‘I miss her so mu …’ The words hardly make a sound and tail off before they’re fully formed. Instinctively, I wrap my fingers around his, and sink my hand into his palm. Arthur flinches, his hand knocking against the soaked wood of the bench, but before I have a chance to feel the ripple of rejection, he steals my hand back in his and holds it tighter than before. The outside is cold to the touch, slick with rain, but the inside pulses with heat that diffuses up my hand, wrist, arm, until my body throbs with such a warmth that I can no longer feel the biting breeze of early spring.
In this moment he isn’t Arthur Cavendish, son of Edward, son of Helena, the man on the phone in the snug, the man who arrived in New York all high and mighty. This is Arthur, the real him, for just a second, fully on display for me to admire, like a rare painting uncovered just once a year to protect its fragility. And he looks beautiful.
Without thinking, without second-guessing, and without worrying about what is safe, I clutch his hand tightly in mine, lean forward against his thigh and press my lips to his. Like a shot of adrenaline, my heartbeat quickens and quickens until all I can hear is the pounding of my ventricles against my ribcage, and all I can feel is his lips. I feel them on every inch of my body, as though one touch on my mouth has sent a shockwave throughout my nervous system and his touch overrides any other feeling in this moment.
Arthur freezes at my touch, his body rigid, his heart thumping in every piece of flesh. What have I done? Drawing back, the nausea just threatens to overtake my sudden eruption of feeling before he bursts back to life, just like that first breath on the water’s surface after you’ve been drowning, and he slides his hand behind my head, drawing me as close as he can until my plait hooks over his shoulder and desperation seeps into his every movement. I can feel myself melting into him, as though fusing my body to his with every second that his touch lingers on me.
The pub door swinging open and a body clattering against the terracotta plant pot startles me out of whatever hypnosis he has me under and I burst from him, the hotness of my body going instantly cold, the adrenaline turning from vibrating passion to trembling hands and legs. Tracy scrambles to recover her foliage in the doorway, her eyes as wide as I assume mine are. Arthur slides along the bench, before hastily clambering to his feet and standing to attention.
‘I, er, well I came to say your shift started ten minutes ago, Bea. But I can see you’re busy so—’
‘No!’ I cut her off and leap to my feet beside Arthur. ‘I’m sorry, I’m coming.’ Unable to look him, or Tracy, in the eye, I scarper into the pub, adrenaline shifting to nausea.
Chapter 18
Arthur
‘Ireckon with a bit more time I’d have won.’ Lizzie’s face is so vivid in my memory that she could be sat before me on this bench right now and it wouldn’t startle me. Her wide-eyed panic as she watches the blood pool on my head and then slowly abseil down my face. I remember it tickling on its descent. I didn’t cry, only scratched at the gash, smearing the blood across my brow.
‘Stop that,’ Lizzie said when she finally snapped out of her older sibling panic as she grasped my hand in hers and ripped off her cardigan to stop the stream.
‘You were close with your sister.’ Beatrice’s voice comes to me, muffled as though I’m underwater, and I have to claw my way to the surface to reach her. My face is wet when I see hers again and a sense of relief washes over me. Her stern features are soft, her usually firm expression isyielding, welcoming. If she opened her arms now, I couldn’t stop myself from falling into her.
As I speak, her hand finds its way to mine and what was once fuzzy, stifled in my mind, clears and it’s Beatrice and her touch that pulls into focus in a way that I have never seen her before. Her eyes, usually so dark, come to me now in their array of colour, as though I’ve discovered a whole new spectrum of greens, hazels, and golds. A mole peeks from behind her left eyebrow, then one at the corner of her eye, then again at the arch of her lip, like an Orion’s Belt of beauty marks that guide one’s gaze through her whole image. I could study her for decades and it still wouldn’t be enough. So when she presses her lips to mine, I know this is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling whole.
