CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

As Ben motored across the river in the dinghy, he couldn’t quite wipe the smile from his face. Life had a funny way of throwing surprises at you. If someone had told him six months ago that he’d fall in love with one of those glitzy women from the magazine covers, he’d probably have hurt himself laughing. But, in his eyes, Louise wasn’t one of them, anyway.

Through a series of text messages that morning, they’d decided that since it was a Sunday he should come to Whitehaven as usual. The hike up the hill towards the house seemed to last forever. It didn’t stop Jas complaining that he was going too fast and pulling on his jacket to slow him down. Finally, he caught a glimpse of white masonry between the trees. Jas started running—probably because she had cakes on the brain.

Two seconds later, he sprinted after her.

When he laid eyes on Louise, who had obviously been hovering in the empty kitchen waiting for him, he hadn’t counted on how hard it would be to be only feet away, but not able to pull her into his arms and kiss her senseless. Not yet, anyway.

It was torture, having to go out to the greenhouse and look at the plants while Louise and Jas made banana muffins together—bonding time. When he returned, he drank his cup of tea so fast he scalded his throat. Did he care?

‘Come on, Jas. You and I are going for a bit of a walk.’

Jas rolled her eyes. ‘Aw. Can’t I have another muffin?’

‘When we get back.’ He walked over to the back door and handed her coat to her, then, over the top of Jas’s head, he winked at Louise. She rewarded him with a smile.

As soon as the door closed behind them and they started making their way along the path towards the old stable complex, his heart began to thump. ‘Jas? You like Louise, don’t you?’

Jas bent down to pick up a stick. ‘Yeah. She’s cool—and really pretty.’

No arguments from him there.

Suddenly his mouth went dry. ‘How would you feel if she … if we …’ heck, this was more nerve-wracking than when he’d proposed to Megan ‘… if she was my girlfriend?’ he finished in a rush.

Jas twiddled the stick in her fingers. ‘Cool!’ she said, suddenly, smiling up at him. ‘Can I have another muffin now?’ And, without waiting for him, she ran off back to the house.

He shook his head as a grin spread on his face. How easy had that been? He’d been expecting tears, arguments about why couldn’t he and Mummy live together again, but Jas had taken it totally in her stride. Maybe he wasn’t doing such a bad job of bringing her up after all.

Then, realising he could now go back to the house and, at the very least, hug Louise in front of Jas, he started to jog. If only telling the rest of the world could be that simple and uneventful, but he didn’t have to worry about that yet. For now, this was their little secret.

Ben should have suspected something was up as soon as he walked into the newsagent’s to collect his morning paper. Instead of the buzz of gossip, the rustle of paper and the ding of the old-fashioned till, there was silence, only broken by the echo of the brass bell that had announced his arrival.

There were around six people in the shop and they all stopped what they were doing and looked at him.

He felt decidedly uncomfortable as he headed for the rack full of newspapers. Had he turned green overnight or grown an extra head? What was up with these people?

As he bent to pick up his usual broadsheet there was a collective gasp.

Okay, that was enough. He stood up, and turned around to face them, his arms wide. ‘What?’

Still, no one uttered a word but, one by one, they all looked at something behind him on the magazine and newspaper rack. He had the feeling that if he turned round a trap door would open underneath him and he’d be standing on thin air.

Slowly, he twisted round and scanned the display. The other villagers burst into motion and chatter. More than one darted out of the shop without buying anything.

What the …?

He shut his eyes and opened them again, just to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. There was a woman he knew very well on the front of one of the tabloids, looking grim and angry with her arms crossed and her eyes blazing. Only, it wasn’t Louise.

It was Megan.

‘LOUISE GOT HER CLAWS INTO MY MAN,’ the headline screamed in tall white letters on a black background. Below were two smaller pictures, one a heart-shaped photo of him and Megan from the last summer holiday they’d shared together—graphically altered by putting a jagged rip between the two of them—and a headshot of Louise, taken from below, so it seemed as if she was looking down her nose at something.

