The yard was full of activity and completely floodlit. What was going on, it appeared, was horse care on an industrial scale. It was Teenage Girl Central. I could feel the angst and acne from here.
“Some of the girls come up from town, especially in the school holidays to help around the place.” Leo killed the engine outside the gate.
Some of the girls? It looked to me like the whole of the underage female contingent of Charlton Hawsell. The teenage boys round here probably had to date each other.
“Hi, Leo.” As soon as we walked within range of the floodlights the greetings went off.
“Hello, girls.” Leo seemed oblivious to the hero worship which crackled in the air. “Alys and I are just going to take a look at the foals, then I’ll give you a hand.” I felt every pair of eyes swivel away from the four-legged beasties and towards me. The air thickened like hormone soup. If Leo left me alone for a second, I’d probably be bludgeoned to death with cherry lip gloss and copies of Mizz. “Through here, Alys.”
The foaling boxes were in blessed semidarkness. Two mares were quietly eating hay in a determined way, one had a foal suckling beneath her and the other foal was lying by its mother, sprawled untidily in the careless way of the very young. He indicated the shape like a badly made sock puppet spread over the straw in front of us. “I thought we might call her Alys. Would you mind?”
Charlton Alys. Sounds a bit like a football team. But I was absurdly touched. “I wouldn’t mind at all.” I watched my namesake wave a dreaming leg briefly.
“Good.” Slowly Leo turned me around until I was facing him, lowered his face to mine and gave me a kiss, a brief stroke of the lips. I was glad he hadn’t gone for the full face-eating scenario, what with all the rampant adolescence going on outside. Puberty might not be fatal, but being submerged under a jealous heap of it could be. “Why don’t you go on up to the house and make yourself at home. I’ll lend a hand here then come and join you. You know where the wine is. Leave your bag in the wagon, I’ll bring it on with me.”
I wandered on up and into the dark hallway where I found some light switches. These lights revealed that I was at the front of the house, in a wooden-floored area with doors leading off to left and right, and the big staircase I had ascended on my previous visit behind me. I opened a door at random, it gave onto a huge room with a moulded ceiling and an impressive array of mismatched armchairs. Another door led into a room lined with bookshelves, and another into what seemed to be an office with a computer screen eerily lighting a semicircle around itself.
I giggled to myself, but the giggle was magnified, thrown along distant corridors, rattling off into the shrinking distance, growing more and more indistinct as it vanished around unseen corners. No wonder people who lived in houses like this tended towards keeping mad women in attics as a recreational activity.
“Alys?” Leo was calling me from somewhere, it sounded like several corridors away.
“I’m here!” I called back.
“I’ve got your bag! Do you want to come to the kitchen and I’ll find us some supper?”
“That would be lovely!” I yelled. Courtship by megaphone. “Where is the kitchen?”
“Hold on, I’ll come and get you.”
It must be nice to be able to walk around your house without having to sidle past the furniture. And to have rooms large enough for two people to be in without having to stand buttock to buttock. Although I could probably spend all night happily buttock to buttock with Leo, I thought, as he rounded a corner and came towards me, swinging my bag casually from a slender wrist and whistling under his breath. Even the shorts had a new charm from a perspective where I didn’t have to be seen out with them.
“Hi there. Stables go all right?”
“Oh yes, fine thanks. We did think Felicity had a touch of colic, so we’ve brought her up onto the yard, but apart from that—” He advanced towards me and put my bag on the floor at my feet. “And how about you?”
I smiled. “Can I go grab a quick shower and get changed? I’m feeling terribly overdressed here.”
He backed away a few steps, his eyes glimmering with something like panic. “Oh, um. Well, yes…um…of course…but…” He obviously thought that I was going to slip into a wisp of lace and two nipple clamps. “Wouldn’t you rather we have a bite to eat first?”
God, what was it with me? I didn’t exactly want to meet a man who’d rip all my clothes off with his teeth and a bullwhip, but I seemed to find myself attracted without exception to men who’d bought their sexual personas from Reticence R Us. But then, Leo’s shyness was part of his charm, wasn’t it?
