Love & Freedom (6 page)

‘A new guy wouldn’t have wanted you, anyway. The new partner always wants a clean slate and their family to be all perfect and symmetrical.’ Honor rolled back down on the grass and watched a puff of white cloud sailing over the washed blue sky.

Sinking on to his stomach and elbows brought his face level with hers, making her aware of his proximity in a way that undid the cooling accomplished by the smoothie. ‘Maybe. Clarissa did eventually decide she wanted me, long before she married Duncan. But I liked living with comfy Mum rather than spiky Clarissa and so Clarissa was hurt.’

‘Fighting over you! Lucky guy.’

He laughed. His eyes were fixed on hers. ‘It didn’t feel lucky. First I was Clarissa’s “mistake”, but then, when her friends began to settle down and have babies, she looked around for me as if I was a handbag she’d put away until it came back into fashion.’

His hair hung around his face in quills. It was
just
long enough, Honor decided. Long enough to be sexy and cool and swing almost in his eyes, not so long as to be surfer-dude. It lay just so. Women would kill for hair like that but guys didn’t even seem to notice their amazing good fortune. His eyes, apart from being dark, were full of intelligence and wry humour. And interest. It burned in his eyes and intrigued her. ‘So what did she come out of college as?’

‘A schoolteacher in drama and dance. But she didn’t have the understanding disposition for the schoolteacher bit, so now she gives dance classes privately. You know, the kind of thing adults do in the evening and at weekends and kids do after school.’

‘I certainly do know. I was one of those kids mad on tap and ballet, graduating on to street dancing. Maybe I’ll take a class with her.’

He closed one eye against the sun, as if he were winking. ‘Dancing would build up your stamina. And Clarissa would love it.

‘I get on with her OK, now,’ he went on. ‘Except for her incessant complaints about my life. When I dropped out of uni, we could hardly be in the same room because I asked Mum if I could live with her while I got on my feet and Clarissa wanted me to finish my degree and pick up a graduate’s salary. We had some shocking arguments.’

Honor remembered the explosions Clarissa had mentioned.

‘Clarissa said that Mum shouldn’t let me live there for nothing,’ he went on, ‘with my head in the clouds. Mum said, “I let you live your own life and make your own choices. And you lived that life for some time before you chose to take any notice of Martyn. Now he’s going to make his own choices and take opportunities and make mistakes, too.” So Clarissa had to accept it.

‘She’s still circling “good jobs” in the paper for me, though. And, because I help her out by designing flyers for her dance classes and keeping up her website in my spare time – of which I have plenty, as she never hesitates to remind me – she drops heavy hints about the benefits of working a forty-hour-week in design.’

‘And Clarissa never had any other kids?’

‘No. It would probably have been different if she had. Maybe she would have found a way to start calling me her son instead of her brother. But she’s born and bred in Eastingdean and, having once agreed to the rewriting of the family history, it was hard to make the change.’ His smile twisted.

She snorted. ‘I know about small towns. Back home in Hamilton Drives, one half of the town is never happy unless it’s picking busily over the lives of the other half. How about your dad? Is he around?’

‘My natural father, he was a tourist. Nothing romantic about Clarissa’s story, just teenagers letting testosterone get ahead of what little sense they had.’ His grin flashed.

‘Aren’t you
curious
about your natural father?’

He shrugged. ‘I suppose I have been. I’m a giant next to Clarissa, and much darker, so it was no surprise when she told me that I look just like him.’

And kind of understandable that, if he’d had towering calendar-guy looks like Martyn’s, the absent tourist father might have found Clarissa a pushover. ‘Didn’t her parents track him down and make him pay child maintenance? Or even marry her?’

‘All Clarissa knew about him was that he was called John and came from Leicester.’

‘Oh.’ She began bending and stretching her legs, feeling stiffness setting in already. ‘That would make it tough for you to find him.’

‘I never felt the need. He doesn’t know about me. I just think of him as a sperm donor.’ Then he smiled, his teeth even and white. ‘I’ve churned out my entire life story. Sorry. Incredibly boring.’

