Facing the Light (32 page)

He stirred the drink and handed it to her, then sat down on a chair opposite the sofa. Rilla took a sip and said, ‘I like your cottage. It's quite unusual, isn't it?'

‘A mess, you mean. I'm sorry. I didn't know I was
going to be entertaining. I'd have made more effort, truly.'

‘That's okay,' said Rilla. ‘I like it.'

And it was true. You couldn't have found a greater contrast to Willow Court in the whole of the county, and that was what she liked about it. She would have liked it whoever had been living here, but of course it was Hugh's house and that made it extra special.

‘Are you an actor?' she asked him and he shook his head.

‘No, I'm a potter. I've got a kiln in a shed out in the garden. I used to work full-time in an advertising agency in London, but it all got too much, d'you know what I mean? The rat race, and so on. So I've gone part-time, and this cottage, well, it's a sort of bolt-hole. Somewhere to escape to, where I can really be myself. And see whether I can make a go of the pots.'

‘I'd love to live in London,' Rilla said. ‘I think I'd enjoy the rat race. After the holidays, all I have is weeks and weeks of school to look forward to. But I'm leaving next year and then I'm going to drama school. My mother didn't want me to at first, but now she's given in. Well, Gwen, that's my sister, she's doing a Domestic Science course in Switzerland, so Mummy couldn't really say no, could she? I'm just dying to get there. It's so dead round here. There's absolutely nothing to do and no one to talk to.'

Hugh made a sad face, and Rilla laughed. ‘I mean, till I met you there was no one.'

‘I hope you feel you can talk to me,' he said. ‘Or I shall be as lonely as you are, and I'd hate that. Will you come and visit me sometimes?'

‘Yes,' said Rilla. ‘Of course I will. I'd love to.' She put her cup down in the tiny space left between a pot plant and three or four notebooks, which took up most of the
occasional table next to the sofa. She'd hardly drunk any of it after all. Then she stood up.

‘I ought to get home now,' she said. ‘My mother will wonder where I am if I stay any longer. I'm sorry I haven't finished my coffee. It was lovely, really.'

‘My pleasure,' said Hugh. ‘Do come again soon.'

He'd stood in the doorway and waved at her as she walked to the gate. Mrs Pritchard, who lived next to the pub and who was one of her mother's bridge ladies, was passing by on the other side of the road as she left. She can stare all she likes, Rilla thought. I don't care if it's not the done thing to go drinking cups of coffee with men who live on their own. I don't care if Mrs P tells Mummy. I don't care about anything. For two pins, she'd have turned round and hammered on his door again and cried, Let me in! I want to stay with you. No one else, not ever.

That was how it began. Now, everything had changed, utterly. Now she was a totally different being and walked through her life in a kind of daze, her whole body throbbing and singing and longing for Hugh every second that they were apart.

She'd fallen into the habit of going to see him in the afternoons when he wasn't in London. To her mother she said she was visiting this or that friend from her primary school days … there were still a few of them living near the village. On her third visit, they went upstairs to the bedroom, which was surprisingly tidy, with lovely pale pink sheets and curtains printed with a pattern of ivy and white flowers, and Rilla lost her virginity willingly, happily and with considerably less pain than she'd been expecting.

*

‘I've never spoken to anyone like this before,' Rilla said, turning to look at Hugh's profile on the pillow next to her. ‘I didn't realize you could. I love you. I love this; just lying here like this with the sun coming in and everything.' She closed her eyes. The smoke from Hugh's roll-up had a wonderful smell. He gave her puffs from it sometimes and it made her feel swimmy and delicious, as though her body might melt into the bed. She giggled. What would Mummy say, or Gwen, if they knew that she was here, smoking pot? Would it be more shocking than the fact that she was in bed with a man? Or less shocking? The two things together would, she was sure, be the height of wickedness in Leonora's opinion. Rilla couldn't help smiling at the hypocrisy. She's fond of a gin and tonic, isn't she? Practically hooked on it, was the woozy thought that went through her head. She's got no right to tell me what to do. No right at all. She opened her eyes, and there he was, still looking at her and smiling.

‘I think,' Rilla said, ‘I must have been born into the wrong family. D'you know what I mean?'

