Sitting Pretty Page 9

  ‘Right.’ He jumped upright, pulled his phone out of his pocket, and looked at me. ‘Shall I ring Henry now, or shall I start dialling 999, or are you going to tell me who you are and what you’re doing in my brother’s house in the middle of the night?’

  This was insane. I had to tell this man the truth. It was no worse than anything he had already decided I was guilty of. I’d explain everything to him and just hope he took pity on me.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘What a tosser!’ was Marvin’s verdict when I’d finished telling him what had happened and how I’d ended up in this position. ‘What an absolute tosser!’

  It was one of the many descriptions for Alex which had run, like a loop, through my head since the day he left without me. After keeping what he’d done to myself for all this time, part of me revelled in hearing it out loud in somebody else’s voice – a validation of my anger, not that one was needed after the way my so-called husband had treated me. A small, sad part of me had, at first hoped Alex would realise his mistake and that he loved me after all. Now a bigger, vengeful part of me hoped he would, but only so I could shove it right back in his face with several bells on it and see how he liked it.

  ‘I’ll go first thing in the morning,’ I said. What I really wanted was to beg him not to tell his brother about me being here, but that would be too pathetic and I’d decided I was done with being pathetic. ‘Unless you want me to go straight away.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he jumped in. ‘Bloody hell, after the way your husband’s treated you, the last thing you need is another man making you homeless. Bugger me,’ he chuckled. ‘I’ve got to hand it to you. I can’t think of many women who would have the nerve to do what you’ve been doing. You’ve got some balls, Beth – although I don’t know that Henry would see it quite like that. Look,’ he said, possibly having registered the look of panic I could feel rolling across my face, ‘you must be tired, you go on back to bed in the spare room. I’ll kip in Henry’s room until he comes back.’

  ‘What are you going to tell him?’ I heard my mouth ask, even though my brain had specifically instructed it not to.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Beth. We’ll think of something.’ He drained the cup of tea laced with whisky he’d made himself – I hadn’t wanted one – looking like a man more at home with a big, chunky mug, a tankard, or maybe even a foaming flagon in his hand. ‘It’s all right. I’m not going to drop you in it.’ He yawned and stretched. ‘Time I was crashing. And you too,’ he nodded at me. He stood up and started for the stairs, stopping briefly to call back, ‘First one up makes the coffee, eh? Strong, black, and sweet for me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  As tired as I was, the sky was starting to get light by the time I managed to fall into some kind of sleep. When I did, I dreamt that I was at an airport, somewhere abroad, but not one I’d ever been to before so it could have been Dubai. It was beyond huge and there were no signs anywhere in English, and nobody seemed able to understand a word I said.

  I must have already checked in, because I had no luggage, just bags and bags of bulky shopping. I was rushing to get to my boarding gate. None of the gate numbers, however, were sequential – they seemed to be random, as if the numbers had been called out in a game of Bingo – and anybody I tried to ask just shrugged at me, or chattered away in a language I couldn’t understand.

  Things kept falling out of the many bags I was trying to carry – I must have bought half of Duty Free – and I had to keep stopping to pick them up again. Bottles rolled like skittles across the shiny floors, their criss-cross plastic covers doing nothing to slow their progress. I chased after them, wondering how they could roll so fast and in so many different directions and why none of them had smashed.

  Cumbersome electrical items were bulging, like awkwardly shaped biceps, through the rips their pointy corners had managed to make in their bags. Posh boxes of chocolates and fancily wrapped cosmetic gift sets were tumbling about all over the place and people were starting to trip up on the things my bags were shedding around me.

  An announcement shrilled through the speakers, calling my name, the final passenger for boarding. I had to hurry. The gate was going to close.

  I had to leave everything and run. But which way?

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  A knock at my door woke me from my dream. My confused brain couldn’t work out whether it was part of it or not. By the time it had realised it wasn’t, I was absolutely exhausted.

