Paradise Fields (32 page)

‘Yes,' she said smoothly. ‘I was just about to tell Pierce that you have been implicated in a very dodgy building deal, and that I thought he ought to know.'

Oh God, that wasn't what she'd meant to say at all. Nel had never intended telling Pierce anything about Jake's possible connection to a dodgy building deal. She had no idea whether the rumours were true or not, and she was not in the habit of slandering people without access to the facts. Warning Pierce to keep Kerry Anne away from Jake would have been one thing – she'd seen them together – but now, with both Jake and Pierce actually sitting there in front of her, she couldn't quite bring herself to accuse him of seducing Pierce's wife. And so
she'd landed herself in something even more complicated.

Jake raised a hand to attract the attention of the barman. ‘Diet cola, please. So tell me, Nel, what is it I am supposed to have done?'

Nel looked down at the table, her brain working furiously as Jake collected his drink from the bar, came back and pulled out a chair.

‘Well,' he demanded when he'd sat on it.

Nel had had precious seconds in which to think up what to say. ‘I have heard, on quite good authority, that you might not just be a solicitor assisting the Hunstantons to sell their land.'

‘So what have you heard, then?' He sounded more irritated than anything else.

‘That you narrowly escaped being prosecuted for a dodgy deal concerning old peoples' homes.'

‘Oh, well, that didn't take long. I thought that old chestnut would follow me here eventually, but I didn't realise it would be so soon.'

‘So you're not denying it?' asked Nel, astounded by his casual attitude.

‘Nope. Now, was that all you wanted to see Pierce about? He told me you'd asked for a meeting. Was it only to tell unsubstantiated tales about me?'

He seemed terribly unconcerned. She was quietly dying. ‘I actually came to tell him about a meeting that's been called of the hospice committee, but I hadn't quite got round to it.'

‘No, she was telling me a lot of nonsense about my wife! As if I don't know what she's up to!'

‘And what nonsense is that?'

Nel looked at Jake straight in the eye. He looked right
back. Not for a second did he look away, or show any sign of guilt or discomfort. He was annoyed, angry even, but he was not feeling remotely guilty. Which, considering what she'd seen, was slightly odd. She looked away first. She felt she was the one with the secret romance, not him.

‘That's not important,' she declared, as breezily as she possibly could. ‘What I really want to do is persuade Pierce and Kerry Anne that they'd be much better off with the plans Abraham has created.'

‘Chris Mowbray says that Gideon Freebody's are the ones to go for, and I respect his opinion,' said Pierce. ‘He's got a lot of experience of this type of project.'

I bet he has, thought Nel. ‘Well anyway, there's going to be a meeting, at the hospice, about the buildings. What isn't quite clear – to me, anyway – is why the hospice is involved.' She looked at her two companions, hoping one of them might give her a clue. Nothing.

‘Oh. I don't suppose I need to go to that.' Losing interest, Pierce got up and headed in the direction of the Gents. ‘Chris will make all the right decisions.'

‘I see,' said Jake when they were alone. ‘And you weren't going to tell me about this meeting at the hospice?'

‘No! It's not for me to invite you! You're Pierce's solicitor. It's up to him if he wants you there.'

‘So you wouldn't have told me as a friend?'

‘No! We're not friends!' And she sighed, far too deeply.

He didn't say anything for a few moments and then said, ‘Can I get you another drink?' She nodded. She should have refused but she was too desolate to argue.
While he was getting it, she slumped back in her chair, fighting despair.

He put a glass of whisky in front of her. ‘Now,' he said firmly. ‘Let me tell you what's what. You really shouldn't listen to gossip, you know. People do it all the time, but it leads them quite off track.'

‘Does it?' She sipped her drink, aware that if she wasn't careful it would be gone in two goes. I'm turning into an alcoholic, she thought.

‘Yes. Now, because I've suffered from gossip myself, I am not going to pass any on, but I do wish you'd keep your eyes open, use your brain and think about just who is the good guy around here.'

