Chapter 47
Elizabeth was in the back of Vincent’s car again and it was as if time had looped back to the day before Christmas Eve.
They had barely spoken since they had walked across from Figgy Hollow.
Everything that formed in her mouth felt too big, too awkward to come out, other than the banal like ‘good night’, ‘good morning’ and ‘thank you’ when he helped her with her suitcase off the Yorkshire Belle.
She may have been surprised to find that Vincent’s thoughts were running parallel.
He had played it over and over in his head trying to work out how her hand had ended up in his when they’d been walking back from the abandoned Figgy Hollow, although he was glad it had.
But what the hell it had done to the rest of him as a result was anyone’s guess.
There had been a burst of warmth in his chest when she took his arm, but when their hands clasped, there was a full-on nuclear explosion.
He should have said something but all words fused together in his throat, he could barely get air past them to breathe.
And now it was too late because she was once again his passenger and he was taking her to her fiancé and then going home to his cat.
The thaw was all that was needed for the train brakes to unlock.
The guard had agreed to take Henry as far as St Hilda where he could pick up the line to London.
They had all bid him ‘adieu’ because, as Radio Brian said, there was no need for a word as final as ‘goodbye’.
But it felt like one when the rest of them got off at Eskford, and Henry stood at the window and waved slowly as the Yorkshire Belle pulled away.
The gesture said he sensed it too: the last vestige of connectedness, the flipside of a glimmer, a spell broken.
They didn’t have long to wait for the shuttle to Derringbury where they found themselves back where it all started.
Frank and Grace would be well on their way back to Norfolk now, Jane to her home in Derby.
Vincent had been ready to get his tools out for Tim’s car but it fired into life with one twist of the ignition key.
He was giving Roo a lift as her village was just a short detour from his route back to Sheffield.
They traded car pips at the end of the road where Tim turned south and Vincent turned to the north.
Elizabeth took a deep breath as she turned on her phone and waited for the messages to begin downloading.
It sounded as if it had developed a fault: bing bing bing bing bing…
one hundred and twenty-seven missed calls.
Texts in shouty capitals. Voicemails too.
She couldn’t read them or listen to them; she deleted them and would pretend she never got them.
‘Would you like to stop on the way for a coffee?’ Vincent asked.
Bing bing bing bing. Even more coming through, demanding attention.
‘No… I’d better just get there soon as I can,’ she answered. She needed to face them, get it over with.
Vincent flicked his eyes up to the mirror and saw her staring down at the phone in her hand. She looked different to how she had last night with the soft gold glow of the lamps lighting her features in the bar, making her lovely eyes shine; she looked drawn, stressed, sad.
She braced herself when the shrill brrr-brrr ringtone started up, the sound piercing the quiet of the car, an incoming call this time. Gregory’s name filled her screen. She pressed ‘answer’ and didn’t have the chance to speak before he did.
‘Elizabeth?’
‘Yes. I—’
‘What the fuck is going on? Why haven’t you answered my calls? Where have you been? Where are you now…?’
A long string of questions with barely a break in between them for her to insert an answer.
‘Gregory, I’m on my way. I’ve been stuck on a train with no—’
‘What train?’
‘A private train. We had a lift from—’
‘What are you talking about, a private train? Are you still on it?’
‘No, I’m in the taxi.’
‘Where have you been for the past FOUR DAYS?’
‘On the train, I told you. It was a sleeper. There were a few of us trapped on it. They couldn’t move the train until today because of the snow.’
‘There hasn’t been any snow for two fucking days, what are you talking about? So I’ll ask you again, Elizabeth—’
She couldn’t stand it, the snapping relentless bark of his tone, a nail scraping down the blackboard of her nerves.
‘I’m sorry, you’re breaking up,’ she fibbed and made a series of staccato noises that would intimate her voice was breaking up too.
Vincent saw her disconnect the call and stuff the phone in her bag, where it continued to buzz like a livid wasp.
She’d dropped her head as if it were weighted with more angst than it could carry.
‘You all right in the back there?’ he asked.
‘Yes, fine.’
What else could she say?
Vincent switched on the radio, not the gentle sounds of yesteryear from Brian, but tunes, some of which Elizabeth knew, some she didn’t.
She couldn’t really concentrate. All she could think of was what she had to face in less than fifteen miles because Gregory was fuming and the fact she was now actively ignoring his calls was tantamount to throwing petrol on a bonfire. Ten miles. Five miles. Two miles.
She could hear her heart thumping in her ears as if it had crawled there for a better place of safety.
A horrible mix of emotions was tearing around inside her because they didn’t know where to go, her whole body was in panic mode.
