‘Zumba’s always fun,’ Honor agreed, without committing herself.
Clarissa waited outside, silently. As usual, Martyn would end up regretting striking back at Clarissa, but she jabbed him with every spiky word and never seemed to worry how much that stung, so he wasn’t ready to be conciliatory yet.
In the doorway, he looked down at Honor, who was gazing at him, frowning. He knew that he didn’t have to explain to her why Clarissa brought out the worst in him. Instead, he winked and somehow found himself dropping a kiss on the top of her head. ‘I need to be there by nine-thirty, tomorrow, so I’ll pick you up at eight.’
Chapter Sixteen
Honor had no idea what to wear to a photo shoot. The day was fine but the wind was frolicking with white woolly-lamb clouds so she teamed an aquamarine summer dress with a long cream cardigan that fell right the way to the dress’s hem, like something out of the sixties. She was no fashion guru but you couldn’t go wrong with retro.
Martyn was quiet.
He hadn’t shaved. His hair swung spikily around his cheekbones as it usually did and, thinking back to his image rumbling down The Butts on the side of that bus, Honor concluded that Martyn’s style of modelling relied a lot on people liking him exactly as he happened, by good luck, to be.
‘So, tell me about the shoot,’ she tried, when they’d negotiated the village traffic and were on their way, uphill, out of Rottingdean. ‘What’s it all about?’
‘The client is DownJo Jeans and it’s for an ad — magazine, website and the lead page of their section in catalogues,’ he said economically, eyes on the road.
‘Will it be exciting?’
‘No.’ He accelerated past the mock-Tudor Downs Hotel.
Juice, a Brighton radio station, took the place of conversation. Honor watched the scenery, the roadside bungalows with little windows in the roof and flint cottages with redbrick corners, giving way to grassy hills divided into irregular fields by darker green hedgerows. Sheep and horses grazed. The occasional hill was clad entirely in trees, reminding her of west Connecticut. Small scale.
They fought their way on to the A27 and, periodically, Martyn glanced at his watch.
‘Worried about being late?’
He glanced in his side mirror and pulled into the right-hand lane. Although she’d never driven in England and hated the idea of tackling those endless rotaries — roundabouts — let alone driving on the ‘wrong’ side, she knew that the faster traffic should be in the right-hand lane and the slower should be in the left-hand. It didn’t appear that all of the traffic knew that. ‘More mindful than worried,’ he said, after driving closer and closer to the dawdling little car in front before, grudgingly, it inched over. ‘I could have stayed at the hotel with the rest of the crew but as the shoot’s almost on my doorstep I decided not to. Now, of course . . .’ He waved a disparaging hand at the lines of traffic. ‘People trying to get to work are being held up by tourists setting out on their nice day trips. But I’ve built in a time buffer.’
‘And I guess they won’t start without you?’
He grunted but didn’t smile. Honor translated the grunt into, ‘Actually, I’m feeling tense and regretting inviting you so I’d prefer you not to tease me about my job. Let me retire into my own head for a while.’ Under time pressure, Stef had not only been as snappy as a dog but, unlike Martyn, who seemed self-reliant, he’d expected her to multitask her way through both their schedules as an unofficial and ultra-reliable PA. She knew how it felt to desire a little silence in which to contemplate the business of the day.
When had she last thought about business? Wearing a suit or studying client files would seem like living on Mars, now. She tried to imagine herself back at her desk with her licences on the wall and her computer screen permanently alight, land line and cell phone ringing all day and her income linked firmly to commission. Driving home with a headache that promised to last until bedtime only to discover that Stef had an evening off from the diner and wanted to go to the Star Bar where his old high-school buddies’ rock band would play and he’d dance all night with a bottle of Bud in his hand. If she mentioned herheadache he’d say, ‘It’s because you have to relax, babe. You’ve got to learn to chill.’
Time had flown by, in Eastingdean. Was it really only six weeks since she’d taken down her licences and walked out of that life?
Nearly a month since she’d stored her stuff in a storage facility and taken a car to the airport?
In that short time, she seemed to have learned how to chill. Waiting tables didn’t pay well but neither did it scramble her brain. Robina and Sophie were just nuts enough and the locals just friendly enough to make her time in England fun. Her old life had fractured and she’d crept out of one of the cracks.
She watched the cars, buses, trucks and vans streaming along the undulating road between tall banks of scrubby shrubs in the morning sun and sank into her seat, content, for now, just to soak up the country that had given her half the blood in her veins.
Even the silence of the man beside her was fine. And, fifty minutes later, when they were approaching a fairytale town on a hill, swinging over a little humped bridge and up towards castle, trees and cathedral, he kind of shook his shoulders and relaxed into his seat and began tapping his fingertips to the music on the radio. ‘We’re here. This is Arundel.’
Jolted from her reverie, she leaned forward to stare as they cruised past a jumble of grey stone, flint, red brick walls, spires and turrets.
‘That’s part of the castle, but not where you get in. And, see that kind of mini castle peeping over the wall? That’s made of oak and it’s in the castle grounds.’
‘Wow.’ Honor gazed at the jaunty flags waving on each corner of the ‘mini castle’, which, she knew from her guidebook reading in bed, last night, was actually called Oberon’s Palace, created from drawings by Inigo Jones. Her mind wasbombarded with a feeling of entering history, as if all the thousands of souls who had lived in Arundel over the centuries it had stood where the hill met the river were yelling at her all at once. No way had the guidebook done Arundel justice.
The road eased around to the right and into a broad street in which brick, stone and flint were joined by buildings painted white, blue or yellow and a couple of those cute timbered places, lining the slope down towards a monument in the middle of the road.
Martyn found his way around the back of the buildings to park at a red brick hotel. A last glance at his watch seemed to reassure him. But as she gathered her things he said, ‘Are you coming to watch the shoot?’
She hesitated. She was, wasn’t she? Didn’t he invite her last night . . . ? But then she got it. Last night, he’d been put on the spot by Clarissa and, making the best of a bad job, had invited Honor to cut Clarissa out. Aw, shit.
She responded brightly, hoisting her bag on to her shoulder and trying not to look disappointed. ‘I don’t quite know. I don’t want to miss out on seeing around this cute town and all these amazing buildings—’
