The Unfinished Garden. Barbara White Claypole
Sebastian. “My hair got in the way when I gardened. So I hacked it off with the kitchen scissors.”
“Kitchen scissors?” His tone was light, but his face gave nothing away. “Makes you look younger.” And how would he know? He hadn’t seen her in ten years. He grasped the metal bar of the cart, pushed forward with his flat stomach, and walked off with her luggage. Ever the gentleman. Still, he could have asked first. Then she could have said no.
Rowena and Isaac skipped after Sebastian, swinging their clasped hands, gabbing away as if they hadn’t seen each other in six years, not six months. Rowena stopped to smack a kiss on Isaac’s cheek, and they both erupted into laughter.
Tilly watched her little band with a sigh. Who was she kidding? Hating was such hard work, and she didn’t hate Sebastian. Well, maybe only a smidgen. And yes, she could fault his radio silence, but history stood in Sebastian’s favor. He had loved her, protected her, desired her when she had believed no one could, and she had thrown the relationship away not once, but three times. Technically, two and a half. Seemed he had every right to deny her his friendship. But if he and Rowena had palled up, Tilly would have to let him back into her life. The question, though, was how much.
She watched the back of Sebastian’s head as he walked away. His hair, darkened to dirty-blond, was cut close to his scalp and gelled into non-rebellious spikes. It was a banker’s haircut: sculpted, immaculate, expensive. And, unfortunately, it suited him, too.
* * *
Tilly and Isaac were trapped in Rowena’s Discovery on a seat spackled with dried mud and imbued with the stench of wet Labrador. Bob Marley blasted into the back of the car as they hurtled around the M25, a loop of a racetrack with few signs and no billboards. A highway that skirted a capital city yet advertised nothing; a highway that didn’t distract you with the lure of shopping or the promise of a fun family getaway. A highway that aimed to get you from point A to point B at warp speed. At least, that seemed to be Rowena’s interpretation.
If David had been in Sebastian’s seat, he would have insisted Rowena pull over so they could swap. But Sebastian appeared as unruffled by Rowena’s high-speed lane weaving as he was by his reunion with a girl he’d sweet-talked out of her virginity. When the speedometer passed ninety, he turned away and stared out of the window.
“For gawd’s sake, what does the plonker think he’s doing?” Rowena accelerated up to the bumper of a French truck and blasted the horn. “Get out of the fucking lane, wanker!”
“Ro—” Tilly jerked forward and kicked the back of the driver’s seat.
“Fuck. Sorry,” Rowena said. Tilly kicked the seat again.
“Mom, what does fuc—”
“It’s an outlaw word,” Tilly raised her voice. “You are never to use it. Understand?”
Isaac shriveled into the seat. Tilly, you loathsome toad of a parent. She never turned to Isaac in anger, never, and being trapped in this sweltering car with Sebastian, shackled in her own private hell, was no excuse for nipping at her son like a snapping turtle.
“It’s a bad word, Angel Bug.” Tilly grabbed Isaac’s hand and squeezed. “Or rather a word people see as bad. Which means that most people find it offensive. Which is why you shouldn’t use it. Right, Ro?”
“Absolutely, dear heart. Ab-so-lutely. Always listen to Mummy. Never bad, foul-mouthed Aunty Ro.” Rowena gave her right hand a playful slap.
“But—” Isaac glanced at Sebastian, as if checking for his reaction. “What does it mean?”
“This I’ve got to hear,” Rowena muttered, and turned down Bob Marley.
“It’s an ugly word for sex.” Tilly’s cheeks flamed, which was ridiculous. She and Rowena had spent half of their childhoods scouring National Geographic for pictures of naked tribesmen, the other half searching Lady Roxton’s romance novels for sex scenes. And Sebastian had known Tilly’s teenage body better than she had. So why did she feel as if she were swirling down a whirlpool instead of bobbing along in the slipstream of her past?
Isaac curled up his lips. “Are we going to have another conversation about your sperm, Mom?”
Rowena brayed with laughter that sounded like whooping cough shot through the nose, and the Discovery swerved.
“Let’s make this a private conversation,” Tilly said.
Isaac grinned; he loved mother-son secrets.
Then Sebastian giggled. How could she hear that giggle and not let her attitude toward him thaw? She imagined the expression that accompanied the giggle: eyes sunk into creases of laughter, nose puckered up, lips stretched back to reveal the sexy gap between his front teeth. This was the Sebastian she’d fallen in love with—the boy who chased kites across the moors, or sat cross-legged on Tilly’s window seat holding his cigarette out of her bedroom window and laughing at who knew what. But that was before his father left and Sebastian prepared for a life of responsibility, before he grew old with worry for his mother, for his grandmother, even for Tilly. And that was the beginning of the end, because the more Sebastian coddled her, the farther she ran.
Tilly gave a fake cough. “My mother tells me you’re living in Bramwell Chase, Sebastian?”
Sebastian stopped giggling. “I’m renting Manor Farm.”
“Yes,” Tilly said slowly. “My mother told me that, too.”
“I didn’t tell you first?” Rowena stretched against the steering wheel. “Sure I had. But since you don’t answer my emails, I have no idea what you know.”
Tilly bit her lip. Challenging Rowena was not an exercise for the jet-lagged.
“Anyway. It’s a brilliant story, so I’m happy to repeat it.” Rowena tailgated a BMW and flashed her lights, while Tilly sank lower in her seat. “I was in town for a meeting at the bank. No offense, Sebastian, but ruddy bankers. It’s always something. I walked in and there he was. Well, I about died.” She smacked the steering wheel and the baubles around her wrist tinkled. “Can you imagine?”
Yes, Tilly could. Rowena would have shrieked and people would have gawked. Sebastian would have been embarrassed, but would have concealed it and kissed both her cheeks. He certainly wouldn’t have stood and stared as he had done with Tilly. She yanked a tissue from her pocket and shredded it.
“I had absolutely no idea he was back from Hong Kong not that he’s ever handled the Roxton account have you Sebastian but we went to dinner—” jeez, was she going to pause for breath? “—and Sebastian told me he needed somewhere to stay and I thought the Farm with all that fresh air for the children and here we are.”
Tilly glared at Rowena’s headrest. Rowena’s recent emails had been full of chatter about finding her gamekeeper passed out with an empty bottle of whiskey, and about Sunday lunch at Woodend with roast lamb and the first new potatoes of the season. But no mention of Sebastian. And Rowena didn’t keep secrets. She didn’t know how.
Rowena twiddled with the heat controls, and Tilly breathed through a surge of nausea. Was no one else suffocating in this car? If she threw up that would be interesting: Sebastian was vomit-phobic.
Tilly shrugged off her cardigan. “Back for good, Sebastian?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you were in Hong Kong for the long haul. What changed your mind?”
“Who, not what. Fiona.”
Tilly sat up and watched the silver belly of an airliner soar above them. “She’d had enough of Hong Kong?” Was the plane full of holidaymakers, businessmen and women? People fleeing?
“She’d had enough of me.” The front passenger seat groaned as Sebastian swung around. “Mind if I smoke? In front of Isaac?”
He never managed to quit, then. And yes, she did mind him exposing Isaac to secondhand smoke.