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“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Living here, with you? It might feel a bit, I don’t know…like I’m encroaching on your space. Your domain.”
Harriet was silent for a moment, her gaze distant. “You’re already doing that, anyway,” she said at last, “and who knows what the future will bring, Rachel? We’ll need to find out Dad’s MRI results and go from there.”
Which brought Rachel down from her dreamy post-kiss haze to a depressing and grim reality. For a little while she’d almost forgotten about her dad’s potential diagnosis. “How is he this morning?” she asked.
“Irritable at feeling frail. Not ready to get out of bed.” Harriet pursed her lips, her eyes becoming shadowed. “You know he’s struggling when he doesn’t even try to get up.”
“The fall and hospital stay really took it out of him.”
“Yes.” But Harriet didn’t sound convinced.
Rachel finished her last spoonful of porridge and then started to clear the dishes. It was half past seven and she needed to get showered and dressed and ready for work. She hadn’t yet had an email from Danielle agreeing to some time off, so in the meantime she needed to put in her hours, even if both her mind and heart felt a million miles away from the investment opportunities in London.
*
That evening Benheaded over to the farm just as dusk was falling, shadows gathering in the nooks and corners of the farmyard.
“I thought we could go out for a curry in Pickering,” he said. “Unless you’d rather stay in?” He jangled his keys in his pocket, and with a thrill of wonder Rachel realised he seemed nervous. Abouther.
“A curry sounds nice. We were only having leftovers, anyway. Let me just check with Harriet—”
“She can come, if she likes,” Ben offered, not sounding entirely enthused about the idea.
“Not bloody likely, Ben Mackey,” Harriet called from the hall as she came towards them, smiling and wiping her hands on a tea towel. “I have no interest in third-wheeling. I’ll have leftovers with Dad and watchEastEnders, thanks very much.”
Ben cracked an uncharacteristically wide grin as he gave Harriet a nod. “Allreyt, then. We’ll be away.”
A few minutes later they were in his Land Rover, bumping down the lane and then heading east towards Pickering. Neither of them spoke, but Rachel didn’t mind. She was reminded, poignantly, of how many afternoons they’d had as children, climbing a tree or lying in the long grass or sprawled on a sofa, with no need to fill the silence that stretched golden between them.
After a few minutes like this, Ben glanced at her. “How’s your dad, then?”
“He seems all right.” Rachel had popped up to see him that afternoon, during a break from work. He’d been his usual grumpy self, but she’d detected a certain, hidden pleasure at having her come up and talk to him; she hadn’t been in his bedroom, herparents’bedroom, in decades, maybe even since before her mum had left. The room hadn’t changed at all, and when Rachel had sat down at the chair in the corner, she’d been jolted to see some of her mother’s old clothes in her half of the wardrobe. After twelveyears? She didn’t know what it meant; if her dad had left them there as some sort of indictment, or because he missed her, or maybe because he simply couldn’t be bothered to move them. She hadn’t asked, hadn’t even let him know she’d seen them. She hadn’t had time yet to process what it meant, or at least what it could mean.
She’d had a lot of other stuff to think about, and so she’d pushed that to the back of her mind, and she did it again now. Ben gave her a sympathetic smile.
“It’s hard, waiting.”
“Yes.” Another thing she was pushing to the back of her mind. “Let’s not talk about all that now,” she told him. “One day at a time, remember?”
For a second his expression stilled, and then he nodded slowly, giving that lovely little quirk of a smile. “Right. One day at a time.”
They kept the chat easy and light for the rest of the short trip to Pickering, and it wasn’t until they were seated at a table in Pickering’s best curry house, perusing laminated menus with a hundred different options, that Rachel realised this was actually a date. Somehow, because it was Ben, it hadn’t seemed like one. It had never seemed like a date with Ben, she realised, since the day of that disco; she’d just slotted into his life, more or less, and he’d taken her along for the happy ride.
She lowered her menu and propped her elbows on the table to give him a serious yet still teasing look. “So, is this a date?” she asked. “Like, a proper one?”
Ben glanced up from his own menu, looking jolted by the question. “A date? We’re not sixteen.”
“We didn’t go on any dates when we were sixteen,” she replied. “Not that I remember. Whydidyou ask me to dance at that disco?” she asked suddenly. She’d never asked him when they were younger; she hadn’t wanted to risk losing the magic that had sprung up between them. Really, she’d been woefully insecure in their whole relationship, such as it had been. She didn’t want to be that way again. “Well?” she prompted.
“Why did I?” He looked surprisingly discomfited. “Because I wanted to dance with you.” He made it sound obvious, but Rachel knew it wasn’t.
“When you never talked to me all through school?” she asked sceptically.
“You never talked to me,” he replied, his tone mild, and she let out a laugh of genuine amusement.
“Ben, no. You were the one who blanked me first, on the bus.”
