Page 31 of The Player

I look around. Despite the building site air of the house, I still envy Con. If this were mine, I’d have opened up skylights in the kitchen and put in bi-folding doors to take advantage of the uninterrupted view over the fields beyond the house.

“Awful, isn’t it?” Tim’s voice makes me jump, and I twist to find him leaning against the door to the dining room and watching me.

“What’s awful?” I ask reluctantly.

He gestures with the hand holding a cup, and liquid slops onto the floor that he makes no attempt to clean up. It rankles, but I suppose I can see his point in this mess.

“This place. I couldn’t believe it when Con drove up. I mean the size of it. It must be worth a fortune, and look at it. It’s falling apart.”

“He has his reasons,” I say steadily.

This was Con’s parents’ house. From what I’ve heard from him and stories that David told me, they bought the house with a view to doing it up. Con’s father was something big in financeat the time, but he had a wild hair and decided to do it himself. As he was away so much, this took a long time, and they lived in a state of perpetual chaos. However, from what Con says, they were very happy, and his parents found the whole thing endlessly entertaining.

However, on their anniversary, they took a weekend away by themselves to celebrate, only to die when their plane crashed. Now, Con lives here alone, held in chains by a house he can’t leave but doesn’t want to restore because then he’ll lose the last final memories of his parents.

“I hope they’re good reasons,” Tim sniffs. “Because I can’t put up with this. It’s a shithole.”

“Then go home,” I snap. “His reasons are good, and it’s up to him what he does. No one else has a say in it. Least of all you.”

“What do you mean by that?”

I sigh, wanting out of this conversation with him so badly that I itch. “I mean that you’ve only known him properly for a few days. If he gets round to telling you about the house, you need to listen to him and not try to force through your agenda. He needs someone to be with him as he is and not as you think he should be.”

“Is that what you did with your husband? It didn’t seem to work very well.”

I stare at him, unbothered by his barbs. “No,” I finally say. “I didn’t do that with my husband. He wasn’t Con.”

“What’s going on here?”

Con’s voice makes us jump, and I turn to face him. “Just talking,” I say quickly.

“So it seems.”

Tim huffs and walks out of the room without saying another word.

“Trouble in paradise?” I say sweetly.

Con scrubs his hand over his neck. “Hardly paradise. More a huge misjudgement on my behalf that’s currently landed me in purgatory,” he mutters. He looks at me. “You ready to go?”

I gesture to my outfit of black skinny trousers and a pink filmy shirt. “Does this not look ready? Does this not scream I am prepared to talk pop culture while Con sighs and languishes in an artistic sulk because no one knows what a treble clef is?”

He snorts. “Any sharper and you’ll cut yourself.”

“Better other people than myself,” I say, looking after where Tim vanished.

Con shakes his head. “Come on. The motorway’s going to be hell if we don’t get a move on.”

“Shall we take my car?”

“Only if you want me to stay crunched over like a human sausage roll. Otherwise, we’ll take mine.”

“Someone got out of bed the wrong side this morning,” I observe.

“Only if we’re counting bed as being the floor in the lounge.”

My heart sings at the fact that he’s not sleeping with Tim, but I make myself sniff disapprovingly. “Musicians are wild,” I observe and follow him out.

It’s late afternoon by the time Con flicks the indicator and turns down a gravelled drive between two stone posts. The drive curves upwards and out of sight.

---