  ‘Well, lazy bones, I gave up waiting for you to make the coffee.’ Marvin wandered in with a cup of black coffee for me in one hand and a pint of milk in the other with Henry Halliday’s probably very expensive sugar bowl and its silver spoon balanced precariously on top. ‘That Elaine at the shop’s a funny old bird, isn’t she? I haven’t been there often, and when I have I think it must have been her husband serving me. I went to get this.’ He jiggled the milk, nearly tipping the sugar bowl onto the floor. ‘I half expected her to say “This is a local shop, for local people!” and not let me buy anything.’

  ‘Do you mean Eleanor?’ I asked, wondering if Eleanor had a sister I hadn’t met.

  ‘That’s the one! I grabbed this and paid before I found myself locked in and forced to watch her feeding a piglet or something.’ He shuddered dramatically. I reached out and rescued the sugar bowl and put it down on the bedside table before anything happened to it. ‘I didn’t know how you liked it.’ He put the coffee down and the milk next to it. ‘It might be a bit strong.’

  ‘Thanks, that’s very kind of you.’ I was glad my T-shirt was thick. It felt a bit … not uncomfortable exactly, but there was something rather bizarre about sitting in a bed I wasn’t supposed to be in, while a man I’d only met a few hours ago brought me coffee. Alex would have had a fit. Huh! I pushed that thought aside as it was his fault I was here in the first place, and he had no business having an opinion on anything I did any more. In fact, I wished he could see me here. ‘That would show him,’ one half of my brain said, while the other half asked, ‘Show him what, exactly?’

  ‘Anyway, I’ll leave you to it.’ Marvin turned to go, got as far as the door, and said, ‘I suppose you have to go to work today?’

  ‘Yes, of course I do, and actually,’ I glanced at the little clock on the bedside table, ‘I’ll need to get going soon.’ Would he take the hint and leave me to go and have a quick shower?

  ‘Well, do you have any plans for tomorrow, Beth? You know,’ he grinned, ‘other than pretending not to be here?’

  ‘Well …’ I was embarrassed to admit my not very exciting plans for a Saturday. ‘It’s my weekend to be on duty, although it’s not busy. I have a few cats to feed at some point during the morning – their owners are all away, so there’s no fixed time. And one dog to walk. Then I was thinking of going into Wintertown. I was going to call some of my friends from work and see if they wanted to meet up for lunch, then I thought I’d find out what was on at the cinema, and then pop in on the cats again in the evening and give the dog a walk on my way back here …’

  ‘So, apart from some hungry cats and a dog wanting a walk, there’s nothing that can’t wait until next weekend?

  ‘Well,’ I hedged, wondering what on earth he was going to suggest. The fact that he’d thought my recent bout of borrowing other people’s sofas while they were away was ballsy and worthy of some sort of admiration was a rather worrying barometer of what he might think was a fun way to spend a Saturday. He wasn’t going to ask me to don a Margaret Thatcher mask and help him rob a building society, was he? Or break into a medical laboratory to rescue a load of test rats?

  ‘How do you fancy the Isle of Wight?’ His question came as something of an anti-climax. Unless he’d been in the middle of organising a jail break from Parkhurst and just waiting for the perfect accomplice to come along, which happened to be me.

  ‘What?’ He had just asked me to go to the Isle of Wight with him, hadn’t he?

&nb
sp; ‘I need to take Lizzy over to Yarmouth for a few hours. Got some bits and pieces to do there. I was going to do it today, but tomorrow would do just as well. We could have a nice lunch, go for a walk, take a look around …’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit cold for sightseeing?’ I asked, hoping I didn’t sound ungrateful for the offer. And anyway, this Lizzy might not want me tagging along.

  ‘Cold?’ he laughed good naturedly. ‘Don’t you walk dogs in all weathers for a living? You don’t tell the poor little mutts they have to hold it in because it’s snowing out and you don’t want to get your little tootsies cold, do you?’

  ‘Well, that’s true,’ I laughed. He had a point – when a dog had to go, it had to go, there was no waiting until the weather got a bit nicer. I’d walked my charges round parts of the New Forest through howling gales, rain, snow, and sleet. I’d slid along icy paths while they’d sniffed at frost-covered trees, waiting for them to do their business. The only type of weather that got in the way of our walks was thunder and lightning. If anybody who did my job wasn’t quickly toughened up to a bit of cold then nobody was.

