Sometimes there were just tiny indications that she was losing control. Perdita got her fastidiousness from her mother, and seeing her with a stain on her shirt or an unwashed pile of dishes in the sink was heartbreaking confirmation that, however much she resisted it, her mother was declining. Occasionally, though, her mother would be brighter and so much her old self that Perdita let herself hope that she might be getting better after all.
‘I hate you!’
Perdita was startled out of her thoughts by the sight of a very pretty teenage girl flouncing out of the neighbouring house. ‘I wish we’d never come here! I’m going back to London!’ she shouted at someone inside and, slamming the front door, she stormed past the removal men, who were rolling up cloths and carrying empty packing cases back into the van, and stalked off down the road.
Suppressing a smile, Perdita got out of the car at last. She remembered stomping off down that very same road on a regular basis when she was a teenager. Her mother had never bothered chasing after her either.
The memory of her mother as she had been then made her smile fade as she let herself into the house. ‘Mum, it’s me!’
She found her mother in the kitchen, peering uneasily through the window at the house next door. ‘There’s new people next door,’ she said, sounding fretful. ‘I hope they won’t be noisy.’
Perdita thought of the slammed front door. ‘I’m sure they won’t,’ she said soothingly. ‘You won’t hear them anyway.’
Picking up a can from the counter, she sniffed at it cautiously and wrinkled her nose at the smell. ‘Why don’t I make some supper?’ she said brightly, trying to distract her mother from the window as she poured the contents away down the sink and rinsed out the can. ‘I’ve brought some chicken. I thought I could grill it the way you like.’
‘Oh, it’s all right, dear. I’ve made supper.’
‘Oh?’ Perdita looked around with a sinking heart. Helen James had once been a wonderful cook, but her recent attempts had been very erratic.
‘A casserole. It’s in the oven.’
But when Perdita looked in the oven it was stone cold. She took out the uncooked stew and wanted to weep. ‘I think you must have forgotten to turn it on,’ she said as cheerfully as she could. ‘It’ll take too long to cook now. I’ll do the chicken instead.’
All through supper her mother fretted about the fact that there were new people next door. She worried about the noise and whether the children would run into the garden, repeating herself endlessly until Perdita had to grit her teeth to stop herself snapping. Eventually she suggested that she went and introduced herself to the new neighbours.
‘I’ll tell them that you don’t want them in the garden,’ she said, reflecting that it might not be a bad idea to go round and make contact in any case. She would be able to leave her phone numbers in case there was ever a problem.
‘Oh, would you, dear?’
‘I’ll take them a bottle of wine as a housewarming present.’
Settling her mother in front of the television after supper, Perdita cleared up the kitchen and then went down to the cellar where her father’s store was still kept. He had loved his wine and it always made Perdita feel sad to see how many bottles he had never had the chance to enjoy.
She selected a bottle, blew the dust off and headed next door. August’s brief burst of heat seemed to have disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived and a light drizzle was falling, settling on Perdita like a gossamer web as she crossed the drive.
Reaching the front door, Perdita hesitated before ringing the bell. Should she be doing this? The poor people were probably exhausted after their move and the last thing they would want was a neighbour turning up. On the other hand, the idea that she would make contact appeared to have soothed her mother. She didn’t really want to go back and say that she hadn’t done it. She wouldn’t stay long, though. She would simply hand over the bottle and explain who she was.
There was such a long silence after she rang that Perdita was about to turn and leave when, with a clatter of shoes on a tiled hall floor, the door was abruptly opened by the same girl she had last seen striding furiously down the road. Perdita thought it tactful not to ask if she had decided better of returning to London.
‘Hello,’ she said instead with a smile. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’ve just come from next door. I’ve brought this,’ she said, holding up the bottle. ‘Just to welcome you to the street and ask if there’s anything I can do for you.’
‘Can you get Dad to take us back to London?’ the girl asked, taking her literally, and Perdita suppressed a smile. Here was someone who wasn’t at all happy about being in Ellsborough, obviously.
‘I was thinking more about lending a cup of sugar, that kind of thing.’
‘Oh. OK.’ The girl sighed, then turned and bellowed up the staircase in a voice that belied her slight frame. ‘Dad! It’s the neighbour!’
There was a pause, followed by a muffled shout of, ‘Coming!’ A few moments later, Perdita heard the sound of feet echoing on the uncarpeted staircase and she turned, a welcoming smile pinned to her face, only for it to freeze in shock as she saw who had reached the bottom of the stairs.
Ed Merrick.
CHAPTER THREE
PERDITA’S heart lurched into her throat. The sight of him was a physical shock, a charge of recognition that surged and crackled through her body so powerfully that she felt jarred and jolted. She barely knew the man, after all. He shouldn’t seem so startlingly familiar. Ed was looking tired and more than a little grubby in a T-shirt and jeans but the keen eyes were just the same as she had remembered. He had the same mouth, the same air of cool competence, the same ability to discompose her just by standing there.
‘It’s you,’ she said stupidly.
Ed looked equally surprised to see her, and for one awful moment she thought that she was going to have to remind him who she was, but then his face cleared and he was coming towards her with a smile.
‘Perdita…’ For once Ed seemed to have lost his normal composure. ‘Sorry…you’re the last person I was expecting…’
Ed, in fact, was completely thrown by the sight of Perdita standing in his hall, as slender and as vivid as ever, throwing her surroundings into relief and yet making them seem faintly drab in comparison.
He remembered her so clearly from the course in June, and had been looking forward to seeing her again. He had hoped to bump into her on one of his visits to Bell Browning over the summer, but he hadn’t had so much as a glimpse of her. He had asked, very casually, if she were around one day, but she had been away then for some reason and he hadn’t wanted to push it by asking again.
There would be time to get to know her when he moved permanently, Ed reasoned. People would think that he was interested in her, which he wasn’t, or at least, not in that way. Quite apart from the fact that he was pretty sure someone like her would already be in a relationship, she wasn’t at all his type. It wasn’t that he couldn’t see that she was attractive, in a striking rather than a pretty way, but she was nothing like Sue, for instance, who had been soft and sweet and calm and loving. There was nothing soft or sweet about Perdita. She was edgy and astringent and restless and when she was around, calm was the last thing Ed felt.
Her performance on the last day of that course had exasperated and impressed him in equal measure. In spite of all her complaints and in spite of the rain, she had contributed more than anyone else to the success of the tasks, and Ed was fairly sure that she had enjoyed herself too. Her ability to motivate and defuse tension with humour was extraordinary, he had thought. So he had remembered her, yes, but only because she was such an impossible person to forget. He wasn’t interested.
So he was rather taken aback by the