After the Honeymoon (21 page)

Winston turned from the window, embarrassed. Then he stopped. She was looking up at him. How awful. She thought he was spying! Mortified, he walked back towards Melissa, who was sitting up in bed, her long dark hair strewn over her breasts.

‘Winston?’ Tara was shrilling down the line. ‘Are you still there?’

‘Sure.’ What was wrong with him? Normally he was far more on the ball than this. It was this place, that’s what it was. And the people around him.

‘You might want to check out the
Globe
this weekend.’

Her voice definitely had an edge to it now.

‘Why?’

‘They’re running a piece on you, apparently.’ Tara’s tone was dangerously light. ‘Nothing to worry about. You know what these journalists are like. Goes with the business. Must go, darling. I’ve got another call coming in. Have a great honeymoon.’

She was gone. Almost immediately the phone rang again. Melissa snatched it off him. ‘Alice. Are you all right? No, I’m not fussing. All right. Have a lovely time.’ She turned to him, her eyes dancing. ‘The children are fine.’ Then she grabbed his hand. ‘Shall we go for a swim? Maybe we could try some skinny dipping in that little cove we found, before they get back?’

He loved it when she was carefree like this. Once more, Winston felt an overwhelming urge to protect her and make up for her miserable first marriage.

‘Was everything all right?’ she asked as they made their way down the wooden staircase. ‘With your agent, I mean?’

Anyone else might have asked this sooner, but actually Winston was glad she hadn’t. It helped him to block out the rest of the world from his head, including this wretched newspaper piece.

An hour later, Winston walked smugly back up to the villa, arm in arm with Melissa; their hair wet and their bodies drying in the late afternoon sun.

‘I’ve got sand inside me,’ giggled his wife as she leaned her head against his bare chest.

Winston was light-headed with relief. So he’d been right. It
had
been the room that had put him off, with those posters of the countryside and the blue and red Junior Gymkhana rosettes on the mirror, suggesting that the owner used to ride as a child.

‘Mum!’

Winston’s heart sank as two figures flew towards them. Alice, as usual, was in the lead. ‘Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over the villa for you.’

Crossly, she took in her mother’s flushed appearance and her bikini top with its right-hand strap falling loose on one side. His stepdaughter knew what they’d been doing, Winston realised. And she didn’t like it. Not one little bit.

‘Where were you?’ she repeated angrily.

Melissa was flushing and stammering. ‘We … we just went for a walk, didn’t we, Winston?’

He eyeballed the girl. ‘Sure. Did you all have a good time?’

She shrugged. ‘It was all right until we ran out of money.’

The little so-and-so was looking right at him. What was she trying to do? Blackmail him for more?

‘Didn’t I give you enough?’ asked Melissa, worried.

So his wife had stumped up too!

‘No, but Winston did.’ Alice was hanging on to her mother tightly, to establish clear ownership. ‘Didn’t you, Winston? You gave me quite a lot, just as long as Freddie and I gave you some peace for the afternoon.’

Little cow!

‘Those weren’t my exact words,’ he began, but Melissa gave him a disappointed look and moved away.

‘Mum,’ puffed Freddie, running up. ‘I’m bored. Alice and Jack ignored me all afternoon.’

‘Didn’t!’

‘Did!’

‘Didn’t!’

Didn’t those two ever stop?

‘I just wanted us to have some time on our own,’ he whispered, brushing Melissa’s cheek, acutely aware that the girl was taking in every word.

His wife glared. ‘You paid them to give us some “peace”!’ When she put it that way, it didn’t sound great. ‘How could you?’ Then her eyes hardened. ‘Please tell me it wasn’t your idea that Jack took them out for the afternoon.’

Winston hated lies. But sometimes they were necessary. ‘Of course not. Look, I’ve got to go and check my emails. I’ll see you for dinner in an hour, shall I?’

Quickly he headed back to the room, grabbed his iPad and went down to the terrace below where, if he was lucky, the Wi-Fi would kick in. Yes. He was in luck.

‘Had a good day?’ Annoyed at the interruption, he looked up at Mrs Harrison. Not for the first time, he was struck by her piercing blue-green eyes. There was something about them that reminded him of someone.

‘Fine.’ He looked down at his iPad again. ‘I’ve just got to catch up with some work.’

