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Ben stood for a few moments and watched her climb the steps up to a door on the upper level. It hadn’t been used for years. Laura hadn’t been steady enough on her feet to make the journey down the hill for quite some time before she died.
He climbed into the dinghy because it felt like a safe distance but carried on watching. The wooden floor could be beetle-infested, rotten. He’d just stay here a few moments to make sure the new owner didn’t go through it.
His hand hovered above the outboard motor. Any moment now, he’d be on his way. He readied his shoulder muscles and brushed his fingertips against the rubber pull on the end of the cord. He gripped the loosened rope lightly in his other hand.
The boathouse was on two levels. The bottom storey, level with the jetty, had large arched, panelled doors and had been used for storing small boats. The upper level was a single room with a balcony that stretched the width of the building. He was waiting for her to walk out onto it, spread her hands wide on the railing and lean forward to inhale the glorious salty, slightly seaweedy air. Her glossy, dark hair would swing forward and the wind would muss it gently.
A minute passed and she didn’t appear. He began to feel twitchy.
With a sigh, he climbed out of the boat and planted his boots on the solid concrete of the jetty. ‘Are you okay back there?’
No response. Just as he was readying his lungs to call again, she appeared back on the jetty and shrugged. ‘No key,’ she yelled back, looking unduly crestfallen.
All his alarm bells rang, told him to get the hell back in the boat and keep his nose out of it. Whitehaven wasn’t his responsibility any more. Only, the message obviously hadn’t travelled the length of his arm to his fingertips, because he suddenly found himself retying the boat and walking back up the jetty to the steep steps that climbed up to the boathouse door.
As he reached the bottom step, she turned and looked down at him, one hand on the metal railing, one hand bracing herself against the wall. Her thick hair swung forwards as she leaned towards him.
‘The door’s locked. Any ideas?’
With his fingernails, already dark-rimmed from the rich compost of the glasshouse plants, he scraped at a slightly protruding brick in the wall near the base of the stairs. At first, he thought he’d remembered it wrong, but after a couple of seconds the block of stone moved and came away in his hand. In the recess left behind, he could see the dull black glint of metal. Laura had told him about the secret nook, just in case.
He supposed he could have just told the woman about it, yelled the vital information from the safety of the dinghy. He needn’t get involved. Even now his lips remained closed and his mouth silent as he climbed the mossy stairs and pressed the key into the soft flesh of her palm.
There. Job done.
For a couple of seconds, they stayed like that. Then he pulled his hand away and rubbed it on the back of his jeans.
‘Thank you,’ she said, then shook her long fringe so it covered her eyes a little more.
She slid the key into the lock and turned it. He’d half-expected to door to fall off its hinges, but it swung in a graceful arc, opening wide and welcoming them in. Well, welcoming her in. But his curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t resist getting a glimpse.
‘Wow.’
He’d expected shelves and oars and tins of varnish. Decades-old grime clung to the windows, and the filmy-grey light revealed a very different scene. A cane sofa and chairs huddled round a small Victorian fireplace, decorated with white and blue tiles, and a small desk and chair occupied a corner in front of one of the arched windows.
She walked over to the desk and touched it reverently, leaving four little smudges in the thick dust, then pulled her fingers back and gently blew the dirt off them with a sigh.
‘Did she come here often, do you know? Ms Hastings?’ she asked, still staring at the desk.
Why exactly he was still here, keeping guard like some sentry, he wasn’t sure. He should just go. He’d kept his promise to Laura. He wasn’t required. And yet … he couldn’t seem to make his feet move.
She turned to look at him and he shrugged. ‘Not when I knew her. She was too frail to manage the path down, but she talked of it fondly.’
She blinked and continued to stare at him, expressionless. He wasn’t normally the sort who had the urge to babble on, but most women he knew didn’t leave huge gaping gaps in the conversation. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the dust on the bare floorboards with the toe of his boot. Everything was too still.
‘Not really your sort of place, is it?’ he muttered, taking in the shabby furniture, the broken leg on the desk chair, held together with string. The place was nowhere near elegant enough to match her. This woman was used to the finer things in life. Finer than a dilapidated old boathouse like this, anyway.
Her chin rose just a notch. ‘What makes you think you know anything about what sort of woman I am?’
Just like that, the sadness that seemed to cloak her hardened into a shell. Now the room wasn’t still any more. Every molecule in the air danced and shimmered. She strode over to the large arched door in the centre of the opposite wall, unbolted it, threw the two door panels open and stepped out onto the wide balcony.
