Lots of Love (58 page)

Ellen started walking away from the shop, thinking tetchily about Dilly’s latest absurd plan to get her mother together with him.

Pheely followed, checking the lane so that they could cross over to the green. ‘I’m stunned that he didn’t take up your offer of a night of sin. By God, even if nothing else convinced me, that shows he
must
have changed. Either that or he’s fallen in love at last.’ She laughed uproariously. ‘But with whom, I wonder. Probably himself. All that therapy has created the great love of his life.’

Sometimes Pheely’s delight in dissecting Spurs infuriated Ellen. Having expended so much effort in revving her up to talk about him over recent weeks, she now regretted that he’d latterly become the most common topic of their conversations. Pheely’s combined fascination and hatred was unhealthy. ‘So Dilly’s excited about this evening?’ she asked, to get her friend off topic.

‘Very much so. Although I do still entertain doubts about that haughty horseman she fancies, however pretty he looks. He was very louche the other night, I thought. And he mumbles terribly. Do make sure she comes to no harm.’

‘I’ll try my best,’ Ellen promised.

‘Where are you going while the youngsters moon?’

‘A pub in another village, I guess. I promised Spurs supper.’

‘Let’s hope they have very long-handled spoons.’ Pheely gave her a shrewd look. ‘Don’t go too far from Springlode in case Dilly needs rescuing.’

‘Are you going to sculpt this evening?’ Ellen had worrying visions of Pheely taking up pursuit on her moped.

‘I should. That wretched bust really isn’t coming together. I long to start again, but I’m running out of time.’

‘Is it that bad?’

‘My work is
never
bad, but I sense it might be too interpretive for Ely’s taste. I don’t suppose . . .’ She gave Ellen a sly look. ‘Could Dilly sleep over at the cottage? She’d love that, and it means I can sculpt uninterrupted all night.’

‘I – er—’

‘Oh, please, darling. It’s not as though you and Spurs are going to get up to anything naughty, are you?’

‘No, we’re not.’ Then Ellen gasped with alarm as she remembered that the jeep was out of action. ‘Oh, God, I must fit the new battery.’

‘Steady on.’ Pheely giggled. ‘You do know those devices can make you go blind?’

Having wired in the replacement battery, Ellen decided to give Dilly’s carriage a quick valet. She plastered the jeep with foamy water, then washed it off with the hose and gave it a chamois polish. Then she dragged out the vacuum cleaner and sucked up enough Cornish sand from the upholstery and footwells to make a twenty-four-hour egg-timer. When she straightened up and switched it off, she heard a familiar engine rattling along North Street and walked to the gates just as Spurs rounded the corner into Goose Lane, riding the mini-tractor. Its front racks were piled so high with bags and boxes that they almost obscured him, and it wasn’t until the oversized quad ground to a halt on the gravel beside her that Ellen saw he was wearing a suit.

‘Evening.’ He jumped off and brushed dust from his legs.

Ellen watched him warily, rubbing the rebellious goosebumps from her arms and telling her heart to shut up. Instantly she felt very, very ill-at-ease.

It might have been the very first time he’d appeared in the Goose Cottage drive telling her that she had to make a wish there and then. There was something unfamiliar about him, an impatient, intimidating mood that seemed to make the air spit hotly around her.

She told herself firmly that it was just because he looked different. He had always been impossibly scruffy, apart from that one interrupted evening when he’d worn pretty sharp rags, but they had had nothing on this. The suit – immaculately tailored pale grey silk, matched with a purple shirt and tie – wouldn’t have looked out of place on a shady Soho boho or a fashion icon at a première. It made him seem strange and formidable, as did his narrowed eyes and brutish smile.

‘I’ve got the props,’ he announced, as he started to unload the tractor. ‘Open the boot.’

Ellen silently watched bags and boxes being transferred into the freshly vacuumed space, unable to talk around the lump in her throat. Despite her mental battle, she was almost wiped out by how attractive she found him. And yet it felt wrong. The entire thing felt completely wrong.

‘Rory gave me a shopping list – he’s really into your bigged-up romance idea.’ He laughed. ‘When I went to see this new horse of his this morning, I checked all over the house for vodka in case he’s on one of his benders, but I think he really is inspired. He’s okayed it with Keith Wilmore – the landlord at the Plough.’ He handed her two boxes. ‘These are for you. It’s your costume, and your new friendship shoes.’

