The Summer Without You (44 page)

‘Hump, why has he done this? He was fine when we saw him earlier.’

‘Yeah, but that was before the evening’s big announcement.’

‘What? Thanking sponsors and supporters?’

‘Erin and Todd announced their engagement.’

‘No!’

‘Yep. Straight back to the old days.’

Ro looked down sadly at Greg, his superb body limp, his handsome face slack, his objective clearly achieved as the pain, any feeling at all in fact, was numbed – for now at least.

‘Can you get him under the other arm?’ Hump panted, trying to take Greg’s weight along with his own.

‘Yes, sure.’ Ro ran back down from unlocking the front door and tried propping Greg from the other side so that he was – marginally – more balanced.

Greg laughed, an indistinct, undefined sound that he had neither energy nor sense of mind to punctuate. They had been in the hospital for several hours as Greg’s stomach was pumped and he
was fed a saline drip to rehydrate him, but the damage had already been done and he was as drunk as a skunk in drag. ‘You guys . . .’ he slurred, his feet leaden and useless beneath him
as they part carried, part dragged him up the porch steps and into the house.

‘How are we going to get him up the stairs?’ Ro cringed, panting from the effort after only fifty yards.

‘We’re not. He’ll have to sleep it off on the sofa,’ Hump groaned, for he was bearing most of Greg’s weight. ‘I’ll stay down here with him.’

They turned to drag him into the sitting room, just as a pretty pair of toes appeared on the stairs. They looked up. Bobbi was tying a dressing gown around her, although it had slipped on the
shoulder and her black bra strap was visible.

‘Sexy . . .’ Greg slurred.

‘Fuck! What the hell happened to
him
?’ she exclaimed in astonishment at the sight of Greg so incapacitated.

‘A bottle of vodka in under two minutes. Give us a hand, would you?’ Ro panted. She could only take pigeon steps in her tight dress.

Bobbi ran down the stairs, thighs flashing, and helped the others get him to the sofa. He fell onto it, almost face first, and Ro would have laughed if she hadn’t wanted so badly to cry.
She felt distressed to see her dignified housemate in this state.

Bobbi sat beside him on the sofa, unable to stop staring at the sight of him, his dinner jacket lost somewhere – probably still back at the estate – his dress shirt untucked and only
fastened with two buttons, his face pale and streaked from the tears that had caught up with him in the hospital as he’d revived just long enough for the pain to catch him up, burying his
face in Ro’s neck, her soft skin a universal comfort men remembered from their mothers.

A creak on the floorboards upstairs made them all look up. Ro hitched up an eyebrow.

‘Kevin’s here?’

Hump stood in front of Greg defensively. ‘I don’t want anyone seeing Greg like this. You’d better keep Kevin upstairs.’

‘Can you just tell me what happened to him?’ Bobbi asked, looking up at him, unconsciously stroking Greg’s hair from his face. Even she didn’t like to see her sparring
partner so wounded.

Hump lowered his voice, not wanting to distress Greg further. ‘Erin announced her engagement to Todd Blaize at the fundraiser tonight – even though she’s been secretly having
an affair with Greg all summer.’

‘You’re fucking kidding me?’ Bobbi gawped.

‘Wish I was,’ Hump sighed, looking down at his old friend.

Greg’s eyes were open, although unfocused, rolling up occasionally before he snapped them back with a sudden jerk of his head. He looked at Bobbi as she took his hand in hers, rubbing his
palm gently with her thumb.

‘You’re going to be OK, Greg. We’ll get you through this,’ she said firmly, brushing back one particularly floppy forelock that kept falling over his eye.

He grinned, a daft, wolfish grin that he couldn’t quite control and which tipped him over into tears in the next instant. ‘Have we met?’ he asked her, his face telling two
stories at once as silent tears slid down his appled, smiling cheeks.

‘Unfortunately for you, yes. I’m Bobbi, your stroppy housemate.’

Greg stared at her as she wiped away the tears with her thumbs. His hand closed round her wrist. ‘No, that was what
she
said to you.’

Who? Ro frowned as Bobbi pulled back. It was easy enough to wrest her arm away from his grip; he had no strength to speak of right now.

‘I’ll go make sure Kevin doesn’t come down.’

‘Thanks,’ Hump said, as she rose and walked across the room.

‘I think you have!’ Greg called after her, every word linked to the next one like joined-up writing.

