Erin Kaye - Second Time Around

And there was something else too – a vague uneasiness that, when it came to Lucy, everything wasn’t quite as it ought to be. It was more intuition than a concrete thought, for when she tried to pin it down, it bobbed away like a Halloween apple in a barrel of water.

But she had no wish to spend another weekend locking horns with Lucy. She would put last Friday night out of her mind and try and make a fresh start. She keyed a short, warm reply to Lucy and slipped the phone back in her pocket.

Then she played with the zip on her brown leather jacket, wondering briefly if her choice of casual chic – dark jeans, a crisp white shirt, and cowboy boots – was flattering. Then she tried to convince herself that she didn’t care what Ben thought of her, except in a professional capacity.

Switching to designer mode, she flicked on the windscreen wipers and stared at the unprepossessing building opposite. It was single storey, of indeterminate age, with a steeply pitched slate roof. It might have been a workshop once. The harled, pebbly exterior was grey and streaked with water stains from a leak in the guttering and a yellow skip rested on the tarmaced forecourt. One of the front windows was boarded up and a huge, plastic-shiny sign announcing ‘Peggy’s Kitchen’ in yellow and red hung right across the width of the shopfront. But there were plus points too – the façade was symmetrical and nicely proportioned. And the ugly glass door with metal bars on it was unusually tall and wide, and centrally positioned.

It would be relatively easy to transform the outside with a lick of paint, a tasteful sign, the right lighting, new windows and a handsome new door framed by a pair of potted trees. A sprinkling of her magic really could, like fairy dust, transform an ugly duckling into a swan. She glanced at her watch one more time and panicked. Time to go. Quickly, she flipped the visor down and looked at her reflection in the small vanity mirror. She adjusted her hair in an attempt to hide the lines round her eyes, rummaged in her bag for some gloss and touched up her lips. At last, satisfied, she collected her bag and clipboard, and got out of the car.

Ben stood at a wallpaper table in the middle of the room, wearing fashionable black-rimmed rectangular glasses. He was peering at blueprints, his palms flat on the surface of the table. When she entered he looked up and smiled broadly, revealing the little gap between his two creamy-white front teeth, a flaw that ought to have made him less attractive. But the tiny imperfection only softened his appeal, making him more approachable, almost vulnerable. And, like Jeff Goldblum, he looked sexier with the glasses than without. Too busy staring at him, Jennifer only just remembered to return his smile. And then she looked around.

The large open space was dimly lit by two forlorn, bare light bulbs hanging from the rafters. The interior was more or less a bare shell, the walls holed and marked where fittings had been removed along with the flooring, revealing a cold concrete floor covered in carpet adhesive. In one corner lay a stack of steel appliances – sinks and metal cabinets, she thought – wrapped up in layers of clear plastic.

Ben came over and shook her hand. Then he peeled off the glasses, and rubbed the bridge of his nose where the nose pads had left small, brown indentations on his pale skin. ‘Sorry about the state of the place.’ In spite of the damp chill that permeated Jennifer’s bones, he was casually dressed in a frayed lumberjack-style shirt over an old t-shirt, and loose-fitting jeans. It wasn’t what she’d expected from the rather suave way he’d been dressed in the restaurant, but then that had been a uniform of sorts. She liked him better this way. And she liked the fact that he wasn’t precious about his appearance. He sported a day’s dark stubble and his hair was messed up and dusty too. ‘And sorry about asking you to meet me here so late in the day. I thought it’d be best if the contractors were out of the way.’

She smiled, trying not to shiver in the cold, wishing that she’d worn a warmer coat. She followed him over to the table situated under one of the light bulbs, a temporary focal point in the room, and wrapped the edges of her jacket across her chest. ‘I see they’ve been busy. I remember the booths and red leatherette benches that used to line the walls. Peggy’s had a sort of retro fifties feel to it. Along with a smoke haze you could cut with a knife. This was in the days before the smoking ban of course.’

He rubbed his chin with his hand and smiled. ‘You frequented it then?’ he said, the corners of his eyes crinkled up in a smile. ‘You don’t look like the sort of woman to don biking leathers and smoke thirty a day.’

Laughing, she relaxed. ‘I’m not. I was only in it a couple of times to pick up Matt – he had a brief fascination with bikes when he was fifteen and used to hang out here. I used to worry about him rubbing shoulders with those hard men. Luckily he discovered girls shortly after that.’ She laughed and then paused, annoyed with herself for raising the subject of Matt. It would only serve to remind Ben how old she was.

She set her things on the table and said, looking skywards at the old exposed rafters and the nicotine-stained ceiling, ‘I always thought the vaulted ceiling was the best thing about this place.’

‘Me too. According to the architect, there used to be a second floor.’

‘Interesting.’ She glanced at the blueprint Ben had been studying when she came in, and said, ‘Can I have a closer look?’

‘Of course.’

She went and stood next to him, liking the way he was taller than her but not so tall, like David and Matt, that she felt like some sort of midget. She leaned in, their heads only a hand’s width apart, aware of the heat of his body and the faint odour of a woody, masculine scent.

‘These are the architect’s plans,’ he said and he moved his elegant hand, long-fingered like a musician’s and ropey with veins, across the page. ‘The main thing we’re doing internally is putting in a wall between the kitchen here,’ said Ben, pointing to a line on the plan, ‘and the dining area here. That’s what the joiner’s working on just now. And we’re extending the kitchen into these old storerooms in the back. The toilets are in the right place – they just need to be completely refurbished of course.’ The nail on his index finger was short and gently rounded, the moon a pale, pinkish-white like the inside of a shell. ‘And I’m thinking of a reception desk and a small waiting area where people can have a drink and look at the menus.’

She nodded slowly, trying to take all this in, noticing that was the first time he’d used the pronoun ‘I’ when talking about the project. He looked at her and some uncertainty crept into his voice. ‘I’ve something to show you. Two things actually. And I hope you don’t take this the wrong way.’

‘Okay,’ she said cautiously, slipping both hands into the back pockets of her jeans, her fingers stiffening in the cold.

He lifted up a large rectangular board that had been lying against the legs of the table and turned it around. It was a professional mood board for a lavish interior in gold, green and deep purple. There were photographs of crystal chandeliers, close-ups of gilded chairs and silver candlesticks, distressed gilt mirrors, swatches of velvet and brocade, and expensive flocked wallpapers and deep-pile carpet. He rested the board on the table, supporting it with his left hand. ‘Bronagh at Calico did this and it’s pretty much spot on in terms of the brief. We wanted a luxurious, tactile design that’s timeless and opulent, but warm and welcoming as well.’

Jennifer folded her arms and considered it all for some moments. ‘It’s going to have the wow factor, that’s for sure,’ she said at last.