16. Malvasia di Cagliara
Has a honeyed fragrance but tends towards the flat.

“Have a good day!” Jamie picked up his briefcase from a chair and leant over and kissed Claire’s cheek. “I’ll do my best to get the six-eighteen tonight but you know how it is…”

“No problem.” Claire, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and sweatshirt, was sitting at the kitchen table, tapping at a calculator and frowning over columns of figures in a red hard-back book in front of her. She sounded distracted. “I’ll probably be in the bar, anyway.”

Jamie stopped, one hand on the handle of the back door. “But I thought it was your night off. I thought we were going out.”

“We are!” Claire glanced up at him. “Come straight down to Greens when you get off the train and we’ll go as soon as you get there. I’ve booked a table at the new Thai at the top of the High Street – fantastic vegetarian selection apparently. We can have a drink on the way.”

Jamie nodded. “OK. Perhaps we can have two. Then I might get my wicked way with you later…”

“Yeah, yeah.” Claire waved Jamie goodbye, closed the accounts and gathered up the dogs’ leads. The two Airedales leapt from the floor and threw themselves at her, nearly knocking her over. She grabbed at their collars, wrestling with them while she clipped on the leather straps. At last she got the door open. “OK boys! Let’s hit that beach.”

They tugged hard against her as she made her way down Harbour Street, under the flint archway to Viking Bay. Once down the slope on to the sand, she bent and released both dogs who bounded joyfully away from her.

It was supposed to be her day off but she wanted to get the VAT up to date. And she’d thought that this morning, while they were closed, she might just pop an extra coat of paint over the walls of the stone passageway to the loos. She told the others it was looking tatty already, not wanting to admit, even to herself, that she wanted everything perfect for when her parents visited later in the week.

Her father still hadn’t been down to see her new business. He’d said he was short-staffed and couldn’t to leave his pub in Norwich when it was the opening evening; had cancelled another visit since. Now he was supposed to be bringing her mother down on Thursday, but Claire wouldn’t hold her breath.

She’d already invited them all down for Christmas – knowing you had to get in early for a fighting chance of any family gathering that wasn’t on her father’s own licensed premises. “That will be lovely,” her mother had said, anxiously. But Claire wouldn’t hold her breath for that, either.

She wanted her father, Grant, to see how well she’d done. She felt childish for needing it but she wanted to hear him say, just for once: well done! It was Neill he watched with pride. Neill – the big banker with the glittering future and his slick city life – who got the praise. Even though Neill had never given a toss about the family business and she had slogged her guts out, helping Grant build up one crumbling pub after another. Still it was Neill he clapped on the back and Neill he had the faith in. “You should get your brother to go in with you,” Grant had said, on hearing about Gaynor as the third partner. “He’d know how to turn out the profits!”

Well, actually, so did she. Neither Sarah nor Gaynor showed any particular interest in the books but Claire pored over them constantly and, by anyone’s standards, Greens was doing well. Despite the fact that Sarah seemed a lot more stressed in the kitchen than Claire remembered her and Gaynor could be irritatingly ditzy at times, she’d grown really fond of them both. Somehow it was working, though it could work even better perhaps if …

She walked the length of the bay and back, planning and dreaming. She had so many ideas for the future. This was just the beginning…

Reaching the jetty again, she whistled for the dogs. Wooster arrived first. “Come on!” she called to Henry who was still sniffing among the seaweed. Eventually he trotted towards her, something in his mouth.

“What have you got?” Claire bent down and retrieved a bashed-up fruit juice carton from between her dog’s teeth. Henry was always picking things up on the beach. If she was lucky she’d be gifted with a piece of wood or chalk. But sometimes he’d have gulped down the remains of a picnic and would bring her the chewed packaging; on one charming occasion he’d bounded up with a condom dangling from his jaws.

“You terrible dog.” She patted them both and clipped on their leads. Then she straightened and began to walk purposefully back up towards the wine bar. Sarah wouldn’t be in till much later, Gaynor was still away. In the meantime, Claire had work to do.

