The Boy is Back in Town (16 page)

Everything about this place and this moment was as different from her normal office life as anywhere in the world. But, as she stood there and listened to the sea and the
bird calls and felt the wind and smelt the sea, she realised that in truth she had never left.

She had always carried this special place with her in her heart over these last ten years. It was the core of her sense of who she was and who she probably always would be. The self-confident girl who’d loved school and had a world of opportunity in front of her.

A smile crept onto Mari’s face like a welcome friend. Strange. That idea had never even occurred to her until that moment. But it would explain why she felt so at peace here and why she felt compelled to go out on such a cold morning wearing the extra-long sheepskin coat that Ethan had given her when she could have stayed warm and snug in bed.

And of course there was one other reason why she had pulled on all of her winter clothing and borrowed Rosa’s warm boots. She longed to see the house again so that she could start planning what improvements needed to be made.

Inhaling deeply, allowing the cold salty air to purge her lungs of the city smog, Mari finally opened her eyes and looked straight ahead of her.

She could just see the roof of the house, which was set back a few hundred feet away from the cliff path and, with renewed vigour
and purpose, she set off walking towards it, covering the short distance in fast long strides, her eyes fixed on the red tiles.

She turned her back on the sea, swung open the garden gate and stood and stared at her old home. And her breath froze in her lungs. Transfixed by shock and amazement at what she was looking at.

The pretty flower beds and neat lawn where she had once played and held tea parties was a brown, barren wasteland of waist-high weeds and wild bushes that choked the evergreen shrubs which had been chosen with such loving care to flourish in the harsh sea breezes. Broken pieces of furniture, glass and plastic bottles and rubbish of all kinds spewed out from an open dustbin, which was jammed against what was left of the broken wooden fence which had once been white and fresh and welcoming.

But it was the house itself which was the greatest shock. The front picture windows were gone—covered over by pieces of timber which stared out like grey eyes, cold and lifeless. The window frames and the front door were rotten and splintered, uncared for and useless and the guttering was waving loose in the wind from a broken wooden fascia.

Tiles were missing from the roof. There
was a crack in the main chimney and a wild thistle was growing in the drainpipe.

Tears of grief and the biting wind pricked Mari’s eyes and she heaved in a breath.

This was where she had wanted her lovely sister to make a home! This was the house she had longed to come back to! This was the house she had just bought with all of her savings, a loan from Ethan and a lot more than she could afford.

What had she been expecting? The same house she’d last seen when her mother was alive and they had walked along the cliff path on a hot summer day arm in arm and made light of the fact that the elderly couple who lived there were lovely people but gardening was not their strength? How could the house have deteriorated so fast? She had seen it only a few years ago and it had been nothing like this. But of course she had only seen it at a distance from the beach. Any closer was too painful.

Rosa had tried to warn her, but nothing could have prepared her for this amount of neglect. It was going to take months of work and more money than she had to make the house fit to live in.

Oh, Ethan. You were so right.
Where was
her secure and loving home? This certainly was not it.

Taking a couple of deep breaths, Mari pushed her way through the garden, being careful where she placed her feet, until she came to the kitchen door.

Once glance confirmed it. The door still had the original lock.

She glanced from side to side and immediately felt foolish because she had not seen anyone for the last ten minutes and she was the new owner on paper, then reached into her trouser pocket and pulled out a long brass key with an engraved handle.

Her father had made the keys and the lock by hand and given each of his family their own key. She had used this key once before, when she had sneaked in here with Ethan on the night of her sixteenth birthday, and she had kept it safe all of these years, waiting, just waiting, for this moment to use it again.
Time to see if it still fitted.

Cautiously, she stretched out her hand, and then pulled it back again.

This was not her property yet! She couldn’t simply go inside without asking permission. Could she?

The wind howled around her ankles and blew old leaves up in the air. She had come a
long way to stand on this very special piece of earth. It was now or never.

Head up, Mari slowly and gently turned the key in the lock and felt the mechanism engage. The door itself had swollen in the winter rain and it took a little persuasion to open but, a few moments later, Mari Chance stepped inside the lobby and closed the door behind her.

She was back inside her home again.

This was the moment that had sustained her in the endless airport lounges and interminable meetings in boardrooms without windows. This should have been her great achievement.

She had come home. She was back.

And she felt sick at what she was looking at.

Her home was a shell of a building, dark, dank and gloomy and, in a moment of horror and barely suppressed claustrophobia, Mari stepped across the broken and filthy floor tiles they used to polish every Sunday evening to the window above the sink, and tugged hard at the plastic sheeting and cardboard which covered the window.

The flimsy sheets came away easily in her hands and pale February sunshine flooded into the dark kitchen, creating a spotlight
around where she stood in the otherwise dark place. This window was north-facing and her mother had created stained glass panels in the top half of the window to add colour to the otherwise dull, flat light.

Mari blinked hard as the light flooded into the room through the large window that dominated the wall above the old ceramic sink.

Elsewhere in the stripped-out shell of a kitchen, there were dim shadows and corners of dark purple and grey above exposed electric wires and gas pipes, but Mari’s attention was totally focused on the stained glass which, amazingly, wondrously, had survived intact and as bright and colourful as ever.

As she stepped closer, mesmerised, it was obvious that the glass in the window was not made from one continuous sheet of glass, but composed of separate smaller panels of varying thicknesses and slight colour differences which her mother had collected from old glass windows and painted by hand.

It was a garden with flowers and leaves of every colour in the spectrum.

Each piece was unique to itself but an essential component of the piece as they fitted together seamlessly to create the whole. Light hitting the thicker bevelled edges was deflected through multiple prisms to create
rainbow spectra of colour which danced on the tiled floor at Mari’s feet in a chaos of reds and pinks, pale violets and blues through to greens.

