Wishing Water (19 page)

‘I could never imagine coming to a place like this with my friends,’ she laughed, feeling self-conscious.

‘You count Derek Colwith as a friend?’
 

Lissa smiled across the small table at him, quenching the curious disquiet she felt in talking about her feelings for Derry. ‘His sister is my best friend.’ She saw by his expression that he was not convinced it was quite so simple.

‘I would have thought a girl like you could do better than my clerk,’ Philip’s handsome face took on a scathing expression which did not suit him. ‘He’s a young tearaway who thinks too much of himself. Take the yacht race, for instance.’
 

Perversely, though Lissa had said the very same thing about Derry, she now defended him. ‘I felt rather sorry for him actually, coming so close. But you were the better sailor, evidently.’ She smiled, to show how sporting she was.

‘I can also win without cheating. The trouble with young Colwith is that he is so determined to be the best he is perfectly unscrupulous.’
 

For a moment Lissa was stunned into silence. ‘What did he do?’
 

‘He cheated.’
 

‘I don’t believe it.’
 

But by the time Philip had finished explaining his version of events she had no choice but to believe it.

Lissa was horrified. She’d come out on this date to prove something, to herself perhaps, and to make Derry jealous perhaps. To make him want her so much he’d give up on the blond fan club. Now she felt sickened by this new aspect of his character. ‘You say he deliberately tried to cause a collision?’
 

‘Someone could easily have been injured.’
 

Lissa’s eyes were bleak, her mind so distracted she did not notice when the waiter placed a dish of prawns and salad before her.

‘May I pour you a glass of wine?’ The conversation moved smoothly on to safer topics but her appetite had quite gone. She couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Seeing her face, Philip slid a hand over hers. ‘You mustn’t fret over Derry Colwith. He’s a young fool with his head in the clouds. You are far too beautiful to waste time over him. You deserve better. Someone to care for you as you should be cared for.’
 

The hand gently squeezed hers and she lifted her eyes to his, reading a message she could not deny. Heavens, he fancied her. And he thought her beautiful. Surely this charming, good-looking man couldn’t be jealous, could he?

As they ate he got her talking of Broombank and Ashlea, smiling over tales of her childhood with Nick and Daniel. Lissa felt quite at ease with him, almost sorry when the evening ended.

A perfect gentleman to the last, he took her to the door of the boathouse, unlocked it with her key and bade her a polite good night. No fumbling attempts at a goodnight kiss.

‘I have so enjoyed our evening. Perhaps we may repeat it some time?’
 

‘I’d like that,’ she said, and was surprised to realise that she meant it.

‘Who’s a pretty boy then?’ Renee poked a finger between the bars of the budgie’s cage only to be met with a loud squawk and a vicious nip from the sharp beak.

‘Bloody hell.’
 

She pulled the finger away and ran to the kitchen tap. No blood appeared but tears stood out in her childlike blue eyes. ‘What a day,’ she mourned, switching on the electric fire, kettle, radiogram and television set all at once in a fit of pique, unmindful of the huge electricity bill Jimmy had recently received.

Music blared out from the one while the television set blinked blankly at her, too early for its programmes to have begun. Peeved, she switched it off again.

‘Waste of money, that was,’ she said and went to glare out of the window instead. It was, in Renee’s view, a typical Lakes day, grey and miserable with rain coming down in stair rods. Poor old Jimboy. He’d hoped to get a bit of fishing in later.

‘Anyone would think it was November instead of September,’ she mourned. ‘And nobody to talk to half the time, what with Jimmy working long hours and Derry never in.’
 

She’d been glad at first when Jan and Lissa had taken the boathouse. Give Jimmy and me more time on our own, she’d thought. But in the twelve months since she’d found it hadn’t worked out as she’d hoped. Jimmy worked all hours and she was more and more alone. Derry still hung around, making a nuisance of himself.

‘Not that he isn’t still fanciable,’ she admitted, mouth lifting into a knowing smile. ‘That’s part of the problem, isn’t it, Peter?’ she said, addressing the budgie. ‘Don’t do to have two gorgeous men in one house. Particularly when you wouldn’t mind sleeping with either of them. Not that I would, you understand. But thinking about it can have a funny effect on a girl.’
 

She sat with her hands cradling a mug of tea, her skirt pulled up over bare thighs to warm her cold legs by the glowing bars of the electric fire, and began to plan.

They were having a nice pair of lamb cutlets tonight, baked with a sprinkle of rosemary on top, accompanied by mash potatoes and some nice Batchelor’s peas out of a tin. Amazing really that she had taken so well to cooking. There’d never been the opportunity before, not at home where you were lucky to get a bag of chips. Nor at the Marina Hotel where she worked, skivvied more like, as a waitress and general dogsbody.

Renee hated working at the hotel. Jimmy hated it too. He felt threatened by all the young men she met there.

‘Just because I like to dress with a bit of flair,’ she constantly assured him, ‘men think they can take liberties, cheeky buggers. Forever pinching my bottom they are, and I don’t like it. No respect for women, that’s what it is. Not like you, pet.’ Then she would kiss him and in no time at all he would feel better. He was a good man, her Jimmy.

‘Deserves the very best, don’t he, Peter darling?’ She reached for her packet of cigarettes and lit one.

Having beaten out its ill temper on its companion in the swinging mirror, the budgie chirruped back, quite equably.

Renee pulled out her own small spotted mirror from her crocodile plastic handbag and, holding it in one hand, started to titivate her hair with the other, cigarette stuck between orange lips, eyes creased against the ensuing curl of blue smoke.

‘I’d hand in me notice only I enjoy a bit of money of me own, d’you see? Point of fact, we could do with a bit more.’
 

The budgie attacked its millet spray, quite unconcerned.

