He wanted to push it all out of his mind, but he couldn’t. Since Posh Boy had left, Pax had gone to ground. She usually worked on the yard like an addict. They both did. It was their therapy. And Ronnie had said something about her collecting her son, hadn’t she?
Be kind to Pax.
Eventually, he jogged beneath the arch to the front of the stables cottage to knock on the door. When there was no answer, he turned back and played ship’s head beneath the little porch for a moment, telling himself that this was absolutely none of his business, and that he didn’t want it to be.
Be kind to Pax.
And where are you, Ronnie?
You have absolutely no idea about this family!
Tell me, Pax.
Still he remained rooted, the same compulsion to play sentry as the one which had kept watch from the chair in her hotel room a week earlier. He felt in his pockets, pulling out the leaflet he’d picked up in town a few days earlier, raided from a display by the chemist’s pharmacy counter. If he posted it through the door, he guessed she’d take terrible offence. He folded it back up. He could hear music – a kitschy Latin Jazz – and had a brief involuntary mental image of Pax as a fifties housewife slewed on gin, head in the oven.
As he went to knock again, the door opened, leaving him like a Chinese lucky cat offering an awkward power salute. She was buttoning up her coat, surprised to find him there. Her hair was a mess, her swollen-lidded eyes wild behind their unflattering glasses. It was obvious she’d been sobbing for a long, long time. And drinking. He could smell it on her. Her car keys were in her hand.
She looked at him, disconcerted. ‘You forgot your smile, Luca.’
‘May I come in?’ Be kind to her, Luca. If Pax wanted to pickle herself on his watch, fine. But she would do so without getting behind the wheel.
‘I’m running an hour late.’
An hour in which she’d consumed both Blair’s bottles of wine judging by the glazed expression.
‘This won’t take a minute.’
She looked poised to tell him to go to hell, but then she let out a cry and turned abruptly back inside, rattling through the cottage to fetch her handbag. ‘Oh God, where’s my bloody phone?’
Pushing the door closed behind him, Luca followed. ‘You threw it in a skip.’
‘I have a new one.’ She started pulling open drawers and cupboards at random. It was, inexplicably, in the fridge. She lobbed it in her bag. The big headlamp gaze turned to him, daring him to comment. ‘What is it you want, Luca?’ She was brittle with self-control, no trace of any tears now.
‘I’m not sure you should be driving.’
‘Says the man who’s scarier behind the wheel than Mr Magoo. You don’t have worry, I’m perfectly safe to drive, Luca.’
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t agree.’
Her jaw set, a thousand freckles framing a determined chin dimple. She plunged back through the kitchen, returning with the two unopened bottles of Barossa Valley shiraz. ‘Take them, although they’re wasted on you and Mummy. You two really should start up the Compton chapter of the Temperance Society. She took one of the neighbour’s keys away in the pub car park to stop him driving not long ago. He wasn’t even over the limit, for the record.’
He could smell the sweet hit of her breath. Was it port? Cassis? She must have raided the old boy’s larder. ‘Let me drive you. I could use the practice.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’re needed here. I only have to stick my head in to the village school then pick up Kes from his grandparents.’ The deep voice wasn’t remotely slurred, but there was a wilful agitation that told Luca to trust his instinct. She was saying something about her in-laws taking her son out for the day. ‘They’re on a sodding steam train. I’ve told them if they’re not back with him when I get there, I’m going to stop the train by waving big red knickers. Now where did I leave those keys?’
She started looking for the car keys she’d put down when searching for her phone. ‘Oh come on, Pax, think!’ She stood still and swung round. Her eyes, red-rimmed and unfocussed, darting from object to object.
Luca followed them, tracking their guilty trail for the telltale shadow of a vodka bottle behind the toaster or rum in the bread bin, but there was nothing, just a plastic bottle of blackcurrant squash by the kettle and a pink-stained mug. He crossed the room, pretending to look for the keys too.
‘Hot Ribena.’ Pax picked up the mug and thrust it under his nose. ‘When we were kids, Lester used to make up a flask of “hot bina” to drink out hunting. It’s a habitual comforter. Did Mummy ask you to nanny me? Don’t answer that. Of course she did. I heard her.’ Her face lit up at the sight of her keys by the sink, dumping the mug there to retrieve them. She clicked her fingers for Stubbs to get in his basket, the grey puppy shadowing her as usual as she turned back to face Luca, frostily polite. ‘Please just get on with what you’re doing on the yard, Luca, and trust me when I tell you that I can drive.’
