The tractor ride turned out to be a lot more fun than the pantomime itself. We arrived at the village hall exhilarated from the bumpy ride across the snow, our cheeks glowing from the cold, and were introduced to everyone.
“He drove out here in December in a Porsche, can you believe it?” the barman from the hotel, who was playing some minor character or other in the pantomime, told anyone who would listen. Xander pretended to laugh at his own apparent incompetence, but his smile looked increasingly like a grimace and I led him away to sit down before he reverted to the rude, arrogant version of himself.
The village hall was freezing cold and smelled strongly of disinfectant, as though somebody was trying to cover up a more sinister aroma. Hard, plastic chairs were set out in rows facing a high stage surrounded by faded red velvet curtains.
“Are you OK?” I asked Xander as he sat down, folding his long legs under the chair. Typically, the boots he had in his car were navy blue Hunters and he still looked like he belonged on a designer photoshoot. I, on the other hand, had to borrow bright pink wellies with yellow flowers on them. The cold air had made my hair static and I was generally feeling a bit of a mess.
“This is going to be awful, isn’t it?” he replied. “What was I thinking?”
“I did wonder.”
“I thought it would be interesting, you know. People-watching.”
I looked around at the other people in the audience – a mix of families, older couples and what appeared to be a Brownie pack – and wondered where they’d all come from and how they’d got through the snow.
Once the show started I realised we were in for a bit of an ordeal. I don’t think anything could have prepared us for how utterly dreadful the pantomime was. The man playing the Pantomime Dame was also the director (and the chairman of a group that was rather ambitiously known as ‘The Graydon Players’) and kept giving stage directions while in character so that nobody could tell which lines were part of the play and which weren’t. Other than the Dame, nobody knew their lines at all, which resulted in long and uncomfortable silences. Some people seemed to be playing more than two roles at once and I couldn’t work out if that was intended or because some of the actors (a word used very loosely) had been snowed in somewhere.
Just as I was beginning to think the first half of the pantomime would never end, the curtains were suddenly drawn.
“Thank Christ for that,” Xander said, standing up and stretching his legs.
“Shall we get a cup of tea?” I asked. “They’re selling them for 50p over there.” I pointed towards the back of the hall.
Everyone was staring at us as we queued for the tea. I felt ridiculously overdressed despite the electric hair and vibrant boots. Xander, meanwhile, stood head and shoulders above almost everyone else and his clothes couldn’t scream ‘I come from London’ more if they’d tried. Everyone already seemed to know he was the hapless Porsche driver but then he doubled down by asking if they had any green tea.
The women who were serving the tea muttered among themselves for a moment.
“Now you’ve thrown the cat among the pigeons,” I whispered to Xander.
After some commotion, it was concluded that there was only PG Tips.
“But we’ve got hot orange squash if you like, love,” one of the women said.
“Never mind,” I said, trying to be as friendly as possible. I put a pound in their collection jar and led Xander away from people before he said something rude and obnoxious and had us exiled from the village forever.
“Green tea,” I heard someone saying as we walked away. “First a Porsche and now green tea.” I could feel Xander tensing up beside me.
“Shall we go outside?” I asked and he nodded.
It was freezing outside but the snow looked beautiful and the sky was completely clear. Xander puffed out a breath that steamed in the cold night air.
“Well, this was a truly terrible idea of mine,” he said.
“Green tea though?” I asked, nudging him gently.
“It’s not like I asked for Lapsang Souchong,” he snapped.
“You should meet Ben,” I said. “He and his girlfriend run the tearoom near the bookshop – it’s called The Two Teas – and he’s a fan of tea that tastes like bonfires.” I heard Xander exhale beside me. “They did the catering for your book launch actually. I can introduce you when we get back to York.”
“If we ever get back,” he sighed despondently. He turned to me. “Today has been a disaster.”
“Has it?” I asked. “I think it’s been fun.”
“You do?” He seemed startled. “With the snow and the pantomime and the bed situation?”
“Well the pantomime was a disastrous idea, admittedly, and the bed situation was… unexpected, but the snow is very pretty, the food and wine were lovely and the company was OK too.”
“Well I stand corrected.” He smiled. “But I don’t know if I can bear to go back in there for the second act.”