Gaynor pulled out on to the M4, moved across to the outside lane and put her foot down. She felt a glorious sense of freedom. She turned the radio up. They were playing ‘Young at Heart’ and all at once it was exactly how she felt. She turned it up, feeling herself moving swiftly and smoothly away, leaving the stifling air of her parents’ semi in Reading behind. David had seemed much better by the time she left.

“Thanks,” he’d said diffidently when she went into his room to say goodbye. She’d hugged him. “Sorry,” he added as she left.

“Don’t be daft,” she’d said. He wasn’t back at work yet but he was taking his medication again. They hadn’t really talked about what had happened. They’d managed to skirt round it in a way that enabled them both to express apology yet still feel their actions were defensible. She was relieved that any sense of betrayal David might have felt at her letting him be carted off by the burly arm of the law seemed cancelled out by his embarrassment at having tried to smash her house up.

She’d quietly closed his bedroom door. “You take care, eh?”

“Don’t you feel like walking out sometimes?” she’d asked her mother downstairs as she kissed her.

And her mother had given a sad smile. “Sometimes,” she said. “But then I remind myself they can’t help it.”

Gaynor privately thought her father probably could. He wore his depression like a badge. One that gave him total absolution from responsibility.

“Why don’t you do something nice for her for a change?” Gaynor had asked him. “Buy her some flowers, take her to the cinema – Mum’d love that.”

He’d looked at her in that half-patronising, half-disparaging way he’d looked at her all her life, and said, “I don’t think it’s any of your business how we spend our time, dear,” the last word delivered with that blend of superiority and malice that made her want to hit him with something hard.

But she said nothing more. She had got through the whole visit by holding on to what she had inside – the memory of Sam, glowing like a warm coal. Each time she thought about the way they had fallen on each other, she felt a hot jolt of desire that almost made her cry out.

She was longing to see him again and in no rush at all to face Victor, whom she’d spoken to briefly on the phone and who had been largely uninterested in David’s welfare but only too keen to debate the cost of new mirrors. “Seven years bad luck you’ll have now,” he’d said spitefully.

She was glad she’d emptied an entire can of 1001 mousse on to the bedroom carpet and he hadn’t seen the tea stains.

She put in her earpiece and tried ringing Sam again. He still wasn’t answering. She guessed he must be out or in the garden but she felt a vague unease. She’d tried a couple of times yesterday too, when she’d escaped her family for ten minutes, but he hadn’t been there then, either. She wished he’d get a mobile but, when she’d suggested it, he’d looked at her askance. “What on earth for?” he’d asked. She smiled to herself. Perhaps she’d get him one for Christmas.

She remembered him saying Debra was coming down sometime. Perhaps she was there now and they’d gone out somewhere. Perhaps he had a sign to get finished and he was ignoring the phone – she’d known him do that before.

She’d try one final time and then leave it till she got home. She hoped he’d answer soon. She hoped Debra wouldn’t be there. She wanted to meet her, but not just yet. She missed Sam and when she got back she wanted him all to herself.

But she got Victor instead. As she pulled into the drive she saw him getting out of his Jag and her heart sank. Damn it, she should have gone straight to Sam’s cottage. But Victor actually looked pleased to see her for once, perhaps regretting his unsupportive attitude earlier.

“Hi,” he said, warmly. “Shall we go out tonight?”

It was the last thing she’d thought of doing. She’d expected him to be home late, if at all, giving her the opportunity to hotfoot it down to Sam’s. She’d have to wait till the morning now.

“Marchesi’s?” asked Victor.

She smiled and nodded, unable to think of a single convincing reason not to. “Sure,” she said, pulling her bag from the boot, going upstairs to unpack and get changed, wishing she could let Sam know what she was doing and deciding that she would buy him a phone tomorrow, never mind Christmas, so that at least she could text him at times like these.

Victor was at his most charming. She sat opposite him in the conservatory at Marchesi’s, toying with her king prawns, listening while he spoke cheerily of the ad campaign they were doing for Easy-Chef Cook-it Sauces and the debate he was having with Laurence about the wisdom of having a Delia Smith look-alike wearing high heels and a bikini beneath her pinny as she stirred.

