by Karen Clarke
Charlie’s bedroom door was open, no light on inside, so at least they weren’t in there. I had a peep inside, jumping when I was faced with a poster of Max Weaver on the wall, looking disapproving. How did Ryan feel about the handsome actor watching him sleep? I tried to picture Ryan asleep, then realised I was hovering like a phantom waiting to be discovered and shot back to bed.
I couldn’t even message Charlie because I’d left my phone in the living room – though he’d probably be sleeping anyway.
I flumped back on the pillows and closed my eyes, willing sleep to come. I hoped Dolly was OK. I’d missed her presence today as without her around, things felt less solid somehow – as if chaos could break out at any moment (which it almost had).
Much later, I thought I heard whispered voices on the landing, but they merged into a dream where Ryan and I were walking a Great Dane along a cycle path, our arms wrapped around one another, and when I woke, daylight was poking around the curtains.
I squinted at Dolly’s digital clock and saw with a shock that the alarm I’d set hadn’t gone off and it was nine o’clock. From the sounds downstairs, it was obviously business as usual, but I shot out of bed and hastily dressed in yesterday’s discarded clothes (I really must put a wash on) before stepping onto the landing, pulling back quickly when I spotted Ryan and Nicole at the top of the stairs.
Had she stayed the night? Of course she had. Where else would she have gone? As I spied through the gap in the door, I wondered whether Ryan had slept on the sofa and given Nicole his bed. She was wearing her coat, as if she’d never taken it off (I hoped she hadn’t) and I tensed when she moved into Ryan’s arms. They closed around her, as they must have done hundreds of times before, and she nestled against him for what seemed like ages, before they pulled apart and went downstairs together.
So, a reconciliation, after all.
I waited until I was sure the coast was clear before leaving my room, feeling as if I’d swallowed something heavy that was weighing me down.
‘Looks like they’ve sorted things out,’ said Dolly, beaming widely as soon as I entered the kitchen.
‘You spoke to them?’
‘Just briefly,’ she said. ‘They’re going to have a bite to eat in the café and take a look around before heading to the airport.’
Nausea swirled in my stomach. ‘That’s great,’ I said with forced brightness.
She nodded. ‘It’s good for those kiddies,’ she said, and I wondered what had happened to Ryan’s insistence that he wasn’t ready to be a father, that the children needed their real dad. Perhaps he’d be hands-off, leave the fathering to Nicole’s ex, or was he keen to play a big role in their lives – John, the biological one, and Ryan the father…
Perhaps Nicole had come up with some solution that would work for them all – though I couldn’t imagine what it would be. That the children live full-time with John, while she moved in with Ryan? Either way, it wasn’t my concern.
‘Feeling better?’ I said drily.
‘Top of the world, thank you, love.’ Dolly certainly looked in peak condition, her fringe extra glossy, her cheeks glowing, but no longer in a feverish way. ‘Frank’s on the mend too.’
‘That’s good, considering how ill he was yesterday.’ Her gaze remained steady, as innocent as a child’s. ‘And Charlie?’ I looked around, wondering whether he was in the café, where I recognised Margot’s distinctive voice, asking for her ‘usual’.
‘He had a very sore throat last night.’ Dolly prepared to roll out some pastry, and I hoped she hadn’t looked in the bin outside and seen my burnt offerings from yesterday. ‘He said he was going to try and sleep it off. He wants to be better for when Elle gets here.’ Her eyes twinkled at me. ‘Sounds like you and Ryan did a great job yesterday.’
‘I wouldn’t go that far.’ My gaze strayed in the direction of the café. Was he still wearing the shirt I’d unbuttoned yesterday evening?
My face grew fiery hot.
‘Sure you’re OK?’ Dolly pinned me with her all-seeing eyes. ‘You’re not running a fever?’
‘I’m fine.’ I injected my voice with a smile. ‘Ryan’s great with the coffee machine.’ And a world-class kisser.
‘He’s a natural.’ Unlike you, she didn’t add as she nodded to Stefan’s brother, who was approaching the sink with a tray of plates in each hand.
