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‘You are in no way to blame,’ she’d told Cara gently.
But Cara did blame herself because a bank manager’s salary should have been more than enough to send Mae on school trips and she, Cara, ought to have challenged him about his gambling long before she had.
‘These trips aren’t supervised enough,’ Mark had said once when Rosie had offered to pay for Mae to go on a trip to Amsterdam. ‘I’m not allowing my daughter to roam about some foreign city at night, un-chaperoned, while their teachers are in a bar somewhere drinking their heads off, whoever might be paying for it.’
And Cara had given in. But what do you do when you love someone as much as Cara had loved Mark? He’d been a good husband in other ways – a fantastic lover for a start. And on Cara’s birthday there had always been another painting, or some other present that Mark knew Cara would love.
Now Cara knew different. Mark preferred to risk money that should have been spent on Mae in the hope of making more. And with that knowledge, her love for him had dimmed. And the original paintings had only been an investment, hadn’t they? Mark had said as much, wanting her to sell a painting he’d bought for one of her birthdays once he realised the artist was on the up and her painting was making four times the amount he’d paid for it.
It was the car full of paintings, now smashed, and burned, beyond saving, in the back-seat area that had alerted the police to the fact that this was not just another sad, speed-induced accident. Mae had been at school and Cara, unable to bear seeing Mark leave, had walked down the hill to the harbour as he loaded his car with his clothes, his favourite CDs and his computer. She hadn’t known he would be taking the paintings.
When she’d got back, she’d almost stopped breathing when she saw all the darker patches on the walls where her beloved paintings had been.
A knock at the front door jolted Cara back to the present, and glad in a way that it had. She raced down the hall, making a mental note to get the polisher out and give the parquet a thorough going over very soon. She could see the silhouettes of two people – a man and a woman at a guess – through the stained glass.
‘Have you got a double room?’ the woman asked the second Cara opened the door. ‘Two nights?’
‘Oh,’ Cara said. She hadn’t been expecting guests so soon. ‘Well …’
She had two nights with no bookings before the people she’d just spoken to arrived. A whole host of butterflies was doing a dance in her stomach – this was all happening so fast. What had been just the germ of an idea was being made a reality.
‘Have you?’ the man said. ‘It does say B&B on your sign. And vacancies.’
‘Yes, I know it does,’ Cara said. ‘But it was a try-out with the sign, and really I’m not quite ready for guests. I was just about to put the polisher over the parquet.’ She opened the door wider so that the middle-aged couple could see the tatty state of the hall floor and her still-denuded walls. ‘I’m in the middle of redecorating,’ she lied.
‘Well, it looks clean enough to me,’ the woman said, ‘so can we come in? We’ve tried the pub but they don’t do rooms, and that place called…what was it, the Lookout?… is fully booked, and the Information Office is closed. I know I sound desperate and really we would be so …’
Cara took a deep breath. She hadn’t really prepared herself for how it might feel to have strangers in her home. But she had to start her fledgling business some time. She hoped Mae wouldn’t be too shocked – or cross – to find strangers in the house already when she got back from her date with Josh.
‘A double,’ the man said, as though to remind Cara of what she’d been asked.
‘Yes, I’ve got a double room,’ she said. ‘Do come in, if you don’t mind the fact the walls are less than perfect. My paintings are in storage while I redecorate …’
‘A bit of faded wall won’t bother us, will it, Eddie?’ the woman said.
Cara did a mental inventory of the linen cupboard. The best was an Egyptian cotton duvet cover and matching sheets and pillowcases, which was on her own bed – a luxurious treat to herself, a bit of spoiling now that Mark was gone. But the lilac floral was clean and aired and would have to do. No matching towels, but she couldn’t worry about that now.
‘I’ll get a room ready for you as quick as I can.’ She opened the door wider and ushered them in. ‘I’m Cara, by the way.’
She proffered her hand first to the woman, and then the man.
‘Pam and Eddie Hine,’ the woman said. ‘Pleased to meet you, and I mean really pleased. We thought we were going to have to sleep in the car, didn’t we, Ed?’
‘Yes, love,’ Eddie said, looking fondly at Pam as a flush reddened the side of his neck.
