arrived,’ said Philippe, picking up the menu. ‘It can’t be much fun trying to celebrate your engagement when your fiancé's ex is on the other side of the room and he can’t take his eyes off her.’
‘Oh, he’s not looking at me,’ said Caro bitterly. ‘He’s looking at you and wondering what on earth a guy like you is doing with a boring frump like me!’
Philippe’s dark brows shot up. ‘Boring? You?‘
His surprise was some consolation, Caro supposed. She opened the menu and pretended to read it, but the words were a blur and all she saw instead was George’s face the day he’d told her it was over. He’d waited until she came back from the supermarket, and told her while she was unpacking the bags. Now Caro couldn’t look at a carton of orange juice without feeling queasy.
‘George thinks I’m boring.’ She pressed her lips together against the jab of memory. ‘He always said that he wanted to marry someone like me, but then he fell in love with Melanie because she was sexy and fun and everything I’m not, apparently.’
Turning a page unseeingly, she went on, ‘There’s a certain irony in that. I spent five years being careful and dressing conventionally, and deliberately not being fun or obvious, just so that I would fit into his world. I’d have done anything for him.’
Whenever she thought about how much she had loved George, her voice would crack like that. It was mortifying because she was over him now. Pretty much.
‘Lotty said you’d been engaged, but that it was over,’ Philippe said in that cool, couldn’t-give-a-damn voice. ‘It’s one of the reasons she thought you might like to come to Montluce. A chance to get away for a while.’
‘It would be nice.’ Caro hadn’t thought of that aspect of things before. She’d been too busy thinking what it would be like to spend two months with Philippe, who was sitting opposite her looking remote and gorgeous and totally out of reach in spite of being only a matter of inches away.
‘Ellerby’s a small town,’ she said, ‘and I spend a lot of time dreading that I’m going to bump into George, like just now.’
Although this time it hadn’t been so bad, after all, she realised. There’d been that horrible moment when she’d seen George there with Melanie, and she’d been gripped by that old mixture of misery and rage and humiliation. They were a cosy twosome and she was left alone … and then, suddenly, she hadn’t been on her own. Philippe had put his arm around her and made it look as if they were a couple, and she’d seen the astonishment flash in George’s face.
Caro looked at Philippe. The dark brows were drawn together as he studied the menu and, with those piercing eyes shielded for once, she could let her gaze travel down his straight nose to the cool set of his mouth, where it snagged in spite of her efforts to tear her eyes away. Looking at it made her feel quite … funny.
He hadn’t hesitated to step in and rescue her, while she had been floundering.
‘Thank you for earlier,’ she said.
‘Earlier?’
‘You know, making George think we were a couple.’ He’d been so quick, seeing instantly what was needed, before she’d even thought about how to react. ‘They always see me looking lonely and miserable and pathetic,’ she said, laying down the menu so that he could see how grateful she was. ‘I don’t look like that when I’m with you.’
‘ARE you still in love with him?’ Philippe asked and then looked as if the question had caught him unawares. ‘I mean, it would be difficult for you to act as my girlfriend if you were,’ he added.
‘No.’ She didn’t sound quite as sure as she should have done, Caro realised. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘I adored George. When he broke off our engagement, it broke my heart. For a long time I told myself that I wanted him back, that I still loved him, but now … now I think maybe I love the idea of him more than the reality.’
She saw Philippe flick a brief, uncomprehending glance at George. No, he wouldn’t understand.
‘I know he’s not particularly good-looking or glamorous, but he was everything I’ve ever wanted. He belongs.’
Philippe looked mystified.
‘I never belonged anywhere,’ she tried to explain. ‘My dad was a mechanical engineer, and when I was small we moved around from project to project overseas. Then he got ill, and we moved to St Wulfrida’s.’
‘That was Lotty’s school,’ he remembered, and Caro nodded.
‘That’s where we met. My mother got a teaching post there, Dad applied to be the handyman so they could be together, and I got a free education as part of the deal. Except I was never going to belong in a school like that, where all the other girls had titles or triple-bar-relled names. I wasn’t nearly posh enough for them. Lotty was my only friend, and I wouldn’t have got through it without her.’
‘Funny,’ said Philippe, ‘that’s what she said about you.’
Caro smiled. ‘We got each other through, I think. Neither of us could wait to leave. St Wulfrida’s doesn’t exactly excel in academic achievement, so after GCSEs Lotty went to finishing school, and I went to the local college to do A levels. I thought that would be better, but of course I didn’t fit in there either. I was too posh for them!’
‘What’s the big deal about belonging, anyway?’ asked Philippe. ‘You’re lucky. You can go wherever you like, do what you like. That’s what most of us want.’
‘I don’t,’ said Caro. ‘Dad died when I was fifteen, and my mother five years later, so I don’t have any family left.’
She smiled wistfully. ‘I suppose I’ve been looking for a home ever since. When I came to Ellerby and met George, I really thought I’d found a place to belong at last,’ she went on. ‘George’s family have been here for generations. He’s the third generation of solicitors, and he’s part of Ellerby.’ Caro searched her mind for an example. ‘He’s on the committee at the golf club.’
Philippe raised his brows.
‘I know,’ she said, even though he hadn’t said a word, ‘it doesn’t sound very exciting. But being with George made me feel safe. He had a house, and it felt like being part of the community. I think that’s what I miss more than anything else.’
The wine waiter arrived with the bottle of champagne just then, and they went through the whole palaver of showing Philippe the label, opening the bottle with a flourish, pouring the glasses.
Caro concentrated on the menu while all that was going on, a little embarrassed by how much she’d blurted out to Philippe. He was surprisingly easy to talk to, she realised. Perhaps it was because he so clearly didn’t care. Or maybe it was knowing that he was so far out of her league she didn’t even need to try and impress him with her coolness or her success. She wasn’t here to be clever or witty or interesting. It didn’t matter what he thought of George, or of her.
The realisation was strangely exhilarating.
When
