‘You know that I could as soon forget you as my existence!’
Normally, Nina wasn’t the kind of woman to dither. She was a ripper-off of plasters, a plunger into cold swimming pools, but instead of immediately breaking things off with Noah, she decided to sleep on it.
Then Noah gave her the perfect opportunity the next day when he texted Nina to tell her that he had to fly to Glasgow to sort out a crisis at a packaging plant.
‘Posy and Verity know about us,’ she texted back, reasoning that it was only fair to have the difficult conversation face to face. Binning people by text message was so ten years ago … ‘Apparently, we weren’t very stealthy.’
‘I know they know. Sebastian is worried that you’ll be a bad influence and I’ll end up with all sorts of body parts pierced and tattooed.’
What Sebastian had probably said was more along the lines of ‘You could do better than Tattoo Girl: she’s been around the block more times than the milkman.’ Nina also didn’t want to think about Noah’s body parts or his lovely freckly skin covered up with tattoos.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had so many conflicting thoughts about a man. Probably not since Orlando Bloom (her teen crush) had married Miranda Kerr.
She texted back a perfunctory: ‘I guess I’ll see you when you get back’ and in the meantime, set about trying to forget Noah, which meant firing up HookUpp and up-swiping on a graphic designer who worked just round the corner. In his profile pic he was dark and smouldering and his bio was one line: ‘Let me paint you like one of those French girls.’
When Nina turned up to meet him in The Thornton Arms, Wilhelm was even more smouldering in the flesh. Smirky too and Nina was a sucker for a smirk as much as she was for guys in skinny jeans, Ramones T-shirts (did they give out Ramones T-shirts on the first day at art college along with an orientation pack?) and designer stubble.
Nina hadn’t even had three sips of her vodka tonic before he said that he’d like to draw Nina naked.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ Nina heard herself drawl in a world-weary tone when usually that was just the kind of suggestion that had her firing back with some flirty repartee of her own but honestly, she was so done with the frogs who were only interested in getting her knickers off. The date only lasted that one drink.
Noah had ruined her for all other men and for the rest of the week, Nina lived like a nun. Well, a very progressive, liberal nun who still went to the pub with her friends, but Nina was determined not to get chatted up or picked up so she kept her eyes to herself.
‘Are you ill?’ Verity asked Nina one night in The Midnight Bell when Nina turned down the offer of a drink from a scruffy-haired Australian with tribal tattoos. ‘He’s just your type.’
‘Sickening for Noah, maybe?’ Posy suggested with a sly smile while Tom, who hadn’t been privy to the latest intel on Nina’s love life said, ‘Why would you say that? Noah and Nina? Don’t be ridiculous.’
Even Tom knew that Nina and Noah were two people who didn’t fit together, like oil and water, or spots and stripes.
‘We were quite surprised when you rocked up with Noah,’ Marianne told Nina when they met for their monthly ‘nana night out’ which involved a big sesh at the Mecca bingo hall in Camden then spending their winnings on a bowl of pasta and a bottle of wine at the old-fashioned ristorante across the road.
‘Yeah yeah, he’s not my type,’ Nina murmured as they waited for the bingo to start. ‘I got that memo.’
‘He might not look your type, but that doesn’t mean a thing. You’ve been out with some absolute pigs simply because they did look your type,’ Marianne pointed out, which wasn’t very helpful. She waved at an elderly lady sitting across the aisle from them. ‘Hello Lily, how are your knees?’
‘I wouldn’t wish them on my worst enemy,’ Lily said, as she always did, and then she started listing her other ailments, of which there were many, and for the rest of the evening, Nina made sure that Noah’s name didn’t come up.
She did such a great job of forgetting about him that when she came downstairs on Friday morning, ten days after Noah had flown to Glasgow, to see him coming through the shop door, she felt rocked where she stood. Her heart thumped giddily, her body jerked in joyful recognition and she had to tell herself sternly not to smile too much, not to run over to him.
She was going to play it cool.
Then Noah looked up, caught sight of Nina hovering uncertainly in the no-man’s-land between shop and counter and he smiled broadly and brilliantly as if just the sight of her was enough to make everything right in his world.
Forgetting all about her resolutions to end things before they’d started, Nina felt her heart and her spirits perk up like nobody’s business.
‘You’re back!’ she noted and her powers of observation weren’t going to give Sherlock Holmes any sleepless nights.
‘I am back,’ Noah agreed. ‘You’ve changed your hair.’
Nina put a hand up to her hair, which was platinum once more. ‘Well, you know what they say about blondes having more fun,’ she said in a breathy voice as if she were seconds away from an asthma attack.
