Chapter 30
30
T he next morning, with Tomasz still sleeping, Caro woke early. In the kitchen she took a handful of tomatoes and sliced them open, the insides revealing glistening jewels of orange red fruit, golden seeded, intensely aromatic. She went out to the chicken village and collected eggs that she hard boiled and sliced open to see yolks more golden than sun. Even the cucumber she prepared, warped and ridged on the outside, had a taste and smell utterly unlike its supermarket cousin. She cut two chunks of sourdough bread and finished off with a chunk of crumbling white cheese, produced five miles away and bought from the local farmer’s market. Then with a cafeteria of fresh coffee made, she woke Tomasz and told him to meet her in the garden.
After Laura and Neil had left, Tomasz had gone straight to bed and Caro had gone to sit in the garden, a blanket around her shoulders, recrimination blowing in from the peaks of the Lake District, whispering through the grass a rebuke she could not deny. She had never been beautiful, not at twenty-three, and certainly not now at fifty-three, and men like Spencer Cooper were seasoned pros, experts at sniffing out the plain woman’s insecurity. Only the truly beautiful were immune to their callous efficiency, and if only for the pitifulness of her vanity she had deserved those bullets, those nine little words that a man like Tomasz would never, could never, have said: It’s just that I have an appointment at six.
She poured a cup of coffee and waited in silence, the sun warm on her shoulders, a butterfly idling through air so still it might have been painted. She had made her decision. She would tell him and, one way or the other, they would have to find a way forward from there. She heard a footstep behind, a cough, and turned to see Tomasz. Reaching for his hand, she looked to the hills. ‘I need to explain,' she said. 'About last night.'
But Tomasz didn’t answer. He didn’t sit down next to her and say, ‘OK.’ He didn’t accept the coffee she offered him. He simply put his hand on her shoulder, and in a low voice said, ‘I think you should go back to London.’