Liz Fielding: The Last Woman He'd Ever Date

‘All done,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to call the Town Hall and make your apologies?’

‘No need.’ She looked at the phone she was still holding, then put it on the table. ‘The news editor is handling it.’

‘Right, well I’ll clean up your foot.’

She frowned as he placed the bowl of water at her feet, then she rallied; he could practically hear her spine snapping straight. ‘There’s no need to make a fuss. I’ll get in the shower as soon as you’ve gone.’

‘It’s cut,’ he said. ‘There’s blood on the floor.’

‘Is there?’ She looked down and saw the trail of muddy, bloody footprints on her clean floor. ‘Oh…’ She bit back the word she’d undoubtedly have let drop if she’d been on her own. ‘It must have been when I stepped on a stone.’

One sharp enough to cut her and yet she hadn’t so much as whimpered. His fault. If he hadn’t kissed her, if he’d just scraped the mud off her shoe, let her go…

‘It might have been a piece of glass,’ he said, not wanting to think about that kiss. About the button she’d been playing with or how she’d felt as she’d leaned against him as he’d helped her home. ‘Or a ring pull from a can. I can’t believe the litter down there.’

‘A lot of it blows in from the towpath. It used to drive my dad wild.’

‘It wasn’t just me, then.’ Before she could answer, he said, ‘Stick your foot in this and soak off the dirt so that I can make sure there’s nothing still in there.’ She didn’t bother to argue, just sucked in her breath as she lifted her foot into the water.

‘Okay?’

She held her breath for a moment, then relaxed. ‘Yes…’

He nodded and left her to soak while he made tea, adding a load of sugar to hers. Adding rather more than usual to his own.

He shouldn’t have come to Cranbrook. He hadn’t intended to come here. Not now. Not until it was all done. It had been his intention to keep his distance and leave it all to the consultants he’d engaged, but it was like a bad tooth you couldn’t leave alone…

‘Have you got any antiseptic?’ he asked, setting the mug beside her.

‘Under the sink, with the first-aid box.’

‘Towel?’

‘There’s a clean one in the airing cupboard. It’s in the bathroom at the top of the…’

‘I know my way around.’ He took a chocolate biscuit—it had been a long time since breakfast—and handed another to her. ‘Eat this.’

‘I—’

‘It’s medicinal,’ he said, cutting off her objection, opening the door to stairs that seemed narrower than he remembered. He glanced back. ‘You might want to lose the tights while I’m fetching it.’

‘Are you quite sure I can manage that all by myself?’

He paused, his foot on the bottom step, and looked back. ‘You have a mouth that will get you into serious trouble one of these days, Claire Thackeray.’

‘Too late,’ she said. ‘It already has.’

‘It’s not a one-time-only option,’ he pointed out and as she blushed virgin pink, he very nearly stepped back down into the kitchen to offer her a demonstration.

Peeling down tights over long, shapely legs that he’d already enjoyed at his leisure as she’d lain sprawled on top of him with her skirt around her waist would have offered some compensation in a day that was not, so far, going to plan.

He’d arrived at sunrise and set out for a quiet drive around the estate, wanting to claim its acres for himself. To enjoy his triumph.

The rush of possessiveness, unreasoning anger, when he’d seen a lad fishing from what had once been his favourite spot had brought him up short. Or maybe it had been the fancy rod and antique reel wielded so inexpertly that had irritated him. The boy had sworn it had belonged to his granddad, but he was very much afraid that it had been stolen.

Not the most pleasant start to the day and, once the boy had gone, he’d stopped to look, remembering his own wild days.

That’s when he’d noticed that the bank opposite had been seriously undermined by the torrential winter rain. He’d pulled on the overalls and boots that had been lying in the back of the Land Rover and crossed the stream to take a closer look at the damage and walked right into the Claire and Archie double-act.

And if it hadn’t been part of his plans to come back to Cranbrook Park until he’d made it his own, that was doubly so with Primrose Cottage.

There had been no reason to come down a lane on the edge of the village, a lane that stopped at a cottage that was hidden unless you were looking for it. Forgotten by the estate.

Jack North had never been prepared to use good drinking and gambling money to decorate, repair a house he did not own and Robert Cranbrook would have seen it fall down before he’d have allowed his workmen to touch it.

He never could understand why his mother had stayed. Some twisted sense of loyalty? Or was it guilt?

In his head the cottage had remained the way it had looked on the day he’d fired up his motorbike and ridden away. But, like him, it had changed out of all recognition.

The small window panes broken in one of Jack’s drunken rages and stuffed with cardboard to keep out the weather had all been replaced and polished to a shine. Windows and trim were now painted white and the dull, blistering green front door was a fresh primrose yellow to match the flowers that were blooming all along the verge in front of a white-painted picket fence.

There had always been primroses…

Weeds no longer grew through the gravel path that led around to the rear; the yard, once half an acre of rank weeds where he’d spent hours stripping down and rebuilding an old motorcycle, was now a garden.

Inside everything had changed, too. His mother had battled against all odds to keep the place spotless. Now the walls had been stripped of the old wallpaper and painted in pale colours, the treads of the stairs each carpeted with a neatly trimmed offcut.

He’d once known every creak, every dip to avoid when he wanted to creep out at night and he still instinctively avoided them as he took the second flight to revisit his past.

Everything was changed up there, too.

Where he’d once stuck posters of motorcycles against the shabby attic walls, delicate little fairies now flitted across ivory wallpaper.

Did Claire Thackeray’s little girl resemble her mother? All fair plaits and starched school uniform. Or did she betray her father?

He shook his head as if to clear the image. What Claire Thackeray had got up to and with whom, was none of his business.

None of this—the clean walls, stripped and polished floors, the pretty lace curtains—changed a thing. Taking it from her, doing to her what her father had done to him would be all the sweeter because the cottage was now something worth losing.

A towel…

The door to the front bedroom was shut and he didn’t open it. Claire was disturbing enough without acquainting himself with the intimacy of her bedroom, but the back bedroom door stood wide open and he could see that it had been converted into an office.

An old wallpaper pasting table, painted dark green, served as a desk. On it there was an old laptop, a printer, a pile of books. Drawn to take a closer look, he found himself looking out of the window, down into the garden.

He’d hadn’t been able to miss the fact that it was now a garden, rather than the neglected patch of earth he remembered, but from above he could see that it was a lot more.

Linked by winding paths, the ugly patch had been divided into a series of intimate spaces. Divided with trees and shrubs as herbaceous borders, there were places to sit, places to play and, at the rear, the kind of vegetable garden usually only seen on television programmes was tucked beneath the shelter of a bank on which spring bulbs were now dying back.