Restoring Grace (35 page)

She was back in her seat
by the fire, looking much the
same as
before, when Ran returned with the drinks. She
had
decided there was nothing she could do to her
appearance,
lacking grey hair powder or a pencil suitable
for drawing in some
laughter lines. She would have to depend on her acting skills to appear more
mature.

‘Thank you, Ran,' she said cooingly.

He frowned suddenly and picked up his pint.
'Are you all right? Don't feel unwell, or anything?'

‘
I'm fine. Why shouldn't I be?'

‘
Nothing, it's just that
you've gone all polite on me.
Not so
long ago you were telling me to shut up, Grandad,
more or less.'

‘
Well, that was very rude. I do apologise.'

‘
Please don't mention
it,' he said. 'So, tell me about this
wine tasting with dinner I'm being
dragged to?’

Ellie bit back her
natural indignation at his attitude; it
would do
her no good. 'Well, it should be very pleasant.
I'm going to think up some lovely little dishes to eat with the wine,
so you'll get good food, good wine, and possibly
good company' Without knowing who else was going,
she couldn't promise he'd find someone
interesting to talk
to. 'But you're
supposed just to talk about wine, anyway'

‘
Hardly my favourite topic. I'm happy to drink it, but
I can't
be bothered to think up amusing little ways of
describing it. To me, if it smells of cabbage water, it smells
of
cabbage water.'

‘Perfect! That's just the type of no-nonsense
description that Grace is looking for. You'll be a natural.' She
smiled approvingly. 'And at some point during the
evening
you'll excuse yourself, come into the kitchen' -
where I will be looking particularly sexy, she added
silently -
'and I will show you the panels and you can have a look at them.'

‘Having concealed my magnifying glasses about
my person?'

‘Exactly. It's going to be easy! Ah, here's the
food, I'm starving.'

‘So you're not nauseous any more?' he asked as
the waitress set down plates heaped with food on the little table in front of
them.

‘Oh yes, sometimes, but in between times, I
could eat a horse.'

‘
Pity it wasn't on the
menu. I would have liked to have
seen that.’

Chapter
Fourteen

‘
OK, we've got to do it now,' said
Ellie as she and Grace sat together in the kitchen a fortnight later. They had
been enjoying a late, leisurely breakfast after Grace had delivered Demi to the
bus that went all the way to her college.

Getting Hermia to agree to Grace driving Demi to a
bus stop, and
not all the way to college, had taken a little
firmness on Grace's part,
but when Hermia realised that
Grace was not going to be bullied into driving Demi all the way and back
now an alternative had been found, she had accepted defeat on the matter.

‘
It does save time, not having to take Demi to the
door,'
said Grace, putting the last
square of toast and marmalade
into her mouth.

‘
Yes, and to be honest we need the time. The food is
as ready as it can be at this stage, you've got the wine, the glasses,
the marking forms, and enough people are coming. But there's still the drawing
room to be decorated, and if we tackle it now we've got time to make it really
beautiful.'

‘It's
already beautiful,' said Grace, trying not to mind that Flynn hadn't responded
to her invitation, in fact
hadn't spoken to
her at all since his return, although she'd
driven to his house to feed
his cat every day for a fort-
night.
She wouldn't have known he was back if she hadn't
seen his car in the
drive yesterday morning. She hadn't
^go
ne in to say hello and felt she'd been a bit of a
coward.
In a minimalist sort of way, it is,' agreed Ellie, so as
not to hurt Grace's feelings. 'But in a way quite inap
propriate for the house. Apart from anything else,
we
need a table.’

Grace sighed and accepted that the room would
have
to be faced. Now the day was upon them,
she found
herself annoyingly edgy.
'OK. Let's go into the stables
and
find the ping-pong table. It may not have all its legs.'

‘
It's only half-past eleven. We've got time to mend
them.
Come to that, we've got time to buy a whole new
ping-pong table, if necessary.' Ellie had her own nerves
to contend with. Not only had she had to devise
six
courses for ten people, she had to think of a way to get Ran on his
own, in the dining room, without the others
noticing.
It was with this in mind that she had persuaded
Grace into inviting so many – it would be easier to winkle
one
out from the crowd.

Chairs scraped on the stone floor as they got
up. 'It's such a shame that Graham and his magazine friend couldn't come,' said
Grace. 'Even when we changed the
date for
this Friday night. All this work would seem more
worthwhile if they were
going to be there.'

‘This is a dummy run,' Ellie reminded her, not
for the first time, aware that if Ran agreed that the panels were valuable,
Grace's financial problems would be over.

‘And I can't talk you into eating with us? I
could do with the support.'

‘
Really, it
would be so much easier for me if I was in
the kitchen, cooking the next course, taking away plates.'
Sneaking
off to the dining room with Ran, she added silently.

‘I suppose so. But shouldn't you be there for –
what's his name? Ran?'

