“Piers.” There was a little sob in my voice, even I didn’t know what it meant, but I did know that the heat inside me was crying out for him, for his cool sureness of touch.
Chapter Thirty-One
I walked back to Charlton House on rubber legs and with a slight, but noticeable, flush still staining my skin. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Piers. I mean, Piers. Good God, it was almost unthinkable. He was so young. Bloody hell, but he had some experience on him though. So young and so careless. Or should that be carefree? He thought he loved me, said he loved me, but where the hell did that leave me?
Leo was offering me everything. All those things I’d thought I wanted during the years of loneliness and struggling. Stability, kindness. I looked across the paddock towards the big house which was glowing a pinkish colour as the sun spread its late-afternoon rays across its face, the air dulled with heat. So Leo loved me with all this and with his words, his poetry. Piers loved me with—my legs trembled again—with a passion that registered on the Richter scale. A love that could bend metal.
And the downside? Leo had his horses, his raison d’etre. And the poetry he never let me see. Was he ashamed? Of the way he felt or the need to write it down? Piers had his youth, his instinctive spontaneity. Leo was kind, gentle, wanted me to be happy and life to run smoothly. Piers—Piers was just bloody gorgeous and who knew what he wanted?
I wanted to think. No. I needed to talk.
The Land Rover was drawn up at the front of the house, two-horse trailer still coupled onto the back. There was no sign of the occupants of the trailer nor the car, although the driver and passenger doors were open. It was the Marie Celeste of animal transporters. A faint trail of straw wisps led around to the stable yard. I followed and found Leo inside a stable. He was covered in straw and chatting rather earnestly to Jay.
“Alys!” Leo sounded startled. “I…we…you were out for a walk?”
“Leo. We need to talk.”
A rush of emotions made his face go pink as they conflicted, fighting for dominance. “Yes, we do.”
Jay and I met one another’s eyes. She looked oddly self-assured, but carefully blank-faced, and I wondered if Leo had been telling her his plans for me, for us. Something must have shown in my face, because her eyebrows raised.
“It needs to be now.” As I spoke I turned. Without even making sure he was behind me, I headed towards the house, back stiff with determination.
Leo followed me into the kitchen, his boots clonking against the old stone floor. “Alys—” he began, but I waved a hand.
“Look, Leo, I—” Then I stammered to a halt. Couldn’t think what to say. The pair of us stared, beetroot faced, at each other. “You first.”
Leo just shook his head. “I’m not sure how to put it.”
I closed my eyes. It was easier when I couldn’t see his face, even if it did instantly conjure an image of Piers. He was burned onto my retina.
“Listen to me, Leo. Please.” I had to do it. I really did. “I’ve read your poetry—yes, even the stuff in the drawer in the bedroom. It isn’t some psychic tie that we share, it’s the fact that I recognised you from your photo in the book Isabelle had printed.” I opened my eyes. My face was scalding hot. “And I engineered our meeting. I don’t much like horses either. I’m really sorry, but—” I took the ring out of my pocket. “I can’t marry you.”
Leo stared at the ring. His gaze began to roam around the room as his face flamed again. “I can’t marry you,” he echoed. He was shifting from foot to foot as though even his boots wanted out.
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“No, I mean, I can’t marry you.”
“What?” I blinked in confusion. “Of course you can’t marry me, if I won’t marry you.”
“No. It…it’s complicated.” His stare came down off the ceiling and brushed past me on its way to investigate a corner. A shifty little emotion fled through his eyes. “I’ve only just—things have come home to me that I’ve been blind to for so long.” He went, if it was possible, even redder.
The straw-covered sweater. The expression on Jay’s face. “Oh my God. You’ve screwed Jay.”
“She…I…we never…this was the only time.” Then, pleadingly, “She was leaving.”
“That’s one hell of a reinterpreting of the term golden handshake.”
“I’ve just realised what I could have lost. What I’ve been hiding from myself for all this time. That Jay is the woman for me.” A hand reached out. “I’m sorry, Alys. Truly sorry.”
