Away from the daily stresses of home, of Michele being a teacher and Alister a head teacher, things might improve.
Then Leah could quietly pack up her car and give them privacy to realign their relationship. Behind her back, she crossed her fingers.
Three weeks later
Leah loved her sunglasses, and not just because they made her look cool or made driving her Porsche in the mellow sunshine of France more pleasurable. No. Those sunglasses were currently allowing her to pretend to leaf through a magazine in the sunshine outside La Petite Annexe while actually watching the first-floor balcony of the house next door where a workman had bared his tanned back to the morning sun.
His sure and easy brushstrokes were transforming the walls of the house from dirty grey to the gold of unclarified honey but Leah’s anxious gaze was trained on the youth behind him. Everything the youth wore was black and decorated with studs or chains. Having perched himself on the wooden balcony rail and hooked his feet around the uprights, he was now arching backwards into scarily thin air. Flexing his spine, he swung gently, chains dangling and winking in the sun.
Leah bit her lip against an urge to shout a warning, scared of startling the youngster into falling.
Then, as if possessing a sixth sense, the man turned. Demonstrating commendable reflexes, he dumped his paint pot and made a grab for the gangly figure. Bellowing with laughter, the youth allowed himself to be hauled to safety. Leah let out the breath she’d been holding and grinned at the man’s obvious exasperation as he gave the youth a tiny shake before dragging him into his arms for a hard hug. Finally, the man managed a laugh as he loosened his embrace, his dark hair lifting in the breeze.
Then his gaze snagged on Leah and, after a moment’s contemplation, he raised his voice. ‘Bonjour!’
Unnerved at being spotted through the leafy trees, Leah lifted her head as if she hadn’t been spying on them. ‘Oh! Bonjour.’
‘Vous êtes en vacances? Restez-vous ici en Kirchhoffen?’ The man settled his forearms on the balcony rail as his voice rolled over the sunny air. His front view was as pleasing as the back had been.
Leah smiled. Her French was just about equal to the conversation so far. ‘Oui.’
But then, ‘Enchantés’ launched him into a speech of fascinating undulating rhythm punctuated with urrrr and airrr, of which Leah caught about ten per cent. She did at least understand that when he paused it was to invite her to respond to a question.
Both oui and non carrying equal risk, she prepared to offer a shrug and her stock phrases, ‘Désolée, mon français est très mauvais. Parlez-vous anglais?’
But then Natasha bounded out through the door of the main gîte. ‘Dad says, aren’t you coming in for breakfast? We want to go kayaking.’ Both man and boy swung their heads to gaze Natasha’s way as, message delivered, she dashed back inside again.
Thus saved from confessing to her rubbish command of the native language of her host country, Leah put her shrug to good use and called ‘Excusez-moi!’ to the occupants of the balcony and went to join the family.
Curtis craned over the rail to watch the woman and girl out of sight. ‘Hot.’
Ronan quashed the reflex to call out a sharp ‘Don’t lean too far!’ His heart might not have recovered from Curtis’s last stunt but Curtis was one big growing pain these days and making it abundantly clear that he no longer expected to be treated like a child. He was a teenager and had embraced the language, rituals and social conventions with the fervour of a religious convert to a sect.
Instead, Ronan hazarded a suitably laddish reply. ‘Obviously, I won’t comment on a teenage girl, but the woman was hot.’
Curtis rolled his eyes. ‘How d’you know I didn’t mean the woman?’
Ronan tried to decide whether his teenage self would have had this conversation with his own father. It had been just him and Dad for a long time and Ronan had only good memories. But no, he couldn’t imagine openly staring at a thirty-something woman with long bare legs and a rope of streaky hair. Even when Ronan had been old enough to spend university holidays on big, bluff Gordon Shea’s building sites, he wouldn’t have sprouted four facial piercings, as Curtis had done this summer holiday. And what Dad would have thought of Curtis’s long hair at the front and shaved patches at the side …
Ronan took up his brush. ‘The hot woman seems to be the mum and the girl mentioned a dad so she’s taken anyway.’
Curtis jingled the four chains he wore in place of a belt. ‘Try not to be intimidated by convention, Dad.’
Suppressing simultaneous compulsions to laugh, scold, and suggest Curtis get himself a paintbrush and direct his energies to something more productive than being a smartarse, Ronan replied gravely, ‘Try not to gawp at other people’s wives, Curtis.’
With one of the lightning changes of mood that came with his teenaged landscape, Curtis began to whoop like an ape, ‘Oo oo oo!’, crossing his eyes and swinging his arms.
Glad they were joking around rather than arguing, Ronan tucked his left arm into his pocket to relieve his sore shoulder of its weight as he turned back to his task with a wry ‘How could she resist?’
The roomy kitchen was bright with colourful tiles and fabrics. Alister was attacking the shiny crust of a baguette and Leah realised guiltily that he must have been down to the boulangerie while she’d been lazing in the sun.
Natasha was already at the table, buttering chunks of bread, tutting as her knife made a hole, while Jordan stabbed at his phone with the intensity reserved by fifteen-year-olds for anything with a screen. ‘You’re coming kayaking with us, aren’t you?’ demanded Natasha.
‘Sounds fun.’ Leah washed her hands before opening the fridge in search of cheese and cold meats. She glanced at her brother-in-law. ‘Does Michele know kayaking’s on today’s schedule?’ It didn’t seem the obvious activity for a forty-three-year-old in the early stages of pregnancy.
Alister sawed energetically, his eyes fixed rigidly on the baguette through the lenses of his glasses. ‘Haven’t seen her this morning.’
‘I have,’ Natasha piped up. ‘She’s a bit under the weather so she’s going to stay here and rest. If the boats are two-person, can I be with you, Leah? Then it’ll be girls against boys.’
Jordan glanced up from his phone. ‘We’d spend all day waiting for you. It’ll be better if I go with Leah and you go with Dad.’
Natasha pointed an indignant butter knife. ‘I said Leah first. Just because Mum’s not here –’
‘Jordan, would you make the coffee, please?’ interrupted Alister, in his head-teacher voice that managed somehow to be both mild and authoritative. ‘Natasha, how many more slices?’
Leah followed Alister’s lead in distracting the kids from bickering. ‘We’ll take the advice of the hire staff regarding distribution of paddlers between kayaks, shall we?’ As they sat down at the refectory-style table and she sliced Munster cheese onto her bread Leah added, ‘I could eat so much of this that I wouldn’t fit in a kayak.’
Jordan grinned. ‘You do have the appetite of the average gorilla.’ The conversation loosened with laughter, though Leah’s thoughts were less than cheery.
Three days they’d been in Kirchhoffen. For two of them, Michele had managed to contrive that the family went out without her. So far nobody had openly questioned it but Leah knew the oddness of this behaviour wouldn’t bypass the kids for long.
When breakfast was over, she slipped out