she’ll be back by Sunday afternoon,’ he adds quickly, seeing my face drop. ‘And Mark’s fine about a bit of banter after hours as long he doesn’t know about it, if you know what I mean. Discretion, that’s the key.’ Clive winks and grins before tapping the side of his nose with an index finger. ‘Now, how about I get you a drink before we find you somewhere to stay.’ He rubs his hands together.
‘Er, I thought it was OK to stay here. Cher said …’ My voice trails off and for some ridiculous reason I can feel tears threatening. I push my top teeth down hard on my tongue to focus my mind and stop the tears from tumbling out. I’ve cocked up again. I should never have just rocked up here. What was I thinking? I can’t imagine there’s a Travelodge anywhere in Tindledale so I’m going to have to go back home – which is where I probably should have stayed to face the music in the morning with Mr Banerjee.
‘Hey, of course it is,’ Clive says kindly. ‘Cher has been going on and on about you coming. Like I said, she’ll be made up that you’re here. And it’ll sweeten the blow when she returns.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Come and see.’ And Clive pulls open a little timber-slatted door in the corner that I hadn’t even noticed, and after ducking his head under the low frame, he motions for me to follow him up the narrowest, twistiest, higgledy-piggledy stairs I think I’ve ever seen. I feel like Alice in Wonderland as I crouch down and place the palms of my hands on the steps in front of me just to get low enough to climb up to the next floor.
‘Oh dear! I see what you mean.’ We’ve emerged into a tiny, exposed beamed bedroom with a mattress on the floor, one side of which is propped up on a row of wooden blocks next to a window so low and bowed it’s practically a continuation of the carpet. ‘What are they for?’ I point to the blocks.
‘So we don’t tumble away when we’re fast asleep in the middle of the night and end up going through the window.’ He manages a wry smile, but he also has a very good point, because the floorboards slope so severely that there’s every chance this really could happen. ‘We can’t get any of our furniture up those doll’s house stairs. The pub was built in 1706 as a coaching inn originally – even the old stable buildings are still intact. And currently storing all of our furniture, I hasten to add. People were clearly pocket-size in those days.’ He shrugs and pulls a face. ‘We’re lucky to even have the mattress; if it wasn’t for Pete lashing it up tight like a bale of hay, we would have never squeezed it up the stairs. No, we need a new bed, one that can be assembled in situ, as it were.’ He pauses and shrugs. ‘But until then, this is it, I’m afraid. So unless you and Basil fancy bunking down with me on the mattress …’ He laughs, slings a friendly arm around my shoulders, and jiggles me up and down in a big bear hug.
I like Clive, always have. When Cher first met him, he was washing dishes in her parents’ pub in Doncaster to pay his way through catering college, and they’ve been together ever since. He’s so solid and uncomplicated. When I ran out of the church, Cher and Clive arrived at Mum and Dad’s house within moments of me getting there. I learned later that Clive had grabbed Cher’s hand, run her from the church (she was bridesmaid, of course) and driven at breakneck speed to find me. No fuss, just a ‘well, she’s your mate and he’s a wanker’, and he was all for hunting Luke down and giving him a ‘good slap’, but Cher talked him out of it. Yes, Clive is a what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of guy, and there’s a lot to be said for that. Not like Luke who clearly has very hidden depths. You know, Luke even tried telling me once that he mistook Sasha for me and that’s how the ‘mix up’ had all started in the first place. He snogged her by accident and it ‘sort of went from there’. I didn’t buy it of course – because for starters, our faces may be the same but that’s where the identical twin bit ends these days. And Sasha wears completely different clothes to me – expensive body-con dresses and designer stacked heels to my hand-sewn Renfrew tops or chunky jumpers in winter with jeans and flats. Anyway, Sasha could easily have pushed him away, or laughed it off at the very least.
‘Um, think I’ll pass if you don’t mind. Cher has told me all about your super-loud snoring,’ I play punch his chest, trying to make light of the situation and wondering if perhaps Basil and I could sleep on one of the sofas in the bar. If the villagers ever decide to head back to their chocolate box cottages, that is.
Leaning back against the plum-coloured velvet headboard with Basil snuggled up on a blanket beside me, his front left paw on my thigh as he snores softly, I snuggle into the enormous squishy bed in my ditsy floral-themed bedroom.
After Clive and I had made it back down the tiny stairs and into the saloon bar area earlier, the woman in the poncho, who it turns out is called Molly and has a pet ferret which she walks around the village on a lead – it was under the pub table apparently, and I didn’t even notice – anyway, she’s Cooper’s wife, and she kindly rang the only B&B for miles around. It’s located in the valley on the far side of the village and doubles as a hair salon too, apparently. As luck would have it, there was one room left, and dogs are very welcome, so Pete, who I later found out farms cattle – ‘three fields over near Cherry Tree Orchard which supplies apples to all the major supermarkets’ – loaded me, Basil and my suitcase into the cab of his tractor, I kid you not, and then trundled us all the way down the hill in the snow and right up to the front door that doubles up as the B&B and hair salon reception.
So now I’m wrapped in a fluffy white bathrobe trying not to think about the contents of my suitcase. All of my clean clothes, pyjamas, underwear – the whole lot’s soaked in red wine. Ruined. Even my almost-finished knitting project, a lovely little Christmas pudding, is now stained a vivid claret colour and stinks like a barrel of rotten grapes. The top on the bottle wasn’t screwed on properly so had come off and seeped wine into everything. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, in my rush to escape London and the wrath of Mr Banerjee, I left my make-up bag and hairbrush behind on the hall table, so I will now have to spend the whole weekend wearing my super warm, fleece-lined Ho Ho Ho jumper and snow-sodden jeans.
I say good night to Basil and switch off the lamp – the electricity in the village flicked back on, just like magic, as Pete and I left the Duck & Puddle. I was climbing into the tractor when the festive fairy-tale scene literally took my breath away. The pretty red, gold and green Christmas lights twinkling all over the tree on the village green before cascading the length of the High Street, with a grand finale – the cross at the top of the tall church steeple illuminated in silver as if bathing the whole village in a ray of tranquillity and spiritual peace.
I lie in the silent night of the countryside, except for the intermittent ter-wit-ter-woo of an owl and try to let everything wash over me: Jennifer Ford, Mr Banerjee, Mum and her ‘make do with whatever’s left over’ implications, Luke the tool, Star Wars, Princess Leia buns, Chewbacca and, worst of all, the betrayal by my very own twin sister. I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive her; men come and go, I know that, but my own sister? How does one deal with that? It’s not as if I can just cut her out of my life! What would that do to Mum and Dad? And it would certainly make things very awkward at family events. But then again, Sasha did this, not me. And I can’t help wondering if she has difficulty sleeping at night too!
I breathe in and out, desperately trying to slow my racing thoughts, in the hope of actually getting to sleep and making it through to the morning without waking up for once. It’s been ages since I managed to get a proper night’s sleep. Soon after the wedding-that-wasn’t, my GP prescribed sleeping tablets, saying they would help with the ‘overwhelming feelings of sadness too’ and they do, a bit, I guess. Which reminds me. I sit bolt upright and switch
