Chapter Thirty-Five
From halfway down the iron stairs, Honor could see that Stef was sitting in the teagarden of the Teapot, staring down the street, just waiting.
Obviously, he knew she hadn’t spent the night at the bungalow and was smart enough to know where she’d go. Tucking Martyn’s spare key in her purse and squaring her shoulders, she padded the rest of the way down to the street. As she approached, Stef pushed out the empty chair at his table with his foot. She sat, planting her elbows on the wooden top.
He grinned. ‘Showdown time.’
‘Fine. Then I’ll shoot from the hip. You know what, Stef? It’s over.’
He chose not to hear. ‘You ready to come home to Hamilton Drives?’
A picture swam into her mind of her dad’s blue clapboard house. And in it her father. ‘I’ll be going back in a while — you know, to start divorce proceedings.’
His tousled fair hair lifted in the wind. His eyes were hard. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
‘It is.’
Ru came out with his baseball hat on back-to-front and a tea towel tucked around his waist. He hesitated when he saw Honor. She smiled at him. ‘OK?’
He nodded.
‘Could I get a coffee?’ She realised she’d phrased it as if she was in the States and wished she’d said, ‘Coffee, please,’ like the English, to show Stef how well she fit in.
Ru looked from Honor to Stef.
‘For me, too,’ snapped Stef.
They waited, in silence, for Ru to reappear with a round tray and two tall white mugs, a milk jug and sachets of sugar. ‘Thanks, Ru.’ Honor watched him through the door into the tearoom and caught sight of Robina looking at her. Robina smiled. She wasn’t smiling at Honor; it was just the kind of smile people give when their thoughts amuse them. But Honor still smiled back.
Stef followed the direction of her gaze. ‘You know how weird she is, don’t you? She knows everything there is to know about your Englishman.’ He said the word Englishman as if it tasted bad. ‘She knows when he runs and where to intercept him on his route, all his social networking platforms and that he does web design. I’ll bet she has a scrapbook of his ads. Doesn’t it creep you out that she feels like that about him ?’
What was creeping her out was that he was talking about this right outside Robina’s tearoom. Keeping her eye out for Robina to appear, Honor added milk and sugar to her coffee and took a sip. ‘It’s certainly an awkward situation.’ She met his gaze steadily. ‘My life seems to be filled with them, right now. I have stuff to sort out and changes to make.’
His brows snapped down. ‘Don’t you count me as one of those changes! I’m your husband. You made vows.’
‘I did,’ she admitted. ‘But I made those vows to a different Stefan Sontag and I don’t think even vows are designed to allow a woman’s husband to run wild while she just has to put up with the consequences. You’ve chosen a life I don’t want a part of.’ She shivered. ‘I curled up and died of humiliation, seeing you in the dock, and when they took you away to jail I felt disgust.’
He dropped his eyes, fiddling with a tube of sugar. ‘It can be put in the past, Honor; Martyn Mayfair and all of my pranks. I’ll mend my ways, I swear. I’ll never make you feel humiliated or disgusted again.’ Suddenly, his eyes were tawny bright. ‘Our life is still waiting for us. We can go home and get our apartment back, put our lives back how they were. Only better.’
‘With neither of us having a job?’
He scrabbled for arguments. ‘OK, we’ll start over, somewhere new.’ He looked less sure of this idea. ‘You still have all your licences, you can get a job, and maybe I’ll start my own business so my record won’t count against me with an employer.’
‘Doing what? You never got yourself a career or a skill, Stef. And we don’t have enough money to open up a diner.’ She fumbled her way to her feet before the tears of pity came and Stef thought she was weakening. ‘I hate that I’m pouring cold water over everything you offer. But, I’m sorry, it’s not going to happen.’
He jumped up, screeching his chair back. ‘Then I’ll just have to make it happen, won’t I?’
* * *
Martyn returned from his run, cooled down, stretched, and showered. Honor was out, so he picked up his phone and called Clarissa.
