Chapter 27 #2
‘Oh yeah, I remember you did now.’ Barbara chuckles to herself and I can’t help but roll my eyes. ‘I dropped it in my downstairs loo and it’s not worked very well since. I reckon there’s some water in the lens.’
Before we can go on yet another tangent and all reluctantly find out why Barbara had her video camera in the toilet with her, an unwelcome distraction walks through the door.
Arthur saunters in, shoulders back, head high, oozing confidence, and my chest caves at the sight of him.
Christ, can a girl not just try and sort her life out in peace? Why is it that when I come up with a plan, there are too many curveballs to count and I end up too overwhelmed to function?
I try my best to ignore him and push on, ‘Okay, so no camera. Cerys, do you and your mates fancy a role in a film?’
The teen looks up from her phone. ‘I’d love to help you, Bea, but how are they going to act when you’ve got nothing to video with? Sounds a bit pointless to me.’
‘Cheers for your unwavering truthfulness as always, Cer,’ I reply, feeling increasingly itchy and breathless as I try my best to ignore Arthur’s eyes as they follow my every move.
‘What’s happening here then?’ I hear him ask Tracy, as he takes his usual seat at the bar.
‘Barbara videos herself on the toilet and I’m pretty sure Beatrice is having a breakdown,’ my boss replies and plops a peanut into her mouth as she watches it all unfold in front of her.
‘Beatrice.’ Arthur calls out my name, but I pretend I can’t hear him.
‘Okay, who here has a camera? A smartphone? A cine camera?’ They all look at me blankly.
‘Beatrice, can we talk?’ Arthur stands beside me and takes me by the hand, but I pull it from his grip before I can falter.
‘No.’ My bluntness takes him aback and he blinks at me with furrowed brows. ‘All right then, who wants to be in a film?’ I direct my attention back at the room but they all just look at me like I’m an idiot.
‘Bea, I’ve got a camera you can borrow. I’ll give you it.
Will you just come and talk to me for five minutes?
Please?’ I say neither yes nor no as I storm out of the pub and into the smoking area.
Arthur is right behind me and he leans against the same picnic table that I practically threw myself at him on and I feel the tears begin to sting at the corners of my eyes.
‘I’ve got something so exciting to tell you …’ He grins like a fucking baboon and I could rip it straight off his face.
‘What the fuck is wrong with you?’ His face drops in an instant. ‘How can you stand there all giddy as if nothing has happened?’
‘What?’ There’s no sign of his excitement left on his face now, only concern. ‘I-I don’t …’
‘I told you things this morning that I have never had the gall to even say out loud before, and you just up and left like it was nothing. I get it. I do. Why would you want to hear all of that? Why would you want to see me cry? We work together whilst your parents are mad at you. That’s it.’
‘Beatrice.’ My name falls from his lips with such pain as he takes a step towards me that I have to look away from him before I cave entirely.
‘But I felt safe with you. Being held by you made me feel as though nothing that ever hurt me before could harm me. Being held by you made me feel loved, Arthur. And maybe I’m a fool for thinking that your feelings could have changed since your first day here.
Every village has its idiot and I think I can take that title now for ever opening my heart up to someone who would never look twice at me if he ever had a choice.
’ Arthur reaches forward and sweeps the tears from my face, but I fight the feelings that his touch brings and pull further from him.
‘Where is this coming from?’ A pained expression overwhelms his face until I’m sure we’re a mirror image of one another.
‘You left me, Arthur. You left me when I opened up, and you left me when I needed you.’ I feel weak as I try my hardest to fight him.
‘Fuck.’ He breathes ‘I’m an idiot.’ He tugs at the root of his hair with the hand still damp with my tears.
‘Yeah, you are,’ I huff pathetically.
‘Bea, you’re right.’ I’ve waited for him to say those words for so long, but now they’re laced with agony and I choke back a sob.
‘I didn’t have a choice in being here. Not initially anyway.
But, in all honesty, the thought of having to leave again hurts far more than anything else.
I didn’t leave this morning because you’d scared me off, or I didn’t care.
Quite the opposite, Bea. I left this morning to get these. ’
He pulls two sheets of paper from his pocket and lays them on the table. The writing on them is blurred as I read it with tear-filled eyes, but I can just about make out what they say. ‘What is this?’ I ask with a sniffle.
‘A second, second chance.’ His urgency relaxes a little and he hazards another step towards me.
‘It’s a gala next week. Another place to put your talent on display.
To get someone behind this film and behind this story.
There will be a room full of people looking for new ideas.
Now I’m realising that I’ve gone about this all the wrong way, but this is all new to me.
I heard every word you said this morning and it killed me to see you cry knowing there was nothing I could do to help.
This is my way of thinking I was helping. I’m so sorry, Beatrice.’
‘I don’t want them. I just wanted you to stay.’ His expression fractures in pain. ‘This thing—’ I gesture to the tickets in his hand ‘—couldn’t have waited just an hour longer? You left me when I needed you, Arthur. No tickets, no film, no fancy party can undo that. I’m sorry.’
