” and there he is, smouldering on the carpet beneath them, like a cigarette someone’s ashed!’ At which point, Duncan had taken a long drag of his own, and added, ‘Bloody marvellous.’
But I didn’t tell Will that’s how I felt. I had not come to Willow to find a love I knew I didn’t des
erve, and besides, everyone knew it was foolhardy to mix business with pleasure.
I closed my eyes against the window pane – if Will was going to be Barney’s B and B’s Water Sports Director, our relationship would be all business, no pleasure.
Dammit.
‘Hello, Lulu.’
‘Hi, Andrew.’
‘Well, I’ve had a look at that letter you gave me about Frank Andrews and the tree house, but it seems pretty watertight to me – I’m sorry, Lulu, but I’m not overly optimistic I can help at all.’
‘Are you sure? Have you really had a good look through it?’
‘Lulu.’
‘Sorry, Andrew, of course you have, so what can I do now?’
‘With your permission, I’m going to pass it on to a colleague of mine – Linda Mayberry, whose firm specialises in these sorts of things, she’s very good, not cheap of course.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said automatically.
‘Really not cheap, Lulu, about two hundred an hour the last time I dealt with her.’
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I repeated, even though my savings were depleting at an alarming rate.
‘I’ll get back to you on that when I hear from her. I’ll stress to Linda that obviously we don’t have much time, but it should be all right, she’s a good egg and I’ll tell her to get cracking. Now, how’s the B and B going?’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Will’s finished repainting all the canoes, Julia’s sorted out all the linen and towels for the different bedrooms, the plasterers are here fixing that ceiling in the downstairs bathroom, and the first night’s booked out already.’
Walking on Trampolines Page 27