‘I appreciate being put in the picture.’ She sat up and turned her face to the sun. Lying down next to him, so close, was making her feel skippy inside.

A sprinkling of mothers let tiny children play on the climbing frames below, perhaps on their way back from dropping the older kids at school. But then she noticed a woman with long black curls and a multi-coloured crocheted poncho shading her eyes and gazing up at Martyn and Honor. ‘Friend of yours?’

Martyn turned to look and the woman waved enthusiastically. ‘Shit, it’s Robina.’ He turned away, embarrassment curling his face.

Honor stared at the woman, who was hovering as if considering climbing up to join them. ‘That’s an unusual name.’ She paused, waiting for him to fill the silence, give her information about Robina. And, when he didn’t, ‘She seems to know you.’

He cupped the side of his face as if to prevent the image of wildly waving Robina burning itself on to his retinas. ‘Sorry, but can we ignore her? She can be a giant pain and it’s the best way. Honestly.’

‘What kind of giant pain?’ Honor itched to respond to someone so obviously available for communication. ‘Will she come up here to talk?’

He groaned. ‘Hope not! She wants to be in my life. She wants to
be
my life! She owns a tearoom, the Eastingdean Teapot, and I used to go in there, but I stopped because
 
… You know how it is, when someone likes you too much.’

Intrigued and astounded, Honor turned to look at him and the slot of tension that had appeared between his eyes. ‘How does someone like you “too much”?’

His hand remained a barrier between his eyes and Robina, who had stopped waving now and was just watching. ‘She sits with you uninvited when you visit her tearoom, makes you special cakes, writes you poetry, gives you presents, calls at your flat or lurks around bushes watching your flat, she follows you on Twitter and makes you a page on Facebook, she
walks through the park when she knows you’ll be out for your morning run
, she hangs out wherever she thinks you might turn up.’ He sighed. ‘I can hardly cross the road to the pub any more, because she’ll be waiting to try and burrow into me, like a parasite.’

‘Wow. I find that bizarre.’ As Honor watched, the woman turned away, hair flying behind her. The disappointment in her slumped shoulders tugged at Honor’s vulnerable heart. ‘You mean she’s like a stalker?’ She knew she sounded incredulous but
 
… well, it was pretty incredible.

‘Just like one.’ He risked a glance and visibly relaxed when he saw Robina stumping away. ‘Zoë told me that you were over here to trace your family?’

Honor could sympathise with his obvious desire to change the subject but her curiosity kept her watching Robina. ‘It’s not the only reason but, sure, I might look for my roots, while I’m here. My mom’s English. She left me when I was a baby. I’ve always wondered about her.’ She paused. The woman was passing from sight now, skirting the back of the cream art deco building with the swimming pools in front, which Honor had seen from the road before – Saltdean Lido. Honor moved her gaze back to Martyn. ‘
Obsessed
about her, my family would say. So, yeah, I could try and talk to her. My dad was over here on vacation from law school when they met at the Reading Rock Festival, and he let himself be enchanted by her, a wild child of rock music, champion of personal freedom –
completely
unlike him. Nowadays he practises law and is buttoned up in a major way. But back in the day, apparently, he was so enchanted that when the wild child told him she’d missed a period, they went through a Druid handfasting ceremony at the Autumnal Equinox, on Primrose Hill. And he took the wild child back to the States in time for him to begin his final year at law school.’ She shook her head. ‘And that was when all the trouble started.’

‘Trouble?’ He sat up and hooked his arms around his knees, his shoulder brushing hers, warm and firm. Seriously firm. UK dictionaries probably said:
toned – see Martyn Mayfair
.