‘Looks like he’s recovered too,’ I said. ‘What a coincidence that everyone’s healthy and the café’s fully staffed once more.’
Dolly looked round. ‘Oh, Sacha,’ she said. ‘Yes, he’s fine.’
‘I’ve never known people get better so quickly from the flu.’ I studied her face for a tell-tale tic or twitch, but Dolly gave nothing away.
‘Sacha’s was just a twenty-four-hour thing.’ She took the lid off a jar of fragrant mincemeat and dug a spoon inside with an expertise borne from years of practice. ‘You sound suspicious, Nina.’ She cocked her head. ‘Don’t you believe Sacha was ill?’
Hearing his name, Sacha looked up from the dishwasher, big brown eyes wide with alarm.
I shook my head. ‘Of course not,’ I mumbled, tugging at my crumpled shirt. I must look a state in the trousers I’d managed to cover in flour the day before, with just a clean dark square where my apron had been. ‘I’m glad everyone’s feeling better.’
‘Apart from Charlie.’
‘I’m sure he’ll be fully recovered by lunchtime.’ I looked away from Dolly’s reproachful stare. ‘Did he know Nicole was going to turn up?’
She didn’t flinch at the abrupt change of topic. ‘He spoke to her on the phone yesterday morning,’ she said. ‘He thought it was likely, but didn’t want to tell Ryan in case he tried to put her off, or did a runner.’
Odd, when he’d been the one telling Ryan to ignore Nicole in the first place. ‘I don’t think he’d have done a runner, Dolly, he’s not a teenager.’
‘She said she wanted to tell him something he needed to hear.’
‘But she didn’t say what?’
Dolly’s hands stilled. ‘You sound very interested.’
‘It’s just we were having… dinner and she walked in.’
‘You and Ryan were having dinner together?’
I had no idea why she sounded so pleased when it didn’t matter any more. ‘He’d made a chicken chasseur in the slow cooker.’
‘Oh, how lovely!’ she said as if it hadn’t been her idea in the first place. ‘He’s really quite domesticated, you know.’ As if seeing something in my face, she began cutting circles out of the pasty and pressing them into a tart tin. ‘The knitting ladies thought you were lovely,’ she said, knowing when to switch topic. ‘Dee said Margot told her what a splendid job you’d made of her front room.’
I remembered Dee was the florist with red, spiky hair, who’d eaten the most macarons and whose knitting was the most puzzling: a jumble of mismatched colours that stretched to the floor, wide at the top and gradually narrowing. When Madame Bisset came in and sat nearby, giving me a conspiratorial smile, Delphine had leapt under the knitters’ table and clawed at the end of whatever Dee was making.
‘It is fine, she will not notice,’ Madame Bisset had assured me, once Delphine had returned to her lap, keeping one eye on me. I hadn’t dared touch her, in case I activated her attack button.
‘That’s nice,’ I said to Dolly, coming back to the moment.
‘She’d like you to do her bedroom.’
‘Oh?’ I brightened. ‘When?’
‘Any time.’ Dolly spooned mincemeat into the pastry moulds. ‘She lives above the shop. You can go up and do it whenever you like.’
‘Word travels fast around here.’ I indulged a quick fantasy of me advertising my services: Nina Bailey: The House Whisperer. Let me bring out the beauty in your home. So many houses, so many rooms – it was almost irresistible. I clenched my tingling fingers and tried to push them in my pockets, but the trousers were too tight.
‘Chamillon’s a small place,’ sai
d Dolly. ‘But there are other villages on the island. You’d never be short of work.’
‘I can’t stay here, Dolly.’
‘I don’t see why not.’ She placed the tray in the oven. ‘But it’s the sort of business you could set up anywhere.’
Before I could respond, she turned and said brightly, ‘Breakfast?’
