Chapter 31
‘ MAGGIE , WAIT UP! ’
She turned to see Gray jogging down the drive after her, still in his tennis shorts and t-shirt. ‘You heading into town?’
‘No, for a walk. I …’ she paused and looked beyond him to the hotel, ‘need some air.’ Mungo had become so overexcited at the email from Ellen making an offer that he’d tried to jump up from the sunbed, knocking his laptop and coffee cup to the paving stones, before howling in pain. He’d then said he wanted to ring Ellen immediately and accept, whereupon Maggie told him to calm down and said she needed to think about it.
‘It’s twice the asking price!’ Mungo had shrieked. ‘What could you possibly need to think about?’
Next, Arabella Wrackham had reappeared from the dining room and asked which cheeses were pasteurized, whereupon Maggie declared she was going for a walk. She felt, suddenly, intensely claustrophobic, like she might spontaneously combust if she didn’t get away from the hotel for an hour.
‘Can I get you something?’
‘No.’ Gray shook his head. ‘I just wondered if I could tag along again, if you were heading out? It’s nice, getting out. Not that the hotel isn’t nice, I mean, but I like exploring around here.’
Maggie rolled her lower lip through her teeth. She wanted a walk to get away from her husband, the Wrackhams, Audrey and even Jamie, who kept peppering her with questions about the party. But the idea of walking with Gray didn’t annoy her. Actually, the idea of walking with Gray was soothing.
‘Sure.’
‘Really? I don’t wanna cramp you.’
‘You won’t. I’ll show you the old railway line, it leads up into the hills.’ Maggie glanced back to the hotel to see if Mungo was watching but she couldn’t see him. He’d almost certainly be on the phone to Ellen.
They walked down the drive in silence and she led him across the road to a small track opposite the hotel gates. It was easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there; disguised between two pine trees, a narrow, dusty path that looped down the bank until it hit a larger track at the bottom which ran for miles, meandering into the hills, under old bridges and splintering at points to lead in different directions.
Maggie had walked most of it when she was younger and needed an escape; she’d take a bottle of water and walk for a couple of hours, inhaling the smell of pine, listening to the cicadas. She’d walked it the summer she was obsessed with Pierre and fantasized about marrying him; she’d walked it the summer afterwards and still daydreamed about him; she’d walked it the summer she worked at the hotel after leaving school, pounding the track, furious at her parents for telling her she had to do something other than cooking, and later still, when she was upset by Phil’s drinking.
‘You said it’s an old rail line?’ Gray asked, breaking the quiet.
‘Mmmhmm. The train des pignes .’ Maggie glanced sideways. ‘The pine cone train. Old women used to collect bags of the cones and leave them by the trains so they could be taken higher up into the hills for fuel in the winter.’
‘Serious?’
‘Serious.’
‘How much heat do you get out of one of these guys?’ Gray stooped to pick up a pine cone.
Maggie grinned. ‘I think you took what you could back then.’
‘When are we talking?’
‘Er …’ She screwed up her face in thought. ‘Before the war, early twentieth century.’
‘So your duke, what was he called, the guy who built the hotel?’
‘The Duc de Miradoux?’
‘He could have caught this train?’
‘Maybe. But if he was a recluse he probably wasn’t into day trips.’
‘So what happened to it?’
‘What happened?’ she checked, as they walked under a stone bridge.
‘To the railway?’
‘Oh, blown up. Parts of it. During the war.’
‘By the Nazis?’
‘Uh uh. The resistance, so the Germans couldn’t get around easily, couldn’t move their troops. And after that there were better roads round here, and more people had cars, so the trains became kind of redundant.’
Gray whistled under his breath before looking across at her. ‘It’s cool that you know all this.’
‘The history?’
‘Yeah. The house, the duke, this …’ He threw an arm ahead of him at the overgrown railway track. ‘The war, the Nazis. You know what?’
She pushed a wisp of hair off her face and looked expectantly at him.
‘It would make a great film.’
Maggie nodded before falling silent. She recognized every bend of the track they were walking, every tree they passed. She always knew what time it was by the light, where it was falling on the chateau; she knew the sounds of the nightingales and the clock tower better than the hum of London traffic. She certainly preferred the clock tower to the traffic, even though it chimed through the night. She still recognized so many of the locals. Almost as soon as she’d arrived she’d known the chateau had to be sold, but now there was an offer she couldn’t reasonably refuse it felt like she was selling part of herself.
‘Can I ask something?’ Gray said tentatively.
‘Mmmhmm.’
‘How come you and Mungo don’t have kids?’
She burst out laughing and Gray looked at her, bemused.
‘I thought you were going to ask me something else about Nazis,’ she explained.
‘Oh, right. Sorry? Is that insensitive? I mean, it is insensitive. I hate being asked. But I figured, by now, I could. And I heard that lady talking about it to Mungo so …’
‘Which lady?’
‘The pregnant one.’
‘Was she? What is wrong with people?’
‘Sorry.’
‘I don’t mean you.’
‘I get it, believe me. I have the same. Every interview I ever do.’ Gray paused and put on an exaggerated talk-show voice. ‘Great to see you, Gray, thanks for coming on. We’ll talk about your new project in a second but first of all, the question that everyone really wants to know, when are we going to hear the patter of tiny feet?’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Gets boring, huh?’
