Chapter Fourteen

The next week further advanced my opinion that Luke and I were right together. He rang me at work several times a day, and the real clincher was that he didn’t ring to say anything. I got the collywobbles every time the phone rang now, thinking of him standing in the midst of the showroom renovation (apparently the place was a wreck) thinking of me enough to whip out that cutting edge phone and dial, to say hi and exchange no factual information at all.

Katie, of course, was mad-on jealous and now refused to answer the phone on the grounds that it was bound to be some limpid-eyed man wanting to simper at me. I thought she was being grossly unfair because the only men ever to call were Luke and occasionally Cal, whom she’d never met, and was therefore not in any position to pass opinion on the limpidity of his eyes, which I had at first taken to be an insult until I got home and wrestled my dictionary down from the shelf, to find that I had been thinking of limpets.

‘What on earth would I be meaning, saying “limpet eyes”?’ Katie asked. It was our usual Friday night and we were well stuck into anything that came in a bottle in the Grape and Sprout. Which was rather a lot. Jazz swore they sold bottled spit to visitors.

‘How should I know? That’s just what I thought you said.’

‘Could be kind of, you know, sticky, hanging on to you like limpets hang on rocks.’ This was Jazz’s contribution.

‘Luke does not have sticky eyes,’ I pouted. ‘He’s wonderful. In fact, he’s taking me away for the weekend again in a few weeks, that’s how wonderful he is. Cornwall, before you say anything.’

Katie made a face. ‘So, how come he’s never around at weekends? He’s all over you all week and then come Friday night he vanishes, unless he’s whisking you away to some expensive hotel, where the only view you get to see is the bedroom ceiling.’

Jazz made a ‘that’s not fair’ noise in his throat, his mouth being full of beer.

‘He works all day at weekends.’ I poured myself a hefty glass of wine. ‘Sometimes he goes back to Wales to visit his dad.’ Katie and Jazz gave each other A Look, and I turned down the corner of my mental page to bookmark this for future reference. ‘Or sometimes he has to go to Boston to check up on James. He knows that I’ve got stuff that needs catching up with at weekends, too. So we’ve agreed, for now, to keep our weekends apart.’

Katie sniffed. ‘When Dan proposed to me, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight until we’d got up that aisle.’

‘Yeah, but you were living in that tiny little house in Acomb at the time. He couldn’t get out of your sight, not without climbing into the understairs cupboard.’

‘So why aren’t you and Luke moving in together yet? Surely you’re not going to marry him without living with him for a while first? That’s so old-fashioned, it’s …’ She groped for the right word. ‘Well, actually it’s quite sensible. That way you’re safely hitched before the disillusionment can sink in.’

‘What disillusionment? He hasn’t got a two-inch dick, has he?’

‘Jazz.’ I spluttered my wine.

‘Well?’

‘No!’

‘That’s all the disillusionment I can think of. Nothing worse than getting a guy into bed and finding out that he’s got a knob like a matchstick.’

Katie hiccupped. ‘I meant, like finding that he uses the sheets as a hanky in the middle of the night, and that he hums all the way through your favourite TV programmes, and that if there’s no toilet roll left when he has a shit he doesn’t bother to wipe, and—’

‘Stop!’ shouted Jazz and I, as one. ‘Jesus, Katie, we’ve got to look Dan in the eye again sometime.’

‘Oh. Sorry, yes. I didn’t mean … It’s not all Dan, if that’s what you were thinking. I kind of amalgamated previous fellers.’

‘So then, you two. Why the funny look when I mentioned Luke’s dad?’

Jazz took another enormous mouthful of beer, leaving Katie to answer. ‘You haven’t met Luke’s father yet, have you?’

Jazz swallowed noisily and then nearly choked himself trying to do a Darth Vader impersonation, hissing into his beer glass, ‘Luke, I am your father.’ He’d clearly reached the stage of drunkenness where we could expect him to start bursting into song. We’d been known to leave him to it and just put a hat down to collect a few quid.