“So am I.” If I’d been a better person, now would have been the time to confess to the rip-roaring sex with Piers. I couldn’t do it. But knowing Leo and I were both guilty made me feel better. I caught his hand, held it loosely. “I think maybe I wanted to be in love a bit more than I was capable of. I tried to fool myself that you could be the one, even when I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“And I was so bowled over by you, by your interest in me, that I lost sight of what was important to me. The stud, the horses.”
“And the poetry?” I met his clear green eyes.
“That’s—not important. Not really. Not to me. It’s just something I do, it’s not who I am.”
Therein had lain my problem all along. I’d wanted to fall for a poetic soul and it wasn’t Leo’s fault that he didn’t have one. Just a facility for words and the kind of lonely introspection that made it all come out on paper. Poetry in his heart, perhaps, but not his soul.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Letting myself into the flat, I surprised Florence, who was sitting on the floor in the living room, packing a suitcase. “Mum?”
I didn’t answer, barely acknowledged her presence and swept on into my bedroom. The silent sanctuary-ness of it soothed my nerves, although the scarlet throw I’d bought to tempt Leo rankled, until I balled it up and shoved it under the bed.
“Mum?” The door opened quietly. “Are you okay? Is it because of Mrs. Treadgold?”
“I’m feeling fragile,” I muttered, muffled by the amount of duvet in my mouth. “Just leave me be, Florrie, please.”
Florrie moved closer, sat down beside me and gave my back a tentative pat. “It’s all right to feel sad. It’s healthy.” Another pat. “Piers said you were a bit shaken. Do you want me to call him?”
The mattress barely had time to bounce. I shot to my feet like a reversed film. “No. No, honestly, Florence, I’m okay. Well, I’m sure you can imagine.” Please God, don’t let her be able to imagine. In fact never let her feel the way I’m feeling right now.
“All right then. Just thought. You and he seem so tight these days, and the way he insisted on driving down to tell you—”
“Tell me?” She didn’t know, did she, what Piers had said?
“About Mrs. Treadgold.” Florence stared at her feet. “Did something happen, Mum? With Piers?”
Shock nearly stopped me breathing. “With Piers?” My voice was high with tension. “With Piers? Good Lord, Florrie, whatever could happen between me and Piers?” I blushed a scalding tide to my hairline, and my hands started to sweat.
“Well, you keep falling out and making up, thought you might have had another bust up. He came by to say you were coming back. Looked completely fucked up.”
“Florence.” I wasn’t so completely appalled by myself that I couldn’t spare a bit of appall for her. “Language!”
“Sorry.” She cupped her knees up under her chin and fiddled with her toes like a five year old. “Mum—”
Why wouldn’t she go away and let me think? “Can this wait Florence? Can’t you go out? There’s twenty pounds in my bag, go to the pictures or something.” Oh, but what if Piers came by to see if I was back yet? Found me sitting in on my own. My mouth was suddenly full of the taste of him, my skin flickering as it had beneath his featherlight touch… “Or rent a film, that’s a good idea.”
“Something slushy? Romantic? What about Notting Hill again?”
“I was thinki
ng more about Dawn of the Dead actually. Something violent, lots of limbs hanging off, you know the kind of thing.”
Florence stood, then sat again. “I’d really better get this over with.” She sounded incredibly adult. “If I stop now I might not have the nerve.”
I felt my mouth dry and the blood which had started seeping slowly away from my blush-encrusted cheeks suddenly drained downwards. “What?” I said faintly.
“Mum. Oh shit, there’s no easy way to say this, is there? Look, about my A levels… Well. I’m not going to be able to take them. I mean, I’ll always have those GCSE results if I want to. But. Not for a while.”
“Oh my God.” I flopped onto the trunk which served as a bedside table, knocking over a glass of water and a lamp. I didn’t even notice. “Oh, Florrie.”
“In London I met this guy.”
“It’s all right, darling, I understand… Have you decided what to do yet?” I burbled incoherently for a moment and all I could think of was like mother, like daughter. I gave Florence a quick up-and-down look, feeling guilty that I’d not noticed any changes in her. She looked slim in her tiny jeans, no sign of swelling stomach or breasts yet.
