Chapter 9 #2
Lucy wondered if he would mention his wife, or if she should be the one to mention that she knew. Or, since this was such a small village, would he assume she knew? Should she say she was sorry to hear about his wife’s death? This was a whole new territory of uncertainty and awkwardness.
“So has the village met your expectations?” she finally asked, her tone a little too jolly, and Alex looked up with a surprisingly bleak smile.
“I don’t think I’ve met its expectations.”
Surprise jolted through her at this honest admission. “Why do you say that?”
He spread his hands flat on the table and stared down at them; there was something about the gesture that seemed both contemplative and lonely. “Work has taken up most of my life.”
“But as head teacher you’re giving back to the community,” Lucy pointed out. She felt she should really say something about his wife, or maybe he should.
He just shrugged and said, “I suppose.” Lucy opened her mouth to say something, although I know about your wife made her sound like some bad TV detective. Then Alex spoke first. “What about you?” he asked. “You’re only here for four months, but what made you decide to come all the way to Cumbria?”
“Well.” She considered fobbing him off with the usual I wanted a change and then decided she was tired of prevaricating.
Alex had been surprisingly honest, so maybe she could be too.
“My life in Boston kind of fell apart. Actually, there’s no ‘kind of’ about it.
Completely fell apart is more accurate.”
“I’m sorry,” Alex said after a moment. “That’s always difficult.”
He spoke as if he understood what she was talking about and Lucy knew she couldn’t let the moment pass. “I’m sorry,” she blurted, and Alex arched an eyebrow. “About—about your wife.”
“Ah.” His mouth twisted in a rather grim smile. “You’ve heard.”
“One of the teachers told me she died a couple years ago.” He nodded, not seeming inclined to say anything more. “I’m sorry,” Lucy said again.
“So am I.”
Fortunately the woman brought their coffees, and Lucy was spared from making any more awkward condolences.
Alex’s expression was back to the basilisk stare.
She turned to the woman, who had the little boy—Noah—clinging to her legs as she struggled to put their coffee on the table.
Lucy reached for her latte to help her. “Is Mary all right?” she asked, and the woman jerked back a little in surprise, sloshing black coffee on the tray.
Alex took the cup from her, mopping up the spilled coffee with a napkin.
“You know her?”
“My sister does. We came in here a week or so ago.”
“She’s all right,” the woman said, but she sounded resigned. “She had a bit of a turn last week and she needs to rest.”
Lucy nodded, not wanting to ask any more questions and seem nosy. With a tired smile the woman left, taking the little boy with her.
“And when you go back to Boston,” Alex said as Lucy loaded her latte with sugar and took a frothy sip, “what will you do?”
“Honestly? I have no idea.”
She saw remembrance flicker across his face. “You worked in an art gallery, didn’t you?”
“Is that what I told you?” He raised his eyebrows at that.
“Well, yes, I did work in a gallery, but in the café part. I was a barista. And before you say anything, I know it seems like a waste of a perfectly good education. I do have a university degree, even if you’re surprised to know it. ” Now where had all that come from?
Her mother, obviously. I spent three hundred thousand dollars on your education so you could pour people coffee?
Lucy had replied, as cheerfully as always, that it was a little more complicated than that. She could operate fairly complex machinery, after all. But she’d taken her mother’s point. How could she not?
“In what subject?” Alex asked, and Lucy dragged her mind back to the conversation.
“Art. I know, I know. Most useless degree ever, but I really did want to have a career as a serious artist.”
“You still could,” Alex answered. “You’re what, twenty-six? Not many people are making it professionally as artists by then.”
“My mother was.” Actually, her mother had been thirty when she’d gotten her big break, winning an emerging female artist award. Lucy braced herself for the obvious question about who her mother was, but Alex didn’t ask.
“Well, like I said, you still have time,” he said after a moment, shrugging as he took a sip of coffee. Lucy felt a rush of relief that he wasn’t going to press. Maybe he wasn’t that interested.
They both lapsed into silence, and Lucy gazed out the rain-smeared window, wondering if she’d ever pick up a paintbrush again.
The funny or perhaps the sad thing was, she didn’t feel tempted to.
She didn’t miss painting, so maybe her mother had been right.
The brushwork is amateurish at best, revealing a lack of both focus and passion.
And the whole world had read that. The whole world knew she sucked at art.
“You’re frowning.”
Lucy jerked her gaze back to Alex. “So are you,” she answered, and his usual scowl morphed into a small smile.
“So I am. I was thinking about Charlie. I really should take him to obedience school.”
He glanced away, and Lucy had the distinct feeling that he hadn’t been thinking about Charlie at all. “No time, you said,” she said lightly.
“Right.”
“How long have you had him?”
“Eighteen months. He’s seven, though. I got him from a rescue center. His last owner had died.”
“Eighteen months,” she repeated, and he nodded in answer to her silent question.
“Since Anna died. I got him for my two daughters, because they’d been begging for so long.” He glanced away again before turning back to her with a wry smile that wrapped right round her heart. “But a dog doesn’t make up for a mother.”
“No.” Belatedly she registered what he’d said: two daughters.
Just like Thomas had two sons. But it was stupid to compare Alex to Thomas; yes, they were both single dads, and yes, they both happened to be teachers.
And yes, maybe they both had a bit of a pompous thing going on, but really, the similarities ended there.
And in any case, she wasn’t going to date Alex.