‘No,’ I said, ignoring him.

‘Hasn’t Luke wanted to introduce you? Or hasn’t Luke told him yet that he’s got a fiancée bobbing around in York? And’ – she rounded on Jazz – ‘how do you know there’s nothing worse than getting a guy into bed who turns out to have a micro-penis?’

Jazz pointed at her with the end of his glass. ‘I listen to women. I am a New Man.’ Then he burped resonantly, grinned and fell off his stool.

‘Luke’s waiting until his dad has got over his heart surgery,’ I explained to Katie. ‘He’s been really poorly and Luke wants to wait, rather than mention it when everything is all oxygen tents and monitors.’

‘Fair enough.’

From under the table there came a warbled intro to ‘My Way’ and I stood up.

‘Right. I’m off. Going over to Cal’s tomorrow and I wouldn’t want to tangle with him if I was hungover.’ Beneath the table there was now the sound of an enthusiastic amateur Frank Sinatra impersonator doing a really bad job, at full volume. ‘He’s all yours, Kate.’

‘Gosh, thanks.’

Due to Jazz’s prodigious consumption of alcohol causing the evening to end a little earlier than usual, I found myself at a bit of a loose end. I could have gone home with Katie but, although I adored her twins, I frankly found them completely exhausting. So I found myself wandering around York, through the narrow, picturesque streets in the Shambles area, heading towards the river, along with most of the jogging population of the city. The smell of muscle spray filled the air, and the hissing and cracking of water bottles being sucked echoed off the concrete of the embankment like the sound of a Dalek life-support system.

I looked up at the windows of our flat-to-be. On impulse I crossed the bridge and went through the glass and metal foyer to stand in the hallway which led to the lifts. People had already started living in some of the flats. I could tell by the lights shining onto balconies and the shadowy figures moving about within. Anticipation nudged its way around my heart like a dolphin in an aquarium.

Soon two of those figures would be mine and Luke’s, cooking dinner together, flopping on the sofa with a glass of wine and a DVD, deciding on a colour scheme for the bedroom. All things I was totally unpractised at, comfortable, domestic things. Our lives to date seemed to run along parallel to one another, with occasional passionate collisions and exciting interludes in hotels or on beaches – very romantic, but hardly real life. I thought about Luke’s reasoning for not moving into the house with me, that it wouldn’t exactly be a gentle initiation into what married life could be, but more a baptism of fire – what with Flint, Ash, and the vagaries of our working lives – and we’d hardly ever see each other.

I walked outside, into the freshening breeze, and gazed up at the building. We’d got the deposit together between us and Luke was going to the estate agent on Monday to put in the offer. Once the flat was secured, we could go ahead and set a date for the wedding, and then the wagons would be rolling. Although rolling was probably not the word, more like accelerating rapidly downhill. After all, hadn’t my wedding been planned in great detail since my first boyfriend had twanged my bra strap? Now it really only remained to weed out the place settings for the relatives who had since died.

I was considering dress styles, lengths and appropriate materials (was raw silk a little too passé or could I get away with it?) when I arrived home. The house was quiet, in that buzzy kind of way which meant that there was nobody else home, rather than the hushed-quiet-with-background-stereo which might indicate that Flint was hanging upside down in the loft, or whatever it was he did up there. Maybe he’d got a Friday night date. Or maybe he was roaming the streets, being all luminous and ‘fulfilling destiny’, sketching unwary buildings. Anyway, who cared? After being out almost every night this week, I was in the mood for a long, soapy bath, candles and an early bed.

There, accusingly, direct on the mat, sat another brown envelope. I felt a curious sense of violation, as my heartbeat sprinted blood through my veins and the back of my neck tingled with a feeling that something malevolent had put a dark mark on my home. After all, who thought they were entitled to tell my family we couldn’t have what we wanted?

I tore open the flap and flicked the single sheet open. ‘You can’t have everything you want.’ Again the same handwriting, the same graphic approach to indefinite one-liners. Did they think that this cloak-and-dagger approach made it better somehow, more palatable? And there was something laughable in the repetition. My stalker couldn’t even manage originality.