He snatched the paper off the shelf. What the hell?

Megan had to have something to do with this. How else had the paper got that photo of them? What on earth was she playing at? Didn’t she think anything through? What if Jasmine saw this? Or even her friends?

At first he was relieved that there only seemed to be three copies on display but, eventually, his brain kicked in and he realised that must be because the rest had been sold. He grabbed all three of them, marched up to the counter and threw a few coins down. He wasn’t about to wait for change.

‘You should be ashamed of yourself for selling such trash,’ he told Mrs Green.

She gave him a stony look. ‘Well, Mister Oliver, we all know Megan’s been gone a while, and that Thornton woman has only just arrived, but you know what they say …’

Suddenly, he really didn’t want to know what the mysterious ‘they’ had to say about anything. He turned and walked towards the door. Mrs Green raised her voice, just so he wouldn’t miss her pearl of wisdom as he opened the door and exited the shop.

‘There’s no smoke without fire.’

What a pity the old stable block had deteriorated so badly. Louise pushed gingerly at one of the doors. The building was huge—a double-height room with gigantic arched doors at one end, big enough to take a carriage or two. The low-ceilinged central section had enough stalls for one, two, three … eight horses.

There was a hatch in the ceiling above one of the abandoned stalls. What was upstairs? Those skylights in the steep slate-tiled roof had to be there for a reason. She was dying to find out. Or, at least, she was dying to think of something other than the email that had blithely pinged into her inbox earlier that morning, and pulling buildings apart and putting them back together again was a familiar displacement activity for her at present. Safe. Comforting. All-consuming.

In a corner she found a stepladder, obviously not authentic Georgian as it was made of aluminium. Still, it would do. She dragged it underneath the hatch and unfolded it, making sure the safety catches were in place.

She was up the steps in a shot and, when she pushed the hatch door, she was showered with dust and dirt and probably a hundred creepy-crawlies. Holding onto the ladder for support, she brushed her hair down with her free hand.

When she’d stopped coughing and blinking, she poked her head through the hole. Enough light was filtering through the streaky grey skylights for her too see a long loft, with fabulous supporting beams in the roof. She turned round to look in the other direction. Goodness, this must run the whole length of the stables. It was easily sixty feet long. Just think what an amazing guest house this would make! There was room for at least four good-sized bedrooms.

Louise turned round and sat on the large, flat step on the top of the stepladder. She already had a house full of rooms she didn’t know what to do with. What on earth did she need a guest house for? And shouldn’t she find something more worthwhile to do with her life than prettying up her own house?

‘Louise!’

That was Ben’s voice. A second later, he appeared in the stable door, breathless and dishevelled.

‘Up here,’ she called, her skin cold and tingling as she peered into the dingy interior. He spotted her and ran to the bottom of the ladder. How was she going to tell him? How could she prepare him for the poisonous taste of her world? Just when she thought things were finally going right, all her old choices—the kind of life she’d led, the kind of man she’d married—came back to bite her on the arse.

He wanted stability for Jas and as much as she thought he liked her, she guessed he would back away now, hunker down and protect his daughter. And she wouldn’t blame him one bit. If she could escape all this, she would.

‘What are you doing …? Never mind.’ He held a hand out and she used it to steady herself as she descended the ladder. He looked unusually pale and serious, his mouth a thin line. Her heart began to stammer.

‘What is it? Is everything okay?’ she asked.

‘No! Everything is not bloody okay!’ He pulled away from her, then marched to the door.

‘Ben!’

He pulled a folded newspaper from his back pocket. ‘It’s Megan. She’s outdone herself this time and I am so, so, sorry … I could happily throttle her!’

‘Ben?’

‘I just went into the newsagents this morning and … well, there it was … and the whole village staring …’

She tried to get eye contact but he was talking to himself, reliving some memory, more than he was talking to her. ‘Ben!’