“I’d like to change first, if that’s okay.” I undid the zip on my bag. “I’ll wear these”—I grabbed jeans and a long-sleeved T—“if you show me where.”
“Oh I see. Changed, yes.” Leo reached out an arm and flipped open a door, pulling a cord to flood a tiled room with halogen lights. “In here. Just come on through to the kitchen when you’ve…well, yes.”
I went inside and he pulled the door shut behind me as though relieved that I had, indeed, chosen to take my clothes off behind a door. I glanced around at a room which was completely tiled, with a central drain and several nozzles jutting out of one wall. It looked either like a cubicle in a slaughterhouse or a luxurious urinal.
After about a minute’s showering, and while I still had some skin left, I turned the water off and stood dripping, realising with a nasty sinking in my stomach, that there were no towels in here with me. Woollen jumpers, I found, are not as absorbent as they look or feel. When rubbed over a wet body they slide over water droplets with the ease of a cabinet minister avoiding an awkward question. So, still slightly moister than I usually liked, I went in search of Leo.
Chapter Fifteen
“You must be starved.”
When I found the kitchen again, after a couple of false starts, it was filled with an appetising smell. “I am rather, yes.”
Leo looked a bit embarrassed. “It’s nothing very special, I’m afraid.” He bent to the door in a gigantic iron range which would invoke sleepless nights for any wicked witches with a gingerbread inclination. He straightened up bearing a baking sheet and flourished it onto the table in front of me. “Pizza.”
“It looks delicious.” In reality it had a kind of second-hand quality to it.
“I did think about taking you out to eat.” Leo began slicing the pizza in an inept way, causing the base to split and drag the topping from one slice to another. “But I thought it would be better if we could stay here and talk. There wasn’t anything much in the freezer apart from pizza so I hope you like pepperoni.”
Leo sat opposite me and we chewed at each other for a few moments. Eventually he sighed and rested back in his chair. “You really can’t buy this feeling.”
I didn’t know how to answer. I knew offhand of three places where you could purchase the makings of chronic indigestion, but didn’t think that was what he meant. “Mmmm,” I said, noncommittally.
He put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, cupping his chin in his hands and looking at me intently. “You’ve brought out feelings in me, Alys, feelings I thought I’d buried with Sabine. Do you realise what that means to me?”
I shook my head. There was blood pounding in my head, echoing my heartbeat.
“When I saw you in Izzie’s dining room, looking at the photographs with such—such fierceness, such concentration—for the first time in these two years, I felt that I could relate to another person, that I wasn’t totally alone.” He reached out a hand and loosely clasped fingers around my wrist. “I’m sorry if this is all a little fast for you. Believe me I can’t really get my head around it either. But—I’m hoping—well, actually I’m praying, Alys, that you feel the same way.”
I turned my hand over and let my fingers tangle with his. “I think so,” I said through dry lips. His fingers felt hot and my pulse was booming against the veins in my wrist like an insistent incoming tide. We we
re lit only by a small table lamp with a lopsided lampshade. I could see his glasses gleaming, the soft fall of hair across his forehead, but the rest of his face was vestigial, features drifting in and out of focus in a surreal way as he moved slightly and the light twisted against his skin.
“I—” he began, when a strident beeping broke out of nowhere, crashing into our little idyll, making me jump and jerk out of his grasp. “Oh bugger. This is just—” He was thrusting his hands into pockets in a desperate search for the source of the beep. “Bloody typical.” Finally he withdrew his mobile, still squealing its message-received tone to the world, and glanced at it. “Sod. It’s Jay. Says Felicity is down in agony, do I want to phone the vet?”
He stared at the text as though it might spring into life and wrench him out of the kitchen. He was so clearly torn that it seemed the only kind thing to do was to help out.