“Don’t we have to wait for our tractor ride home?”
“We could walk. It wasn’t that far and it’s straight up the road.”
I looked at the snow doubtfully.
“I could carry you, Ms Taylor,” Xander said. “Like one of your romantic heroes.”
“No need for that,” I said as I started to walk in what I hoped was the direction of the hotel.
“It’s this way,” Xander called after me, pointing in the other direction. I turned around and started walking back towards him when my slightly-too-large boot hit an icy patch and the next thing I knew I was flat on my back in the snow.
“At the very least take my arm,” Xander said, hauling me up onto my feet again. “Unless you want to re-enact one of those sickbed scenes you’re so fond of.”
He offered me his elbow and I reluctantly slipped my hand into the crook of his arm, feeling my stomach tip at little at his proximity, even through all the layers of wool. We walked along in silence for a while, the only sound the crunch of our boots in the snow.
“Can I ask you something?” I said after a few minutes. “Tell me to shut up if you think I’m prying though.”
“OK,” he replied slowly.
“Did your life really used to be like you describe it in Boxed? It’s just… well…” I hesitated. “You seem quite different to how I imagined, what with the clothes and the car and the taste for fancy tea.”
“Aren’t we all a little bit different to the image we put out into the world?” he replied. “Don’t we all have a tendency to eclectic tastes and hypocritical opinions? People tend to have this ridiculous idea that because of my background, I should behave in a certain way, but none of us really fit into preconceived pigeonholes, do we?”
“You don’t really look like a boxer though.”
He chuckled. “And what should a boxer look like?”
“OK, fair point on the pigeonholes.”
“I didn’t box heavyweight, you know,” he said.
“I don’t know what that means.”
“Boxers fight at a certain weight that depends on their own bodyweight. The famous boxers that you’ve probably seen on TV are heavyweights. I was a welterweight, which is much lighter.”
“I see,” I said, not really seeing and not really wanting to ask him how much he weighed.
“And to answer your question,” he went on. “Boxed isn’t as autobiographical as my publishers might have made it out to be.”
“So you didn’t fight for a living?”
“I did for nearly three years, but I wasn’t as successful as the main character in Boxed. Plus I was much more vain than him. I gave up after I broke my nose for the third time and the doctor couldn’t set it straight.” He touched his nose subconsciously. I’d noticed it was crooked the first time I’d met him in the supermarket – I thought it suited him, adding to his rakish good looks.
“And so you just stopped boxing completely?” I asked.
“No,” he replied. “I quit boxing competitively just before I got married and I took over the management of one of the gyms I used to fight at. I’d gone back to school by that point and it freed up a little bit of brain space. But I carried on training there too. I still do, but just to keep fit really. I don’t fight anymore but I find the discipline of the training really helps me keep in shape – physically and mentally.” I tried not to think about the ‘physically’ part that would be lying next to me in bed in the not-too-distant future.
“Did you keep working at the gym until you had your first book published?” I asked.
“Yes…” He hesitated and I wondered if I’d pushed too hard into an area of his life he didn’t really want to talk about. I didn’t say anything else or ask any more questions. I just listened to the crunch of our boots in the snow and waited.
“How old were you when you got married?” he asked eventually.
“Twenty-one. We met in our first year of university and married the summer after we graduated.”
“Did you ever feel you were too young? Or that you grew apart too quickly?”
“We never really got a chance to grow apart,” I replied quietly.
“Oh God I’m sorry, Megan, I—”
“Don’t worry about it. I know what you were trying to ask. Joe and I never got much of a chance to dig deep into whether or not we married too young, whether or not we’d changed. We’d been married less than five years when he was first diagnosed and suddenly my entire life revolved around him and his treatments and his hospital appointments. But I’m guessing that’s what happened to you?”
“I married the sister of one of the guys I used to box with. We’d been dating since we were fifteen and got married just after we both turned twenty, mostly because it seemed the logical thing to do. Except…” He puffed out a sigh, his breath fogging in the air. “I went back to school and then I got into Birkbeck to study English. April, my wife, started to think I was leaving her behind, she kept telling me I thought I was too good for her and our old friends. I never meant to hurt her or make her feel inadequate; I just felt as though I was changing, going in a different direction to everyone else I knew. To be honest, it was as much a surprise to me as it was to her.”
