Chapter 8
Beatrice
‘Whatareyou wearing?’ Leaning on my tractor, I don’t bother to move to greet Arthur as he strides across the concrete in a shirt, suit trousers, and pair of leather shoes.
Following my gaze, he scans his outfit top to bottom and returns his eyes to me nervously as if unsure of what could possibly be wrong. ‘My grandmother told me I’m coming to work with you.’
‘I think you might want to leave the Armani at home for this job …’ I try and hide my smile.
‘You work in the pub, right?’ His brow furrows.
‘I do,’ I reply and he sighs in relief. ‘In the evenings. But you’re coming to work the farm with me. We’re pulling udders this morning, not pints, I’m afraid.’
Rubbing a hand over his face, he sighs and shakes his head. ‘I don’t have any other clothes.’
‘Not anything you don’t mind getting dirty? An old T-shirt? Trackie bottoms?’ It’s my turn to be confused. Who comes to a farming village in the middle of a farming county without even so much as a pair of wellies?
‘I packed for New York,’ he murmurs and my only reply is a look of perplexity on my face. ‘You know, New York, New York.’ He refuses to look at me when he speaks and hardly raises his voice above a whisper.
‘Let me get this straight …’ I begin, trying my hardest to hide my grin. ‘You thought that—’ An uncontrollable little chuckle bursts from me and I have to cover my mouth to catch it.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he grumbles, though a ghost of a smile is on his lips.
‘You thought you were off to America so packed all of your fancy suits but you’re actually having to muck out cows in Lincolnshire?’ I can’t stop my laugh as it shakes its way up through my chest and leaps out of me, stirring the pheasants from their slumber in the nearby bushes.
‘All right, all right,’ Arthur says after five minutes of my laughing, his cheeks growing a deeper shade of red with each passing second.
‘Didn’t your dad ever tell you about New York? Surely, you’d have known that’s where he was raised?’ I say, still laughing, and his face falls.
‘You’d have thought so, wouldn’t you?’ he says in a low voice, more to himself than to me. Arthur doesn’t speak again, only looks back at his grandmother’s house, then around the yard with a distant look on his face.
Leaving him to his own internal musings, I slip off intothe grain store and dig through one of the old storage bins in the back. Brushing off some of the dried mud and a few spiders, I take a set of overalls back over to Arthur who still stares at the concrete under his shoes, unaware that I ever left at all.
‘Here,’ I say, handing him the old boilersuit. ‘It’s probably been sat in there for a good twenty years, but it will be better than that.’ I gesture to his pristine white shirt and try my best not to picture what I now know lies beneath it.
Taking it from me reluctantly, he holds it up to his body and gives me an almost pained expression. I’m half expecting him to complain that he only wears natural fibres, or something that I’d need a loan to afford.
‘Thank you,’ he says with a grimace.
‘You won’t be on any runways in this but it will save you from a repeat of last night.’ It’s Arthur’s turn to blush, as though he had forgotten he’d stripped off in front of the woman that he was insulting only hours earlier.
‘I’ll … er … just go …’ He gestures to the barn, then gestures to the overalls before slinking off behind the door to change.
Why am I doing this? Helping this guy all whilst pretending that my first meeting with him didn’t send me home to cry until my head ached? But what choice do I have? I need to work. I need the wage his grandmother pays me. And I certainly can’t turn down the double she offered me to take her useless grandson with me as some sort of farming handicap. So, I’m stuck, playing nice with a man who has not yet once been nice to me, trying to pretend that his words haven’t hurt me.
What does it matter what someone like him thinks?my grandad would say. And he’s right, Arthur Cavendish is nothing to me, no one important, so why should I be troubled by his opinion? But there’s something so painful about hearing a stranger’s opinion of you. That is their first and only impression, one look at me and that is their conclusion and clearly I have done something to allow him to think that. How many others have looked and me and reached the same decision?
Before I run away with myself again and ruminate into yet another sleepless night, Arthur re-emerges from the barn. ‘Um, don’t suppose you’ve got anything a bit … longer?’ He tugs at the legs of his overalls that sit like pantaloons just below his knees, his leather loafers still on, and the sight of his bare calves are enough to renew my laughter once more.
‘Bit taller than your dad then?’ I say between chuckles.
‘These were his?’ he says, wide-eyed, and I’m glad when he too sees the funny side of it all. ‘No wonder they don’t fit – he can shop for jeans in the kids’ section.’
Now I was hoping to learn a few more intimate details about my idol from his son, but I can’t say that was ever on my list of things to ask. ‘He looks so tall on the telly.’
‘That’s all camera tricks, and he’d kill me if he knew I told you this, but he wears lifts in his shoes.’ I gasp as though he’s just revealed that he’s secretly a Martian and Arthur laughs. ‘Yep, he’s only five eight.’
‘Well, you learn something new every day.’ I shake my head, trying to soften my grin. ‘Anyway, we’ve got work to do, come on.’
