Deep Waters (3 page)

‘I really love her,’ he confided. He wouldn’t have told his mother that, but he felt comfortable saying it to Serena.

‘You haven’t…?’

‘Asked her to marry me? Not yet,’ Mark admitted. ‘I’m
working
up to it, though.’

Serena didn’t look at him, but she laid a damp hand on his sleeve. ‘Don’t rush into anything,’ she said in a flat voice. ‘I mean it, Marco. You may think she’s the one, the right person—’

‘She
is
,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m sure of it. I’ve never felt this way about anyone before.’

‘Give it time,’ Serena said. ‘If she’s the right one, you won’t lose anything by waiting. And if not…well, it’s better to find that out before you commit yourself.’ She swallowed. ‘You think you know someone, but it takes time. Lots of time.’

Mark realised she was talking about Joe, was talking out of her own pain. He shouldn’t have expected her to be over the moon about his happiness with Callie.

And yet…there was something in what Serena said. If it was right, then what was the rush? Callie wasn’t going anywhere, and as his feelings for her—their feelings for each other—deepened even further, there would come a time when the next step would present itself as inevitable.

Mark’s churchyard reverie was interrupted by the jangling of his phone. Callie.

‘
Cara mia
,’ he greeted her, a smile in his voice.

‘I just wanted to let you know, Marco. There’s a change of plan for this evening.’

‘Well, Bella,’ said Callie. ‘I suppose this is it.’ Home, for the next few weeks.

Home. If you could call it that. Callie looked round the room, trying hard to find something homely about it.

It wasn’t a small room: that was one thing in its favour. High ceiling, plenty of floor space. The high ceiling, though, meant that there was all the more of the drab, depressing wallpaper on view. And as for the floor space…

The floor was covered with not one but two patterned carpets, joining somewhere near the wardrobe. The carpets were equally threadbare, equally hideous—one a bilious shade of green, with large swirls of a darker green, and the other a floral design,
featuring
overblown pink roses on a dreary grey background. The Stanfords’ last vicarage must have had smaller rooms, Callie guessed, with none of its carpets large enough to make the transition to this current Victorian monstrosity. Either of those carpets would have been ugly enough on their own; together they were truly sick-making.

Unsurprisingly, none of the furniture matched either. There was a frameless double bed, covered with a dingy white
candlewick
spread, a dark oak wardrobe, a lighter oak chest of drawers, and a pine bedside table. Blessedly there was also a wash basin attached to the wall in the corner, its pipe-work concealed by a frilled and gathered skirt.

Callie looked at the books on the bedside table. Thoughtfully provided? On the whole, she doubted it: they seemed a random collection of old paperback novels—from some long-ago church jumble sale, or left behind by previous guests—mingled with an assortment of other tomes. There was a cookery book, a
chemistry
text book, and a battered children’s picture book. She was glad she’d thought to bring along her own reading material.

Unfortunately, though, there was no reading lamp on the bedside table. The room’s only illumination came from the window, and above—from the single dim bulb dangling from the middle of the ceiling, shrouded in an ugly fringed shade. Evidently people were not meant to read in this room.

Bella jumped up on the bed and flopped down, seemingly impervious to her depressing surroundings.

‘Oh, Bella,’ Callie said. She realised she should probably get the dog off of the candlewick bedspread, but she didn’t have the heart. Instead she sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Bella’s ears.

What had she done? What had she committed herself—and Bella—to?

She hadn’t had many other options, and when Brian had suggested it, she’d overcome her reservations about living under Jane’s roof for maybe two months, and had accepted his offer.

At least, she told herself philosophically, the new
arrangements
would put on hold the fraught question of sleeping with Mark Lombardi. It certainly wasn’t going to happen here, at All Saints’ vicarage. And maybe that was no bad thing, to remove that particular issue from the equation for a while.

For once in his miserable life, Neville Stewart counted himself a happy man. A contented one, even.

He was, after all, on his honeymoon. In Spain, where the sun shone every day instead of maybe once a fortnight. With the woman he adored and had finally realised he didn’t want to live without.

She was next to him now, in a large and comfortable bed, sleeping soundly in the early hours of a Spanish morning.

Neville himself was awake. They’d spent so much of the last week in bed that he seemed to have caught up with his chronic sleep deficit. Maybe, he thought, that was one reason why he felt so good. The honeymoon hadn’t just been about sun, sea and sex—though there had been plenty of those, and not necessarily in that order. Sleep had also been on the menu, along with all the wonderful food they’d consumed.

