Saving Saffron Sweeting (35 page)

‘Right. Thanks.’ My chin drooped.

‘But if you do see James, can you get him to give me a
call? I’d like to talk to him about unauthorised access of
our email server.’

‘Okay.’ My ears threw this information away
immediately; they were too busy helping me keep my balance, as the
oxygen evaporated from the atmosphere around me.

I didn’t start crying until I was outside, sitting in the
rental car. Then I let my head fall to the steering wheel and I
sobbed. How could I have got this so wrong? I’d come five
thousand miles and had missed the boat.

The glowing December sun had dipped below the Stanford hills and
the mild winter air felt suddenly brisk. Around me, the Christmas
lights of downtown Palo Alto twinkled, palm trees wrapped with tiny
white stars. Yet Silicon Valley, home of so many dreams, had never
looked less appealing.

I looked at my watch. There didn’t seem to be anything
left to do. If I got a serious wiggle on, I might just catch the
last British Airways flight of the day.

With typical British joie de vivre, there was a
forty minute queue for passport control and London’s taxi
drivers were on strike.

‘Welcome home,’ said the immigration officer as he
examined my passport with leisurely interest and scrutinised me for
signs of terrorist tendencies.

I looked back at him blankly, struggling even to find a
courteous smile. I suspected the only story on my face was shell
shock, brought on by two days’ non-stop travel and managing
to lose the same husband twice. Oscar Wilde would no doubt deem
this most careless.

Having been allowed back into my own country, I took one look at
the seething bowels of Heathrow’s transportation system and
gave up. Desperate international arrivals were trying to fathom
their transit options, buy Oyster cards with foreign currency and
cram themselves onto the churning platforms for either the
Piccadilly line or the Heathrow Express. Deciding to take my
chances on the M25, I headed wearily for the National Express coach
station.

The taxi from Cambridge dropped me on the road
outside Grey Stoke House. It was already pitch dark and all I
wanted to do was crawl into bed and sleep.

I picked my way over the perilous, potholed obstacle course to
my cottage, assisted only by a wafer of moon. For once, it was a
relatively clear night and a few flakes of snow fell on the back of
my neck.

As I came nearer to home, I realised that as well as my faithful
Beetle, another car was parked in the shadows. My heart lifted,
Hollywood-style, as I saw a male figure huddled by the front door.
For one tiny moment, time froze and hope flared as I jumped to the
irrational conclusion that James was waiting.

The joy crumbled as I saw the car was a Jaguar, and the man was
Scott. And he wasn’t huddled like a desperate romantic hero,
he was putting something through the letterbox.

‘Well, that’s lucky,’ he said brightly, as I
coughed to announce my presence behind him. He spoke as if no
animosity had happened between us.

‘What are you doing here?’ I was five minutes away
from the oblivion of my duvet and had no interest in being
delayed.

‘I just put a copy through your door, but I think
I’m supposed to hand one to you too.’ He paused and
squinted at me in the darkness. ‘How was your
Christmas?’

‘Best ever,’ I muttered bitterly. I sure as heck
wasn’t going to enquire about Vienna. ‘What is
it?’ I looked down at the envelope he’d put into my
hand.

‘Er, it’s a Section 21 Notice.’

‘A what?’ I tucked the envelope under one arm and
started to dig in my bag for my door key. I couldn’t find it
amongst all the random rubbish which had accompanied me to San
Francisco and back again.

Scott looked fleetingly uncomfortable, but he settled on an
expression of bland innocence. ‘Don’t go flying off the
deep end,’ he said. ‘By law, I have to give you at
least two months.’

‘Two months what?’ Where was that wretched key?

‘Notice to vacate.’ He shifted from foot to foot as
if to keep warm, or perhaps just because he was shifty.

‘Sorry? What?’ I was definitely going to have to get
my ears tested. ‘Did you say
vacate
?’

But as I finally found my key and looked up at his face, I
realised my ears were absolutely fine.

I had eaten nothing but meagre airline rations for two days. The
last of my savings were now lining the velvet coffers of British
Airways. The only man I ever wanted to be with had given up on our
marriage and disappeared.

And now, I was being evicted from my cottage.

