Page 61 of The Cornish Cream Tea Holiday
Chapter Sixteen
Thea found the stopper and put it on the bottle of sparkling wine. She was discovering that being near Ben, and finding out something so fundamental – not to mention heartbreaking – about him made her feel untethered enough, without any more alcohol.
‘Ready for the horrendous cliché of it all?’ he asked. He was sitting with his back against the glass, his knees drawn up, elbows resting on them.
Thea winced. ‘Go on, then.’
‘I went out to a job, came back an hour later because my customer had changed his mind about a design feature and I needed a specific tool, and found them … together.’
‘Oh God,’ she whispered. ‘Seriously?’
‘And not even in our bed, but in the, uh … kitchen. Scooter went racing up to them – he was really fond of Damien – and then, it was almost comical, the way they reacted to being found out. I was shell-shocked.’
‘What did you do?’ It came out as a scratch, as if her throat was clogged up.
‘I left. Went to my sister’s. She lived about half an hour from me, with her husband and three kids. I stayed in her box room and it was chaos, but what I needed right then: to be distracted.’
‘Did they try to get in touch with you? Your girlfriend or Damien?’
‘Oh yeah. They gave me all the obvious excuses:It just happened; our feelings crept up on us; we never meant to hurt you. And once the shock had gone, I wasn’t really surprised. Allie is an interior designer, she loves the finer things, and Damien – he designs video games, he’s done really well for himself. I’m not saying it’s all about money, just that their views, their tastes, are much more aligned. They always got on well, but I never thought …’
‘You never thought that two people you loved would betray you in such a horrendous way? That is entirely understandable.’ Thea had found her voice again, her words propelled by anger.
Ben looked at her. ‘I was naive.’
‘You trusted them. That’s not the same thing.’
How could anyone do that to him? He was such a genuine person: so quietly thoughtful and generous, hardly any ego, and objectively so good-looking that Thea sometimes caught herself doing a double-take, just to see if he really was that handsome. As she’d got to know him, she realised his attractiveness went so much deeper than his hazel eyes and carved jawline: his tanned, toned physique. Then, to hear this? She shook her head.
‘I felt like a fool for not realising,’ he went on. ‘And because it was Damien – we went to school together. I was with Allie for three years, but I’d been friends with Damien for twenty. I’ve struggled with that, more than anything.’
‘That’s not surprising,’ Thea said. ‘Not at all. A friendship, especially one you make when you’re young, goes so deep, I think. Of course his betrayal traumatised you. And if you’ve chosen Cornwall because you wanted to move away – physically and emotionally – but you haven’t come to terms with what they did, then perhaps that’s what’s blocking your work on the house?’
He shifted around so he was facing her, his knee brushing hers. ‘You think that might be it?’
She nodded. ‘We have a lot of self-help books in the library.’
Ben shook his head. ‘That came from you. You’re not just quoting some relationship guru. Have you been cheated on?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not cheated on.’
‘There’s something, though.’ He moved again, so he was sitting cross-legged. Scooter planted himself between them, sniffing the crumbs on their empty plates before he lay down. ‘Something happened to you, that’s given you some insight?’
‘Oh, I—’ she started, wondering how much to tell him, realising he’d given so much of himself to her, opened himself up, that it was only fair she do the same. ‘I was bullied a lot, at school. I’ve always been bookish, unpopular. I had my hair pulled and my notebooks stolen, but then there was a girl, Genevieve, who I was friends with for a while – close friends, I thought, in the first year of secondary school. But it turned out she wasn’t a friend at all.’
‘What happened?’
‘She told me that there was a boy who liked me. He was called Chris, he was in the year above, and I had never evenconsideredhe would be interested in someone like me – he was one of the cool, handsome boys, a bit like you.’ She gave Ben a quick smile, but his expression remained serious. ‘I wouldn’t have believed it – I knew where I stood in the school pecking order – except that Genevieve swore it was true, and encouraged me to talk to him. In the end, he asked me out, and Genevieve helped me get ready for our date. I was supposed to meet him at the cinema, but—’ she swallowed. Even now, the memory had enough power to hurt her, her skin prickling uncomfortably.
‘He didn’t show up,’ Ben said. His voice was hard, like flint.
‘No. I waited for over half an hour, though I think I realised a lot sooner that Chris wasn’t coming. Then I spotted him and his friends across the road, in the pizza place, sitting at a window table and laughing at me. It took me a moment to notice that Genevieve was there too. It was as if – I don’t know – she wanted to make sure I knew where I stood: that I knew she was popular, and I wasn’t.’ She was cross with herself. It had been almost half her lifetime ago, and she still felt the horror and humiliation of it.
‘Fucking cowards,’ Ben said through gritted teeth. ‘You shouldn’t have had to go through that.’
‘I know it was a long time ago, and after that, Esme sort of – I wondered if she was taking pity on me at first, but then we became firm friends. But still, there’s a part of me that hasn’t really shrugged it off, and it means I can bepretty judgemental about people. I feel like I have to assess, even as I meet someone, whether their friendliness is genuine. It makes me more guarded, shyer than I want to be.’ She looked out at the acres of blue sky. She felt so removed from the real world, in this place that was like a fantasy, but some of this still wasn’t easy to say. ‘And these things don’t just happen at school. There’s bullying, belittling going on all the time.’
She thought back to a day as warm as this one, a little under a year ago, when it had felt like nothing bad could happen, but she’d been followed after leaving the library. She could still remember the pure, almost blinding fear as she’d realised what was happening, as she listened to the boys’ laughter, tried to make out the whispered words that were deliberately too low for her to hear. The flashback came with an accompanying chill, and she didn’t want to linger on it.