As I had done with the last letter, I scrunched this one up into a ball and dropped it into a drawer in the hall dresser. There was simply no point in getting angry over such vague hints which couldn’t be said to amount to a threat, was not much more than a simple point of view, unattributed and unattributable. So why did my thoughts keep coming back to it?

I was still shambling around the house in dressing gown and slippers when Cal turned up at the door next morning.

‘God, you’re early.’ I let him in and shuffled back through to the kitchen for more strong tea.

‘Great thinkers never sleep.’

‘Do they drink tea?’ I brandished a mug.

‘All the time. Noted for it. No milk, two sugars and I could slaughter a piece of toast.’

‘Bread. Toaster. Butter. Marmalade. Teapot.’ I pointed as I spoke, my arm jerking randomly around the kitchen. ‘I’m going to get dressed.’

By the time I came back down, wearing my best goat-proof clothing, Cal had made a stack of toast, which leaned dangerously over the edge of the plate, defying gravity only through the adhesive powers of marmalade.

And then he ate it. All of it. I watched, with my jaw becoming more and more slack, until the final crust was chewed and swallowed, and he noticed me.

‘What?’

‘Where the hell do you put it all? You’re … I mean, you should weigh about forty stone! How can you eat so much and be so, well, sort of shapely?’

‘Genuinely interested, or is this a women’s comment type thing?’

‘No, I really want to know. I mean, do you have worms or something?’ I heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs and unthinkingly poured tea into another mug, holding it at arm’s length just in time for Flint’s entrance into the kitchen. Cal glanced at Flint and carried on talking to me.

‘I am, in reality, incredibly fat. I have an enormous pleat which runs down my spine. Observe how I never walk away from people, only towards them. This is to prevent them noticing that said pleat stretches into Lancashire.’

Flint, decidedly less deific at this time in the morning, looked puzzled. ‘Who the hell are you?’ And then, a misplaced sense of realisation dawned. ‘Oh, right. You’re, um, with Willow, yes?’

I broke the embarrassed silence by dropping Cal’s toast plate into the sink. ‘This is Cal. He’s a friend of Ash’s.’

‘Oh. Is Ash back then?’

‘Er, no.’ I grabbed a jacket from the back of the kitchen door. It didn’t look very goat-resistant, but I wanted to get out of there before Flint really got started. ‘See you later, Flint, okay?’ I hustled Cal, as swiftly as he would let himself be hustled, to the front door.

‘And Flint is, what?’ Cal stopped on the doorstep, screwing up his face and rummaging in pockets. ‘Eldest brother?’

‘That’s right.’

Cal brandished a set of keys. ‘Phew. Glad I remembered, it’s quite hard to keep track of you lot. Right.’

I stared at him. ‘You’re driving?’

‘Well, yeah. It’s a bloody long way for a piggyback.’

‘No, I just …’ I managed to shut myself up.

‘You didn’t think I’d be able to drive, did you?’ Cal waved the key fob and across the road the lights on the tattiest Micra I’d ever seen blinked in response.

‘It’s not that.’ I bridled at the implication. ‘I kind of assumed you’d have a bike.’

‘A bike?’ This said in Lady Bracknellesque tones.

‘Yes. Like Ash.’

‘Oh, a motorbike. I see. No, sorry to disappoint any fantasies you might have about slipping your leg over my tank. If it makes you feel any better I could strap you to the bonnet?’

Since the bonnet of the Micra looked semi-permanent at best, I declined his kind offer and wriggled my way into the passenger seat, negotiating three Aero wrappers, an empty sandwich packet, a full bag of crisps (cheese and onion) and a lone sock on my way.