“You never imagined yourself becoming a writer?” I asked.
“Not in a million years.” He laughed. “People like me didn’t grow up to be writers, no matter how much we secretly loved books.”
“But you did it anyway,” I said.
“And trust me, nobody was as surprised as me when that happened.” He paused again. “The book deal was the last straw for April. She moved out just before my first book was published and our divorce was finalised eighteen months later.”
“She couldn’t handle you being a writer?” I asked. It seemed a strange thing to get divorced over.
“She just wanted a different life from the one I was heading towards. She wanted to settle down and have children and I was being invited to publishing parties and talk shows. But it seemed to be the name change that was the final straw for her.”
“Name change?” I asked, even though I knew Xander Stone wasn’t strictly his real name.
He turned to me. “April always just knew me as Alex Stone. Xander was Philomena’s idea, but you must already know that.” He smiled at me. “I doubt you’d have booked me to launch at your shop without doing some research on me.”
“I may remember something about it on your Wikipedia page,” I replied, pretending to sound vague. “Which might I say is otherwise very much lacking in detail.”
“Philomena manages all that,” he said. “I make her keep it as impersonal as possible.” He paused. “Anyway, I don’t know why, but the name thing seemed to be the final straw for April – the confirmation that I’d changed too much to ever go back to who I used to be.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, waiting for him to go on if he needed to.
“I’m sorry,” I said eventually, when it was clear he’d finished.
“You have nothing to be sorry about. Plenty of people go through a divorce and in the grand scheme of things ours was fairly amicable. I still see April’s brother from time to time and I know that she’s happy, married again now with their second kid on the way, living in Bermondsey. If it hadn’t been for Mum dying at the same time as my decree absolute arriving I’d probably have come through it all fairly unscathed, but…”
“Grief is a bitch, right?” I said. It was a heavy, maudlin thing to say but I figured he’d understand.
“How did you cope?” he asked. “How did you manage after your husband…” He hesitated again. “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
“At first I coped because I had to.” I looked down at my brightly coloured boots in the snow. “Like I said, from the moment Joe was diagnosed my life revolved around him – his appointments, his treatment, giving him the best chance of surviving. Work were amazing and let me take as much time off as I needed but when Joe’s leukaemia returned, a few months after we thought he’d gone into remission, I knew I had to take a sabbatical. Until that point everything had been about getting Joe better, but after that a part of me knew he might never get better and I just wanted to spend as much time with him as I possibly could, that work could wait, that Joe needed me.”
“And afterwards?” Xander asked, so quietly I almost didn’t hear him.
“I remember walking out of the church after Joe’s funeral service and my boss was there. It was so kind of her to come, to support me, but I knew as soon as I saw her that I’d never go back to my job. But you asked me how I coped and the answer is, that after Joe died I didn’t. It was easier to cope when he was ill because he needed me to be strong, but afterwards…”
“Everything fell apart,” Xander said in the voice of someone who knew.
“Let’s just say that the story you were telling me earlier about before you got Gus…”
“The story about lying in bed drinking vodka that made me sound so incredibly attractive,” he said, half-smiling.
“That one,” I replied. “Well it was familiar – except I lay on the sofa in my dressing gown eating peanut butter out of the jar until my mother came down from York and told me it was time to pack up Joe’s things and make a decision about the flat.”
“How did you know when it was time?” Xander asked.
“To move out of London and sell the flat?”
He nodded.
“I don’t think you do know, do you? And I know for many people packing up their loved one’s belongings is the hardest part, but it wasn’t like that for me. I actually wanted to do it but couldn’t find the energy. I spent months living in a cloud of inertia and guilt.” I took a shaky breath as I remembered that feeling of being stuck on the sofa, unable to move or make a decision. Sometimes it was only when I looked back that I could see how far I’d come. “How about you?”
“Having four very noisy siblings makes even the hardest tasks a little bit easier.” He smiled.
“Tell me about them.”
“I’m the oldest, my brother is eighteen months younger than me, then come the three girls – whose sole purpose is to make my life a misery.” He laughed. “I don’t know how my parents managed. There’s only seven years between me and my youngest sister. By the time Mum was my age she had five kids under ten. I can’t even imagine that.” I watched his face soften as he talked.