Florence was looking at me with pity. Surely that was wrong? Shouldn’t it be the other way round? What was I missing? My head felt as though I’d put it on inside out.
“Mum. Just listen for a moment. I’m not pregnant! Now, will you stop staring at my boobs and just listen. When I was in London I met this guy. Keish and I met him actually—well, we didn’t exactly meet him, more, we went to see him. He’s an agent, y’see, and we’d taken our pictures. Proper pictures, like a kind of portfolio thing and he said—he said he’d take me on. He phoned yesterday. Well, he’s shown my photos around and, oh, get this, Mum, Models Inc. want to have a look at me in person. Apparently they think I’ve got what it takes! They’ve got a branch in York, but you have to come with me to sign things and make sure it’s all above board and no one’s going to sell me into prostitution or anything like that. But if they want me—if they do—they want me to go to Paris and do a show with some of the other new girls. Isn’t it fantastic?”
“You.” I needed the whole monologue again, in little bite-sized chunks. “London?”
“Yes, Mum.” Florence had started patting me again as if I had Old Lady syndrome. “Keisha and I went to London to see Jamie. That’s his name, Jamie Keene. Not just to see him of course. We went to see Lex as well and do stuff. We could have sent pictures but we thought it would be better to go in person.” She jumped up and executed a stylish pirouette. “To show him how stunningly amazing we were. He said that, you know, he called us stunningly amazing.”
“Er.” I felt not particularly amazed but certainly completely stunned. “You had pictures?”
“Yes. Jack did mine. Came round one afternoon.”
And I’d thought they were my birthday present. How stupid had I been? Why had I never asked?
“Well.” I breathed in deeply. “Then I guess even more congratulations are in order.”
“You’re not cross?” Florence put her head on one side. Her white-blonde hair hung down over half her face. She suddenly looked so like her father that my heart burrowed behind my lungs and hid.
“No. Not really. I mean, I wish you’d told me, but, no. Why should I be cross, really? My daughter, my incredibly intelligent daughter has officially been recognised as intelligent and beautiful.”
Florence smiled at me. It was her father’s smile too, slightly crooked. I wondered if, should Florence become a successful model, Flick would see her picture and realise who she was. Come crawling out of the Polish woodwork with an Arts Council award on one arm and a beautiful wife on the other to claim his daughter. Then Alasdair would find out—oh God, something else to worry about. I was at saturation point. All it needed was a red telephone bill and I would probably go raving insane.
“Thanks, Mum.”
I gave her a grin which owed more to my jaw falling beyond its lowest point than to humour. “Is your father happy about all this?”
“He’s being very supportive,” Florence said, diplomatically. “Piers has been great though.”
“Piers knew?” An unwarranted vision of Piers the last time we’d met, cool and damp with river water, my head on his chest, tracing the pattern of hairs which ran down his lean, flat stomach. Against my will my entire body juddered.
“Yeah, I told him when I got back. He thinks it’s really cool.”
Duty done, Florrie bounded to her feet and sprang from the room to get on with her packing. I lay back down on the bed, not sure whether to be grateful that at least she wasn’t pregnant, or angry that, while her father, stepbrother and best friend had all known what was going on, I’d been told at the eleven-and-a-half-th hour. Why—I searched for a scapegoat—why hadn’t Piers said something? Bastard. I punched the pillow and it made me feel better, so I did it again. Bastard. Bastard! Everything had been okay—punch—until he’d appeared. Wading through that river like—punch—like Mr. Darcy, all wet shirt and sex appeal. Had he no consideration for my hormones? Punch.