‘Could I take some coffee upstairs? I’m feeling a bit…’ My words petered out as I imagined Ryan and Nicole, heads together over whichever table they were sitting at, catching up on the past few months, probably riddled with lust. After everything he’d said, all it had taken was for her to literally turn up on the doorstep, wearing a swingy coat, to bring home to him exactly what he’d lost, his resolve swept away with one blast of her dewy eyes and a gentle touch on his arm. ‘I’m a bit tired.’
‘I know what day it is, Nina.’
I jolted. ‘What?’
‘It would have been your wedding day today.’ Dolly’s voice was gentle.
‘That’s right, it… it would.’ How could I have forgotten?
‘If you need some time alone, I understand, but remember, love, if it was meant to be, you’d still be together.’ Augustine and William leapt into my head, and I wondered whether that was true, or whether other forces had kept them apart. ‘And not all men are like him.’ She was obviously referring to Scott. She never got to meet him after his no-show at the café, which I knew even then she’d felt spoke volumes about his character.
‘I know that, Dolly, but thank you.’ All of a sudden I was very near to tears. I wondered whether to tell her it was more about Gran than Scott, knowing she’d understand, but now I’d told Ryan, I didn’t feel the need to say it again. Telling him how I’d felt had put it into perspective, I realised. I would always be sad that she hadn’t lived to see me get married, and a part of me still believed that calling off the wedding had precipitated her death – but I knew in my heart she wouldn’t have wanted me to marry a man who’d cheated on me, a man who didn’t love me the way I wanted to be loved. ‘I think I might go for a bike ride,’ I said instead. ‘Blow away the cobwebs.’
‘That wind will blow you away.’ She turned to the window, and I saw it was snowing once more, flakes hurtling past the glass. Elvis was singing ‘Blue Christmas’ on the CD player, which Dolly had placed on the windowsill, and she was baking mince pies in her reindeer jumper. It was almost like being back home.
‘Maybe I’ll go for a walk later on, instead.’
Twenty-Two
Dolly made me some coffee and fetched me a couple of pains au chocolat, which I took upstairs and stuck my head around Charlie’s bedroom door. The room was empty and as tidy as ever, with no sign of any activity – even sleeping. Ryan’s suitcase was lying at the foot of the bed, so he’d have to come back to collect it before going to the airport. Unwilling to examine my feelings about him leaving, I went through to the living room and placed my coffee and pastries on the table, before looking in the kitchen to see it was clean and tidy in there too. I wondered whether Ryan or Nicole had done the washing-up. Perhaps they’d done it together, falling into old habits.
I went back to my room, gathered my dirty clothes and put them in the washing machine, then sat at the dining table, scanning the sofa for evidence that it had been slept on as I drank my coffee. The sofa-bedding was in the same neat pile it had been when I left the room, the cushions squashed in places, where Ryan and I had— I snapped off the memory, and wondered what would have happened if Nicole hadn’t turned up.
I also wondered what had possessed me to kiss Ryan in the first place. I’d known his life was complicated, and I was supposed to be focusing on my career, not snogging men while I was here. Even if he had the most kissable lips in the universe.
Stop it, Nina. It was over – whatever ‘it’ was – before it had barely begun.
I picked my phone off the coffee table and messaged Charlie.
How’s the invalid this morning?
He was probably still sleeping, so I didn’t expect an answer right away.
I ate a pain au chocolat without really tasting it, then took a photo of the tree and sent it in a message to Ben.
What do you get if you cross an apple with a Christmas tree? A PINEapple!! X (pine as in pine tree, pine as in pineapple… the fruit.)
You’re hilarious he replied, seconds later. He was never far from his phone even out in the fields, or supervising milking time.
How’s it going?
Surprisingly eventful. How’s life on the farm?
He sent an image of a dog ‘driving’ a tractor.
I miss Tess! I replied.
She’s been going to the farm shop with Mum, the customers love her.
How’s the donkey training going?
She’s been trying to teach Barney to sit down.
???!!!
What have you bought me for Xmas?
I sent an image of a black hole and he responded with a crying emoji.
Say hi to Mum and Dad for me.
