What She Wants (34 page)

Matt gave Hope a perfunctory peck on the cheek and threw himself tiredly onto the couch. In his faded jeans, with an old grey fleece hugging his muscular body and a day’s dark stubble on his chiselled jaw, he looked more like an off-duty rock star than a would-be-writer. ‘You’ll have a drink, won’t you, Finula?’ he said, his voice low. He was not in a good mood, Hope figured. ‘Well just the one …’ Finula said with a great show of reluctance. She batted her eyelids at Mart, unable to stop herself flirting with him. That was the effect her husband had on women, Hope realized grimly: drawn in by the movie star dark good looks, they were doubly hooked when they realized that there was a sharp and incisive mind behind the gorgeous facade. ‘I’ll have a glass of wine too, Hope,’ Matt added. Hope’s eyes narrowed. She was obviously cast as maid servant for the night. Her nicely chilled bottle of wine didn’t last long, so Matt opened some red. The wine had certainly livened him up but he wasn’t any happier, Hope thought, as she took the casserole off the range and covered it with tinfoil. He was more animated than he’d been earlier but still as tense as a tightly coiled spring, long fingers drumming the arm of the couch. As if he was brooding on some inner problem and was trying to be chatty for Finula’s benefit. Not that Finula would have noticed. Drink in hand, she was leaning as close to Matt as she could get without actually sitting on his lap, telling a story about some artist she’d admired ten years ago, who was now famous and successful. ‘People tell me I have a good eye for art, you know,’ she said mistily before she took another big gulp of wine. ‘One does one’s best but it can be difficult. So many of us artistic people are forced to live in the cultural wasteland.’ Hope was pretty sure that she was one of the cultural wasteland people, while Finula and Matt were the misunderstood artists.

‘We mustn’t bore Hope talking about art. How about literature? You do read, don’t you?’ Finula asked her, like a patronizing aunt making the effort to talk to a not-very- bright niece. ‘What have you read recently that moved you?’ ‘The DIY Guide to Getting Rid Of Rats,’ responded Hope. ‘It made me nauseous.’ Finula laughed throatily and Matt stared at Hope. ‘Rats?’ he inquired. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said. ‘What do you think of Matt’s work?’ Finula inquired, not interested in domestic details. ‘I’m fascinated by his ideas.’ It was Hope’s turn to stare at her husband. She hadn’t seen one word of the famous novel but obviously Finula had. Rage bubbled up like the casserole that now sat on the worktop. ‘Now Finula, don’t get me into trouble here,’ Matt said, uneasily. ‘I haven’t shown anybody what I’m working on.’ ‘I know, you wretch.’ Finula smiled coquettishly and hit him a playful thump on the arm. ‘But from the way you’ve spoken about it, Ciaran and I can’t wait to read it. With your intellect, it’ll be a wonderful novel, of that I have no doubt. I bet you’re proud as punch of your husband?’ she addressed Hope again. ‘Very proud,’ Hope said with gritted teeth. Finula didn’t go until the second bottle of wine had been drunk, waving off Matt’s offers to phone a taxi by saying she had only to drive down a small country lane and she’d be home. ‘They were only teeny glasses of wine,’ she said gaily as she clattered out to the car in high heels deeply unsuitable for country living. ‘Stupid bitch will probably drive straight into the hedge,’ Hope fumed as she dumped the two wine bottles in the bin. Finula was a boring, pretentious cow. She might have thought she was talking in deep intellectual terms about art and culture but in reality, she was just wittering on and on about this exhibition she’d seen and that book she’d read in an attempt to show off. The combination of hunger, two

glasses of wine, and rage that Matt had ruined her cosy evening by bringing Finula home, fuelled Hope’s temper. She slammed the dirty glasses into the sink. Matt shut the door after waving Finula off and sat down again on the couch, long legs resting on the coffee table, staring moodily into the middle distance. ‘Dinner is probably ruined,’ Hope snarled. ‘I mean, what a stupid bloody question: “what have you read recently that moved you?” Patronizing cow!’ She ripped the tinfoil from the dish and stared into the dried remains of her lovely casserole. No matter how idiot-proof they were making jars of casserole mix these days, no concoction was up to two hours drying out in a cantankerous oven. ‘Even better: “do you read, Hope?” Meaning, are you a stupid housewife schmuck or do you have a bit of a brain in there as well?’ The casserole dish hit the kitchen table with a resounding bang. ‘You’ll wake the kids,’ Matt warned. It was like lighting a fuse. Hope’s eyes blazed with rage. ‘If they do wake up, it’ll give them a chance to talk to their father for a change. They’ve had a long day, an interesting day, come to that. But you haven’t bothered to ask about them, or about my day. Oh no.’ She was warming to her theme and her voice went up an octave. ‘When dear intellectual Finula is here, why bother asking stupid wifey how her day was? It’s much more interesting to drag the neighbourhood gossip round and get her to patronize me and ruin our dinner!’ ‘She invited herself in!’ hissed Matt. Hope could see the warning signs. She could see the muscles in his jaw working rapidly, signs that the inner tension was uncurling and was about to erupt. But she couldn’t stop. Her long-nurtured hatred of Finula started seeping out. ‘And you tried to stop her, right! That stupid cow is obsessed with you and it’s annoying the hell out of me …’ ‘It’s great to think that something provokes a reaction from you, then,’ Matt snarled. ‘It’s been like living with a

