Page 29 of The Price of Love
‘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 laddersto 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 fromThe 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 machineevenIrecognised 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 juttingpubicly 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. Ashfeels 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?’
