It's Raining Men (12 page)

Considering the late hour there was a surprising amount of traffic on the roads. That was good for Lara because it made her concentrate on the job in hand and kept her thoughts from drifting
back to the scene in the bedroom. Ridiculously her brain seemed fixated on trivia: that the tie at Tianne’s left leg was the one James wore when he met the prime minister. And how very skinny
and white James’s bum had looked from the back. She hadn’t realized how small his buttocks were.

The aftermath of an accident on the M1 added another half-hour to their journey, not that the others would notice. Clare was snoring softly in the back and May was fast asleep in the passenger
seat, her head resting on the window. Lara was glad to be going away now. She would flush James sodding Galsworthy out of her system with lots of cool, clear water and fresh fruit. She would run
from his image on treadmills and imagine Tianne’s face on a punchbag as she pummelled it. She would emerge from the spa holiday a fully purged and stronger person. Thank GOD she hadn’t
sold her flat in Islington. Too bad it would be another three months before her tenants left it, though.

The satnav was telling her that she was on the home straight at last. Less than half an hour away from the postcode that she had typed in. However, the satnav was also telling her there were no
named streets pertaining to the postcode, so she hoped she’d keyed in the right one. She was getting tired now. She wanted a hot shower and a hard scrub-down with a loofah and to fall into
bed too tired to think – and hopefully too weary to dream.

She left the A64, as instructed by Brian Blessed’s voice, and headed down and up a twisty country lane which seemed to go on for ever. It was a good job there was a bright full moon ahead
because there was absolutely no street lighting here and the roads were muddy and full of unfriendly hairpin bends. Her headlights picked up an old signpost and she slowed down to read it.

‘Useful,’ she commented to herself, seeing that all the letters seemed to have been scratched out. Only the last ‘em’ remained. She carried on until the satnav told her
to take a right. This must be wrong, Lara thought to herself, driving down a road that seemed to be a fly-tippers’ paradise. Old mattresses and sofas lined the verges. This did not herald the
drive up to a swanky – and very expensive – spa complex.

‘What the f—’ A finishing post showed up on the satnav and then Brian boomed a congratulations to her for reaching her destination – a destination which looked absolutely
nothing like the Internet picture she remembered. This holiday cottage was made of old stone, whitewashed long ago, and now, with the aid of lots of honeysuckle clinging to it, had acquired a
shabby-chic charm. It was a one-storey build with a neat grey slate roof and lots of tiny windows set in two-foot-thick walls. To the left was a small terraced garden with a bench affording a view
of what she supposed, in the daylight, would be a cove. It might have had an old charm of sorts, but it was hardly the newly built log cabin she was expecting. And where were the surrounding
cabins: Robin, Lark, Swift and Finch Cottages, not to mention the main manor house? She reached in her handbag for her phone to check the email confirmation, then remembered she didn’t have a
phone any more.

She pulled on the handbrake and killed the engine. There appeared to be a note pinned on the door.

It was too much to think there was another Lara Rickman expected in the area. This had to be the place, then. She was too weary to go looking around for the main complex.

Clare stirred in the back. ‘Are we here?’

‘Well, there’s the question. I think so.’

Clare leaned forwards and shook May’s shoulder. ‘May. We’re here.’

May stretched a crick out of her neck. ‘Thank goodness.’ Her eyes focused on the building to her right. ‘Ooh, that’s different to what I was expecting.’

They all made a stiff exit from the car.

‘I think they’ve given us the wrong cottage, but we’ll sort it in the morning,’ said Lara, picking up the key from under the mat. Nice security measure, she thought. This
wasn’t looking good. Was God having a laugh with her life today?

‘What a lovely smell,’ said May.

‘Honeysuckle,’ replied Clare with a yawn. ‘Gorgeous, isn’t it?’