He traced a line with his finger from where her hair ended, down her forehead and her nose till he reached her mouth. When she felt him touching her lips, she kissed him, and put out her tongue and licked the finger, tasting his skin.

‘Little kids think they're in the wrong family, don't they?' he said. ‘They've been kidnapped away from a king's house, or something like that. Is that what you mean?'

‘No, nothing like that. It's just that in my family everyone's so, I don't know what to call it, stiff? Formal, maybe. My mother is always properly dressed. I've never seen her in a dressing-gown, for instance. She gets dressed as soon as she gets up. No chatting over cups of tea at the kitchen table for her. And my sister's nearly as bad.'

‘She's older, right?'

‘Yes. She'll be coming back to London soon, when her course in Switzerland finishes, and then she'll do even
more cookery and stuff, which sounds just so boring. And she's got a proper fiancé and everything. When they're together, they do all the prim and proper engaged-couple things together, even though they're not going to get married for ages and ages. You know, choosing equipment for married people. Knives and forks.' This suddenly struck both of them as tremendously funny and they rolled around in the tangled sheets together, laughing.

‘I haven't a clue what they talk about,' Rilla continued, when she'd recovered a little. They slept together, she knew that much, but Gwen refused to discuss it. She believed such things were personal and private and shouldn't be talked about. Perhaps, Rilla thought, she's got a point. I wouldn't like her to know about me. About this. She went on, ‘He's foreign. Well, not really foreign, only his people come from Spain. He's called James Rivera. He's quite nice actually. Good-looking and everything. Can't think what he sees in Gwen.'

‘If she's anything at all like you,' Hugh said, ‘there's no mystery.'

Rilla shook her head. ‘She's the good one in the family. She only ever does what Mummy wants her to do, and she's very quiet and not at all like me. I'm all over the place. You have no idea how hard it is at school with teachers going
oh, you're not a bit like Gwen … why can't you be more like Gwen
 … till I'm sick to death of hearing it. She's one of those people, you know, reliable and kind and good with animals and that sort of thing. And she and Mummy get on much better than we do. Me and my mother, I mean. I don't really know why. I can see that I annoy Mummy sometimes. She does her best to hide it, really, but it comes out every so often.'

‘I can't imagine anyone not adoring you. Just can't imagine it,' Hugh said.

‘Oh, she adores me, I expect,' Rilla said. ‘But she gets
annoyed all the same. It's what I told you. I'm not in the right family. Maybe I'm a whatsit. A changeling. The fairies came and stole her real baby away and left me instead. They're often redheads, aren't they? Changelings?'

Hugh stubbed out his joint and lay back on the pillows. Soon, he was snoring slightly. He was always doing that, Rilla reflected. Men just naturally fell asleep quickly after sex. She'd read about it in books. I'm good at it, she said to herself. I'm good at sex. The thought made her happy. She became a different person when she was with Hugh, and it wasn't just the sex, which, okay, was brilliant, and which nothing she'd ever read described properly at all. She liked it better than any other thing she'd ever done. She felt shiny all over, and as though her body had a slight electrical charge going through it whenever Hugh touched her. Even when she wasn't with him, thinking about what they did together while, for instance, she was sitting at breakfast across the table from her mother, made her blush and go hot all over. Once or twice, Leonora had actually asked her if she was all right and she'd had to find some excuse for the sudden redness flooding her cheeks and neck. While she was asleep, she dreamed about him, and woke up sweating. There was one night when she was longing for him so desperately that she could hardly catch her breath. She'd actually started up out of her bed and begun dressing, ready to creep out of the house in the early hours of the morning and run and run all down the drive and through the village and into his cottage and up the stairs and into bed beside him before he was even awake. But she sank back on to her own bed in a storm of desire and despair, knowing the row it would cause if she were not in her place at breakfast.

Also, maddeningly, some of the days when she could have been with him she had to spend mooching around at
Willow Court because he was up in London. He came for two or three nights a week and occasionally for a weekend and that was all. Soon the holidays would be over, and then she'd hardly ever see him. How was she going to concentrate on her A-levels knowing he was just a few miles away? Perhaps she could leave now? Just never go back for the Michaelmas term? All she wanted to do was go to drama school, but even though she'd begged and begged her mother, Leonora was unconvinced that acting was a suitable career, and insisted that her daughter stay at school long enough to notch up what she called ‘proper qualifications'.

