Toby slapped the page with a gleeful, podgy hand. ‘Watty got pictures like that!’
‘Really?’ She selected a once-black felt pen and added curly hair blowing back from the piggy features in the wind. And stubble.
‘Do the car green,’ insisted Toby, so close to the pad as to almost obscure the view, his hot little arm sweatily against hers, his head smelling of shampoo and biscuits.
His approval was heady stuff. Between it and Angel’s awe-struck, ‘You’re brilliant,’ Tess began to enjoy herself as her crayon flew over Nigel after Nigel. Too much to notice the back door opening.
But nothing so vital escaped Toby. He jumped up. ‘Look, Watty!’ he shouted. ‘Tess drawed Nigel, driving!’
Huge from her startled perspective, Ratty loomed above. ‘Clever. Very flattering. I hope we don’t have pork for lunch?’ He shot her a curious look, then smiled to prove he could bear being caricatured as a pig.
Tess hadn’t realised anyone else was invited for lunch, although entertaining was definitely one of Angel’s things. All the time that used to be spent at the pub pre-children was now spent at Pete and Angel’s house. Ratty, at least, seemed to half live there.
‘Steak pie, wedges and salad. Can you lay the table, Ratty, if you’ve finished admiring your portrait? Tess, do you prefer mustard dressing or mayonnaise? Will Jos be very long, Ratty? I hope one of you can work this bottle opener ...’
Tess was uncertain how she felt at being so … included. She wasn’t sure if she was ready for it. But Jos and Pete had come in, too, and to leave when there was a place set for her wouldn’t be friendly.
The page of Nigels was passed around with the salad, Pete and Jos both grinning at Ratty.
‘Would you paint a proper picture of Nigel for Toby’s room?’ Angel asked. ‘How much will it cost?’
Tess considered as she chewed her mouthful. ‘Another glass of wine.’
‘Wow, that’s a bargain! I’ll trim your hair sometime,’ Angel exchanged. Her hair and beauty salon in Bettsbrough, Tess already knew, had a bubbly, brisk manager until Angel got the kids up to school age. She was always being asked when she was going back and she always groaned about how much she missed it, the prettiness and the girlie atmosphere.
After lunch, concentrating on Toby in order to remain on the edges of the adult conversation, conscious of not being part of the easy familiarity the others shared, Tess drew him quick sketches of the three now familiar Dragons of Diggleditch. Slinker, the green-backed lizard-like one with red belly, amber spines and eyes. Slider, blue and mauve with a gun-barrel snout and tongue coiled neatly behind smirking fangs, sliding on huge feet. Finally, her favourite, Winder in cheery primrose with a green tummy and crimson spines, the inept one who kept rushing his snaky body into a knot.
Toby was rapt at being able to order what he’d like to emerge on the page. ‘Another Winder! Draw the knot.’
From the armchair, Ratty nudged Toby with his toe. ‘Swap you a Spiderman comic for the drawing of Nigel in the sports car?’
Toby protected his assets better than that. ‘Got Spiderman already,’ he growled, clutching his drawing to his chest.
‘Look, they’ve got the TR4 going – lunatics!’
Tess watched a noisy contraption heading up the lane towards them. Better, in her opinion, if their walk along Port Road, huddled into thickest jackets, between slapping hawthorn hedges budding already, had remained uninterrupted. Despite being included in lunch a few days ago, she still wasn’t sure of her welcome with anyone but Angel.
But there was no ignoring Ratty and Pete roaring up on a ‘vehicle’, for want of a better description – the chassis of a sports car, apparently short of the body shell, kitchen chair seats held in place precariously by bungee elastic luggage straps and a dashboard sprouting a taped-on rear-view mirror.
Angel was obviously far more impressed than Tess by this phenomenon, circling admiringly whilst Tess rested her hand on the tandem buggy where both children – though Toby, had he been awake to ask, would declare himself too old – slept in cellular blankets.
Obviously an event, this, a landmark. Something she couldn’t appreciate.
Pete bellowed over the considerable noise of the uncovered Triumph engine. ‘We’re going to the pub to celebrate, hop on!’
‘Be sensible, how can I?’ Angel indicated the buggy, throwing a yearning and, to Tess, incomprehensible look at the rear passenger accommodation, or lack of it.