bloody robot for the past month. I’ve had more interesting conversations with my laptop than with you.’ ‘And whose fault is that?’ screeched Hope, stung. ‘You spend more time talking to your laptop than you do to me.’ ‘Oh gimme a break,’ snapped Matt. ‘You’re never here to help out with the kids,’ she yelled. ‘You’ve dumped us all in this backwater and I’m supposed to run around like Martha Stewart and keep the house perfect for you. Little wifey! And when you get home, you snap my head off if I ask you how your day went!’ ‘Just stop it!’ They faced each other across the steaming, dried-up casserole. Hope had never seen Matt look so angry. His lips were clamped together as if he was trying to stop himself saying something he’d really regret. And then, the anger left her in a sudden rush, flowing out of her body like a bubbling stream. Hope could never maintain anger: she was too scared to. People who got angry were bad people and got dumped. What had she said? She’d hurt him, she’d wounded him and now he’d go. Oh no. A sudden surge of memory meant she recalled exactly how terrified she’d been when she’d thought he was having an affair, the fear of thinking he’d leave her. Swamped by this fear, Hope knew she had to apologize. She reached out to touch him and say sorry but Matt was way beyond that now. ‘I’m sorry for bringing you to this backwater,’ he said cruelly. ‘If you want to go, I won’t stop you. You can always run home to Sam if you don’t want to stick by me. All I wanted was support for this dream I’ve always had.’ He looked at her bleakly. ‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow. I’m sure there’s enough money in the account for plane tickets for you and the kids.’ Hope gasped and her hands flew to her mouth. ‘Don’t wait up,’ Matt added coldly. He pulled his big leather jacket off the rack, flung it on and slammed the front door behind him. What had happened? It had all got so out of control;

she’d started something she couldn’t stop. Hope bit her lip but the tears had started flooding and nothing could stop them. Upstairs, a child wailed. Toby. He was a light sleeper and she’d never get him off to sleep again, not now, not with her in floods of tears. Matt hadn’t been serious about her and the kids going home, had he? He couldn’t have been. What had she done? She should have kept her mouth shut about Finula. She should have kept her mouth shut full stop.

Matt knew he shouldn’t be driving, not after the wine, but he didn’t care. He drove to the top of the lane, and only then guilt over drink driving hit him and he left the car and marched the last half a mile to the village. The Widows was crammed as usual, full of a combination of locals and tourists. People who stayed in the luxury hotel up the road sometimes dropped in for a taste of genuine Irish pub life and forgot to go home. The hotel was always having to send a minibus to the village to pick up lost residents who didn’t realize that Irish alcohol measures were bigger than European or American ones and who’d lost the run of themselves after the Widow herself had poured them ‘.. , one more for the road’. There was one unoccupied stool at the bar and Matt sank onto it. ‘Double whiskey,’ he said to the young girl behind the bar. ‘Jameson. No ice.’ Hers were not the only eyes to widen appreciatively at the sight of the tall, dark man in the leather jacket who’d stormed into the pub. He looked angry with that fierce scowl, but that only heightened his handsomeness. He was sort of dangerous looking with that stubble and the dark long-lashed eyes. A fine thing, definitely. She didn’t recognize him but he didn’t look like any of the rich people from the hotel. From under the bar, she retrieved her handbag, checked her lipstick in a hand mirror and applied another slash of hot, sexy pink. Oblivious to the effect he was having, Matt drained his

