Love & Freedom (17 page)

Clarissa’s eyebrows rose in the way they did whenever anyone was presumptuous enough to call her actions into question. ‘In fact, I rang the bell on the way to the pub, but Honor wasn’t here. You were out together, were you?’

Martyn simply lifted his eyebrows to give her back her own astonishment at being questioned.

Honor interrupted. ‘Well, now, I know Clarissa and Dr
 
Zoë, but
 
…?’

Clarissa abandoned Martyn and showed him how sweetly reasonable she could be to anybody else. ‘The rest of the Mayfairs, my sisters Beverley and Nicola. I’m sorry if we’re imposing, Honor. We didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘No, we didn’t mean to interrupt.’ Nicola, Beverley and Zoë threw meaningful grins at Martyn. He tried to frown them down but that just made them snuffle with giggles as they exchanged nudges. It was an incredibly maddening way for grown women to behave.

‘You’re not interrupting a thing,’ said Honor, calmly. ‘Suppose I make a pot of coffee, and then you can tell me whatever it is you want to tell me.’ She pulled out one of the two remaining kitchen chairs and glanced first at Martyn and then at the chair.

Martyn sighed and took the seat. At the end of the table. Which meant all four of his sisters could smirk and twinkle at him. ‘Looks to me like coffee’s exactly what you lot need,’ he grumbled.

‘So we’ve turned up at the right time.’ Nicola looked pleased, her habitual expression, maybe because she spent so much time delivering bouncing babies.

‘Probably, we need two cups,’ agreed Beverley. Beverley was one of the most agreeable people he knew, at the opposite end of the spectrum to Clarissa.

‘It’s actually a fallacy that coffee helps sober you up.’ Zoë assumed doctorly mode. ‘It makes you feel a bit more awake, which is what fools you into thinking you’re becoming sober. You have to give your liver time to eliminate the toxins and there’s no way of speeding up the process. A pint of water helps with hydration, ie the hangover.’

‘Would you prefer a pint of water?’ Honor paused in pouring coffee into cups.

Zoë looked horrified. ‘No, I’d like coffee, please. I’m not drunk so I won’t be hungover.’

‘That’s good.’ Honor put sugar and milk in the centre of the table, flicking a glance at Martyn that shone with silent laughter:
They look pretty drunk to me
 
…

He smiled back conspiratorially, enjoying the way her ponytail wagged behind her as she turned back to her task. The smile flipped to a scowl when he saw all four of his sisters were regarding him with knowing grins. Then, as Clarissa talked to Honor about getting the garden tidied up and Honor confessed that she wasn’t used to gardening, Nicola, Beverley and Zoë began to yawn between sips of coffee, and Martyn sighed as realisation dawned that he was going to end his night by delivering sleepy female Mayfairs to various addresses around Saltdean and Eastingdean. Why hadn’t he left the X5 in the car park behind Starboard Walk and walked Honor home?

The yawns increased in size and frequency as the coffee cups emptied. Clarissa continued to monopolise Honor with truly trivial tenant/landlord crapola, so he rose, resignedly, to his feet. ‘Shall I drop you lot off?’

‘Lovely!’ Amidst scraping of chairs and thankful noises, Nicola, Beverley and Zoë clambered to their feet. Clarissa followed, but she was never big on thanking him for merely doing what she considered he ought to. Instead, she demanded, ‘Why the rush? Working tomorrow?’

‘Yes, actually. Doing a shoot in Arundel for DownJo Jeans.’ He was pleased to be able to spike her guns before she could fire off a list of jobs he could do to help people in the family who worked ‘proper hours’. Like her.

Honor chipped in before Clarissa could arm her next salvo. ‘Arundel! I plan to go on the train to Arundel soon to see the castle. I love how the way you guys in England have castles and palaces right in the towns.’

Martyn held the kitchen door for Clarissa. But, instead of walking through it, she said, ‘Martyn can take you with him, tomorrow. He can take you on his shoot and then there will be time afterwards to look around the castle.’

‘Oh!’ Honor’s eyes lit up. Then she looked into his face and instantly rearranged her expression. ‘No, I couldn’t possibly impose that way.’

