‘Have you ever asked Josh if he wants to be rich?’ Cara asked. ‘Or if, perhaps, he’s happy working the soil, growing things?’
Meg Smythson bridled.
‘Well, all I’m saying is,’ Meg said, leaning closer towards Cara as though someone might overhear her even though there was no one else in her shop, ‘I know I’m telling tales out of school, and that Josh can charm the birds from the trees, but it was alcohol he was buying.’
‘And is legally able to do so,’ Cara said. ‘He’s over eighteen.’
‘Ah yes,’ Meg said. ‘I know that.’ She tapped the side of her nose. ‘And he assured me it was for his parents’ consumption, if you know what I mean.’
Cara knew. Meg Smythson was implying that Mae would be given a share of the wine and none of it would be going back to the rectory.
‘Eggs,’ Cara said. ‘I’d like half a dozen large eggs if you’ve got them. And a packet of best back bacon. Sausages – chipolatas if you have them. Oh, and a thick sliced loaf. Please.’
There were, Cara knew, a couple of tomatoes in the salad box of the fridge that had gone a bit soft but which would be perfect to go with a fried breakfast, and there was an unopened jar of marmalade in the cupboard, won at Mae’s school winter fair, and neither of them liked marmalade, so that would have to do.
‘And a dozen or so mushrooms,’ Cara added, as she spied a basket on the counter with milky-white button mushrooms in it.
‘Got guests, have you?’ Meg said, taking a packet of bacon from the fridge and handing it to Cara. ‘I saw the sign. You’ve had the council people in, hygiene and that, I expect?’
‘Er, yes. Of course,’ Cara said, hoping Meg wouldn’t realise the word ‘yes’ wasn’t the answer to both questions. How had she completely overlooked the possibility that she might have to be registered to take in B&B guests and have her kitchen and bathrooms passed for hygiene?
Well, that’s what widowhood did to you, wasn’t it? It deprived you of rational thinking for a while at least. And widowhood, mixed with the terrible guilt that Mark wouldn’t have died had she not asked him to leave, was threatening to overwhelm her now. She made a show of examining a tin of chicken curry on the shelf beside her, just for something to do – so she wouldn’t have to look Meg Smythson in the eye and run the risk that Meg would know she was lying.
‘Good,’ Meg said. ‘Because if you haven’t had the hygiene people in before guests arrive, then they take a very dim view of the whole thing. A very dim view.’
Meg reached for the mushrooms to weigh them out. She sniffed, giving her head a shake and her shoulders a shudder as if envisaging the dire consequences for Cara if she’d failed to register with the council.
‘And they take a very dim view of underage drinking around here as well,’ Meg finished. ‘No matter it might be the vicar’s son what offered that drink.’
Oh dear, Cara thought, Meg Smythson didn’t like me stopping her telling tales about Josh and Mae, did she?
‘And that’ll be four pounds and ninety-seven pence,’ Meg said. ‘Shocking the price of things today, isn’t it? Money goes nowhere, does it? And I expect with you being a widow now it’s even …’
‘Here’s the money,’ Cara said, certain that there had been knowing in Meg’s voice and it was a crowing sort of knowing rather than a sympathetic one. She couldn’t get out of the shop fast enough.
And if anyone from the council should turn up in the morning, she’d tell them that the Hines were personal friends and that she wasn’t charging them. There, stuff that in your pipe and smoke it, Meg Smythson!
‘Josh, no!’ Mae said. ‘You can’t drive. You’ve drunk almost the whole bottle.’
She lunged towards him and tried to snatch the car keys from him, but he jerked his hand away, held them over his head so that Mae couldn’t reach. The car was parked at the bottom of a rough, narrow lane that led to a secluded rocky beach – a perfect place for courting couples although theirs was the only car there at the moment. How she was going to get herself out of this predicament she didn’t know yet, but she’d think of something. Foremost in her mind was stopping Josh from driving.
‘You want it all, you do,’ Josh said, slurring his words slightly. ‘Or don’t want it in your case.’
Josh slid a hand between her knees, and began to slide it up her thigh, but Mae pushed it away.
‘No, Josh. Don’t. Please.’
Josh had never done that before and Mae wondered if it was the alcohol affecting his judgment – he knew she was underage for sex and she’d told him, right at the beginning, that she wasn’t up for that and he said he understood. Mae shifted sideways on the car seat to put a bit more distance between her and Josh, wondering why alcohol seemed to change a person’s personality the more they drank. They either became louder and funnier if they were cheerful people to begin with, but the flipside of that was that some people became nasty and mean. Where had the Josh, who was so kind and understanding when she’d been remembering her dad, gone? She was pretty certain now that Josh had been drinking before they’d met. Bailey’s words flashed through her mind – ‘He got my sister rat-arsed and it wasn’t pretty’. Well, she wasn’t even tiddly. Perhaps what Bailey had warned her about had been in the back of her mind all the time.
‘Teathe,’ Josh slurred, leaning towards her, but she pushed him away. ‘You’re a teathe.’
‘If you mean sex,’ Mae said, ‘it has to feel right for me and it would only be a drunken fumble at the moment, wouldn’t it?’ And against the law as Rosie had so recently advised her, she thought but didn’t say. Josh knew that anyway. Best not to antagonise him by saying she didn’t want to lose her virginity here in a secluded lane in the front seat of Josh’s sister’s car.
If she kept Josh talking, doing her best to stop him getting the key in the ignition while she did it, then Josh couldn’t be driving, maybe killing someone because his reactions were reduced by alcohol. She was on the verge of tears now, thinking about her dad and how the last time she’d seen him alive he’d been sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands, not looking up as she’d said, ‘Bye, Dad, see you tonight,’ as she left for school. She’d assumed he was tired – yes, that would be it, he’d not slept well and he’d been too tired, lost concentration on the roundabout and …. mercifully he hadn’t killed anyone else in the accident.
‘I can fumble with the betht of them,’ Josh said.
Which Mae took to mean that although she was a virgin, Josh probably wasn’t.
‘Give me the keys,’ Mae said, but it only served to make Josh hold them higher over his head, jangling them noisily, teasingly out of reach for Mae.
Her dad had laid his car keys on the table in front of him that morning, and Mae had often wondered why. He normally kept them in his pocket, only taking them out as he reached the car before pressing the button to open the door automatically.
She wished now she’d asked why, or at least gone back and given her dad a hug, or kissed the top of his head or something. She’d heard her parents talking low – first her dad’s voice, then her mum’s – late into the night. She’d strained to hear what they were talking about, but they’d made a fine art of talking just quietly enough that Mae, in her bedroom, couldn’t catch the words.
‘Did you let Bailey Lucas do it?’ Josh asked. He leaned sideways and tried to plant a kiss on Mae’s cheek as she sat in the passenger seat beside him, but she jerked her head away from him.