Kiss Me Under the Mistletoe

Ben stood for a few moments and watched her climb the steps up to a door on the upper level. It hadn’t been used for years. Laura hadn’t been steady enough on her feet to make the journey down the hill for quite some time before she died.

He climbed into the dinghy because it felt like a safe distance but carried on watching. The wooden floor could be beetle-infested, rotten. He’d just stay here a few moments to make sure the new owner didn’t go through it.

His hand hovered above the outboard motor. Any moment now, he’d be on his way. He readied his shoulder muscles and brushed his fingertips against the rubber pull on the end of the cord. He gripped the loosened rope lightly in his other hand.

The boathouse was on two levels. The bottom storey, level with the jetty, had large arched, panelled doors and had been used for storing small boats. The upper level was a single room with a balcony that stretched the width of the building. He was waiting for her to walk out onto it, spread her hands wide on the railing and lean forward to inhale the glorious salty, slightly seaweedy air. Her glossy, dark hair would swing forward and the wind would muss it gently.

A minute passed and she didn’t appear. He began to feel twitchy.

With a sigh, he climbed out of the boat and planted his boots on the solid concrete of the jetty. ‘Are you okay back there?’

No response. Just as he was readying his lungs to call again, she appeared back on the jetty and shrugged. ‘No key,’ she yelled back, looking unduly crestfallen.

All his alarm bells rang, told him to get the hell back in the boat and keep his nose out of it. Whitehaven wasn’t his responsibility any more. Only, the message obviously hadn’t travelled the length of his arm to his fingertips, because he suddenly found himself retying the boat and walking back up the jetty to the steep steps that climbed up to the boathouse door.

As he reached the bottom step, she turned and looked down at him, one hand on the metal railing, one hand bracing herself against the wall. Her thick hair swung forwards as she leaned towards him.

‘The door’s locked. Any ideas?’

With his fingernails, already dark-rimmed from the rich compost of the glasshouse plants, he scraped at a slightly protruding brick in the wall near the base of the stairs. At first, he thought he’d remembered it wrong, but after a couple of seconds the block of stone moved and came away in his hand. In the recess left behind, he could see the dull black glint of metal. Laura had told him about the secret nook, just in case.

He supposed he could have just told the woman about it, yelled the vital information from the safety of the dinghy. He needn’t get involved. Even now his lips remained closed and his mouth silent as he climbed the mossy stairs and pressed the key into the soft flesh of her palm.

There. Job done.

For a couple of seconds, they stayed like that. Then he pulled his hand away and rubbed it on the back of his jeans.

‘Thank you,’ she said, then shook her long fringe so it covered her eyes a little more.

She slid the key into the lock and turned it. He’d half-expected to door to fall off its hinges, but it swung in a graceful arc, opening wide and welcoming them in. Well, welcoming her in. But his curiosity got the better of him and he couldn’t resist getting a glimpse.

‘Wow.’

He’d expected shelves and oars and tins of varnish. Decades-old grime clung to the windows, and the filmy-grey light revealed a very different scene. A cane sofa and chairs huddled round a small Victorian fireplace, decorated with white and blue tiles, and a small desk and chair occupied a corner in front of one of the arched windows.

She walked over to the desk and touched it reverently, leaving four little smudges in the thick dust, then pulled her fingers back and gently blew the dirt off them with a sigh.

‘Did she come here often, do you know? Ms Hastings?’ she asked, still staring at the desk.

Why exactly he was still here, keeping guard like some sentry, he wasn’t sure. He should just go. He’d kept his promise to Laura. He wasn’t required. And yet … he couldn’t seem to make his feet move.

She turned to look at him and he shrugged. ‘Not when I knew her. She was too frail to manage the path down, but she talked of it fondly.’

She blinked and continued to stare at him, expressionless. He wasn’t normally the sort who had the urge to babble on, but most women he knew didn’t leave huge gaping gaps in the conversation. He stuffed his hands in his pockets and kicked at the dust on the bare floorboards with the toe of his boot. Everything was too still.

‘Not really your sort of place, is it?’ he muttered, taking in the shabby furniture, the broken leg on the desk chair, held together with string. The place was nowhere near elegant enough to match her. This woman was used to the finer things in life. Finer than a dilapidated old boathouse like this, anyway.

Her chin rose just a notch. ‘What makes you think you know anything about what sort of woman I am?’

Just like that, the sadness that seemed to cloak her hardened into a shell. Now the room wasn’t still any more. Every molecule in the air danced and shimmered. She strode over to the large arched door in the centre of the opposite wall, unbolted it, threw the two door panels open and stepped out onto the wide balcony.

He was dismissed.

