Just Friends (36 page)

“Don’t tell me you don’t remember?”

“Well . . . I feel grrreat.” Jack thumped his chest, Tarzan-style. “But the details kinda escape me.”

“Oh, Jack, how could you forget?” Her voice throbbed with reproach. “The masterful way you stole all the blankets . . . That mighty snore, like the call of a wild stallion . . . The sexy way you turned over in bed, like a rampant hippotota—hittopopa—”

By this time Freya was laughing so hard that she had to climb to her knees, gasping for breath. She snickered and chortled and hooted and howled with hilarity, then toppled forward, clutching her stomach. The bedclothes fell away, revealing that she had been dressed in jeans and T-shirt all along.

“Very funny,” said Jack. He should have known. He
had
known. He walked with dignity to the wardrobe and took out a shirt, while his mind raced to invent a swift revenge.

Freya dabbed at her eyes. “Honestly, Jack, you should have seen yourself, snoring away with your mouth open. It would have been like making love with a tranquilized sperm whale.” She lurched to her feet and staggered back and forth across the saggy mattress, growling, “I feel great,” and beating her fists on her chest. Jack hadn’t seen her look so pleased with herself in years.

Coolly, he began to do up his buttons. “At least I don’t talk in my sleep,” he said conversationally.

“What?” Freya stopped bouncing. “Are you saying that I do?” Her brow furrowed. “Bollocks,” she said.

He shrugged. “If you don’t want to know what you said, I won’t tell you.”

“I never talk in my sleep.”

“Have it your own way.”

“What did I say, then?”

“I don’t know if I should tell you.”

“Go on.”

“Say
please
.”

Freya stamped her foot. “Tell me!”

“All right.” Jack clasped his hands in a maidenly fashion, fluttered his eyelashes, and assumed a ludicrous falsetto. “Oh, Jack,” he fluted, “how handsome you are. What a genius you are. Oh, Jack, Jack—be gentle with me.
Oof!
”

A pillow hit him smack in the face. He threw it back. She threw another one. Soon a full-scale pillow fight was under way. Jack’s aim was better, but Freya cheated by taking cover behind the bedposts. She had to come out to retrieve the pillows, though, and during one such foray Jack managed to score a direct hit, knocking her off balance. He pumped his arms in triumph, momentarily forgetting the insecure arrangement of his towel. He felt it loosen and slither to the floor. Meanwhile, Freya grabbed wildly at one of the bed hangings, which suddenly shredded loose from its attachment and collapsed on top of her. She fought her way out of its dusty folds, emerging with fluff in her eyelashes and a smudge on her nose, just as Jack whipped his towel back into position. Around them a snowstorm of feathers drifted slowly to the floor.

Their eyes met in a truce.

“Breakfast?” said Jack.

CHAPTER 24

They found Annabelle in the kitchen in sergeant-major mode, bifocals on nose and clipboard in hand. While Freya made toast and scrambled eggs for herself and Jack, a succession of young men with earrings and local women in aprons flowed in and out of the room, taking orders about marquees, flowers, caterers, cars and bed linen. A dozen extra people were staying in the house tonight, including a pair of bridesmaids and Roland’s parents (“frightfully rich—we must make a good impression”); Roland and his mates had been booked into a local pub. Most of “the young people” would be coming by train from London; they’d need to be fetched from the station and ferried back and forth. Freya’s father had popped into Truro for a book he’d ordered (“Today of all days! Really, Freya, your father’s impossible.”) Tash, apparently, was suffering from prewedding nerves and had gone back to bed, “poor little love.” It was the pattern of Freya’s relationship with her stepmother that Annabelle always felt impelled to give her some household chore—anything from picking roses for the dinner table to worming the dogs—and Freya always felt unable to say no. She munched her breakfast glumly, waiting for the axe to fall.

But it never did. Jack persuaded Annabelle to stop pacing and sat her down next to him with a cup of coffee. He took her through the list, listening patiently to her explanation of all the things that had to be done and why she would
never be ready
! Then he borrowed her pen and somehow reduced everything to five headings on a single piece of paper. He ringed one of the headings, labeled it “F and J” and passed the list back to a dazed-looking Annabelle. “We’ll be back around six,” he told her.

