Chapter 3
3
Finn watched her hurry back along the moss-covered path and reflected wryly that after two chance meetings he should have taken the opportunity to ask for her number so he could see her again. Except that at neither time would it have been appropriate.
Then he chided himself for assuming she’d be interested in him – or even single. He’d thought she was lovely earlier, and she was, even with her nose red from crying and the strands of her long dark hair that had escaped from their clips in a scatter around her face. Her eyes, almost black with pain, had looked haunted, and even though everyone was vulnerable when they were visiting their lost loved ones, he’d sensed she didn’t usually ‘do’ vulnerability.
He’d had to fight back the urge to put his arms around her slender shoulders and hold her tightly. He told himself he’d have felt the same towards any woman so obviously in need of comfort, but he suspected it wasn’t true.
‘Forget it,’ he muttered crossly. Why on earth would she take a second look at him? She’d barely taken a first look, he reminded himself as he watched her fumbling with the latch on the gate and tear up the road. She’d been too preoccupied with rescuing the bird and this time she’d been too blinded with grief to see where she was going, poor kid. She was young to have lost her mother. He hoped she had someone back home who was supporting her through it. Losing a parent was terribly tough. His mother wasn’t dead, but he’d lost her just the same.
He waited until Jade was out of sight, sensing her need for distance, and then strolled back to his grandparents’ cottage, which was less than a quarter of a mile from the cemetery.
He still thought of it as theirs, even though they’d left it to his father when they’d died within weeks of each other, eight months earlier.
‘You took your time, lad, thought you’d got lost.’ Ray greeted him from the front garden where he was puffing furiously on a roll-up, and Finn realised his father must feel the same. His grandmother had never let anyone smoke in the house.
‘I bumped into a girl in the churchyard. I saw her earlier too,’ he added, frowning, and deciding not to tell Ray about the bird rescue, as the only birds he was interested in came fully plucked, cooked and with gravy.
‘Oh, aye – you were supposed to be sorting out graves, not chatting up women.’
Finn watched him draw on the thin roll-up so deeply that the burning end shot towards his fingers, and he had to drop it on the path.
‘That stuff will kill you one day. I wish you’d pack it in.’
‘Too late now. I reckon I’ve done all the damage I’m going to do.’
Finn doubted that very much, but his dad could be a stubborn old fool where his health was concerned.
‘And I wasn’t chatting her up. She was upset. She was visiting her mother’s grave. ’
‘Ah,’ Ray said, and promptly shut up.
One nil to me, Finn thought without much satisfaction as he went past his father and into the house. The mention of mothers worked every time. But he’d have given a lot for things to be different.
He was doing a Wordle on his phone when Ray came into the back room.
‘Shall I do us some burnt sausage and chips again for tea or shall we risk the pub?’
‘The pub, I think.’ Finn glanced up. ‘I could do with a pint of Guinness.’
And he could ask the landlord about Jade, too, he decided as they strolled down to the Red Lion. Mike would know who she was. He knew everything that was going on in the village and was an incorrigible gossip.
He looked pleased to see them, too, Finn saw as he pushed open the heavy oak door, lowering his head as they stepped into the dark beamed interior. They weren’t here often enough to be classed as locals, but often enough for Mike to know what they drank.
‘Usual, is it, gentlemen?’ he queried, grinning through his salt-and-pepper beard and rubbing his hands together. He’d have looked more at home behind the bar of a seafaring pub strung with fish nets holding plastic lobsters, Finn had often thought. Captain Bird’s Eye. Deciding against asking about the girl in the cemetery, he carried their pints to the table where his father sat. He didn’t want it to get back to her he’d been asking, and it more than likely would if he said anything to Mike.
‘Do you two want the wood burner lit?’ Mike called after him. ‘It’s a bit chilly once the sun goes down, isn’t it.’
‘No, you’re all right,’ Ray said, rubbing his hands together as Finn settled opposite him. ‘We’re from up north. We don’t feel the cold. Not like you soft southerners.’
Finn didn’t catch Mike’s disparaging reply. This was a nice pub, he thought, trying to decide if it had changed since the last time they’d been down. No. The Red Lion probably hadn’t changed much in the last couple of hundred years. It was a piece of old England, with its thick cob walls, ancient beams and big old inglenook fireplace. Their local, the Sheaf of Arrows, was more working man’s club, with pitted tables lined by faded velveteen seats that you sank into when you sat down because the springs had long since gone. The walls were dotted with black and white pictures of football teams that no one had ever heard of. The walls of the Red Lion sported ancient hunting prints and a couple of faded watercolours. Above the bar hung a banner printed with the words:
A good wine should be drunk and not worshipped. A good landlord should be worshipped and not drunk.