Triona seemed to need even more sleep than he did—
probably
because of the pregnancy.

Neville played with a strand of Triona’s long black hair,
twisting
a curl round his finger. Triona, in her everyday life as a staid solicitor, usually tamed her hair by wearing it scraped into a knot at the back of her neck, but on honeymoon she’d not bothered, letting it go wild much of the time and otherwise just pulling it back with a scrunchie or piling it on top of her head. He’d always loved her hair, which seemed to him to have a life of its
own. When he’d first known her, when they’d first been lovers so many years ago, she’d kept it short and curly. It had been sexy then; now it was erotic in the extreme.

As was everything else about her. Whatever else he may have thought about her unexpected pregnancy—whatever his
unspoken
and unexplored ambivalence about becoming a father—Neville found the changes in Triona’s body deeply, irresistibly erotic. The gentle swell of her belly, the astonishing enlargement of her breasts: he couldn’t get enough of her. And the hormones of pregnancy meant that she was equally hungry for him.

They’d been on honeymoon for nearly a week, with just over a week to go. In ten days he’d have to be back at his desk, and Triona would return to her office in the City, continuing to work until it was time to go on maternity leave.

Living…where? That was the one fraught question. Neville had his grotty flat in Shepherds Bush, where he’d been for years; it had been good enough for Triona once, but it certainly wouldn’t do for her now. Her posh City pad was tiny, really only suitable for the workaholic singleton she had been until a few months ago.

Triona wanted to find a house—a family house. That, in Neville’s mind, meant the suburbs. He couldn’t imagine
himself
stuck in the suburbs, with a long commute into work. And London was so damnably expensive these days that it would have to be quite a way out. Even with Triona’s respectable salary they couldn’t afford anything very convenient.

But it would have to be done. The baby would be there before the end of summer.

Neville ran his hand over Triona’s tummy and she stirred in her sleep. ‘Hey,’ he murmured in her ear. ‘Are you awake?’

Her eyes, heavy-lidded, opened just a slit. ‘No, I’m not.’ Triona pushed his hand away. ‘Let me sleep, okay?’

He supposed he could wait. They weren’t going anywhere, and she was certainly worth waiting for. Maybe he’d go back to sleep himself for a bit.

The question of sleep, though, suddenly became academic. Neville’s mobile phone, on the bedside table, bleated out a few notes in a minor key which told him before he even looked at it that the call was from work.

Unbelieving, he reached for the phone and squinted at the screen. ‘Evans,’ he grunted. ‘What the hell does Evans want? Doesn’t the bloody man know I’m on my honeymoon?’

‘Don’t answer it,’ Triona said sharply, raising her head from the pillow. ‘Just don’t answer it.’

By now she should have known him better. Neville punched the green button. ‘Yes?’

It was, without a doubt, the most uncomfortable bed Callie had ever slept in. It was soft, for a start, and lumpy as well. There was a deep indentation—a trough, to put not too fine a point on it—in the centre of the bed, towards which she inevitably rolled and where she stayed for the whole of the night. Though it was a double bed, it would have been almost impossible for two people to share it without each clinging to opposite edges of the mattress.

Through the long and miserable night, Callie’s mind threw up a succession of unanswerable questions.

How long had Brian and Jane had this bed, she wondered, and where had they obtained it? Had they bought it new, at the beginning of their marriage, and worn it out themselves, or was it a family heirloom? Had it already been through a succession of owners before it came to reside at All Saints’ Vicarage?

Did Jane and Brian have any idea how uncomfortable it was? If they’d used and discarded it, perhaps they did know—and just didn’t care that their guests would wake up in the morning feeling worse than when they’d retired at night. Assuming, that is, they could sleep at all.

There was only one place for a bed like this, more like a mediaeval torture device than a place for rest and refreshment: a landfill somewhere.

Should she mention it to Jane? If Jane were, for instance, to ask how she’d slept?

Not jolly likely, Callie decided. She was on shaky enough ground as it was. Brian might have insisted on her coming here to stay, but Callie could tell that Jane wasn’t keen. Dinner last night had been frosty, to say the least, in spite of Brian’s heedless chatter.

And unfortunately it was obvious that Jane was not a dog person. How anyone could resist Bella’s charms was beyond Callie’s imagination, but Jane managed it very well. She insisted that Bella be banned from the public rooms of the house and confined to Callie’s bedroom. So Bella, accustomed to sleeping in Callie’s kitchen, was unsettled as well, her bed now tucked into the corner of the guest room. She whimpered occasionally through the night, further interrupting Callie’s intermittent periods of sleep.