“Why don’t you go on down to the yard and do what needs doing. I’ll clear up in here, pour a couple of glasses of wine and we can carry on talking when you get back?” Given that two minutes ago, I’d been half a dozen heartbeats from flinging myself across the table at him, I thought this was particularly decent of me.
“Well, I—look, are you sure you’ll be all right?” He was running his hands through his hair, and hayseeds were falling like bucolic dandruff onto the table. “This is particularly unfair, but I should really—”
“Go. I’ll be fine.” Then to make sure, “I’m a big girl, I can cope.”
“I could take you down with me.” He was already halfway to the door. “But if we get the vet out, it could be a long wait and you’d, well, you might…”
“I’d only be in the way.” I gave him a cheery little wave and didn’t add that I really didn’t like horses that much. “I’ll just mooch about, read, have a drink. You go deal with your emergency. Go on. Go.”
When he’d gone, I managed not to give in to the urge to fling his mobile repeatedly against the wall until it broke. Instead, I picked up the pizza plates, put them in the sink and switched on the main lights. Romantic illumination was all very well when things were going romantically, but when they weren’t going at all, fluorescent glare was the thing. This room really was grotty and in need of a female touch—hell, in need of any touch at all. It was tinsel-chained with cobwebs, the flagstones were patterned with random muddy paw prints and an examination of the greaseproof-wrapped butter on the middle of the table showed the unmistakeable marks of tongue raspings. But, if tonight was anything to go by, Leo clearly didn’t have a second to call his own. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect him to spend his spare time cleaning every inch of the house.
Another ten minutes passed. I made myself tea in a mug which necessitated dispossessing several woodlice of an apparently ancestral home. I’d even begun to leaf through a copy of Horse and Hound when the mobile on the table buzzed into life, urgent and unignorable as an alarm clock. I leaped for it and picked it up.
“Alys. Very sorry, looks like I’ll be late. The Green Room is yours again, see you in the morning. Leo.”
Right. Well I might as well go to bed. I switched off the lights and groped my way along the hall towards the main staircase. At the base of the stairs a telephone squatting on a wisp of a table cast a mighty shadow on the wall behind.
I dropped my bag and lifted the receiver. The thought of calling a taxi crossed my mind, but stomping off in a huff was a bit juvenile.
I took a deep breath, overwhelmed with a longing to be home. Back in the flat, with Florrie’s music thrumming from her room and a pile of Book Club selections beside the bed. A bar of chocolate, a cup of tea, and possibly Mrs. Treadgold on the phone gossiping about Mrs. Searle and her family. All this buildup, all this longing. Now, here I was. Lonely.
“Jace?” It was twenty past eleven, and her answerphone was picking up? Where the hell was she? Jacinta never went out after dark. She had what I considered to be a totally irrational fear of being attacked. I repeatedly pointed out that she was by far the most scary thing on the streets of York, but she resolutely stayed in and watched videos. I wasn’t sure which videos, her shelves were always bare of the evidence, but I suspected that she was to Benicio del Toro what I was to Johnny Depp. “Jace, if you’re there, pick up. It’s me. Alys.”
Nothing but her pre-recorded message. Anyway, what could I say? “He’s left me on my own”? I could almost hear Jacinta’s scathing voice as she listened to the tape. Alys you are a big wimp. Go to bed or you will be baggy in the morning.
“Sorry Jace, I was—er—ringing up to check everything was okay after I left today. Don’t forget that I left Mrs. Winterbourne’s order parcelled up on the desk. Okay, thanks, goodbye.” Then I dialled my only other friend.
“Hello?” The voice sounded tentative. “Who is it, please?”
“Mrs. Treadgold. It’s Alys.”
“Alys, is something the matter? It’s not that young man of yours, is it? I was saying to Mrs. Munroe only yesterday, Alys’ll have to be careful. He’s a bit of a looker. She’s going to have to keep an eye out for the other girls. But, saying that, he really does seem smitten, doesn’t he?”
