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Chapter 23
‘What shall I say to Doris?’ Kate wanted to know. ‘Should I ask her to pass my number on?’
‘I suppose it all depends on what she wants him for,’ Helen said. She’d been remarkably quiet for the last ten minutes, but now she was sticking her oar in again. Annabelle would have liked to have shoved that oar somewhere after the way she’d spoken about Ron, but it wasn’t her place to say anything, so she held her tongue.
Helen continued, ‘In my experience, ex-wives – or ex-husbands – don’t go looking for their former spouses unless they want something. What could Ron possibly give her?’ she wondered. ‘Unless… she’s heard about Ron’s good fortune in falling in with an old bat who is daft enough to let a complete stranger into her house, and this woman thinks she can get in on the action.’
‘Well, Miss Hoity-Toity, Ron’s ex-wife is going to have another think coming when she realises he’s gone walkabout again,’ Beverley declared. She’d regained some of her composure and seemed somewhat back to her old self.
‘There’s only one way to find out,’ Kate said, her thumbs flying over her mobile phone’s screen. ‘There, I’ve just sent a message to Doris telling her she can give this woman my mobile number. It can’t do any harm, can it? I wonder if we’ll ever see him again.’ Kate caught sight of Annabelle’s face and hastily added, ‘No doubt we will – he’ll turn up in Pershore at some point, and when he does he often kips down in the charity shop’s doorway. Do you want me to message you if I see him?’
Annabelle sighed. ‘There’s hardly much point, although it would give me peace of mind to know he’s OK. I feel so responsible for him buggering off.’
‘Why?’ Helen asked sharply. ‘It’s hardly your fault. As I said, his sort are unreliable.’
Annabelle gave the snooty woman a sour look. ‘And what sort is that – the homeless sort?’
Helen was about to agree but she rapidly changed her mind when she understood what Annabelle was getting at. ‘Breakfast anyone?’ she asked brightly. ‘Brett, you still haven’t made the tea, and if we want to get a game of golf in we’d better get a move on.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ Jake said.
Annabelle gave her son a squeeze. ‘You have to eat something. For me? Please? Izzie, you’ll have some cereal, won’t you? Or how about I make you a boiled egg with soldiers?’
‘I haven’t got time for boiled eggs,’ Helen said. ‘I’ll have a nice cup of tea and a Danish out on the terrace, if you don’t mind,’ she ordered, and stalked off outside.
‘I’ll get it,’ Brett said hurriedly, as Annabelle and Kate both began to speak at once. ‘Do you want me to put some eggs on for you?’
‘Yes, please, that would be great.’ Annabelle gently extricated herself from her children, but before she went into the kitchen area to see to the breakfasts (she’d have to eat something herself, to set a good example to the kids), she wanted to have a word with Jake.
‘I know you’re blaming yourself, but don’t,’ she told him. ‘Ron’s a grown-up; he knew you were upset and that you didn’t mean what you said. His leaving is nothing to do with you. He has his reasons, even if we might never know what they are, but I can assure you it won’t be because of anything you said.’
God, she wished she could talk to him, to ask him why he’d taken to the road again. Didn’t he love her enough to stay? Didn’t he care for her at all? Or had she just been a holiday fling?
No, she refused to believe it. Ron cared for her – she knew deep down that he did. So maybe he had this ridiculous notion that if he was out of the picture the decision of whether or not to go back to Australia with Troy would be that much more clear cut.
Her heart aching so badly she thought it mightn’t ever recover, Annabelle blamed herself, despite recognising that she couldn’t possibly have anticipated Troy’s arrival in Rest Bay. She shouldn’t have jumped in with both feet the minute a handsome man paid her any attention. But she had been lonely, goddam it! It had been a long time since a man had looked at her the way Ron had. It had been just as long since she’d been held so tenderly – Troy’s embraces didn’t count. They had been more like the kind of encounter an ewe had with a ram – brief and soulless. At least a ram never made any secret of the fact that he had many other ewes in his sights, so a ram actually held the higher moral ground when compared to Troy.
She was in the middle of fishing the boiled eggs out of the saucepan when she almost jumped out of her skin as Kate’s phone blared out a tune.
Kate scrambled to answer it. ‘Hello?’ A pause. ‘Oh, hi, Doris told me you wanted to speak with him. I’m afraid he’s not here. He’s… um… left.’
Another pause. Annabelle was listening avidly as she carried on with making the kids their breakfasts, although with Ron gone and her relationship with him at an end, it wasn’t really any of her business.
Kate mouthed, ‘It’s Louise, Ron’s ex,’ at her, before saying to the woman on the other end of the phone, ‘By left, I mean he’s living back on the streets,’ Kate said. ‘No, sorry, I don’t know where he might be. He’ll probably show up in Pershore at some point. He usually does. If I see him, is there any message you’d like me to give him?’
Annabelle put the children’s plates on the table and beckoned them over. She ignored her own, too curious about the one-sided conversation and too heartsore to think of food.
‘Sorry, could you repeat that? You cut out for a second.’ Kate made frantic ‘keep-quiet’ gestures as she put the phone on the counter next to Annabelle and pointed at it.
Annabelle’s eyes grew wide, and Kate nodded frantically at her, her finger on her lips as a voice issued tinnily from the mobile.
‘I said, can you tell him I need to speak to him? It’s not urgent, but it is something I’d like to sort out sooner rather than later. You’ve got my phone number, so you can give it to him, if you’d be so kind?’ Ron’s ex-wife had a modulated voice with no discernible accent.
‘Of course. I don’t know when that will be, though,’ Kate said. ‘It could be weeks; it could be months.’
‘I know. Look, I might as well tell you, and you can pass this on to him, because if he doesn’t know what it’s about he might not bother calling me at all.’ Ron’s ex-wife took a breath, then said. ‘I owe him some money. A great deal of money, actually. I don’t know if you’re aware, but he wasn’t in a good place when we split up.’
If Annabelle’s eyes grew any larger, she worried that they might pop out of her head, and her mouth dropped open into a silent scream.