‘I apologise if I’ve misjudged the situation.’ Still certain she was covering, he noticed the anxious threading of the keyring from finger to finger, clumsily letting go so they dropped on the quarry tiled floor with a clatter that made the puppy streak away. Her hands were shaking too much to pick them up on the first attempt. Stooping over them, a sob wracked through her, furiously swallowed back down and masked with a cough.
‘I’m sorry too.’ She looked up at him, then quickly away. ‘It’s been a tough morning. I’ve just spent the past hour staring at that wine, willing myself not to open it, so you weren’t entirely wrong.’
Luca crouched beside her. He rarely gave anything much away about himself, least of all to someone he wasn’t sure he could trust, but he knew no other way to appeal for the truth than by offering it. ‘Pax, I’ve been where you are; I’m still there, if I’m honest.’
She stared across at him, unblinking. For a moment, he felt a collision of compassion. The look in her eyes he’d seen earlier was back, that emotional whirlwind. Then it was averted just as swiftly.
‘Oh, I don’t think so.’ She stood up briskly.
Luca stood too, catching her arm. ‘It’s easier to overcome it with help.’
‘Thank you for your concern, but I’m not about to wallow in self-pity. I must go.’ As she brushed past him, he caught another waft of liqueur sweetness.
‘How come it was a tough morning?’ He followed.
‘Not now, Luca.’ She was at the door.
‘You and Bay Austen looked pretty intense earlier.’
Her hand faltered on the latch. ‘That’s absolutely not your concern.’
‘With respect, it is if you’re drunk at the wheel.’
‘I am not drunk!’ She turned back, eyes huge.
‘Seeing Bay upset you.’
She crossed her arms, saying nothing.
‘I’ve been where you are,’ he reminded her.
‘Upset with Bay?’ she mocked him, cried-out hare’s eyes glowing golden. ‘And there was me thinking it was Mummy who pulled your strings.’
‘Let’s leave your mother out of this, shall we?’
‘The thing is, Luca,’ she leaned back against the door, scuffing a foot on the sisal mat, ‘my mother is right in the middle of it all. So is Bay, if you must know. He caused it, our rift.’
‘Go on.’
She was staring across at an old framed photograph, that blue flame heat back, and it spilled out in a quiet, rushed undertone. ‘Austen and Percy children always played together; we were like cousins. Mummy pushed off when I was tiny, so she was never much part of that. Bay was closer to my brother and sister at first; he’s five years older than me and I just remember him winning everything at Pony Club and being a menace at sleepovers. I was eleven when Daddy died, in a hell of hormones and grief. Bay was terribly sweet about it, coming here of his own volition and singling me out. He was about to take GCSEs, all floppy hair and loud waistcoats. Afterwards, I was sent away to boarding school and we wrote a few
times, but we barely saw each other again until the summer he came back from university to learn the ropes as a gentleman farmer. By then, the curtain hair and waistcoats had gone and he was quite the best-looking man I’d ever seen. I was in my first year of A levels and competing for the stud every weekend. We really fell for each other. Three months in, I was hopelessly in love and Bay said it often enough for me to think he was too.’
Luca sensed the point coming, its romanticised prologue seeking to sweeten something soul-destroying.
‘Then Bay slept with my mother.’
Luca hadn’t seen that coming. She gave him a curiously apologetic smile.
‘Such a stupid phrase, isn’t it? Sleep didn’t come into it at all. I suppose I’ve always just thought of it like that because I was seventeen and wanted to wake up and find it was all a dream.’
‘That’s a hard betrayal to take.’
‘Isn’t it just?’ She threw up her palms, car keys jangling, playing it too lightly, soft laugh contradicting the pain in her eyes. ‘How do you forgive two people you love doing that to you?’
‘I don’t suppose you can.’
