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‘Oh!’ It seemed a pretty inadequate response but Gwen couldn’t think of what else to say.
‘Right, here we are.’ They were drawing into the courtyard, which surrounded the house on three sides.
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘It looks even better in daylight and I can’t take responsibility for the landscaping. The honour goes to an ancestor from a couple of centuries ago but my mother rediscovered the skeleton of the original garden lost under a lot of neglect, and she had it restored.’ One of his earliest happy memories was of his mother wearing a straw hat on her head and holding a trowel in her hand, bossing around the gardeners.
As they came to a halt the lights came on, presumably activated by sensors, illuminating the low-lying stone building. One side of it, which overlooked the sea, seemed to be made entirely of glass, and the sea itself reflected a silver sheen off the dark shadows of the hills either side of the sheltered bay.
‘It’s beautiful.’ His idea of a beach house was very different from her own!
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Not at all what I was expecting.’
‘I will show you around once you have settled in.’ He stepped out of the car and walked around to the passenger door, opening it for her.
She climbed out, enjoying the fact that the warmth was far less oppressive here than it had been in the airport. The light breeze smelt wonderfully of the sea and the wild thyme that grew between the cobbles underfoot.
She hesitated, half anticipating an army of staff to come running out to greet them.
‘I hope you don’t mind but for the first few days I thought it might be helpful for us to be alone here. I gave the staff some time off, though, if you prefer, I can recall them?’
She shook her head, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.
‘The food is arranged, the kitchen is stocked with provisions, and there are meals already prepared in the freezer. Estelle is a very good cook, and she is also the housekeeper here. She supervised the arrangements before she left.’
‘Arrangements?’
‘The house has not seen children for a long time, not since—’ His eyes wandered over the high stone wall to the right; he was clearly lost in memories.
‘Since?’ she prompted, wondering at an expression that was close to wistful that had drifted across his hard features.
He turned to look at her. ‘Since I was a child. May I?’ He tilted his head towards the sleeping child still in the car.
She nodded. ‘Go ahead.’
She felt her throat tighten as she watched how carefully he bent and picked Ellie up, as though she might break. She grabbed the bag that contained the baby essentials that she had packed separately and followed him down the cobbled path and under an arch of clematis and honeysuckle.
‘The pool,’ he said, rather unnecessarily, indicating the infinity pool cut into the rock, which was surrounded by a terrace of flowers.
Ellie nestling on his shoulder like a baby animal, he punched numbers into a keypad and as if by magic the entire glass wall slid apart silently, the glass seeming to vanish inside the walls.
‘Wow!’
‘It’s pretty much open-plan.’ He pressed another button and the room was illuminated by recessed lights in the ceiling and tiled floor. The massive space stretched the entire width of the house, incorporating several seating areas with massive sofas, a long polished oak antique table that could have seated twenty, a grand piano that took pride of place one end, with bookshelves the other, and a modernistic wood burner hung suspended from the ceiling in the middle of the room.
She’d already said wow so she just stared.
‘Kitchen is that way, study’s off to that side and the bedrooms are in the other two wings.’
Gwen heard him but she was too busy staring at a corner of the room where there was a tall doll’s house, several tubs of toys and a doll’s pram.
‘If they’re not the right kind of toys, you can—’
‘They’re absolutely right. She’ll love them all.’
‘This is the nursery,’ he said. There was a wooden child gate across the doorway and a faint smell of paint as they walked into a bright square room with a frieze of rabbits around the wall. The bed in the corner was painted to resemble a castle and there was a cot at the far end of the room.
