A Summer Fling (40 page)

As old as she was now, Raychel had read the letter with a shake in her hands. It acted like a key to a door in her head which held back all those memories of her childhood: the scruffy house, the strangers buying drugs, Nathan Lunn and his cruelty and her mother, too spaced out to stop him when he went on his smashing, hitting, violent rampages. But finding Elizabeth had strengthened her. She no longer felt as if she and Ben were alone in the world. John was looking after Ben like a son and she could feel Elizabeth’s strength and love radiate out towards her. She felt safer than she had ever done in her whole life within the confines of her new family circle.

‘I don’t want to see her but I feel that I have to. She can tell me what she has to and then she can leave me alone. What should I do?’

Elizabeth gripped Raychel’s hands in her own.

‘Would you like me to go to her?’

‘I can’t ask that of you.’

‘Yes, you can. Leave it with me.’ Elizabeth took in a deep breath as she made the decision to commit herself to this. ‘I’ll deal with it. I’ll see what she wants.’

The time was long overdue. Elizabeth
needed
to see her sister. She had things of her own to sort out with her.

At West House, things had fallen into a routine as if they had always been so. Niki was chopping up vegetables in the kitchen when Grace got home. He had opened a bottle of wine and three glasses stood waiting impatiently at the side of it.

‘Ah, good evening, Gracie,’ said Niki. ‘Where’s my sister?’

‘Christie’s nipped into town. She needs shoes.’

‘No, she doesn’t, she
wants
shoes,’ said Niki with a big, booming and infectious laugh that Grace couldn’t help smiling at. How different this house felt to her old one. Despite the age of the walls, it was young and alive with no atmosphere sliding down towards a grave. Niki had Lily Allen playing out of his iPod station. Gordon would have had, at best, some morbid radio programme on that sounded as if it was being broadcast through the war. She wondered where Gordon was and what was going through his head at this moment. Then she cut off the thought as Niki pushed a generous glass of Chablis into her hand.

‘Try this,’ he invited. ‘I think it’s divine, personally.’

‘Anything I can do to help?’ asked Grace.

‘Nope,’ said Niki. ‘Cooking unwinds me. And I had the patient of all nervous patients in today. Fifty-eight-year-old company director and terrified of needles like you wouldn’t imagine.’

‘How do you calm down someone like that?’ said Grace.

‘Acupuncture,’ said Niki.

‘No!’ said Grace.

‘Joke,’ replied Niki, clicking his tongue. ‘Gotcha, Grace!’ Their eyes met and locked and Grace knew that Christie hadn’t been exaggerating at all when she intimated that her brother was growing fond of her. His next words confirmed it.

‘I . . . we both like having you here so much,’ he said in his lovely deep bear of a voice.

‘Thank you, Niki. I’m so grateful to you both. I shall try not to outstay my welcome.’

‘You couldn’t possibly do that, Gracie,’ said Niki. Then he notched up the humour by singing a falsetto opera song about his scallops because, as his sister so rightly said, he would not want to compromise Grace as a guest, not after what she had been through recently. He knew her thoughts would be a jumble and the last thing she would want was some bachelor-dentist declaring an ever-growing batch of undeniable feelings.

She was, however, a woman worth waiting for. And Nikita Koslov thought he might just have been waiting his whole life for her.

‘Can’t believe we are at the end of another week!’ said Christie, pouring the bottle of chilled Zinfandel into five glasses. ‘Anyone doing anything exciting this weekend? It only seems like two minutes since I was asking that question last Friday.’

‘I’m off to see Calum’s old auntie in a retirement home,’ said Dawn.

‘Bloody hell, I can’t compete with that much excitement,’ said Anna.

‘Aw, don’t be rotten,’ laughed Dawn. ‘She wants to see my dress so I had a picture taken. She’s too frail to come to the church.’

‘Christie and I are off to the theatre,’ said Grace.

‘And my brother is coming as well,’ said Christie. ‘He has rather a crush on Grace.’

‘Get in there, Gracie,’ said Anna, which mirrored exactly what Paul and Laura had said. It was, apparently, obvious to them also that Niki rather liked their mother. He was always fizzily cheerful around her and, though Grace had told her children that he was like that around everyone because it was his natural disposition, they didn’t believe her at all. Did she like Niki enough to say ‘yes’ if he invited her out to dinner? Paul had asked her. The thought terrified Grace, to be honest. The idea of starting a new,
normal
relationship, with all that it entailed, was scary stuff. Especially with a fifty-five-year-old body, although it was still in fantastic shape, thanks to years of yoga. But then Niki was fifty too. Did men feel the same insecurity about their bodies with new partners?