They hate you and don’t want to see you again X
Hate you too XXXXXX
Feeling cheered, I put down my phone and finished my coffee, then looked at Ryan’s laptop, which was open in front of me, the screen black. I pressed a key, not expecting it to come on, or to at least be password protected this time, but just like before, a document sprang up. He really was careless about security. What if I was a rival novelist and pinched his ideas? Or I found his email inbox and sent an embarrassing message to everyone on his address list. Not that I would. Anna had once sent a picture of a cat dressed as the Cookie Monster to everyone at work and nearly got the sack.
I pushed my plate aside and looked more closely at the page. He’d stopped typing mid-sentence, as though he’d been interrupted – probably by me.
I scrolled back a bit, feeling furtive, but also excited, just as I had reading Augustine’s letters to William. I couldn’t resist a glimpse of the new Grace Benedict novel before anyone else saw it. Only one page, I promised myself, pulling the laptop closer. Anything more would be a total invasion of privacy.
…Noah was a force of nature; funny, sweet and kind, with a sense of humour that made people warm to him. He was Grace’s opposite in many ways and she wondered whether that was why she found him intriguing, even if his approach to police work was somewhat unorthodox. She’d heard that on one occasion, Noah had turned up to a job wearing a one-piece sleepsuit – a onesie – designed to look like a penguin, complete with a yellow beak. An icebreaker, he’d said, executing a funny penguin dance, arms clamped to his sides…
I stopped, mouth falling open and read the paragraph again. The character was clearly based on me. Ryan had taken my advice to heart and given Grace an adversary, but not the hard-bitten, gum-chewing, smart-mouthed female I’d had in mind, someone for Grace to lock horns with. Instead, he’d used my onesie as inspiration, and turned me into a man.
I scrolled down and read some more.
…Noah was adept at catching criminals, his record was a testament to that, and he never looked happier than when doing the thing he loved most, but he was no great shakes in the kitchen – could barely boil an egg, in fact. He did love tidying up though, and took great pleasure in rearranging his surroundings – releasing their potential – a trait that Grace admired and found endearing. In fact, murder was on her mind less and less these days. She almost wished she didn’t find Noah Dailey so attractive…
‘You’ve got to be kidding me!’ I couldn’t work out whether I was flattered or outraged by Ryan plundering my life for entertainment. What next? Was he going to write in what I’d told him last night? Would Noah suddenly confess to having called off his wedding – a wedding he’d only agreed to in order to make his dying grandmother happy? Or maybe he’d change it to grandfather, because that would be original. Would he find some ancient love letters and uncover a passionate affair that he had to stay quiet about?
I felt winded. Was this why Ryan had
been suddenly keen to talk to me? Perhaps he’d decided I was a rich source of material. It would have been more flattering if he’d written me in as a sassy but sexy redhead (I’d always fancied having red hair), who was brilliant at kick-boxing, and could speak Japanese and had a Pomeranian called Sushi.
Still unsure how I felt, wishing I hadn’t looked… what was the visual form of eavesdropping called? Snooping, I supposed… I closed the laptop and felt the walls closing in; I needed to get some air, snowing or not.
I threw on my coat, dragged on my boots, grabbed my purse and phone and ran downstairs. Dolly wasn’t in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to go through to the café and anyway, she didn’t need a rundown of my whereabouts. I was a grown woman (apparently).
I let myself out of the back door and almost screamed when I bumped into Mathilde coming in, shrinking back from her thunderous glare as she passed.
The wind was bracing, blowing flurries of snowflakes that blurred my vision as I headed away from the harbour, but it didn’t stop me from spotting the swish of Nicole’s scarlet coat in the distance, her hair cascading from a black knitted hat with a furry pom-pom on top. She was walking beside Ryan, her arm through his, her cheek pressed to the sleeve of his coat as if trying to draw warmth from him. It was such a loving gesture, I felt my insides drop.
Picking up pace, I followed them through the streets to a medieval-style square which had been transformed into a winter wonderland of wooden huts and market stalls, strung with coloured lights and displaying gifts, crafts and food. It was surprisingly busy, considering the weather, and people seemed in good spirits as they browsed.
