It had been a long, long time since she’d stood up for Claire West.
“So how are you?” she asked, trying to pitch her tone somewhere between friendly and polite. “Back from Portugal?” Obviously.
“Yeah... for a few months.” Claire tugged the towel a little higher up on her body.
“Well... great.” Rachel nodded several times as she put her hands on her hips and then dropped them; suddenly her body had become awkward, as if she had too many limbs. “Huh. Wow.” The last she’d heard, Claire had been engaged to some hotshot property developer, someone with a double-barreled name and a father who was a baronet. Claire’s mother—after telling Rachel to clean the bathrooms “just a touch more thoroughly”—had regaled her with the endless wedding plans for her only daughter. An afternoon reception at the fancy hotel overlooking Derwentwater. An evening ball at another hotel in Windermere. And then a whole raft of events down in London.
“Have you come back to plan the wedding?” Rachel asked.
“Um, no.” Claire’s smile slipped. “The engagement’s off, unfortunately.”
“Oh.” Rachel squashed the inevitable schadenfreude she felt at knowing that at least one thing had not gone well for Claire. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, me too.”
Claire shifted where she stood, dripping water onto the carpet Rachel would have to vacuum later. “Sorry,” Rachel said. “I’ll get out of your way.”
“No, don’t bother,” Claire said quickly. “You’re obviously busy. I’ll just...” She gestured to the bedroom, one of the house’s four guest rooms, although perhaps this one had been Claire’s as a child. Rachel didn’t know; she’d never been invited to Claire’s house when they were friends. She was the riffraff whose fatherwas sometimes on the dole and whose mother cleaned houses. Definitely not good enough to be Marie West’s only daughter’s friend, even though they’d been inseparable during school for four years.
“It’s fine,” she said, and scooping up her mop and pail, she moved past Claire. “I’ll do one of the other bathrooms,” she called over her shoulder. “Just let me know when you’re done.”
She opened the door to another of the en suites, flicking on the switch before she sat down hard on the toilet seat. Distantly she could hear Claire moving around, turning on taps.
Claire. Claire West. For a second Rachel pictured Claire as she’d been the first time she’d seen her. They’d both been six years old, starting Year Two, taking off their coats in the crowded cloakroom at school. Claire had shrunk back from the noisy press of children and parents, and Rachel had seen from the corner of her eye how shiny her black patent Mary Janes were, her coat a kind no self-respecting six-year-old would wear, made of red wool with black epaulets and a Peter Pan collar. She wore a matching tam o’shanter, red with a black silk bobble on top, and she’d looked like an overdressed extra from a Shirley Temple film. Rachel had seen how the other girls in their sparkly jean jackets and puffy pink parkas had kept shooting her incredulous, disparaging looks. Her dark, silky hair had been neatly braided into two plaits, with shiny red ribbons tied into big bows on the ends. One of the boys had leaned forward and yanked one of those ribbons, and Claire had jerked back as if she’d been slapped.
Rachel had stepped forward, elbowing the boy—had it been Rob Telford or Oliver Bradley?—out of the way, and then she’d turned to Claire and asked if she needed help with her buttons. Claire had nodded wordlessly, and Rachel had stooped to undo each button of her coat while Claire had remained stilland accepting, her gaze averted. Then Rachel had said, kindly, “Maybe you shouldn’t wear that coat tomorrow.”
Claire had blinked at her, surprised, and then she’d given her a shy smile of gratitude and whispered, “I think you’re right.”
From that day on they’d stayed together. Claire had clung to Rachel, and Rachel had anchored her to her side. It had been wonderful to have someone you could count on, a forever partner in PE, someone who would always save you a seat at lunch. And more than that, someone who listened.
Claire had always been good at listening. At recess they’d often run off to a rhododendron bush on the side of the schoolyard. They’d wriggle underneath its tangled branches and sit there on their knees, mindless of the dirt or mud. Under that bush Rachel had admitted how she wished her father had a proper job, and Claire had whispered how she wished her mother wouldn’t worry so much. Rachel had secretly wished she’d had a mother who worried; her mother was too busy cleaning houses and keeping them afloat financially to worry whether Rachel was having a good day at school.
