The Chateau of Happily-Ever-Afters Read online

  Kat snorts into her coffee. ‘He must have women throwing themselves at him. Who’d need a girlfriend in that position?’

  ‘Yeah, no doubt,’ I mutter.

  Julian chooses that moment to pick up a scythe and start slashing away at blackberry bushes.

  ‘Oh, that is just not fair.’ Kat lets out a guttural groan. ‘Have you seen Poldark? This is like the half-naked scything scene, but hotter. And naked-er. Aidan Turner is gorgeous, but that is beautiful. He’s like living art.’

  Another bird has joined the one at the apple and they’re having some sort of bird fight over half a maggot. It’s amazing how interesting they are when you really study them.

  Kat slaps her hand on the table in front of me, wobbling my coffee. ‘Okay, seriously, what has happened between you two since I was here yesterday?’

  ‘Nothing,’ I say incredulously. ‘Nothing has happened. Absolutely nothing. Whatever gives you that utterly absurd, bizarre, ridiculous idea?’

  ‘Well, firstly that excessive denial, and secondly, you usually look at him and tell me how unattractive he is. Today you haven’t taken your eyes off that bloody maggot. What’s changed?’

  I glance over at him. ‘He’s unattractive. Happy now?’

  She raises an expectant eyebrow.

  I roll my eyes. ‘Fine. There was a snake—’

  She gasps. ‘He rescued you from a snake?’

  ‘No. Not at all. I could’ve dealt with the snake.’ You know, after I finished screaming and shaking and panicking, and burnt the whole house to the ground. ‘He just barged in and—’

  ‘Saved the day! He’s a hero.’

  ‘He’s not a hero. He’s a bloody lunatic. He picked the thing up with his bare hands. It bit him.’

  ‘Oh my God.’ She puts a hand over her heart. ‘He got bitten by a snake to save you.’

  ‘To be honest, I think he was saving the snake from me, but… yeah.’ I can’t help the smile spreading across my face. He did that for me.

  ‘And?’ Kat demands.

  ‘And nothing. He put the snake outside and went back to his business and I stayed in the kitchen and made this batch of hazelnut brownies. There’s really nothing to it.’ I deliberately leave out the part about patching up his hand and talking for ages afterwards. It doesn’t feel like something to natter about over breakfast. I’m protecting his pride, I tell myself. It’s not like it meant anything. He just wouldn’t want me to gossip about his wounds.

  ‘If there was nothing to it, that rotting apple wouldn’t be so interesting.’

  ‘I’ve seen everything he’s got to offer, thank you,’ I say, because I happen to already know that today he’s wearing nothing but a pair of black shorts and knee-high gardening boots, which is the most dressed I’ve ever seen him. ‘Dead maggots are more appealing.’

  ‘Has anyone ever told you that you’re a terrible liar?’

  ‘I’m not lying,’ I lie.

  ‘You can’t fool a fellow Brit who uses baking as an escape. I get it, Wend. You’ve had your heart broken, you’ve sworn you’ll never trust another guy, and you’re trying just a bit too hard to dislike him.’

  ‘He’s making it easy. He’s very dislikeable.’

  ‘He got bitten by a snake for you!’

  ‘He got bitten by a snake because he’s an idiot. I tried to tell him to use something to pick it up with and he wouldn’t listen. If he wants to wrap his bare hands around—’

  ‘Why do you care?’ She interrupts me. ‘If you hate him so much, why did you try to stop him getting hurt?’

  I go to reply but nothing comes out. I huff and look away instead.

  ‘Exactly.’ Kat grins smugly at me.

  ‘Maybe it was because I didn’t want him bleeding all over the château. I’m doing enough cleaning as it is.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Kat nods like she can see right through me. ‘You know it would be more realistic to tell me you’d gone off cake and were relocating to Antarctica to become a polar bear groomer, right?’

