In her new spirit of honesty, Rachel decided the best course of action was to take the bull by the horns herself and sort out where they stood. She didn’t want to go from gazing up in awe at his broad naked shoulders to discussing some puking spaniel over the kennel table. Her skin was already crawling at how embarrassing that would be, especially with the obligatory audience of Megan and at least two dogs.
So just after lunch, Rachel pulled into the surgery car park only to see George’s muddy Land Rover swing in at top speed on the opposite side.
She took a deep breath, pinned a smile on her face and jumped out.
‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Have you got two minutes?’
George’s face was friendly, but guarded.
‘I have, yes. Good timing,’ he said, a little stiffly. ‘I’m only popping back to get supplies – full day today. Lots of lambing dramas.’
They scrunched up the gravel to the surgery and he held the door open for her to go in. It was a modern reception room, decorated with lots of flea control posters, and, Rachel was pleased to see, a whole notice board of rescue pleas, which Megan must have photocopied for him.
A couple of clients were waiting with carrying baskets and cardboard boxes, and they smiled as George walked past. He ushered her rather formally into his office, where he opened a filing cabinet and carried on checking through some files.
‘Do you mind if I carry on?’ he asked. ‘I’ve got to be out again in ten minutes.’
‘Not at all.’ Rachel suddenly realised she didn’t quite know what to say. It was like seeing the first boy she’d snogged at a school disco in class the following morning.
George turned round, and she saw that he was as awkward as she was.
‘So, what have you come to talk to me about? Or are you worried I’ve upped my call-out rate?’ His voice was light, but he wasn’t as easy as normal.
‘Listen, I wanted to come and see you, because . . .’ Rachel was turning red, despite her best efforts to behave like a mature woman. ‘Because these things never go well when you try to do it over the phone.’
George raised an eyebrow and Rachel’s insides fluttered.
She put her hands on the back of the chair. ‘I came up to say thank you for cooking me supper last night. I had a really lovely evening, but I got a bit drunk, as you probably noticed, and, um, I just wanted to say that I don’t normally . . .’
How to say she didn’t sleep with men on the first date, without sounding like a prude? She was nearly forty years old. But for some reason, his opinion mattered to her. Whether they started a relationship or whether it stayed as a friendship, Rachel wanted things to be right this time.
George took pity on her blushes and rolled his eyes, looking more like the George she remembered from the previous night.
‘No need to explain,’ he said. ‘I don’t generally, either.’
‘Oh, right. Good!’
‘Good!’ George looked at her and the tension between them crackled again. ‘Right answer?’
‘Yes. Absolutely. ’ Rachel steeled herself for the next question. ‘We did . . .’
‘We did.’ George nodded. ‘Maybe you’ve blotted it out, but you nearly fell off the bed, searching about in your overnight bag, and tried to make me use a handiwipe from a sushi restaurant as a contraceptive.’
Rachel froze, then spluttered. It wasn’t funny, but there was something about the solemn way he said it, and his straight face. ‘Did I?’
‘You did.’ He sighed. ‘Obviously we both need to go back to school on that front, because it wasn’t the most textbook demonstration. That’s what happens when enthusiasm gets in the way of experience.’
‘Well, it definitely was enthusiastic.’ It was quite endearing, really, she thought – the two of them, at their age, agonising over this like a pair of horny, drunk teenagers.
They looked at each other for a moment, and Rachel wondered where she was supposed to steer this conversation next. For a rural vet with apparently little female service history, George seemed to be doing a much better job of handling this than she was.
‘But now we’ve got that out of the way,’ he went on, ‘would you like to go back about ten paces, and have dinner with me some time this weekend? I’m old-fashioned, you see. I think if we go forward any more steps I’d have to propose.’
Rachel realised that she hadn’t been expecting this reaction: the simple, we’ve-started-something calm. No subterfuge, no need to think up reasons not to do it. It felt like putting one foot on an icy lake and finding it solid enough to skate on.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘Yes, that would be great. Shouldn’t I cook you dinner, though?’