‘And we were trying to keep it secret, for the kids …’

She grabbed him by the shoulder. ‘Ben!’

He stopped mid-sentence and stared at her.

‘I know.’

He blinked, then looked down at the paper in his hands.

‘Toby’s agent sent me an email. He has a press agency that deals with all his cuttings …’ She shrugged and gave him what she hoped was an encouraging smile. ‘Seems the cat is out of the bag.’

The frown lines on his forehead deepened. ‘How can you be so blasé about it? Don’t you know what she said about you … about me? Don’t you know how she made it sound?’

Yes, she knew. She knew Megan had told the papers that she and Ben were on the verge of a reconciliation when nasty old Louise had slunk up and stolen her man away. People would believe it. Even after it had come out that Toby had been unfaithful, the public had forgiven him and, somehow, there seemed to be an undercurrent of opinion that it had been her fault. She was too cold, too remote. Couldn’t give him what he needed. Never mind that she’d given and given and given, and it still hadn’t been enough.

Well, they were right about that. What Toby really needed was a good kick in the pants. And she’d have loved to have been the one to dish it out, but she wasn’t about to generate even more column inches by doing so. She only cared about the smudged print on the paper if it affected how Ben felt, whether it was going to change things between them. Anything else was irrelevant.

‘Forget it,’ she said.

He stared at the paper again, then hurled it into the nearest stall. ‘I can’t!’

Louise thought back to her first really awful press story. It had hurt, cut deep. Nowadays she just usually ignored them. But Ben wasn’t used to this. In one fell swoop, his ordered, stable little universe had been set on its head.

Silently, she walked over to him and put her arms round him. He was shaking with rage. She kissed him gently on the cheek, on the nose, on the lips, until he wound his arms round her and kissed her back.

It didn’t matter what anyone else thought. He’d understand that eventually.

‘Ben,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘It doesn’t matter. I don’t care.’

He pulled back and his frown deepened. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘Do? Nothing.’

‘Nothing.’ He repeated the word as if he didn’t understand its meaning. ‘What do you mean “nothing”?

She shrugged. ‘As far as the press is concerned, we just don’t comment. Any response from us will just keep the story running.’

‘But I don’t want people to think those things about you. It’s not the truth!’

She silenced him with a kiss. He was so sweet for being worried about her, rather than fuming on his own behalf. ‘The reporters don’t care about truth. They care about the story—what’s juiciest, what’s going to sell more papers. The people who read that trash might think I’m a man-eating witch, but I don’t care. What we think matters—what we believe about ourselves.’

‘That doesn’t seem fair.’

‘But that’s how it is and we’ve just got to deal with it.’ She exhaled long and hard. ‘You might want to take Jas away for a few days, just in case people turn up wanting an interview or a picture. You’ve seen for yourself what some of them can be like.’

He nodded. ‘I could ring up my sister in Exeter. She’s back home now and could certainly have us until Jas starts school again, but you’ll be here … all on your own.’

She took him by the hand and they walked out into the bright winter morning, the sun so low in the sky it hadn’t risen above the tops of the bare trees. ‘This isn’t nice, but it’s ‘normal’ in my world. I can deal with this—I have done for more than a decade. It’s Jas who matters at the moment.’

He nodded. ‘She’s with a friend in the village right now. I’d better go and tell her we’re off on an impromptu visit to Aunty Tammy’s.’

Much as he’d like to wring Megan’s neck right that very second, there were some important issues they needed to discuss. He jabbed at the doorbell of her flat for a third time and left his thumb on the button so it rang loud and long.

Nothing. And any calls he made to her mobile were going straight through to voicemail.

Why? Why had she done this? Had she not thought what sort of effect this would have on Jasmine?

No, of course she hadn’t. Megan always thought of herself first and everyone else second. It had been her decision to end their marriage, her decision to leave Jasmine with him—saying she needed to learn to be a whole person herself before she could be a truly devoted mother—and now that he’d finally picked himself up and was moving on with his life, she was trying to sabotage that too.