“I can’t even imagine having siblings,” I said. “Family’s important to you, isn’t it?” I asked.
“I’ve always felt a bit responsible for them, even now they’re all grown up and everyone except me and Ivy have kids of their own.”
“Which sister is Ivy?”
“The youngest – she’s the only other one who went to university. She studied textile design at Central St Martins and works for a big fashion retailer now. Her ambition is to work for Chanel.”
“Wow.”
“She’s pretty amazing – they all are really, even though I complain about them.” He paused. “Was it lonely growing up an only child?” he asked.
“I never thought about it really. Besides, I had a bookshop full of books!”
Ahead of us we could see the hotel now and the glowing lights in its windows felt like a beacon of warmth and hope after our cold walk and rather depressing conversation. But at the same time I felt reluctant for the walk to end, and not just because it meant that sharing a room with Xander loomed ever closer. As we’d walked from the village I’d felt able to talk to him about Joe in a way I’d never talked to anyone before, and part of me didn’t want to step back into the hotel or for the conversation to end.
“Can I ask you one other question?” Xander said as we approached the steps leading up to the hotel entrance. He turned to me, his eyes locking on mine.
I nodded, my mouth feeling dry.
“You said you felt guilty about your husband’s death, but why?” he asked. “It’s been, what, three years?”
“Three and a half,” I corrected quietly.
“So why do you still feel guilty?”
How on earth could I answer that? I looked away from him, tears burning the backs of my eyes as I thought about watching that horrible hospital coffee drip into the plastic cup. I was back in the hospital, standing in front of the drinks vending machine while my husband died alone. As I thought about it I took a step away from Xander, letting go of his arm, his proximity suddenly feeling as though it was too much. Because while I knew it was time to move on with my life, the guilt was still there and I didn’t know what to do about that. I felt as though I was stuck on a carousel, going round and round for evermore, never able to get off, never able to catch my breath.
I opened my mouth to try to say something, anything, but I was interrupted by a riot of barking. When I looked up Gus was standing in the hotel entrance looking for all the world like he owned the place.
“Hey, buddy,” Xander said, running up the steps to pick up his dog. “What are you doing here?”
One of the girls we’d left Gus with appeared then. “Sorry, Mr Stone,” she said. “I think he must have heard your voice.”
“I hope he’s behaved himself,” Xander said.
“Good as gold!”
Xander turned to me. “I could do with a brandy to warm up. What do you reckon?”
“Brandy sounds great,” I replied, following him and Gus into the bar.
Gus and I sat down on a sofa near the bar and Xander came back with two glasses of brandy a few minutes later. We sipped our drinks in companionable silence for a few moments.
“You asked me about the guilt,” I said after a while.
“And you should probably tell me to mind my own business. Grief is a personal thing and I shouldn’t have intruded on that.”
“I wasn’t there when Joe died.” I took a breath. It still hurt so much to think about it. I felt Xander shift on the sofa next to me. “I promised him I wouldn’t leave him alone, that I’d stay with him as long as he needed me and I broke that promise.” I heard the catch in my voice and I closed my eyes to stop myself crying. I felt Xander’s hand, warm and comforting, on my back.
“I only went to get a coffee.” I took another deep breath and opened my eyes, turning to look at him. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive myself. Some days I feel as though I’m finding myself again, that I’m starting to live again and then I remember what I did and everything spirals backwards and I feel so stuck.”
“Is that how you felt just now?” he asked. “Just before Gus interrupted us?”
I nodded.
“And why you’ve found it so hard to move on?”
“Is it that obvious?” I tried to smile.
“Perhaps only to people who understand what you’ve been through.”
“Everyone seems to think I should just be getting on with my life. Mum and my friends are always trying to encourage me to go out more, to start dating. Even Joe’s parents think I need to stop living like a nun. But how can I, when remembering that day can stop me in my tracks still?” I hadn’t meant to tell Xander any of this, but there was something about him that made me want to open up, to say the words out loud, to admit how far I’d come but also, no matter how hard I tried, how I sometimes felt as though I was being pulled back down.