Cal was the worst driver in possession of a full licence that I’d ever sat next to. In complete silence, because his concentration was almost palpable, we ricocheted through the streets of York, along the road north and up onto the moors, where we were overtaken by several curious sheep and a bunch of octogenarian walkers. At last we pulled in to the top of the path to the house and got out. Cal was almost immediately disadvantaged.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s the bloody mud. Can’t get my balance. One of the reasons why I don’t reckon I can hang on to the place.’

‘You could tarmac the path as far as the first field, then have a kind of gravelled parking area and it’s not so much of a stretch to the house.’

Cal looked at me sideways. ‘You’ve clearly thought about it.’

‘Well, when I was here with Ash, I wondered how you’d get a car down. How did your great-aunt manage?’

Cal turned his attention back to the path, down which he was edging slowly. ‘Oh, she carried everything. On her back. Built like King Kong, my great-aunt, thighs like a set of welding equipment.’

‘Cal,’ I warned.

‘Oh, all right. She had a pony and trap. The ultimate in four-wheel-drive.’

We rounded the last bend and stopped, by silent agreement, to take in the sight of the tiny white cottage stamped in the green field. A few late daffodils fluttered flags of yellow in the grass, puffs of cloud scratting about overhead. ‘Wordsworth would have wet himself,’ I said.

‘Wordsworth never had to pick up the maintenance bill for picturesque.’ Cal gave a sigh and leaned against the gate. ‘If any of the Romantic poets had ever had to contend with damp courses, they would have taken to writing obscene limericks.’

‘I dunno. I always suspected Coleridge would have been handy with a routing tool.’ I leaned alongside him, arms on the top bar, chewing my lip. ‘Cal, are you sure you want to sell?’

‘No. But, ach, sometimes everything’s wrong, you know?’ Briskly he pulled himself off the gate. ‘Right. Let’s go and find the old bitch, shall we? Are you going to be all right? I mean, she’s hefty, and she’s got a whole circus of tricks up her … what I shall have to describe, for now, as a sleeve.’

‘If you’d really thought I couldn’t handle her, you wouldn’t have asked me to come along, would you?’ I asked with impeccable logic. ‘Lead the way. If not the goat.’

We found the goat, a Toggenburg improbably enough named Winnie, grazing in the orchard next to the house. It was a fairly simple matter to grab her by the leather belt she wore around her neck and haul her through the gateway. Throughout the whole experience, Winnie maintained a typically goatlike expression of aggrieved surprise and only tried to injure me seriously once. I, however, had trained up on small, evil ponies, every one a semi-professional in maiming, and steering a goat presented few problems to a woman who has once rolled a Shetland down an embankment.

‘That was incredible.’ Cal spoke from the safety of the sidelines, as Winnie, with a look of execration in her satanic eyes, peed all over my foot, then trotted to the river, managing to drink whilst still staring at us from under her eyebrows.

‘Thank you.’ I squelched my way out of the field. ‘And for my next trick, I shall smell of goat’s piss all the way home.’

‘You don’t have to. If I get the Aga lit, you could have a bath.’

‘Have you got a towel?’

‘In the car. Oh, and if you’re going up, there’s a cool bag in the boot with some food and drinks in.’

‘Anything else? I mean, if I say I fancy listening to some music, are you going to tell me that you’ve got the Manchester Philharmonic in the glovebox?’

‘Er, no. But there is a digital radio under the passenger seat.’

‘Oh, aren’t you the well-equipped one.’

‘Never had any complaints yet,’ Cal said archly.

I rolled my eyes at him and started the soggy-socked process back up the hill towards the parked car. The sun was shining through the leaves, lime green with newness, which made it feel as though I was walking along the bottom of a river. A feeling which the silence and the occasional stickleback dart of small birds only enhanced. In the time it took me to riffle through the vehicle’s contents (loads of clothes and CDs, two bottles of beer, an unopened packet of condoms and more rubbish and wrappers than I would have believed a Micra could hold), only two cars and a tractor passed the lane end.

I trotted back down to the house with the fluorescent pink cool bag under one arm and a striped beach towel under the other, to find that Cal had managed to fire up the ancient farmhouse range which occupied the kitchen like a rusty squatter.