For four and a half years they’d wriggled under the rhododendron, sat together during lunch, and said goodbye at the bottom of the school lane because Rachel had known, without Claire ever having to say anything, that she would never be invited up to Four Gables to play. She’d told herself she didn’t mind, and she hadn’t, until their friendship had come to an abrupt halt in Year Six, when they were eleven years old.
Looking back, it felt as if one day Rachel had been linking arms with Claire as they’d walked into school from the playground; the next Claire had been surrounded by the in girls, who had formed a protective circle around her Rachel had been too proud to attempt to breach. But maybe it hadn’t been that quick. Memories had a way of blurring together, especially then. So much had been going wrong.
Rachel hadn’t talked to Claire since; in all those intervening years they hadn’t exchanged more than a few stilted words, a frozen smile, a nod in the street. Sometimes not even that.
Rachel let out a breath and rose from the toilet seat. This bathroom didn’t need cleaning, but she spritzed it all the same. Marie West was the kind of woman who sniffed a room upon entering it to make sure it smelled like lemon polish. Once, when Rachel had been talking to her about her work schedule, Marie had slowly run her finger along the top of a very tall curio cabinet. When it had come away covered with a thin film of dust, she’d given Rachel a silent, pointed look.
“Rachel?” Claire’s voice floated down the hallway. “I’m done in here, if you...”
Rachel stuffed her supplies back in her pail and came out into the hallway. Claire stood by the doorway to her bedroom, her damp hair tucked behind her ears, dressed in jeans and a fleece. Even in such standard-issue clothes Claire looked expensive and put together. The jeans were skinny designer ones; the fleece, with its chunky buttons and signature stripe, was from one of the pricey mountain-gear shops in Keswick or Windermere. Still, with her feet bare and her hair damp, Claire looked much as she had back in school, fragile and uncertain, and Rachel felt a tug of protectiveness that she resolutely ignored.
“Great, thanks.” Rachel slipped past Claire into the bedroom and scooped up the wet towels Claire had left in a sodden pile on the floor. She tried not to do it as pointedly as Marie West had with her dust-grimed finger, but Claire muttered an apology, so maybe she had.
She was starting to feel a tingling sense of annoyance, like a toothache she just couldn’t keep from probing with her tongue, as other memories came back in lightning-streak flashes. Claire at sixteen, walking down the high street of Whitehaven on a Saturday night with a gaggle of private-school girls in tight skirtsand tottering heels. Rachel had been standing outside the fish and chips shop, waiting for her father to finish his evening shift. She’d folded her arms and stared straight ahead as the girls had bent their heads close together and giggled behind their hands. Claire’s vacant gaze had skimmed right over Rachel. She hadn’t been ignoring her; she simply hadn’t registered her at all. Rachel hadn’t known which was worse.
Claire at nineteen, coming back from university at Christmas. They’d both attended the Christmas Eve carol service at church, Claire seated near the front with her parents and brother, Andrew, Rachel in back with Mum, who had needed a walker to get her through the door but had insisted on going, wheezing all the way, and left halfway through to have a smoke. Her father had been gone for three months by then, three bitter months when every day had been nothing but something to struggle through. Three months of seeing the life she’d hoped to have, a place at university, dreams, trickled away to nothing.
Sitting in the back of the church, Rachel had watched as Claire had taken off her cashmere coat, flicked her long, glossy hair over her shoulders, and whispered something to her brother. Rachel had suppressed a pang of envy so fierce and terrible it had felt like an ulcer eating away her insides. Her envy didn’t arise from Claire’s things; it had never been about material possessions. So Claire was rich. Lots of people were. No, it had been about the freedom. The ease with which Claire sat there smiling and didn’t seem to have a single worry in the world. The family that surrounded her, protective, loving, there. Claire didn’t know how lucky she was.
From what Rachel had seen now, she didn’t think Claire had changed. But why was she back in Hartley-by-the-Sea, and for a couple of months?
“I’ll just take these downstairs,” she murmured to Claire, nodding towards the towels, and after an awkward pause Claire stepped out of the way.
Rachel was switching on the washing machine when she realized Claire had followed her down to the utility room off the kitchen. She’d put her hands in the back pockets of her jeans and rocked back and forth on her heels. “So, Rachel.” She cleared her throat. “How are you?”