‘Of course.’ She ran her fingers through her short blonde hair. ‘I also wanted to thank you for running the yoga session. It’s very good of you. A couple of guests from another taverna have joined up too, so it’s great publicity. I’m grateful.’

Please go away, he wanted to say. ‘It’s a pleasure,’ he heard himself saying instead.

‘My son tells me that you work out every morning.’ He could feel her looking at the screen while he scrolled down. ‘A bit of a hobby, is it?’

Was she having him on or was it a genuine question? Perhaps she honestly didn’t know that he was
the
Winston King. After all, he wasn’t on Greek television, as far as he knew. ‘Sort of.’

Surely any fool could tell he didn’t want company, but she wouldn’t take the hint. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

‘No, thanks.’ Winston’s eye was drawn to the words on the
Globe
site. His skin began to crawl as he started to read.

TWENTY THINGS YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT WINSTON KING!

THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT BRITAIN’S FAVOURITE FITNESS GURU!

HOW WINSTON WOOED MY WIFE, BY HER FORMER HUSBAND.

WHAT WINSTON’S LIFE WAS
REALLY
LIKE IN THE MARINES.

WHY I’M HANDING IN MY NOTICE – BY POPPY, WINSTON’S RIGHT-HAND WOMAN

DON’T MISS THE NEWS THAT EVERYONE’S TALKING ABOUT!

‘Our honeymoon loo didn’t have a lock on it. At eighteen I found that really humiliating.’

Sandra, now married for sixty-three years

ROSIE

Rosie had long ago made it a rule not to tune in to guests’ conversations. The Villa Rosa, Cara used to tell her, needed to be a place where people could relax. But even so, she hadn’t been able to stop herself from glancing at the iPad screen that Winston was reading so intently, with that worried crease on his forehead: ‘Twenty Things You Didn’t Know About Winston King!’

The sentence might have an exclamation mark, but in Rosie’s head, it was a very big question. Could one of those twenty things have anything to do with her? she wondered with a shiver.

She’d already glimpsed the first at the top of the ‘teaser’, which gave a flavour of what was to come.

Winston’s real name is Charles, but his agent persuaded him to use his middle name because it was more distinctive – and because ‘Winston’s Workout’ had a better ring to it!

So that explained it. She could hardly criticise him. After all, hadn’t she been a Rosemary at school? It wasn’t until she had left home and her pregnancy had begun to show that she’d decided to become Mrs Rosie Harrison (the surname had been her mother’s maiden name). It was a new start. How ironic that Winston had done the same.

Uncertainly, Rosie had glanced again at the screen, but it was difficult to see more without looking obviously nosy. Trembling, she headed back into the kitchen on pretence of checking the new cook had got everything under control. But her mind was not so much on Yannis (a rather good-looking man with a handsome aquiline nose who reminded her of Greco), as on the letter she had sent Winston all those years ago.

‘Write to him,’ Gemma had urged when the second test – just to make sure – was positive. Her sweet face had shone with the conviction that the rest of the world was as decent as she was. ‘I’m sure that if you did, he’d come back and marry you.’

Marry her! The idea of getting married at seventeen had seemed unreal, yet at the same time, what else could she do? She was pregnant, and she loved Charlie with an ache that was like a transparent hole in her chest. Rosie felt sick and excited and terrified all at the same time.

So she did write. In fact, she could remember the words as clearly as if they were in front of her right now on the scrubbed pine kitchen table in Greece.

Dear Charlie
,

I’ve got something really difficult to tell you. I’d much rather talk face to face, but I don’t know where you’ve gone, so I’m hoping that if I send this to your base, you will get it before too long. There’s no easy way of saying this
…

Her pen had trembled here, but dear Gemma, with a comforting squeeze of the hand, had helped her find the next paragraph.

I’m pregnant. And I’m scared. I need you here with your strong arms around me, telling me it’s going to be all right. Dad is going to go absolutely mad when he finds out. He wants me to go to university and I want to go too. But I can’t get rid of your baby, Charlie. I just can’t.

She’d stopped here for a little cry against Gemma’s shoulder. Both girls had discussed this endlessly and reached the same conclusion. Gemma had said she couldn’t have had an abortion either; not when it came to it.

