Chapter Two
Morning. The sun glared through the window. Inch by painful inch, Honor peeled herself from the sheets. The skin of her right arm, shoulder, neck and cheek felt as if it had shrunk to fit someone two sizes smaller, stinging viciously. ‘ Son of a bitch !’ she hissed.
Glugging down the last of the cold water from the white bedside table, she eased from the bed and tottered along the hall to the bathroom. The shower unit, the kind that hung over the bath, provided a deluge of water. It took a bit of experimentation to make it bearable because anything the warm side of lukewarm made her feel as if she were being basted like a Thanksgiving turkey, but then she stood for a long time, letting the flood soothe her savaged skin and trying not to wish she was at home in Hamilton Drives, where Jess would have clucked and sighed then taken care of her.
Dabbing herself dry and spreading more of Dr Mayfair’s magic cream over her boiling scarlet patches, she wondered how to dress. Certainly nothing that had to be hauled over her head — ooh, ow. No.
Sorting through a suitcase, she was able to locate a loose, pale green shirt to ease cautiously up her burned arm, ‘Ow . . . ow . . . ow . . .’ so that it burst none of the water-filled bubbles clustered as ugly as frogspawn on the crest of her shoulder. A bra was out of the question. It would be torture.
On her way to the kitchen she noticed a key glinting on the doormat by the front door. Martyn must have posted it through after letting himself out. She’d tackle bending over to retrieve it later.
The kitchen was large for a compact home, meant for eating in as well as for the preparation of food. At the side of the single-storey house — she must remember to refer to it as a bungalow — it gave a close-up view of the fence that ran between this property and the next, yet light danced through it on to yellow walls and white counters.
In the fridge, she discovered milk, cheese, eggs, pineapple juice, sunflower spread, a pre-packed salad and a cooked breast of chicken. In a cupboard: tea bags, instant coffee, wholemeal bread, sugar, McVitie’s Digestive Biscuits, crackers, several tins of soup and a box of cereal.
Best of all, on the kitchen counter along with the ibuprofen and the receipts, stood a giant container of green aloe aftersun gel — spray on. ‘What a guy,’ she marvelled. ‘Brains as well as looks.’ She unbuttoned and carefully slid down her shirt, closing her eyes as she sprayed the pulsing area that she hadn’t been able to reach with the cream. Bliss.
Buttoning up, she picked up the receipt and saw it came attached to a note in a spiky hand.
Honor,
Hope what I brought will keep you going until you can shop. Clarissa says that if you need anything else, to ring her. Hope you’re OK soon.
Martyn Mayfair.
Having consumed a bowl of cereal and three cups of coffee, wincing whenever the steam brushed its cruel fingers across her tight red cheek, Honor was in the middle of revising the plans she’d had for the day — unpack, shop, get her laptop online, explore — and postponing most of them until she’d recovered from her sunburn, when she heard the front doorbell.
On the doorstep was a woman wearing pink-and-blue gym clothes and an impatient expression. She did manage a smile, though. ‘Hello, I’m Clarissa, you’re renting the bungalow from me.’
‘Oh, hi!’ began Honor, stepping back, because it was unreasonable to keep somebody standing on the doorstep of her own house. Bungalow. Clarissa evidently needed no invitation, anyway, because by the time Honor closed the door behind her, she was already in the living room that fronted the bungalow, had dropped into a pink swivel chair and was spreading paperwork on the seat of the small cream sofa.
She opened the conversation with a corresponding lack of ceremony. ‘Thought I’d check you’re OK. Are you OK? Martyn realised you weren’t up to signing the tenancy agreement when he found you getting sunburned, so he left it with me.’ She selected a set of papers and a pen.
Honor lowered herself gently on to the vacant half of the sofa. ‘Sure, I’ll sign it now. I was so stupid to fall asleep in the sun and was lucky your brother found me and called the doctor. She’s your sister, right?’ The resemblance was clear. Both women were small and stocky, their hair identical shades of mouse. Maybe it was just the men in their family that got the dark, brooding movie-star looks.
