Chapter 17
CHAPTER 17
Beau rang from the train. It wasn’t great timing. Sophie and Tamar were in the middle of doing their first test shots for the book, trying the dishes in different pots and bowls to see what worked, and they were caught up in it. Tamar had been staying for a few days now and they’d settled into a really comfortable little groove: buying food together from all the interesting local independent shops and suppliers, cooking, going for daily swims – and now the test shots.
Sophie was happy to see how much more relaxed Tamar was. The little knot of frown had gone. She laughed a lot.
‘Hello, Mama dearest,’ said Beau. ‘It’s your great big boy.’
‘Oh, hello, darling,’ said Sophie, holding her phone in the crook of her neck as she tweaked a carrot two millimetres to the left and pushed two pomegranate seeds infinitesimally closer together. Nodding, her eyebrows raised, she looked up at Tamar, who pressed the shutter. Sophie immediately went over to look at the image on the camera screen.
‘It’s nice,’ she said, ‘but I think we need to bring out some more warmth, because the white of the bowl is chilling it all down and this is such a hearty dish I feel like we’re losing something—’
‘Mum?’ said Beau.
‘Oh, sorry, darling, it’s just we’re doing some shots here and I’m a bit distracted. Could I call you back later?’
‘You won’t need to do that,’ said Beau. ‘You can tell me to my face.’
‘Tell you what?’ asked Sophie, confused and a bit irritated, because doing their first shots together was a delicate phase of working with Tamar.
‘You can tell me how pleased you are to see me,’ said Beau, ‘because I will be at St Leonards station in under an hour. Can you pick me up?’
‘What?’ she said, then hastened to add, ‘How lovely. Text me the actual time the train gets in. Are you coming for the weekend?’
‘I’m going to see how it goes. It’s great weather and I feel like having a bit of a Hastings staycation. I’ve taken a break from the restaurant for a couple of weeks, I’m owed some time off. We can hang out and go to the beach—’
‘Great,’ said Sophie, trying to sound more enthusiastic than she felt, but then feeling confused about that. Normally, there was nothing she would like more than a visit from one of her boys – but why did he have to spring it on her like this? Just when she and Tamar were really beginning to gel as a creative team. It was terrible timing. He should have asked her first if it was convenient.
Then it struck her why his announcement was really niggling her – it was exactly what Matt would have done. He had never understood that the joy of a surprise was always much greater for the surpriser than the surprisee.
She glanced over at Tamar, making a ‘sorry’ face. Tamar beamed her lovely smile back, which made something else occur to Sophie. She had a beautiful young woman staying with her and there was nothing Beau loved more than a beautiful young woman – and they were usually pretty taken with him. There was no way she was going to let him make a move on Tamar. She had to take action and fast.
‘Okay,’ said Sophie, briskly. ‘But it would be good if you could walk from the station. And you can meet my lovely new friend, Tamar, who is staying with me, er, us. Bye.’
As she hung up, she turned to look at Tamar and saw she now had a slightly nervous look on her face. Back to the frightened Bambi she’d been when she arrived.
‘That was my older son, Beau,’ said Sophie, trying to sound more positive than she felt. ‘He’s just told me that he’ll be here in an hour. It’s not ideal timing, because I am so enjoying doing this with you, but perhaps what we both need is to take the weekend off and chill out for a bit. Go swimming and hang out. You’ll love Beau, he’s a laugh.’
‘Great,’ said Tamar, not very convincingly. ‘I can go back to London for the weekend, if it’s too much,’ she added, ‘or try again to get in touch with my friend down here...’
‘Whatever’s best for you,’ said Sophie. ‘But as I’ve said, you can stay here as long as you like. I want you to think of that room as your own. I love having you here and Beau really is fun. He’ll get us two food obsessives out of ourselves for a bit, and if Rey’s down this weekend as well, then it will be a proper party.’
But I do have to stop my lothario son hitting on you .
‘Just give me a moment,’ she continued. ‘Play around with the lighting a bit, see if you can get some more warmth into it. Perhaps look at some other bowls?’
She nipped out of the studio and went through the front door, pulling it closed behind her before she rang Beau back.
‘Hey, Mumster,’ he said. ‘Have you called to sound a bit more enthusiastic about my imminent arrival?’
‘I am very excited to see you,’ said Sophie, starting to mean it a bit more, ‘but there is one thing I have to quickly say to you.’ She turned her back to the door and cupped her hand round the phone, lowering her voice as much as she could. ‘I have a lovely young woman staying with me—’
‘Ooh...’
‘Stop it!’ she hissed. ‘That’s exactly why I’m ringing – to tell you that you are not under any circumstances to make a move on her. She’s very beautiful, so I know you’ll want to, but she’s off limits, because she’s been through a horrible trauma and I’m working with her on her first book – and it’s my first book since Daddy died...’ Was she wrong to throw that in? Oh, well. ‘And the situation is delicate. The last thing she needs is you doing your lover boy number on her. Have you got that?’
‘Absolutely,’ said Beau. ‘I promise one hundred per cent I will not make a move on her.’
Sophie was surprised he hadn’t put up more of a fight but was relieved he’d accepted her wishes. When she got back inside, Tamar was in the kitchen.
‘I’m going to start dinner, Sophie,’ she said. ‘If that’s OK. I’ve done a couple more shots you can look at, but I’m ready for a break now and I’ll feel less of a spare part if I’m doing something useful when your son arrives.’
‘That’s great, thank you.’
‘Are those fantastic black and white photos of the two boys in the sitting room your sons?’ asked Tamar.