‘Jimmy works hard all day at the boatyard, comes home knackered and a tired man ain’t no good to woman nor beast.’ She laughed. ‘You know what I mean, Peter boy?’
 

He blinked at her through the bars then bashed his bell, just to assure her that he understood perfectly.

‘I fancy one of them new Hotpoint washing machines. A Hoover vac and a new electric cooker. So clean they are, you wouldn’t credit. We might even save up enough for a Hillman Minx.’ She blew smoke rings up to the yellowed ceiling. ‘Ooh, that would be lovely, don’t you think?’
 

Sometimes she could hardly sleep, she was that busy planning. She stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and set off up the stairs to investigate the bedrooms.

There was hers and Jimmy’s, the biggest in the house. Next to that was Jan’s which she’d shared with Lissa for a time. At the end of the landing, next to the bathroom, was Derry’s. That was only a single but it was a good-sized one all the same. You might fit a three-quarter bed in it if you got a smaller chest of drawers.

She took a tape measure out of her skirt pocket and started to measure.

With these three bedrooms in operation she could take in two, four, maybe five, guests at ten shillings and sixpence a night bed and breakfast. She started doing sums in her head, got lost and went searching for a bit of paper on the kitchen mantelshelf.

Back upstairs again, satisfied with her arithmetic, she faced her major problem. Jimmy.

First off she’d have to persuade him to convert the loft into a bedroom for them to use. It had a proper staircase to it, that was one good thing, narrow but solid. But the room itself was a junk heap with cracked floorboards that didn’t quite reach the plastered walls, and no electricity. She stood rather gingerly on the floorboards and stared out of the small attic window.

The rain had stopped and though the mountains beyond were still wreathed in mist a faint sun was attempting to break through the grey cloud, sending shafts of sunlight down on to the grey water. Needing no further indication of a brighter day ahead, she could see two elderly couples taking to the lake with gusto, pulling up masts and sails, swinging jibs about, wheeling dinghies down the slipway.

You get a good view of the lake from up here, that might appeal,’ she announced to the empty room, so used to talking to the budgie she hardly noticed when it was absent.

But she’d have her work cut out to persuade him. It wasn’t so much the joinery in the loft that would be the problem. Best craftsman in Carreckwater, Jimmy was. Had built their kitchen cupboards easily and with the same spit and polish as the clinker-built boats he worked on for his boss at the yard. They could spend the winter getting it ready for next season.

Oh, no. It was the idea of having strangers in his house. She’d have to prove her figures, show him how much money they could make with bed and breakfast. How tourism was the coming thing.

Renee upturned an old box, licked the tip of her pencil and sat on it to tot up the figures again, just to make sure she’d got them right. It was true. She could make more money out of letting three bedrooms than she could working four nights a week at the hotel.
 

But then she came to the most difficult problem of all, which could put a stop to all her plans. Derry. Renee thought about this for some time, chewing on the pencil till it was a frayed soggy mess, as she had used to do with the pencils the teacher gave her at school. Got a right telling off for that she had.

But she was a married woman now, not a schoolgirl, for all she was only seventeen. She could make her own decisions. If she wanted to chew pencils, she would chew pencils. If she wanted Derry out, then out he would go. And she could handle Jimmy. When had she ever not been able to handle Jimmy?

B and B. That was the future.

The solution came to her. Mr Brandon. He could tell her about any possible regulations the council might throw at her. And he might also be able to help with Derry.

The rain had stopped and the sun was glinting on pale pebbles, lapped by the waves on the shore. A breeze shuffled across the water and the reflections of cloud and boats and sunbeams broke into a brilliance of disorganised fragments then pieced themselves together again, like a jig-saw. It made Derry feel quite light-hearted as he hurried to the boathouse. The two girls would have finished early since it was half day closing and he’d made it his habit to take lunch with them every week at this time. Whether there’d be a welcome for him today was another matter.
 

He couldn’t quite make Lissa out, one minute all friendly, the next cool and distant. Jan said she had family problems needing dealing with. And he always managed to say or do the wrong thing when she was around. He might like to give the impression of the tough, swaggering man-about-town, but in truth he was as shy and very nearly as inexperienced as Lissa herself. He knew she was jealous of the attention he got when he was singing, which excited as much as it irritated him.

How could he not enjoy it when all the girls screamed at his music, or hung around waiting for him afterwards? Gave him a good feeling, that did. Made him look real cool to his mates. But he couldn’t quite see himself as a lothario. Was that the word? Up close they unnerved him with their long nails and bright pink lipstick. Girls liked you to spend money on them, which he didn’t have.

And Money was something he’d never have if he stayed at Brandon’s, a small, down-at-heel solicitors.

In any case Derry believed he could afford to be choosy. He was going to be famous, wasn’t he? Some days he thought the right girl might be Lissa Turner. When they quarrelled, he thought not. She’d thawed a bit recently but still kept him at arm’s length. And they never had a minute to themselves. He thought she deliberately encouraged Jan to hang around, perhaps only tolerated him because he was Jan’s brother.

Once he got a recording contract, then the money would really start rolling in. Derry had no doubt that he could make it big. She’d take more notice of him then, wouldn’t she? The fact that half the teenage boys in the country had the same dream did not occur to him.
 

He clucked to the ducks as he swung along, whistling happily, his natural optimism restored. He took no notice of the people sitting upon the green benches as he sprinted up the steps to the boathouse. His heart was racing, and he bounced impatiently from one foot to the other as he waited for Lissa to open the door.

Five seconds later there she was, as lovely as he had imagined.

‘Hello.’

‘Hello.’
 

Tongue-tied, he simply looked at her. He could scent the sweetness of her skin, longed to run his hands over the slim curves of her back and up into those silky black curls. She still hadn’t let him cross the threshold, nor had he noticed.