If I don’t hear anything back from you, I’ll presume you don’t want anything to do with me. But I know you’re not like that. I know you’ll do the decent thing.

She’d crossed that last line out. It had seemed, as she’d explained to Gemma, too forceful. If Charlie was the decent man she’d thought, he wouldn’t need any prompting.

And if he wasn’t, she didn’t want anything to do with him.

Six weeks later, there was still no sign of a letter in reply. There was nothing else for it. Even now, Rosie could hardly bear to remember the details: only the stark facts. Eventually, she’d had to summon up courage and tell Dad. There had been a furious argument and, despite Gemma’s tears, Rosie had packed her bags and left.

The rest was history.

‘Mum! I prepared the vine leaves exactly as Yannis told me but he’s having a go at me for not doing it right.’

Jack’s newly gruff, almost-grown-up voice brought Rosie sharply back to the present. She glanced at the rows of plates with the vine leaves and the tomato salad carefully placed in the middle, ready to be rolled up into the Villa Rosa’s signature starter dish.

They seemed quite passable to her. Yet when Jack had pleaded to work at the villa and get paid for it, she’d decided he had to take his place in the pecking order. As the kitchen assistant-cum-general run-around boy, he had to take criticism – even when it wasn’t fair.

‘Yannis is in charge of the kitchen, Jack. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. You can learn from him. He’s good.’

He was, too. He also happened to be Greco’s cousin, but then again, wasn’t everyone related around here? Including one of the guests and her own son …

Rosie shivered. Supposing Jack found out? This was her worst nightmare. Back in the early days, it had seemed easier to pretend she was a young widow. This, of course, had led to several sympathetic but inquisitive questions and before she knew it, Rosie had found herself spinning a story about a tragic motorbike accident in the UK, when she was only two months pregnant.

Over the years, the tale had become so vivid and real in her head that when Jack had become old enough to ride a bike himself, she had been quite distressed.

‘I don’t want to lose you in the same way as your father,’ she’d declared, realising, as she did so, how some people got their lives in a real old muddle thanks to lying.

‘I’ll be careful, Mum,’ he’d insisted. ‘But I can’t be the odd one out.’

She could see that. All the kids had these little mopeds which didn’t, after all, go that fast.

Now, looking across the kitchen at Jack and Yannis working side by side, rolling up the vine leaves (they seemed to have resolved their differences), Rosie couldn’t help wondering what her life and her son’s would have been like if Charlie, or Winston as she should probably think of him now, had bothered to respond to her letter.

Her son certainly wouldn’t be living a life on a Greek island with mopeds, working in a kitchen to earn pocket money. He’d have been at a good school, like the one where Gemma and her husband taught, perhaps, near London. She would be married to Charlie/Winston and they’d have had at least another child. Maybe two.

The image was so real that Rosie almost had to grab the edge of the table to steady herself. She’d always wanted a daughter, but another son would have been just as wonderful. At times, her heart ached for Jack as an only child. Hadn’t she sworn as a teenager that her own children would have the brother or sister that she herself had always craved?

Grabbing one of the kitchen knives from the block, Rosie sliced through a watermelon with an anger that wasn’t like her at all. Both Yannis and Jack stared as she proceeded to chop it up furiously in the way that Cara had taught her.

‘What’s got into you, Mum?’ asked Jack, raising his right eyebrow. Rosie started. Her son had always done that all his life: raise his right eyebrow without lifting the other. It was something she’d never been able to do herself. But in the last couple of days, she’d seen someone else do exactly the same thing.

Winston.

‘Nothing,’ she said crisply, arranging the slices into a fan shape. ‘Nothing at all.’

Blast. The phone. Normally she’d have left it to the receptionist, but she’d given Anna extended time off to visit her sick mother on the mainland, insisting that Jack could help during the school holidays.

‘I’ll go,’ offered her son, clearly eager to do something that didn’t involve vine leaves or melon.

Rosie nodded, glad to be left with her thoughts. Winston’s arrival had shaken her to the core, and now she had to put up with him mooning over that tall, dark, pretty woman who was so hopeless at dealing with her own kids. As if on cue, the girl – Alice, wasn’t it? – walked past, looking through the kitchen window, clearly searching for Jack.