A Place in the Country (6 page)

Every morning, Caroline got up early, gave the girls breakfast and drove them to school. Maggie picked them up in the afternoon. They were inseparable. They did their homework together; ate breakfast, lunch, and supper together. They gossiped and flirted with boys online. They went to the movies and shopping in Oxford, hung out with boys in cafés, and had a good time. Then, back home at the Star & Plough, watching TV they cuddled Blind Brenda on the sofa between them.

Two months passed and Caroline knew the time had come to take life into her own hands. She took a leap of faith and bought the broken-down barn grill & bar that cost every cent of her settlement from James (at least she'd gotten that up front.) She bought it because it was quite simply the cheapest place for sale around, and she had exactly enough for a low bid. The owner was desperate and accepted; he'd been trying to sell it for years. Looking at the place, in the clear light of day, Caroline understood why. The whole place needed restoration.

Still, there was something about it; its solitude, its age, its history she felt comfortable with. She loved the sound of the slow-flowing river; loved the stone that turned out to be honey-colored after all; loved the way it sat at the end of the rutted once-graveled drive (don't even ask what gravel cost and how much to deliver and spread it around!). Somehow, there was a connection. Possibly it was the sign,
Bar, Grill and Dancing,
that did it. She had always been a dreamer.

They were still living at the pub, wondering how to put their new “home” in order, when a few weeks later, James's business partner, Mark Santos, came to see her.

 

chapter 10

It was seven o'clock
on a Friday night and the pub was packed with mostly young people, ten deep at the bar, with the old-fashioned juke box Jesus had rescued from somewhere, blasting the dated seventies pop he loved, and people shouting over everyone else to make themselves heard.

Every table was taken in both the lounge and the snug, and orders were coming in thick and fast, especially for the chicken pot pie with its billowing crust. The smell of beer, of bread, baking and
pico de gallo,
hot sauce and tacos leaked out into the street, where cars were crammed into tiny parking spots and smokers leaned up against the walls, lingering over cigarettes. Friday nights were always like that.

Caroline was in the kitchen, hovering over the Aga, pink-cheeked from the heat, helped by her Friday assistant, a young single mom called Sarah, who lived on her own with her baby, Little Billy, in a cottage nearby. She brought him to work and mostly he slept through all the noise, in his carrier. Teenager Lily who also babysat for Sarah, from time to time, helped with the dishes, mostly by dropping them.

Issy and Sam were too young to work in the pub but usually helped out in the kitchen on Fridays. Tonight, though they had been given a reprieve and were in the upstairs sitting room, homework done for the weekend. Blind Brenda was slotted between them on the sofa, and they had their bare feet on the green velvet ottoman, watching TV, and texting friends.

Caroline was wearing jeans, her old yellow sweater, and scuffed white clogs that made her feet look enormous. Her hair was stuffed under a denim Club 55 baseball cap and her red cat's-eye glasses were sliding down her nose from the heat. Sweaty, was how she would have described herself, when Maggie came in carrying a load of empty dishes and told her there was a man at the bar who wished to see her.

Caroline froze. Her eyes met Maggie's in a question.

“It's not him,” Maggie said quietly. “This one's tall, with a beard, glasses too. In a nice jacket. Cashmere, you can always tell. Better go wash your face. He'll wait. I'll take over in here.”

Still, Caroline was nervous seeing Mark, it would bring back her past. He was James's longtime friend as well as his business partner, a solid, quiet, bearded man you just knew you could trust. In fact, he was the first person she had called, from the Peninsula Hotel in Hong Kong, to say she had left James.

He had kept in touch, checking on her via e-mail or phone, always asking if she needed help. Was James doing his duty? Did Issy need anything? Of course Caroline always said she was fine and refused any help. She had made her choice and must live with it.