‘Give it an hour or so, then we’ll have more than enough hot water for you to get clean. Pass me the lunch, I’ll pop the bottles in the stream to cool down.’

While he was gone I had an in-depth look around the little house. Okay, it smelled of damp and cabbagey old ladies but … ‘This really could be a lovely place,’ I said, descending the vertical, and bannisterless, staircase. ‘That front bedroom with those beams, it’s perfect.’

‘Used to be mine, when I was a kid. If you open the cupboard in the corner, there’s a secret set of ladders leading to the attics.’

‘And the views. How much land comes with the place?’

Cal looked at me quizzically. ‘Why the interest?’

I was suddenly ashamed. Whilst I’d wandered upstairs my imagination had taken over and I had seen the master bedroom all fitted out, the smaller back room painted pink, carpeted and with a tiny cot taking pride of place. Outside I could almost have sworn that I had seen my future self trailing a lazy finger over knee-high herbs in an area currently occupied by the spitting-mad goat. Even the archaic bathroom fixtures had a kind of Country Living charm. ‘I think the place has potential, that’s all.’

‘Yes, it’s potentially a house. Slightly unfortunately it isn’t one at the moment. Look, I’ve got some work to do. Would you like to cruise around the acres for a bit? I won’t be long and then we can have some lunch.’

‘Do you need a hand with anything?’ There was a short pause during which I had time to wish I could bite my tongue off.

‘I’ll be fine.’ Cal spoke a little stiffly. ‘I’ll give you a shout when I’m done.’ And he walked carefully and precisely out into the courtyard, around to one of the little barns, went in and shut the door with a kind of ‘bugger off’ finality.

I went back upstairs and became slightly disenchanted with the bathroom. Then I further explored the bedrooms, finding the cupboard Cal had mentioned and ascending the rickety ladders to the dust-haunted attic beyond. A dormer window let more light in up there than any of the lower rooms could boast, and the view across the valley to the purple hills beyond was spectacular.

The place was absolutely and totally the house I would have picked for myself, mouldy floorboards and all. It had everything, seclusion, outbuildings, cosy rooms with open fireplaces. The range sitting in the kitchen could have comfortably cooked a meal for forty, and heated enough water to wash it all up in. And, as instinctively as I knew that I could happily live here, I knew that Luke would hate it.

I sighed and looked out of the window which opened onto the courtyard. There was no sign of Cal and the barn door was still firmly closed. From the field beyond, the goat gave me a narrow-eyed look of hatred, and I was sure I could hear the music from The Exorcist.

‘Sod it.’ I was bored now, and hungry. I crossed the yard and pulled open the barn door. ‘Cal? Sorry, I just wondered …’ I pushed the door open slowly and put my head around, in time to catch Cal whipping off a pair of headphones and starting to his feet.

‘Oh, fuck it. Come in here, Willow, and shut the bloody door!’ I was taken aback by this uncharacteristic ferocity. Cal was usually laid-back and so indirect that you needed a map to get his point. In here, though, he seemed to have become someone else. His hair was tied behind his head, his gaze direct and incisive. ‘Sit over there for a second, I’m nearly done.’ Indicating a bale of straw in one corner of the barn, he was already turning to the screen in front of him, replacing the headphones and sitting on the ergonomic seat with the keyboard set on the table attached.

I could only stare. In contrast to the charmingly unmodernised cottage, the barn was, well, shit hot. A machine even I recognised as a state-of-the-art computer was humming away to itself on the wall, a green light flashing on and off beside it. Cal sat before a screen the thickness of a credit card, tapping on the keyboard at rattling speed, every now and then speaking into a microphoned headset. Two laptops were running, set on the side of an old hayrack and the air smelled of technology.

A couple more snapped remarks into the microphone and Cal snatched it off, shutting down monitors and shushing noisy units with a well-pressed button. A flick of a master switch and all the lights went dead, leaving us in the windowless dark and new silence.

‘Well,’ said Cal, and there was a slightly different tone in his voice.