“I said,” Victor explained happily, “that stuff is just too last century. It would be a lot more happening to just try and get Nigella.”

Gaynor smiled, half amused, half irritated at his attempts to sound young and funky. Perhaps, she thought suddenly, Victor was simply having one giant mid-life crisis. Perhaps all this staying away involved nothing more sinister than him hanging round achingly-trendy nightclubs trying to kid himself he was still in the bloom of youth. She herself felt like a teenager. She felt the old affection for Victor she always did when he was nice to her but she was also thinking about Sam. She’d been to the Ladies twice so she could phone him but the loos here were in the basement and there was not a flicker of a signal either time.

Victor poured more Montrachet into her glass. “How was the trip? Are your parents well?” he enquired politely.

She nodded stiffly, sipping the cold white burgundy, usually one of her favourites, now barely tasting it, not wanting to think or talk about her family, not really wanting to talk about anything. She wanted to fling her arms around Sam – see his slow smile as he opened the door. Hear his voice, as he hugged her to him.

“Are you all right?” At the end of the meal, Victor peered at her.

“Just tired.” She smiled brightly at him. “Just need to get home and have some sleep, I think.”

Victor nodded. He was being solicitous. “Another coffee first? Herbal tea? Brandy?”

She shook her head, wanting to get out of the place so she could get home, hide away in the bathroom and try another phone call. She didn’t want anything. No coffee, or after-dinner mints, or any more banal conversation.

Victor was being perfectly good company for a change, but she just wanted to see Sam.

Fate was against her. When Victor woke, he was still in born-again mode. He brought her tea, stood in the kitchen in his dressing gown scrambling eggs, smiled at her across the orange juice and munched toast with maddening slowness and enquired after everything from the progress of the wine-bar to Lizzie’s love life and Gaynor’s excellent judgement in choosing a new shade of nail polish at her last manicure.

She tried to look pleased. He was being the Victor she had craved for some months, but of all the mornings for him to return from the dead this was not the one she’d have chosen.

“I’m in no rush to get the office,” he said, “I’m entertaining half the night, after all. Frankly I’d rather be here with you.”

Hurrah! And Oh-for-God’s-sake-go-to-work. Sam was still not answering his phone. Gaynor wanted to get to his cottage and track him down and very probably take him to bed. Her body still tingled at the memory of last time. Her mind was split in two with longing and guilt in equal measures. It would be so much easier if Victor was being a bastard.

“Love you!” he called as he slid into the Jag at around two by which time she could barely keep still.

“Love you too,” she called back, thinking: it is true, I do love you. But can I trust you? Will you still be like this when you get back and oh – Sam…

The moment his car was gone, so was she. She didn’t even walk today. She drove down to the seafront, parking her car on the esplanade, and ran the short distance along the cliff-top pathway to Sam’s cottage.

She banged on the front door. And waited. Nothing. She walked around the back of the house, feeling uneasy. She hoped he hadn’t gone out early. She still couldn’t understand why he hadn’t answered late last night. A sudden fear gripped her at the thought of him lying ill, or dead. Unless he’d stayed away overnight. Her mind slid away from the thought. She couldn’t lose Sam. Victor, maybe, but please not Sam. Was he fed up with her? Tired of her weeping and wailing?

Brutus was sitting on the back step. “Hello, gorgeous!” She bent and stroked him. He stood up, arched his back and purred. He looked sleek and well-fed, so he clearly hadn’t been left alone long. “What have you done with him?”

She tried the handle of the French window – it was open. Heart thumping, she walked into the back room. The piano was closed. The roses she’d bought him hung their heads in a vase on the top. An ashtray on the table next to the battered sofa was full of his tiny squashed cigarette ends.

“Sam?”

She walked through into the hall, looked in the kitchen. “Sam?”

She didn’t want to go upstairs. She was suddenly afraid of finding him slumped in bed or the bathroom. Afraid, too, of finding some evidence that he had someone else. But not Sam, she told herself. Not in the space of a few days. I love you. He’d said it on Monday. He’d meant it – she could see he meant it. He’d almost had tears in his eyes.