“I think,” he began slowly. “That when the time is right and when you meet the right person you’ll be able to talk it through with them and then you’ll be able to start letting it go. I don’t believe that life is ever the same again after loss, but I do believe that life can be good again. Eventually.”
“What if…” I asked quietly. “What if I meet the right person before I’m ready?” The words hung in the air between us and Xander’s hand moved on my back.
“If that person is even remotely worthy of you, Megan,” Xander replied, his voice almost a whisper, “then they’ll wait until you’re ready.”
My stomach flipped over. Did he know I was talking about him? Was he talking about himself? Did he feel this spark of electricity between us or was I imagining it? But why else would he be taking me for lunch and dancing quadrilles?
I’d have thought that was obvious.
I turned to look at him and he was so close to me I could smell the woody scent of his aftershave; I could hear his breath. He leaned towards me as he tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.
“Megan, I…” he began.
“Can I get you anything else?” said a loud jovial voice from somewhere behind my shoulder. I turned, moving away from Xander to look at one of the waiters who had come to clear away our empty glasses. I realised we were the only people left in the bar.
“No, I think we’re done, aren’t we?”
Xander nodded, not meeting my eye, and I started to stand up. Gus woke up and started barking again.
“I’d better take him out for a pee,” Xander said. “We’ll take our time to give you a chance to get ready.” He handed me a key card. “I got us one each so you don’t have to worry about letting us back in.”
By the time he and Gus returned from their night-time perambulations I was already in bed with the duvet pulled up to my chin, reading a copy of Persuasion that I’d found among the pile of Penguin classics by the side of the sofa in our room. The hotel had been as good as its word and sent up toiletries, and a fluffy robe, which I’d decided, in the absence of pyjamas, to sleep in. The thought of sleeping in only my underwear was more than I could handle, especially after whatever it was that had just almost happened in the bar.
“What are you reading?” Xander asked as he started to settle Gus down on some blankets the hotel had lent us.
“I found a copy of Persuasion,” I replied.
“Your favourite romance,” Xander said. “What’s so special about it? No spoilers though – I haven’t finished it yet.”
I closed the book and sat up in bed. “There are a lot of problematic heroes in romantic fiction,” I began. “Heathcliff for starters…”
“I’m afraid I never made it through Wuthering Heights.”
“I don’t blame you – but don’t tell Bella I said that; she’d never forgive me. There’s also Rochester in Jane Eyre.”
Xander shook his head. “Borderline psychopathic,” he said.
“Exactly! And you already know I’m not Darcy’s biggest fan. But Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion is a genuinely good man. OK, so he’s pretty crap at verbal communication but he loves Anne and…”
Xander held up his hand. “Stop,” he said. “Spoilers! Let’s have this conversation when I’ve finished the book.”
He went into the bathroom then and shut the door and I realised that I was inordinately happy at the thought there would be further conversations about books with Xander on another day.
I stopped reading when he came back into the room and turned off the lamp by my bed so the only light was the lamp on his side – or the side I’d allocated to him when I’d got into bed and balanced precariously on the edge so as to be as far away from him as possible. I’d found some spare pillows in the wardrobe that I’d almost put down the middle of the bed but decided it was a step too far. He had promised to keep his body parts to himself after all.
“You sure you don’t want me to sleep on the sofa?” Xander asked as he pulled his jumper over his head. As he did so, the T-shirt he was wearing underneath rode up, exposing a flat muscular abdomen and a line of dark hair that ran from his navel to his belt buckle. The wave of desire that hit me was so unfamiliar that it made me feel almost nauseous and I had to turn on to my side, rolling up into a tight ball with my back to him.
“No,” I replied, my voice sounding tight and strangled. “It’s fine.”
I tried not to think about him getting undressed just a few metres from me, but the harder I tried not to think about semi-naked Xander the more I thought about semi-naked Xander. It wasn’t until I felt the mattress dip as he got into bed and heard the click of his light turning out that I found myself able to relax a little.
“Megan,” he said quietly into the darkness. “You said that you knew you couldn’t go back to work after your husband died, but do you see yourself working in the bookshop forever?”
“No,” I replied immediately.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
I thought for a moment – I hadn’t got around to planning this far ahead.
“I have no idea,” I replied.
Just before I fell asleep I remembered Philomena Bloom’s card, which I’d kept in my purse.