‘What are you going to do now that filming is over? Won’t you feel lost?’ Raychel asked Anna.

‘Well,’ Anna leaned forward to impart her information. ‘Mr Darq is sending a car for me tomorrow night. Says he’s got something for me.’

‘What?’ asked Dawn, her eyes lit up with excitement.

‘Haven’t a clue. I won’t be there long apparently, so he says.’ She sighed rather heavily at the thought of having to say a second goodbye to him.

‘Ooh, how exciting,’ Christie grinned. ‘Wonder what it could be. Can you wait?’

Anna downplayed the thrill that tripped along her nerve-endings at the thought of seeing him again. ‘I’ll have to, won’t I?’ She had thought of his hand on her heart more times than she cared to count that past week. She’d even dreamed about him one night, wild and saturnine and threatening to eat her. Although the dream had ended before he had fulfilled his promise and she never did get to find out if he meant literally or metaphorically. She wondered if she could look him in the face after the sexual tension that her night-brain had created.
Vladimir Darq.
He was taking up more and more of her thought space, which concerned her. There was no point in forming an attachment with someone like him. But she was aware that was exactly what was happening.

‘And I’m going shopping with my aunt,’ said Raychel after taking a deep breath.

She cut through most of the story and told them that she had been contacted by an estranged aunt who was, by fantastic coincidence, living in the area.

‘What an amazing story,’ said Christie. ‘I didn’t think things happened like that in real life. You must be delighted.’

‘It’s a long, complicated story,’ said Raychel. ‘I gave you the abridged version.’

‘And the happy ending,’ said Dawn. ‘So that’ll do nicely.’

On Raychel’s face was a great big wide arc of a smile. She had so wanted to tell her work-mates some of her story: the nice parts. They had made it so easy for her to be friends with them. Accepting her without wanting to know all the ins and outs of her past life. She felt like she had a big, cosy blanket around her. She was content, despite the niggle about her mother’s reappearance in her life. But she had Elizabeth on her side and that made her feel protected in a way that not even her lovely Ben could manage.

After the others had left, Dawn sat at the bar and watched the band.

‘Are you going to sing again?’ asked the barman when she gave him a drinks order. ‘You were fab.’

‘It was a one-off,’ said Dawn, secretly glowing.

‘The manager wanted to see you. Think he was on about offering you the odd singing job.’

‘Oh?’ said Dawn. She was flattered but she didn’t relish the thought of standing on that stage alone. Al would have gone back to Canada then and singing solo had never been part of her plans. ‘Tell him thanks but I don’t think I dare,’ she said. ‘But it was nice of him to say so.’

‘Shame,’ said the barman. ‘But then you fitted in so well with that band. Maybe you should ask them to take you with them when they go.’

Dawn laughed politely, but the barman’s words were too close to the bone for comfort. They brought pictures in her head of her touring on a bus with the boys, setting up the stage with them, jamming together outside with a backdrop of Canadian mountains and warm, orangey sunsets.

Al Holly’s arm circled her waist. The contact lasted barely a second but it was enough to send fireworks rocketing up towards her brain and then onwards to the moon.

‘You looked lost in thought,’ he said. ‘Anything interesting?’

‘Sort of,’ said Dawn. ‘How are you? Have you had a good week?’

‘Yes, good,’ he smiled, his eyes as twinkly as polished rhinestones. ‘And how are you, Dawny Sole? I was going to invite you on stage to sing with us again tonight but you were talking with your friends. I didn’t see you even look up at me once.’

Dawn felt her cheeks grow hot. He had such a dreamy voice. He had a head start on anyone else she could ever meet for giving her palpitations. George Clooney included.

‘Every time I looked up, you were looking down,’ replied Dawn. ‘Seems we didn’t have our eyes coordinated.’

‘I looked at you quite a lot,’ said Al. ‘Not sure how I’m going to spend my Fridays not seeing you out there at the back of the room.’

‘Bet you say that to all the girls,’ said Dawn, her smile shaky on her lips.

