‘Meaning?’
‘Meaning that as soon as I tell Martha and Willow, everything will change. You’ll be horribly scrutinised. Your every motive will be questioned.’
The dressing mixed, he drizzled it over the salad leaves he’d already placed in a large pottery bowl. ‘I have nothing to hide,’ he said. ‘And I’d expect nothing less than your daughters to be suspicious of me. They need to know their mother isn’t going to come to any harm with some stranger.’
‘You’re not a stranger,’ she said faintly.
‘I am to them.’
‘But they wouldn’t need to know the whole truth, we could gloss over a few details, couldn’t we? I wouldn’t want them to think—’
‘Badly of you,’ he finished for her. ‘I wouldn’t want that either. I thought we’d covered all that?’
‘And there’s your stepson to consider as well,’ she went on stubbornly, reluctant to accept that he was right. ‘He might have strong views on you being with someone other than his mother.’
‘I’ve told you before, Lucas has his own life in Los Angeles and has always made it clear that I shouldn’t live in the past.’ He came over and put his arms around her. ‘But that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate your concerns. I do. You’ve lived here in a close-knit village for more than thirty years and everyone knows you as one half of a couple, the wife of a man who was hugely liked and admired. Who am I to think I could step into his shoes?’
‘Don’t say that.’
‘But I’m sure it’s what a lot of your friends will think. Particularly your daughters. But sooner, rather than later, we need to be honest.’ He kissed her lightly on the lips. ‘I just want there to be areal us.’
‘As opposed to asecret us?’ she said, tilting her head back a few inches so she could look at him.
He smiled. ‘Exactly. Unless you think I’m rushing you, that this has happened too quickly? If that’s how you feel, you must say, and we can put the brakes on. I’ve always regretted that I let you slip through my fingers all those years ago and I don’t want to repeat that mistake.’
‘I don’t want that to happen either, but I’m worried that by telling my daughters about us it will break the spell.’
‘Then we must do all we can to ensure we keep the magic going. But first things first,’ he said in a brighter tone, ‘you need to convince me that it’s not just my body you want. That’s it’s my mind too.’
She laughed. How she loved that he could do that to her. That he could brush away her worries so effortlessly with his gentle humour. She placed her hands around his neck and allowed herself to forget about Martha and Willow who were coming to see her on Sunday and specifically, how they might react to her telling them about this perfectly wonderful man who made her feel so young and free again. She had cowardly put off answering her eldest daughter’s message about them coming down to Anchor House for as long as she could, sensing that it was a turning point. The last time they had visited was shortly before Ellis moved in and in the weeks since, she had carefully avoided mentioning that there was a new tenant living next door.
She really didn’t relish the prospect of sharing Ellis as she now reluctantly accepted that she should. She liked having him to herself. It felt like this was the first time she’d had anything that was just hers.
It was also the first time she’d had a good secret to keep, and not one that made her feel ashamed.
Chapter Eight
Ellis had always regarded himself as a mild-mannered man. Which he knew was a character trait invariably mistaken for weakness. If you were trying to sell yourself on a work CV or an online dating website, describing oneself in such terms would probably be the kiss of death. It didn’t sound exciting enough; it gave rise to the suspicion that you lacked backbone.
Funny that not having a temper should be seen as a negative attribute, but he was just one of those people who rarely allowed things to reduce him to a state of apoplexy. Or perhaps he’d just been lucky in life, that he hadn’t been tested to the point that he’d been in danger of losing his self-control. It wasn’t that he allowed people to walk all over him; far from it, he merely had a knack for quietly resolving a tricky situation. Of course, who knew how he would react if he was attacked, or somebody he cared about was threatened? Perhaps then the monster within would rise up and reveal itself.
He believed that it was his ability to keep his emotions in check that had helped him care for his wife four years ago when cancer had finally robbed her of her life.
Their marriage had been a happy one with scarcely a cross word exchanged between them. They’d been set up to meet at a dinner party given by mutual friends who had decided that Diana had grieved long enough for her husband,who had died in a car crash three years previously. They had also decided it was high time Ellis settled down. To everyone’s satisfaction, he and Diana had hit it off and before the evening was over they’d swapped telephone numbers.
At the time Diana’s son, Lucas, was ten years old and Ellis was in his late thirties with no previous experience of children. A relationship with Diana had the potential to be a minefield of complex challenges, but it hadn’t been like that at all. Lucas was an easy-going child and accepted Ellis into his mother’s life quite readily. Had he not, who knows whether things would have gone as well as they had.
Ellis’s mother, Rose, had been delighted at last to have a grandchild and loved Lucas as though he were Ellis’s own son. As did he. Amongst the many framed and treasured photographs which Rose had brought with her to make her room here at the care home feel more homely were several of Lucas, charting his years from young boy to teenager to adult. She was so very proud of him.
Sitting in the stuffy, overly warm room where Rose was fast asleep, Ellis hoped she found the pictures a comfort. For him, the collection of photographs was a poignant reminder of her life coming to an end. Ninety-six years of age, she was now painfully insubstantial, as though the slightest of breezes would blow her away.
Physically she had never been a big woman, but mentally she had been a colossus, and an inspiration to many. A schoolteacher all her working life, she had taken to mentoring troubled teenagers in her retirement. She believed everybody deserved not just a second chance, but a third and a fourth,or however many chances it took to find one’s place in the world. Anyone who knew Rose Ashton had had nothing but respect for her.
The nursing staff here at West View Care Home were wonderful and Ellis didn’t give a damn how much it was costing him to have Rose so well cared for. It had been a sad day for him when she had admitted that she could no longer look after herself, that she had begun to feel worryingly unsteady on her feet. Always a pragmatist, she had refused point-blank his suggestion that she live with him in Richmond.
‘If you think I’m going to let you take me to the lavatory, you have another think coming!’ she’d fired back at him. Her body might have been failing her, but her mental faculties and the ability to assert herself were not. ‘No son deserves that punishment inflicted upon him.’
It didn’t matter how often he assured her that he wouldn’t be embarrassed by taking her to the bathroom, that he had done it for Diana, she was adamant that that was different. ‘Diana was your wife; intimacy was an established bond between the two of you. No such thing should ever exist between a mother and a son and that is my final word on the subject.’