‘No, thanks,’ said George, ‘in the kindest possible way. I think we know each other well enough already to know that’s not a great idea. How about this Saturday? Got any plans?’ He paused. ‘Or is the whole point of being ageing singletons in the middle of nowhere that we don’t have to pretend about stuff like that?’
‘Quite,’ said Rachel. ‘My diary is empty. I am desperate. I’ll come over for dinner.’ She smiled because she could see how much, despite their words, they were both rather looking forward to the prospect of another evening’s talking.
It had got to two o’clock and Natalie still hadn’t managed to do anything on her to-do list, thanks to Bertie and his incessant, child-like demands for attention.
If this was what kids were like, she thought, removing his paw from her leg, she wasn’t a hundred per cent sure it was a good idea any more.
Not being at work wasn’t as easy as she’d imagined it would be, either. The day had started when she’d woken at seven, as usual, but instead of getting into her suit and charging off to the office, she’d got up, let Bertie out and begun his routine, which seemed to include fifteen minutes standing in their garden with a poobag, waiting for him to perform.
Johnny had gone off to school at eight, and now she and Bertie were in her study downstairs, where they’d been locked in a battle of wills all morning. Natalie was strong, and very focused on her sabbatical to-do list, but she couldn’t type with a Basset hound leaning on her right forearm, begging for attention.
‘Down!’ she said, in the firm tone the books recommended, but Bertie didn’t give up his position at the side of her desk. Instead he lunged for her nose with his, to administer a bump. Natalie jerked her face out of reach at the last minute but, undeterred, he shuffled even further forward on his sturdy back legs.
Stretched out, Bertie could reach desks, kitchen work surfaces, Natalie’s dressing table and any other surface with edibles like a canine extending ladder.
‘That’s lovely, but down,’ she said again, more firmly, pointing at the floor. ‘Down!’
He lunged for her face again, this time banging his nose against hers so hard it hurt. It still hurt from the first time he’d done it – when Johnny had roared with laughter at how cute it was and thus cemented it in Bertie’s repertoire of attention-seeking tricks.
‘Ow! No! Bad!’ She pushed the dog down so she could cover her nose, which felt like it might be bleeding.
Bertie dropped onto all four paws and gazed up at her sadly. She knew what he wanted: he wanted her to sit on the floor, so he could sit on her lap, then go to sleep. Sometimes Natalie wondered who was training whom here.
‘Bertie, just because I’m home doesn’t mean I haven’t got loads to do. How am I going to get my CV updated if you keep interrupting?’ she demanded through her hands.
So far, all she had managed to do that morning was to have a shower, and that had been a speedy operation, since she only had the amount of time Bertie could be distracted with a treat-stuffed Kong. Otherwise, he appeared at the shower door, making his unearthly grumbles for attention and padding around the place looking devastated.
Apart from the recommended hour’s walk, which actually took up nearly two hours if you counted all the bribery required to get Bertie off the sofa in the first place, Natalie had spent the first days of her new
life chained to the house, because she wasn’t sure she could leave him alone safely. Johnny thought she and Bertie were home watching daytime TV and having a whale of a time, but in fact, if Natalie was honest, it was a bit, well, limiting. Not that she was going to tell him that, or let Bertie see.
‘You can’t have Mummy’s attention all the time,’ she informed the dog.
Bertie let out a low, melancholy moan and Natalie’s heart melted. She was being mean. He’d had so little attention in his last home, no wonder he wanted to make sure she wasn’t going to abandon him too.
‘Right, well, we’ll go for a walk, shall we?’ Natalie gave up on her CV and reached for her list instead. Her sabbatical, as she was now thinking of it, had only made her more determined not to waste a second; her goals were to get pregnant, train Bertie and chill out completely.
Walk Bertie was on there, so it counted as something to tick off.
Poring over the Longhampton street map at the weekend, Johnny and Natalie had worked out some nice varied routes for Bertie’s daily leg-stretch, all ending up at the big park, where he could have a run around and chase some balls.
That was the idea anyway. Natalie had read that Basset hounds could be trained to retrieve, if you were patient and persistent enough, but so far she’d thrown the ball twelve times and had to collect it herself. She was starting to feel a bit stupid when Bertie finally showed some signs of animation and bounded off towards the trees on the edge of the park.