The jobs for which Jack had volunteered included dropping by the pub, collecting an order of fresh fish from a village Freya had intended to show Jack anyway, and picking up Roland and a couple of his friends at the train station late in the afternoon. In other words, they had the day to themselves.

“How did you do that?” Freya asked as they were walking out to the car.

“Oaksboro’s stuffed with women like that: never happier than when they’re busy, but love to complain. Annabelle’s okay. She’s just a little scared of you.”

“
She’s
scared of
me
?” Freya stopped dead in her tracks. She remembered the thousands of times she’d choked back her resentment and politely agreed to perform some task, so that Annabelle couldn’t complain about her. “Why? What’s so frightening about me?”

“You’re clever and metropolitan and tall and blond, and her husband adores you. She’s a middle-aged provincial housewife trying to keep this whole show on the road.” He waved an arm to encompass the chickens and the garden and the huge, crumbling house—even, perhaps, her father. “Asking you to do things is her way of telling you that you’re one of the family, and that this is your home—even if you hardly ever come here, and freeze her out when you do. It wouldn’t hurt to be a bit nicer to her, you know. So who’s driving?”

Freya was so stunned by this piece of off-the-cuff psychoanalysis that she hardly heard his question. Annabelle was the wicked stepmother who had gate-crashed her life and stolen her father. Annabelle was the woman who had landed him with a second daughter when he already had a perfectly good one of his own. The idea that Annabelle might also be a normal human being, with the average mix of strengths and weaknesses, was revolutionary. Freya became aware that Jack was watching her curiously, his palm outstretched for the car keys. She hid her eyes behind sunglasses. “I’ll drive.”

First they tootled down to the whitewashed pub overlooking the estuary, where Roland and company were to be billeted, and checked that all was in order, as per Annabelle’s instructions. Then Freya wove westward toward the sea, taking tiny back lanes hemmed in by hedgerows that cascaded with honeysuckle and dog roses. The sun was high and hot in a clear blue sky. Through the open car windows came the caterwauling of seagulls and a metallic whiff of the sea. For the first time since she’d arrived in England Freya began to relax. Apart from the disaster of oversleeping and waking up in Jack’s bed—a crisis she thought she had averted rather brilliantly—everything was going okay. The day stretched invitingly before her. She looped inland and dropped back to the village where the fish man had a shop on the cobbled quayside. Boats bobbed in the small harbor ringed by gray cottages. Having dealt with Annabelle’s order, Freya added a small one of her own: fresh crabmeat stuffed into two crusty rolls, which she packed into a knapsack already containing a bottle of water, a bag of juicy plums, and swimming things. Her plan, endorsed by Jack at breakfast, was to walk from here along the coastal footpath to a beach, where they could picnic and swim.

Freya had never been to the country with Jack, and didn’t know how he’d behave. He might be one of those pathetic men who never wanted to get out of the car and get their shoes dirty, and had to be congratulated on surviving any “walk” more taxing than a brief stroll across level terrain. In fact, he strode along at a good pace, knapsack on his back, seeming to enjoy everything, from the ingenious construction of the stone stiles to the comical sheep that cropped the grassy headlands, to the fact that the magenta flowers that sprayed out of sword-shaped leaves were known locally as “whistling jacks.” The narrow footpath snaked up and down, through waist-high bracken and brambly hedges, over windswept cliffs, past the ruined towers of abandoned copper mines, skirting shingly coves and bustling caravan parks, until they stood high above a curving stretch of smooth sand, lapped by an inviting blue sea. They scrambled and slithered down a precipitous rocky path and at last, hot and dusty, collapsed onto their chosen spot on an almost empty beach. A shallow cave in the cliffside provided a sliver of shade for the picnic and enough privacy for Freya to change at once into her bikini.