Well, well, well, Cara thought. I’ll bet my last £223.26 that these two aren’t married, despite making a good display of being newlyweds. She glanced at Pam’s wedding finger where a wide gold band shone brightly in the lights from the hall. And that look, and that flush of Eddie’s, brought a lump to Cara’s throat that was threatening to choke her. She saw herself trapped, in limbo, between fifteen-year-old Mae’s calf-love for Josh, and Eddie and Pam at the other end of the spectrum.
And her own love for Mark stripped bare, sucked from her by his gambling.
‘Will you want the full English breakfast?’ Cara croaked.
‘Lovely,’ Pam said. ‘We don’t usually have a fried breakfast when we’re at home, do we, Ed?’
‘No, love,’ Eddie said. ‘But we’re not at home now, are we?’
‘No, we’re not,’ Pam giggled, which made Cara’s oneness more painful, and she felt herself invisible, a not-really-wanted witness to their coupledom.
‘Right,’ Cara said, battling to look like a real B&B hostess, ‘I’ll show you where the sitting room is and then I’ll make you a cup of tea while I get your room ready. The downstairs cloakroom is over there,’ she went on, pointing, and metaphorically crossing her fingers it was as squeaky clean as it usually was. ‘After that, I’ll need to pop to the shop to get the wherewithal for a cooked breakfast because, as I said, I wasn’t expecting guests so soon.’
At least the sitting room was nicely appointed. Mark hadn’t had room to take the flat screen TV or what was left of the silver that had been Cara’s grandmother’s, although Mark had already squirreled a fair bit of that out of the house and sold it, much to Cara’s annoyance at the time.
‘You do that, Cara,’ Pam said as Cara ushered them into the sitting room and urged them to make themselves comfortable. ‘We’ll be as happy in pigs in muck here while we wait.’
‘I’ll make you a cup of tea. Then ten minutes to sort your room, another fifteen or so while I pop to the shops and…’
‘Don’t panic, Cara,’ Pam interrupted, laying a gentle hand on Cara’s arm. ‘We’ll be just fine while you pop out or our names aren’t Pam and Eddie Hine.’
‘Lovely in here it is, Ed,’ Cara heard Pam say as she walked towards the door that led into the hall. ‘Quality. Lovely curtains and everything. Comfy cushions. Very high end, designer.’
A warm glow spread across Cara’s shoulders. She’d made those curtains. And the cushion covers. Rosie was always telling her she should take up sewing and make a business of it … well, maybe if the B&B business didn’t take off, she would. She left Pam and Eddie Hine cooing over her lovely sitting room and went to make the tea.
Cara ran along Higher Street praying she’d catch the corner shop before it closed for the night. The sky was beginning to darken, that lovely indigo shade shot through with fuchsia pink that Cara loved, and which usually meant that tomorrow would be a fine day. She speeded up as she saw Meg Smythson walk towards the door of her shop, as though she was about to lock up. But Meg had seen Cara and held the door open for her to go in.
‘Well, fancy,’ Meg said. ‘I had your Mae in here earlier. Lovely girl, your Mae. Where does she get those dresses she wears?’
Mae had been to the shop? Cara wondered what for, and what she might have bought, not that she had a lot to buy anything with, but the bank was paying Cara a small widow’s pension, even though it wasn’t stretching very far and Cara liked to give Mae a bit of pocket money.
‘Charity shops,’ Cara said. ‘And a stall in Totnes Market. And she’s had some of it for ages, waiting to grow into it.’
‘Well, she looks stunning in them,’ Meg said. ‘And is going to be more beautiful still once she’s finished her growing. With that Josh Maynard, she was.’
Cara didn’t like the way Meg had put the word ‘that’ in front of Josh’s name, as though he was something best left in the gutter.
‘I know. She’s going out with him.’
‘Bit of a disappointment to his dad is that Josh,’ Meg said. ‘Wanted university for his son, he did, but all that was in Josh’s head was surfing and earning money and he was having none of it. Never going to get rich gardening, is he?’
Cara suddenly felt defensive of Josh. She didn’t like his character being ripped to shreds by Meg, any more than she’d liked it when Mae had been dismissive of Rosie.
‘Monty Don seems to do very well from gardening on TV,’ Cara said. She had a ‘bit of a thing’ for Monty Don as she imagined many viewers did.
‘Another world, that, TV,’ Meg countered, her voice dripping with disdain. ‘Hardly Larracombe, is it? A bit of lawn-mowing for the Thrupps at Barley Mead, and a quick strim around the edge of the graves up at St Peter’s.’