It was as though the light itself had taken on the colour of the glass, creating layers of different luminosity as it was diffracted and refracted and deflected through the uneven panels to produce a barrier between this space and the world outside.

Each panel was unique, creating a different illusion of the world beyond the glass.

On the other side of the glass, bare skeletons of trees bent towards the town in the howling wind from the sea, above the browns and russets of autumn colours. But here and there she could just make out the first signs of yellow daffodils and white snowdrops. Spring was on the way and in a few short weeks there would be new life and energy on the other side of the glass.

Mari sucked in a breath of cold, damp and dusty air, coughed and exhaled slowly as she glanced around this empty, echoing and frigid room.

Her life was in that window.

The past was captured in her reflection on the glass for a few fleeting seconds until she moved away and the moment was lost. On
this
side of the glass was the present, and a girl whose reflection was looking back at her. And on the other side of the glass? That was where the future lay. Still hazy but with the promise of sunny days ahead.

But not here. Not in this room and not in this building. There was nothing for her here any more.

Mari closed her eyes and let the tears finally fall down her cheeks unchecked as she mourned the loss of everything she’d thought that she wanted.

What a fool she had been.

She pushed the heel of her hand tight against her forehead.

This was not the home she remembered and it never could be. Her mother was gone, and Rosa was moving away to create a new life for herself.

Almost blinded by tears and with a burning throat, Mari forced herself to look around the bare walls and in an instant saw it for what it truly was. A shell of a house which had been cared for at one time when a family lived here, but that time was long gone.

Selfish, stupid girl.
She had told herself that she wanted this house for Rosa, but that had been a pathetic delusion. This was all about what
she
wanted—for herself. Rosa
was simply an excuse for justifying the years of hard work and sacrifice she had spent building up the finances to buy back this … what? This shell of a house filled with the echoes of ghosts and sadness? A tired and wrecked version of the home she had once known?

Mari leant back against the dirty painted kitchen wall, suddenly exhausted and bereft of ideas and energy.

She had to face the truth. It had never been the house she wanted. It had always been about the feeling of security and love. That was what she had hoped to bring back into her life through buying this building. As if a physical place could give her back her shattered self-confidence and make her open her heart to being loved.

Mari choked on the cold, dirty air she gulped into her lungs.

But there it was.

Ethan was right. She should be outside the window, looking at the new spring flowers, instead of inside her past, looking out in fear. But the idea was so hard to take.

Somehow she had to build up the strength to walk out of this room and this house, find Ethan and thank him again for loaning
her the money and tell him it would not be needed after all.

It would be tough, embarrassing and humiliating, but that was what she had to do before she could move forward.

She had to accept the fact that she was not going to live here. The family who had wanted this house could buy it. And love it. And be happy here. This house needed a real family to transform it back into a loving home again, not a lonely single girl with delusions of bringing back the past.

Mari sniffled away the tears of grief at what she had lost and sacrificed, and she slid off her warm glove to dive into the pocket of Ethan’s coat. Hopeful that he kept tissues somewhere down inside those extra-deep pockets.

Only instead of paper tissues her fingers closed around a package.

She pulled out a long oblong which had been gift-wrapped in bright red foil. A white adhesive label with Christmas holly leaves around the edges said:
A bit late for a Christmas present but I hope you like it. Thinking of you, Ethan.

Mari swallowed down a lump in her throat the size of Dorset as she pressed her fingertip against the blue ink. She would have recognised
his spidery-thin writing anywhere. Ethan had given her a present and not told her. Simply left it in his pocket for her to find.

She almost pushed it back into the pocket. She would be seeing him soon enough—he could present it to her properly then.

And yet …
Her fingers smoothed the paper for a second before ripping open the tape to find a slim black photo album.

Should she open it? Now? Here? In this cold, echoing place, so remote from the cosy, sunny bedroom with the stunning sea view in the house Ethan had built with such love for his parents?

Maybe there was something in here which would take her back there to that calm and intimate space where she had almost felt relaxed and open enough to reveal her feelings, in spirit if not in body?

Mari slowly unzipped the case and looked at the first photograph.

It was a bright colour print of the teenage Ethan she remembered from his first summer in Swanhaven, his arm wrapped around the junior sailing regatta trophy while his parents stood on either side of him, their arms draped around his shoulders. His pretty English mother in a printed summer dress, and his American father, tall and stately in shorts
and T-shirt which never had seemed right on him.

All three of them were so happy. Their laughter captured forever in that fraction of a second.

This was his family. This was what he wanted to create for himself.

But it was the second photograph which undid her. It was a perfect shot of Kit and Ethan messing about on Ethan’s boat with her dad at the helm. And there she was, laughing and happy. Standing on the jetty watching the two boys and her dad having fun. The kind of event that was such a commonplace part of her life over those last few summer holidays that she had taken it for granted and not once even thought of capturing it with her camera. And now she was so grateful that someone had. Probably Ethan’s mum.

The tears streamed down her face unchecked. There was no point trying to stop them; it was much too late for that. Because the next photograph, and the one after that, was of Mari and Kit standing next to Ethan with their arms wrapped around one another’s shoulders at the Swanhaven sailing school prize-giving, just smiling at the camera with their whole bright future ahead
of them. So happy and content and living in the moment, with not a care in the world.

Oh, Ethan. Thank you for giving me this photograph.

Mari dropped her head down and slowly pulled the paper cover back over the photograph, blinking away her tears as best she could. The other photographs were for later. When she was secure in her own room with the door locked. On her own. Where she could weep in private.