On Saturday evening, after another blissful night at the Royal West Country Show, with Sophie marvelling how she and Alex could still function facing the crowds of visitors all day and making love all night, they returned to Little Somerby, and had to readjust to normal life once more. Despite the hard work that the show had involved, to a certain extent it had felt like a holiday. Both of them definitely felt as though they were coming back to earth when they parted.
Sophie had gone back with Alex to Lily’s cottage to check on her grandmother, who seemed pleased to see them both. Jane had been taking care of both Lily and dog walking duties for the duration of the show, and Barney was ecstatic to see them back. After a brief cup of tea with her grandmother, Sophie, with more than a little regret, kissed Alex goodbye lingeringly on the doorstep of her grandmother’s cottage. Jane was flying back out to Marseille tomorrow afternoon, and mother and daughter both wanted to spend a little time together before she left.
‘I’ll see you on Monday,’ Alex murmured, also reluctant to be parted from her. Neither of them felt comfortable at the prospect of sharing a room under Lily’s roof, and Sophie couldn’t face answering her mother’s Spanish Inquisition should she present Alex at the breakfast table the next morning, so they decided for the moment to sleep separately. Besides, it wasn’t as if they wouldn’t be seeing plenty of each other at work anyway.
*
As it was, they both got swept up in the next big event in the Carter’s calendar, and this one was quite a bit closer to home. As soon as the Royal West Country Show was over, the team at Carter’s were well into preparations for Jack Carter’s memorial celebration, which would be happening on what would have been his eighty-fifth birthday in the middle of August.
Carter’s Cider liked to host various social events on the site during the year, as a way of keeping in touch with the village that had always been so accommodating and supportive of the business and its rapid expansion, but this particular event also had a deeper resonance. Jack had been a figurehead for the business in life with his charisma, sense of humour and encyclopaedic knowledge of apples. If his son, Matthew, had been the driving force behind the business’ expansion in recent years, Jack Carter had perennially been seen as the heart of the brand. His death eighteen months ago had been sudden but not unexpected, but it had still left a hole in the Carter family and also the cider business. The memorial celebration would be a good way of marking his life and his legacy, as well as a reason to have a great night. The last of which, Jack would most definitely have approved of.
All of the cider farm’s staff had been invited, and, such was the family ethos of the business, it wasn’t going to be a night where they’d be forced to stand on ceremony. Matthew had seen to it that outside caterers and waiting staff had been hired, so no one felt like an employee. The invitation had been clear: wear something colourful, and dance the night away. Meredith had vetoed the use of ‘eat, drink and be Merry’ on the invitations, for obvious reasons.
Alex, charmed to have received his own invitation to the party, was also feeling distinctly nervous about it. Such a markedly family oriented gathering was an unnerving prospect on one level. He ached, since his nights at the Royal West Country Show, to level with Sophie, but the deeper he got, the harder it was to find the right words. How could he explain to her now, after everything they’d said and done, who he really was?
Sophie, who was looking at her own invitation as Alex opened his, smiled. ‘You OK?’ They’d managed to maintain a professional distance during the day, partly because Alex had been working with other departments for the past week or so, but he was still at a desk in her and David’s office during the down times.
Alex mentally shook himself. ‘I’m fine.’ He smiled, dragging himself back to the present. ‘This looks like fun,’ he said, gesturing to the invitation.
‘Should be a good night,’ Sophie replied. ‘Did you, er, want to be my date for it?’
Alex put down his invitation and wandered over to Sophie’s desk. He took her hand and pulled her up from her chair, drawing her closer to him. ‘There is nothing I’d like more,’ he said softly. Just as he was dipping his head to kiss her, a cough from behind them made them both leap apart guiltily.
‘Not on work time, if you don’t mind,’ David said gruffly, passing Sophie a stack of printouts from the latest vat tests. ‘You might want to check number fifteen this morning,’ he said. ‘Its stats aren’t quite as they should be.’
‘Thanks for the heads up,’ Sophie said, feeling the blush creeping up her cheeks. She suppressed a smile; David still preferred to check the numbers as they were spewed out on an ancient dot-matrix printer, rather than carry an iPad around with him at work, so she made a show of looking at the sheaf of paper that he passed her, before logging in to the real time numbers on her own iPad.
‘And you’d better head on over to the presses.’ David turned to Alex. ‘The boys over there don’t like to be kept waiting.’
‘Sure, right away,’ Alex said, feeling like a teenager who’d been caught by his date’s father. He was sure he didn’t imagine the faintest of twinkles in David’s eye as the older man slipped back out of the office, though. Laughing nervously, he looked back at Sophie. ‘See you at lunchtime?’
Sophie nodded, still rather pink. ‘I’ll meet you over in the canteen.’
Alex hurried out of the office and across the courtyard to the cannery. He tried not to think about the invitation on his desk, celebrating the life of a man he’d never known, and never would. For all kinds of reasons, the night would stir up a lot of emotions; he just hoped he’d know how to handle them.