  I lean over and pinch another croissant out of her basket just to show her how wrong she is.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When I wake up a couple of nights later, Julian’s gone from the bed and his empty sleeping bag is still on the covers beside me. It can only mean he’s up to no good. That would be exactly the sort of thing he’d do. Act normal for a while, then get up in the middle of the night to cause havoc. He’s been reasonable to live with lately too… Pleasant, even. I should’ve known it couldn’t last, especially after we had such a nice afternoon today as well. He picked a bucket of blackberries from the grounds, and while I baked blackberry muffins, he sat at the kitchen table eating the washed berries, and he didn’t make me want to strangle him once, even though he protested at the use of fruit in cake on the grounds of ruining the fruit. My concern about adding fruit to cake is ruining the cake, or worse, making it healthy. Cake should never be healthy.

  After I’ve not heard any hint of him for a few minutes, I start to get worried. It’s three in the morning and he’s not howling old Spice Girls songs – there’s either something wrong or he’s doing something he doesn’t want me to know about. I take the torch he’s lent me and sneak out of the bedroom, and at the bottom of the main stairway, my eyes catch the hint of light from the kitchen downstairs. He’s up to something all right. I creep down the narrow bare stone staircase towards what has easily become my favourite room in the house. Whatever he’s doing, I’m determined to catch him in the act.

  I pad silently across to the kitchen doorway and stop there, too surprised to speak. Julian’s standing at the unit, and not only is he wearing clothes, but the muffins I made earlier are spread out in front of him, along with an array of empty cake cases.

  ‘I thought you didn’t like cake.’

  I feel guilty for how much I make him jump. He spins around with wide eyes, looking like a deer in headlights, if the deer had a cake halfway into its mouth and was wearing Homer Simpson pyjamas.

  His cheeks flare red, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me do a little internal victory dance. Jules has done everything he can to embarrass me, I’ve seen him naked and flaunting his body in shorts so small they wouldn’t hide a Chihuahua’s modesty, but I’ve never seen him blush.

  He mumbles something incomprehensible, before swallowing the cake and repeating himself. ‘I lied.’ He turns away as he says it, refusing to look at me, and there’s something in the hunch of his shoulders that makes me want to go over and give him a squeeze, but I force myself to stay still.

  ‘I’m sorry about the muffins,’ he says in a rush. ‘I can’t cook but I’ll replace all your ingredients. I didn’t mean to eat so many…’

  ‘Jules, it’s fine. I told you, you’re welcome to anything that’s here. I wanted to make you something anyway. I just didn’t think you liked cake.’

  ‘I bloody love cake.’

  ‘So there is a normal person hiding in there somewhere then?’ I say to tease him. I knew no relative of Eulalie’s could ever dislike cake.

  He looks sheepish when he glances up at me and starts clearing away empty muffin cases.

  As a Brit faced with a situation I’m not quite sure what to do with, I do the obvious. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Aren’t you mad at me?’

  ‘Of course not.’ I nudge him with my hip as I walk past and start making a cuppa for us both without waiting for his answer. What self-respecting person would turn down a cup of tea? ‘Nice PJs.’

  I really don’t get him sometimes. He wanders around like a cross between Ross Poldark and a walking gym advert, and then I find him in baggy red pyjama trousers with Homer Simpson’s face plastered all over them, and a black T-shirt with ‘D’oh’ written on the front, and it’s somehow the sexiest I’ve ever seen him look.

  He’s still picking bits off a muffin when the tea’s made. I put the mug down in front of him and hoist myself u
p on the unit on the other side of the cakes. ‘So, let me get this straight, you like cake and Homer Simpson, and you walk around mostly naked all day, but at night you wear the cutest comedy pyjamas ever made?’

  ‘They’re not meant to be cute, they’re meant to be effortlessly sexy.’

  ‘If you find yellow cartoon characters sexy, you’re even weirder than I thought.’

  ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘It’s a shame you don’t wear them more often,’ I say as I reach over to take a muffin.

  ‘Ah, I only strip off for you. I know you like looking at my bod.’ He tries to make it sound like a joke but there’s a judder in his voice that betrays him.