‘Right. Zo?. If you’re sure you’re up to this?’ Clarissa held out the pen. ‘It’s exactly the agreement that I emailed to you to read over, so you just need to sign . . . and I’ll sign . . . I’ve dated it from when you moved in. That’s good, thanks.’ Then she added, ingenuously, ‘I just got the agreement off the internet, so I hope it’s OK. But you feel trustworthy, to me.’ Her smile flashed again, a glimpse of a softer side under her brisk manner.
The daughter of a lawyer and until lately an employee in an industry in which every agreement was a shrine to proper procedure, Honor was bemused. But she just said, politely, ‘Sure, I’m good for it. Ouch!’ Extending her arm too far to pass the paperwork back, her shoulder burned as if a Band Aid had been ripped from her skin.
Clarissa made a sympathetic face. ‘Will you be all right? I can call Zo? again—’ But she glanced at her watch as if checking she could spare the time.
‘I’ll be fine. I just need time to recover. Zo? fixed me up and Martyn helped me out with food and medication. It was so great of him to do that because he doesn’t look exactly—’ she searched for something to adequately encapsulate why Martyn Mayfair didn’t look like anybody’s personal shopper — ‘domesticated.’
Her choice surprised a laugh from Clarissa. ‘The only thing domesticated about Martyn is that he lives indoors. Although, I suppose, he does know how to open tins or buy food that doesn’t need much cooking.
‘It’s good to know he uses his time for something more useful than seeing how attractive he can make himself to women.’ And then she shrugged and softened the words. ‘Martyn’s one of the good guys, if you don’t mind his lifestyle and his occasional explosions.’ Her kid brother so dismissed, she returned to the purpose of her visit. ‘We have a small information point for visitors at the community hall so I picked up some things I thought might be useful to you — timetables for the buses and for the trains from Brighton, and a couple of maps, so you can find your way around. It’s only a few minutes’ walk to the local shops — I’ve marked them in red.’
‘Thank you!’ Honor was touched. ‘Between you, your family has provided almost a welcome wagon. The bus schedule will be really useful because I need to look for temp jobs and driving here is damned scary.’ Then, as Clarissa rose, ‘Wait, I need to pay Martyn for the things he bought for me.’ Making no sudden movements, she fetched her bag from the bedroom, glad she’d stopped at the airport ATM for currency.
Clarissa hung around only long enough to take the money. ‘Thanks — but I have to go. My contact details are on your copy of the tenancy agreement. Call if you have a problem.’
‘Thanks again—’ Honor began. But Clarissa was already halfway out of the door. After watching through the window as her landlady ran down to her car and reversed neatly out of the gravel drive, Honor stood looking out at the patio with its white-painted concrete balustrade and the concrete steps dropping to the drive and front lawn. Built on an incline, the bungalow was the top step of a kind of giant stairway with its own garage tucked niftily beneath it; then down to the lawn, down again to the coast road with its growling traffic and the grassy cliff top beyond and, one last giant step over the cliff to the blue ocean dancing with jewels from the morning sun. She was going to like it here, she decided. She hadn’t moved home often but she knew familiarity was just a question of finding new habits to get into.
Of letting go of the idea that Hamilton Drives, either her town-centre apartment or her dad’s blue clapboard house, was ‘home’.
If she hadn’t let herself get burned she could have run across the road — there was a crossing right outside — and found the way down to the beach.
But, she sighed, there were some boring necessities to take care of, even if she felt like crap and her sunburn throbbed like a dragon’s roar. Firing up her laptop on the mobile internet signal, which would do until she could get properly hooked up, she trawled through her credit card and bank accounts, clicking on change details and tapping in her new address in Marine Drive, Eastingdean, Brighton, East Sussex, United Kingdom, with a sense of adventure.
Switching to a sense of guilt, she opened her email account and selected Stef, Jess, Zach and Dad from her address book for the To: line.
Subject: A little space
Hi,
With everything that’s happened, recently, I’m sure you’re not too surprised that I’ve decided to take some time out, away from Hamilton Drives. You don’t have to worry about me. I’ve rented a little house and I have my severance pay so I’m all set.
She reread the last line and wondered whether to say something about being back soon. Then she shrugged — which made the dragon roar harder — and simply added:
Lots of love
Honor x
And pressed ‘send’. There. That ought to reassure everyone at home in Connecticut. She wasn’t sure whether Stef had internet access in his new place but someone was bound to pass the message on.