Clarissa talked her down. ‘There’s no point you going on the train when Martyn has his big, shiny car and is going to the same place. Eh, Martyn?’

He jumped on his irritation and wrestled it into submission, giving Honor his sweetest smile. ‘It’s only a small shoot so I’d love it if you’d like to watch, if you don’t mind hovering in the background. Then we can look around Arundel when I’m done.’

‘Really?’ Light flew back into Honor’s eyes. ‘That would be great.’

Clarissa bounced back in expectantly. ‘I’d love to watch a shoot, too.’

Martyn let his eyebrows speak his incredulity. ‘Nobody takes their mother on a shoot. Nothing could be uncooler.’

A crackling silence. Clarissa dropped her gaze and strode across the hall. He let the other Mayfair women cover Clarissa’s silence by babbling to Honor about joining their Zumba class in the community hall. ‘Clarissa’s the instructor and it’s really fun! And the class needs people or it’ll close.’

‘Zumba’s always fun,’ Honor agreed, without committing herself.

Clarissa waited outside, silently. As usual, Martyn would end up regretting striking back at Clarissa, but she jabbed him with every spiky word and never seemed to worry how much that stung, so he wasn’t ready to be conciliatory yet.

In the doorway, he looked down at Honor, who was gazing at him, frowning. He knew that he didn’t have to explain to her why Clarissa brought out the worst in him. Instead, he winked and somehow found himself dropping a kiss on the top of her head. ‘I need to be there by nine-thirty, tomorrow, so I’ll pick you up at eight.’

Chapter Sixteen

Honor had no idea what to wear to a photo shoot. The day was fine but the wind was frolicking with white woolly-lamb clouds so she teamed an aquamarine summer dress with a long cream cardigan that fell right the way to the dress’s hem, like something out of the sixties. She was no fashion guru but you couldn’t go wrong with retro.

Martyn was quiet.

He hadn’t shaved. His hair swung spikily around his cheekbones as it usually did and, thinking back to his image rumbling down The Butts on the side of that bus, Honor concluded that Martyn’s style of modelling relied a lot on people liking him exactly as he happened, by good luck, to be.

‘So, tell me about the shoot,’ she tried, when they’d negotiated the village traffic and were on their way, uphill, out of Rottingdean. ‘What’s it all about?’

‘The client is DownJo Jeans and it’s for an ad – magazine, website and the lead page of their section in catalogues,’ he said economically, eyes on the road.

‘Will it be exciting?’

‘No.’ He accelerated past the mock-Tudor Downs Hotel.

Juice, a Brighton radio station, took the place of conversation. Honor watched the scenery, the roadside bungalows with little windows in the roof and flint cottages with redbrick corners, giving way to grassy hills divided into irregular fields by darker green hedgerows. Sheep and horses grazed. The occasional hill was clad entirely in trees, reminding her of west Connecticut. Small scale.

They fought their way on to the A27 and, periodically, Martyn glanced at his watch.

‘Worried about being late?’

He glanced in his side mirror and pulled into the right-hand lane. Although she’d never driven in England and hated the idea of tackling those endless rotaries – roundabouts – let alone driving on the ‘wrong’ side, she knew that the faster traffic should be in the right-hand lane and the slower should be in the left-hand. It didn’t appear that all of the traffic knew that. ‘More mindful than worried,’ he said, after driving closer and closer to the dawdling little car in front before, grudgingly, it inched over. ‘I could have stayed at the hotel with the rest of the crew but as the shoot’s almost on my doorstep I decided not to. Now, of course
 
…’ He waved a disparaging hand at the lines of traffic. ‘People trying to get to work are being held up by tourists setting out on their nice day trips. But I’ve built in a time buffer.’

‘And I guess they won’t start without you?’

He grunted but didn’t smile. Honor translated the grunt into, ‘Actually, I’m feeling tense and regretting inviting you so I’d prefer you not to tease me about my job. Let me retire into my own head for a while.’ Under time pressure, Stef had not only been as snappy as a dog but, unlike Martyn, who seemed self-reliant, he’d expected her to multitask her way through both their schedules as an unofficial and ultra-reliable PA. She knew how it felt to desire a little silence in which to contemplate the business of the day.