She swished the last drops of the smoothie in the bottom of the bottle and drank it down. ‘The handfasting had no standing in law, of course. I guess that Garvin Lefevre isn’t the type to lose his marbles, even when he falls instantly in love.’ She tilted her baseball cap over her eyes against the climbing morning sun. ‘But, apparently, my mother started to call herself Mrs Lefevre and Grandma said that she didn’t care whether they’d married in the eyes of Mother Earth, they had to be married in the eyes of the State of Connecticut before she could call herself that. They didn’t get along, particularly when my mom kicked up a storm because she wanted a home birth, which, like, nobody did in New England in the seventies. She wanted to go to bars and gigs and my dad was always at school or studying, so I guess it was pretty hard on her and she didn’t much like America. And I guess she didn’t like being my mom either because, three weeks after I was born, she took off. I understand why it would have been hard to take me – I’m American and the FBI takes a dim view of foreigners swiping our citizens, even when the citizen is the foreigner’s kid. But I’d kind of like to know why I wasn’t important enough to make her stay. Or even stay in touch.

‘Dad was relieved to see her go, I think, though he was in the middle of exams and probably didn’t know which way was up. Grandma took me over – just like yours – and Dad married a good American girl, Karen, a few years later.

‘So, there you have it – I’m a mistake, too.’

Chapter Six

‘It happens,’ he said, quietly. She was looking away, now, watching mothers pushing buggies, toddlers trying to keep up. Now she was no longer sunburn red, tiny freckles kissed her nose. Her ponytail was a toffee-coloured cloud, but when he had found her on the patio this morning her hair had hung loose over her shoulders, not in waves but in ripples. He liked her hair. He liked her pixily determined chin and short, straight nose. But not as much as her pretty mouth. She had a seriously pretty mouth. Her lips were glistening with the last of the smoothie and it begged to be licked away.

She was no cover girl; her beauty was too quirky, too expressive. Too dependent on the pretty mouth that he couldn’t stop watching as she said, ‘I was five and Dad and me were a unit, when they got married. Karen was a good stepmom but, of course, she couldn’t love me as much as she loved her own kids. Sometimes she’d act as if I’d been a lot of trouble and get Dad to take me off somewhere, like she was saying, “This one’s your child, sort her out.” She carried on with her career until she was pregnant with Jessamine, and Jess was a difficult baby and Zachary followed quite soon, so Grandma carried on caring for me when Daddy wasn’t home until I went to junior high when I was twelve. Old enough to get the school bus and old enough to watch Jessie and Zach.’

‘Watch them do what?’ He couldn’t resist teasing her for her American terminology.

A smile flickered across her eyes. ‘I watched them do just about everything – helping them if it was a good thing, stopping them if it was a bad thing. You say “babysit”, right?

‘You know how you get that child in a family, the one who is older and more self-possessed, who runs lots of errands? Well, that was me, because when I was responsible and helpful, Karen didn’t make other arrangements for me. So it was a lot easier on everyone.’ She turned her fine green gaze on him and smiled. ‘You can’t fault her logic – I’m not her kid. Families do you in, don’t they?’

He commiserated with a touch to her hand. Her nails were manicured and her fingers dainty. ‘Mum would have called you “a fine-boned lady”. That was her greatest compliment because she was like my sisters – short and sturdy, like peasant stock. And I’m a big guy.’

She laughed. ‘You sure are.’

His glance flickered contemplatively to her mouth. But he just took her hand and surged to his feet. ‘Ready to go?’

She winced. ‘Ow! Ooh,’ as she began to use her legs, so he led her back out of the underpass and along the undercliff to Eastingdean at a snail’s pace. He should never have kept running when he knew she was blown; it didn’t seem like such a good joke, now, because she was walking as stiffly as a heron. And it was taking forever to get back to Eastingdean.

‘All I can see from here is the top of your cap,’ he observed, when she seemed to be walking more easily.

‘Doctor’s orders were that I cover up in the sun for a while.’ She glanced up. ‘I don’t think I ever said thank you for dragging me in from the sun and calling
Dr
Zoë. You were the good guy, looking after things for your sister, and you got a sick American to take care of. One more thing to hold against Clarissa.’

The undercliff was busy and he sidestepped a small child on tow behind a large black dog and steered her to a slope up to the road. ‘I’m being kind to her, at the moment, even when she pulls all the sister-mum crap. Her husband did one, a few months ago.’