The door creaked open and Lara felt on the wall for a light switch. It was an old-fashioned type – like a nipple. Like Tianne’s sticky-out nipple. The light revealed a large square
room with a monster-sized oxblood leather sofa and chair in front of a huge stone inglenook fireplace. To the right of the room was a chunky pine dining table with a square wooden crate on it. The
note attached to it read:
Hamper
. Lara unpacked the crate whilst May lumbered in with two suitcases and Clare went on a brief exploration of the bedrooms. Inside there was a waxed packet
of bacon, a paper bag full of eggs, two large triangles of cheese, a home-made loaf, some soup, jam, butter, milk . . . There was nothing luxury about it. No champagne, no cocktail chocolates, no
little jars with exotic-sounding French names. Lara huffed and knew that as soon as the morning sun was up, she was going to be having serious words with this spa hotel.

The kitchen and the lounge were one big room and formed the heart of the cottage. There was no upper floor so all doors led off from this main room – six in total: a front and a side door,
a bathroom and three small bedrooms.

‘Any preference as to sleeping quarters?’ asked Clare. ‘They’re just about all the same.’

‘Nope,’ said May. ‘Take your pick.’

‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ said Clare, picking the corner bedroom; it looked slightly smaller than the other two – and seeing as she was the smallest of them all,
that seemed fitting. ‘I’m beat. Lara, what are you doing? Rest, woman.’

‘I’m putting these luxury items in the fridge then I’m off to bed myself,’ she replied, adding more than a splash of sarcasm to the words ‘luxury items’.

‘Come on,’ said May. ‘You must be knackered. Get to bed, Lara.’

A wave of tiredness suddenly hit Lara and she knew she needed to put her head down on a soft pillow.

May pushed her into the first bedroom. ‘Go to sleep,’ she said. ‘We can’t sort anything out now, it’s nearly two o’clock.’

Everything would have to wait until the morning.

The best thing one can do when it’s raining is to let it rain.

HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW

Lara slept surprisingly well in the single bed with a very fat quilt tucked around her, until the sunlight peeping through the cream-coloured curtains woke her up at seven a.m.
And though she hoped to drift off to sleep again, there were too many images from the night before waiting to torture her. She wondered what had happened after she had gone. Had James and Tianne
carried on where they had left off after it was clear she wasn’t going to pick up the phone? Did Miss Brazilian stay the night in their bed? Did Tianne try to ring her to deliver all the
delicious details of their illicit union, as she had with Rachel when she sought her out especially to brag to her that her James had been a naughty boy? That thought really hurt – because
surely James would have known she would try to get in touch with Lara and make things even worse. Lara’s heart was clearly not as important as his knob. He hadn’t given a toss about her
in all this, had he? Actually he had been giving less and less of a toss about her since she moved in. More and more it looked as if Keely’s observation was true: Kristina’s cut hours
had indeed coincided with James’s rush to move her in. Lara had jumped through hoops for him out of affection and a genuine desire to help, and her reward was to be labelled
‘stale’.

Once again she heard in her head those delighted little whimpers of pleasure coming from Tianne tarty Lee’s lips and she felt hot tears of envy and pain rising to her eyes. She slapped her
face to shock the tears into retreat then bounced out of bed and over to the shabby, cream-framed oval mirror on the wall to give herself a good talking-to.

‘Lara Rickman. You are not going to spend this holiday moping around after James tossing Galsworthy. You are going to have a good time with your friends as soon as this booking mistake is
sorted out. Now do you hear me?’

The face that stared back at her seemed to have lost weight overnight. She hunted in her case for her make-up bag. It was time to brush the life back into her bouncy blonde hair, put on a
façade and get ready to kick ass with the spa managers.

May had had a fitful sleep. She hadn’t had much problem drifting off in the squashy cosy bed, but then the dreams had started. She couldn’t remember much about the
first one, other than that she had woken up crying because she had discovered that Michael was married to a very old woman with bright red hair and he idolized her. It had felt like hours before
she got back to sleep, only to dream then that she had gone round to Michael’s house and found him happily married to a very pretty blonde. He opened the door, saw it was May, then his whole
expression changed into something cold and hateful as he told her to go away and leave them alone. May saw them kissing just as the door closed. She had spent a lot of the night crying silently
into her pillow. What he had done to her was beyond cruel. She would never let another man into her heart again.

She emerged from the bedroom hoping to slip unseen into the bathroom, but bumped straight into Lara instead.