  ‘Seriously?’ I let out a snort. ‘I’d rather look at a blocked drainpipe.’

  He smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes. I wait for a sarcastic comment back but nothing comes.

  ‘What’s really going on here, Jules?’ I reach my foot out and poke his leg with my toe. ‘You barely eat anything, you pour that protein stuff down your throat, but you’re gagging on it, and now you’re down here in the middle of the night eating, well, everything. If you’re trying to hide an eating disorder or something, you can tell me.’

  ‘Nah.’ He looks up and meets my eyes. ‘The only eating disorder I’ve got is that I love food, and if I keep eating it, I’m going to end up as fat as I was a few years ago.’

  ‘You were fat?’ I ask, taken aback.

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You?’

  He nods.

  ‘Fat as in those washboard abs only had four-packs instead of six?’

  ‘Fat as in fat.’

  ‘Like me?’ I prod my own stomach, which is showing a good amount of evidence regarding how many cakes I eat. Especially since Eulalie died. Now I bake to remember her, and I have no one to share the results with. I could definitely do with losing a few tyres and at least one chin.

  He smiles that tight-lipped smile. ‘You’re not fat. You didn’t really think I was going to walk headfirst into that insult, did you?’

  I grin at him. ‘That wasn’t actually a trick question, but good catch.’

  ‘You’ll have to work harder than that to catch me out.’ He bows his head and nods at me like we’re opponents in battle.

  I’m starting to think I might be sick of battling him. ‘You haven’t always looked like you were made by Mattel then?’

  He laughs a sarcastic laugh but doesn’t reply.

  ‘So, what happened?’ I keep prodding.

  ‘Nothing.’

  There’s so much unsaid in that short, clipped answer. ‘Oh, come on. Anyone can go on a diet and lose a bit of weight, but they don’t end up looking like you. Don’t tell me it’s because you love protein shakes and vegetables or you wouldn’t be down here stuffing muffins into your face at three a.m.’

  ‘Why do you care?’ He flashes me a harsh look that makes me feel guilty for the way I’ve treated him.

  I think about it before I answer. The honest answer is because this is a chink in his my-body-is-a-temple armour and I can’t resist chipping at it. ‘Because you’re down here stuffing muffins into your face at three a.m and acting like you’re doing something wrong. Everyone wants to stuff muffins into their face at three a.m. It’s normal.’

  ‘I’ve already told you, I’m thirty-eight and my bosses think I’m twenty-seven. I get paid good money for having a body like this, and it doesn’t upkeep itself. I can’t afford to lose my job and no one wants a forty-year-old bloke selling clothes to twenty-year-olds. I’m supposed to look inspirational, not past it.’

  ‘You really think a couple of muffins are going to make that much difference?’

  He shrugs, but the look on his face is a clear answer.

  ‘You’re, like, a health nut. Surely you know crash diets aren’t good for you.’

  ‘It’s not a crash diet. It’s a way of life.’

  ‘Know what I think would make a difference? Speaking as someone who’s done every diet in the known universe and failed with a spectacular nosedive into a vat of chocolate at all of them?’

  He shakes his head and doesn’t particularly look like he wants to know.

  ‘Just eat normally. You’re incredibly fit, and you’re always outdoors working or exercising. Dump that blended Pedigree Chum you’re gagging on and eat proper food. There’s no way you won’t burn it off.’

  ‘You don’t understand. I can’t risk losing a millimetre of definition. The tiniest bit of flab and everyone’s gonna notice.’

  ‘For God’s sake, you’re on holiday. No one’s going to care if you eat a few too many croissants and overindulge in a bit of local butter.’

  ‘Biggest shoot of my career next month,’ he reminds me.

  I sigh. ‘So what are you doing? Binging?’

  ‘No. I fight so hard with myself to be good, and sometimes I lose. I’ll jog an extra couple of miles in the morning to make up for it. Don’t worry about me.’

