Sorry, I was in a bit of a mood last night.
He had, indeed, been in a bit of a mood. And if his sudden disappearance was anything to go by, was in a bit of a mood today as well. But, once again, she didn’t particularly want to confront him with it. She was very out of the loop on dating, but she didn’t think “have sex a few times and then start complaining at someone” was a good way to kick off a relationship.
I understand. We all have bad days.
If I haven’t put you off, I’d love to see you this week. I’ve just come to the end of a contract so I’ve got some free time at the moment.
Could she get babysitting? Lauren was already doing a lot for her, and she couldn’t ask her parents twice in a row. But maybe if it was Thursday—Amelie had karate on Thursday, so she’d be out for most of the evening anyway.
There’s a lovely little pub in the village. We could have lunch. Go for a walk. Or not go for a walk. Sit in my garden. Practise our bakes. I’ve recently had the kitchen re-done so you’re more than welcome to take advantage. A pause. Of the kitchen. And anything else that takes your fancy.
It sounded so exactly what she needed. A little bit romantic, a little bit sexy. Taking the time to be alone with someone who was into her and liked the same things she did. But could she get the day off work? Could she afford to?
That all sounds great, she texted back. I just need to sort some things out first.
Absolutely.
Can I let you know Tuesday?
Looking forward to it.
Sticking her phone back in her pocket, Rosaline plonked herself down on a wall and watched the few wisps of cloud drift across the slowly setting sun. She wanted to feel more excited—this was a date, a proper date, not a stress-relieving on-set hookup—but the logistics. God, the logistics.
Immediately her mind began spinning through everything she’d need to put in place: she’d have to ask Lauren to come a day early, ask her manager to move her shift, and move it where? She was already taking weekends off. She’d have to let the community centre know that someone else would be picking Amelie up from karate and, for that matter, let the school know someone else would be picking her up from school. And, of course, she’d have to tell Amelie she’d be away for another day, which Amelie would accept but not like, and, fuck, was she being a bad mother? Running away to be with some guy in his garden instead of looking after her child like she was meant to. Or did worrying about that make her a bad feminist? Was she a bad mother and a bad feminist? And would Amelie like Alain? She liked him, but she wasn’t an eight-year-old girl. And while there were lots of good things to say about Alain, he definitely wasn’t an anglerfish. Or a Viking.
On top of which she somehow had to find time, space, and energy to make an awful lot of biscuits.
And all this stress and chaos because a guy she liked had invited her to a pretty village for a baking-themed booty call? Surely there’d been a time in her life when good news hadn’t fucked with her head this much.
Week Four
Biscuits
Thursday
ALAIN LIVED IN a chocolate-box English village called Something-on-the-Wold or Whatever-on-the-Water, which was sufficiently hard to get to by train that Rosaline had been forced to choose between travelling at an inconvenient time or for several hours. Having plumped for “inconvenient time,” she had arrived at Thingummy-on-the-Thinagammy station at five to ten for a twelve thirty lunch date. Texting Alain to say she was early—two hours early—felt a little bit Fatal Attraction, so she decided to make the most of a nice morning in the countryside.
And she tried. She really tried. But as she wandered, doing her best to appreciate the little cottages and the sleepy wend of the river between them—a waterway of such profound local significance that it had apparently inspired the council to brand the village as the Venice of the Cotswolds—her mind kept drifting back to her biscuits, her daughter, and her job. All of which she would, in one way or another, have to make up for lost time with.
Eventually she gave up the attempt to soothe her weary spirit and went to the pub instead.
Of course, Alain had said it was a pub but it was clearly an inn—it called itself an inn, it had rooms, and she wouldn’t have been surprised if it had a stable. And inside it was all fireplaces and wood furniture, and a man at the bar who’d clearly been sitting there for the last seventy years. As a general rule, Rosaline tried to avoid drinking before noon, but it was a special occasion of really needing to. She compromised and, despite being more of a local gin person than a local ale person, got herself a beer.
Once it had got to a level of earliness that was at least vaguely socially acceptable, she sent Alain a quick text to say she’d arrived, and he replied with Just need to take my biscuits out the oven. With you as soon as I can. And sure enough, he turned up a little after twelve looking, as usual, well-groomed enough to leave Rosaline teetering between attracted and intimidated. Whereas she, conscious she had multiple train journeys in her future and packing primarily for a TV baking show with a strict but bland dress code, had failed to push the boat anywhere resembling out and gone with the comfortable sort of jeans and a slightly-nicer-than-usual blouse. But at least she’d dipped into the sexier end of her underwear drawer and, in her experience, people remembered the finale better than the preamble.
“Have you been waiting long?” asked Alain, sliding in opposite her.
“Not too long.” Oh God, she was lying to him again. But this was the kind of polite British lie that was practically mandatory. “I took a bit of a walk around the village. It’s beautiful here.”
He smiled at her across the table, his eyes brightening as if she’d praised him personally. “I know. I’m rather in love with it. My parents have been wanting me to put down roots for a while—get on the property ladder and all that, although my father’s in real estate so I suppose he would say that. And I tried looking in London for a while but since I didn’t want to pay half a million for a two-room bedsit above a public toilet, I decided to go for something more rural. It makes getting into the city harder, but where you live has such an impact on how you live, you know?”
To be honest, the primary questions that occupied Rosaline when she’d been looking to turn a timely inheritance from a Grandparent into a deposit on a house had been how much she could afford to pay and how long she could afford to keep paying it. Followed closely by “Are the schools okay?” and “Is there any asbestos?” At the time, though, she’d been pretty pleased with her purchase. It was homey and it was hers—one of the few things that absolutely were. But now, imagining how it might look through Alain’s eyes, it felt a lot more like a scruffy two-up, two-down in a crappy commuter town.
“Yes,” she said. “It does, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “It’s probably very dreary and sincere of me, but I really like that sense of continuous history you get in a village. There’s evidence of habitation here going back six thousand years, and some of the historical buildings are fascinating. Take the church—it’s mostly seventeenth- and eighteenth-century, but you can still see traces of the original fourteenth-century structure, and even the Norman building before that, and the barest evidence of the Saxon original and the Roman Temple under that.”