The Girl From Barefoot House (46 page)

It was Jack Coltrane.

Over the years, Josie had sometimes imagined how she would greet her ex-husband should they meet. Coolly, she had decided, even though the longing to see Jack again was never far away. But she had her pride. He’d made no attempt to contact her. ‘Why, hello, Jack,’ she would say with a warm, slightly distant smile.

Never had she thought she would burst into tears, race downstairs, throw herself in his arms and hungrily kiss him, as if it were only yesterday they had parted.

‘Jack, Jack, Jack.’ She kept saying his name over and
over between kisses. ‘I’ve just been dreaming about you. Oh!’ she wept, ‘I felt so sad. I flew away, and you wanted me to stay.’

It really was only like yesterday when he held her face in both hands, kissed the tears, then her trembling lips. He touched her hair, pressed his cheek against her burning forehead. She felt his body shudder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, drawing away, embarrassed. ‘I’m feeling a bit … weird! You must think I’m mad, throwing myself at you like this. It’s been twenty years …’

‘Hey.’ He pulled her back in to his arms. ‘I like you weird. I expected to be shown the door. This is a welcome surprise.’

Esther opened the door of Reception, blinked and quickly closed it. Richard and Bobby’s voices could be heard outside, returning from lunch.

‘Let’s go upstairs.’ Lord knew what they’d think if they found their employer in her bathrobe with a strange man. She pulled Jack towards the stairs.

Had he come another day, had she not just had the awful dream, felt so distinctly weird, no doubt she would have greeted Jack with the warm but distant smile. Instead, when they reached the landing, out of sight from down below, they kissed again.

‘Let me look at you,’ Jack said huskily, and undid the knot on her robe. It fell in folds around her feet. His eyes travelled slowly over her body, and she felt every single nerve quiver, turn to liquid, and was filled with desire. ‘You’re as lovely as ever. I’ve missed you, sweetheart. You’ll never know how much.’

‘I do, Jack. I’ve missed you.’ She looked at him properly for the first time. He looked tired, she thought. His face was thin and drawn, and there were tiny crinkles beneath the warm brown eyes, perhaps slightly duller
than they used to be. Deep, craggy lines ran from nose to jaw. But his hair was as black and thick as it had always been, and lay in the same careless quiff on his forehead. His skin was brown, from the Californian sun, she assumed. The off-white linen suit he wore over a plain white T-shirt was crumpled, but worn with such casual panache it looked smart. Some men were lucky, she thought enviously. Age served them well. Jack was fifty-one, but as charismatic and attractive as he’d always been, possibly more so.

He reached out and began to caress her breasts, brought her closer, stroked her waist, her buttocks, slid his hand between her legs. Oh, this is mad, she thought wildly. This is quite mad. It’s been twenty years …

‘Come.’ She drew him up another flight of stairs, to the bedroom, where she lay on the bed, inviting him. He kissed every part of her body, made her come with his tongue, with his hand.

‘Jack!’ she said urgently. She badly wanted him inside her.

He laughed joyfully and began to remove his clothes. ‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ he said incredulously, and the familiarity of his smile, his closeness, the way his hair flopped down in front of his eyes, made Josie gasp. He bent over her, and she stroked the brown skin of his arms, his chest, noting somewhere at the back of her mind that he’d lost a lot of weight, too much.

When he entered her, it was as if a miracle had occurred. This was something she had thought would never happen again. But it had, and it was almost too much to bear. She giddily wondered if it was just another dream, like the one she’d had before, and any minute she would wake up and he wouldn’t be there.

But then it was over. She was lying in Jack’s arms, and it wasn’t a dream. It was real.

‘What I’d like now,’ he said comfortably, ‘is one of your famous cups of tea. I’m still in throes of jet lag.’ He gently kissed her lips. ‘You’re a very demanding woman, Mrs Coltrane.’

‘I’ll get dressed.’

He watched her find clean pants and bra, and slip into a thin white cotton frock and sandals, then began to put on his own clothes. Two floors down a phone rang, and she realised she had forgotten all about Barefoot House, which could manage perfectly well without her.

‘The kitchen’s on the floor below.’ In Maude’s room! She went down, put the kettle on and was waiting for it to boil when she heard his footsteps on the stairs and smiled at him through the open door.

