Page 36 of The Price of Love
Upshot of said discussions — Jazz, gingerly driving his pristine white Skoda (‘First time I’ve had her out this year’) with me alongside, not full of confidence, heading for the old rectory. We didn’t speak. Jazz was almost as bad a driver as Cal, hunching over the wheel like an elderly spinster, hands ten-to-two-ing like fury. I was too busy worrying about Bree and Luke to say much more than ‘turn right here’ and ‘mind thatbus!’
When we pulled up at the end of the rectory drive, I was encouraged by the sight of my sister at the front door, not bent double and biting through her own knees. (I’d been an avid reader of Catherine Cookson’s more lurid fiction as a teenager.) In fact she looked poised in a navy maternity top and jeans, and her make-up was immaculate.
‘Willow, how nice to see you. Do come and have some tea. Jasper, you look amazing. Come in.’
But as she walked us through the house to the kitchen, I could tell things weren’t right. For a start, the dogs weren’t confined to the garden room but loose, running up to greet our ankles with whiskery sniffs and lurking by Bree’s side when she eventually lowered herself into a chair in the glass-roofed kitchen extension. For another thing, although her make-up was all in place, I could see traces of redness around her eyes, puffiness of the lids. Bree had been crying. She had also been baking. Fresh scones were lined up on the granite work surface, and buns and muffins cluttered the scrubbed refectory table. Bree bakes when under stress.
Jazz looked intimidated by the conspicuous wealth around him and took the dogs into the garden. ‘So?’ I poured boiling water into mugs. ‘What’s up?’
‘Mmmm?’ She was pretending to read aMother and Babymagazine, one hand on her rapidly emerging bump, but shehadn’t turned a page since she’d sat down. ‘Oh, you know.’ But she didn’t meet my eye. ‘Jasper’s looking very trendy these days, isn’t he?’
‘If you like that sort of thing. Personally I’d rather take fashion advice from a squirrel. Bree . . .’
I could see the tears now, dripping onto the pages she held, falling with a sad little popping sound. Her hands were shaking. ‘Willow.’ Her voice was tiny. ‘I don’t know what to do. He’s left me.’
‘Fuck me.’ I sat suddenly. My worries about Luke’s unfindability folded into insignificance. ‘Paddy? He’s gone?’
Still without looking up, she nodded. ‘He sent me an email. Says that he’s found somebody else. Somebody who . . .’ The words clotted in her throat and she dropped her head farther onto her chest, fingers caressing her bump. ‘Somebody who makes him feel “alive”, apparently.’
‘Shit.’
‘Oh, I can keep the house. And he’ll make an allowance to pay for the baby, but he doesn’t want to see it.’ Now she met my eye and the glint of misery made my own heart shrivel. ‘He called the baby “it”, Willow. Last week we were thinking of names, now this’ — she stroked her navel possessively — ‘is just “it”.’
‘The bastard.’ But words couldn’t do justice to the way I felt. My dear, mellow, house-proud sister deserved way better than this. And her baby deserved a better father.
I sat with her in her spotless steel-and-chrome kitchen and watched her break her heart over the worthless spunk-machine that she had married. Jazz came in later. The spaniels ran to Bree and put their doggy heads in her lap as if they, too, knew how miserable she was, and she played with their ears while Jazz and I made her something to eat and then forced her to eat it. Gone was the hostess face she showed to everyone else. Instead,for once, the real Bree was on display. I’d forgotten what my sister was like. Underneath the Cath Kidston aprons and the Barbour jackets, she was far more like me than I’d remembered.
Jazz, too, showed another side of himself, rather than the hard-drinking cynic. He was softer, kinder, more touchy-feely. He hugged Bree frequently, told her that Paddy had never deserved her, until I began to think that there might be something in Katie’s suspicions about where his true feelings lay.
When we came to leave, Bree started to panic. ‘Take me home with you, Wills,’ she pleaded. ‘Don’t leave me here on my own.’ Then, when I agreed, she had to rush around packing things, and I hadn’t realised that the deal would involve Booter and Snag, because she had to pack things for them, too, and take her hospital bag and all her maternity records ‘in case’, until I was nearly screaming. But I could see that all this activity was distracting her, and maybe getting away from this place for a while wasn’t such a bad idea. For a start, if Paddy came creeping back to say that it had all been a terrible mistake, she wouldn’t be here, which Jazz and I, probably for wildly different reasons, both agreed would be a good thing.
So, variously tear-streaked, shell-shocked, exhausted and, in the case of the dogs, wildly overexcited, we arrived back in York where Bree was greeted by her eldest and youngest brothers, who provided a new audience for her tale, while Jazz and I hid in the living room with the gin. I dug my mobile out of my bag and sent Luke a text.Where are you? I called hotel, they said you aren’t there. Has there been an emergency? Is your dad okay?
‘I’m going home, Will.’ Jazz got to his feet, rubbing his eyes. ‘Breeze needs to be with her family right now. But if she needs anything else, or if anything happens, you know, with the baby, for fuck’s sake, call me.’
‘I will. Thanks, Jazz.’
But he’d already gone into the kitchen to drop a kiss of farewell on my sister’s tear-ridden cheek. There, you see? I told you I read too many Catherine Cookson novels. Deserted wives bring me out in clichés. He did no such thing. He just ruffled her hair, grunted ‘see you’ and disappeared.
We all went to bed. I was shattered but couldn’t sleep. From the sound of crying in the next room, Bree felt the same. I kept checking my mobile in case Luke texted back, but his phone must still have been switched off because there was nothing. In between paranoically snatching at my phone and lying in the dark listening to my sister cry, I worried. Could he have checked out of the Moat House because of the cost, not wanting to say anything to me for fear that I might offer him more money? But surely if cost was that much of an issue, he’d have chosen to come and live here with me, rather than move on? And there was always the flat, if he was desperate. All right, so there was no furniture in it. But he could have borrowed some, at least a sleeping bag and a microwave. And if money was such an issue, where had he got the cash to take me to Cornwall? Places like that didn’t come cheap, and he’d had money spare for his share of the deposit on the flat.
But then I thought of Luke’s obvious concern for my happiness and wellbeing. He’d encouraged me to go off riding while he was stuck in our room with his laptop, so that I could ‘enjoy the countryside instead of being cooped up’. I thought of his complete abandonment when we slept together, the wild (and even slightly exotic) sex. He wouldn’t hide anything from me, I was sure of it. This whole Moat House thing was a simple misunderstanding, being blown out of proportion by my tiredness and my concern for my sister.
Tomorrow it would be resolved.
Chapter Seventeen
Funny, isn’t it, how a simple question can make itself so hard to ask? I sat there in the dark, eyes front, while my mouth became drier and drier and my brain churned the words into meaningless syllables inside my head. The French film playing on the screen, the feel of Luke’s arm behind me, even the taste of the reckless brandy cocktails that I’d drunk, none of it seemed real. It should have been easy — all I needed to do was to ask Luke outright. But the more time that elapsed between his picking me up and my framing the sentence, the more difficult it became to form those flittering, elusive words into the required order, and the more nervous I became.
‘Are you all right?’ Luke whispered as I shifted and fidgeted about in my seat. ‘Aren’t you enjoying the film?’
‘It’s fine,’ I hissed back, my stomach pure acid.
‘What’s the matter then?’ He had his mouth almost against my ear, the feel of his breath on my neck made little goose pimples break out all down one side of my body. ‘You’ve been quiet all evening.’
‘It’s nothing.’
On screen, a dishevelled yet sexy Frenchman was berating his girlfriend for some imaginary misdemeanour while she yelled and slammed plates into the wall. I wished I had her guts.