“Looks like it’s clearing,” he said, nodding towards the window.
The sun was emerging from behind wispy white clouds, and though the horizon was still dark, bits of blue were breaking through.
Perhaps it was because of the discussion of her degree, but Lucy could suddenly imagine how she’d paint the scene: the contrasting darkness and light, the choppy waves breaking on the shore.
She’d do it in oils, maybe, rather than her usual watercolors—an insipid medium, her mother had called it.
But oils . . . thick, dark oils soaking into the canvas seemed right for such a scene of wild beauty.
“So it is.” She turned back to Alex, sensing the dismissal. Twenty minutes of small talk was all Alex was up for, although actually it had ended up not being all that small.
“I should head back.” He stood, awkwardly, and Lucy reached for her purse. “I’ll pay for the coffees,” he said, and she glanced up, frowning.
“I was the one who—”
“I know, but I should have suggested it first,” he said firmly. “And a couple of coffees really isn’t all that much.” He left enough change on the table to cover the coffees and they went out to collect the dogs, saying stilted good-byes over tangled leads before they finally managed to separate.
They ended up walking in the same direction back up the beach road, smiling self-consciously as they fell into step without speaking.
The silence stretched on, even more awkward than their good-byes, and so when Milly and Molly stopped to sniff something in the bushes lining the road, Lucy indulged them, letting Alex walk far ahead of her before she tugged on their leads.
Juliet hadn’t returned by the time she got back to Tarn House, dried off the dogs, and left her mud-caked Wellies out by the front step.
She made herself a cup of tea and stood in the kitchen, the sun streaming through the window, and wondered what she should do.
She didn’t feel like kicking around Tarn House by herself, and so after finishing her tea and then giving the dogs treats to keep them occupied, she headed back out into the sunshine to explore a bit more of Hartley-by-the-Sea.
The village, she’d already surmised, was made up of only two main streets: the high street with the school, the pub, and the post office shop, and the beach road that stretched through sheep fields towards the sea.
Lucy headed up the high street, past the Hangman’s Noose and the school, to the top end she hadn’t yet seen.
With the sun shining brightly and the sea glinting in the distance, the air fresh and clean, and the only sound the distant bleating of sheep, Lucy decided Hartley-by-the-Sea was just as charming as she’d hoped it would be.
It seemed hard to believe that just weeks ago she’d been in Boston, surrounded by strangers and high-rise buildings. Now she had sheep and the sea. And, as Juliet had told her, a decent fish-and-chip shop five miles away in Whitehaven.
Yet she wasn’t missing the culture or restaurants or even a proper caffé latte as she continued up the high street, the road becoming both steeper and narrower, the houses now older, low-lying stone farmhouses with slate roofs and tumbled outbuildings, the sea twinkling like a promise when she glanced between them.
She felt as if she were going somewhere, although in reality she suspected the village’s main street would peter out to yet more sheep fields.
At least there would be a decent view, and she could certainly do with the exercise.
And with each step she felt her mood improve, her natural optimism strengthening into determination.
She could make this funny little life of hers in funny little Hartley-by-the-Sea work.
She could make friends, even with the stony-faced Alex Kincaid, and she could do her job well and she could reconcile with Juliet.
It was the last thought that had her slowing her step, bending over, and resting her hands on her thighs as she tried to catch her breath.
She could do it, she told herself. She could do it all.
And she’d start today, when Juliet returned from Carlisle.
Lucy had no idea how she’d broach that topic of conversation—Why do you resent me?
seemed like a bit of a loaded question—but she was determined to try.
She wasn’t running away anymore.
She was almost at the top of the street; the only buildings she could see ahead were a stucco-fronted bungalow that looked like an afterthought and an abandoned stone barn with its roof fallen in.
She took the last few steps; as she’d suspected, the high street fell away to fields, but the long grass glinted gold in the sunlight, and from this vantage point she could see the sea stretching all the way to the horizon, flat and sparkling, and the hazy, violet shape of the Isle of Man in the distance.
A boy she recognized from school came careening around the bungalow, wearing a Manchester United jersey and kicking a battered soccer ball. He came up short at the sight of her.
“Hey there,” Lucy said cheerfully. She felt a sudden, overwhelming benevolence towards all of humanity, even this gap-toothed, tousle-headed kid.
He stared at her, nonplussed, and then he stuck out his tongue.
Lucy blinked in surprise and then she stuck out her tongue right back at him. He grinned, unexpectedly, before he kicked the football across the weedy garden and ran off after it.
She laughed aloud then, so thankful to feel genuine joy.
She’d been miserable for so long, trapped by her mother’s scorn and expectations, clinging to her optimism by her fingernails, always waiting for things to happen.
For her art to take off. For Thomas to make their relationship more serious. For life to begin.
Well, it was beginning now. She’d just pushed the start button. Humming softly under her breath, she started down the street, back to Tarn House. Impulsively she ducked into the post office shop and bought a newspaper. Dan Trenton was at the till, looking as surly as ever.
“So what brought you to Cumbria?” Lucy asked, determined to make the man speak more than a monosyllable. “Or are you from here?”
He stared at her for a moment and then said, “I left the army after half my men were killed in a raid in Afghanistan.” His voice was as flat as his stare.
“Found out my wife was cheating on me with my brother, and decided I needed to do something different.” Lucy stared at him openmouthed as he pushed twenty pence across the counter. “Here’s your change.”