He smiled back, but she wondered why he was walking so stiffly. Why did he have to concentrate so hard, hold so tightly to the bannister, as if he was worried he’d fall? At first she thought it was the jet lag, but a chill ran through her bones when she realised he was drunk. He’d been drunk when he’d arrived, and he was drunk now. Not mildly, not even moderately, but completely, totally inebriated. And he was so used to it, it was so much a part of him that he’d learnt to cope, to converse, to pretend, when he’d probably been drunk for days, for months or it might even be for years.

‘What made you come?’ she asked over the tea. His hand, holding the cup, was shaking slightly. They were in the lounge, sitting together on the pink and cream settee.

‘Two things. Remember Bud Wagner? He was always round at the apartment.’

She shook her head. ‘No.’ She remembered hardly anyone from those days.

‘Well, he remembers you. He runs a literary agency in New York. We’ve kept in touch, and he sent an article from the trade press about a company – I don’t recall the name – buying the US rights to books published in Britain by a firm called Barefoot House. That rang a bell. You’d told me that’s where you lived with Louisa Chalcott. When I read that the firm belonged to Josephine Coltrane, I knew it could only be you.’

‘What was the other thing?’

His lips twisted ruefully. ‘Dinah.’

She remembered, too late, one of the reasons for the cool reception she had planned, the warm, distant smile. He had ignored the letter telling him about Dinah. ‘You took your time, Jack.’ She tried not to spoil things by sounding cold. ‘I wrote to you about Dinah on her fifth birthday. She’s twenty in September.’

‘I only got it last week, sweetheart. I showed Jessie Mae the article, told her who you were and she gave me the letter. It’s Mae with an “e”, by the way, she’s particular about that.’

She’d actually forgotten he had a wife! If only he’d arrived yesterday, or tomorrow, when she was fully dressed, with a clear head, when she hadn’t felt so damn
weird
.

‘Coral used to open mail that came from the lawyers about the divorce,’ Jack was saying. ‘We were living together by then.’

‘Who’s Coral?’

‘My wife. She died two years after we were married. Leukaemia.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It was horrible to hear him say, ‘my wife’,
when it wasn’t
her
he was referring to. ‘Then who’s Jessie Mae?’

‘She’s my daughter, stepdaughter. She’s nineteen, same as Dinah. I have a stepson too, Tyler. He’s twenty-one.’

‘Really!’ Josie muttered. How fortunate for Tyler and Jessie Mae to have had the benefit of a father all these years, she thought cynically, when his real daughter had been deprived.

She seemed to have lost the thread of the conversation. ‘You mean Coral, your wife, opened my letter, but didn’t show it to you?’

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

‘But it was marked “Strictly Confidential”.’ She could actually remember writing the words on the envelope.

‘All the more reason for her to open it. She would have guessed it was from you, and was worried it might say something that would stop us getting married. She gave it to Jessie Mae, said to let me have it when she thought the time was right.’ He put the cup and saucer on the floor, which seemed to require much frowning concentration, then took Josie’s hands in his. ‘Coral was dying, sweetheart, she wanted a father for her kids. We met on the set of this movie we were making. She was the continuity girl, divorced. Her ex was a bastard, she was terrified he’d get his hands on Jessie Mae and Tyler when she died. We weren’t in love, but I was prepared to take on the kids.’ His mouth twisted wryly. ‘You can guess why.’

She guessed straight away. ‘Because of Laura?’

He nodded. ‘I wanted to give something back for what I’d taken away.’

It had been a supremely kind, very noble thing to do, but Josie felt herself withdrawing slightly from him. She
felt resentment for the woman who had kept her letter, and even more for Jack for understanding why. She’d been the victim of an underhand trick, conned out of the husband she loved. Then she remembered that five years had passed before he had met Coral, five years during which he hadn’t thought to get in touch, see how she was. She was about to ask why, tell him she’d tried to contact him in Bingham Mews and he’d already left. But what was the point of raking over the past? She’d told him she never wanted to see him again, and he’d taken her at her word.

‘Where is Dinah?’ he asked.

‘She works in London. I’ll ring soon, tell her you’re here.’

He gave a nervous grin. ‘How is she likely to take it? It’s a bit of a bombshell.’

‘I don’t know,’ Josie said truthfully. ‘I’ve never been able to guess how Dinah will react. She’s a law unto herself.’ She picked up the cups. ‘I’ll get more tea.’

In the kitchen, she leaned on the sink and took several deep breaths. It was hotter than ever, and the afternoon air felt sticky and humid. Her head was whirling. She almost wished that Jack hadn’t come, that she was downstairs in her office dealing with the mundane affairs of Barefoot House.