‘No. He's only coming for the free food and
wine. He's not interested in me. As a person,' she added hurriedly.
Since their day out at the antiques fair, Ellie
had gone to
visit him three times, and reorganised his kitchen cupboards
and his bathroom. Any minute now, she was convinced, he would let her do
something in the studio.
Not actually touch
a painting, of course, but be near them,
which would be a start. Her plans to seduce him were
no further on, but tonight would be a turning point.
She wasn't going to be sitting down and eating and drinking,
but when she whisked in and out of the room with
plates,
she was going to be wearing a very little black dress and he
would notice her as a woman if she had to tip boiling soup in his lap!

‘
It's a pity
Demi ducked out of helping and arranged
to spend the night with a
friend,' said Grace, carrying
their
breakfast plates to the sink. 'But she has been awfully
good and it's
nice that she's settled in so well back at college, and has met new people and
stuff. It can't have been easy for her.'

‘You don't sound quite as happy as you ought to
be about it,' said Ellie.

‘
I'm not.
There was something about the way she asked
me, something a bit shifty about it. It didn't seem like Demi,
somehow.' She dried her hands, still slightly
worried. She
really hadn't been keen on Demi disappearing off, but
couldn't think of a reason to stop her. 'Then
again, she has
been different since she saw her mother.'

‘
You could
ring the mother of the girl she's staying with
and check?'

‘
I could –
possibly should – but Demi would never trust
me again if she thought I
didn't trust her!'

‘True.'

‘
And she
was pleased to get all her stuff, to make herself a bedroom,' said Ellie,
remembering the fun she and Demi
had had, putting it all together.

‘
I'm sure
she's fine,' said Grace. 'Let's go and tackle
the spiders.'

‘
Oh, is that why you've
been so reluctant to go into the
stables! Scared of spiders, huh!'

‘It's quite
a common phobia, you know,' said Grace, leading the way out of the back door.

‘
I know,' replied Ellie. 'I've got it, too.’

Apart from the spiders, of which there were a
great
number, the stables contained some
very useful bits and
pieces.

‘I love doing this!' said Ellie, hauling out an
old washstand base. 'It's like creating a stage set. Do you think there's a top
to this anywhere?'

‘There might be. Allegra and Nicholas only took
the good stuff. Anything that was broken ended up in here, but that doesn't
mean we can't mend it.'

‘Do you mind about Flynn not coming?' asked Ellie,
dragging out an old carpet by a corner and disturbing a spider as big as a
mouse.

‘
I suppose
I do, really,' said Grace, watching the spider
warily. 'Although I wouldn't have thought I would have,
if that
makes sense.'

‘Perfect sense.'

‘I mean, he's so not my type, but there is
something rather . . .' She paused, looking for the word.

‘
Nice?'
suggested Ellie, who had spotted the ping-pong
table and was trying to
work out how to get to it.

‘
No. I don't
think that's quite what he is. He's just
totally unlike Edward.’

Ellie took a breath to say that this was a good
thing –
but didn't. Why Grace was still
carrying a torch for
Edward Ellie couldn't fathom. Rick had stayed in
her
mind for about five minutes after she
had decided he was
a waste of space
and left him – although maybe that was
partly because it had been her
choice. Ran, on the other hand, was occupying far too much of her brain,
possibly because he had refused to respond to her increasingly blatant
advances.

‘
I think if
we get this lot out first, we should be able
to get to the table,' she said, deciding against commenting
on the man who had left Grace with this pile of
junk
while he swanned off with his antiques.

‘
And there
might be some quite nice stuff in here, it
we just got rid of the cobwebs.' Grace looked up suddenly
'I've
got some gardening gloves. That would help.’

*

'Will it matter that the china doesn't match?' asked Grace,
not for the first time.

‘
No. It's a harlequin
set! Which is a posh way of saying
it doesn't match!' Ellie declared.

Preferring not to ask Flynn to lend her china,
as she hadn't seen him since his return, Grace had gone to the
local junk shop. There she had managed to buy a
couple
of quite pretty but incomplete dinner services as well as some
chairs, some hideous but useful occasional tables
and some lovely serving dishes. Grace had spent the afternoon washing
them all, while Ellie cooked what she could
in advance.

‘It is quite fun, this,' said Grace, who had
been slower
to come to this realisation
than Ellie. 'When we did it for
Allegra, it was a bit more worrying.
Although there are going to be far more people, and we're feeding them and
everything, it's potentially more satisfying. Also, they're not going to try
and make me sell my house.'

‘Although we didn't have to make the drawing
room into a dining room for Allegra.'

‘
Oh, do you
think we should have used the dining
room? If you think it would be
better—'

‘
No! After
all, a room is only a dining room if it's got
a table in it,' said
Ellie, wishing she'd never mentioned the dining room. It was going to be hard
enough to get
Ran to see the pictures,
without filling the room they were
in with people.

‘And if these evenings go well, we won't want
to have
them where you're restoring the
paintings. Do you think
you know
enough about it to start soon? Like tomorrow?’