“Um, no. It’s—no. Nothing like that. I was just—I’d forgotten whose turn it was to choose a book this fortnight and I wondered if you knew,” I finished, feebly. Here I was, fully paid-up member of the Gloria Gaynor I Will Survive club, ringing a seventy-year-old just to hear a reassuring voice. Too much of a chicken to admit I was wondering what the hell I was doing here. I hadn’t told the book group about Leo. They were all so convinced I was being naughty, as they would have put it, with a lovestruck Piers. Admitting I was really involved with someone else would be tantamount to pitchforking puppies.
At the far end of the phone, Mrs. Treadgold coughed gently. “Are you sure? If you’re in any trouble, I can get Mr. Mansell to ask his niece for the loan of her car. We can come and get you, you know.”
“No. No, I’m fine. Sorry to have bothered you.”
Having heard a voice apart from my own brought me back to earth. If I’d been Florence, I would have got a good talking-to for being petty and selfish. He wouldn’t just shrug his shoulders and leave an animal rolling around a stable in pain, would he? I was tired and grouchy and not in the best frame of mind for seduction anyway. I should go to bed and arise all fresh and dewy eyed, the better to ravage him on the morrow.
I hefted my bag again and set off up the stairs, moonlight shadowing my heels like a ghostly dog. At the top I turned for the Green Room, but halfway down the corridor I stopped. All right, so he might be back late. What was there to stop me from simply being there, in his bed when he came in? Warm and willing and sleepily disarranged. I could feel his fingers against mine even now, as they had been in the kitchen, firm and dry and promising. I felt like Bluebeard’s wife, pushing open doors all along the landing as I went, hoping nothing nasty was going to jump out at me. Past two largely empty rooms, another bathroom, and then I hit pay dirt.
It was a big, airy room with the windows thrown wide to catch the cool night breezes. Full-length muslin curtains fluttered like lazy phantoms into the room, almost brushing the items off the top of a dressing table. A silver-framed photograph, some scent bottles which looked empty and a book which, disappointingly, turned out to be on the subject of breeding Welsh ponies.
The bed was enormous, made up with white crisp sheets and a lovely puffy white duvet. The look was slightly spoiled by a pair of Leo’s jeans lying on top and two grubby T-shirts crumpled on the floor, but the room was almost obsessively tidy apart from the dropped clothes.
I slipped naked between the refreshing cotton sheets. The photo in the silver frame caught my eye, and I picked it up and held it under the lamp to get a good view. Bloody hellfire. If that was Sabine—and, let’s face it, who else was it likely to be, a woman in a wedding dress hanging onto Leo’s arm and laughing fit to bust at the camera—she was absolutely frigging gorgeous.
Huh. On my wedding day I’d
been feeling fat and nauseous. Florence had kicked my stomach all through the ceremony. While the registrar had had a kerfuffle with the rings, I had been quietly sick into a decorative urn. This woman looked as though she could have partied all evening, given her new husband the night of his life and still been up at dawn, golden haired, impeccable in a negligee, with breakfast on a tray.
I turned off the light, arranging myself on the pillows in as decorative a manner as I could, fanning my red curls across the white bolsters. I tucked the covers around me in a form-fitting way, suggesting that I was somewhat more shapely than was the case, and allowed myself to sink down into the mattress. It really was comfortable.
Bright. It was very bright. The room was washed with sunshine, heating the waxed pine of the floor and making it smell musty. Despite the fact that the window was still open, the curtains were dangling limp as melted ice cream. I turned to see the unmarked pillow next to mine. Leo had clearly not decided to climb in next to me. I propped myself up on one elbow and nearly fell out of bed with shock as the door flew open and Leo, wearing only a small towel around his waist, barrelled into the room.
His shout of horror was almost equalled by mine. He dropped the towel but that was fine because I’d shot under the duvet, and by the time I resurfaced, he was tucking it very firmly back around his middle. He looked great, by the way, with wet hair, clearly straight from the shower because droplets were running down his back and chest. “What on earth—Alys?” He’d retreated to the far side of the room and had one hand on the towel for added security.
Slightly Foxed Page 9