The sight of him breaks me even more. His look of boyish excitement has completely eroded. Now he looks withered. Pushing open the pub door, I leave him there, wilting in the cold of the garden, and I try to pretend I’m not hurting all over.
Bill tries to talk to me as soon as I step back into the room but I can’t lift my eyes to look at him, or listen to what he says. Dragging my feet with the weight of the last ten minutes, I shuffle back behind the bar.
‘What would you like?’ I try to continue as normal, but as I turn my back to the patrons, my tears fall, and I cry, in front of them all.
‘You all right, love?’ It’s Jimmy who notices first, and his attention sends the rest of the place snowballing into a panic.
‘Beatrice?’ Tracy comes up behind me and places her hand on the middle of my back. Instinctively, I turn into her and she cradles me close to her chest to let me cry. The pub quickly falls to a low murmur.
‘Beatrice, love?’ Barbara’s voice comes to me, muffled through Tracy’s shirt. ‘I take it you didn’t get the camera?’
‘Barb, come on now,’ I hear Bill scold her but she shushes him.
‘Well, we were just having a natter there whilst you were out. And well, we can all chip in you know, a few quid for some equipment? A quick whip round and then we can send Bill off to PC World in the morning. How about that, duck?’
Standing back up, I wipe the snot from my face as I look around at the faces staring back at me. They all watch me, expectantly, though their concern seeps through in every one of them. The heart of them all only makes me want to cry again.
‘No, Barbara,’ I finally say when I compose myself, ‘you keep your money. It’s not that.’
‘It’s that fella, in’t it?’ Bill says, with the fire of a father learning of his daughter’s first heartbreak.
‘Do we need to chase him off?’ another of the locals pipes up from the corner, and I laugh through my tears.
‘No, no, it’s nothing. Don’t mind me, I don’t know what’s come over me.’ I reach for a tissue and blow my nose.
‘I do.’ Cerys speaks for the first time, still not looking up from her phone. ‘Arthur Cavendish has got into you, and you can’t decide if you’d rather bone him or carry on being a mardy cow forever.’
‘Cerys!’ her mother scolds her. The teen only shrugs.
‘For a twat, he doesn’t half make you glow at the mention of him,’ Cerys continues, her voice monotone as though this is the most obvious thing in the world.
‘I do not,’ I protest weakly.
‘You do, to be fair.’ Barbara adds her two pennies’ worth, as always. ‘I’ve never seen you so fired up. You just plodded along before. You were proper boring when you came back from London.’
I look to Tracy with pleading eyes. She shrugs. ‘You have seemed happier, Bea. Well, not right now, obviously. But it’s been nice to see you so, so …’ She tails off.
‘So what?’
‘Alive.’
‘I’m just an old fool who knows nothing about the hearts of young ladies, but I know that boy brings out what is good in you.’ Grandad’s voice rings through my head as though he’s another patron of this pub who has just decided that tonight is a Beatrice counselling session.
But they’re right. Arthur was wrong; there’s no debating that. But there is no doubt that he is the right person.
‘This was weird, very weird.’ I point at the few individuals in the crowd. ‘But thank you,’ I say before hopping over the bar and throwing open the door.
Arthur is still where I left him, though this time he’s pacing back and forth, rubbing his hand across his face and muttering to himself as though fighting with his own conscience, not privileged enough to have a whole village of people be his conscience for him.
At the sound of my frantic exit, he snaps his head to me, and looks at me with those sad, hopeful eyes that I can’t bring myself to look away from.
I charge towards him. I don’t struggle when he pulls me into his chest; it’s the only place I’ve wanted to be all day.
He wraps one arm around my waist, and with the other hand he twists his fingers into my hair and cradles my head.
Planting a heavy, lingering kiss on my crown, he releases a warm breath across me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he breathes against me, and I hold him tighter.
After a minute of absorbing his heartbeat and feeling mine beat in time with his, he pulls me from the warmth of his body to capture a full view of my face.
I’m sure it’s red, patchy, and smeared with snot but he looks at me as though I have just fallen from the sky and I glow like stardust in his arms. I’ve never thought of myself as pretty; I’ve been content to be strong, or smart, but seeing myself warped in his dilated pupils, I feel beautiful.
‘My feelings aren’t what they were back when we met.
Beatrice, those weren’t even my feelings then.
You have taken my life and shoved it into the blades of a bloody combine.
There has always been something missing in my life.
I thought it should be perfect, I should be the happiest man alive, but there was something not quite right, something I desperately needed, but I didn’t know what.
I know now that that thing is you. You are my mind, my muse, and you are a fucking wildfire.
You have sent a spark through every dead part of me and set it ablaze and … and …’
‘All right, Hollywood, enough of your Nicholas Sparks shit, come here—’ I take him by the cheeks and slam my lips on his.