‘Well?’ I realised that I was trapped here, in this barn, on this nameless farm, with a man I didn’t know. And someone had been sending me anonymous letters. And no one knew where I was. ‘Well,’ I repeated, and my voice had a little wobble to it.

‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m bloody starving. Come on.’ The big door was pulled open and sunlight spilled like butter through the gap. Cal loosened his hair from its ponytail and was back in the land of the vague again. Even his eyes lost their focussed expression. ‘I would race you, but we all know about the tortoise and the hare, don’t we, and I wouldn’t want you to have to bear the humiliation.’

Almost bursting with questions, I followed him down a pretty little garden path which led between low-growing beds of alpine phlox and thrift to where the garden seemed to fold in upon itself. It was an almost obscenely sexual place.

‘It’s like having lunch in a porn star, but there you go. My great-aunt, bless her, wasn’t the most perceptive of people and she liked the shape of the garden here. The stream was an accident, but I’m afraid the judiciously planted ferns were her doing.’ Cal nodded towards a group of feathery fronds jutting pubicly just above the stream’s trickle. ‘Have a sandwich. Just thank God it’s not sausage.’

I snorted and took one. It was egg and cress and delicious. Then I had four more. Cal opened a bottle of wine which had been dangling in the green water and we shared some strawberries and before I knew it, I was telling Cal all about Luke, the engagement and the flat. I moved on to Katie and Jazz, my family and then I was pontificating about Ash.

‘And, d’you know the stupid thing? Now he’s prannying about in Prague or wherever, instead of being here. An’ he should be here, really, shouldn’t he? I mean, really. Go on, you can tell me.’ It was dawning on my system that I was nearly through a bottle of wine, and I was drinking pretty much all by myself, Cal’s single glass had lasted him the whole picnic. Maybe now was the time for me to shut up. But sounding off about Ash always overrode the system.

‘Do you know where I met Ash?’ Cal asked suddenly, lying on his stomach facing away from me.

‘No.’

‘We were both in therapy.’

‘Therapy? What, you mean lying on a couch telling everyone how unhappy your childhood was?’

‘More or less.’ Cal poured me some more wine, then he took a deep breath. ‘Ash was there because of his family relationships. Did you know that?’

I shook my head. ‘My brother never tells me anything. I think he hates me.’ My lip trembled. I’d reached that stage down the bottle.

‘Uh-huh.’ Cal gave me a smile. ‘He was in therapy because of your family dynamics. Flint was the “ambitious” one, Bree was the “clever” one, Ocean was the “quiet” one that needed special treatment, and you …’ He paused for a moment and looked away over the trees. ‘You were the “responsible” one. Ash feels he doesn’t have a place, he’s just defined by his sexuality. Imagine, in a family, being “the gay one” from the age of fourteen, and that’s the only thing that marks you out.’

‘I’m not “responsible,”’ I said, slightly sulkily. Cal inclined his head. He still wasn’t looking at me, he seemed to be staring out to where the hills stretched themselves up out of the valley, like people just getting out of a comfortable bed. I wondered about his family for a moment. How had he been defined? I downed the wine in one gulp because it was beginning to taste like paint-thinner. ‘Why were you in therapy? You seem really sorted.’

‘Sorted? Me?’ There was an uncharacteristic bitterness in his voice for a second. ‘No, I was in therapy because I was mad. Totally, unalterably mad, you see.’ He added a little cackle for effect. ‘But I’m fine now. I have come to terms with the fact that I’m Napoleon.’

‘No one ever imagines that they’re plain old Mrs Biggins, do they?’

Cal rolled over on his back. ‘I don’t think it quite works like that, you know.’ He laid an arm over his eyes to block out the sun. So I couldn’t see his face when he asked, ‘Have you set a date for the wedding yet?’

‘Not yet. Luke’s still getting the showroom up and running, so he’s hopping over to the States a lot. We have to wait until that settles down before we can finalise details.’