Perhaps it was just as well he hadn’t caught up with her, he thought as he climbed into his car and slammed the door. Choosing to hurt Louise had been cowardly; she was an easy target.

He put the car into gear and made the thirty-minute drive back to Lower Hadwell. By the time he got back to his cottage it was almost two o’clock and he was supposed to be packing to go to his sister’s before picking Jasmine up at three. It wasn’t until he’d parked his car and walked round to the front of his cottage that he noticed the figure on his doorstep. Megan was sat on the low step, her face buried in her knees, drawing in jerky breaths.

Uh-oh. That damsel-in-distress thing inside him kicked to life again, robbing him of the nice head of anger he’d got going. How messed up must she be to think that selling her story to the papers would cause anything but a headache? For everyone—including her.

She stopped sniffing when she heard him walking towards her and raised her head to look at him. Her eyes were pink and her face was blotchy and puffy. He might feel sorry for her, but that didn’t mean he was going to let her off the hook completely.

‘Why, Megan?’

Her face crumpled, then she sniffed loudly again and wiped her nose with a crushed tissue. ‘I spent the last two years following my heart, trying to work out what would make me happy, what would make me feel like a whole person …’ She patted her palm against her chest.

Ben put his hands in his pockets. ‘Well, maybe you did the right thing in leaving me. You obviously weren’t happy, living here with me and Jasmine.’

She shook her head and rearranged the almost disintegrated tissue so she could use it for one last blow. ‘No, I was happy—sort of. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted more.’ She fixed him with her clear, blue eyes. ‘Only, I don’t seem to be able to work out what more is.’

Welcome to the human race, honey.

He nearly always had a small packet of tissues in his pocket—required kit with a child in tow. He fished a packet out of his jacket and offered them to Megan, but her eyes were glazed and she was staring off into the distance.

‘And then I realised—oh, about a month ago—that not only was I not any happier than I had been when we were together, but that I was less happy. The grass truly wasn’t greener on the other side of the fence.’ Spotting the tissues, she reached up and but instead of taking them from him, she clasped on to his hand. ‘You’re a good man, Ben. And I was too blind to see that.’

She looked at him with large blue eyes and her breath caught in her throat. Oh, no. He had a feeling he knew what was coming next and he willed her not to say it. He pulled his hand away and stuffed the packet of tissues into her fingers.

‘Megan, we can’t go back. You don’t love me that way any more, not really. And I don’t want to be with you by default, because you can’t find anything or anyone you like better. I deserve more too.’

She pressed her lips together and nodded and a fresh batch of tears ran down her face. She squeezed his hand. ‘Yes, you do. And I’m sorry for what I did. I suppose I got into a real state because I was …’ she struggled getting the next word out ‘… jealous.’ She gave him a weak smile. ‘It was pretty obvious, you know. The pair if you couldn’t keep your eyes off each other. Just … don’t let her hurt you, Ben. I see that same ache in her that I have inside me.’

No. Megan was wrong about that. Louise was stronger than she was. But he wasn’t going to stand on his own doorstep and discuss that right now. He reached for Megan’s hand and pulled her up to stand.

Sometimes his ex-wife could seem like a force of nature—a cyclone—twisting her way through other people’s lives and leaving destruction in her wake but, right now, she looked more like a frightened child.

He put his arms around her and gave her a brotherly hug. ‘We both deserve more, Meg. Don’t you forget that.’

She nodded and kissed him softly on the cheek. ‘Thanks, Ben. Jasmine is lucky to have a dad like you. And, I think—’ she paused to take a shuddering sniff ‘—she ought to stay with you for the time being. I reckon I have a few things to sort out first.’

Relief washed through him. That had to be the most mature and sensible decision Megan had made in a long time. Perhaps there was hope for her yet.