Cara’s blood seemed to chill in her veins at that last remark – Mark was buried in the graveyard at St Peter’s. She hadn’t been there for a while to lay flowers or just to stand there and talk to him, tell him how sorry she was for everything that had happened between them. She wondered if Mae had. She could ask, of course, but Mae thought questions like that were an intrusion so Cara tended to hold back. But right now Cara didn’t really have the time or the inclination to be getting into any sort of philosophical argument with Meg about gardening and TV and she could only think that life wasn’t too exciting amongst the pre-packaged potatoes and the newspapers and the bars of Cadbury Milk, and that when Meg did manage to get an audience she liked to share an opinion or two.
‘Have you ever asked Josh if he wants to be rich?’ Cara asked. ‘Or if, perhaps, he’s happy working the soil, growing things?’
Meg Smythson bridled.
‘Well, all I’m saying is,’ Meg said, leaning closer towards Cara as though someone might overhear her even though there was no one else in her shop, ‘I know I’m telling tales out of school, and that Josh can charm the birds from the trees, but it was alcohol he was buying.’
‘And is legally able to do so,’ Cara said. ‘He’s over eighteen.’
‘Ah yes,’ Meg said. ‘I know that.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘And he assured me it was for his parents’ consumption, if you know what I mean.’
Cara knew. Meg Smythson was implying that Mae would be given a share of the wine and none of it would be going back to the rectory.
‘Eggs,’ Cara said. ‘I’d like half a dozen large eggs if you’ve got them. And a packet of best back bacon. Sausages – chipolatas if you have them. Oh, and a thick sliced loaf. Please.’
There were, Cara knew, a couple of tomatoes in the salad box of the fridge that had gone a bit soft but which would be perfect to go with a fried breakfast, and there was an unopened jar of marmalade in the cupboard, won at Mae’s school winter fair, and neither of them liked marmalade, so that would have to do.
‘And a dozen or so mushrooms,’ Cara added, as she spied a basket on the counter with milky-white button mushrooms in it.
‘Got guests, have you?’ Meg said, taking a packet of bacon from the fridge and handing it to Cara. ‘I saw the sign. You’ve had the council people in, hygiene and that, I expect?’
‘Er, yes. Of course,’ Cara said, hoping Meg wouldn’t realise the word ‘yes’ wasn’t the answer to both questions. How had she completely overlooked the possibility that she might have to be registered to take in B&B guests and have her kitchen and bathrooms passed for hygiene?
Well, that’s what widowhood did to you, wasn’t it? It deprived you of rational thinking for a while at least. And widowhood, mixed with the terrible guilt that Mark wouldn’t have died had she not asked him to leave, was threatening to overwhelm her now. She made a show of examining a tin of chicken curry on the shelf beside her, just for something to do – so she wouldn’t have to look Meg Smythson in the eye and run the risk that Meg would know she was lying.
‘Good,’ Meg said. ‘Because if you haven’t had the hygiene people in before guests arrive, then they take a very dim view of the whole thing. A very dim view.’
Meg reached for the mushrooms to weigh them out. She sniffed, giving her head a shake and her shoulders a shudder as if envisaging the dire consequences for Cara if she’d failed to register with the council.
‘And they take a very dim view of underage drinking around here as well,’ Meg finished. ‘No matter it might be the vicar’s son what offered that drink.’
Oh dear, Cara thought, Meg Smythson didn’t like me stopping her telling tales about Josh and Mae, did she?
‘And that’ll be four pounds and ninety-seven pence,’ Meg said. ‘Shocking the price of things today, isn’t it? Money goes nowhere, does it? And I expect with you being a widow now it’s even …’
‘Here’s the money,’ Cara said, certain that there had been knowing in Meg’s voice and it was a crowing sort of knowing rather than a sympathetic one. She couldn’t get out of the shop fast enough.
And if anyone from the council should turn up in the morning, she’d tell them that the Hines were personal friends and that she wasn’t charging them. There, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Meg Smythson!
Chapter Four
‘Josh, no!’ Mae said. ‘You can’t drive. You’ve drunk almost the whole bottle.’
She lunged towards him and tried to snatch the car keys from him, but he jerked his hand away, held them over his head so that Mae couldn’t reach. The car was parked at the bottom of a rough, narrow lane that led to a secluded rocky beach – a perfect place for courting couples although theirs was the only car there at the moment. How she was going to get herself out of this predicament she didn’t know yet, but she’d think of something. Foremost in her mind was stopping Josh from driving.