I woke up in the middle of the night, disorientated. My much-thumped Piers-substitute was clutched to my chest, and I was tangled in the duvet, sweating in the heat of the oppressive darkness and the sexually charged dream I’d been having. I tried to turn over and go back to sleep, but the dream had kicked my brain into action. It was reluctant to relinquish this opportunity for a little undisturbed activity. My life. The middle-class good-girl upbringing. Until. God, I still blushed to think about it. Blushed all over my body, to remember the arousal, the white-heat of desire that had risen in me like steam from a boiling kettle the first time I’d set eyes on Flick, during my first term at university. My first time away from home. So many firsts. God, I’d adored him. I’d thought it was all right if we were in love. It was all right. Until it wasn’t. Was suddenly real, and frightening and crying in dark rooms. And the start of the lies.
I lay in the darkness with little pinpricks of light behind my eyes swirling and joining like a dot-to-dot puzzle, a picture becoming clearer by the second. I’d married Alasdair without loving him, attempting to make everything right for my baby. Being someone I wasn’t? Was that what I’d tried to do with Leo? Make my life normal, stable. Doing the right thing for the wrong reasons? Then, what had I done with Piers?
Shit. Three a.m. philosophy. Dangerous stuff.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Jace’s phone rang and rang. There wasn’t even the usual recorded message at the other end. “Where is she?” I disconnected then redialled, in case by some fluke I’d called the wrong number. “It’s her day off.”
Florence had her feet up over the back of the sofa and was lying with her head on the floor, tickling Caspar. “Maybe she’s gone to the beach or something.”
“She never goes anywhere. Except shopping, and I’ve been ringing her every half hour since I got up, even Jace can’t do that much shopping.”
Florrie shrugged and clapped her bare feet together. Grainger, at the far end of the sofa managing to keep one eye on the kitten while he slept, flicked an ear.
“Go round.” She flipped herself up the right way. “Her phone might be buggered. Or she might have had an accident.” Ghoulish eyes rolled. “Be lying at the bottom of the stairs calling for help.”
I shuddered. “I don’t think for one minute that’s happened, but I might pop into Webbe’s for a bit.” It would stop me sitting here jumping every time I heard a car pull up outside. “If she’s not there, I’ll go to her place.”
“’Kay.”
“Florence…” I had to phrase my words very carefully. A hint of criticism could ruin the new mother/daughter entente cordiale which we seemed to be enjoying, “…the whole modelling thing. Why didn’t you tell me?”
She looked at me seriously and I found it hard to return her gaze. Guilt, I suppose. “Well, to start with I didn’t think it would happen.” Eyes dropped, she re
turned to teasing the kitten. “I thought it would be stupid to get you all wound up over something which could just have been me dreaming. And you’ve always been so keen for me to get on in life, get qualifications. Mum, I don’t even know what I want to do yet. I know that really it’s only because of what happened to you, and I’m grateful Mum, I really am, that you gave up school and everything to have me, but—”
“But you’re not me.”
“Um. Yes. I think that’s it, really. You’re not mad—angry, I mean? Truthfully?”
Angry? Me? That my bright, lovely daughter was going into a profession which seemed designed to turn girls into coke-sniffing clones of one another, burnt out by twenty and too thin to stand?
“No. I’m a bit hurt that you told Piers before you told me though. And your father,” I added hastily. Didn’t want her to even suspect that I’d so much as thought about Piers in the last twenty-four hours.
“Piers did tell me to tell you. Kind of threatened that he’d do it if I didn’t. But he told me to pick the right time and go for it, not to lose my nerve and back out.”
“Yes, picking his moment, that’s Piers,” I said without thinking. Well, without thinking of anything but that moment he’d picked, under the tree, that kiss, with our hair tangling together in the breeze. God, Alys, stop it.
“Er, yes.”
We stood silently for a moment. Caspar rubbed his newly darkening ears against my leg and Grainger wrapped a paw over his own eyes to block out the sight.
“I just want you to be happy,” I whispered.
“Aww, Mum. Don’t get soppy! I am happy. I always do what makes me happy, don’t I? And I want you to be happy too. Leo seems like a really nice guy, not the kind to sleep his way through your friends or beat you up after a few drinks. You’ll make a cool couple.”
“I think I need to talk to you about that.” I grabbed my bag and headed out to catch the bus to the bookshop. “But it’ll have to be later.”
Slightly Foxed Page 21