‘Talking of fun, you have the rest of the week off,’ said a voice behind her, which made Nina jump before she turned round to see Posy standing there. Two minutes with Noah and, once again, the rest of the world ceased to exist.
‘What do you mean, I have the rest of the week off?’ she asked, because Nina was pretty sure that if she’d booked Friday and Saturday off she’d have remembered it.
‘I hope you don’t mind, I asked Posy … it’s a surprise,’ Noah said a little hesitantly. ‘Do you like surprises?’
‘Depends,’ Nina said, because often when a man asked her if she liked surprises, it usually involved him whipping down his trousers. Plus, she was supposed to be breaking them up at the earliest opportunity. ‘What kind of surprise?’
‘Well, it’s a road-trip kind of surprise,’ Noah revealed with a hopeful smile. ‘How does that sound?’
Nina clasped her hands to her chest. ‘Oh my God, that sounds thrilling!’
‘We’ll be gone overnight,’ Noah explained. ‘I did ask Verity to pack a bag for you to add to the surprise element but she said that she didn’t feel comfortable doing that.’
‘The make-up alone,’ Verity called out from the kitchen. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Nina was very grateful that Verity had recognised her limitations and hadn’t attempted to send her off without any liquid eyeliner or night cream. ‘I’ll go and pack, shall I?’ she asked, a little dazed that Noah was here and whisking her off to some place that wasn’t here.
‘You’ll need sensible walking shoes and a thick coat,’ Noah said, which, truthfully, sounded a lot less thrilling.
It took Nina twenty minutes (a personal best) to pack two bags (one just for her make-up, skincare and hair products) and then Noah was escorting her to the hire car parked in the mews, with a food parcel from Mattie and coffee from Paloma.
‘Don’t worry about the time off!’ Posy called out kindly as she waved them off. ‘You can make it up when we start our extended summer opening hours.’
Nina was quite beside herself. This was all so unexpected. She’d convinced herself that for his own emotional well-being she needed to end things with Noah as soon as he got back from Glasgow and yet he’d suddenly reappeared to rescue her from two days of retail drudgery and whisk her away on an adventure.
A proper adventure.
‘Where are we going?’ she asked as Regent’s Park came into view. ‘Is it in London?’
‘It wouldn’t be a surprise if I told you,’ Noah said firmly, like he was one of those annoying people who wouldn’t crack under interrogation.
Soon they joined the M1, past a sign that said ‘To The North’, which made Nina think of polar bears and ice caps and igloos. Then Noah started telling her about the packaging-plant emergency in Glasgow and how he’d had to spend most of his time in a factory in the middle of a huge industrial estate. ‘I had lots to say about staff morale,’ he said. ‘They didn’t even have a staff canteen. Just a whole wall of vending machines, half of which were broken, and the other half sold over-priced protein bars.’
‘It sounds like you’ve been to a very dark place,’ Nina noted, catching Noah’s eye. There was a lot of eye-catching going on.
‘The very darkest,’ he said mournfully.
There was a quick stop at Watford Gap services for coffee and then back in the car and heading to the Midlands as Nina bragged about her success on social media.
‘Nearly two thousand followers on Instagram,’ she was proud to report. ‘Just over a thousand on Twitter and I got Sam to give me a tutorial on how to update the website, though I didn’t understand a word of it.’
‘I’ll help you with that,’ Noah offered immediately. Then he tried to explain how to game the Google rankings but Nina only understood every other word. Still, it was so good to see Noah again, to have his hand brush against her leg when he changed gears, to think greedily of all the time they were going to spend with each other.
Past Derby and Nottingham, past signs to the Peak National Park and Nina couldn’t imagine where Noah might be taking her. ‘We’re not going to Glasgow, are we?’ she asked with a hint of genuine suspicion. ‘Do you have unfinished business at that packaging plant?’
‘You’ve found me out.’ Noah smiled and shook his head. ‘Guess again.’
They came off the motorway to stop for an early lunch of toasted-cheese sandwiches in a pretty village pub on the outskirts of Chesterfield and talked about how Noah had missed pretty village pubs when he’d been in the States. Also Coronation Street (which he had a secret fondness for, even though his parents were very against commercial television) and ‘a decent cup of tea’.
‘Isn’t it a bit of a cliché to complain that you can’t get a decent cup of tea once you leave British shipping waters?’ Nina asked teasingly.
‘It’s a cliché only because it’s true,’ Noah replied. ‘You have to pay a fortune for a proper brand of tea bags from an import shop and their water tastes funny and they don’t even do proper milk. They have this stuff called half and half. It’s half milk and half I don’t even know what.’
‘This is why I only drink coffee,’ Nina said and Noah’s eyes widened even further.