But Bobbi didn’t turn back. ‘’Night, everyone,’ she said, as she started climbing the stairs. ‘Sleep tight.’

Ro’s sleep was anything but tight. It barely held her through the night, its bonds loose around her, her mind frantic and racing – only one degree below waking
– her ears pricked for sound, her body ready to run. The night was too hot for one thing; there was no breeze. And she was worried about Greg. Worried that he’d poisoned his own blood,
worried that his fragile glass heart, which had already been patched together once before, had now been smashed for good. She could glimpse a fragment of that emotional landscape he was now
wandering in and she pitied him: the past four and a half months without Matt had offered her occasional moments of clarity as to what life would look like without him, and it was a desolate and
bleak world in which she faded into her own shadow.

But what finally nudged her from her gauzy slumber wasn’t Greg or Matt at all, but another man’s face close to hers, too close to say to ‘no’, his lips on hers—

She sat up, her heart pounding like a bass drum, her lips still parted as she’d kissed him back. She threw the covers off and walked straight over to the window, furious with her brain for
betraying her like that
again
even if it was simply a mash-up of last night’s events. She poked her head out, like one of the doves at the dovecote – albeit less fresh and
pure-looking – and looked out onto the fresh day budding up.

The sea mist hadn’t yet rolled back, telling her it was still before six, although the flags were already in the pins on the greens at the Maidstone. People gladly sacrificed extra hours
in bed for a round there.

A car parked outside the cottage suddenly started up and slowly pulled away. Ro looked down and watched it go. A Porsche. Wasn’t that what Kevin drove? Maybe it had been the sound of him
leaving the house that had awakened her after all, not . . . not . . . Dammit. She rubbed her face hard, pulling down on her cheeks with the heels of her hands, trying to wake herself up fully.

She watched as the car indicated left, then immediately right – meaning he was either going to the beach or the Maidstone. It was a shame to have missed him by only a few moments. She was
curious to see what type of man had tamed – at least temporarily – her feisty friend. Feeling nosy, and because it was too early to go downstairs and risk disturbing the boys, she
remained by the window. If he was playing golf, she’d see him in a few minutes. The first green was visible from this spot.

She grabbed the laptop and fell into her usual early morning position at the window – sitting on the deep sill, legs jammed up in the frames, her knees level with her nose, the laptop on
Skype speed dial.

She and Matt still hadn’t spoken since their fight ten days earlier. She’d been determined up till now not to be the one to call first. But last night had been a wake-up call and
there was more at stake here than pride. She and Matt needed contact: they needed to talk to each other and see each other and make their old jokes, because she couldn’t find him on her own
anymore – not in her yoga meditations, not in her dreams. She was getting too used to being without him. She needed to need him more.

The connection timed out and she pressed ‘call’ again, her eyes tracking a beaten-up pickup truck that idled slowly past on the road below – no one ever seemed to be in a hurry
out here, no tail-gating or frustrated overtaking, and she realized again she was going to miss this. She had only six weeks left – six weeks of waking up to blue skies and an ocean breeze,
bike rides and yoga, and housemates who may slam doors but always chilled the beer.

She saw a buggy bounce over the grass towards the first green, two men inside. One was wearing claret-red trousers and a hat, the other an emerald-green jumper, and was bald as a . . . well, a
Matt. She hoped for Bobbi’s sake that Kevin – if he was either one of these guys – wasn’t the short bald one. Matt could carry it off; this guy couldn’t.

She watched as they climbed out, one of them inspecting the position of the pin by crouching down on his haunches, the other beginning to rifle in his bag for his clubs.

‘Ro?’

She jumped, startled to hear Matt’s voice rumbling against her tummy.

‘Matt!’

‘No need to look so surprised. You did call me.’

She stared down at him, not sure whether he was still prickly with her, but then he winked – ‘Thank God,’ he murmured – and she felt relief loosen the tension in her
shoulders.

‘You’re growing your hair!’ she grinned, taking in the dark fuzz that crested his head like duckling’s down.

‘I got the impression you didn’t like it last time we spoke.’

‘I didn’t mention it.’

‘Exactly.’

‘I could level the same charge at you,’ she said archly, tipping her head to the side slightly to indicate her bob.

‘Looks amazing. It annoyed me how good you looked. It looks very . . . sleek.’