  ‘So?’ he chivvied me. ‘We’ll go tomorrow, then? We can have a bit of toast or something for breakfast, feed your cats and give the mutt a quick walk on the way, and be there by lunchtime. Then we can do the same on the way back. What do you think?’

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  What did I think? As I drove out of pretty Netley Parva, its village green showing even more bright emerald against the now half-dressed November trees, and on through the autumnal New Forest lanes, I thought I must be in the middle of another weird dream. I could just imagine the bronze and copper foliage on either side of me, punctuated by little strings of temperamental ponies, going on and on for ever, the turnings and forks in the roads that I usually turned off disappearing into thin air. I could be driving along this lane for what felt like for ever, until I eventually woke up in Henry Halliday’s spare bed, with Talisker purring his little furry head off on the pillow next to me and no sign of any previously unmet Halliday relations.

  There was an air of surrealism to being invited out for a jolly Saturday jaunt by Marvin –as if I was somebody he’d met at a social event and found he’d got something in common with – literally hours after him finding me squatting in his brother’s house. From what I knew of Henry Halliday, he must be the stiff, white stick of chalk standing to attention in its pristine box to Marvin’s squidgy chunk of Camembert oozing messily all over the cheese board.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Daisy asked me as we bumped into each other outside the door to the Sitting Pretty office. ‘You look a bit preoccupied.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine, thanks. What are you and Nick up to this weekend?’ I hoped she didn’t notice how eagerly I’d changed the subject. She was a kind and empathetic girl and I’d hated not to be able to tell her the truth about my situation. I would miss her most of all my work mates when I went back to London.

  ‘There’s a gig on at Southampton uni that Nick wants us to go to – some band I’ve never heard of, but he seems very keen. What about you?’

  Damn! I should have realised she’d ask me that. Unlike Katya and Natalia, Daisy actually took an interest in other people’s lives. ‘Well …’ Should I tell her about the trip to Lymington or not? ‘I might be going to Lymington for … for lunch tomorrow, once I’ve fed the cats and walked Bubbles.’ Apparently my mouth had decided for me. I wished it would stop doing that; one of these days it was going to get me into real trouble – and the rest of me was quite capable enough of doing that, all by itself.

  ‘That’s a long way to go just for lunch,’ she said as she signed for her pack of keys for the day and handed me mine and the pen. Katya was missing from her desk. It didn’t look like she was in yet and I was more than happy about that. ‘Look,’ Daisy carried on, ‘I’m not doing anything much tomorrow until the evening. If you like, I could do the morning and late afternoon feeds and give Bubbles his walks, then you can set off whatever time you want and don’t have to rush back.’

  That’s really kind of you, Daisy,’ I told her,’ but Bubbles? Do you really want to risk walking him again?’

  ‘Hey! That was my first day! I’m more experienced now. And don’t forget I did walk him that weekend …’

  ‘Didn’t he end up dragging you through Wintertown Park on your bum?’ I chuckled.

  She joined in too, then gave a little shudder, ‘Eugh, and that horrible man with those cigarettes started making comments.’

  ‘Yes, he seems to lurk about the park like some kind of giant, smelly, garden gnome,’ I felt my nose wrinkle up at the memory of those cigarettes. What were they, Gauloise or Gitanes or something? Or they could be Turkish ones? They whiff too don’t they?

  ‘Gnome Man! I like that,’ Daisy chuckled again. ‘Nat calls him Stinky Steve, but I think I’m going to call him Gnome Man from now on.’

  We settled on Daisy giving Bubbles both his morning and afternoon walks for me on Saturday. I’d feed the cats on the way and they’d be fine, even if we got back a bit late. I didn’t want the favour Daisy was doing me to get any bigger as I knew it was highly unlikely I would be here long enough to pay it back. I still had Daisy’s Gnome Man chuckles in my ears as I went off to walk Bubbles. The disobedient dog was waiting for me when I got there, paws up on the little window sill next to the front door, barking for all he was worth. Mrs Parker opened the door just enough for me slide in without Bubbles making his escape.