She laid the boxes carefully on the garden bench and went to unplug the vacuum. She couldn’t bring herself to look, frightened of the emotions welling up inside her, knowing she had to hold it together.

Spurs eyed her edgily, reluctant to acknowledge that she wasn’t playing along as he had hoped. ‘Shame you haven’t time to try them on.’ He heaved the biggest of the boxes – marked ‘Easy Assemble Oriental Pagoda’ – on to the roof and went in search of the cargo straps under the back seat. ‘We have to run everything up to Springlode and then you need to come back here for Dilly. I’d have dropped this lot off myself, but I was giving Pa a lift back from Cheltenham Races and I couldn’t risk taking him anywhere near a pub. After all this effort, Rory sure as hell doesn’t want his hot date screwed up by the old man drowning his sorrows at the bar all night.’

She stooped to wind the flex back into the vacuum, watching it slither across the gravel like a snake. Then Spurs stepped on it, forcing her to look up. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

‘Cat’s still missing,’ she muttered.

He untangled the cargo straps, winding them around his hand as he looked down at her. ‘So what’s wrong?’

‘I told you I didn’t want this.’

‘Well, I do,’ he snapped, stepping off the taut flex. ‘I want to be good.’

‘This isn’t good.’ She laughed hollowly as the plug rattled into its plastic well. ‘This is interfering.’

He unleashed a cargo strap over the car like a long whip, then stalked round to the other side to thread it under the running rails.

Ellen stood up, ruffled by his insolence and the way he was hijacking the evening. ‘You shouldn’t have filled Rory’s head with stupid ideas about big romantic gestures,’ she rounded on him. ‘They should be allowed to get to know each other without us imposing a great theatrical happening on them.’

‘I’m not imposing anything.’

‘Yes, we are – you are. You were the one who started banging on about fairy tales and pantomimes and acting as set-designer and stealing my kindness. You’re the one who grants wishes and lights fire circles around Chinese takeaways, who buggers off for days, then gallops up on a horse to tell me you’ve sold your soul but, hey, now I’ve sold the gingerbread cottage, let’s be mates.’

‘Don’t be so unromantic.’ He pulled back on the first cargo strap to snap it tight, bracing his legs against the car so that he looked like a sailor mending rigging.

‘I don’t want to be romantic!’ she howled, knowing that there was absolutely no point. Nothing was going to happen between them.

‘You made that abundantly clear on Sunday.’ He reached for the second strap and lassoed it over the roof. ‘When you announced that we were going to – now, how did you so delicately put it? – “fuck each other’s brains out”?’

Ellen glanced nervously at the lane in case anybody was within earshot. ‘Was that why you left?’ she asked hoarsely.

He looked at her over the roof, his eyes giving nothing away.

‘I thought that’s what you wanted all along,’ she muttered.

‘Maybe, at first,’ he sighed, ‘but it’s like wanting to be mortal then finding you have no voice.’

‘Sorry?’

‘
The Little Mermaid.
’

‘I told you. I don’t know the story.’

‘I’ll tell you it over supper. We don’t have time now.’ He fixed the second strap.

She sighed, defeated by his indomitable mood. It was the same mood she’d left him in the day before, and she didn’t understand it at all.

‘All this must have cost a fortune.’ She looked at the bags with their designer tags.

‘Don’t worry, it’s all going back tomorrow. I told the department store that I was borrowing it all for a fashion shoot for
Cotswold Living
mag.’

‘That’s fraudulent.’

‘Not as fraudulent as using your credit-card details for security.’

‘What?’

‘You really shouldn’t leave your drawers open.’ He smiled easily. ‘I have a wonderful head for figures.’

‘What’s got into you?’ she demanded.

‘Oh dear.’ He blinked up at her. ‘Am I straying from the straight and narrow?’

Ellen drove Spurs to Upper Springlode in silence while he smoked a cigarette broodingly beside her, the window wide open so that ash billowed around them, flecking his expensive suit. He turned the stereo on full blast and kicked his foot against the glovebox in time to Robbie Williams’ ‘Let Me Entertain You’. It was partly like driving a small, sulking, hyperactive boy, Ellen decided – and partly like driving a wild animal.