Now she looked unhappily at herself in the mirror. Her sweater was too snug; she'd bet she'd gained five pounds since she'd become a cook. She rinsed her face, dabbed in some perfume—Cartier's So Pretty, a gift from the ex that she had not used in years—and put on a clean white shirt, and a pair of gold sandals (it was cold but she was still hot from cooking), ran a brush through her hair, fluffed up her bangs, cleaned her red glasses and put them back on. Oh, she'd forgotten lipstick. She smoothed on Revlon's Just Enough Buff, then took a deep breath and went downstairs.

“You haven't changed,” were Mark's first words, when he saw her.

 

chapter 11

Still sitting
on the couch upstairs, Issy lifted her eyes from the tweet she'd just gotten from Lysander, an older boy (seventeen for God's sakes, and
cute
with it—and with whom she hoped to get a date) just in time to see her mom hurrying past the open door in a clean white shirt, hair combed and, Issy could
swear,
wearing lipstick.

“Sam?” Issy turned to look at her friend, thinking Sam had a perfect nose, small and straight with a short upper lip that made her mouth appear to smile all the time, and blue eyes with long dark lashes. How a blonde like Sam got dark lashes while she, the dark one, got pale, was something that bewildered Issy. Life, she had decided, long ago, simply was not fair.

“What?” Sam's gaze hovered between a dance program on the telly where a skimpily-dressed young woman was being twirled around by a man in tight black pants while the audience applauded and scores were tallied, and a text message from a boy who Sammy knew fancied her, though she did not fancy him. “Do you think she's wearing Spanx under that dress?” she asked.

Issy studied the woman. “I don't see how she can. I mean she's almost not wearing anything.”

Sam twisted her blond pigtail, thoughtfully. “I wish I was her,” she said. “I'd like to be a dancer.”

“You're too short,” Issy said, though of course she would never have hurt Sam's feelings by telling her she was also too plump. Which was the truth. Sam was. A bit.

“And you're too tall,” Sam said. “Do you think Rob Maclean fancies me?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

Issy frowned. “Sam? Something's going on with my mom. She just dashed up here, then dashed back down again, all done up.”

This time Sam turned to look at her. “You mean, like, in a dress and heels?”

Issy hadn't seen her mother in a dress and heels since Singapore. “No. But she'd changed her sweater and combed her hair, and put lipstick on.”

Sammy laughed.

“You don't get it!”
Sam had not seen her point. “Mom was going downstairs to the pub with lipstick on and her hair combed. That means she was going to see
a man.
”

“What
man
?” Sam had never seen Caroline with any man.

“I think it might be my dad.”

Shocked, Sam sat up. “Are you sure?”

“Who else would she dash downstairs to see without even stopping to tell me?”

She picked up Blind Brenda and buried her face in the cat's scrappy fur. “I'm scared to go and look,” she mumbled. “Imagine, Sam, I'm scared in case it's my own dad.”

“I'll go.” Sam got up, turned the TV volume down and tripped over the pizza box. “I remember what he looks like,” she added, because of course Issy had shown her photos of her good-looking father who Jesus called, when Sam wasn't meant to hear, “a deadbeat dad.”

Alone, Issy waited, anxiously stroking the cat for comfort. It seemed ages before Sam got back, but it was really only a few minutes. “Well?” she asked.

“It's not him. It's a big man with a beard.”

“That's Mark Santos. Dad's partner. I wonder why he's here.”

She hoped he'd come to tell them her father wanted her back, that he would also tell her mom to get rid of that filthy old barn. She so wanted her old life back, a girl with a proper home and a normal mother and father. She just wanted everything to be all right again, and maybe Mark Santos could make that happen.

 

chapter 12

“Liar,”
Caroline said, when Mark told her she looked exactly the same. She threw her arms round him in a hug, then they stood back and smiled at each other.

“At least
you
haven't changed,” she said, meaning it.