‘Yes, it does.’ She paused and exhaled. ‘It hasn’t worked for us, for whatever reason. We’ve tried for seven years but no good.’ Briefly, she thought back to the bathroom floor in London, to lying there with another negative pregnancy test, to the black hopelessness she’d felt at her body failing at its main purpose all over again.
‘Sorry,’ Gray said, echoing her apology.
They carried on for a few steps in silence until he spoke again. ‘Same with us.’
‘Really?’
He nodded and gave her a half smile. ‘Yeah. Three years and nada. And we talked about surrogacy or adopting but, I dunno.’
‘You’ve always wanted them?’
Gray winced into the distance. ‘I’m not sure any more. I think maybe it was a case of always assuming I’d have kids, but now I don’t know if I want them because we’ve come this far so we need to keep going, or because I do really want them.’
Maggie felt this to her bones. Three miscarriages, three unsuccessful IVF implantations, and every time it didn’t happen, it was as if the stakes got higher. She and Mungo had to try again and double down on their losses, because otherwise what was left of them? A couple who actively decided not to have children were modern and cool and making a concerted stand on the environment. A couple who tried to have children again and again but couldn’t? They seemed tragic, to be pitied.
‘Shall we go back to the Nazis?’ Gray suggested.
She laughed. ‘Maybe. But actually, it’s nice to talk about it to someone else. Mungo and I …’ She sighed again. ‘I know we need to talk about it but I don’t know if I can have that conversation again. I honestly don’t know if I have the strength.’
‘To have the conversation or to keep trying?’
‘Both maybe?’
Gray nodded and they continued on without talking for a few moments; both reflecting on how liberating it was to talk about this subject with someone they weren’t married to. Maggie almost felt as if she could move easier, having voiced her secret fear that she couldn’t go on, like it had released the pent-up tension inside her.
‘What made you ask the question?’ she asked.
‘About you guys? Curiosity, partly. But also because I notice other couples that don’t have kids now, and I always wonder why. Like, is it their choice? Or have they tried and it hasn’t worked? It makes me feel less of an outlier, I guess, when I see other couples who don’t have them.’
She looked at him in surprise. It hadn’t taken her very long to stop seeing Gray as Gray Hudson the actor, and instead see him as Gray the American guest who was helping her out. But suddenly it was as if she could see another layer of him entirely. Here was a man who’d gone through the same disappointments as she and Mungo had in the past few years, but who couldn’t insulate himself against them no matter how much money he had.
‘What?’ he checked.
‘Nothing, sorry,’ she said, looking at her feet, embarrassed to have been caught staring. ‘But I understand that, too. I go to friends’ houses, sometimes, and I see the buggy in the hallway and I won—’
‘ Buggy? ’
‘Oh, sorry, a stroller.’
‘Right.’
‘And I sometimes feel so left behind that it makes me well up, and I’m standing there, a grown woman in someone else’s house, almost crying at the sight of a toy elephant. But then I feel so selfish , because I have so much, and yet …’
‘You don’t have that,’ Gray answered for her. ‘Listen, I have a house in LA with seven bedrooms and a maid who puts new towels in my bathroom every time I take a shower. I have, like, nine cars and so many sneakers that I think I could probably wear a new pair every day for the rest of my life. I am an incredibly indulged, fortunate human being, but Holly and I have still had days, many days, when we’ve screamed and shouted, and blamed one another because, yeah, there’s this one thing we can’t have. Having nice stuff doesn’t mean you can’t be sad about the big stuff.’
‘Therapy?’ Maggie guessed, shooting him a small smile.
Gray laughed. ‘A fuck-ton of it, yeah. Can you tell?’
‘Little bit,’ she replied, before changing the subject, figuring she could ask given they were speaking so frankly. ‘How’s the online storm?’
He blew out his cheeks. ‘Calming? Gonna speak to Rich tomorrow and make plans. I should head home soon but …’
Maggie waited for him to finish.
‘I like it here.’
‘What, the leaking bathrooms, and the dead garden and ancient tennis court? Not to mention the bad-tempered staff?’
‘I like all of it. Plus the views are pretty decent, and the food is insane, and they have this place which does pretty good ice cream. And hey, some of the staff are OK.’ Gray brushed his hand against Maggie’s back and, just as earlier, at the touch of his arm, she felt another jolt of longing, a deep craving to be closer to this man who seemed to instinctively get her, and she him.
‘We might not be here for much longer,’ she joked quickly. He’d touched her back; he’d hardly lunged. But she could still feel the imprint of his palm between her shoulder blades.
‘Yeah, I heard Mungo as I left. So that guy’s gonna buy it?’
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, still feeling flustered. Gray didn’t seem awkward, so why did she feel weird? Or was it simply that her body had become so uptight, so medicated over the past few years that the briefest of touches from another man made her react like this? ‘We should probably turn back when we reach the bridge,’ she said, nodding ahead of them. ‘I have to talk to him.’
‘Buy you an ice cream first?’
‘Two in one day?’
Gray shrugged and smiled, his blue eyes challenging hers. ‘I won’t tell if you won’t?’
‘OK,’ Maggie replied, holding his gaze, wondering if he sensed even a fraction of what she did, or if she was imagining chemistry that didn’t exist, fangirling like everybody else towards him. ‘You’re on.’