Each morning for the next three days, I wait for her at the door to the farmhouse. Five a.m. on the dot. And each morning for the next three days, Beatrice doesn’t come.
Cerys is behind the bar every day that I look for her in the Big Apple. There is not a single word on her whereabouts. It is as if she is some creature of folklore destined to disappear after turning a man’s mind to mush.
Replaying the moment of that night over and over, I wonder what it is that I could have done wrong. Was I too vulnerable? Should I have rejected her? Should I have chased her back into the pub to steal another kiss instead of walking back through the rain to lie awake in my father’s childhood bedroom, staring at the ceiling and wondering why my feelings are so scrambled?
This doesn’t happen to me. I’ve kissed a hundred girls in bars, at award shows, on film sets, and I always know where I stand. A kiss is a kiss. Meaningless. My mother has watched behind the camera as my father has kissed woman after woman, man after man, and she still welcomes him home with open arms. You aren’t in the film industry unless you’ve snogged almost all of your mates, your colleagues, and their wives. A kiss isn’t intimate in my world; a kiss is work. It’s a transaction; it’s nothing more than two humans pressing their anatomy together. Meaningless.
So why am I disappointed every morning that Beatrice doesn’t come?
I call Dad on the first day. Perhaps falling at his feet and begging to come home again is less humiliating than whatever this is that I’m feeling now. I’ve been to New York, I’ve done as he’s instructed, and I know at least something has changed in me. Surely that will be enough.
‘Two months,’ Dad says after my speech. ‘I’ll pick you up in two months’ time. That’s when my new film will be out, the promotions will be done, and I’ll go into hiding for a while. I can’t have you lingering around press junkets. The studio has already warned me about your drama fucking this up for them.’
Two months. Two more months I have to stick this out. In a week, I’ve already pissed off half the community and snogged the farm girl; I dread to think what else I’ll end up doing once I well and truly lose my mind. He ends the call before I fight back, or pathetically beg any more.
On the second day, the boredom begins. I scroll through my phone as I lie on my grandmother’s sofa, trying tothink of who else I could call, just to pass the time. Each name that flicks across the screen feels foreign. I hardly recognise them. They’re the names of passing faces from events been and gone, where a relationship had threatened to form, but I never pursued it. You don’t have friends in this life. Only contacts.
I have no need for contacts in New York. Anything you need around here, you only have to call one person, and she is nowhere to be seen. So instead, I sit for hours, searchinghername. Delving into what I can find of her past. Photos of her at indie film festivals, others of her stood beside a man with thick long hair knotted into a bun at the top of his head, articles written about her talents, her intrigue, her potential, but there’s nothing dated past 2022. It’s like she disappeared then too.
I call Lizzie on the third day. ‘Yes,’ she answers harshly.
‘Lizzie, it’s me, Artie,’ I reply, already defeated.
‘I don’t care if you’re arty, why are you calling me?’ I can picture her rolling her eyes, though the attitude was something that came along with her condition. She was always mild-mannered when we were kids. She was kind, soft-spoken. I could count on one hand how many brash words she’d used, and I’m pretty sure they all came from when I cut all of the hair from her Arwen Barbie doll and stuck it back on like a dwarven beard.
‘I’m your brother.’ This never gets easier. ‘How are you today?’ This back and forth continues for a time until I give up in my frustration and blab everything I was holding in. ‘There’s a girl, Lizzie. Her name’s Beatrice, and I don’t know what to do.’
‘Of course you know what to do,’ she says in a glimmer of recognition. ‘You just feel like you need approval first because you don’t trust yourself.’
‘You know she hasn’t missed a day of work in two years,’ my grandmother says on the third day as she busies herself in the kitchen, swatting crumbs from the worktop with a tea towel. ‘I’ve seen that lass vomit in a field and get straight back in her tractor to carry on working. Not one sick day.’
All I can do is watch her march up and down as I sit at the dining table, unable to shake the feeling that this is all my fault.