How could this arrangement possibly work for the weeks it was going to take to get her roof sorted? When she had to be out during the day—and she certainly wasn’t planning to spend any more time than necessary in this dreary room—what was Bella meant to do? How could her poor dog survive?

If every night was going to be as sleepless as this one, how could Callie herself survive?

As the first finger of morning light poked between the ill-
fitting
curtains, Callie groaned and buried her face in the pillow.

At least there was no rush this morning. This was her day off; she could remain in this dreadful bed for as long as she liked—or as long as she could bear it.

Mark Lombardi rarely saw his flatmate, Geoff Brownlow. They both worked long hours, and most of Mark’s evenings, when he wasn’t working, were spent with Callie. He and Geoff weren’t friends by anyone’s definition: they’d never been down to the pub for a drink together, or engaged in anything but the most superficial of conversations. Their flat-share was a business arrangement—the result of a newspaper advert—which
happened
to work very well for both of them, most of the time. Both
Mark and Geoff were tidy by nature, so there was no conflict on that front. Once in a while they both needed the shower or the kitchen at the same time, but they were civilised about it and had never argued. For Mark, it was worth the occasional delayed shower to be on his own, out of his parents’ house. He knew that he could never afford the flat on his own; Geoff ’s presence was a small price to pay for that freedom.

So it was, Mark recognised, a most uncharacteristic thing he’d done the night before.

Callie had cancelled their evening together. He’d been planning, as was customary, to go to her flat after work. It was his turn to cook—of the two of them he was by far the more accomplished and confident cook—so he’d already bought the ingredients for dinner. But Callie’s flat had suffered storm damage and was off limits, that night and for some weeks to come, and her move into the vicarage left them without a place to be together. In any case, she’d felt strongly that the first night she would need to settle in to her temporary home and have a meal with Brian and Jane.

As a result, Mark had gone home with his food—home to his flat. And Geoff had come in from work a few minutes later. On impulse, Mark had made the offer. ‘I have rather a lot of food here,’ he’d said. ‘If you don’t have plans…’

Geoff didn’t have plans. So Mark cooked the sort of dinner he’d grown up with and had been taught by his mother to
prepare
to perfection: heaps of glistening pasta, followed by tender braised steaks and crisp vegetables, ending with a melt-in-
the-mouth
pudding, all accompanied with a nice bottle of wine.

Afterwards Geoff produced an almost-full bottle of a fine single malt whisky, and they settled down for the rest of the evening.

And Mark did most of the talking. He told Geoff about Callie: how they’d met, how he felt about her. How he was trying to take things slowly, let them develop in their own time. How that process was now interrupted by Callie’s forced removal to the vicarage.

‘It won’t be easy for you to sleep with her there,’ Geoff observed, refilling their glasses.

‘We’re not…I mean, we haven’t got to that point yet,’
admitted
Mark.

‘You’re not sleeping with her?’ Geoff ’s look of incredulity was replaced by one of dawning comprehension. ‘Oh, I get it. She’s a priest. So she won’t because it’s against her religion or something.’

‘Not exactly.’ Technically, Callie wasn’t a priest yet—that wouldn’t happen for a few months—though that wasn’t what Mark meant. How could he tell this virtual stranger that
he
was the one holding back, not Callie? Not that he didn’t want to, desperately. But there was something about the fact that she was in Holy Orders…

When Mark woke the next morning, a little the worse for the whisky, it was with a slight feeling of embarrassment that he had opened his heart to Geoff that way. He could blame the whisky for loosening his tongue, but the fact was that he’d needed to talk to someone. In any other circumstances he would have gone to Serena, the person with whom he’d always shared his feelings; at the moment that just wasn’t possible. And Neville wasn’t around. Anyway, he knew what Neville would say: just stop being such a bloody fool and shag her.

So instead he’d bared his soul to Geoff, his flatmate. The person he had to live with, even if he didn’t see him very often. How stupid was that?

He certainly didn’t feel like facing him now, with his head throbbing and a rather unpleasant taste in his mouth.

Fortunately Mark didn’t have a very early start this morning. He wasn’t going straight to the police station; he was going to accompany someone to court at the Old Bailey.

He could use a couple of paracetamol—or some strong coffee. But he could hear Geoff in the kitchen. The coffee could wait.

‘Yes, Sir. Yes. I understand. But—’ Neville grimaced at Triona, who was sitting up in bed glaring at him, miming dramatic throat-cutting gestures. NO, she mouthed. N - O.