  ‘Good morning, Beth,’ she smiled, and stood back as I clipped on the dog’s lead. She was a lovely lady, Mrs Parker. I guessed she was only in her fifties, but she had been diagnosed with osteoporosis and she was afraid to walk her much loved but very wilful dog in case he pulled her too hard and she broke a bone. She could manage Bubbles in the confines of her house, but outdoors he was just too much for her to manage, so when it came to walkies, Sitting Pretty had been called in. ‘I hope he won’t be any trouble today.’ Bless her, she always hoped that. And nine times out of ten he was – although most of those times I didn’t tell her – but you had to love her optimism.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll be fine,’ I white lied. ‘We’ll have a lovely W-A-L-K, won’t we, Bubbles?’ I don’t know why I bothered spelling it out to stop him becoming hyperactive, he’d heard it enough times to know what the sounds meant. Plus, me or one of my work mates arriving at walkies time almost every day was a bit of a giveaway. He was almost turning himself inside out in his excitement to get outside and find some poor cat who’d been foolhardy enough to risk one of its nine lives by being on the street at the same time as him. ‘We’ll see you later.’ I gave Mrs Parker my most professional smile before grasping the lead firmly, preparing for starter’s orders and opening the front door for the off.

  I wondered, as I walked him, who would get Bubbles added to their list after I left. It would probably be Natalia who, in spite of being so slender she didn’t look strong enough to handle a Chihuahua, was amazingly good with the big and/or physically powerful dogs. I didn’t know if she was a secret dog whisperer or if one look just scared them into doing what they were told, but whatever it was, it was certainly working. Talisker wouldn’t like her. Talisker would like kind, gentle Daisy. Hopefully Davina would realise that. And I was pretty sure she wouldn’t want to disappoint her best customer in any way.

  By the end of the day, I’d managed to get over the weirdness I’d felt earlier about tomorrow and was actually looking forward to doing something a bit different with my weekend. This evening was another thing entirely though, and I couldn’t believe it had only just occurred to me. Would Marvin be spending the evening in the cottage? Or would he have more exciting things to do in town? Would he expect me, as the uninvited lodger, to put together some kind of dinner? Or would he want me to make myself scarce if he brought this Lizzy back tonight? We hadn’t talked about any kind of arrangements for this evening and neither of us had a mobile number for the other.<
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  Daisy and Nick were going out for a drink after work in Nettles, the quietest of the wine bars in Wintertown, where you knew you had a good chance of getting a table. At lunchtime she’d invited me to go with them. I would have gone anyway as I liked them both, but would Marvin think it rude of me? Maybe I should leave a message on the cottage answer phone, just in case he also wasn’t sure what to do. I had the phone number in my mobile. Without thinking any more about it, I keyed in the contact and waited for the answer phone to kick in.

  ‘Hi, Marvin,’ I started with great originality. ‘It’s Beth. Just thought I’d let you know I’m going for a drink with some friends in Wintertown after work, so I’m not sure what time I’ll be back. See you later …’ If I hadn’t only just met him I’d have known how to word a question like ‘Do you want me to stay out of the way if you’re planning on bringing somebody back?’ But I had only just met him, so as I couldn’t think of anything else to say, I ended the call.

  The very second I put my mobile back in my bag a horrible thought struck me. What if, for some reason or other, Henry Halliday didn’t end up staying in Geneva for as long as he’d told Marvin he needed to? What if he got back tonight, before either myself or Marvin? And what if he was the one who listened to my message?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ‘Earth to Beth, earth to Beth.’ Daisy waved gently at me from across the little table and I realised the waiter was clicking his pen on and off over his pad and looking at me, clearly waiting for us to finish making our order. ‘I thought we’d have a bottle of Pinot Grigio and three glasses. Is that all right with you, or did you want something else?’