“Oh, yes, yes, of course. Mr. Kincaid. Yes. Sorry.” She was not actually all that keen to make Alex Kincaid’s acquaintance. Given how unimpressed by her he’d seemed for the ten excruciating minutes of their phone interview, she thought he was unlikely to revise his opinion upon meeting her.
And she was unlikely to revise hers; she already had a picture of him in her head: He would be tall and angular with short-cut steel gray hair and square spectacles. He’d have one of those mouths that looked thin and unfriendly, and he would narrow his eyes at you as you spoke, as if incredulous of every word that came out of your mouth.
Oh, wait, maybe she was picturing her last boss, Simon Hansen, when he’d told her he was canceling her art exhibition.Sorry, Lucy, but after the bad press we can hardly go ahead with the exhibit. And in any case, your mother’s not coming anyway.
As for Alex Kincaid, now that she remembered that irritated voice on the phone, she decided he’d be balding and have bushy eyebrows. He’d blink too much as he spoke and have a nasal drip.
All right, perhaps that was a little unfair. But he’d definitely sounded as if he’d had his sense of humor surgically removed.
“I’m sure you’re completely knackered now,” Juliet continued, “but tomorrow I’ll give you a proper tour of the village, introduce you.” She nodded, that clearly decided, and Lucy, not knowing what else to do, nodded back.
It was sostrangebeing here with her sister, sitting across from her in this cozy little kitchen, knowing she was actually going to live here and maybe get to know this sibling of hers who had semi-terrified her for most of her life. Intimidated, anyway, but perhaps that was her fault and not Juliet’s.
In any case, when Lucy had needed someone to talk to, someone who understood the maelstrom that was their mother but wasn’t caught up in her currents, she’d turned to Juliet. And Juliet hadn’t let her down. She had to remember that, keep hold of it in moments like these, when Juliet seemed like another disapproving person in her life, mentally rolling her eyes at how Lucy could never seem to get it together.
And shewasgoing to get it together. Here, in rainy, picturesque Hartley-by-the-Sea. She was going to reconnectwith her sister, and make loads of friends, and go on picnics and pub crawls and find happiness.
“He’s a good sort,” Juliet said as she whisked the kettle off the Aga before it had shrilled for so much as a millisecond. It took Lucy a moment to remember whom Juliet was talking about. Alex Kincaid, her new boss. “Tough,” Juliet added, “but good.”
Lucy didn’t like the sound of tough, especially Juliet’s version of tough. She wanted her boss to be cuddly and comforting, or maybe a pull-you-up-by-your-bootstraps type, but in a jolly, let’s-get-on-with-it kind of way. She had a feeling Alex Kincaid was going to be neither.
“Here you are.” Juliet put a mug of steaming tea in front of Lucy, and pushed the sugar bowl and the milk jug towards her before taking her own mug. “So,” she said, taking a sip of tea, her face settling into neutral lines. “What did Fiona think of you coming here to stay with me?”
Lucy gave a noncommittal shrug. She supposed she’d eventually have to give Juliet the details of everything that had happened with their mother, but she’d part with them reluctantly and in any case Juliet could find them plastered all over the Internet if she did a search. Maybe she already had. “I don’t know. I just sent her an e-mail, telling her I was coming here. We haven’t actually spoken since . . .”
“That’s understandable,” Juliet answered blandly. “I haven’t spoken with her in five years.”
Lucy didn’t know the source of her sister’s estrangement with their mother, although she supposed she could guess at it. Fiona Bagshaw was, to put it mildly, a personality. A “tour de force” would be how she described herself. She’d made a name for herself in the world of modern art before Lucy was born, creating sculptures of round-hipped and large-breasted women that reminded Lucy of something you might discover in a prehistoric cave.Fertility Goddess, circa 2000 BC.But thefigures were immensely popular and now sold for thousands of dollars, along with her latest artistic undertaking, angry-looking phalluses made from handblown glass.
In the last decade Fiona Bagshaw had become as much of a social commentator as an artist. If a newspaper or a television program needed a quote about women’s rights or modern culture or just about anything, they went to Fiona. Lucy had become used to her mother’s constant theorizing, the endless commentary on what anyone wore, ate, said, did. She couldn’t so much as eat a Twinkie without her mother making some remark about it being a phallic representation and a symbol of modern patriarchy.
But Juliet had missed her mother’s fame and its effects on Fiona’s purpose-built family. She’d left before Fiona had become something of a cultural icon, at least in America. She certainly hadn’t lived with it day in and day out the way Lucy had. So whyhadher sister chosen to alienate herself from their mother? Lucy wasn’t about to ask. One, she didn’t know Juliet well enough to ask such a personal question. Two, she didn’t want to think about her mother for the next four months. And three, she was exhausted.
“I’ll show you your room,” Juliet said, draining her mug of tea. She rose and went to the sink, rinsing the mug out with her usual brisk movements. “You probably want a lie-down, although it’s best not to sleep for more than an hour or two. Otherwise you’ll be completely off schedule.”
And Juliet was someone who seemed to thrive on schedules. Left to her own devices, Lucy would sleep all day. But now she obediently rose from the table and followed Juliet back into the hall. “I’ll just get my bags from the car. What time is dinner?” Juliet gave her a rather narrow look. “I only meant, with your other—umm, your paying guests? Are they . . . ?”
“I haven’t any guests at the moment,” Juliet answered. “They left this morning, and the next lot arrive tomorrow at noon. They’re all walkers, and they’re usually only here for a night before they move on to the next stop on their route. I don’t do dinner for guests, though, so it’ll just be the two of us.”
“Okay.” Lucy jangled her car keys, the sound seeming too loud in the little hall. “I’m happy to pitch in, of course. With cooking and cleaning and all that.”
“I’ll make a rota,” Juliet answered.
“A rota?” Lucy said blankly, and her half sister pursed her lips.
“A schedule,” she explained, and Lucy suspected she’d already made one.
“Great.” In the short silence after this awkward exchange, she jangled her keys again, and then went for her bags, ducking her head in the persistent drizzle, giving Hartley-by-the-Sea’s high street one dubious glance. In the rain it all looked gray and bleak, without a single person to liven up the muted, monochrome landscape of terraced houses. If she were to paint it, she’d use a palette of grays and title itLoneliness. Or maybeIsolation. Not that she was planning on painting anything here, or ever again. Standing there, she couldn’t hear a single sound besides the soft pattering of rain on the hood of her car.
Ten minutes later Juliet had left her alone in a sunshine yellow room at the back of the house, the white duvet cover stitched with daisies and a single window overlooking the sheep fields.
Lucy sank onto the bed, feeling more exhausted than ever and quite suddenly homesick—although for whom or what, she didn’t know. She didn’t miss Boston, particularly, or her job as a barista at a gallery/café in Cambridge. She didn’t miss her mother or even Thomas, to whom she’d given three years of her life. She would have missed his children, if they’d shown her even a modicum of kindness or affection, but as it was, she was relieved to be free of them.
Maybe that was the trouble. She was missing the very fact that she didn’t miss anything, that no one was special to her, that she’d left nothing behind that she still wanted. And nobody would miss her.
All right, perhaps that was being a bit maudlin. Her best friend, Chloe, hadn’t wanted her to go. She had a small circle of friends and acquaintances who would at least read her Facebook updates, if she could be bothered to post them.
Arrived in Hartley-by-the-Sea! Raining steadily and had a cup of tea.