‘I thought your phone didn’t make outgoing calls to mine and that’s why I always call you,’ she greeted him.
He wasn’t in the mood to be guilted. ‘Honor’s got a problem with the bungalow. She has a squatter.’
A pause. Clarissa sounded guarded. ‘Squatter?’
He hesitated, alerted by her uncharacteristically mild reaction. ‘You don’t sound shocked or horrified or outraged. I thought you’d go ballistic.’
‘I just—’ She seemed to be choosing her words. ‘Would the squatter be Honor’s husband, by any chance?’
His heart gave a thud. ‘How did you know?’
She sounded uncomfortable. ‘He was there when I called. About the lawns.’
‘In the bungalow?’
‘Um . . . outside.’
He let a silence grow, hoping she’d fill it. She didn’t. ‘He’s inside now,’ he prompted, helpfully.
‘I didn’t let him in. Or not into the house.’ Clarissa sounded defensive.
‘So where did you let him into?’
‘He said that he’d cut the grass so I let him in the garage.’
‘And I suppose he found a window open at the back,’ Martyn finished, grimly. ‘And now he’s in, he’s refusing to get out.’
Clarissa sighed. ‘Then, evidently, I’ve unintentionally caused a situation. But if he’s her husband—? Martyn, it’s obvious that you’ve got a thing about Honor, it’s been written on you all summer. But she’s married. I presume there’s been some issue, for her to have come here without her husband, but he’s here now, so he wants to patch things up. Don’t get involved! You know how I feel about people who interfere in other people’s marriages.’ Her voice tightened. ‘If I gave him access to the bungalow it was inadvertent but it’s probably for the best. I’m not going to apologise if it’s stopped you getting mixed up in their problems. And I can’t quite blame him for fighting to get his wife back. In fact,’ she ended, defiantly, ‘I applaud it.’
Martyn took a deep breath. He counted to ten. He reminded himself that Clarissa was his mother and she loved him. And that it wasn’t long since her own marriage had ended and it had caused her enormous pain. ‘But Stef could be as mad as a box of frogs. You don’t know why she left him or what he did once he got Honor alone in that bungalow. So she’s moved in with me.’ He ended the call feeling he’d been as polite as he could be, under the circumstances.
* * *
After Honor had gone — back to her fucking fancy, male-model boyfriend, presumably, Stef sat for a while, letting the white heat fade. It had seemed like a good idea, planting himself in her rented house, but it had backfired big time. He hadn’t thought it through. Underestimated Honor’s desire to keep distance between herself and him.
Finally, he picked up the order check that Ru had left on the table and wandered into the tearoom, pausing inside the door and letting his eyes adjust to the dimmer light. Ru, enveloped in a cloud of steam, was busy at the steel sinks with his back to the kitchen. Pink-hair lady was cutting crosses in baked potatoes and piling in cheese. Conveniently, Robina was closest to the counter.
He walked soundlessly to the open flap, leaned in and touched her sleeve. When she glanced up from balancing little silver balls on whorls of frosting, he jerked his head and stepped back, so the others couldn’t see him.
Robina followed him out. ‘All you need to do,’ he said, ‘is ring her when I give you the word. That OK?’
Robina smiled like a mischievous child. ‘Aren’t you going to tell me why?’
He made a conspiratorial face. ‘Honey, that would be no fun at all.’
Paying her for the two cups of coffee, he left, wandering along The Butts, stopping and gazing into shop windows — many of which, he thought, needed the salt cleaning off of them — and then crossed to the other side of the road and dawdled like a tourist, turning his face up to the sun, which had decided to grace Eastingdean with its presence, watching white fluffy clouds drift by.
When he reached the Starboard Walk shops he meandered, idly, into the car park, glancing around. And then up. Around the outbuildings and the dumpsters. Then he wandered out, looked at a few more shop windows, and rambled back off to the bungalow.