He was in the front room. Sitting back from the window, looking out, his profile turned away from her as she walked in.

“Oh!” She gave a cry of pleasure and relief. “There you are.” She rushed over to the big leather chair. “Why didn’t you answer me?”

He went on gazing out across the garden. “Sorry.”

“I was worried. What’s the matter?”

He didn’t reply. His face had a remote, haunted look – even the corners of his mouth seemed to be dragged down.

“What’s happened?” She felt instantly guilty, as though she’d been caught out in a terrible deed, as though he’d found out something awful about her and was about to say that everything had changed. “Has something happened?” she asked again.

He turned then and shook his head. “No,” he said, his voice sounding tired and beaten. “Nothing has happened – just me.”

She sat on the arm of the chair, put an arm around him and hugged him, all her good spirits dwindled away to dismay. “I’ve been so longing to see you,” she said. “I’ve missed you.”

He looked round at her. It was an expression she hadn’t seen before. “I’ve missed you too,” he said tonelessly.

“Well, I’m here now,” she said, moving closer.

He felt stiff and unyielding. “Not really,” he said.

She moved round and knelt on the floor in front of him, looking up into his face. “I am – I am here. I’ve been thinking about you all the time, thinking about that night, knowing I just want to be with you.”

Sam looked back at her. His eyes were sad. “Are you going to go home and pack your bags, then? Tell your husband it’s all over? That you’ve met someone else? That you want a divorce? I’m not asking you to,” he went on, as she hesitated. “I would never ask you to do that.”

“So why…” She looked at him, confused.

“I’ve been sitting here doing a lot of thinking. Feeling badly about what we did. Badly for you, for your husband. And for me. I promised myself I wouldn’t do that.”

“I don’t regret it,” she said staunchly. “I think it was meant to be.”

He gave a grim smile. “That’s something people come up with to excuse their shabby behaviour.”

The nails from one of her hands dug into the palm of the other. “Do you think what we did was shabby?”

He looked past her, out of the window. “I’m not very proud of it. Having sex with a married woman who’s in a highly emotional state and suffering from lack of sleep, when her husband’s away, in her husband’s house – does that sound like behaviour to take pride in, to you?”

She grabbed at his arm and shook it. “It wasn’t like that! I wanted it – I made it happen. You wanted it too, didn’t you?” Even now the thought of his passion sent a shock of desire through her.

He nodded. “Oh yes. I should have controlled myself. It always takes two.”

There was something about the way he said it. Gaynor looked at him and things fell into place. “Did your wife have an affair?” she asked suddenly.

He was silent for a moment. Then he reached for his tobacco. “I don’t know. Part of me hopes she did. That I wasn’t all she ever had. She threw out a lot of stuff before she died. Was very keen to clear everything up. Diaries, letters, cards. I don’t know. I saw one of them. It just had kisses inside. I don’t know who it was from. There was this black plastic sack full of rubbish waiting to go out. She’d tied the top up. I carried it downstairs to the bins outside the flats and I wanted to rip it open and take out all her papers and look for clues. But I couldn’t do that to her.”

He stared bleakly in front of him. “Though I sometimes wonder what would have lasted longer – the guilt at betraying her trust like that, or the unanswered questions that eat me now.”

Gaynor took his hand, moved by his expression, and tried to sound reassuring. “I think you’d have known if she was having a long-term thing. Perhaps it was just a harmless little flirtation at work or something. I think you do know when your partner has someone else.” Though did she? Sometimes she was convinced Victor was playing away. Other times, like last night, she wasn’t sure at all…

Sam was talking again. “I don’t know – Eleanor had this sort of closed air about her. You never really knew what was going on with her. Even the kids will say that now. And yet she was a lovely mother to them – she’d hug them, laugh with them.”

He looked away again. Gaynor couldn’t work out whether it was anger or tears he was controlling.

“They’d all be laughing at something and I’d walk in and it would stop.” He shook his head. “Debra says it wasn’t like that but it was. Eleanor never laughed with me any more.”