‘You want it all, you do,’ Josh said, slurring his words slightly. ‘Or don’t want it in your case.’
Josh slid a hand between her knees, and began to slide it up her thigh, but Mae pushed it away.
‘No, Josh. Don’t. Please.’
Josh had never done that before and Mae wondered if it was the alcohol affecting his judgment – he knew she was underage for sex and she’d told him, right at the beginning, that she wasn’t up for that and he said he understood. Mae shifted sideways on the car seat to put a bit more distance between her and Josh, wondering why alcohol seemed to change a person’s personality the more they drank. They either became louder and funnier if they were cheerful people to begin with, but the flipside of that was that some people became nasty and mean. Where had the Josh, who was so kind and understanding when she’d been remembering her dad, gone? She was pretty certain now that Josh had been drinking before they’d met. Bailey’s words flashed through her mind – ‘He got my sister rat-arsed and it wasn’t pretty’. Well, she wasn’t even tiddly. Perhaps what Bailey had warned her about had been in the back of her mind all the time.
‘Teathe,’ Josh slurred, leaning towards her, but she pushed him away. ‘You’re a teathe.’
‘If you mean sex,’ Mae said, ‘it has to feel right for me and it would only be a drunken fumble at the moment, wouldn’t it?’ And against the law as Rosie had so recently advised her, she thought but didn’t say. Josh knew that anyway. Best not to antagonise him by saying she didn’t want to lose her virginity here in a secluded lane in the front seat of Josh’s sister’s car.
If she kept Josh talking, doing her best to stop him getting the key in the ignition while she did it, then Josh couldn’t be driving, maybe killing someone because his reactions were reduced by alcohol. She was on the verge of tears now, thinking about her dad and how the last time she’d seen him alive he’d been sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, not looking up as she’d said, ‘Bye, Dad, see you tonight,’ as she left for school. She’d assumed he was tired – yes, that would be it, he’d not slept well and he’d been too tired, lost concentration on the roundabout and …. mercifully he hadn’t killed anyone else in the accident.
‘I can fumble with the betht of them,’ Josh said.
Which Mae took to mean that although she was a virgin, Josh probably wasn’t.
‘Give me the keys,’ Mae said, but it only served to make Josh hold them higher over his head, jangling them noisily, teasingly out of reach for Mae.
Her dad had laid his car keys on the table in front of him that morning, and Mae had often wondered why. He normally kept them in his pocket, only taking them out as he reached the car before pressing the button to open the door automatically.
She wished now she’d asked why, or at least gone back and given her dad a hug, or kissed the top of his head or something. She’d heard her parents talking low – first her dad’s voice, then her mum’s – late into the night. She’d strained to hear what they were talking about, but they’d made a fine art of talking just quietly enough that Mae, in her bedroom, couldn’t catch the words.
‘Did you let Bailey Lucas do it?’ Josh asked. He leaned sideways and tried to plant a kiss on Mae’s cheek as she sat in the passenger seat beside him, but she jerked her head away from him.
‘I’m not answering that.’
She didn’t ask Josh, chapter and verse, what he’d got up to with previous girlfriends, so the same applied – he had no right to ask.
‘Yeah, well, I have you down as having better taste than that anyway.’
She was going to have to make a decision about how she was going to get home in a minute. Let Josh drive back up the long lane to the main road, get out, and walk from there was an option. But would Josh stop the car to let her out?
Best keep him talking. Maybe talking would sober him up a bit.
‘Bailey’s only jealous I’m going out with you now,’ Mae said.
Josh shrugged his shoulders. ‘He made that pretty obvious! There’s all sorts of rumours flying about the place.’
‘What sort of rumours?’ Mae asked.
‘Shtuff.’
Josh jangled the keys high above his head again, and with his other hand began to caress Mae’s knee.
Mae pushed his hand away.
‘Come here, gorgeous,’ Josh said.
‘No!’
‘You’re nothing but a teathe, Mae Howard,’ Josh said. ‘You were up for it jutht now.’
He was well and truly over the legal limit for driving now, wasn’t he? He couldn’t say his s’s properly.
