Summer at the Lake (19 page)

She told him about her grandmother dying and leaving her enough money to get a deposit together. ‘I decided to be sensible with the money and invest it by getting a foot on the property ladder. I’m living in North Oxford now.’

‘Well done.’

‘Hey, I’m not looking for a pat on the head.’

He rolled his eyes. ‘Then shut up and listen to what I’m going to suggest.’

She listened and when he’d finished, she shook her head. ‘No. Absolutely not.’

‘I knew you’d be bloody awkward and say that.’

‘Then you shouldn’t have wasted your breath on asking.’

He leant across the table, his brows drawn, the flecks of amber glittering in his eyes. ‘Look, Imogen doesn’t need to know if that’s what’s worrying you.’

She jerked back from him, stunned. ‘Oh, that’s very good, Seb, starting off your marriage with a secret! And a secret about me, well, that’s just a genius idea!’

‘OK, OK, I’ll tell Imogen if it makes you feel better. But I owe you, Florrie. You and your parents were always so good to me. And don’t forget what I was like here in Oxford, I was a mess for most of it. You saved me from myself.’

Adam liked nothing more than to get in the car and drive around. It was a good way to keep an eye on what was going on property-wise. Keeping his ear to the ground, he liked to call it.

After lunch and bored rigid with paperwork – the bane of his life – he’d told Denise he’d be back in a few hours. Denise had been his PA at Strong Property Solutions for nearly a decade now and was quite used to the way he worked – basically he hated to be confined. He’d much rather be on the move and taking calls on his mobile than be stuck behind a desk. His being away from the office suited them both as not only did he trust Denise to run things smoothly in his absence, he reckoned she preferred it when he left her to it. Many a time people had assumed she was the boss and he’d never had a problem with that.

His first destination had been Headington, where a tenant had reported a problem with the central heating. All his maintenance men were busy, so it was no big deal for him to go instead. Turned out it was a minor fault with a valve in the airing cupboard, which Adam had fixed himself.

He was now driving round the narrow streets of Osney. It was doing exactly this that had led him to find his very first house. It had been a wet and dreary day and he’d noticed a particularly shabby end of terrace with its guttering hanging off in places, an upstairs window boarded up and the paintwork seemingly all that was holding the window frames together. With nothing to lose, he’d knocked on the door and explained to the elderly owner that he was interested in buying a house just like this one. As luck would have it, the man had been considering selling and over the following days they came to an agreement on the price and made a deal. Because there were no agent fees involved, Adam was able to offer a good and fair price and so both parties were happy. Six months later – re-wired, re-plumbed and thoroughly modernised – the house was sold for twice what he had originally paid for it.

That property still meant a lot to Adam; it was where it all started for him. He’d acquired dozens of properties since then and learnt a ton of stuff along the way, including down-to-earth practical skills and fundamental dos and don’ts when it came to investing in property, which he could boil down to just two simple golden rules: You make the money when you buy, not when you sell. And: Buy in haste and you’ll repent at leisure.

While he still got a thrill out of finding a place and turning it around, nothing had given him as much pleasure as that very first purchase.

Until now.

The house on Latimer Street had come to mean more to him than merely another acquisition to do up and sell on, or to offer for rent. Without intending to, he’d become attached to it. As a consequence, and having decided he was going to start the year afresh, he was contemplating renting out his house in Summertown and moving to Latimer Street. Usually any property-based decision he made was reached through objective evaluation, but in this instance it was purely an emotional choice he was making. More than likely he’d grown attached to it because it was synonymous with two new friends whose very diverse company he valued. There had been many times since meeting Esme and Floriana when they had distracted him from dwelling on Jesse, and for that he was grateful.

He turned into East Street and stopped the car in front of his very first purchase, which overlooked the Thames. Staring at the well-cared-for house – smart pale yellow-painted rendering, white front door and white window frames – he remembered how he’d slept on a mattress on the bare floorboards in the back bedroom while he did it up.