Gaynor said cautiously, “When did it start to go wrong?”

She always felt intrusive questioning Sam, as though she were probing somewhere he didn’t want her touching, but she had a strong urge to hear more. A sense it was important. He turned and looked at her. His face had softened a little.

“It wasn’t ever really right,” he said matter-of-factly. He pulled a cigarette paper from the packet. “She was a WPC when I met her. We were partnered. We got called out to a party where a kid had been abused. You couldn’t believe it. The bloke’s family stood around him, shielding him. He was drunk, they said. They offered it by way of an explanation. He was drunk so he tried to screw his six-year old niece.”

He stopped and began to roll a cigarette. Gaynor sat quite still, stiff with horror.

Sam went on in the same even voice. “Eleanor carried the child out while I arrested him. We couldn’t look at each other afterwards. Back at the station, my mate Terry was suspended for throwing the bloke’s hot tea in his crotch. I felt dreadful afterwards because I wished I’d done it…”

The light was going. Sam stared out at the garden, his expression in shadow. Gaynor sat on the floor at his feet, laid her head against his legs, leant up and took his hand. He squeezed it briefly.

“We shouldn’t have got married after that. We were both doing it for the wrong reasons. We both wanted it for what we thought it stood for but not for each other. We did it because the church had been booked and the cake iced and her mother would have been mortified if we hadn’t.”

“Did Eleanor say that?”

“No, Eleanor wouldn’t say that. Eleanor didn’t say much about anything.” He sighed. “She was a lovely mother and the best wife she knew how to be, bearing in mind she wasn’t in love with me.”

Gaynor searched for something to say that would make it better. “Perhaps she was but she couldn’t show it.”

He laughed without mirth. “Or perhaps she just wasn’t.”

“I think,” he said later, as they sat quietly looking out at the blackness, “that she loved me in her way. She loved me as her husband, as the father of her children, as the provider, because that is what one does. She didn’t feel passion for me and – in fairness to her – why should she have done? After the first, short, desperate weeks, I didn’t feel it for her, either.”

Gaynor realised she was holding her breath. She felt as if she had to keep very still, that now he had started telling her this, she must not move and interrupt it.

“We ended up embarrassed for each other,” Sam was saying. “I think there were times when she would have liked me to take her in my arms, when perhaps she even wished we could make love, but by then she couldn’t approach me and I would never have made a move towards her, for fear of more rejection.”

He looked down at Gaynor and she saw the pain on his face. “It was the thing that grieved me most at the end,” he said. “I did try and hold her then and I felt between us all that loss and remorse and regret.”

Gaynor twisted round and put her arms around his knees, hugging them. “I want you to hold me, Sam.”

He stroked her hair. “You belong to someone else.”

“Someone who is unfaithful to me.”

“You don’t know that yet.”

“I’m going to find out.”

“And then?”

Gaynor sat back, throwing up her hands. “Tell him, leave him. I don’t know. I thought I’d feel bad the next morning but I didn’t. It felt right. It felt special. But…” She struggled to put into words how she felt – to even understand those feelings herself. “I’m confused about Victor. I was quite sure he had someone else – well, I am sure. I think he has. So what can he expect from me?”

Sam was silent.

“And although he has just been nice to me today, he spends more time being awful and I can’t live like that. But then, when he is OK, I feel that I should...”

Sam spoke quietly. “I’m not going to be a weapon. Not something you use to get even with your husband. My feelings are involved here, Gaynor. I don’t know what’s bloody hit me.”

She looked at him desperately. “Please give me time to sort it out. Please do that. You said you loved me. You said it. Do you love me, Sam?”

He leant down and pulled her up into the big chair with him, on to his lap, into his arms, held her against him.

Her heart stilled. Brutus appeared on the arm of the chair and rubbed his face against Sam’s shoulder. She wished it could all stop here – that they could stay in this chair in front of this night-filled window, warm and safe, for ever.

“Do you still love me, Sam?”

He squeezed her tighter. “That is the problem. Yes, I do.”