Helen closed her eyes. In her imagination she could see him, feel him, almost taste him as he leaned towards her. She savoured every detail, each one so familiar from a million replays of this one perfect moment. The crisp cotton of his plain blue shirt; the breadth of his shoulders; the hint of stubble on his normally clean-shaven jaw; the bright electric blue of his eyes. Her skin flushed hot with the anticipation of ...
‘Helen!’
Her eyes flew open. The kettle in front of her was boiling, sending wisps of steam towards her face. Two mugs, with teabags already sitting in place. She looked around. Emily was standing in the doorway. ‘You were miles away. What were you thinking about?’
Helen turned back to face the kettle. ‘Nothing. Just a daydream.’ She poured the water with a shaking hand, and told herself to be calm. Emily wasn’t a mind reader. She didn’t know who Helen was thinking about. She handed the less chipped of the two mugs to her friend, and watched as Emily topped it up with three spoons of sugar.
They carried their tea upstairs into the spare bedroom. This was the point of Emily’s visit. She was here to help repaint the bedroom before Helen’s new lodger arrived. Emily sat down cross-legged on the floor. Her decorating clothes were straight out of the pages of a magazine interior design feature. The pristine denim dungarees were apparently brand new for the occasion. Her blonde hair was twisted under a bandana, with a few wisps hanging down around her ears. Helen’s shapeless jogging bottoms, paint-stained ‘Historians can always find a date’ T-shirt and unwashed ponytail were no competition in the decorating style-stakes. Helen took a sip of her tea, before setting her mug down and using a screwdriver to prise open the can of paint.
Emily looked around. ‘This is a really nice room. It’s a shame you have to have a lodger. It would be great as an office.’ Her eyes lit up. ‘Or a nursery.’
Helen bristled. ‘A nursery for whom?’
Emily shrugged. ‘For children.’
Helen shook her head. ‘Given that I’m single and have no intention of having a baby, I thought a lodger made more sense.’ She stirred the paint in the can. ‘Anyway I need the money.’
Her friend didn’t answer. Emily lived with her father in the house she’d grown up in, and worked as his assistant. It wasn’t nice to be nosey, so Helen had never asked, but she suspected that Emily wasn’t overburdened with mundane issues like having to pay rent.
Helen tipped some paint into a roller tray and stood up. Emily was being kind; it wasn’t a particularly nice room. It was small and pokey and the windows had clearly been fitted by trained chimps so there was a permanent draft from under the frame. That wouldn’t be fixed with a fresh coat of paint. There was also a worrying brown mark slowly extending across part of the ceiling. That could be hidden, at least until it seeped through again.
The stepladder was borrowed from a neighbour, which meant Helen wasn’t in a position to complain about its slightly wobbly nature. She balanced her paint tray at the top and climbed up. Emily stayed sitting with her tea on the floor. Helen resisted the urge to flick paint at her head. ‘You could start on one of the other walls.’
Emily glanced absently around the room. She took another sip of tea. ‘I’m so glad you asked me over today. I couldn’t stand it at home.’
Helen had already heard the bare bones of the story, told with rapid fire anxiety and breathless indignation, the second Emily had come through the door. ‘Tell me again. Where did he find her?’
Emily shook her head. ‘I don’t even want to think about it. It’s horrifying. My dad and ...’ she spluttered out of words. ‘My dad and a cocktail waitress. It’s disgusting. He goes away for two weeks and comes back with a cocktail waitress.’
It did sound out of character. Emily’s father was Helen’s boss. He was a comfortable, slightly tweedy, slightly distracted sort of a man. A doting father. A perfectly innocuous boss. Not a man you could easily picture having a steamy holiday romance, let alone bringing that romance back with him and moving her in to the family home. Helen’s inner academic tutted. She was making an assumption. Of course Professor Midsomer might see himself as more than simply someone’s father and someone’s boss.
‘It’s horrible. My dad doesn’t need girlfriends.’
Helen paused. She understood Emily’s squeamishness at the idea of her father having a romantic life. Helen’s own mum was a single parent, and Helen had clear memories of being mortified as a teenager, when she discovered that her mum had been going out on dates. She tried a new tack. ‘Well you’re grown up. Maybe he was lonely now you don’t need him so much.’
Emily found a paintbrush and started wafting paint in the general direction of the wall. Helen winced. Perhaps she could put a wardrobe thereto hide Emily’s efforts. Of course she couldn’t. A wardrobe would cost money. Emily pouted. ‘I do still need him though. And it’s my house. He can’t just move someone into my house.’
Helen didn’t point out that it was very much Professor Midsomer’s house and, as such, he could move in whoever he damn well pleased.
‘And you haven’t met her. She’s mad. Apparently she took him to a crystal healing centre while they were in Italy. Crystal healing?’
Helen stifled a smile. Emily was dead against crystal healing, but was a serial follower of the fashionable diet of the week, so long as the diets never required foregoing the mountains of sugar she laced her tea and coffee with, and the chocolate bar Helen knew she scoffed at her desk part way through most afternoons. To Helen’s mind, crystal healing and fad diets were just different flavours of snake oil. She watched Emily jabbing her paintbrush at the wall. It was too much. Helen clambered down her ladder, grabbed a second roller tray and roller and handed them to her friend. ‘This is better for walls. Just don’t put too much paint on the roller.’
Emily shrugged. ‘I’ve never done decorating before. Dad usually gets somebody in. Why aren’t you getting somebody in?’
Helen shook her head. She was an hourly paid lecturer. That meant she had no permanent contract with the university, and an income that fluctuated between nothing and very little, depending on how many students signed up for the modules she taught. Her pre-credit crunch bank hadn’t seen the pittance she earned as any barrier to providing her with a mortgage. Helen was finding it a growing barrier to paying the mortgage back. ‘Because somebodies cost money. You don’t know what you’re doing, but I can pay you in tea.’
She watched Emily paint for a second. The roller seemed to be helping. ‘Maybe you need to relax a bit about the cocktail waitress. If it’s a holiday romance, it’ll burn out on its own soon enough.’
Emily’s face tensed a little bit, but she didn’t respond.
Helen continued. ‘Anyway, you probably won’t be living there much longer. You were talking about moving in with Dominic, weren’t you?’ She fought to keep her tone light, as if she was interested casually, not in an obsessively-in-love way at all.
‘That’s not the point.’
‘Right.’ Helen climbed back up her ladder. She didn’t care. Dominic could move in with whoever he chose. They were friends. She was friends with Emily. She was friends with Emily’s boyfriend. It was all very straightforward.
‘He’s a bit distracted at the moment anyway.’
‘With his dad?’ Dominic’s dad had been in and out of hospital for months. High blood pressure, a suspected mini-stroke, heart palpitations, chest pain; it was a catalogue of the consequences of a lifetime of sausage, bacon and a fried slice, but no less worrying for its predictability.
Emily stopped painting. ‘I wish you could come to the party tomorrow. I need the moral support.’
‘Isn’t Dominic going?’
‘If he gets back in time. You could come too.’
Helen shook her head. ‘I’m not invited, and anyway, Alex is moving in tomorrow.’
Emily pouted, as she usually did when she didn’t get her own way. ‘You really think it’ll peter out?’
Helen paused. ‘What?’
‘Dad and the cocktail whore.’ The anxiety in Emily’s voice didn’t match the vigour of the language.
Helen nodded. ‘I’m sure it will.’