Recalling the satisfaction he’d got from the experience, he had a sudden vision of doing the same thing in Latimer Street. The idea had instant appeal to it and he knew then that his mind was made up; moving would give him the new start he needed.

On New Year’s Day, he’d heeded his brother’s advice and ended things with Jesse. The relief in her voice when he’d phoned to say he didn’t see any point in dragging things on any longer had told him all he needed to know: she’d had no intention of coming back to him. It was far from the outcome he had hoped for before Christmas, but now he saw that shock and disappointment, as well as a massive blow to his pride, had blinded him to the obvious, that the relationship was dead in the water.

So, enough was enough. It was time for him to move on. In more ways than one. His house in Summertown was too full of Jesse-related memories and Latimer Street wouldn’t only give him a new start, more importantly, it would be something tangible in which to pour his energy, both physical and creative. He would take his time restoring the property; it would be a labour of love.

A car horn hooted and acknowledging the driver behind him, he drove back to the office in Summertown. But unable to resist the symbolic gesture, he made a quick detour to Latimer Street where he stopped outside his new home.

Yes, he thought, looking up at the attractive bay-fronted Victorian house, it would be good living here. His glance slid along towards Trinity House where he saw Euridice looking out at him through the window. Another impulse had him switching off the engine. Seeing as they were going to be neighbours, it seemed right that Esme should be the first to know of his decision.

An hour later, the afternoon light all but gone, he walked into the office and asked Denise if there was anything urgent for him to deal with.

‘This may surprise you, but the world kept spinning quite happily without you,’ she said, pulling open the top drawer of the filing cabinet next to her desk. She gave him a hard stare when she’d put the file away. ‘You’re looking pretty pleased with yourself, what’ve you been up to?’

‘Oh, you know how it is,’ he said carelessly, ‘this and that.’

‘Now you’re scaring me, you’re positively jaunty.’

He waved vaguely in the direction of her cluttered desk. ‘Haven’t you got any work to do?’

‘Plenty,’ she said. ‘But you’re worrying me. You haven’t looked this cheerful in ages.’

‘You mean, not since before Jesse dumped me?’

He saw the surprise in her face and it was little wonder. Despite knowing each other for as long as they had, he had specifically asked Denise not to discuss Jesse with him. He’d always suspected that she had never taken to Jesse and so any advice from her would have been skewed. Rarely did he put forward his personal life for discussion in the office, but Denise had got it out of him in the run-up to Christmas, that he and Jesse were on a break, when she’d asked him what they would be doing for the festive holiday.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that’s exactly what I was thinking. Are the two of you back together now?’

‘No. And nor will we be. Have you got the Roper file? I need to speak to the planning department.’

She gave him a look that he knew of old. It said,
I’m holding off for now, but this isn’t finished.
And because he was feeling generous as a result of his good mood, he said, ‘I’ve decided to move house.’ Then he told her why.

It was dark when Floriana cycled home and just to make her misery complete it had started to rain. Annoyingly, if she hadn’t stayed on to help in the office and discuss the idea with Tony of adding
Endeavour
to sit alongside the
Morse
and
Lewis
tours, she would have made it home in the dry.

With traffic rumbling past and icy pinpricks of rain stinging her face as she pedalled furiously along St Giles, passing the Eagle and Child on her left where, as she informed her groups, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien used to hang out together, she was conscious she had to keep her wits about her – the last time she had had any contact with Seb she had got herself run over.

To say his appearing so unexpectedly had caught her on the back foot was a massive understatement; it had stirred up no end of feelings. She was desperately trying to convince herself that she was happy Seb had sought her out in the sneaky way he had, happy that he had come to Oxford with the sole intention to reunite them.

But happiness was not what she felt. How could she when Seb’s words played on constant loop inside her head?

Imogen’s forgiven you. Imogen’s forgiven you. Imogen’s forgiven you.