‘No, Dawny,’ said Al, ‘I don’t. I ain’t no womanizer. My music is my woman. But if . . .’

The room melted into a big blur behind Dawn. There was nothing but her and lovely Al Holly and she was desperate for him to finish his sentence. But he didn’t. He said, ‘So, Coke or beer?’

Dawn could have battered him. But she wasn’t free to be flirted with. There was no point in complicating anything.
Yeah, right, like it wasn’t already complicated!
A huge part of her didn’t want to be right and honourable and decent. It wanted Al Holly to lean into her and kiss her hard on the lips and show her what he tasted like. She wanted to do things with him that would make Paris Hilton’s love life look like Mother Teresa’s.

‘Diet Coke, please. A small one.’

‘Two small Diet Cokes, please,’ Al told the barman before turning back to Dawn and asking, ‘Anyhow, how are your wedding plans coming along?’

Dawn didn’t want to talk about her wedding plans. She ignored his question and gave him one of her own.

‘Do you write your own songs?’

‘We write some. I’ve been writing one this week, as a matter of fact.’

‘What’s it called?’

‘Haven’t finished it yet. Hope to have it ready for next week,’ he said. ‘We . . . er . . . have a private party to play for this evening. I can only stay for five minutes.’

‘Oh sure,’ said Dawn.

‘You could come, the guys wouldn’t mind. We could pass you off as a roadie if I lent you my hat.’

‘Thank you,’ smiled Dawn. ‘But I’d better not, I should go home.’

‘I’d prefer not to go to the party and sit here with you and talk about music and guitars or whatever you wanted to talk about and drink beer.’

‘I couldn’t anyway, I’m driving.’

‘I might take your car keys away from you.’

‘How would I get home then?’

The question hung in the thick silence between them and they both knew what his answer would have been, had he spoken.

Dawn felt so hot her brain was in danger of blowing up.

‘Where’s the party?’ she asked.

‘Somewhere called Maltstone Lodge. Do you know it?’

‘Yes, it’s not far away.’ Dawn took a long drink and noticed that Al had already finished his.

‘You have to go,’ she said.

‘Yep, I do.’ But he didn’t move. And neither did Dawn.

‘I—’

‘Dawn—’ They both started to speak simultaneously. Al’s hand twitched upwards. Then dropped back to his side. Then it made a smooth arc to her face. His fingers had barely touched her cheek when a man’s voice called across the bar.

‘Al. We’re ready to go, man. Oh, hi there, Dawny. How are you?’

Al sighed. ‘Samuel’s timing was never all that good.’

‘Maybe his timing is too good,’ said Dawn. Samuel had saved them from God knows what, because if she had kissed Al Holly then, she didn’t know what bombs it would set off inside her. She was clinging onto every reserve she had to resist him and it wasn’t working.

Al dipped his hand into the back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a piece of paper.

‘This is my mobile number. Just in case you want it. Just in case you want to talk. As friends.’

Dawn took it from him. She wouldn’t ring, she couldn’t ring, but it was nice to have.

‘I know you won’t ring,’ he said, as if he could read her thoughts. ‘But I want to hope that you might.’

‘Thank you. And if I don’t ring, will you be here next week?’

‘Of course I will.’

‘Bye.’

‘Bye.’

He touched the tip of her nose. Just one little touch with his finger and those bombs detonated inside her, each one setting off another in a different part of her body.

Bugger – she was falling hook, line and sinker for a country boy and she wished that before he left her forever, she could taste his lips upon her own. Just once.

*

When Anna reached home, she found a small packet on the doorstep. She huffed and ripped it open to find it contained a tiny black thong. She opened the door and threw it on the hall-side table.

To say that Anna was nervous that Saturday evening as she waited for her car was the equivalent of saying that the ‘sun was a bit hot.’ What the heck did he have to give her? Whatever it was was secondary to the fact that she was going to see him again. The anticipation was killing her. She had paced a furrow in the hall carpet by the time she heard the car pull smoothly up outside her front door.

She dropped her house keys twice while she was locking up, and attempting to laugh off her butter-fingers to the Romanian driver with the sense of humour bypass didn’t help her confidence levels.

Vladimir was waiting for her outside his house, his legs astride, his arms folded over a Nehru-collared long, open jacket that made him look sexily authoritarian. She gulped as he presented his hand to help her out of the car. It was the heart-touching hand.