He was dismissed.
He took a step towards her and opened his mouth. Probably not a great idea, since during his last attempt at small talk he’d planted a great muddy boot in it, but he couldn’t leave things like this—taut with tension, unresolved. Messy.
Her hands were spread wide as she rested them on the low wall and looked out over the river, just as he’d imagined. The hair hung halfway down her back, shining, untouchable. The wind didn’t dare tease even a strand out of place. He saw her back rise and fall as she let out a sigh.
‘I thought I’d asked you to get off my property.’ There was no anger in her tone now, just deep weariness.
He turned and walked out of the boathouse and down the stairs to the jetty with even steps. She didn’t need him. She’d made that abundantly clear. But, as he climbed back into the dinghy, he couldn’t help feeling that part of his promise was still unfulfilled.
This time there were no interruptions as he untied the rope and started the motor. He turned the small boat round and set off in the direction of Lower Hadwell, a few minutes’ journey upstream and across the river.
When he passed the Anchor Stone that rose, proud and unmoving, out of the murky green waters, he risked a look back. She was still standing there on the balcony, her hands wide and her chin tilted up, refusing to acknowledge his existence.
CHAPTER FOUR
21st May, 1952
We started filming almost a week ago now, but today was my co-star’s first day on set. Sam Harman might be a very talented director, but he has some very strange methods. Very strange. Up until now he has insisted that Dominic and I rehearse separately. Ridiculous. I mean, instead of building the rapport I should have had with my leading man—in a love story, for goodness’ sake—I’ve been getting acquainted with an assistant producer who reads the lines off a crumpled script like a robot.
The plot’s a simple one, I suppose. Dashing son of the wealthy family falls for the gardener’s daughter, and she for him, but the snobbery of both families conspires to keep them apart. I’m sure there are a thousand stories like it on library shelves. But what makes this one different is the characters, the chemistry. In the script, it just leaps off the page, and I didn’t understand why Sam had stopped Dominic and me meeting until we shot our very first scene together—coincidentally, Charity and Richard’s first meeting too. (She’s come back from university,aged 22, having always been in love with him, and he suddenly sees her with new eyes.)
I wish I could write in an American accent, because I’d so love to reproduce Sam’s blunt instructions accurately. I can’t remember his exact words, but I do remember that he told us the scene had to pulse with unspoken longing, with electricity.
If I’d had more time to think, I probably would have panicked awfully. That was just what I’d been afraid of, having read the script—that I wouldn’t be able to do that ‘instant connection’ thing Sam has been drumming into me since we started rehearsals. I tried to explain this, why it had been such a bad idea keeping Dominic and me apart, but he just kept talking about it being important, about only getting one chance to capture that sweet awkwardness of a first meeting.
To be honest, I thought he was barking up the wrong tree completely. Or maybe just barking mad. Still, he’s the director and I’m no diva. I need to work. I have to work. It keeps me sane.
So we all tramped down to the darling boathouse at the bottom of the hill and I went out onto the balcony overlooking the river. (Richard finds Charity there. She isn’t supposed to be there really, but she goes to the boathouse to think, to breathe. It’s her sanctuary.) I suppose Sam is quite clever as a director. He likes his actors being ‘real’, he says.
Anyway, I didn’t enjoy it much at the time, because heleft me standing there, facing away from the door, hands wide on the balcony railing for what felt like an age. By the time Dominic (as Richard) actually did arrive, I’d been waiting so long, all worked up, that I actually did jump when the door crashed open. Didn’t have to act that reaction one bit.
And then I turned round and saw him.
‘Breathless,’ Sam had said to me. ‘That’s all I want from you, Laura. Breathless.’
And breathless I was.
I’d seen him before, of course, on a cinema screen like everyone else. I knew he was good-looking, with that sandy thick hair and those startling blue eyes. I always thought it was something about the colouring process that made them look that way, but they really are that blue. And he came striding across the room to confront me … I mean, Charity … and I found I literally had to suck the oxygen into my lungs. I seemed to have forgotten how to do it automatically.
What was worse was that at first I could tell he was just in character, ready to put a flea in the ear of someone he thought was a trespasser, but the then he reached the door to the balcony and he just … stopped. Stopped dead. I couldn’t tell if he was still acting at first, or if he’d forgotten his lines. I’d certainly forgotten mine.