On Hughless days, which was how she thought of them, she found that she was actually missing Gwen. There was no one to talk to, and she spent hours pacing the grounds, walking round and round the lake, sometimes reciting speeches from Shakespeare out loud.

‘“Halloo your name to the reverberate hills, and make the babbling gossip of the air cry out Olivia!”' she declaimed to the swans, who passed in and out of the willow branches that dipped into the water, but they weren't really listening. No one listened to her like Hugh did.

Rilla was quickly aware that she'd never before had conversations like the ones she had with Hugh. They talked about everything: books, music, his work. He told her things. He asked her opinion and often agreed with her. He thought she was clever. She loved to watch him as he made his pots. He would throw the clay on to the wheel and stroke it into beautiful shapes till she was nearly mad with wanting to touch him. He warned her off.

‘I know what you're thinking, young Rilla,' he'd say, and go on stroking and stroking the wet shape, pulling it and pushing it till it became what he wanted it to be. ‘Just be patient. It'll be good when it comes, I promise.'

And when he kissed her, there in the little shed behind the cottage where the wheel was, his hands – greyish and chalky from the drying clay – on her hair or her back, she sank into her own pleasure and felt herself falling and dizzy and maddened by wanting him so much.

Rilla got out of bed and went to the window. She drew back at once behind the curtain, because there was that nosy Mrs Pritchard again. It was almost as though she came past the cottage deliberately when Rilla was there. Is she spying on me, she wondered. Does she know anything? No, of course she can't. If I ever meet her and she says anything, I'll make some excuse. Tell her I'm buying a vase or something for Gwen's birthday. Silly old woman. She was actually looking up at Hugh's bedroom window. What a cheek! There wasn't anything wrong with what she was doing. Some people would say that Hugh was too old for her, but how could he be when they loved one another so much? When their bodies fitted together as though some creator had carved them from the same block of flesh, so that when they made love they became one person? Ten years wasn't much at all. In fact, her father was much older than her mother, so Mummy couldn't possibly object, could she? Of course she couldn't. So why didn't she take Hugh up to Willow Court and introduce him to Leonora? She didn't really know, but there was something specially wonderful about the fact that Hugh was her secret and she wanted to keep him all to herself, for a little longer at least. Of course, once he asked her to marry him, he'd have to be introduced to the whole family, but till that day he was just hers and no one else's. She slipped back into bed and began kissing the top of Hugh's arm, where it became his shoulder. His skin was golden and smooth. He opened his eyes and smiled.

‘Know something?' he murmured.

‘What?'

‘You're a very greedy little girl, that's what.'

‘You've no idea how greedy I am.' She could hardly speak.

‘Show me, then,' he said, and turned over to kiss her, covering her body with his.

*

Hugh stopped being Rilla's secret on the day of the Summer Fête at the church. She'd tried to get out of going but she couldn't try too hard or her mother was sure to be suspicious. Perhaps, she thought, as they trailed round in the hot sun from one stall to the next, he won't come. Maybe he'll just think the whole thing is too stupid for words, like I do, and stay away.

She walked slightly behind Leonora and smiled and said hello to everyone they met as they made their way around the Vicarage garden. Mummy knows everyone in the village, she thought, and just
has
to stand and chat to them and let them bore us all silly with their ramblings. Who gives a shit about the size of Bill's marrows, or how
inspired
the White Elephant stall is this year?

And, wouldn't you know it, Mrs Pritchard was running the cake stall, which was Rilla's favourite. She stopped in front of it for rather longer than she ought to have done and was just about to pay Mrs Pritchard for a scrumptious-looking meringue when everything happened at once, as though the whole thing had been choreographed. Her mother came up on her left, Hugh came up on her right and Mrs Pritchard just had to say, ‘Oh, Leonora dear, what an amazing coincidence! Here he is! The young man I was telling you about? The one who's taken the Albertons' cottage. You know Mr Kenworthy, Rilla, don't you?'