‘Hmmm.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Nothing. But he’s okay, this Luke, is he?’

‘He’s … yes, he’s fantastic. Totally gorgeous. I mean, he probably wouldn’t do it for you. He’s nothing like Ash, after all. But he’s got a great body. Not that I’m commenting on Ash’s body, you understand. I mean, yuk, but—’

‘What do you mean, “he’s nothing like Ash”?’

‘Well, he isn’t. Ash is kind of gawky and angular while Luke is—’

‘Yes, I get that. But what I meant was, why would I want to compare him to Ash, for God’s sake?’ Cal uncovered his face and sat up to look at me.

‘Because I know you gay guys usually go for a type, that’s all.’ I sat up, too, although it made my head swim a bit.

‘Hang on. I’m gay? When did that happen?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If I were gay, I think I might have noticed, don’t you? I mean, there’s all that business with the buying the right clothes, hanging round the right bars, the attitude and, oh God, I don’t think I’ve got the time to be gay, let alone the inclination.’

‘But you have to be gay!’ We were practically forehead to forehead now. ‘You and Ash, you were … Can you do that if you’re not gay?’ He really did have the most remarkable eyes, very brown, with lashes so dark they looked like the reeds on the ponds of the netherworld.

‘Well, this is a bit weird.’ Cal wasn’t moving back either, his eyes flickering as they took in my face. ‘Did Ash tell you that I was gay?’

‘Well, no. But he – I mean, why would he want me to meet you?’

Cal shook his head slightly. ‘You’ve done it too, haven’t you? Pigeonholed your brother? Gay men can have straight friends too, you know, Willow. You really thought I was gay?’ He didn’t wait for me to reply, maybe my answer was written all over my face. ‘Look.’ His fingers cupped my chin and curled up onto my cheek. ‘If I was gay, then I wouldn’t want to do this, would I?’ The gentlest kiss fell on the side of my mouth. Instinctively, like a baby searching out food, I turned towards it and felt his lips fasten onto mine for one brief, thunderclap moment.

In the next second he was flat on the grass again, arm blocking the sun, leaving me half-crouched and breathless, wondering whether the whole thing had been an alcohol illusion. ‘You’re not gay,’ I said wonderingly.

‘Nope.’

‘Shit.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, I meant …’ And before I had time to move, I was voluminously, copiously, dramatically sick all over his shirt, his jeans. I think I even managed to fill his pocket and get it in his hair. It was truly the most impressive of vomits. To his credit he didn’t pull away or act shocked. He simply waited for the retching to stop, then sat up and offered me a handkerchief.

‘Here. Do you want a drink of water or something?’

‘Please.’ The tiny voice was all I could manage, forced over the broken glass of embarrassment.

‘Ash did tell me that you had a bit of a problem with your stomach.’ Cal handed me a chilled bottle of mineral water and I used it to rinse my mouth, although I really wanted to pour it over him and eliminate the chunks of recycled picnic which clung to his clothes. ‘Have you ever tried getting help?’

‘The doctors told me it was just stress and I’d grow out of it. They couldn’t explain why it only happens when I meet a man I …’ Oops.

‘A man you …?’

‘I quite like.’ I busied myself blowing my nose and sluicing my face with water from the stream. Anything but meet his eye. ‘It was fine while you were gay.’

‘Again, I wasn’t actually gay, it’s not like a hobby, you know.’

‘Do you think there’s any chance the water will be hot yet?’ I felt a complete idiot. And yes, Cal was right, I had pigeonholed Ash, but then, experience had had a hand in that. He’d never introduced me to any straight, good-looking men before.

Cal glanced down at himself, dripping regurgitation. ‘Oh, I hope so,’ he said fervently. ‘If not, I’m prepared to get in the river. Hey.’ I’d turned away, horrified and ashamed of myself, hiding the tears of mortification in the handkerchief. ‘It’s not your fault. Don’t worry. I’m not soluble, you know.’

My voice was muffled. ‘I just hate it, that’s all. Why can’t I be normal?’