When Rory opened his cottage door, he was wearing nothing but a grubby towel and had a toothbrush poking out of his mouth. Spurs thrust several of the carrier-bags at him and muttered something in his ear, then jumped back into the jeep and told Ellen to drive on to the pub car park.

‘This really
is
his idea.’ He was kicking the glovebox in time to the Prodigy’s ‘Firestarter’ now. ‘I’d never suggest something so completely crass as the surprise he’s got lined up.’

‘What is it?’ she asked.

But Spurs had spotted Keith, the bearded landlord, waiting for them in the car park and jumped out before Ellen had pulled up.

‘I’ve kept it for you like you asked,’ Keith greeted them cheerfully, beckoning them into the beer garden, which was already full of evening drinkers enjoying the sunshine and the views.

Ellen and Spurs carried the boxes to the furthest cluster of trees, beside the bubbling stream that gushed noisily from the spring, masking the sound of conversations nearby. In a clearing on the bank was a lone table, quite hidden from the rest of the garden, on which Keith had placed a handwritten reserved sign.

‘Bring Dilly to this table at half past eight – no later,’ Spurs told Ellen, taking her wrist and glancing at her watch. ‘That should give me enough time to lay everything out and get Rory in place. And don’t forget to change into your costume.’

When Ellen lifted the tissue paper on the first of the boxes Spurs had left with her, she wondered what on earth Rory had cooked up that required Spurs to wear a slick suit and her to dress in . . . She gathered it up and walked to the mirror . . . This. Oh, wow! Layers of white chiffon fluttered against her in the breeze from the open attic window.

It was heaven. But how on earth did you put it on, she wondered.

She was crouching on the carpet searching frantically for her strappy sandals when Dilly arrived downstairs, complaining bitterly the moment she was through the door. ‘Ellen! Can I have a quick shower? Mum’s been hogging the bathroom for the last hour, slopping around like a great hippo saying she needs to soak away her stress to get into the right frame of mind to spend the night reworking the bust. I couldn’t get in there. Ellen!’

‘Help yourself,’ she called down the stairs.

A few minutes later, hair still in a shower cap, Dilly trailed scented drips into the room and ground to an amazed halt. ‘Bloody hell! Like, bloody, bloody hell!’

‘What’s the matter?’ Ellen smoothed the chiffon nervously.

‘Oh, God, can you make me look that sexy? No, forget it. I could
never
look that sexy in a million years. Bloody hell.’

‘You like it?’

‘You are
so
beautiful. I had no idea you could be that beautiful.’

‘Get outta here.’ Ellen laughed. ‘It’s just a posh frock.’

She looked in the mirror again, still uncertain that she had the balls to go anywhere dressed like this. The layers of bias-cut chiffon clung delicately to every curve of her body, like steam from a shower. The long bell sleeves constantly slipped over her worriedly adjusting hands as the dress fell off each shoulder in turn. Slashed almost to the waist in front, it barely maintained her dignity with a few fragile cross-laced ribbons, but the narrow margin of fabric that separated her nipples from the wide expanse of brown chest shifted dangerously if she so much as breathed.

‘It suits you so perfectly,’ Dilly was burbling excitedly. ‘Not sure about the shoes, though.’

Ellen looked down. ‘The ones that go with it don’t fit and I can’t find my strappy sandals.’

‘Oh, Hamlet chewed them up. Sorry. I meant to tell you yesterday when I brought the rest of your stuff back. I can give you the money if you let me pay you in instalments. You will still lend me something, won’t you?’

She smiled. ‘Take your pick.’

Dilly looked at the clothes spread out on the bed and her face lit up.

‘Dilly!’ Ellen burst out laughing when she started to pull on her choice. ‘You don’t want to wear those. They’re only there because I just took them off.’

‘I love them.’ Dilly buttoned up the ancient denim cut-offs that Ellen almost lived in. ‘These are far more me than dresses and high heels. I’ll leave those to old bags like you and Mum.’

Ellen went to swing a good-natured thump at her shoulder, but stopped when her boob fell out of the great cleavage divide.

‘You’ll have to watch that.’ Dilly sniggered, trying on a bootlace top while Ellen tucked herself back in.

Ellen looked at her reflection dubiously. ‘I thought Cinderella was the one who got to wear the beautiful dress, not the fairy godmother.’