‘I certainly couldn’t at the time. It made no difference that they hadn’t met since he was tiny, that they pleaded a moment of mad mutual attraction, a no-names’ once-off. It’s all it takes, ultimately, isn’t it? You can wipe out everything in a night. One fuck. One night.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I left home. Life was a bit messy for a while. Fast forward fourteen years – a lot of which I’ve spent in a marriage which I realised very early on was the worst rebound ever – and Bay desperately wants to say sorry, which I know I should be grown-up about, in the same way I’ve tried to patch it up with Mummy – it’s ancient history, after all – but d’you know, I really don’t think I can forgive him.’
‘Then don’t.’ Luca had disliked the man on instinct, and what he’d witnessed hadn’t looked like much of an apology. ‘Tell him to jump off a cliff.’
Her eyes sharpened, surprised. ‘Not many cliffs round here.’
‘Offer to drive him to one. Just not today,’ he added quickly. ‘Not until you’ve had the strong coffee I’m about to make you, and something to eat. You look like you never eat.’
‘That’s what Bay said.’ The hall clock chimed a quarter. Her face resumed its panicked look. ‘Jesus, I am so late! I’ve phoned the Head twice with a lie about a flat tyre. Christ!’ She turned to the front door then spun back again. ‘Sorry. Blasphemy. Oh God, and I’m being so ungrateful as well. You’re a kind man, Luca, even if you’re only doing this for my mother’s sake, and to avoid teaching pony lessons.’ She’d overhead Ronnie say it, he realised in horror. ‘It was very noble to say that you’ve been where I am, even if we both know it’s not true.’
Luca stiffened. He could smell the alcohol again. He took in the compass points of her face, from high cheeks to dimpled chin to furrowed forehead, her mother’s beauty dusted with fiery cayenne and soured by too many twists of melancholy.
‘The night I arrived here,’ he told her, ‘I’d downed one whisky after another on a seven-hour flight from Toronto then chucked it all up at Schiphol. The six months before that, I’d barely been sober. If I’d walked into that hotel an hour earlier, I’d probably have got drunk with you. I owe you my sobriety right now. You are where I was – and seeing it close up is what’s stopping me going there again. I can’t watch you do it again either.’
The amber eyes scorched afresh. ‘I’m not doing it again.’
A looped slideshow played too fast in Luca’s head whenever he remembered that night: her kissing a stranger, throwing up, wet skin, her total raw despair, his own need to comfort.
‘I’m not doing any of it again, Luca,’ she repeated carefully, letting herself out.
The cold wind caught her unawares. Gasping, she lurched off the step.
He followed, sprinting past to put himself between her and the car. ‘Let me help you, Pax.’
‘Cut out the therapishtact.’ She stopped, aware that she’d just slurred. She held up her hands. ‘My teeth are chattering, okay?’
‘Let’s go to AA. Or you can talk to an addiction counsellor. If you won’t talk to me, talk to someone else.’
‘I told you, I’m fine!’ She tried to push past him, stumbling as the puppy threaded in front of her, losing her balance and flailing to avoid stepping on him, a strange high-stepping dance that pitched her into the cobbles.
Luca caught her before she hit her head, shocked by how much she was shaking, toxic with adrenaline. He steadied her for a moment as they crouched by her car, then she shrugged him away with a muttered ‘thanks’, pressing her forehead to the polished metal door, mortified.
‘What did the Ribenas have in them?’ he demanded.
‘Plum gin.’ She put her face in her hands. ‘Lester has enough stored under the stairs to hospitalise a rugby club.’
‘How much have you had?’
‘Only a splash, but the man makes it navy strength.’ She looked at him through her fingers. ‘You’d think a closet alcoholic could hold her booze, but I had one lousy glass and look at me.’
‘When did you last eat?’
‘I can’t remember.’
‘There’s your answer. That and the fact your measure was probably a half-pint mug.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ She buried her face in her arms. ‘Christ, I’m a terrible mother.’
‘Let’s cancel the school, shall we?’
‘God, no! I’m bloody doing this!’ she shouted into her sleeves.
‘Then I’m driving you,’ he told her wearily, standing up again. ‘And don’t blaspheme.’
‘Were you once ordained or something?’ Her voice was still muffled.
‘I’m no priest, Pax, I told you that.’
‘So the altar boy has an alter ego?’ Her face lifted, incredulous. ‘Luca the lush who gets the plum gin vibe.’
‘I get all of it, Pax,’ he said, holding out a hand to help her up.
‘And if I don’t want your help?’
‘That’s no longer an option.’