‘Oh bugger!’ exclaimed Amelia. Her
shoe twirling stopped mid-circle as she looked at me in sympathetic
horror.

‘That sums it up nicely,’ I agreed in a low
voice.

It was the morning of the second of January and I was too weary
even to switch on my computer. I had told Amelia about the emails
between James and Rebecca, my fruitless escapade to California and
Scott’s unapologetic arrival at the cottage.

‘But I thought he said he wasn’t going to boot you
out?’

‘It seems that was only the case while I was shagging
him.’ I hugged myself, coat tugged tightly around me. The
Hargraves office hadn’t yet warmed up after being closed for
more than a week. ‘Now, all bets are off.’

Scott was behaving perfectly logically. Still dead keen to
develop executive accommodation in the village, his eye had fallen
on Grey Stoke House. Uninspiring and relatively modern, it was
unlikely to trigger the fierce feelings swirling around the malt
house. And it stood on a hefty plot of land. He had made the owners
a generous offer just before Christmas, which they’d
accepted. By now, they were probably celebrating with rum punch in
Barbados.

‘I feel awful,’ Amelia said. ‘I should have
paid more attention to your rental agreement.’

‘You weren’t to know this would happen.’ I
paused to rub my aching temples. ‘The house is going to be
demolished for corporate flats. Apparently, my cottage is destined
to be the fitness centre.’

‘Oh, darling, I’m sorry. How are you
feeling?’

I raised my red-rimmed eyes from the carpet to consider the
question, but then let them sink again as I shook my head.

‘I’m not sure I care,’ I said dully.

And I truly didn’t. My capacity to feel, to worry, to hurt
was wiped out. Over the last few days, I had learned that chocolate
ice cream tastes better swimming in Baileys, that Mungo was a warm
but smelly bed companion and that Pot Noodles were the most
depressing food on earth. I had spent the two remaining days of
last year and the first day of the new year under the duvet,
staring blankly at my bedroom ceiling. The alarm clock had ticked
relentlessly beside me, and with the passing seconds and minutes my
shock and denial had turned to hollow apathy.

Amelia watched me for a moment, then got up to microwave my cold
coffee. She returned holding both my mug and a slim glass bottle.
‘I think it’s time for the emergency brandy,’ she
said.

I trudged through the workday motions, still
numb but soothed by checking emails, taking messages for Amelia and
placing our next advert with the
Cambridge Evening News
.
Despite my claims that I wasn’t hungry, by early afternoon my
stomach was grumbling and I was grateful when Amelia went to the
bakery. Normally, this was my job, but she sensed I didn’t
feel like village chit-chat today. She returned with sandwiches and
mince pies.

‘I hope these haven’t been sitting there since
before Christmas,’ she said, prising up the pastry lid of a
pie and sniffing the dark, spicy contents cautiously.

‘Doesn’t matter. I don’t think they ever go
off,’ I said. ‘And if they do, I can add food poisoning
to my list of triumphs.’

‘Talking of triumphs, I forgot to tell you.’ Amelia
went over to the coffee table by the door and started digging
through the newspapers. ‘You didn’t recycle any of
these yet, did you?’

I shook my head, feeling boosted by strong cheddar and crunchy
pickle on soft poppy seed bread. ‘Nope.’

‘Here it is. That sexy journalist got his piece published.
It was in the paper a few days ago.’

She was clearly thrilled and I took the article obligingly.
Under the headline ‘New Year, New Hope for Malt House’
I read about our
Anglo-American alliance to save local
heritage
. There was a flattering photo of Amelia with some of
her groupies outside the malt house, and an inane quote from me on
different nationalities rallying round a cause.

‘Nice.’ I folded it up and gave it back.

‘I think I might frame it.’ Amelia squinted at the
prime wall space by the door.

‘Okay.’ I had just messed up the printing of some
double-sided house details. Sighing, I dumped the whole lot in our
recycling bin.

‘Grace,’ Amelia went back to her desk and began
thumbing through her piles, ‘I know things seem pretty dire
right now, but on the professional front, stuff is looking good for
you.’

‘Hmm?’ The mince pie would probably be nicer warm,
but I couldn’t be bothered to heat it.