‘
Sleek?
’ Ro spluttered. ‘Can hippos be called sleek?’

‘Stop putting yourself down. From what I can see, you’re looking altogether different. Kind of . . . glossy.’

‘OK, stop it. You’re confusing me with a magazine.’

He laughed, a sound that soothed her, and she preened slightly. ‘I have, however, broken the habit of wearing your clothes.’

‘What? Even my T-shirts in bed?’

She nodded triumphantly. ‘Even your T-shirts in bed.’

‘When?’ He looked almost crestfallen.

‘Oh, a while ago. Hump was about to evict me; Bobbi was on the edge of a breakdown.’ Actually, it had been Erin and Todd’s unexpected breakfast visit that had marked the
beginning of the end for that phase.

‘Well –’ his eyes roamed her face ‘– guess I’ll see for myself six short weeks from now.’

‘Six weeks,’ she echoed, remembering Greg’s words yesterday, everyone keeping time. ‘Flying by now, huh?’

‘Yeah? That’s how it feels for you now?’

‘Why? Doesn’t it for you?’

‘Oh no, no . . . I’m loving it,’ he demurred. ‘But looking forward to getting home obviously.’

‘Oh yeah. Obviously. It’ll be so weird going back to the cottage again. Everything’s so . . . big and airy here. Victorian proportions are going to take some getting used to
again.’ She thought of their narrow dog-leg hallway, the tiny cellar, the double reception room with walk-through arch . . .

‘I’ll be struggling enough with just sleeping in a bed again. Almost five months in a sleeping bag . . .’ He cricked his neck.

Ro pulled a face. ‘You have washed it, I hope?’

‘Of course.’ He grinned, simultaneously shaking his head. ‘I’m passing washing machines every third bamboo tree out here.’

She giggled. Both of them would have big readjustments to make, slotting back into their old life. It felt like they were both going to have to scale down to fit into it, somehow.

‘Where are you now?’

‘En route to Tonlé Sap. It’s like an inland sea. There are literally hundreds of floating villages there. The residents conduct their whole lives on the water, can you
imagine?’

She shook her head. She really couldn’t. She wondered whether he would be able to imagine her dressed in sequins and hunting for diamonds in the bushes.

He pointed to his cheek. ‘You’ve got some mascara . . .’

‘Oh.’ Ro wet her finger and made vague, blind sweeping motions. ‘Gone?’

He pulled a so-so face. ‘Pretty much. So what were you up to last night, then? You only ever wear mascara on high days and holidays. Unless maybe that’s what’s different about
you. You wear make-up every day now?’

‘No. God, no!’ she protested. ‘I’m like a rescue dog compared to the women here. I don’t know where they get the energy, looking so clean and perky all the time.
No, we were just out last night.’

‘Let me guess: the Surf Lodge again?’

So he’d been reading her Facebook updates, then? ‘Actually, no. It was a fundraiser thing over in Southampton. Big money, free booze. A rather fun treasure hunt in the garden.’
She leaned in closer to the screen. ‘You’d have liked my dress.’ She winked cheekily.

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah!’

‘Well, then I hope no one else liked your dress.’

She remembered Hump’s big-brotherly protectiveness, Ted’s eyes tethered to her like guy ropes. ‘Don’t be silly.’

‘Is that it?’ He jerked his chin up, his eyes behind her, and she turned. The red sequinned dress was hanging outside the wardrobe.

‘It is.’

‘Hold it up. Let me see it properly.’ An unhappy note sounded in his voice and she knew he knew all too well what the dress would have looked like on
her.

She jumped off the windowsill and walked towards the wardrobe, holding out the laptop so that the camera could show it more accurately. Matt didn’t say anything and she felt her nerves
rise. ‘Anyway, Greg got bladdered, so it was all a bit of a disaster to be honest and we ended up back home by nine o’clock,’ she gabbled, wandering back over to the bed and
flopping down on it. She could still feel her own body heat on the sheets.

‘Right.’ A tense moment passed.

‘Don’t be jealous.’

‘I’m not jeal—’ he began, before deciding to change the subject instead. ‘How’s Florence?’

‘Much better. She’s recuperating in a nursing home, but you were right – there’s been nothing since. Whoever was behind it seems to have been frightened off.’

It was technically true, at least. There hadn’t been any further threats – not since she’d appeared to fall in line with Ted’s ‘advice’ to sell the house.