And then I realised that he felt it too—the thing I’d hardly realised I’d been feeling myself. It was the strangest thing …
I knew I wasn’t Charity any more, and he wasn’t Richard. I was me and he was Dominic, and yet something just … fell into place. Instant connection. The only words I have to describe it are Sam’s. How ironic. And it still seems like a poor reflection of what it felt like.
I knew.
Knew I loved him. Right from that moment.
So now I’m not just a sentimental, romantic fool; I’m obviously ready for the nuthouse too. And possibly the divorce courts.
I also knew that he was married, as I am. But, unlike me, he loves his wife. He’s one of the few film actors who has a good reputation in that department. Another man might act on whatever weird ‘electricity’ of Sam’s passed between us, but I know Dominic won’t. Even if he felt what I felt.
But now, alone in my hotel room away from Whitehaven, the more I recall the moment, the more I think I was maybe kidding myself. He’s an actor, after all. A very good one. Much better than me.
He’s probably not worrying about the upcoming scenes, the ones when he’ll have to take me in his arms and kiss me. But I can hardly sleep for thinking about it. I haven’t resorted to marking the calendar with big red crosses yet, but I’m close.
I can’t wait. But I also know it’ll be just a few, snatched moments of perfection and then they’ll nevercome again. Which would be worse: to kiss or not to kiss?
And it might mean nothing at all to him. Like shaking hands with a stranger …
And, even if it did, it can only mean something for two glorious months, and then only when the cameras are rolling and Sam is barking his orders at us. Maybe that would be worse.
Come to think of it, Sam was very quiet today. The last couple of days, when I’ve been shooting scenes involving Charity and her parents, he’s been interrupting all the time, making us do things over and over again. But today I hardly heard a squeak out of him. He watched Dominic and me play the scene, his arms folded, and when Dominic had left and I was just staring at the open door, finally able to heave in a breath, Sam just said, very quietly, ‘Cut’.
One take, that was all, and then he packed up and said he was done for the day. Most unusual.
CHAPTER FIVE
Louise had been staring so long at the field of sheep on the other side of the river that the little white dots had blurred and melted together. She refused to unlock her gaze until the dark smudge on the river in her peripheral vision motored out of sight.
Eventually, when it didn’t seem like defeat, she sighed and turned to rest her bottom on the railing of the balcony and stared back into the boathouse.
He couldn’t have known who he’d looked like standing there below her on the steps as he offered her the long, black key. It had been one of her favourite scenes in A Summer Affair—when Richard came to meet Charity secretly in the boathouse. Not that anything really happened between them. It was the undercurrents, the unspoken passion that had made it one of the most romantic scenes in any film she’d ever seen.
The trespasser had looked at her with his warm brown eyes and, somehow, had offered her more than a key as he stood there. For the first time in years, she’d blushed, then hurried to hide the evidence with her hair.
And then he’d had to go and spoil that delicious feeling—the feeling that, maybe, not all men were utter rats—by reminding her of who she was.
Louise stood up, brushed the dirt off of her bottom and walked back into the little sitting room. Of course, she wasn’t interested in getting involved with anyone just now—despite what Tara said about the therapeutic nature of a hot and heavy fling—so she didn’t know why she’d got so upset with the gardener. Slowly, she closed and fastened the balcony doors, then exited the boathouse, locking the door and returning the key to its hiding place.
The light was starting to fade and she hurried back up the steep hill, careful to retrace her steps and not get lost, mulling things over as she went. No, it wasn’t that she was developing a fancy for slightly scruffy men in waxy overcoats; it was just that, for a moment, she’d believed there was a possibility of something more in her future. Something she’d always yearned for, and now believed was only real between the covers of a novel or in the darkness of a cinema.
She shook her hair out of her face to shoo away the sense of disappointment. The gardener had done her a favour. He’d reminded her that her life wasn’t a fairy tale.
She snorted out loud at the very thought, scaring a small bird out of a bush. She was probably just feeling emotional because she wouldn’t see Jack for two weeks. Toby had kicked up a stink, but had finally agreed that, once she was settled at Whitehaven, their son could live with her and go to the local school. She and Jack would be together again at last.
Toby had been difficult every step of the way about the divorce. Surprising that he would lavish so much time and energy on her, really. If he’d paid her that much attention in the last five years, they might not be in the mess they were in at present. But that was Toby all over.
She pulled her coat tighter around her as she reached the clearing just in front of the house. The river seemed grey and troubled at the foot of the hill and dark, woolly clouds were lying in ambush to the west. She ignored the dark speck travelling upstream, even though the noise of an outboard motor hummed on the fringes of her consciousness.