‘I’m getting too old for this sort of trauma,’ she muttered.

But then she took in the tea, and there was Jack Coltrane sitting on her settee, and she felt a wave of love that took her breath away. He looked up. ‘Have you been happy, sweetheart?’

She paused before answering. ‘I haven’t been
un
happy not for most of the time,’ she said seriously. ‘How about you?’

He shrugged tiredly. ‘It’s been difficult. Tyler’s always been a sweet, laid-back kid, but Jessie Mae was badly damaged by the divorce and Coral’s death. She had problems at school.’ He shrugged again. ‘Poor Jessie Mae, she’s had problems more or less every damn where.’

It hardly seemed fair that Jessie Mae’s problems should be
his
. ‘You said you were working on a film?’

‘I’m a script editor. It’s reasonably well paid. We’ve got a neat little house in Venice with a pool. You must come and stay some time, Josie.’

She almost dropped the tea. ‘That would be nice.’ She put both cups on the coffee-table and went over to the window, where she clutched the curtains to steady herself. What on earth had possessed her to assume he had come back for good? How long did he plan to stay, she wondered, a few days, a week, a month?

‘Where’s the bathroom, sweetheart?’ He stood, holding himself determinedly erect. ‘I need to freshen up.’

‘On the floor above, at the back.’

He glanced around the room. ‘I had a bag when I came.’

‘I’ll go and look.’ She found the leather holdall at the top of the stairs. Bottles clinked when she picked it up. Aftershave, perhaps? Mouthwash?

Josie returned to the sanctuary of the curtains, and watched a sharp black shadow creep across the street. Soon the house would be in the shade. She wished, more than she had wished anything in her life before that she had never met Jack Coltrane. I ruined his life, she thought bleakly, and he ruined mine. I thought we were meant for each other, but we weren’t. And now I’m lost, because I still love him. I’ll love him till the day I die.

He returned to the room, having combed his hair and
changed the T-shirt for a black one, looking reinvigorated.

‘What happened to your plays?’ she asked.

‘The last time I saw them, they were on the floor of the study in Bingham Mews where you’d thrown them.’ His eyes twinkled at her. ‘Then you kicked them.’ He held out his arms. ‘Sweetheart, come here.’

She ran across the room and buried her face in his shoulder. ‘Have you written any more?’

‘No.’ He gave an exaggerated sigh. ‘Been too busy, too uninspired, had too many burdens, needed to earn a crust.’

‘It’s not too late to start again.’ She gave him a little shake.

‘I might, one day.’

Later, she went down to her office so she could phone Dinah in private. ‘Are you sitting down? More importantly, are you alone?’

‘I’m sitting down, entirely alone. Evelyn went home early. The heat and the menopause were getting her down, and it didn’t help when I handed in me notice this morning. That job came up, the one I told you about with the much bigger agency. I was going to ring you later. Anyroad, what’s up?’

Josie told her that her father was there, and about the complications with the letter she had sent all those years ago, finishing with, ‘He’s dying to see you.’

There was a long pause, then Dinah said, ‘I feel as if I should come rushing home, but I don’t want to.’

‘Then don’t.’

Another pause. ‘This Coral sounds a selfish bitch, if you ask me,’ she cried passionately. ‘I don’t care if she
is
dead. And Jessie Mae, stupid name, seems just as bad. It’s
not fair
, Mum.’ Dinah was close to tears. ‘He would have
come to see me if it weren’t for them.’ The voice became plaintive. ‘He would have, wouldn’t he, Mum?’

‘Like a shot, luv.’

‘I might come, I dunno. How long will he be there?’

‘I haven’t got round to asking yet.’

That night they went to dinner, and she showed him the house where she had been born and had lived with Mam. ‘In the attic. I never told you before, but she was – what do you say in the States? – a hooker.’

He placed an arm around her shoulders and squeezed hard. ‘You’ve come a long way, sweetheart.’

‘Only four doors,’ she said drily.

They strolled into town, and ate in a little dark pub in North John Street. ‘You know,’ Jack said when they had finished, ‘I never dreamed it would be so
easy
, us being together, talking naturally, like old times. I thought I’d be straining to think of things to say, then saying the wrong thing, and there’d be all sorts of awkward silences. I always got on with you better than anyone. We were best friends as well as lovers.’