Tara grinned as her father went to his chair beside the fire and slipped off his slippers, reaching for his shoes. She wandered slowly around the room, her hand trailing over the familiar furniture and artefacts. Her father’s study had always been comforting to her: walls lined with books, that faded rug, the sun-bleached striped chair by the fire, its arms worn bald over the years. Her mother rarely ventured in here and as such, it had a worn-in, slightly nibbled look.
She went and stood by the window, looking out onto the street, scanning for the lean lope of her fiancé. Gleaming dark cars were parked along both sides, the streetlamps already shining as daylight faded fast. The days, though growing longer, were still too short for her liking and the glow of lights inside their neighbours’ houses was contained by heavy passementerie-trimmed curtains, spilling out only in half crescents through fanlight windows above old Georgian doors. Not a person was to be seen. They were in the centre of London, only a few hundred metres from Piccadilly, Park Lane and Regent Street, but it may as well have been a village in the Dales for all the footfall after dark here.
‘Well, just so you know,’ he said, tying his laces, ‘in the interests of transparency, I’ve had a profile worked up on our guest.’
‘Daddy!’ she admonished.
‘Only a short one,’ he replied, shaking his head quickly. ‘I wasn’t looking for skeletons in the closet or anything like that – although you may be pleased that I can confirm he’s not been married before or got any kids,’ he added with an amused glint in his eye. ‘Relax, I just wanted to find some common ground with him. Your summary of “twenty-three-year-old American botanist” didn’t exactly give me much to go on. But I like what I see. He appears to have gone about things in an unusual manner and he’s a doer, gets his hands dirty. I like that.’
‘Well, I knew you would. He’s a bit of a maverick, but so passionate about his work.’
‘And he’s written some interesting articles. I particularly liked that one on reforestation and food waste.’
‘With the orange peels?’ she asked, pleased. She was pretty sure she had begun to fall in love with Alex in the course of that conversation. He had explained to her how, back in the mid-nineties in Costa Rica, an agreement between an orange juice manufacturer and a conservation-inspired landowner had led to 12,000 metric tonnes of orange peel and waste being allowed to biodegrade on scrub land within the landowner’s park. A rival juice manufacturer had taken a case to the Costa Rican Supreme Court a year later, successfully arguing the waste had despoiled a national park (but really wanting to trim their rival’s expanded profit margin, as their waste disposal costs were slashed) and nothing further was allowed. For fifteen years it was forgotten, until a Princeton biologist friend of Alex’s happened to look in on the site and saw with his own eyes a flourishing, thriving forest so thick with trees and vines that the road wasn’t visible even a few feet away. ‘Can you just imagine,’ Alex had asked her, his eyes shining, ‘how many problems could be eradicated if we could get the private sector to work with environmental communities? Imagine if we could bring back tropical forests by using the leftovers from industrial food production?’ The way his eyes had glittered at that question, his passion for the subject, his need to not just do good by the planet but to do better by it . . .
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it? He’s got so many ideas. His mind is just alive to possibilities, getting different industries to link up and offset one another. He knows the future is about collaboration, re-engaging communities at the grass roots.’
‘Mmm.’ He looked thoughtful suddenly and went over to the desk, beginning to rifle through the slim pile of papers. ‘Hmm . . . I wonder if . . .’
‘What is it?’
‘Hmm, no,’ he murmured, reaching the bottom of the pile. The rest of his desk was bare but for a solid gold nugget paperweight shaped like a bird’s egg, and a selection of ink pens in a pot. ‘I thought I wrote a small cheque a while back to a charity in central America doing something similar, but I can’t see it. I’ll ask Patsy tomorrow, she’ll know.’
‘Tomorrow’s Saturday.’
He looked at her blankly for a second before getting her gist – he might work every day of the week, but his PA didn’t work the weekends.
‘Oh well, Monday then. But I’m keen to get into the detail of it with him tonight. It sounds like it’s got legs.’ He smiled, his eyes softening. ‘Not to mention, he clearly knows a thing or two about our favourite place.’
Tara smiled. Her father had been taking her and Miles to a small cove on the Costa Rican Caribbean coast since they were small children. It had been his way of reconnecting with them when building his business had consumed him; weeks could go by in which they never saw him, he was always in a meeting, on a plane . . . but their month in the Central American tropics was ring-fenced every summer and nothing – absolutely nothing – was allowed to impinge upon it. Costa Rica had been the place where they rewilded, escaping the gilded cages they lived in throughout the year; it was where they ran about like normal kids, the only place where they had no security. It was an arduous journey in and out of the region; no one knew who they were, or cared, so he employed just a local man and his son to provide them with adventures and local knowledge and to keep a beady eye on them. Tara and Miles had learned to surf there, abseil,
