Christmas at Claridge's (55 page)

She turned off the high street and marched down the shady grey-cobbled lanes, past the tiny pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages with bushy thatched roofs – which were now mostly
second homes for affluent Londoners – and over the concrete slipway to the compacted mud towpath that led down towards her studio. It sat on a hillock in the middle of the estuary. ‘St
Laura’s Mount’, Jack called it. The brown water merely slapped at the stilt legs during the high spring tides, but the path over to it was only accessible at low tide, which was why she
was enjoying a late start this morning. Strictly speaking, if she really cared about doing a nine-to-five working day, she could have bought a small dinghy to row over in, but she rather liked the
idiosyncratic hours it forced upon her. But even more than that – and she could
never
admit this to Jack – she loved the occasional stranding overnight, when her absorption in
her work led her to ignore the alarm clock and the path became submerged. After the first ‘stranding’, she had brought a duvet, pillow and overnight bag to the studio so that she was
properly set up for the eventuality, but Jack hated it. He felt it encouraged her – enabled her – to continue working when it was time to stop and come home.

The tide was almost fully out now, and the mudflats looked as glossy as ganache, but Laura didn’t stop to watch the avocets and bitterns picking their way weightlessly over them. Their
mutual fascination with each other had worn off a while ago and now they existed in apathetic harmony. She walked quickly up the two flights of metal stairs and unlocked the door. Jack was forever
telling her they had to up the security on the place. She had thousands of pounds’ worth of materials in the studio.

Dumping her handbag on the floor and carefully lifting the too-small shoes out of their box, she placed them on the windowsill. They looked like two blood-spots in the all-white interior. The
wide planking floorboards had been painted and overvarnished so that they looked glossy and more expensive than they really were, and it had taken over twenty tester pots and Jack on the edge of a
nervous breakdown before she had found the perfect white for the walls. She hadn’t wanted it to look cold in the winter, but it did, in spite of her best efforts – there’s
precious little that can counteract the pervasive grey light that characterizes the Suffolk winter. She had had some blinds run up in sandy-coloured deckchair stripes and that had helped warm
things up a bit. It had to – the windows ran round every side of the room so there were lots of them. Jack always used to worry that she was too exposed working up here, with 360-degree views
where anyone could see her alone in the creek. But Laura insisted that neither bored teenagers nor avid bird-watchers had any interest in her.

The red flashing light on the answering machine caught her eye and she went over to listen. After several years of working alone with only Radio Four for company, it was still a surprise to
realize that people were actively seeking her out and calling her up with commissions. The move from jewellery hobbyist to professional goldsmith had been accidental, when the charm necklace
she’d made for Fee’s mother had provoked a positive response at the WI. After weeks of ignoring Fee’s nagging, well-intentioned demands to set herself up properly, her friend,
young as she was, had taken it upon herself to place a formal advert in the
Charrington Echo
. Rather serendipitously, the editor of the
FT
magazine had been holidaying in
neighbouring Walberswick at the time and happened to chance upon it whilst waiting for her lunch order in the pub. An hour later she had knocked on Laura’s door and from there it had been but
a hop, skip and a jump to the prestigious placement in the
FT
magazine’s jewellery pages.

Today there were two messages, both from Fee – now working as her self-appointed PR and manager on the days she wasn’t manning reception at the leisure centre. Through squeals and
much clapping, she was forwarding appointment dates for three prospective new clients. Yesterday there had been another one, and this was several weeks after the article had come out. Laura
scribbled the dates and times in her diary, shaking her head over the fact that the commissions were still coming in. The feature had been about new-generation jewellers, and the box on Laura had
been the smallest, squeezed in at the very last minute. She had pretty much dismissed it as soon as she’d seen it because they’d cropped the photo so you couldn’t see her shoes,
but clearly lots of people hadn’t, because the little red light was still happily flashing most mornings when the tide finally let her in.

Laura walked over to the bench and began casting a critical eye over the previous day’s work – a necklace that was for a wedding next week. She caught a glimpse of the grey heron
beating past the east window, and knew her eleven o’clock appointment had arrived hot on her heels. Good old Grey. He was better than any CCTV system. He stood for hours in the reed bed, only
retracting his neck and leaping into flight when one of her customers passed by on the path to the studio. Like the avocets and bitterns, he just ignored her now.

‘Hello?’ a male voice drifted up questioningly, and she heard his shoes on the patterned metal treads.

‘Come up to the top,’ Laura called before taking a deep, calming breath. She slid the unfinished necklace into a drawer and refilled the kettle, somewhat aghast to notice that the
limescale had flourished unchecked so that it looked more like a coral reef in there.

‘Hello,’ the voice said, near now.

She set a smile upon her lips, took a deep breath and turned. ‘Hi,’ she replied, as a well-dressed man emerged through the doorway.

He stopped where he was, either transfixed or appalled by the sight of her. In keeping with her ‘take me as you find me’ defiance (and in direct contrast to Fee’s ‘take
me, I’m yours’ dress sense), she was sporting a grubby pair of boyfriend jeans that fell so low they exposed the upper curve of her hip bones, and a faded black Armani A/X sweatshirt of
Jack’s. The only things about her that were shiny were her teeth and the glossy red flats on her feet.

‘Ms Cunningham?’ he enquired, holding out a hand.

‘Laura,’ she replied, shaking his hand so lightly that her fingers slipped away just as he squeezed and he was left gripping her fingertips. He looked down at their star-crossed
hands and released hers.

He straightened up. ‘Robert Blake. You were expecting me?’

In her dreams, maybe.

Karen Swan lives in Sussex with her husband, three children, two dogs and her car called Meltchet.

Visit Karen’s website at www.karenswan.com or you can find Karen Swan’s author page on Facebook or follow her on Twitter
@KarenSwan1.

Also by Karen Swan

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First published 2013 by Pan Books

This electronic edition published 2013 by Pan Books
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ISBN 978-1-4472-4590-2

Copyright © Karen Swan, 2013

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