Natalie grabbed his extending lead, and shaded her eyes against the light. Bertie’s excitement had nothing to do with her. He’d spotted Rachel from the rescue heading towards them with four dogs of varying sizes.
She waved and Rachel came over, followed by Bertie, bouncing around the others as if he hadn’t seen them in years.
‘Hi! Fancy seeing you here!’ joked Rachel, transferring all her leads to one hand with some difficulty. ‘I see you’ve joined the daily walking cult?’
‘I guess this is what the school run mums feel like,’ Natalie said. ‘Same time, same place, same manic behaviour.’
‘Yeah, but if you’re a school-run mum, at least you can go for coffee!’ Rachel hurled a manky tennis ball from her plastic thrower, and all the dogs – plus Bertie, to Natalie’s surprise – hurtled off in pursuit. ‘Have you tried getting in anywhere with one of these in tow? It’s killing me. I had a four-a-day espresso habit back in London. Now I can’t even get into a café. Oi, Lucy! Bring me that ball! Now!’
Lucy, a brindled Staffie, scampered up with the ball lodged in her powerful jaws, followed by the others, and Rachel bent down to hurl it away again.
‘You know what we need? A dog-friendly coffee shop,’ said Natalie, as a rosy vision started to form in her mind’s eye. ‘With hooks and bays so you could park the dogs like the mummies park their buggies – inside, so you’d know no one was nicking them, obviously.’
‘And Bonios free with every coffee and water bowls at different heights.’
‘And a park and escape facility, so you could drop them off for half an hour with a friend, and go and do your chores,’ Natalie went on, thinking of the blood test she really needed to organise at the surgery. ‘Bertie’s perfectly clean, you know. Much cleaner than half the kids I see in cafés.’
‘Sounds like a great idea.’ Rachel smiled. ‘You should set it up.’
‘Want to go halves, with fifty per cent profits to the rescue?’ Natalie hurled the ball for the dogs. ‘You could be selling those bacon sarnies, you know. Johnny said he’d happily pay three quid for one – apparently they’re worth going on a long walk for.’
‘Really? Don’t joke,’ said Rachel. ‘I need to rustle up some extra funding for the kennels. My aunt Dot wasn’t exactly a financial genius and you wouldn’t believe how much those dogs eat. It’s like they’re making up for lost time.’ She chucked the ball again. ‘I’ve got to confess I’m a bit clueless when it comes to that sort of thing, but I’m going to have to come up with something fast if the kennels are going to stay open.’
‘Well, if you need some ideas, I’ve got a lot of marketing experience and plenty of free time. As long as I can bring my dog with me.’ Natalie couldn’t help offering. There was something about Rachel she liked – not least the fact that she was in her late thirties, hadn’t had a child, and seemed pretty happy nonetheless.
Stop it, she told herself. That’s not what defines anyone. And, anyway, the blood test was a positive first step. Natalie looked wistfully at Bertie, now wrestling a passive Treacle. There was no way she could leave him in reception. ‘Is he ever going to be OK to leave on his own? I mean, at home?’
‘He’ll never be great, according to Megan, but who knows?’ Rachel turned to her. ‘Is he stressing you out already? Have you changed your mind about fostering him?’
‘No! No, not at all,’ said Natalie quickly. ‘It’s just that I’ve got to go to the surgery to get a blood test done, and do some stuff round town, and I can’t leave him on his own till Johnny gets back from work.’ She bit her lip. ‘I’ve got to get my bloods done today or tomorrow.’
‘Nothing serious, I hope?’ Rachel looked concerned.
‘No, it’s . . .’ She hesitated, then it poured out. ‘Johnny and I are trying for a baby, like we said at the home check, and it’s not happening as fast as we hoped, so I need to get my hormone levels measured, to see if I’m ovulating. I have to do it today, ideally.’
‘Oh, God, right,’ Rachel murmured sympathetically, then said, ‘Look, I’m going to be here for at least forty minutes, chucking balls and walking them – do you want to leave him while you do your chores?’ She nudged the crowd of dogs around her legs. ‘One more won’t make a difference.’