  Don’t worry about me seems to be his default brush-off, and it does nothing but make me wonder what there is to worry about. No one tells you not to worry about them if they’re fine. ‘Okay, so how does someone go from being whatever your definition of fat is, to looking like you do now? That doesn’t just happen. What you’ve done to yourself takes serious dedication.’

  ‘Nah, just a healthy dose of self-loathing.’ He looks up at me with a grin and a wink. He’s clearly trying to make it into a joke, but his grin is tight-lipped and the wink is forced.

  ‘Seriously, Jules. No body is worth the look on your face whenever I see you swallow a mouthful of that rubbish you drink. Why’re you doing it?’

  He picks his mug up and wraps both hands around it even though it’s not remotely cold at this time of year. He turns around and leans back against the unit, sipping his tea in silence.

  I’m convinced he’s not going to answer.

  ‘Because this is all I’ve got to offer,’ he says, whispered to the silence of the empty kitchen.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. I’m sure you’ve said it yourself enough times. I’m just a body. There’s nothing else to me. Well, you’re right. There isn’t. My abs are all I’ve got to offer.’

  That can’t be right. I might’ve had my issues with him, but he’s got good qualities too. He can be really funny at times. He can be considerate and caring. ‘Got to offer to who? Women? Jobs?’

  ‘Anything,’ he mutters. ‘Everything. Everyone.’

  Of all the things I expected to hear, this was not one of them. I go to say something but he doesn’t let me, which is probably just as well.

  ‘Don’t, okay? Tell me about these cakes instead. Did Eulalie teach you to make these?’

  I understand the shout for a subject change, and I decide to let him get away with it. I want to push him over what he meant, but I also know that pushing him will get me nowhere. I can almost see his walls getting higher. He’s guarded anyway, but he’s just strung barbed wire across the fences that surround him.

  ‘No. They’re a bog-standard muffin recipe that you can alter to accommodate different fruit or whatever you want to put in them. I’ve used it for years. It came out of one of my mum’s old recipe books that was practically antique even when I was young.’

  ‘Well, they’re amazing. I’m surprised you don’t bake professionally.’

  ‘I wish,’ I say, even though I’ve gone all flushed at the compliment and something inside me feels quivery. ‘I’m just a sampler. I’m the person you see in supermarket aisles, getting in the way with my table full of little pieces of whichever product the store is being paid to push that day.’

  ‘People should be sampling these.’ He’s still breaking one apart and feeding pieces into his mouth one at a time, and I’m glad that even being caught hasn’t stopped him. Jules needs to eat something besides that godawful drink he pours down his neck. ‘I’ve never had blackberries in a muffin before. They�
�re like a blueberry muffin but more tart. I like them.’

  ‘It’s the blackberries, not me. They’re so big and juicy here. Have you seen half the things that are out in that garden?’

  ‘Considering how much time I’ve been spending out there, yeah. All around us are plants growing things you pay a fortune for half a rotting punnet of in supermarkets at home. There are strawberries all over the land, raspberry bushes, wild blueberries covering the ground, we’ve got apple trees, cherries, a couple of peaches, hazelnuts, and although it’s not fruiting this year, I’m sure that huge thing behind the house is a walnut tree.’

  I never even realised that walnuts grew on trees before. I might not be good at growing things, but it’s weird in a nice way to think you’ve got a walnut tree outside your back door. That doesn’t happen in a crappy London flat. ‘I’ll make you something else sometime.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  I shrug. ‘You got me an extra plug socket working today, it’s the least I can do.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘What do you mean? Of course you did, I can run the refrigerator and boil the kettle without killing us all with salmonella while the fridge defrosts.’ I point at the two outlets that are working now.

  ‘Wend, I haven’t touched the generator. I’ve been chopping back weeds all day.’

  ‘How is it working then?’

  He walks over and boils the kettle again and goes to check the fridge is still on. ‘That’s ridiculous,’ he says, turning back to me. ‘And the light bulb isn’t even flickering.’