‘One of the bio-tech companies asked me if we could
provide full relocation services to their people.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘It’d be a whole new sideline. We’d help with
orientation tours and schools, as well as the obvious stuff like
housing.’ She had polished off her own mince pie in two
bites, whereas I was dissecting mine slowly. ‘I thought you
could manage it as a separate business. Maybe offer interior design
too,’ she continued, eyeing me beadily.

‘Oh. Heck, I dunno. Sounds scary.’

Amelia sat back and folded her arms. ‘I get it.
You’re too deflated just now. But keep it in mind, Grace.
You’d be brilliant and I bet we can charge a fat
rate.’

I sighed again and said I’d think about it.

‘And I was copied on that email from Visit Britain. That
could be super too.’

‘I think I deleted it.’ Some pushy man from the
tourist board wanted me to write a guide for small business owners
about marketing to American guests. I had zero intention of
responding. ‘So, um, has the Hobbs sale started
yet?’

Amelia was not to be distracted. ‘If you don’t call
him back, I’m coming after you with a hockey
stick.’

‘Okay, okay. I’ll give him a buzz tomorrow.’
Anything to get her off my back.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I know you’re
tired. But take it from me, when your personal life comes crashing
down around you, that’s when work can be a relief. It’s
either that or the bottle.’

I nodded so she wouldn’t think I was completely
ungrateful. But right now, the only relief I wanted was to find a
dark cave and crawl into it with my new cashmere blankie.

Within a couple of days, I saw grudgingly that
Amelia might have a point about work as an antidote for personal
pain. The sheer necessity of getting out of bed in the morning,
showering, finding something to eat and getting to the office,
prevented me from descending into complete senselessness. Business
was still quiet, but I had at least acknowledged the request from
Visit Britain and arranged to meet with them. I had also agreed to
take down the Hargraves Christmas decorations, before we reached
Twelfth Night and tempted yet more bad luck by leaving the tinsel
hanging.

With considerably less enthusiasm than I had felt at Halloween,
I started in the back corner of the office. Amelia was at her desk
so I didn’t bother to turn as I heard the door open and her
standard client greeting of ‘Hello, I’m Amelia, how can
I help?’

‘Hi. Well – I’m looking to buy a house,’
answered a familiar male voice.

And that’s how it came about, that I was balanced on an
eight-foot ladder with a mouth full of fake holly when I realised
that my husband had found me.

To Amelia’s credit, she was quick to
catch on. It could have been the way James was looking straight
past her at me, his face a picture of last-ditch hope. More likely,
though, it was the way I gasped, yelped and promptly fell off the
ladder, bursting into tears even before I hit the floor.

‘Bloody hell, darling, are you all right?’ Amelia
swivelled on a pointy zebra-print ankle boot, but James was
faster.

He knelt down beside me in the holly-strewn corner, and from my
humiliated huddle against the wall I looked into the kindest pair
of brown eyes I’ll ever know.

‘Grace?’ He touched me tentatively on the arm.

‘I’m okay. Ouch.’ I reached for my ankle as a
needle of pain shot through my foot, but by now I was smiling as
well as crying. ‘Sod. I’m fine, really. I’ll just
sit here for a minute.’

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand. Great, another clumsy
triumph. No doubt I was doing a good impression of a dog’s
dinner.

Amelia leaned over my desk to peer down at the pair of us.
Satisfied no ambulance was needed, she retreated to the edge of her
own desk where she perched with an expression of rapt
bemusement.

‘How did you get here?’ I asked between sniffs.

‘I drove,’ James said.

I shook my head. ‘No – I meant, how did you –
’ sniff ‘ – find me?’

‘Ah. Well, your name was in the Cambridge newspaper. It
came up on Google.’

Presumably, he was talking about the article by the journalist
Amelia fancied.

‘After I saw you off at Liverpool Street,’ James
continued, ‘I had an idea of where to look. But it turns out
I was barking up the wrong tree in Saffron Walden.’

I wondered how many trees he’d barked up, and for how
long.

‘You sublet the apartment,’ I said, a hint of
accusation in my voice.

‘Yeah.’ He sighed, then inclined his head to one
side. ‘How did you know that?’