He took a step towards her and opened his mouth. Probably not a great idea, since during his last attempt at small talk he’d planted a great muddy boot in it, but he couldn’t leave things like this—taut with tension, unresolved. Messy.

Her hands were spread wide as she rested them on the low wall and looked out over the river, just as he’d imagined. The hair hung halfway down her back, shining, untouchable. The wind didn’t dare tease even a strand out of place. He saw her back rise and fall as she let out a sigh.

‘I thought I’d asked you to get off my property.’ There was no anger in her tone now, just deep weariness.

He turned and walked out of the boathouse and down the stairs to the jetty with even steps. She didn’t need him. She’d made that abundantly clear. But, as he climbed back into the dinghy, he couldn’t help feeling that part of his promise was still unfulfilled.

This time there were no interruptions as he untied the rope and started the motor. He turned the small boat round and set off in the direction of Lower Hadwell, a few minutes’ journey upstream and across the river.

When he passed the Anchor Stone that rose, proud and unmoving, out of the murky green waters, he risked a look back. She was still standing there on the balcony, her hands wide and her chin tilted up, refusing to acknowledge his existence.

CHAPTER FOUR

21st May, 1952

We started filming almost a week ago now, but today was my co-star’s first day on set. Sam Harman might be a very talented director, but he has some very strange methods. Very strange. Up until now he has insisted that Dominic and I rehearse separately. Ridiculous. I mean, instead of building the rapport I should have had with my leading man—in a love story, for goodness’ sake—I’ve been getting acquainted with an assistant producer who reads the lines off a crumpled script like a robot.

The plot’s a simple one, I suppose. Dashing son of the wealthy family falls for the gardener’s daughter, and she for him, but the snobbery of both families conspires to keep them apart. I’m sure there are a thousand stories like it on library shelves. But what makes this one different is the characters, the chemistry. In the script, it just leaps off the page, and I didn’t understand why Sam had stopped Dominic and me meeting until we shot our very first scene together—coincidentally, Charity and Richard’s first meeting too. (She’s come back from university,aged 22, having always been in love with him, and he suddenly sees her with new eyes.)

I wish I could write in an American accent, because I’d so love to reproduce Sam’s blunt instructions accurately. I can’t remember his exact words, but I do remember that he told us the scene had to pulse with unspoken longing, with electricity.

If I’d had more time to think, I probably would have panicked awfully. That was just what I’d been afraid of, having read the script—that I wouldn’t be able to do that ‘instant connection’ thing Sam has been drumming into me since we started rehearsals. I tried to explain this, why it had been such a bad idea keeping Dominic and me apart, but he just kept talking about it being important, about only getting one chance to capture that sweet awkwardness of a first meeting.

To be honest, I thought he was barking up the wrong tree completely. Or maybe just barking mad. Still, he’s the director and I’m no diva. I need to work. I have to work. It keeps me sane.

So we all tramped down to the darling boathouse at the bottom of the hill and I went out onto the balcony overlooking the river. (Richard finds Charity there. She isn’t supposed to be there really, but she goes to the boathouse to think, to breathe. It’s her sanctuary.) I suppose Sam is quite clever as a director. He likes his actors being ‘real’, he says.

Anyway, I didn’t enjoy it much at the time, because heleft me standing there, facing away from the door, hands wide on the balcony railing for what felt like an age. By the time Dominic (as Richard) actually did arrive, I’d been waiting so long, all worked up, that I actually did jump when the door crashed open. Didn’t have to act that reaction one bit.

And then I turned round and saw him.

‘Breathless,’ Sam had said to me. ‘That’s all I want from you, Laura. Breathless.’

And breathless I was.

I’d seen him before, of course, on a cinema screen like everyone else. I knew he was good-looking, with that sandy thick hair and those startling blue eyes. I always thought it was something about the colouring process that made them look that way, but they really are that blue. And he came striding across the room to confront me … I mean, Charity … and I found I literally had to suck the oxygen into my lungs. I seemed to have forgotten how to do it automatically.

What was worse was that at first I could tell he was just in character, ready to put a flea in the ear of someone he thought was a trespasser, but the then he reached the door to the balcony and he just … stopped. Stopped dead. I couldn’t tell if he was still acting at first, or if he’d forgotten his lines. I’d certainly forgotten mine.

And then I realised that he felt it too—the thing I’d hardly realised I’d been feeling myself. It was the strangest thing …

I knew I wasn’t Charity any more, and he wasn’t Richard. I was me and he was Dominic, and yet something just … fell into place. Instant connection. The only words I have to describe it are Sam’s. How ironic. And it still seems like a poor reflection of what it felt like.

I knew.