Cal gave his lame leg the briefest glance. ‘Normal isn’t everything. Anyway if you were normal, I wouldn’t like you. Come on. I’ll let you have first dibs on the bath, but don’t piss in the water, okay?’

I gave a coughing laugh. ‘Okay.’ We’d got to the house before I summoned enough courage to ask the pressing question. ‘Cal, back there, why did you kiss me?’

‘Felt like it. Problem?’

‘No, I … but you know I’m engaged.’

‘Yeah. So? It was only a kiss, not full penetration. You looked a bit sad, that was all, very fragile. I wanted to cheer you up. Sorry if it didn’t work.’

The weird thing was, I thought later as I lay back in the hot, rusty-coloured water, that it had worked. In a kind of sideways, roundabout way. Y’see, despite my undeniably pert chest and my winning way with a bon mot, I failed to believe that I had anything much going for me. All right, I was pretty enough in a Miss Average, wouldn’t-kick-it-out-of-bed kind of way. But Luke must meet a thousand girls like me in the course of the working day. Cal’s kiss had reassured me that there was something about me that men found appealing. I grinned to myself and submerged. The enormous freestanding, cast-iron bath was large enough to allow all of me under.

A tap at the door. ‘You all right?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Do you want a cup of tea in there?’

A pause. ‘But I’m in the bath. Naked.’

‘Can’t you judiciously pile up some bubbles? I promise not to let my passion be inflamed.’

‘Oh, go on then.’

The door opened cautiously and Cal, pretending to screw his eyes shut, advanced across the floor with a cup held out vaguely in my direction. Since absolutely none of me was visible under the brown water, I chuckled.

‘For God’s sake open your eyes, man. I know you’re peeping anyway, because you avoided that ripped bit of carpet.’

‘Bugger.’ He handed me the cup and perched himself on the window seat looking down onto the garden, leg bent up under his chin. ‘I’m going to have to sell.’ His voice was almost inaudible under the sloshing of the bathwater. ‘I’ve decided. I nearly fell down those bloody stairs, and with the uneven floors, it’s just not possible. I mean, it’s not the money, but what’s the point in keeping it?’

‘You could let it out. For holidays?’

‘Couldn’t bear owning it, but not living in it. This is home. I mean I spent a lot of time here, when I was younger, I … growing up, I …’ The words vanished into a shake of the head and he concentrated on looking out of the window very hard for a few moments. When he spoke again his voice was gruff with something he wouldn’t let me see. ‘Better off with a clean break.’

I swished water around with my hand, thinking. ‘I could buy it.’

‘Nah. You couldn’t.’

‘How much are you going to ask for it?’

‘Dunno. State it’s in, it’s not worth much, but there’s the land. Some clever developer could probably get permission to convert the barns, do up the house, three hundred K, probably.’

‘I could buy it.’ In my excitement, I nearly stood up.

‘What?’

‘I could. Oh, not quite yet, but …’ And then the story of my grandfather’s legacy came tumbling out, mixed-up words and confused sentence structure, but he got the point.

‘Wow. Four hundred and fifty thou. You could buy this place, do it up and still have change.’

‘And I want to. Honestly, Cal, not as a favour to you or anything, but I love it here. The atmosphere and the space, the fields. I can grow my herbs and maybe keep the goat. No, I’ll get a house cow, plenty of stabling for the kids’ ponies. Best of all, you can keep visiting. You needn’t feel that you’ve lost the place forever.’

‘You’d do that?’ There was that bright intensity in his eyes again, that tight, concentrated look I’d seen outside.

‘Yes, of course. You could even keep your equipment out there in the barn if you wanted.’

A sharp glance. ‘Willow, it would be better if you forget you saw any of that, all right?’

I made a hurt face. ‘Why? What were you doing, calling the mothership?’

Cal shook his head again slowly, but all he said was, ‘Are you done in that bath yet? I’m beginning to disintegrate here,’ and left the room, leaving me with the similarly coloured cooling tea and bathwater.