‘That’s it. I’m dropping you at the nearest station to make your own way home,’ he said, putting his hand over the bill as Nina reached for the saucer. ‘No, it’s my treat.’
‘There’s no point in treating me if you plan to drop me off like an unwanted parcel,’ Nina told him and Noah smiled.
‘I suppose if we’ve come this far we might as well continue.’
They were deep in the darkest North now. Past Barnsley, past Wakefield, past little towns and villages whose names sounded clunky when Nina tried to say them out loud. Cleckheaton. Scholes. Hipperholme. Northowram. Dark-green fields were a blur out of the car window until they gave way to a grey stone sprawl as they drove through Bradford.
Queensbury.
Denholme.
Nina’s heart was pounding because she knew they were now deep into Brontë country before she even saw the first sign to Haworth, the village where the Brontës had lived for most of their lives, but she didn’t want to ruin Noah’s surprise. The lovely, kind surprise he’d devised as he spent his days trapped in a packaging plant on an industrial estate on the outskirts of Glasgow and thought about her, about where she might like to go for their third date.
‘Are we … We are, aren’t we?’ Nina blurted out because they were now driving through Haworth and she had to twist around in her seat to take it all in. ‘Oh, Noah, I can’t believe we’re here! You … you …’
‘You what?’ Noah asked but Nina shook her head, words beyond her, which was a first. Instead she put her hand over Noah’s hand, which was resting lightly on the gearshift, and tried to convey her gratitude, that giddiness he made her feel, through her fingertips.
Haworth was as charming a village as she’d ever seen. Maybe not as chocolate-box pretty as its Devonian or Cornish counterparts: its little shops were hewn from rugged, weatherbeaten stone, its church imposing. All the more so for it being a grey, damp March day, not quite raining, but not quite not raining.
‘Mizzle,’ Noah said, as he switched on the windscreen wipers. ‘A misty drizzle or a drizzly mist, one of the two.’
Nina stared out of the window at an old-fashioned apothecary shop that reminded her of the one across the mews that had been boarded up and closed for decades.
As they followed the signs to the Parsonage, the village seemed strangely familiar. ‘I feel like I’ve been here before,’ she remarked, peering out at a small row of shops. ‘I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Emily, Charlotte and Anne suddenly materialise in front of me.’
‘Anne? I didn’t know there was a third Brontë sister,’ Noah said, as he pulled into a car park.
‘She wrote The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall.’ Nina rolled her eyes. ‘I struggled to finish it though and I didn’t even attempt Agnes Grey, her other book. Beyond my GCSE English, I’m afraid,’ she added in what she hoped was a breezy manner. Noah could probably polish off The Tenant Of Wildfell Hall in a couple of hours and then give a presentation on it, complete with graphics and charts and gifs.
‘Oh, please. You’ve read more books than almost anyone I know,’ Noah said, switching off the engine. ‘Apart from Posy and I think her love of books is verging on pathology.’
It was very disloyal to let Noah speak about her dear friend and employer in that way except … ‘Posy reads so fast that her eyes do this rapid flicker thing from side to side and Verity and I worry that she’s going to have a stroke,’ Nina shared with a grin and then because they were no longer in a moving vehicle and she’d regained the power of speech, she took Noah’s hand again.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you so much for bringing me here.’ Holding Noah’s hand, her fingers entwined with his, felt quite different to touching his hand when they were in motion. As if now, the hand-holding could be a prelude to … well, anything. ‘I’ve always dreamed of coming here. Not just because it’s where Wuthering Heights is set but because I wanted to get inside Emily Brontë’s head for a little while; see what she saw, that kind of thing. It sounds silly, doesn’t it?’
Nina ducked her head and she would have tugged her hand free too but Noah wouldn’t let her. ‘It doesn’t sound silly,’ he said. He gestured out of the misty windscreen with his free hand. ‘Well, now that we’ve seen it, shall we head back to London in time to beat the rush hour?’
Nina’s mouth hung open for just one very unflattering second before she did succeed in tugging her hand free so she could lightly smack Noah on the shoulder. ‘Say that you’re joking.’
He pretended to cower away from her. ‘I’m joking. We’re actually due at the Parsonage at four. It’s not even half past one now. Is it too drizzly for you to want to walk on the moors?’
If they were in London, Nina would have insisted on arming herself with her huge, flamingo-printed golf umbrella in case a drop of rain went anywhere near her. But she’d wanted to come to Haworth for ten years and she wasn’t going to let a little rain get in her way.
‘I’m pretty sure I won’t melt,’ she said stoutly. ‘I have sensible walking shoes, a thick coat and a burning desire to see the Brontë Waterfalls.’