She was glad that Vincent hadn’t spoken to her for the last quarter of an hour because one kind word and she would have crumbled.
In the front, Vincent didn’t know what to do. Every time he’d checked on her in the rear-view mirror, she’d looked paler, so lost in whatever was going on in her head that she hadn’t heard him ask again if she was okay because she really didn’t look it.
The satnav was showing a small chequered flag, they were almost there now.
He slowed down, indicated right and they were on the long private drive down to the house.
My, it was grand, even more so in the flesh than on a photo.
He thought of his old mum again who would have asked how much the window-cleaning bill for such a pile would cost every month. Back to the beginning, a full circle.
Elizabeth reached into her coat pocket for a tissue to dab the discreet tears she’d been crying for a mile and a half.
Vincent would have seen if she’d wiped them away before so she’d let them just roll down her face as she looked out of the window.
She felt something else in there and pulled it out.
The silver whistle she’d won in the cracker.
She supposed she must have put it there when she was packing but she couldn’t remember doing so.
The car pulled up next to a fountain in the centre of a gravel circle and a man marched out of the front door – Gregory presumably, thought Vincent. He wasn’t smiling in relief that his darling was finally here, he looked furious; it told in his walk, in his expression and now in his voice.
‘Finally, she turns up!’
He grabbed impatiently at the locked back door handle, trying to hoick it open which pissed Vincent right off.
It was just as he was about to press the door release switch that Vincent heard the high-pitched trill coming from behind him. In the frame of his rear-view mirror he saw Elizabeth with the silver pea-whistle in her mouth.
‘Is that a call for help?’ he asked, as he had asked her yesterday at the table. Yesterday he had meant it as a joke, but not today.
She nodded, unable to speak, she barely had even the breath to blow.
Gregory was rapping hard on the window with one hand, the other still jerking on the handle.
‘Elizabeth, open this fucking door. NOW.’
Vincent slid the gear lever hard into drive, floored the accelerator and slammed the steering wheel into a left lock, spraying Gregory with the family gravel as they sped away.
Vincent stopped at the first large service station he came to, somewhere where they could park themselves in a corner and she could talk to him. She was in a proper state. Even when he opened the door for her and she got out, for a moment he thought she might fold like a dynamited building.
They walked into the busy foyer, past the queue for Burger King and a noodle bar and into the large Costa.
He bought two large Americanos and set one down in front of her.
By the look of her she wouldn’t live long enough to drink it.
Her hands were gripped together in front of her as if they were the only things stopping her from falling off a cliff.
‘What have I done?’ she said. It was warm in the café but she was shivering.
‘I think you should start from the beginning,’ Vincent said. ‘You’ve got about three hours before that coffee cools down enough to drink, that enough time?’
‘Not even half,’ she said.
She told him everything. Way too much detail that made her cringe as soon as it left her mouth, but once she started, it just rolled out under its own momentum.
He listened to every word, fully invested, his eyes never leaving her.
She was past caring how weak she sounded, how feeble and pathetic: how she had been fashioned and groomed, fooled and bullied to tread the path expected of her, marry someone suitable who ticked all the family boxes – and she confessed that she really did think he’d ticked hers too.
Once upon a time. She left out the fact he made love like a machine that something had triggered into action by inserting a pound coin; it would have been one detail too far.
And at the end of her mighty diatribe, Vincent sat back in the seat and said, ‘Sounds as if you’ve been played like a good’un, gel.’
‘If I end it with Gregory, my father won’t lose him from the business, he’s too important, so I’ll have to go. And my flat is in that office block so I’ll have to leave that. And—’
Vincent held up his hand to stop the flow.
‘Do you love him?’
Such a small question, such a big question.
If she said it, it would make it real. She didn’t love him, but she would probably have still married him if a cab-driver from London hadn’t held her hand in the snow and a million scales had fallen from her eyes.
‘No.’
‘Then you got a choice to make. Two doors, you imagine, one leads to Gregory and all his family, and your dad and your job and your house and a big fat salary and a life of privilege, kids in private schools, holidays in Bali…’ He paused.
‘And the other one?’
‘Takes you to a place called Cary’s Pond.
It’s got a village green with ducks, couple of pubs, one of which does the best scampi and chips on the planet.
It’s got a few shops; one of them would make a great little second-hand bookshop.
There’s a farmhouse where you can hole up for as long as you want to get your head sorted out.
And living in it, is a cat and a bloke who won’t shout at you or use you, he’ll just love you. ’
Then Vincent reached across the table and scooped up her hands with his.
And there was absolutely no question which door she was going to walk through.