‘Yes. My late husband took them. He was an artist and he took really good photographs too. He had a darkroom in a shed in our garden. Did all his own printing.’
She wondered why she’d bothered relaying all that extraneous information to Tamar, but then realised it was nice talking about Matt to someone who’d never known him. She didn’t have that sense of panic that she might suddenly blurt out something about the betrayal. It made him conceptual somehow.
‘Can you quickly show me which one is coming?’ asked Tamar. ‘It will make me feel less shy.’
Sophie led the way into the sitting room, where she’d arranged Matt’s portraits of the boys with the baby shots in the centre, radiating out to the most recent – the last one – at the top.
‘That’s Beau,’ said Sophie, pointing at him. He had his finger and his thumb behind Jack’s head in the classic ‘loser’ L shape. ‘He’s the older one, but you wouldn’t know it from the way he behaves – as this picture shows.’
‘He does look, er, fun, like you said.’
‘He likes to put on a show. He’s like his father and his uncles in that way – they love to make a lot of noise, live it large – but he’s a sweetie underneath it. Don’t be put off by the bravado.’
But don’t be too attracted to it either .
Beau was relieved when Sophie relented about picking him up from the station and he strode into the kitchen, smiling broadly and flipping a stray curl away from his face as he went over to say hello to Tamar.
He kissed her warmly on both cheeks. ‘Hello, Tamar,’ he said, ‘brilliant to meet you. I hear you’re doing great book things with my mum, which is super – and keeping her company in this big house, which is also great, plus she says you’re making dinner and I’ve never had Georgian food, so that’s exciting too. It’s all good.’
He was aware he was babbling. He reminded himself of his Uncle Thomas, he was so deep into the jolly bonhomie thing – had he actually said ‘super’? – but he’d had to cover up the urge to go into instant Mojobo mode. He’d promised his mother.
And she hadn’t been kidding. What an extraordinary-looking woman Tamar was. Tall and slender, with curly black hair, like a longer version of his, and the most amazing green eyes. And she was endearingly shy, which he also found very attractive.
He hoped that by being a blabbering twit, he could stop himself ‘twinkling’, which is how Jack described what he did around beautiful women. Jack said it was as powerful as a Vulcan neck grip in its effectiveness. But Beau had promised his mum – and himself – that he was going to lay off the twinkling with Tamar, although looking at her, it was going to be tough.
‘The house is looking great, Ma,’ he said, strolling through into the dining area, partly as a way of not looking at Tamar. ‘Aah... here’s Dad’s old chair, but it’s got a stupid blanket on it.’ He snatched the shawl off and threw it onto the next chair, then ran his hands over the Mickey Mouse ears.
His mother bustled off into the studio as if she had something urgent to do in there and came back holding a plate of food, which she put on the kitchen island.
‘Shame to waste this,’ she said. ‘Can you incorporate it into dinner, Tamar? I think you nailed that shot, the last one in the darker bowl, don’t you? We can add it to the gallery when we look at them all together to see which vessels work best with your food.’
‘It’s starting to feel more like home here,’ said Beau, walking back into the kitchen. ‘But when are you going to put Dad’s paintings up? It won’t really be our house until then.’
‘We will,’ Sophie said, ‘but I’ve had so much upheaval with the move and renovations already this year, I need a bit of breathing space. And you know how they’re packed up by those art movers – just getting them out of the packaging is a major operation.’
‘Joe said he’d called you about doing all that,’ said Beau. ‘He told me he’s going to come down to unpack it all, hang them and take the debris away. You can just lie on the sofa with a glass of champagne and point. We could have a party to celebrate, this is such a great party house.’ He extended both his arms in a disco move and noticed Tamar was smiling.
‘Maybe down the line,’ said Sophie, her voice sounding slightly strained, as it had when he’d phoned earlier – not at all enthusiastic. ‘But just not right now, darling. I’ve already had a housewarming thrust upon me by Thomas, and I’m really enjoying getting back to work with Tamar. Her book is going to be really good and I just want to throw myself into that.’
‘Of course,’ Beau said, turning to Tamar and then slightly wishing he hadn’t. Her mouth was a terrible distraction for someone trying not to twinkle. ‘Tell me more about your book, Tamar. So it’s Georgian food... what’s your connection with that? And I assume it’s Georgia from the former Soviet Union, not the Coca-Cola state.’
‘Definitely the one in the Caucasus,’ said Tamar. ‘My mother was from there. She came to live in London in the nineties, with my uncle, and when I was born, my grandmother came over too and it’s her recipes I’m inspired by.’
‘That sounds amazing,’ said Beau, getting his phone out. ‘What’s your Insta tag? I want to have a look. Mum says your pictures are really good.’
She told him and he scrolled through the feed.
‘Wow, these are great shots,’ he said. ‘I can see why a publisher got in touch with you. These are really nicely lit.’
He looked at her with professional admiration, rather than the raw attraction he had felt on first seeing her, before returning his attention to her food shots. He took his own pictures for his website and Instagram feed and he knew the difference between good enough and properly done. Matt had taught him that when he was a kid.
He felt a sharp stab of sadness, like he was back in the darkroom shed with his father, watching the magic happen. He could almost smell it, but then he remembered his visit to the studio. It was like playing ping pong in his own brain.
He lifted his head to see Tamar looking at him with a concerned expression.
‘Would you like some coffee, Beau?’ she asked. ‘Or tea? I’ve made a really nice cake.’
Beau smiled at her, with real gratitude. His mum had said Tamar had been through a trauma and he was pretty sure she’d recognised his distress. That was a connection he needed much more than the horizontal kind.