Page 51 of The Christmas Retreat
‘You’re getting chilled to the bone!’ he said contritely. ‘Come on – let’s get down before all the hot wassail and cake have gone!’
*
When we were almost back at the village, Rhys said, suddenly, ‘After my divorce came through, I remembered our agents were friends and asked mine to find out what you were doing these days. She told me you’d got back with an old boyfriend and were living in the country.’
‘I did get back with Will. I’d broken up with him quite a while before I met you and then, later, he came looking for me and we thought we’d give it another go. It sort of worked, because I’d got to like living alone, and he’d set up a computer games business with a friend in Battersea, so he spent the weekdays there and the weekends at my cottage. Or at least, I thought it suited us both …’ I added bitterly.
‘What happened?’
‘He’d told me he was living in his friend Simon’s spare roomduring the week – the one he created the computer games with – but when I urgently tried to contact him just before lockdown, Simon’s fiancée told me he’d been living with another woman for months and months. Apparently, he’d been intending to tell me that weekend that he’d moved in with her permanently.’
‘I’m sorry, that must have been horrible,’ he said sympathetically.
‘It was, although I’d realized it was never going to be the same as when we’d got together the first time, on our first day at art college, years before. We were even less well suited second time round. We’d become such opposites. I loved living a quiet life in the country, while he liked the bright lights of London, parties and lots of people.’
‘Like me and Annie, only in our case I was the country lover. Opposites do attract and when you fall in love you don’t think of how things will work out in the future.’
‘No,’ I agreed, ‘but it’s all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? The past is the past. Nemesis, in the form of my mother, has brought us together, but I don’t expect we’ll ever meet again after I leave Triskelion.’
‘Don’t you?’ he said softly as the sound of revelry from the green grew louder. The wassail must have gone round a couple of times already.
‘But I’m glad your mother made you come here, even if Nerys doesn’t seem that keen on Evie digging into the family history. But then, Evie does have a track record of unearthing information that makes for uncomfortable truths about the attribution of artworks. Nerys might be afraid she will try and do that with some of Cosmo Caradoc’s.’
‘I really don’t think so,’ I assured him. From something she’dsaid about the depiction of light in Lewis Madoc’s later works reminding her of the two small seascapes of Arwen’s she had seen in Charlotte’s house, I thought she might be on a different track entirely!
‘Well, it seemed a bit unlikely to me, but Nerys is very protective about her great-grandfather’s reputation.’
‘As far as I know, Evie’s only interest in coming to Triskelion is to fill in the details of the brief time Arwen Madoc spent here, once we’d discovered Caradoc had become her guardian and insisted she make her home here. The only mystery was how, in that case, a mere few weeks after coming here, she’d left and gone to friends in Cornwall. But then Nerys told us that he had died around the time she must have left, so that probably solves that one.’
‘Nerys doesn’t talk about Caradoc much, but I know he died in some kind of accident,’ Rhys said. ‘If that’s all Evie wants to know, I’m sure Nerys will tell her.’
‘We know so little about Arwen’s short life – she died at nineteen – that any details will be welcome for the joint biography of her and her friend, the woodcut artist Milly Vane,’ I said.
‘You can tell me more about Arwen Madoc when we meet in the morning,’ he suggested. ‘I’d never heard of her till you came here, so I’m interested.’
We’d joined the throng by now and I could see Bronwen and her helpers dispensing wassail from large bowls, on a trestle table on the green.
‘You go and bag yourself some wassail before it all vanishes. I must go and change. See you in a bit,’ he said, and headed off towards the door to the village hall.
16
Punch Drunk
I watched Rhys make his way through the crowd, head and shoulders above the rest, then up the steps to the village hall, passing Tudor, denuded of his Green Man foliage, who was coming out.
I got a paper cup of the still-warm punch, a slice of cake and two large Jumbles, the biscuits shaped like knots, and moved away to the edge of the crowd.
‘Thereyou are!’ said a sweet voice at my elbow and I turned to see Verity and Kate standing there. They must have come out again for the return of the procession – or, in Kate’s case, more food.
‘The others have been here for ages, so when we couldn’t see you we thought you’d had an accident, or got lost! But you were safely with Rhys all the time!’ Verity laughed. ‘But perhapssafelyisn’t the right word, given his reputation! I really shouldn’t say that, because I expect you were just discussing books, weren’t you?’
‘Hardly, since he is a literary author and can’t have anything in common with Ginny on that score,’ Kate said with all the literary snobbishness of her kind.
‘Actually, we have the same publisher, and also, our agents are friends,’ I said defensively. ‘In fact, I first met him years ago at a publisher’s party.’
‘Oh, then I expect that’s why you came to Triskelion,’ suggested Verity.
‘Not at all. I had no idea that Rhys lived here until I arrived and bumped into him.’