Nel regarded him. He was so attractive, so good-looking. It would be so nice just to think of him as a knight in shining armour and believe every word that fell from his sexy mouth in his sexy voice. But she knew she couldn't. Trusting him now would be madness, and while she might be seven-eighths besotted, she wasn't entirely deluded. Pierce was her unlikely saviour. ‘Another drink, anyone? No? Barman! Another half, please.'

‘So, Pierce,' said Nel, fighting the desire to shrink back into her coat and disappear. ‘Will you come to the meeting? I really think you should be there. And Kerry Anne.'

Pierce sighed. ‘If you insist. But it'll be a complete waste of time.'

‘I'm sure it won't. I'm sure you'll find it very helpful when it comes to making up your mind. I think you should know how awful the Gideon Freebody scheme is likely to look. Goodbye. Thanks for the drinks.'

Then she picked up her coat and walked out of the
wine bar, aware that the mutterings she left behind her from the bar staff and the regulars who knew her would go on a long time. She could feel Jake's eyes burning accusingly into her back.

As she marched up the hill as fast as she could, to assuage the pain and feeling of utter despair the meeting had left her with, something Vivian said came into her head. ‘The nice bastards are harder to get over than the nasty ones.' Jake was, could be, had been, a nice bastard, but a bastard right enough.

Fleur was whisking about the house looking for something. ‘Oh God, Mum, thank goodness you're back. I can't find the parcel tape.'

Sam, Nel's eldest, had christened this item as ‘tape that can also be used to pack parcels'. Nel and Fleur used it to get dog hairs off their clothes.

‘Just let me get my coat off, I'll have a think.'

‘Hurry, Mum! I'm meeting Jamie off the bus!'

‘But it's not the weekend! Surely his mother wouldn't let him come during the week!'

‘He's got study leave or something. Anyway, who cares? I need my black top!'

Refraining from mentioning that she was, personally, a little concerned about her daughter's education, Nel thought hard.

‘It's probably in an overnight bag or something,' went on Fleur. ‘You know how you never unpack.'

This was true. Nel cast her mind back to when she last spent a night away from home, and left the room quickly. At the top of the stairs she leant her head against the banister and let tears seep through her screwed-up eyelids. Along with the tears were the sort of hard, painful sobs that Nel hadn't experienced since she'd
stopped sobbing over Mark. This was what a broken heart felt like. She was over forty and she'd never felt it before. That meant she was lucky. But as she went to the bedroom and retrieved the tape from where it lay among the remnants of her night with Jake, she didn't feel lucky. Anything but.

‘So, tell us what happened!'

Vivian was perched on the end of her mother's bed. Nel had the chair. Vivian's mother, Florence, was sitting up in her hospital bed, eager for news.

‘Tell me how you are, first,' said Nel, encouraged to see her old friend looked so well, in spite of being in hospital.

‘There's absolutely nothing wrong with me!' insisted the old lady. ‘Just because I slipped on some water and stubbed my toe and fell over, they drag me in here “for tests”. Huh! Anyone would think there was no shortage of beds in the National Health. Now, tell all.'

‘I've brought you something to read. I thought you might be getting bored.'

‘Thank you, dear, that's very kind. But Vivian's told me all about you having to meet that dreadful man.'

‘Yes,' said Vivian, ‘and I'm gagging to know how you got on.'

Nel laughed. Somehow the prospect of relating her recent humiliations to Florence and Viv, in the bright, clinical atmosphere of the hospital, diminished their awfulness.

‘You would have done it much better, Viv. I kept changing horses mid-stream.'

‘Don't talk to me about mid-stream,' said Florence with a shudder. ‘If I have to pee into—'

‘Mother!'

‘Oh, don't fuss. I'm sure Nel's heard the word pee before.'

‘What do you mean?' asked Viv.

‘Well, first of all I thought I should try and be like you and seduce him' – Florence snorted with laughter – ‘but that failed miserably. So I thought I'd resort to blackmail.'

‘Blackmail! You, Nel!' Vivian was almost impressed.

‘Yes, I told him if Kerry Anne couldn't do the cosmetic thing with Sacha, she'd get bored and stray.'

‘And how did that go down?'

‘It didn't, really. I didn't actually get to go through with it.'

‘Why not?' Florence leaned forward to hear better.