Not one stick of furniture occupied the pale, grand entrance hall to Whitehaven, but, as Louise crossed the threshold, she smiled. Only two rooms on the ground floor, two bedrooms and one bathroom had been in a liveable state when she’d bought the house. All they needed was a lick of paint and a good scrub so she could move into them. The furniture would arrive on Wednesday but, until then, she had a blow-up mattress and a sleeping bag in the bedroom, a squashy velvet sofa she’d found in a local junk shop for the living room, and a couple of suitcases to keep her going.
She’d let Toby keep all the furniture, disappointing him completely. He’d been itching for a fight about something, but she just wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Let him be the one waiting for an emotional response of some kind for a change. She didn’t want his furniture, anyway. Nothing that was a link to her old life. Nothing but Jack.
None of that ultra-modern, minimalist designer stuff would fit here, anyway. She smiled again. She fitted here. Whitehaven wasn’t the first property she’d owned, but it was the first place she’d felt comfortable in since she’d left the shabby maisonette she’d shared with her father and siblings. She knew—just as surely as the first time she’d slid her foot into an exquisitely crafted designer shoe—that this was a perfect fit. She and this house understood each other.
The kitchen clock said it was twenty past eight. Ben sat at the old oak table, a lukewarm cup of instant coffee between his palms, and attempted to concentrate on the sports section of the paper instead of the second hand of the clock.
Megan had never been like this when they’d been married. Yes, she’d been a little self-absorbed at times, but she’d never shown this flagrant disregard for other people’s schedules, or boundaries, or … feelings. He wasn’t sure he liked the version of Megan that she’d gone in search of when she’d left him. Or this new boyfriend of hers that he wasn’t supposed to know about.
Twenty minutes later, just as his fingers were really itching to pick up the phone and yell at someone, he heard a car door slam. Jas bounced in through the back door and, before he could ask if her mother was going to make an appearance—and an apology—tyres squealed in the lane and an engine revved then faded.
‘Nice dinner?’ he asked, flicking a page of the paper over and trying not to think about the gallon of beef casserole still sitting in the oven, slowly going cold. Eating a portion on his own hadn’t had the comfort factor that casserole, by rights, ought to have.
Jas shrugged her shoulders as he looked up.
‘Just dinner, you know …’ she said. And, since she was eleven-going-on-seventeen, he supposed that was as verbose as she was going to get.
‘Have you done your homework?’
‘Mostly.’
This was quality conversation, this was. But he was better off sticking to neutral subjects while he was feeling like this. In the last couple of years as a single dad, he’d learned that transitions—picking-up and dropping-off times—were difficult, and it was his job to smooth the ripples, create stability. Being steady, normal, was what was required.
‘Define mostly,’ he said, smoothing the paper closed and standing up.
Jas dropped the envelope assorted junk she was clutching to her chest onto the table and threw her coat over the back of a chair. ‘Two more maths questions, and before you say anything …’
Ben closed his mouth.
‘… it doesn’t have to be in until Thursday. Can I just do it tomorrow? Please, Dad?’
She stared at him with those big brown eyes and blinked, just once. She looked so cute with her wavy blonde hair not quite sitting right in its shoulder-length style. His memory rewound a handful of years and he could hear her begging for just one more push on the swing.
‘Okay. Tomorrow it is.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’ Jas skirted the table and gave him a hug by just throwing her arms around him and squeezing, then she lifted a brightly coloured magazine out of the pile of junk on the table. ‘Recreational reading,’ she said, brandishing it and attempting to escape before he could inspect it more closely.
He wasn’t so old that his reflexes had gone into retirement. The magazine was out of her fingers and in front of his face before she’d fully disentangled herself from the hug.
‘What’s this trash?’
Jas made a feeble attempt at snatching it back. ‘It was Mum’s. She’d finished it and she said I could have it.’
Ben frowned. Buzz magazine. He’d never read it himself, but he knew enough from the bright slogans on the cover that it was the lowest form of celebrity gossip rag. The lead story seemed to be ‘Celebrity Cellulite’. Nice. What was Megan thinking of giving Jasmine a publication like this? Didn’t his ex know how impressionable young girls were at Jas’s age?
‘I don’t think this is appropriate.’
Jas rolled her eyes. ‘It’s interesting. All my friends read it.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘All of them?’
The nod that followed couldn’t have convinced even Jas herself.
‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘I mean, there’s no substance in here. It’s just rubbish …’ He flicked through the pages, hoping his daughter would see what he saw. ‘It’s the worst kind of gossip. I—’