drink in a few gulps. The Jameson hit his system like a lava explosion and he took a sharp intake of breath. He looked up to wave to the barmaid but she was in front of him immediately, lips glistening a hopeful pink. ‘Can I have another,’ he said. ‘Please.’ ‘Of course,’ she breathed hopefully, not realizing that even when he was in a bad mood, Matt Parker was oblivious to flirtation. He nursed this one briefly, holding the glass in his hand and swirling the amber liquid gently. What the hell had happened with Hope? He’d been in a bad mood, sure, but that was no reason for her to go ballistic and take it out on him. She just couldn’t bear Finula and he didn’t know why. Finula was harmless and her flirtation was like a balm to his soul these days. At least Finula seemed to believe he was a talented writer. Nobody else did. Lively folk music rippled all around him and the pub was rowdy, but Matt ignored it all and sipped his drink contemplatively. What he missed, he realized, was the constant excitement of life at Judd’s. If you were working on a bitch of a campaign, there were others with you to commiserate and help and drain a couple of bottles of decent wine in the evening as you moaned about the client. And if you’d come up with a campaign that would win awards, there were people to tell you how marvellous you were. He missed both. Sitting on your own and writing down your thoughts was a fantastic idea in theory but a terribly lonely one in practice. He desperately missed the buzz of the office, the quick-fire wit in the creative department, the bawdy humour and the in-house jokes. And perhaps that wasn’t all. He shivered involuntarily, as if someone had walked over his grave. Instinctively, he drained his glass, anything to block out the thoughts in his head, the thoughts he didn’t want to face. The girl behind the bar smiled coyly at him. She wasn’t bad looking, Matt thought. Dark hair and freckles with those blue Celtic eyes. Very Irish looking. He could just see her in a Guinness commercial, laughing as she held onto a

pint of the black stuff. Mystical Irish music in the background. He grinned to himself. Once an adman, always an adman. He and Dan had spent many happy hours mentally casting total strangers in imaginary adverts. ‘Tampon ad, definitely,’ Dan would say in the pub as they watched a couple of lithe young girls in skintight jeans wiggling their tiny bums as they crossed the floor. ‘Chocolate bar,’ Matt would counter, when one of the girls looked their way, showing off the sort of plump, pillowy lips that would look best puckered up round some type of phallic chocolate bar. Matt never knew why more people didn’t complain about those sexy ads. ‘You win,’ Dan would sigh. ‘She’s perfect. Or … perhaps lipstick?’ They never did it with people they knew: it would be too cruel. Privately, Matt thought that the newest copywriter would be perfect as the weedy guy who didn’t get the girl in a soft-drink campaign and the accounts secretary would look great trying to get stains out of her son’s football shirt in a washing powder ad. And Hope? Hope would look totally out of place in a modern commercial. She’d only work if cast in a historical setting: perhaps a shy lady-in-waiting for an advert for historical tourist sites? But historical commercials were few and far between. Hope. How would he ever tell her what was wrong? He couldn’t because if he did, Hope would realize that he’d uprooted them all for nothing. The great novel was going nowhere. Matt was furious with himself and needed Hope’s support, but all he’d got was a shrewish wife who didn’t seem to understand that. Was Hope blind? Couldn’t she see what was going on inside him? He smiled at the barmaid, a bitter little smile, and asked for another double. He wanted to get terribly, terribly drunk.

It felt very cold but Hope wasn’t sure if it was frosty or not. She’d become more used to anticipating the weather these days; if it was going to be frosty, the night sky was icily

clear and you could see every star in the sky. She’d never been aware of the weather or the sky so much before. In Bath, if it was cold, she’d merely turned the heating up a notch and she’d rarely peered out of the windows at night. But with the limited heating system in Curlew Cottage, she’d got into the habit of listening to forecasts and monitoring the weather herself. If it was frosty, she needed to put much more wood in the range so the house would remain warm all night. Tonight, Hope thought the cold might not be due to the weather. It seemed to come from inside her very bones. She’d been cold for hours now, since Matt had stormed off into the night. Once Toby had finally gone back to sleep, she’d tiptoed downstairs and sat beside the range, her toes resting on the ledge, trying to keep warm as she waited for Matt. But he didn’t come back. Midnight came and went. The pubs closed at half eleven, she knew, so he’d be home soon. Only he wasn’t. At one, she turned off all the lights except the small lamp inside the front door and made her way up to bed. Her movements slow and almost painful, she undressed and climbed into the big bed. The cold embrace of the sheets was so icy it hurt. Her feet were freezing but she’d deliberately not put on her white fluffy bed socks. Matt hated them, even though without them her feet felt like two lumps of ice. She wanted to do something to please him, something to make up for earlier. If only he came home, she’d apologize and tell him it was all her fault. She’d been shrewish, horrible … Her tears wet the pillow she clung to, trying to imagine it was Mart’s warm body. She watched the luminous hands on the clock crawl round to two and then three before she fell into an uneasy sleep. The peal of the alarm made her sit up in bed in shock. Half seven. The time Matt usually got up. She was shocked to realize that his side of the bed hadn’t been slept in. Normally, Hope managed another ten to fifteen minutes in bed before Toby and Millie launched themselves at her,