The Country Escape. Jane Lovering
about Spindrift and their places in the team.
‘I’m going more over to managing the café over at Warram Bay,’ Tansy said. She was small and pretty and had the slightly scrunched-up face of someone who spends a lot of time trying to think about what they say before they say it. ‘Working too closely with Davin was making us bring too much work home. When I realised we spent a whole weekend just talking about filming, I decided it was time to get out, hence—’ She waved a hand to indicate Gabriel, who was still standing at the bar.
‘My daughter keeps mentioning Davin,’ I said. ‘You’re a couple?’
‘Yes. It’s a bit like befriending a wild animal,’ Tansy said. ‘But he’s okay really. If your daughter wants to spend some time on set…’
‘She will, if we film at the cottage.’ Keenan, who was short, plump, balding and almost the exact antithesis of what I’d previously thought TV directors would look like, said, over his gin.
‘Oh, yes, I suppose she will. But I’m handing this one over to Gabriel. I need to take more of a back seat this year, and managing the café is a bit less pressurised and has less of Davin shouting in it.’
‘Tansy’s part-owner of the café,’ Keenan mock-whispered, hooking a slice of lime over his glass rim. ‘And Gabriel is cheap and local. He’s told us a bit about your place. It sounds… well, it sounds horrible, but I expect you like it. Got any pictures?’
I pulled out my phone and showed them the estate agent’s pictures that had made me fall in love with Harvest Cottage in the first place. We discussed access and, when Gabriel finally fought his way through the crush at the bar and brought my drink over, we talked about layout and, finally, money.
Keenan named a figure that would help get us through the winter. Logs were expensive and we still needed carpet and curtains and fewer woodlice. After Christmas I would start looking for local teaching jobs again or apply to be in the bank of teachers to cover absences, but in the meantime payment for use of the cottage would get us through. It would be a squeak, but I was damned if I’d ask Luc for additional money.
We arranged a day for Keenan to come with some of the team to make sure that technicalities I didn’t really grasp would work, and then he and Tansy went off back to Steepleton, leaving me with Gabriel.
‘So, when is Patrick going?’ I felt a bit awkward. I mean, obviously this wasn’t a date, more of a business meeting, but it had been a long time since I’d been alone in a pub with a man. In fact, had I ever? I’d met Luc when I was nineteen, there had only been brief passing boyfriends before that, and Luc would have died rather than hang around in village pubs drinking cider and playing darts like this crowd.
Gabriel pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Um. Yes. Bit of a tricky one there,’ he said, staring down into his pint glass of yellow bubbles. ‘I don’t know if Kee mentioned it…’
Actually Keenan had talked about a lot of stuff, but I’d mostly been focused on the money, so he could have mentioned anything and I might not have noticed.
‘… and it was originally a pig,’ Gabriel was continuing. ‘But I was talking about Patrick being in the orchard and he thinks a horse might work better. I mean, obviously he won’t be coming in the house, but, well. They might work Granny Mary’s van in too. So, if he could stay, just until filming finishes?’
I thought of the stomped-mud path. Of the retreating grass and the patch on the largest apple tree where Patrick rubbed his tail. Of the big face that would appear at the window and gaze balefully at me from time to time. Of the fact that Poppy kept on about riding lessons.
‘I don’t know.’ I put my glass down firmly. ‘There’s not really enough grass now. He’s going to need hay and – does your granny give him hard feed? It must take some energy to pull that van and he’s not getting that from just grass, not in winter. Does he need a rug? And a farrier will have to take his shoes off if he’s not going to be working for a while.’
Gabriel blinked at me over his drink. His glasses magnified his eyes so much that it looked like a special effect. ‘She’s not actually my granny,’ he said, and it sounded as though he’d picked on the least actionable of my statements. ‘It’s just that everyone calls her Granny Mary. She’s just been around the place ever since I was young, sort of a ubiquitous granny rather than a specific one. Sorry.’
My face had clearly fallen. I’d thought he was more intimately connected to the life of Patrick, now he was just a passer-by? ‘I see,’ I said, tightly.
‘Oh, but you’re right about him needing food, of course. I’ll… I’ll ask Granny… I mean, I’ll ask Mary about it. But, will he be all right to stay until we finish filming? It sounds as though he’s going to be an integral part of the storyline.’
Oh, bugger. I was firmly painted into a corner here. Say no to Patrick and it might risk the cottage not being used as a location, and we needed the money. Say yes, and I was stuck with a grazing machine with soup-bowl feet and a penchant for watching me boil the kettle. Plus Poppy’s growing attachment to him, which I wasn’t keen on.
Gabriel was watching me. I looked at him sideways as we sat amid the fug and chatter. There was a curious kind of stillness about him; he didn’t swivel all the time to watch the darts match or people coming and going. He just sat, hands around his pint of cider, as though life was going on around him without touching him at all. My mind briefly contrasted him with Luc, whose sociability and high-functioning boredom meant that he would have joined the darts game, bought a round for everyone in here and started at least three conversations with random strangers before we’d even sat down.
If he’d ever been so pleb as to go into a country pub, of course. Wine bars were more his thing.
I smiled. It felt stretched, as though I was forcing my face. ‘This is a nice place.’
He jerked his head in a sideways nod, but it stopped him from looking at me in that curiously concentrated way. ‘Noisy. Nearest pub to Steepleton and Landle, so it’s usually busy, but the cider is good and local.’ Then he swept a hand up and pushed his hair from his face. ‘Sorry. Am I staring?’
‘No. Well, yes, a bit.’
He gave a rueful smile and looked back down into his drink. ‘Sorry. It’s…’ He took the glasses off and laid them on the table. Without them his face looked less defensive, more classically good-looking, with the curve of cheekbones more pronounced and his eyes a more realistic size. ‘Sight’s degenerating. Even with these it’s not great, and I can’t wear them any thicker or I’ll topple over.’
I didn’t know what to say, so I just sipped my orange juice.
‘The location job is a pity posting, y’see.’ He picked up his glasses and turned them over between his fingers. ‘I’m going to be functionally blind in a few years.’ The words were matter-of-fact, but there was emotion quivering behind them. ‘So I’ve got to earn while I can.’
I had no idea what to say to that. Part of me wanted to do what I would have done with Poppy, thrown out ideas, things to be looked into and researched. But the rest of me knew that wasn’t what he wanted or needed. This wasn’t a problem to be solved, it was a life-altering reality.
‘It must be hard.’ I hoped I’d injected enough sympathy into my voice.
‘Pretty shit, yes,’ and the half-laugh in his tone told me I’d done the right thing. ‘And I’m telling you just so you know that I’m not being a total bastard about Patrick and the van. I’d help you out with him only, well, I don’t know much about horses and I can’t see well enough to pick it up on the fly.’
‘He needs some hay and a hay net, at the least. Otherwise he’s going to start losing condition, and it will be hard to tell under that winter coat he’s growing.’ I sipped down the last of the orange juice.
‘Were you one of those pony-mad children?’ He’d left his glasses off, and it was interesting