When had she last thought about business? Wearing a suit or studying client files would seem like living on Mars, now. She tried to imagine herself back at her desk with her licences on the wall and her computer screen permanently alight, land line and cell phone ringing all day and her income linked firmly to commission. Driving home with a headache that promised to last until bedtime only to discover that Stef had an evening off from the diner and wanted to go to the Star Bar where his old high-school buddies’ rock band would play and he’d dance all night with a bottle of Bud in his hand. If she mentioned her headache he’d say, ‘It’s because you have to relax, babe. You’ve got to learn to chill.’

Time had flown by, in Eastingdean. Was it really only six weeks since she’d taken down her licences and walked out of that life?

Nearly a month since she’d stored her stuff in a storage facility and taken a car to the airport?

In that short time, she seemed to have learned how to chill. Waiting tables didn’t pay well but neither did it scramble her brain. Robina and Sophie were just nuts enough and the locals just friendly enough to make her time in England fun. Her old life had fractured and she’d crept out of one of the cracks.

She watched the cars, buses, trucks and vans streaming along the undulating road between tall banks of scrubby shrubs in the morning sun and sank into her seat, content, for now, just to soak up the country that had given her half the blood in her veins.

Even the silence of the man beside her was fine. And, fifty minutes later, when they were approaching a fairytale town on a hill, swinging over a little humped bridge and up towards castle, trees and cathedral, he kind of shook his shoulders and relaxed into his seat and began tapping his fingertips to the music on the radio. ‘We’re here. This is Arundel.’

Jolted from her reverie, she leaned forward to stare as they cruised past a jumble of grey stone, flint, red brick walls, spires and turrets.

‘That’s part of the castle, but not where you get in. And, see that kind of mini castle peeping over the wall? That’s made of oak and it’s in the castle grounds.’

‘Wow.’ Honor gazed at the jaunty flags waving on each corner of the ‘mini castle’, which, she knew from her guidebook reading in bed, last night, was actually called Oberon’s Palace, created from drawings by Inigo Jones. Her mind was bombarded with a feeling of entering history, as if all the thousands of souls who had lived in Arundel over the centuries it had stood where the hill met the river were yelling at her all at once. No way had the guidebook done Arundel justice.

The road eased around to the right and into a broad street in which brick, stone and flint were joined by buildings painted white, blue or yellow and a couple of those cute timbered places, lining the slope down towards a monument in the middle of the road.

Martyn found his way around the back of the buildings to park at a red brick hotel. A last glance at his watch seemed to reassure him. But as she gathered her things he said, ‘Are you coming to watch the shoot?’

She hesitated. She was, wasn’t she? Didn’t he invite her last night
 
…? But then she got it. Last night, he’d been put on the spot by Clarissa and, making the best of a bad job, had invited Honor to cut Clarissa out. Aw, shit.

She responded brightly, hoisting her bag on to her shoulder and trying not to look disappointed. ‘I don’t quite know. I don’t want to miss out on seeing around this cute town and all these amazing
buildings–’

But maybe her acting needed work because his eyes softened and he actually did the gallant Englishman thing. ‘You can come on the shoot. It’ll be OK if you don’t mind hovering in the background. I should be finished in time for a late lunch anyway, and then we’d have the rest of the day.’

She capitulated in a heartbeat. ‘If you’re sure no one will mind?’ She wouldn’t be human if she wasn’t agog to see a real live shoot.

He shrugged. ‘It’s not a big busy shoot.’

Following him through a rear entrance of the hotel she hovered so far in the background that when one of the reception staff showed them to a ground-floor meeting room with a conference table somewhere in amongst the clutter of clothes rails, aluminium boxes, leads, tripods, boxes and people, he had to look around for her. ‘This is Honor. Honor, this is Ian, the photographer, and Lily the MUA. Make-up artist.’

With a squeal of joy, Lily flung herself into Martyn’s arms, blonde hair flying. ‘Martyn! Hello, stud muffin!’

Martyn laughed and hugged her with one arm, shaking hands with Ian with the other. He’d obviously worked with them before.