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What she couldn’t direct her thoughts towards was what she was going to do now—not, that was, without her mind turning in circles so much so that she didn’t immediately realize she was home.
‘Is this it, ma’am?’ the driver enquired.
‘Oh! Yes. Thanks very much!’
‘Do you need me to carry your luggage in for you, ma’am?’ he asked as he opened the car door for her.
‘No, just up to the front door will be fine. I can manage from there.’
‘If you’re sure, ma’am?’
‘Quite sure, thank you, there’s not so much of it.’
But ten minutes later, after he’d driven away, Alex was sitting on the garden bench beside the front door with the contents of her purse spread out on the seat but no sign of her front-door key. All her pot plants looked as if they’d been moved, which they had, but none had yielded a key underneath them and Patti, who had a spare key, was out.
The only small consolation was that it wasn’t raining, although it was still threatening to do so.
So it was that when a familiar navy-blue Bentley nosed into the kerb in front of the house, an accumulation of frustration and over-taxed emotions saw Alex Hill sitting upright on her garden bench with tears running down her cheeks she was in no way attempting to staunch.
In fact she didn’t even notice the Bentley and it was only when Max Goodwin stood in front of her that she suddenly realized she was not alone.
She looked up with a gasp, grabbed for a hanky from her pocket and launched into speech. ‘Mr Goodwin! What are you doing here?’ She stopped and blew her nose, then jumped up. ‘I was going to say you’re not going to believe this but you probably will—I can’t find my key! And my neighbour, who has a spare, is out.’
Max Goodwin reached into the pocket of the same navy-blue suit he’d been wearing when she’d first met him and produced his mobile phone. He flicked a few buttons, then said, ‘Margaret, I need a locksmith on the double.’ And he gave the Spring Hill address, then he added his thanks, folded the phone and put it away.
‘Th-thank you,’ Alex stammered, ‘but I still don’t understand why you’re here.’
‘Don’t you?’ He looked her up and down, her jeans, her caramel velour jacket and the pretty paisley scarf she’d wound round her neck. She wore no make-up but her hair was loose and riotous enough to drive any man to want to run his hands through it, he thought with some irony. ‘We need to talk, Alex.’
‘I don’t think we need to talk at all. I mean—’ she attempted a smile, but it came off as a sketchy affair at best ‘—I have nothing against talking to you—’ She stopped and her eyes widened as a smart little yellow van with ‘The Travelling Locksmith’ stencilled in red letters on it pulled in behind the Bentley.
‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I know you only have to snap your fingers for people to come running, but this is—amazing!’
He turned and raised his eyebrows at the van. ‘It’s not a case of snapping my fingers, it’s all Margaret’s wizardry, but—’ he smiled wryly ‘—that’s fast, even for her.’
In the event, as the locksmith explained, he’d just finished a job a block away when the call had come through. And it didn’t take him long at all to unlock Alex’s front door.
‘I—’ she began as the locksmith left. ‘Shouldn’t you be on your way to the Coast? They’re expecting you.’
‘I will be. After you, Alex.’ He picked up her two bags. She’d shovelled her possessions into her purse in the meantime.
She hesitated, then preceded him into her flat—just as the heavens opened.
He put her bags down inside the front door and closed it. ‘It’s been threatening to do that all morning.’
‘Yes,’ she agreed as she switched some lamps on, making the room come invitingly alive against the cacophony of the rain outside.
He looked around at the rug on the wall, the songket cushions, the mementoes and the pot plants, and he reached out to smooth his fingers along the back of a Verdite elephant on the bookcase. ‘Very you, Alex,’ he said as he studied a lovely little watercolour of Table Mountain, Cape Town.
‘Thank you.’ She put her purse down on the settee and shrugged. ‘I’m not sure what that means, but it sounded like a compliment so I’ll take it as one.’
‘It was a compliment—to a special girl. But.’ He paused.
Alex squared her shoulders. ‘It’s not going to work, is it? I mean, if you marry her, you won’t need me and—’
‘Who said I was going to marry her?’
‘Just about everyone I’ve spoken to in the last—’ she gestured ‘—forty-eight hours.’