“Last one in’s a rotten egg,” she shouted childishly as she sprinted across the sand and splashed into the waves. “Lovely,” she called to Jack, clamping her teeth against the icy cold. She watched him plunge in after her, and crowed with laughter when he reared out of the water again with a bellow of protest. She stayed in just long enough to prove how tough she was, then they chased each other down the sand until they were warm and wandered slowly back, examining shells and birds’ footprints, sending tiny crabs scurrying into their holes. They ate their lunch sitting on their towels, watching distant fishing boats wink their way to a hazy horizon, then lay on their stomachs, soaking up the sun and playing tic-tac-toe in the sand. They talked in a desultory way about childhood holidays, friends they had in common, movies they had seen, and whether it was better to live in the country or the city, until sunshine and the slow swoosh of the waves lulled them into contented silence. It was only when Freya felt Jack’s cool shadow fall across her, and heard his voice reminding her of the time that she realized she had been asleep. On the walk back, she let him go ahead, hypnotically watching his tanned calves and battered sneakers march ahead of her. She felt drugged with sunshine. Her skin prickled pleasurably with salt and sand.

Back at the village, they stowed Styrofoam boxes of fish, packed in crushed ice, into the trunk of the car and headed toward the train station. Freya had never met Roland, though she had heard his name coupled with Tash’s for a while now. All she knew was that he was twenty-nine years old and did something well-paid in property development. But when the train arrived, there was no mistaking the three young men who erupted noisily onto the platform, gaudy shirts hanging out of baggy shorts. It was a five-hour train journey from London, and they looked like they’d used every one of them for drinking. Having loaded a baggage cart with cases, two of them pushed it down the platform at a swerving run, chanting “Here comes the groom,” while the third, presumably Roland, perched precariously on top. Dark-haired, white-skinned, with heavy-lidded eyes, he was good-looking in an insolent way. When Freya introduced herself, Roland eyed her bare legs and told her she could pick him up any time, hurgh hurgh. His friends were called Jamie (“rugger bugger,” Freya said to herself) and Sponge (blond curls, public school, posh). All of them were in such a silly, schoolboy mood that without Jack she would never have gotten the luggage loaded and the three men squashed, protesting, into the backseat.

“So how’s my gorgeous Tish Tash?” asked Roland, as Freya accelerated out of the station car park. “Not changed her mind, has she?”

“Of course not,” said Freya.

“Bad luck, Rolls,” joked Jamie. “You’re a marked man now.” He hummed the opening bars of the Funeral March.

“Leave it out,” growled Roland.

“He’s right, you know,” said Sponge. “ ‘Til death do us part’ and all that.”

“Shut
up
!” Freya heard a smack and a scuffle from the backseat.

“Mind you, there’s always tonight.” Jamie lowered his voice suggestively. “Still time to get your oar in.”

“Sh!”

The three of them collapsed in snorts and guffaws. A sour smell of beer and cigarettes filled the car. Roland demanded silence while he made an important business call from his mobile phone. “I could be onto a winner here,” he told them; “commission on twenty mil.” Freya pressed her foot to the accelerator. She didn’t much care for Roland’s swaggering air. But presumably Tash loved him, or at least wanted him. In some ways Freya could make sense of the match. Roland had the money; Tash had the country-house credentials. They were both greedy and ambitious. He would do deals; she would shop and lunch and oil the wheels of his career. They would be stylish and successful. It wasn’t the sort of life that appealed to Freya, but perhaps it might make Roland and Tash happy. She glanced at Jack, and was amused to see him cock at eyebrow toward the backseat and roll his eyes at her in silent complicity.

Really, she thought, Jack was working out remarkably well. She’d wanted someone to make a good impression, and so far Jack had done a surprisingly good job. Freya congratulated herself on bringing him. It was so much more relaxing to be with a friend than with a lover. Friends were reliable and easygoing; one didn’t have to worry about being attractive and delightful every second of the day. It wasn’t even that bad sharing a bedroom with him. Suddenly Cat’s face swam into her mind, leaning at her across the table in the Chinese restaurant and warning her that Jack might
pounce
. How ridiculous.