Tess hunched her shoulders. ‘I’ll have the kids. You go.’ Patchy drizzle dashed against her cheeks but the bundles wrapped up beneath their protective plastic cover in the buggy dozed, uncaring.
Angel’s pixie face lit on a smile. ‘But that’s not fair on you, Tess! Don’t you want to go?’
As the invitation hadn’t been directed at her, Tess had no problems with this one. ‘I can go any time. I’ll go another day.’
So the car rumbled off, Angel laughing and glowing from her uncomfortable perch in the rear, waving, calling ‘Owe you one!’, Pete shouting ‘Cheers!’
‘Cheers,’ echoed Ratty, with what might have been approval. ‘I see you’ve got the Freelander back?’
She nodded.
He winked. ‘Try and keep it under control.’
The drizzly period had taken most of February to clear.
But what a day, now that it had! Tess gazed up at a china blue sky heralding glorious, fresh, sudden early spring when, after the winter of long jumpers and short days, it became briefly warm enough for shirtsleeves. Her first winter at Honeybun had been good, the months passing quickly with the joy of work that was going well, with walks in wild weather, which sometimes suited her mood.
But it was great to see the sun.
By the rockery, on the crazy paving where the thyme grew through the cracks and smelt peppery, she turned her face to the welcome warmth, breathed in, sighed out. Daffodils, forsythia, busy birds singing to the breeze. She hitched up her jeans.
Her clothes were no longer tight. Away from her mother’s sugar-based love she’d returned easily to her natural weight. She pulled the waistband away from her skin, marvelling at the gap that appeared. She could find her other jeans and –
‘Need any help down there?’
Whipping her hands away and spinning guiltily, she found Ratty leaning on her gate. Wicked grin. Wicked eyes. Curls lifting gently from his forehead. Tattoos over the cords of his arms exposed to the sunshine.
His grin widened as she coloured.
Her hair sailed about her shoulders in the spring breeze. ‘I didn’t realise you were there.’
‘Guessed not. Coming for a drink?’
‘Me?’
‘You said you’d come, “another day”.’
‘But that was only …’ When Angel had been longing to join the grown-ups for an hour in the pub, and Tess had sought something to say that would persuade her.
Straightening, Ratty shook back his hair. ‘I’m going to visit Lucasta. Call for you about twelve thirty?’
‘Um, right. Yeah, OK.’ She answered his parting nod with a flushed one of her own. So it was true, as Angel held out. He could be nice. Amazing.
Still more amazing, when he called at Honeybun to walk her briskly up Main Road to The Three Fishes, past the run of closed doors at MAR Motors, through the Cross, past Great End and finally into the pub opposite the ford, and, in the burbling beery warmth of a village pub on a Sunday afternoon, she found herself having a good time.
Who was this stranger, buying her wine, slouching on the velvet settle, making sure the brass table was a comfortable distance from her, being good company? After their first meeting being so prickly, he had progressed to civility as her relationship with Angel grew and their paths therefore crossed. But today he was warm, he was dry and funny, interesting and interested.
And he really seemed to be interested in her work, firing questions, eyes like seawater in sunshine. ‘So how do you know what a dragon looks like?’
Used to Olly’s condescension, she began warily. ‘I studied form from dinosaur and lizard books, sketched some exhibits in the Natural History Museum and even a fed-up lizard in a pet shop. Then a lot of character development sketches, dragons from the front, the side, lying, flying, smiling, laughing, snorting, roaring. I experimented and read the manuscript. The end of the commission’s in sight now but I’m still struggling with one character. He’s an enemy to both dragons and villagers, half lizard, half man. I haven’t “got” him yet.’
He seemed intrigued. ‘But how do you get into something like that? How does the industry work?’
Relaxing with another glass of wine she told him about her agent and friend, Kitty, her workroom, painted blue, her training at the University of East Anglia, the wolf cards.
Halfway through Sunday afternoon she was still rambling over glasses of wine and ploughman’s lunch. And laughing. Apparently making him smile. Oh God, a drink or five always convinced her she was the most captivating person in the room, witty, interesting, lazy yet sharp, wine-relaxed. Wonderful. Then suddenly, from nowhere, she heard herself volunteering, ‘Olly hated the card work, he said it was naff.’