‘Just the kissing, Josh,’ Mae whispered, suddenly frightened that if Josh, who was much bigger and stronger than she was, turned nasty down here, with no one to come to her rescue, she could be in real danger. It was the drink talking – she knew that. Josh wasn’t a bit like this when he was sober. She wanted the Josh who had come to the funeral parlour with his dad so she’d have the support of someone nearer her own age as she bent to kiss her dad’s cold, smooth forehead one last time. He’d come in with her, standing respectfully a step or two behind her even though they didn’t really know one another then. The Reverend Maynard had stood beside her, his hand on her elbow. Mae wanted to remember that Josh, not the one who was frightening her. ‘And your arms around me like my dad used to put his arms around me, loving and safe,’ she finished.
‘Well, I’m not your dad, am I?’
Josh turned away from her and began fumbling to get the key in the ignition.
‘No, Josh! Don’t drive, please. I wouldn’t have agreed to come here with you if I’d known you’d drink the whole bottle.’
‘You had some of it.’
‘Nowhere near as much as you had.’ Keep him talking. Perhaps he’d sober up a bit the longer he sat there. Mae reached for her bag in the foot well, and yanked it up onto her lap. Opening it she found a KitKat and a packet of mints. ‘Eat these. They might sop up a bit of alcohol. Put you below the limit at least. Please, Josh.’
‘Give over, Mae, it was only a few mouthfuls more than you had. I’m fine to drive. I’m used to it. I’m a big bloke. I can take more alcohol than that runt Bailey Lucas before it affects me. The Leith police dismisseth me. See, I said that without lisping.’
Runt? Bailey was taller than Josh was, not that that made a person better, or worse.
And then Mae realised Josh had said all of that without slurring his s’s and she considered that perhaps he’d been playing games with her before, slurring his words, and he wasn’t as drunk as she thought he was. Her mum and dad had often had a bottle of wine on the table in the evenings and at lunch on Sundays, but they only ever had a couple of glasses each, not a whole bottle. She couldn’t remember either of them ever slurring their words. There were girls in her year at school who boasted on Mondays how out of their heads on gin or whatever they’d been, but she was never going to be one of them. She was too scared. What if too much drink turned her into another person, as it was turning Josh into someone she didn’t know?
‘I still say we should walk, Josh,’ Mae said as calmly as she could even though her heart was hammering in her chest now. ‘We can tell your sister the car wouldn’t start. That you flooded the engine or something.’
Whatever that meant and however you did it, but she’d heard it said on a TV programme only a few nights ago. Maybe Josh would know.
‘What? A good vicar’s good son tell a lie? What are you asking of me, Mae?’ Josh said, looking mock-outraged. ‘I know, we could do a bit more kissing while I sober up. How would that be?’
‘Hah! You’ve admitted it. You’re drunk.’ Mae had had enough now. She closed her bag, did up the buttons on her cardigan, ready to go. ‘Well, if you won’t walk back, then I will. Mum said not to be late and …’
‘You’re listening to your mum?’
Josh made it sound as though Mae listening to her mum was a rare occurrence – rarer than hens’ teeth.
‘I might be,’ Mae said. She opened the car door and tumbled out, but Josh grabbed onto the fabric of her full skirt yanking her back. She heard a ripping sound. ‘Josh, no! Let me go. Not my frock. It’s the last one Dad bought me before …’
‘Well, he’s dead now, isn’t he? He’s not going to know if it’s ripped or not.’
‘Don’t say that!’ Mae yelled. She was a mixture of fear for the situation she was in and anger that Josh, who still had a clump of the material of her frock clasped in a fist, had just said what he had. Besides, there were times when Mae thought she could feel her dad’s presence, smell his aftershave, knew that he was somewhere taking care of her, whatever scrapes she might get into.
‘I jutht have,’ Josh said, theatrically slurring the ‘s’ again, which made Mae certain he was doing it on purpose to frighten her now. ‘Oh, bugger off and let me sleep it off.’
Josh let go then and because Mae had been struggling to get away from him, the sudden release of tension made her fall against the door lock, the fabric of her frock catching in it, before she fell out onto the muddy, stony ground. Her knees hit the ground first and there was a searing pain as something sharp caught her below her left knee. She reached out a finger and found blood.
‘You’ve hurt me!’ she yelled. She wondered if she’d be able to get back up the lane now. ‘Josh …?’
But there was no answer, so lifting the now-ripped skirt of her dress up over her knees, Mae half ran and half hobbled back up the lane, the heels of her shoes skidding this way and that on the rough, stony ground. If she ran really fast, she could be home in under ten minutes.