13
The sliding glass screen in the front reception area of Compton Magna’s small primary school was still polka-dotted by the nervous fingerprints of parents signing in late pupils that morning. Manning it, head teacher Auriol Bullock was moist with anticipation beneath her ruffle-necked Boden. An inch of white creeping into her burgundy bob, eyes outlined twice in kohl like a circle around a misspelling, crimson lipstick bleeding into old smoker’s creases, Auriol bore the ghost of the glamour that had won her two handsome husbands, a leading role in the Broadbourne Amateur Dramatic Society and an Ofsted ‘Good’ twice running (‘Outstanding for Parent Satisfaction’, boasted a banner on the school gates). A stickler for correct uniform, manners and posture – and for being greeted with a bright ‘Good day, Mrs Bullock!’ by all – Auriol possessed unexpected theatrical panache as well as an allergy to paperwork.
She was intensely proud of Compton Magna C of E Primary School – or ‘Maggers’ as she referred to it when emailing former colleagues – which had gifted her merriment in widowhood. Her little barn conversion in nearby Greater Compton was a haven after the sociable cathedral city years with her choirmaster late husband, and with both adult sons in the army, Auriol was a self-styled grandmother-in-waiting, early retirement beckoning. This role, a step down from her previous headship, was easing her gently into a quieter life, grateful that she had fewer of the little buggers’ names to remember in such a small school. Her memory had become increasingly unreliable throughout her fifties and faced with a long list of Mias, Ellies, Rubies, Ethans and Freddies, Auriol regularly blanked. Even worse was trying to recall what their confounded parents called themselves, which should have made it rather useful that there were so many here with one surname. Yet even thinking the name Turner made Auriol’s left eye twitch involuntarily.
The village school had been on the brink of
closure when she’d taken over the headship four years earlier, and whilst it still struggled with numbers – draughty Victorian classrooms in an Internet dead-zone were no rival to the high-tech, architect-designed Cotswold learning hubs in Broadbourne and Chipping Hampton – Maggers now boasted old-fashioned boaters-and-slates discipline and modern wrap-around care. Being just inside the catchment for Warwickshire’s best grammar schools meant it was ripe territory for those who wanted a Cotswold postcode whilst still looking to save money by getting their little Edies and Axls through the Eleven Plus. Under her leadership, ‘Maggers’ offered extra tuition from the get-go, plus breakfast clubs and high tea for the convenience of busy commuter parents, lots of externally sourced educational after-school clubs that parents paid through the nose for, and ever-more lavish play facilities funded by a PTA with more high flyers sitting on it than Alan Sugar’s boardroom. Its divorce lawyer Chair was a volunteer-enlisting legend, on occasion also discreetly steering new parents in the school’s direction. And today, Mrs Beadle might just have landed Auriol with a very fine feather for Maggers’ cap.
Annual budget stripped bare, Auriol had, by necessity, become adept at enticing parents with deep pockets, the redistribution of wealth starting at her school gates. Old money always attracted new in Auriol’s experience, and where a hand-stitched country boot led, the well-heeled followed. She glanced out of the glass door again, eyeing the lane for movement. Where was the blasted woman? Among social influencers, blue blood was gold dust.
A devotee of the Observer’s glossy style magazines, Auriol had a sharp eye for trends, her latest mission to recreate Soho Farmhouse’s Teeny Camp and Barn to satisfy the influx of hipster parents emigrating from London. And whilst she couldn’t deny that almost a quarter of her register shared the surname Turner, she liked to think her little school was gaining a name for being select, cosmopolitan and just a little bit boho. On its register were the children of an artist, the head of a charity and an actress who had appeared in The Archers; one of the parent governors had written speeches for Blair, another was in a same-sex relationship with the Birmingham Symph’s lead cellist, and of course Mrs Beadle, the PTA’s Lord Kitchener, had personally overseen three celebrity divorces and lifted the Bardswold MP’s super-injunction. Auriol’s roll-call even had a glamorously high ethnicity thanks to the two large families who now ran the old coaching inns on the Fosse Way as Indian and Thai restaurants. As credentials went, socially diverse Compton Magna was up there with champagne-socialist Islington. Only with more Turners and less funding. Attracting liberal-thinking, philanthropic parents was a priority, especially if they had enough land for a forest school.
The Country Lovers Page 36