And she was sober.
Just like that, invoking Olly’s name was an ice bath and Alka Seltzer. Her words dried.
As if such an abrupt silence was unremarkable, Ratty picked up the conversational ball, telling a story she needn’t listen to. She let the swell of bad feeling wash over her, recede.
Jos wandered in, dreamy eyes the colour of newly popped horse chestnuts, contributed his own view to Ratty’s story, drank barley wine, smiled and drifted off to some other conversation. Ratty talked on, about his abbreviated accountancy training and his garage. She recovered enough to smile about the customer who’d whizzed along one day in early autumn and crashed into the back of his breakdown truck.
Her blood gradually stopped thumping in her ears and her fists unclenched.
Then, armed with fresh drinks, apparently privy to the scant information Tess had given Angel, he prompted, ‘So. Olly was the guy you didn’t marry?’
The guy she didn’t marry. Tall, greyhound Olly, athletic from squash and tennis, still so vivid in her mind. Was it just the wine or did he still stir her?
‘What happened to him?’
She sipped. Cold, delicious white wine, so dry it made her ears hurt; her favourite. She licked the flat-tasting condensation from the outside of the glass. ‘He dumped me.’
‘Ah. At least it was before the wedding.’
‘Just.’ She focused on the corded forearm closest to her, just above a TAG Heuer watch, where a tattoo, blue-grey, flexed as he moved. An old-fashioned milestone inscribed with the words, One Miles. ‘That’s good!’ She laughed too hard, poking the tattoo, his flesh warm and only slightly yielding under her fingertip, letting herself slide away from the subject of Olly. ‘One Miles! Miles A. Rattenbury. Miles Alan Rattenbury? Miles Andrew Rattenbury?’
‘Miles Arnott-Rattenbury.’
She laughed again. ‘You’re not hyphenated?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘God,’ she said again. ‘Hyphenated. Shall we have coffee? I’m half cut. Is that hyphenated, too?’
Coffee was good, they had a second. Ratty backtracked. ‘And so Olly told you marriage wasn’t for him? And you wanted to leave ... London?’
‘Brentwood.’ She nodded, considered. ‘That’s a version.’ The coffee wasn’t working too well in the sobering-up stakes. ‘I wouldn’t say he told me,’ she adjusted. ‘Olly e-mailed me. He complained that I wanted a commitment he didn’t – news to me. I was messy – I hadn’t realised, but I suppose next to his computer-brain compulsive orderliness, I might be. All stuff and excuses. Like men do. By e-mail.’
That squashed feeling which went with thoughts of Olly, settled her. She gazed into her coffee. Would it ever stop hollowing her out?
‘You – must – be – joking.’ His entranced distaste recaptured her attention. ‘He jilted you by e-mail!’ If he was registering the whiff of distress, it didn’t stop the dancing of his eyes.
She glared. He was trying not to laugh!
In fact, he was choking and giving in to it. ‘Christ, I’m sorry! But I’ve never heard anything so ludicrous, so ridiculous, so preposterously brutal! It’s outrageous! Didn’t you send your brothers round to give him a hiding?’
‘It wasn’t funny.’ She tried not to let her disobedient smile evolve into a laugh. ‘And I haven’t got any brothers. Just my cousin Guy, who you met when you pulled his car out of the muddy field ... Could you imagine Guy meting out a hiding? And, anyway, he likes Olly.’
Ratty laughed himself sensible again. ‘Pity,’ he remarked. ‘E-mail. What a shit. E-mail.’
Perhaps it was the wine, the relief at functioning normally in a normal situation, or just the sympathy – of a kind – from such an unexpected source. At any rate, she found herself telling him. Telling him what she hadn’t confided in Angel, confessions leaking from all her deepest hurts, oozing through the thin dressings of her tenuous recovery.
‘It got worse. I found out I was pregnant. Then I lost it.’
The amusement faded from his face. ‘Lost the baby?’
‘Lost the baby. Lost my grip. God, I lost my grip. Lost my self-respect and my confidence.’