‘Blimey, May, are you okay?’ said Lara.

May wanted to fall onto her friend’s shoulder and sob. Instead she half-lied. She wouldn’t get away with trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying.

‘I’ve had the worst dream,’ she said. ‘I ran over a dog. Awful. This is what happens when you give your brain some time off the leash.’

‘Poor May.’ Lara smiled. ‘I’m going to find the manor house and get this mess sorted. We need healing treatments and plenty of ’em.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ said May. She could do with some fresh air and company. Anything to keep her thoughts snaking towards Michael.

A loud snore came from behind the closed door to the third bedroom. It made them both smile.

‘I think we can safely assume that Clare won’t be coming with us,’ said Lara, making May grin. And that surprised May, because she didn’t think she ever would again.

After dressing quickly they left Clare a note saying that they’d be back soon, then they set off to find the spa. In the daylight they could see that the cottage was in a beautiful spot.
To their left the view was of the rooftops of the main town of Wellem and its small harbour. Down below them was a tiny horseshoe cove, although they couldn’t see much of it from this angle.
If you looked at it from directly above, the cove would probably appear to have the shape of a lopsided heart. Across to the right was another small cottage, perilously close to the edge of the
cliff. It looked as if the rocks had worn away over time and the house would crumble into the sea within the next couple of years. For that reason, it was easy to deduce that no one lived there.
Or, if they did, they were daft.

It was warmer outside the cottage than in it, yet the sky was full of clouds. Clouds that didn’t look right, thought Lara. May was clearly thinking the same because she glanced up and
said, ‘What a strange-looking sky.’ The clouds were doughy and low and a faint sweetness hung in the air, a scent that Lara associated with dry ice.

‘Shall we walk?’ she asked, pointing to the path that wound down presumably to Wellem. ‘Or shall we drive?’

‘Let’s walk,’ said May, leading the way. ‘It doesn’t look that far.’

Lara looked behind her again. There was definitely no manor house or other ‘exceptional log cabins’ as the advert put it. She followed May down the path which met with a crude road
after two hundred yards. There was a lone cottage on the other side of the junction, but no more houses until just after a sign pointing to Spice Wood on the right. Every dwelling was made of thick
rough stone, with not a new build to be seen.

‘There’s a shop,’ said Lara, pointing across the road. Above the door read: Hubbard’s Cupboard. A strange name for a shop, she thought, considering how bare its namesake
was in the nursery rhyme.

‘I’ll wait outside. It doesn’t look big enough to fit two people in,’ said May, calculating how far she would have to bend down to get through the tiny door. She sat on
the wall and looked down at the sea. It was a pretty little place, despite those grey clouds which seemed to float, then fall and dissipate, before a puff of other grey ones replaced them.

Lara pushed the door open and a loud bell on a spiral of wire heralded her entrance into the shop. As she walked in, silence fell and the male shopkeeper and a very eccentrically dressed old man
with a pipe clamped between his teeth both turned to stare at Lara as if she had two heads – and neither of them attractive. It was like a scene from an old horror film, where the villagers
make it clear that strangers are not welcome in these parts.

‘Hi,’ said Lara, feeling heat rising to her cheeks as the two men continued to stare at her. The older one was dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a long cape and deerstalker. Below his
knees the resemblance ended: he was sporting pink pumps. His gaze never shifted from Lara, not even to blink. It was as if his eyelids were glued up. ‘Er, can you tell me where the manor
house is, please?’

At least her question made them tear their eyes away from her and towards each other for a moment of collusion.

‘The manor house?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Carlton Hall, you mean?’

‘Is that the spa?’

‘No Spar here. The nearest big supermarkets are in Wellem. Spar and Tesco.’

‘Ah, not Spar with an “r”,’ Lara clarified. ‘I mean the health spa. The big building?’

They were looking blankly at her. Hang on; Lara’s brain caught up with her ears.

‘Sorry, did you say the nearest supermarket is in Wellem?’

‘Yes. It’s about five miles away.’

‘Isn’t this Wellem?’ Now she really was confused.