Omit those words from their lunch together and maybe then Floriana could allow herself to be happy – after all, she should be happy for Seb that he was marrying the woman he loved. Happy also that he wanted Floriana back in her life. That’s how friendship worked; you cared about somebody, you wanted them to be happy. Hadn’t she always said Seb’s happiness was as important to her as her own? So even when she forced herself to be utterly objective and accept that Seb would never view her as anything other than a friend, why couldn’t she feel happy for him? Why, when she tried to give that emotion space to bloom, did she feel only sadness and the awful certainty that he was making a terrible mistake marrying Imogen?

It would be easy to dismiss her reaction as nothing more than jealousy, but until Imogen, the girls that came and went through the revolving doors of Seb’s love life in Oxford, and then later after graduation when he moved to London, had never bothered Floriana. It had been a long-standing joke between them, in the same way that Seb would tease her about the duds she had got through.

A few of her boyfriends had been wise enough to cotton on to the fact that when compared against Seb, they didn’t measure up. The last one, a tutor from the language school on the Banbury Road, had realised before she did that she was in love with Seb. There had been no rancour in him when he’d confronted her. ‘It’s not fair to you or your boyfriends to go on pretending you don’t love him,’ Jules had advised. At first she’d protested her innocence, declaring Jules to be mistaken, or perhaps jealous of her close friendship with Seb. ‘There’s only one mistaken person in this relationship,’ he’d said, ‘and it’s not me, Floriana.’ He’d wished her well and the next she’d heard he was seeing one of his ex-students, a pretty Spanish girl.

Looking back on it now, Jules probably had been jealous of Seb; it stood to reason. After all, a number of the girls who had lasted as long as a month with Seb hadn’t exactly approved of Floriana’s presence in his life.

However, she had known straight away that there was something different about Imogen, and not just because she was stunningly attractive and came from a very different world to theirs. No, it was actually Seb’s behaviour that had alerted Floriana to the suspicion that this girl might be a keeper. He had brought Imogen with him to spend the day in Oxford with Floriana and from the moment he introduced this latest girlfriend, she had sensed a curious mixture of pride and nervousness in him. It later dawned on Floriana that he was anxiously seeking her approval; something he had never previously needed.

It was shortly afterwards that she broke up with Jules and the true depth of her feelings for Seb crystallised and Floriana finally admitted to herself that she loved him. This new-found knowledge didn’t make her happy, though. All she could see ahead for herself was misery. Just endless misery. Misery that she would have to pretend nothing had changed between them and misery that she would forever be just good old Floriana; Seb’s oldest and closest friend, the one he could always rely on to have a good laugh with.

Over the weeks and months that followed, she waited for her feelings to revert to how they’d once been, but it didn’t happen. She also waited for Seb to tire of Imogen, but the hope was in vain. He couldn’t stop talking about her whenever they spoke on the phone or got together, which happened less frequently as time went on. It was all about Seb and Imogen; they had become quite the domesticated couple and there was no room for an old pal now.

And all the while as she succumbed to the most awful feelings of jealousy towards Imogen, Floriana grew more convinced that Imogen wasn’t right for Seb. She was too high maintenance. Too frivolous. Too self-absorbed. Just too plainly wrong. What was more, it was clear she hated Floriana.

On one occasion, when the three of them met up for Sunday lunch in Richmond, and while Seb was ordering their food at the bar, Imogen, in a light-hearted jokey voice and with a rise of her perfectly arched eyebrows, had said how lucky Seb was to have a friend like Floriana. ‘You’re like a lovely little lapdog the way you’re always there for him, aren’t you?’

She had been so taken aback by the sheer bitchiness of the remark Floriana hadn’t been able to think of a suitable reply. Nor did she know what to say minutes later, when Seb had returned from the bar, Imogen had linked her arm through his and said, ‘Goodness, I don’t know how poor Floriana puts up with us, we’re like a boring old married couple, aren’t we?’

But then fate, or so it seemed, had intervened and provided Floriana with the perfect means to convince Seb that Imogen was not all he believed her to be. But it backfired horribly and Floriana ended up accused of being a liar, and a lot more besides.