The afternoon was nearly over. The wine had given her a headache. ‘When I miscarried, I bled and bled and bled. They couldn’t stop it, couldn’t keep me conscious.’ Blood on her clothes, the bed, the floor. Great scarlet splashes. She’d woken attached to a drip, someone else’s blood to replace what her body pumped out so incompetently and a taste as if she’d sucked a penny. Shaking with weakness, losing control of string legs and lead-weight feet.
‘It took a while to get over it. To be myself.’
‘And now you’re you again?’
‘Getting there. But with the amount of blood I lose every month, I’m surprised I’m not two-dimensional.’ What was she doing? Talking to Ratty about the Curse? An embarrassed snort and she changed the subject. She was sure she was going to regret this.
Would she regret this tipsy afternoon? His upper arm bounced gently against her shoulder as he walked her home. Angel was right – actually, Ratty was OK.
‘I hear you’ve been calling on Lucasta?’
She laughed. ‘She’s amazing. Sings your praises!’ Swinging back her hair that had sprung out of its clasp some time ago. ‘‘‘Miles does this for me, Miles does that, Miles is such a grand chap!” Difficult to believe it’s you she’s speaking about. More coffee?’
They’d reached Tess’s gate. Ratty was tempted. Turquoise eyes alight, her hair – he must remember to ask Angel what that colour was called – flying in the breeze, and her body neat and lithe, he was tempted to go indoors with her and see where he could make it lead.
He hadn’t set out with seduction in mind. In fact, he already had a date this evening with Catriona and could do with sleeping this skinful off beforehand. Yep. Sticking with Catriona would certainly be simpler.
So he addressed the remark before, instead of discovering what the offer of coffee implied. ‘My grandfather ruined her,’ he explained.
‘Ruined her?’
‘There was a grand affair between them when they were each married to other people. It became public, Grandfather unsportingly elected to remain with his wife. Lucasta’s husband, in self-righteous fury, stuck her in Pennybun whilst he continued to live it up in Chelsea. Poor old Lucasta.’
‘Treacherous men.’ Tess was looking sleepy, maybe the best of the alcohol had passed, for her. He skipped coffee.
‘This is for me?’
Pink and edgy without alcohol for insulation and in the cold light of a Tuesday, Tess fixed her eyes on the folder open in Ratty’s rimed hands, another picture of Nigel the pig, this time driving a shell of a car, black curls streaming, tattoos above his trotters.
‘If you want it.’ Uncertainty. She’d carried the folded c
ard protecting the inked caricature as she’d walked up Port Road and out of the village between the hedges, almost to the next village of Port-le-bain, before turning back and making for the garage on her way home. How would he receive the little offering?
Awkwardly, feeling that Tess was showing off?
Or reluctantly, wondering if he was going to have to fend off a pass?
It was just a couple of hours’ work. Because Toby hadn’t wanted to part with one of his parade of Nigels, because Ratty had, in offering the innocent pleasure of getting squiffy in a village pub on Sunday afternoon, made Tess feel like any normal person. Shown outrage over Olly and put the whole thing more in perspective. In the past. She wasn’t sure how much she liked him, but she felt grateful.
Hands jammed in pockets, feet shifting as if ready to race off, she watched as Pete and Jos crowded round to look, wrenches and gauges idle in their hands.
‘Toby will be jealous.’ Pete grinned, tossing back perennially flopped-forward hair.
‘I’ve done his, Angel’s framing it.’
Jos, looking from Tess to the picture, kept saying, ‘Cool! Wicked! That’s amazing. Really amazing. Cool.’
Her doubts multiplied at Ratty’s continued silence. ‘You don’t have to keep it. But I was doing Toby’s ... Anyway, you could always give it to Toby. But you asked him for the other drawing ...’ Babble. Making him feel awkward, she was nearly sure, gaze fixed to the cartoon, embarrassed because he didn’t want it and didn’t know what to say? How stupid to take an idle joke with a three-year-old, a casual drink when he had nothing better to do, and make a friendship of it. She put out her hand. Even that felt hot and flustered. ‘I’ll take it to Toby, shall I?’
Bottomless eyes fixed on her. ‘No! I’m going to hang it in here, in the garage.’ Abruptly, he swung on her and pecked her cheek with soft, hot lips. ‘It’s great! Thanks.’
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