‘Well, I'd just begun to tell him, more or less in so many words, that Jake and Kerry Anne had something going, but I didn't get a chance to say it.'

‘Why not?' asked Viv.

‘Oh, do stop interrupting, child! She's just getting to the good bit. All anyone talks about in here is bowel movements. A little scandal is just what I need.'

‘Because Jake appeared. Pierce had obviously asked him to come.' Nel paused a moment to compartmentalise what happened from her feelings. ‘Anyway, with him looking over my shoulder, I could hardly tell Pierce I thought he had the hots for Kerry Anne. So I said he had been involved in a dodgy building deal instead.'

Vivian laughed far too loudly. ‘I don't know about scandal, Mum. Slander seems a bit more in Nel's line. Or is it libel?'

‘I know I shouldn't have said it! I would never have
said it if I hadn't been put on the spot. I don't know what came over me.'

‘That's what they say when they've been caught shoplifting,' said Florence authoritatively.

‘Mum! How do you know?' Nel could see the horror on Vivian's face as she imagined her mother having her collar felt by a burly security man.

‘The woman in the next bed told me.'

‘Oh, that's all right.'

Nel glanced across at the now empty bed. ‘Did she go home?'

‘In a manner of speaking. She died.'

‘Oh,' said Vivian, giggling. ‘Not of hypothermia, I hope.'

‘No,' said Florence. ‘I think it was her heart. Why should it be hypothermia?'

‘From stuffing frozen turkeys up her vest,' said Vivian.

Nel found herself laughing quite immoderately, and put it down to the relief of tension. All her emotions seemed extreme lately.

‘So is Pierce coming to the meeting?' asked Viv, handing Nel a medical wipe.

‘I think so. And I think Jake is too. So if he is doing a dodgy deal with Gideon Freebody, we're in trouble. He'll take us apart and convince everyone to vote for pulling down the hospice.'

‘We don't know they plan to pull down the hospice, that's just speculation at the moment.'

‘But I've got a bad feeling about it. I think Chris Mowbray has done this kind of thing before. It's probably why he went on the committee in the first place.'

‘Well, we'll just have to get as many people on our side as possible,' said Vivian firmly, possibly sensing
that Nel's recent laughter was a sign of latent hysteria. ‘How have you been doing with the list?'

‘I went for the soft targets first. The vicar was on our side, and he's going to get as many people as possible to buy chunks of the ransom strip.'

‘I could do that too,' said Florence. ‘How much are they? And how much land do you get? Enough to plant a row of beans on?'

Nel and Vivian regarded each other. ‘The trouble is, we don't know. We haven't had time to work things like that out. We'll have to get it properly measured. Then we'll have to think if it's best to count all the people committed to buying it, and divide it up into that many squares, or the other way round,' said Nel.

‘Mmm,' said Florence. ‘That does make it a little harder. But there are one or two wealthy widows in the bridge club. I'll try and twist their arms.'

‘Now you've got to concentrate on getting better,' said Nel.

‘Nonsense! There's nothing wrong with me. I only stubbed my toe, for God's sake!'

‘And does that explain all the bruising and the possible hairline fracture of your hip?' said Vivian, rearranging the get-well cards on her mother's locker.

‘I shall be out by next week,' went on Florence. ‘Can I come to the meeting?'

‘No,' said Vivian.

‘Not really,' said Nel, more gently. ‘You would have to be on the hospice committee, or something.'

‘Huh! I've spent my life on committees. You'd think that would count for something!'

‘It does, Mum, and we'll be really grateful when you sell all our plots for us, but you can't come to the meeting.'

Florence sat back on her now replumped pillows. ‘Very well, I suppose you're right. Now tell me, girls, what are you going to wear?'

Surprised, Nel considered. She would not have thought that was important, but now Florence had asked the question, she realised that it was.

‘Will you be wearing mud again, Nel?' asked Vivian.

‘It is vital that you feel right!' said Florence. ‘Whenever I had a difficult meeting to go to, I knew I had to be wearing the right thing, from my underwear to my hat.'

‘I hadn't thought about wearing a hat,' said Vivian.

‘I know no one wears hats nowadays, more's the pity,' went on Florence. ‘But the right clothes will give you confidence.'