EIGHTEEN
Rowland’s house was as lovely as Ellie had expected.
As the taxi rolled slowly up the gravel drive, after being buzzed through the tall wooden gates that swung open when the driver approached, Ellie gazed up at the large manor house that revealed itself behind a riot of pink and blue hydrangeas. Sitting in lovely wraparound gardens, Rowland’s home looked as if it was straight out of a magazine. The Georgian façade was painted white, and a porch guarded the wide, wooden front door, which Ellie realised featured a cast-iron door knocker in the shape of a squirrel when she stepped up to knock it.
‘Ah, Ms McTavish, welcome, welcome!’ Rowland opened the door with a flourish almost as soon as she had knocked, holding a champagne glass in one hand. ‘Come with me, and we’ll get one of these for you,’ he added. ‘I’ll take your jacket.’
Rowland opened a door off the long hallway, putting his drink down on a delicate side table nearby, and hung up Ellie’s jacket on a hanger on a coat rack.
‘Thanks. Rowland, this place is amazing!’ Ellie looked around at the high ceilings, the Georgian mouldings and the parquet tiled floor.
‘I’m glad you like it. I bought it as a bit of a tip, actually, then did it up slowly, when time allowed. Had some help here and there, of course. I never claimed to be a handyman. Still, it’s surprising what you can do when you learn. If you’d told me when I lived in Kensington that I’d learn how to wallpaper a room, I wouldn’t have believed you.’
‘Well, it’s lovely,’ she repeated.
‘I’ll give you the tour later, if you want. Anyway, come and get a drink for now. Dinner’s on.’
Ellie followed Rowland along a long hall and through to a beautiful kitchen, where he crouched before a vast marble-topped island and extracted a chilled bottle of champagne from one of two wine fridges built into it. He poured Ellie a champagne flute and handed it to her, placing a kiss on her cheek as he did so.
‘To you,’ he said, clinking her glass with his.
Ellie was a little taken aback by the kiss, not that it was anything other than Rowland being sociable. But, still, the caution that she felt now about anything related to her body, or about being intimate with someone, acted like a leaden coat around her. Her instinct was to avoid all physical contact, all risk of her mastectomy being discovered.
But you don’t have to pull away from a friendly kiss, Ellie reminded herself. And it was true that, since she’d joined the swimming group, she had slowly started to feel more positive about her body.
It was seeing other women’s bodies that had helped. Specifically, the bodies of the women she swam with, who were anywhere from their late twenties to their late sixties, and were gloriously imperfect. She had started to realise that if she thought Simona, Esther, Petra, Mara and Clare were beautiful – and they all were, in their own way – then it was possible that she, also, could have a body that was worthy of love – if only from herself.
Baby steps, she’d told herself as she’d got ready to come to Rowland’s house.Not like you need to enterAmerica’s Next Top Model: at this stage, you need to be able to look at yourself without flinching when you get out of the shower.And she had begun to do that, recognising that one scar wasn’t the totality of her appearance or existence.
There was still a way to go, but at least when she’d had a shower for the past few days, and she had stopped and really looked at herself in the mirror, she had not hated what she’d seen. That felt like progress.
‘So what’s for dinner? You said pasta, I think?’ Ellie walked over to an impressively shiny silver range stove.
‘Tagliatelle with king prawns, chilli and lemon. Followed by chocolate pots.’
‘That sounds delicious. Could you always cook and I just never knew?’ Ellie looked around for evidence of cooking, but the surfaces were impeccably clean.
‘Full disclosure: I can’t cook. But I have a wonderful local caterer.’ Rowland put a silver stopper in the neck of the champagne bottle and replaced it in the fridge. ‘Imagine what would have happened if I could cook? You would have proposed years ago, probably.’
‘Maybe.’ Ellie laughed. She couldn’t help thinking about Mark, and the fact that he could turn out a mango salad as well as all manner of baked treats, as well as knowing how to change a carburettor.
‘Goodness. You don’t need to find that quite such a hilarious prospect.’
‘You moved away!’ Ellie protested. ‘I didn’t have a chance to get to know you better. Or for you to learn to cook.’
‘Come on. I think we both know that’s bullshit.’ Rowland upended his glass, finishing it. ‘I really liked you, but you were a closed book. You were well known for it. I could never work out how to melt the ice queen.’ He shrugged.
‘What?!’ Ellie perched on one of the high stools that sat around the kitchen island.Ice queen?‘What do you mean? Well known for what?’
‘You never talked about your past. You never expressed a preference for anything. You always agreed with’ – Rowland waved his hand vaguely – ‘your friends, you know. I’ve forgotten their names now – Pinky and Perky.’
‘Toni and Suzanne,’ Ellie corrected him. ‘That is not true!’
‘Oh, it is. You just always went with the flow. That’s nice and everything, but it didn’t make it very easy to know you. I’d ask you what you wanted to do on the weekend, and you’d always say you didn’t mind. And then when I chose where to go, I’d get the distinct impression you weren’t really having a good time. Remember Ascot? You hated that.’
‘Yes, I did. But only because everyone got screamingly drunk. And you all threw away so much money that day. It was offensive.’ Ellie shot back.
‘Right. See, there’s the woman I was trying to get to know. Why didn’t you say so at the time – that we were being offensive bastards? Why did you even come, if you hated horse racing so much?’
