is very good, thank you.’ Luc was dressing twenty years younger now, I noted. Slim chinos and a collarless grey shirt, his hair smooth and still dark, damn him. I found new grey hairs every day, but then I had to deal with Poppy. ‘I came to see our daughter.’
‘She’s at school. Obviously.’
Gabriel looked as if he was trying to fade into the background, despite the blood. He kept looking behind him towards the kitchen door, as though he wanted to make a break for it. I didn’t blame him. This was awkward, with a capital A.
‘Term has started already?’ Luc did the Gallic shrug, which didn’t surprise me. We’d been together for nearly fourteen years, and for most of those, plus the year after we’d separated, he’d had a daughter whose comings and goings had regularly bemused him. Luc had been so busy doing Luc that he’d never had the brain-space to contemplate the fact that Poppy might need new clothes, a regular schedule or, in fact, food.
‘Last week. We spent a week moving in and then she started at the local school.’
‘And what year is she, now?’
‘Year Ten. Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but…’
Luc looked at his watch. ‘Ah. Maybe, then, I will come back later.’
‘I’d prefer it if you rang before you came, next time.’ I threw another glance at Gabriel, who looked as though he was desperately trying not to listen in, and Luc misread the look.
‘Of course! You will be wanting to start your new life.’ Another arm-fling, taking in Gabriel this time, who now had taken his glasses off to pat gently at his swollen eye.
‘Yes,’ I said gently. ‘I do. You’re welcome to see Poppy any time, of course you are, she’ll be over the moon, but—’ How did I sum it up? That I couldn’t have this glamorous Frenchman wafting in and out of my life any more, trailing his string of disappointed girlfriends and his trust fund. I was glad he’d met Mariette and decided to settle down. It might mean I knew where he was for more than a fortnight. ‘We aren’t together any more, Luc. It’s just Poppy.’
Luc stood up and Gabriel flinched again. ‘Well, I go. I will call Poppy, maybe I will see her tonight.’
‘I’ll tell her you came by.’ I stood up too, trying to shuffle him towards the front door.
Luc paused, looking out of the kitchen window. ‘There is a horse out there,’ he observed.
‘Patrick,’ Gabriel and I said together, him slightly muffled by two layers of tea towel.
Luc raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you said our daughter would be a horse person over your dead body?’
He said it as though it was a personal accusation. As though I’d spent all those years denying our daughter an experience from sheer bloody-mindedness, rather than the fact that London wasn’t exactly known for its acres of free riding space. Yes, there were riding schools, but…
‘He’s mine,’ Gabriel said nasally. ‘Just staying for a few days.’
Another Gallic shrug, as though Luc had forgotten all those arguments over what Poppy should be allowed to do. As though nothing I had said had ever been important or taken notice of. But then, here was a man who’d promised to love me forever. Who’d met and married me during my year in France where everything had seemed charmed and easy, whose money had greased wheels I hadn’t even known existed and whose charisma should have come with a health warning.
Gabriel and I sat in silence, listening to the rumble of Luc’s car engine as he slowly edged it around in the lane and headed back up the track towards civilisation and chilled Chardonnay. We stared at different parts of the room; my gaze was riveted on the crack in the deep enamel sink, he seemed to be finding the dresser on the opposite wall absolutely fascinating. The sun had moved out of the room now and the smell of damp was back. A few woodlice scurried busily across the stone floor, and I concentrated on those for a while.
‘Sorry about that,’ I said eventually. ‘My ex-husband and his lack of boundaries.’
‘It’s fine,’ came the muted reply.
‘How’s the nose?’
‘Um.’ The tea towel lifted. ‘It’s nearly stopped bleeding.’
‘I’m really sorry.’ The woodlice had shuffled off under the door to the walk-in pantry. I made a mental note to never keep anything that wasn’t in tins in there.
‘It was an accident.’ A cautious finger poked at the bridge of his nose. ‘It was, wasn’t it? I mean, you didn’t do it just to keep me captive here?’
‘Stephen King?’ I looked at him directly now.
‘Maybe. I read too much. Well, audio books, mostly. I’ve got a Kindle but it’s on about two words to a page.’ A bit of a grin appeared under the layers of cotton. His glasses were on the table and I could see again how thick the lenses were. ‘Eyesight’s not great.’
Without the glasses, and even with his nose swollen and his eye discoloured by the spreading bruise that the back of my head had caused, he looked model-like. Cheekbones like cheese wire and almond-shaped eyes that, in this now-shadowed room, looked almost black. Dark stubble outlined his jaw and highlighted his mouth. It seemed an awful shame to waste such good looks on me, who currently had as much desire to appreciate handsomeness as I did to take up deep-sea fishing. Which was none.
Luc was handsome. He’d also got an attractive accent. He was the kind of mistake I would only make once in a lifetime. Besides, for all I knew Gabriel was married, gay, asexual, violently insane and a narcissistic fantasist. I hoped, for his sake, that he wasn’t all of those simultaneously.
‘Well,’ I began. I didn’t know how to go about getting him out of my kitchen gracefully, particularly when I’d just broken his nose, given him a black eye and subjected him to Luc. ‘I ought to get on with, you know, stuff.’ I glanced at the bucket of now cold and scummy water in the corner where I’d been washing walls. I actually wanted a glass of wine and maybe a bacon sandwich, but felt that offering those to Gabriel would be tantamount to saying, ‘I’m a divorced woman in her mid-thirties who wants to work on a drink problem and gaining four stone in solitude and misery.’ So, I didn’t say anything.
‘What colour were you thinking of painting it?’ He was looking at the bucket too.
‘Not sure yet.’ Then, with some suspicion, because he was looking around the room again. ‘Why?’ I really hoped he wasn’t going to make me an offer to buy the cottage. Maybe he was one of those ‘house flippers’ from the programmes that Poppy liked to watch and then gossip about with her friends; where people bought derelict places really cheaply, did them up in a cursory fashion and then sold them on before the rampaging damp and lack of underpinnings became evident. And then I felt a bit insulted, because Harvest Cottage was nowhere near derelict. And had very good underpinnings. The damp was a question yet to be resolved.
‘Have you thought about using it as a location?’ The question was slow, although that might have been the amount of tea towel it was filtered through.
‘Yes. It’s a location for us to live in. I thought the boxes of stuff all over the place would be a giveaway.’
A