He looked the same as he always had. His skin was slightly tanned from sailing the boat she knew he kept out at Lantau, the once-quiet island off Hong Kong that had suddenly developed from an isolated fisherman's paradise and blossomed with big new resorts. His eyes were gray, or were they brownish? She could never quite tell, hidden as they were behind his square, horn-rimmed glasses. But then, he probably couldn't tell her eye color either. Glasses were an impermeable barrier between friends and lovers. She knew that for sure; she had taken them off often enough in the cause of love, God knows. She thought Mark seemed taller, broader,
bigger,
than any other man in the room. And that included the carpenter, whose eyes had connected with hers as she'd pushed through the bar crowd. He'd given her a smile.

Jesus was tending bar alone since Maggie had taken Caroline's place in the kitchen. Now he placed a glass of red wine in front of her and she introduced him to Mark, who leaned across to shake his hand.

“I heard all about you,” Mark said to Jesus. “The lifesaver.”

“To old friends and new,” Caroline said softly, as they touched glasses.

“You've come to tell me about James.” She was suddenly afraid of what he was going to say.

He shrugged and took a sip of his beer. “Actually, I'm here because I wanted to see
you
.”

Caroline leaned affectionately in to him, resting her head on his shoulder, remembering his scent, Chanel's Égoïste, from long ago. She had always thought Mark was a little in love with her; she'd felt his eyes follow her across a room; and the way he held her, too carefully whenever they'd danced. But Mark had never made a wrong move. Now, though, he had come all the way from Singapore specially to see her, and somehow she knew it couldn't be good news.

He said, “I came because I was worried. James told me he'd heard from his lawyer that you'd blown your divorce settlement, such as it was, on a bad piece of property out in the boondocks.” He shook his head. “Not a good idea, Caroline.”

She got that sinking feeling again. Mark was a good businessman, but good deal or bad, she'd fallen for that barn and she intended to keep it.

“I'll see if I can get you out of it,” Mark was saying, taking over. “Then we'll look for a better place. Issy needs a proper home and it's your responsibility to give that to her.”

Caroline was suddenly rattled. Here she was doing her best, cooking in a pub to make a living, buying a house, trying to figure out the next move toward a more secure life for them, and all she was getting was criticism.

“I'll help you,” Mark added.

She knew he meant it. All she had to do was say the word and he'd have had her out of the deal and into something better, with his financial help of course. She thought maybe he was still in love with her. That “maybe” was the reason she knew she could not accept. She needed to keep her independence; she'd managed so far and she wasn't about to succumb now.

“You know how much I care about you, Caroline,” he was saying. “I always have. I could take care of you, you know. Life could be good again, you and me, together.”

Was he asking her to
marry
him?
Well, why don't you?
a weak treacherous little voice inside her asked.
He cares about you. You could have security. A good home. Your daughter would have a better life than living over a pub with a tired financially-stressed-out mom. What woman would not think about that? What woman wouldn't say “grab him with both hands”?

But she was not in love with Mark, she simply did not have that special feeling for him. That spark—that
sparkle
that happens between a man and a woman. She did not want Mark as her “lover,” or her husband.

She said quickly, “Thank you, Mark, it's better if I'm on my own right now.” Then, “Tell me about James.”

He shrugged. “We don't communicate much, except for business.”

She looked at him, astonished.

“He's away most of the time, Hong Kong or Macao, or … who knows where.”

“I'll bet he's with Gayle Lee Chen.”

“You know about her?” He sounded surprised.

“I never told you, but she came to see me, right after I left James. She came to warn me off. You know she was James's mistress, for
twenty years,
and I knew nothing about her?”

“It's easy to dupe the innocent.”

“But, in my heart I
knew
there was someone else, I just refused to acknowledge it.” Caroline sniffed back tears of humiliation. “It's very easy to fool someone who's in denial.”

“There are women in this world,” Mark said quietly, so only she could hear, though the pub din was loud enough to drown out almost anything. “Women who can take over a man's mind with flattery, with sexual favors offered. They can take over so completely a man can be totally controlled. He does as she says, he even uses her words; smiles exactly the way she does; uses her thinking in business, her logic. He gives himself over to her. His entire life is thrown away. And she gives up nothing, not one scrap of her own life. For her, everything remains the same. It's the man who ends up the loser. James lost you, and he lost his daughter.”