green front door was a fresh primrose yellow to match the flowers that were blooming all along the verge in front of a white-painted picket fence.
There had always been primroses…
Weeds no longer grew through the gravel path that led around to the rear; the yard, once half an acre of rank weeds where he’d spent hours stripping down and rebuilding an old motorcycle, was now a garden.
Inside everything had changed, too. His mother had battled against all odds to keep the place spotless. Now the walls had been stripped of the old wallpaper and painted in pale colours, the treads of the stairs each carpeted with a neatly trimmed offcut.
He’d once known every creak, every dip to avoid when he wanted to creep out at night and he still instinctively avoided them as he took the second flight to revisit his past.
Everything was changed up there, too.
Where he’d once stuck posters of motorcycles against the shabby attic walls, delicate little fairies now flitted across ivory wallpaper.
Did Claire Thackeray’s little girl resemble her mother? All fair plaits and starched school uniform. Or did she betray her father?
He shook his head as if to clear the image. What Claire Thackeray had got up to and with whom, was none of his business.
None of this—the clean walls, stripped and polished floors, the pretty lace curtains—changed a thing. Taking it from her, doing to her what her father had done to him would be all the sweeter because the cottage was now something worth losing.
A towel…
The door to the front bedroom was shut and he didn’t open it. Claire was disturbing enough without acquainting himself with the intimacy of her bedroom, but the back bedroom door stood wide open and he could see that it had been converted into an office.
An old wallpaper pasting table, painted dark green, served as a desk. On it there was an old laptop, a printer, a pile of books. Drawn to take a closer look, he found himself looking out of the window, down into the garden.
He’d hadn’t been able to miss the fact that it was now a garden, rather than the neglected patch of earth he remembered, but from above he could see that it was a lot more.
Linked by winding paths, the ugly patch had been divided into a series of intimate spaces. Divided with trees and shrubs as herbaceous borders, there were places to sit, places to play and, at the rear, the kind of vegetable garden usually only seen on television programmes was tucked beneath the shelter of a bank on which spring bulbs were now dying back.
He looked down at the piles of books. He’d expected a thesaurus, a dictionary, whatever reference works journalists used. Instead, he found himself looking at a book on propagation. The other books were on greenhouse care, garden design.
Claire had done this?
Not without help. The house was decorated to a professional standard and the garden was immaculate.
He’d suggested that she was still all buttoned-up but her response to his kiss had blown that idea right out of the water. The woman Claire Thackeray had become would always have help.
He replaced the books, but as he turned away wanting to get out of this room, he was confronted by a cork board, thick with photographs of a little girl from babyhood to the most recent school photograph.
Her hair was jet black, and her golden skin was not the result of lying in the sun. Only her solemn grey eyes featured Claire and he could easily imagine the thrilling shock that must have run around the village when she’d wheeled her buggy into the village shop for the first time.
‘DID you have a good look round?’ Claire asked, as he stepped down into the kitchen.
‘I thought I’d better give you time to make yourself respectable,’ he said, not bothering to deny it. ‘It’s all changed up there.’
It had changed everywhere.
Colour had begun to seep back into her cheeks and she raised a wry smile. ‘Are you telling me that the young Hal North wasn’t into “Forest Fairies”?’
‘It wouldn’t have mattered if I was,’ he said. ‘This house wasn’t on the estate-maintenance rota and nothing would have persuaded Jack North to waste good drinking money on wallpaper.’
‘I thought the cabbage roses in the front bedroom looked a bit pre-war,’ she said. ‘Not that I’m complaining. It was so old that it came off as easy as peeling a Christmas Satsuma.’
‘You did it yourself?’
‘That’s what DIY stands for,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t afford to pay someone to do it for me.’
‘I didn’t mean to sound patronising—’
She tutted. ‘You missed. By a mile.’
‘—but it’s your landlord’s job to keep the place in good repair.’
‘Really? It didn’t seem to work for your mother. In her shoes I’d have bought a few cans of paint and had a go myself.’
‘She wouldn’t…’
Hal’s eyes were dark blue, she realised, with a fan of lines around them just waiting for him to smile. That bitten off “wouldn’t,” the snapping shut of his jaws, the hard line of his mouth, suggested that it wasn’t going to happen if she gave way to her curiosity and asked him why a fit, handsome woman would choose to live like that.
‘Sir Robert would only let me have the cottage on a repairing lease.’
‘Cheapskate.’
‘There was no money for renovations,’ she said, leaping to his defence.
‘So he got you to do it for him.’
‘I had nowhere to live. He was doing me a favour.’
The cleaning, decorating, making a home for herself and Ally had kept her focussed, given her a purpose in those early months when her life had changed out of all recognition. No university, no job, no family. Just her and a new baby.
Cleaning, stripping, painting, making a home for them both had helped to keep the fear at bay.
‘We both got a good deal, Hal. If the cottage had been fixed up, I couldn’t have afforded the rent. He did get the materials for me at trade,’ she said, ‘and he replaced the broken glass and gutters himself.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’
‘I don’t know,’ she asked. ‘Why aren’t you?’
He shook his head. ‘Are you ticklish?’
‘What? No… What are you doing?’ she demanded, confused by the sudden change in subject.
He didn’t bother to answer but got down on one knee, soaped up his hands and picked up her foot.
She drew in a sharp breath as he smoothed his hand over her heel. ‘Does that hurt?’
‘It stings a bit.’
She lied.
With his fingers sliding over the arch of her foot, around her ankle, she was feeling no pain.
‘Ally has started moaning about the wallpaper in her room,’ she said, doing a swift subject change on her own account in a vain attempt to distract herself from the shimmer of pleasure rippling through her, an almost forgotten touch-me heaviness in her breasts, melting heat between her legs.
‘Ally?’
‘Alice Louise,’ she said. ‘After her grandmother.’
‘Oh, right,’ he said, and she knew he’d seen the photographs, put his own