‘Really?’ Natalie felt as if she’d just been let off the lead herself.
‘Sure. Just bring me an espresso and a cake on your way back.’ Rachel wrangled the ball out of Lucy’s drooly mouth, fitted it back onto the thrower with squeamish fingertips and hurled it extra hard towards the woods. ‘Actually, make that a double espresso. And can you get me the latest Vogue?’
‘No problem. Oh, my God, Rachel, you are a lifesaver!’ Natalie tucked Bertie’s lead onto the hook on Rachel’s belt and set off for the surgery, her mobile already out to get Bill to pull some nurse-related strings.
Rachel got back to the kennels at four o’clock, after the final round of walking, put the dogs back into the runs, and went through to the kitchen, humming happily to herself.
From a rubbish start, today had turned into something truly enjoyable. The sun was out, she was at the beginning of a relationship that she could tell the world about if she wanted to, the dogs were actually coming back when she yelled for them, and Natalie Hodge was going to help her work out what to do about raising some real money for the kennels.
It was a relief to have someone help with that, she thought. A rough calculation of the inheritance tax had left her rather panicky – even with her dodgy maths, it was going to be a lot. Dot’s ‘secrets’ didn’t seem to include the magic formula for how she’d managed to make ends meet over the years.
There was the necklace, of course, currently at the old jeweller’s in Longhampton, being valued ‘for insurance’. Hopefully it would go some way to clearing the probate but after that?
Rachel paused, her hand on the fridge door. She’d checked all the other condiments pots for further diamonds, but there weren’t any. What she really wanted to find, though, was some explanation for that amazing necklace – a gift? From mysterious Felix? Or something else?
She made herself a cup of coffee, letting her imagination wander romantically over the possibilities. Dot and Felix lurked at the back of her mind a lot of the time. No further clues or secrets had turned up in the course of her sorting out, so she’d had to embroider her own version of events, based not-very-loosely on her own experience with Oliver – the late nights at the office that had turned into snatched brasserie dinners, that had turned into something more.
At least Felix had taken Dot out in public, if those photos were anything to go by, she thought, with a twinge of regret. There were no records of her years with Oliver, because he’d swerved out of any snaps with the instinct of a spy. At least Dot had had proof of her relationship.
All in the past, she told herself, heading through to the kennels office to see what had been going on. It works both ways – it didn’t exist for him, so it needn’t exist for me.
Megan was at the desk, chewing on a pen and going through the daybook. Freda had been on afternoon phone duty and as usual had left a stack of scrawled missives for Megan and Rachel to decipher once she’d taken herself off home to make Ted’s tea.
‘Hey!’ Megan pointed at the Dundee cake on the table. ‘Freda left this. Help yourself. You look like you’ve had a good walk.’
‘I have,’ said Rachel. ‘Treacle’s recall’s improving. I did the whistle and reward thing you told me.’
‘Excellent. Well done you.’
‘I’ve got to admit, it’s a nice feeling when it works.’ She peered over her shoulder at Freda’s notes. ‘Looks like it’s been a busy afternoon here too. Any messages for me?’
‘Couple of home checks for Freda or you to do in the next few days, for Tinker, and Treacle.’
‘Yay!’ said Rachel, pretending to punch the air like a cheerleader. ‘Four down, eleven to go!’
‘And we’ve had three calls about doggie daycare, which is money in the bank, isn’t it? Oh, and a personal call for you.’
‘A personal call to the kennels?’ Rachel frowned. Her mum would have called her mobile, as would Oliver. Then a depressing thought struck her: her probate estimates would have reached the Inland Revenue by now. ‘Was it someone from the solicitors’ about the probate forms? Oh God, have I ballsed them up?’
‘No, it was on your mobile. You left it here in your other coat, apparently. Someone called . . . Freda’s writing is so awful.’ Megan squinted at the cramped note. ‘Someone called Kath Wrigley. She wanted to talk to you about . . . Oliver? Oh, Rachel.’ She looked up with a worried expression on her face. ‘That’s not your ex, is it?’