The sight of him breaks me even more. His look of boyish excitement has completely eroded. Now he looks withered. Pushing open the pub door, I leave him there, wilting in the cold of the garden, and I try to pretend I’m not hurting all over.
Bill tries to talk to me as soon as I step back into the room but I can’t lift my eyes to look at him, or listen to what he says. Dragging my feet with the weight of the last ten minutes, I shuffle back behind the bar.
‘What would you like?’ I try to continue as normal, but as I turn my back to the patrons, my tears fall, and I cry, in front of them all.
‘You all right, love?’ It’s Jimmy who notices first, and his attention sends the rest of the place snowballing into a panic.
‘Beatrice?’ Tracy comes up behind me and places her hand on the middle of my back. Instinctively, I turn into her and she cradles me close to her chest to let me cry. The pub quickly falls to a low murmur.
‘Beatrice, love?’ Barbara’s voice comes to me, muffled through Tracy’s shirt. ‘I take it you didn’t get the camera?’
‘Barb, come on now,’ I hear Bill scold her but she shushes him.
‘Well, we were just having a natter there whilst you were out. And well, we can all chip in you know, a few quid for some equipment? A quick whip round and then we can send Bill off to PC World in the morning. How about that, duck?’
Standing back up, I wipe the snot from my face as I lookaround at the faces staring back at me. They all watch me, expectantly, though their concern seeps through in every one of them. The heart of them all only makes me want to cry again.
‘No, Barbara,’ I finally say when I compose myself, ‘you keep your money. It’s not that.’
‘It’s that fella, in’t it?’ Bill says, with the fire of a father learning of his daughter’s first heartbreak.
‘Do we need to chase him off?’ another of the locals pipes up from the corner, and I laugh through my tears.
‘No, no, it’s nothing. Don’t mind me, I don’t know what’s come over me.’ I reach for a tissue and blow my nose.
‘I do.’ Cerys speaks for the first time, still not looking up from her phone. ‘Arthur Cavendish has got into you, and you can’t decide if you’d rather bone him or carry on being a mardy cow forever.’
‘Cerys!’ her mother scolds her. The teen only shrugs.
‘For a twat, he doesn’t half make you glow at the mention of him,’ Cerys continues, her voice monotone as though this is the most obvious thing in the world.
‘I do not,’ I protest weakly.
‘You do, to be fair.’ Barbara adds her two pennies’ worth, as always. ‘I’ve never seen you so fired up. You just plodded along before. You were proper boring when you came back from London.’
I look to Tracy with pleading eyes. She shrugs. ‘You have seemed happier, Bea. Well, not right now, obviously. But it’s been nice to see you so, so …’ She tails off.
‘So what?’
‘Alive.’
‘I’m just an old fool who knows nothing about the hearts of young ladies, but I know that boy brings out what is good in you.’Grandad’s voice rings through my head as though he’s another patron of this pub who has just decided that tonight is a Beatrice counselling session.
But they’re right. Arthur was wrong; there’s no debating that. But there is no doubt that he is the right person.
‘This was weird, very weird.’ I point at the few individuals in the crowd. ‘But thank you,’ I say before hopping over the bar and throwing open the door.
Arthur is still where I left him, though this time he’s pacing back and forth, rubbing his hand across his face and muttering to himself as though fighting with his own conscience, not privileged enough to have a whole village of people be his conscience for him.
At the sound of my frantic exit, he snaps his head to me, and looks at me with those sad, hopeful eyes that I can’t bring myself to look away from.
I charge towards him. I don’t struggle when he pulls me into his chest; it’s the only place I’ve wanted to be all day. He wraps one arm around my waist, and with the other hand he twists his fingers into my hair and cradles my head. Planting a heavy, lingering kiss on my crown, he releases a warm breath across me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ he breathes against me, and I hold him tighter.
After a minute of absorbing his heartbeat and feeling mine beat in time with his, he pulls me from the warmth of his body to capture a full view of my face. I’m sure it’sred, patchy, and smeared with snot but he looks at me as though I have just fallen from the sky and I glow like stardust in his arms. I’ve never thought of myself as pretty; I’ve been content to be strong, or smart, but seeing myself warped in his dilated pupils, I feel beautiful.
‘My feelings aren’t what they were back when we met. Beatrice, those weren’t even my feelings then. You have taken my life and shoved it into the blades of a bloody combine. There has always been something missing in my life. I thought it should be perfect, I should be the happiest man alive, but there was something not quite right, something I desperately needed, but I didn’t know what. I know now that that thing is you. You are my mind, my muse, and you are a fucking wildfire. You have sent a spark through every dead part of me and set it ablaze and … and …’