‘So, what’s the verdict, son?’ Ray asked, swigging his pint and interrupting Finn’s musings. ‘Do we let the place go to rack and ruin for lack of funds, or do we cut our losses and put it on the market?’
‘It’s yours. What do you want to do with it?’ Finn asked, even though he had a pretty good idea he already knew. His father had never really taken to the countryside. He was much happier in his terraced two-up, two-down in Nottingham, steeped in traffic fumes and noise and surrounded by tarmac. He’d never been one for open spaces and ‘wild animals’, as he called them – which covered everything from rabbits to cows.
‘I think we should get it on the market, lad. I could buy my place then. Might even get enough for you to put a deposit down on a little place yourself.’
‘Yes,’ Finn replied, without enthusiasm. As far as he could see, his grandparents had had the right idea. Who wanted to live in the city when they could be surrounded by clean air and rolling fields? Ever since they’d died and left his father the cottage, he’d harboured the faint hope he could somehow raise the funds to buy it and move down. He was sure he could get work locally – he could turn his hand to most things. And in his spare time he could paint pictures, a passion for as long as he could remember. His grandparents, particularly his grandmother, had encouraged his artistic endeavours. A couple of his early landscapes still hung in the cottage. Dad, who was more practical, a man’s man, had never been as enamoured. ‘You’ll never earn a living with a paintbrush, lad. Not that kind of paintbrush, anyways.’
He was probably right. Finn knew it was a pipe dream, really. Cottages in the Arleston countryside, a stone’s throw from the beautiful medieval city of Salisbury, even tiny cottages, which needed a lot of money spending on them, didn’t come cheap. He knew his dad couldn’t afford to sell it to him for much less than the market value. Not unless he wanted to spend the rest of his life scrimping and saving, which Finn was determined he wasn’t going to do. Consequently, he hadn’t ever raised the subject.
‘Course – you’ve probably got better memories of the place than me, eh, lad?’ Ray said slyly. ‘Wild, drunken Christmas parties, if my memory serves me right.’
‘I was young and foolish then.’
‘Not that young. Twenty-five if my memory serves me…’
‘Yeah. All right. But it was a one-off.’ Finn frowned. ‘Which is why Gran never forgot it.’
‘She never forgot it because you were sick all the way up her stairs.’ Ray drained his pint triumphantly, leaned forward and tapped his empty glass on the table. ‘Want another one? It’s my round.’
‘I’ll get them.’ Finn escaped to the bar because that was one night he particularly didn’t want to remember and certainly didn’t want to discuss. He’d had the worst hangover of his life the following morning. Being sick all up the stairs hadn’t been good – but it had been a fairly minor crime in the scheme of things.
The Christmas party had been held in someone’s house on the outskirts of the village. He’d been drinking with a group of lads in the Red Lion and when the pub had closed they’d invited him along. The alcohol had flowed freely, and Finn had drunk far more than he was used to. He vaguely remembered leaving the party with a really pretty blonde, who’d been younger than him. He wished he could blank out the rest of the evening, but he couldn’t. He’d hated himself for weeks afterwards. Not because the girl hadn’t been willing – she’d been just as keen as he was to find a quiet spot where they could ‘get to know each other better’. But he’d known they were both too drunk to have really known what they were doing. And it wasn’t Finn’s style to have one-night stands.
What had made it worse was that he’d had to leave for Nottingham the following morning, which meant he hadn’t had time to see her again. What would he have said if he had, he wondered? ‘Sorry’ or ‘Thanks’ or maybe even ‘What did you say your name was?’ He doubted they’d have seen each other again. A few minutes of fumbled lovemaking in a freezing, muddy field wasn’t the best start to a relationship.
He’d never seen her since, which he supposed wasn’t all that surprising. Arleston wasn’t a tiny village; there was no reason to bump into her even if she had been a local. Perhaps, like him, she’d been far from home and had simply done too much celebrating .
He sighed and headed back to their table with the drinks. Maybe his father had a point about it being best to cut all ties with the place. Nottingham was home. It was where his mates were, where his roots were, and very probably where his future lay. Moving to the countryside, swapping his job at the electrical engineers and trying to paint pictures for a living were all pipe dreams. Fleetingly he thought about Jade again and rationality kicked in. Another pipe dream. There were plenty of attractive women in Nottingham.
‘I think you’re right, Dad,’ he said, clunking their pints onto the knotted wooden table and watching a thin trail of froth spill down one of the glasses. ‘You should put it on the market – we don’t get a lot of use out of it, do we? Do you want me to nip down the estate agents in the morning?’
‘Aye, thanks, lad. You’re better at all that malarkey than me.’
Ray’s grey eyes lit briefly with warmth and Finn thought with a mixture of regret and relief that it was probably for the best.