‘I was right about you, Ellie. You’re exactly like Adele’s idiotic red setter. You just leap in, say the first thing that comes into your head, and you don’t know when to quit.’
‘Some people think that’s a good quality,’ she said, then added, ‘The not quitting thing.’
‘Clearly they haven’t been on the receiving end of one of your inquisitions.’ Then, in an attempt to turn the tables, he said, ‘What about you?’
‘Me? You want to know about my family? Mum’s a great cook, she’s a member of the Women’s Institute, helps out at a charity shop three times a week. Dad is a civil servant. Taxes.’ She shook her head. ‘We don’t talk about that outside the family. My sister takes after him. You’d like her. She’s the sensible one with brains-’
‘I’m not interested in them. I said I’d do this when I got home, so why are you out here cutting my grass when you should be devoting all your time to writing? That
‘I needed thinking time, and I can think and mow the lawn at the same time,’ she said. ‘And I haven’t given up my life.’
‘No? I share a house with you, and I haven’t seen any signs of one. When was the last time you went out on a date?’
‘Good question,’ she said without hesitation. ‘When did you?’ Then, before he could answer, ‘Do you want to come to dinner tonight? I’m trying out a recipe and I need someone who’ll give me an honest opinion. I know I can rely on you for that.’
‘You’re evading the question.’
‘And you aren’t?’ she demanded. ‘I’m not ready to date. What’s your excuse?’
For a moment neither of them spoke, giving him plenty of time to regret that he’d followed the sound of the mower. To wish that he’d gone straight inside.
‘I haven’t given up my life, Doc, I’m going for it.’ She stood, hands on hips, looking as if she was about to take on the world. ‘I’ve done all the sensible stuff, made all the compromises. Never again.’
‘You’re taking the balloon ride?’
‘As far as hot air and a following wind will take me.’
‘You’re sure you’re not just running away?’
She stared at him, shocked for a moment into silence. Then, ‘No!’
‘No?’ He wasn’t sure where that thought had come from, except suddenly he wasn’t as convinced by this cheerful, go-for-it exterior as he should be. Ellie had suffered a terrible loss, and instead of rebuilding her life she appeared to be running blindly into the future, doing her best to escape it. ‘So why, when you decided to fly, didn’t you go back to your first love and enrol in art school?’
She took a breath as if to speak. Didn’t. Couldn’t. Opened her mouth. Closed it.
‘Well?’ he pressed, certain now in every fibre of his being that he’d got beneath the outer shell to touch something soft, raw at her centre.
‘It was too late,’ she finally managed. Her arms had dropped to her sides and she was no longer quite as self- assured, in-your-face-confident. ‘I’m a different person.’
‘People don’t change.’
‘Maybe I didn’t want it badly enough in the first place.’
‘Maybe,’ he said, ‘you were always too scared to go for it. Maybe that’s why you didn’t push for it in the first place. Override your father’s objections.’
Her father? When had she said it was her father who’d talked her out of it? She shook her head. It didn’t matter.
‘What’s this? Psychology Central? You’re not exactly living life to the full yourself. You get plenty of invitations. I empty the bin you toss them in. So who messed up your life, Doc?’
And it was his turn to do the fish impression.
She shook her head, just once, said, ‘Life isn’t a rehearsal, it’s one long first night.’
‘Maybe I don’t like the script.’
‘Then change it. You get dumped on the stage, but the moves are up to you. The important thing is to keep moving.’
Then, as if to show him how it was done, she turned and began to walk away from him. The cut-offs were the same ones she’d worn on the day they went to the garden centre, clinging to her hips, accentuating her bottom which, as she walked, swung in the opposite direction to her heavy dark ponytail. The effect was hypnotic.
‘Natasha,’ he called after her. Anything to stop that swaying. Anything to stop her from walking away. ‘Her name was Natasha.’
It worked. She stopped, turned.
No. That was no better. Now, instead of her bottom, he had a full frontal of her heart-stopping bosom, hugged by a close-fitting vest top that swooped low enough to offer a promise of the delights it concealed. He’d caught more than a glimpse that night he’d taken her to the Assembly Rooms when, oblivious of his presence, she pulled off her top to display the kind of bra that had caused traffic chaos when an equally well-endowed model had displayed one on sixty feet of roadside hoarding.
He’d never been turned on by the too obvious sexuality of wide hips, a generous bosom, an old-fashioned waist, but there had been no doubting the effect Ellie’s body had had on him that night.
Or now.
And he kept on inflicting it on himself. While his mind was determined on one course, his body just kept walking into trouble. It was walking into trouble now, he knew, as he took a step towards her.
‘She was tall, fair, slender, always perfectly dressed, never a hair out of place,’ he said, as if by conjuring up Tasha’s pristine pale gold image he could somehow protect himself from a sensual clamour that responded so insistently to Ellie March. ‘She spoke ten languages fluently, another seven well enough to carry on a conversation. She was perfection, and I loved her.’ He stopped six inches from Ellie. Near enough to smell the grass where tiny pieces of it clung to skin damp with the heat. Near enough to feel the warmth of her body.
‘Past tense, Ben?’ she asked, her eyes softening, her voice catching in her throat.
‘Only in relation to my life.’ She waited. For a woman who had a runaway mouth, she understood the power of silence. ‘She was offered a job at the highest level of the United Nations.’
‘And she took it?’
He felt rather than heard her sharp intake of breath. Having anticipated some great personal tragedy to equal her own desperate loss, she was shocked by this banal story of raw ambition overriding emotion. No story there for her imagination to get to grips with. No passion. Quite the reverse.
‘No,’ she said, answering her own question. ‘If she’d grabbed for it, walked away, you’d have got over her. You encouraged her to go, didn’t you? Made the sacrifice?’ She nodded, able to understand that. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s love.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘that’s pragmatism. You see a look in a person’s eyes, Ellie, and you know, even while she’s telling you that it’s nothing, even while you’re clinging to that, trying to block out reality, that it’s over. That you’ve already lost. One way or another she was going to leave. It was the life she was made for, and I didn’t want her to feel guilty about grabbing for it.’
‘Pragmatism. Love. They’re just words. It’s the motivation that counts. The feeling that drives the action.’ She paused, as if to catch her breath. ‘And now I’m here, in her place, doing the things she’d be doing. Bringing it all back.’
‘Yes,’ he said, because to lie would be pointless. Then, because strands of dark hair were clinging to her cheek, because she was pink from the sun, because she worried about rabbits instead of world affairs, wrote silly romances rather than reports of world-changing significance, he added, ‘And no.’ He took her hand, turning it over, looking at her fingers, stained with green. ‘You are not perfect.’
‘No, I’m a scruffy feather-brain who’s ten pounds overweight, has no career prospects and…and can only speak five languages.’
‘Five?’
‘I can count to ten in French, Italian, German and Welsh,’ she said.
‘Welsh?’
‘
