Arthur Read online

  “Absolutely. It’s my day off. I’m at your service.”

  When they got to town she felt good walking by his side. He told her a few stories about the shopkeepers and some of the people they passed, nearly all of whom knew him and then glanced at her curiously.

  She had an email from her agent, which she’d half thought might be there. She clicked on it. No matter how many books she wrote, she worried over each one. She thought this book was good, but what if she’d been fooling herself? What if her writer’s block had become so bad she’d completely lost her judgment?

  Before she could come up with any more what ifs, she opened the damn thing.

  Hi Meg, This is the best thing you’ve ever written. The villain is delicious. Much love, Herbert.

  Relief washed over her. And the sense of absolute satisfaction took its place. Herbert had no idea. Oh, yeah. The villain is very delicious. Her great fear, that somehow she’d lost her own judgment, that after her uncharacteristic dry spell, she was writing dreck and unable to distinguish it, was relieved.

  She even had the secret satisfaction of knowing that her sneaking suspicion that this was her strongest book yet was shared by someone whose opinion she trusted.

  Today was a very good day.

  “What’s put that smile on your face?” Arthur asked her when they met outside once more. “Apart from me, of course.”

  “My villain is delicious,” she informed him.

  “I hope that means he’s less terrifying than the awful bugger in the book I’m reading.”

  She chuckled in delight. “No, it means he’s much, much worse.”

  “How can someone so young and full of light write such evil?”

  She shrugged. “I have my nightmares on the page.”

  “I’d best get you home so you can get a few more written down.”

  And so their days fell into a pattern. They slept together every night, either at Stag Cottage or at the parsonage, though increasingly it seemed, she found herself in the parsonage. The place comforted her almost as much as Arthur’s arms wrapped around her in sleep comforted her.

  She went to the dart nights, and improved enough that she could usually hit the board, or not stray too far, though after that first one, the bullseye continued to elude her. She and Maxine had lunch or coffee, or simply walked the estate. The days grew cooler, more rain fell. Fall progressed and an early frost reminded her that winter, and the end of her time here, was approaching.

  Her work was going well. Too well. The book that wouldn’t start now raced to end, long before she was ready.

  She had two weeks until her time was up. Then a week. Arthur took her to London where Christmas decorations were another reminder of how little time was left. They shopped in the madness of the Portobello Road market and to Oxford Street and Covent Garden. She bought Christmas gifts for her friends and family at home, and in Harrods saw the tablecloth she’d pictured on Arthur’s kitchen table. She bought it, and napkins and a pottery jug striped in blue and white, where a person could put a couple of tulips from the garden, early roses, or a handful of wildflowers.

  They had afternoon tea at the Ritz, something she’d dreamed of since she was a little girl.

  “How’s the book coming, then?” he asked her over tea and scones and tiny, delicious cakes. He hadn’t asked her for a while. She knew they both marked the progress of her book as the journey to the end of her time in England and their time together.

  “It’s going well. Frighteningly well, in some respects.” He didn’t ask her what she meant. “I’ve got my big climax between the villain and the heroine still to write. Heart pounding suspense, terror, and then the conclusion.”

  “He’s the delicious one?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Hmm. What happens to him?”

  She drew a finger across her throat.

  Arthur bit into a scone with strong white teeth. “Shame, if he’s delicious.”

  “He has to die,” she said, gazing across at Arthur and wishing it weren’t so. “To release the heroine. That’s how it ends.”

  They were no longer speaking of some fictitious villain and they both knew it. Somehow, he’d become as central to her as that villain was to her story, and soon both would be gone.

  “No hope of saving him?” his eyes were sad and serious. She looked at his handsome, rugged face and knew she’d fallen in love with him.

  “How?” she asked him.

  When they returned home they were uncharacteristically somber. He made love to her as though it were the last time, and when their cries echoed around them, her eyes stung.

  It was a long time before she slept. Arthur was silent and still in the bed beside her, with his arm around her, his hand curled around her breast, but she was fairly certain he wasn’t asleep either.

  Of course, they’d never exchanged words of love. It hadn’t mattered. She knew he loved her as much as she knew she loved him. But what was the point of getting any deeper into a relationship that had been limited from the start?

  Sometime in the middle of the night she turned to him, and found his eyes open and on her. She reached for him, climbing onto him and riding him with desperation, as though she could cram an entire lifetime into this last week.

  There was no finesse to her loving, she was greedy and desperate, grabbing at his skin, scratching, riding hard, until they were both sweat-drenched and panting.

  “I love you,” she cried, as though the words had been yanked out of her.

  “I know, love. I know.”

  When she slumped down onto his still-heaving chest, her cheeks were wet. He kissed her slowly and then held her until at last she slept.

  She awoke determined to make their last few days good ones. She could mope and whine and snivel at home. She’d have lots of time.

  Arthur was still sleeping when she woke, heavy eyed and a little sore.

  Well, she could make him coffee. And breakfast. She slipped into the spare bedroom where she’d stowed all her bags from their shopping trip and found the cloth, the napkins and the jug.

  When he came into the kitchen half an hour later, she thought she’d never seen anything so good as this scratching, shirtless man with his black hair sticking out in tufts and his boxers riding low. “Smells good,” he said. She gave him a bright smile, one that suggested: no, I didn’t cry all over you and tell you I loved you last night, and handed him his coffee.

  And, as he turned to sit at the table, he stopped.

  “Don’t say it’s too girlish,” she begged, as she saw him staring at the pretty cloth, the neatly folded napkins and the jug containing a scatter of rose hips since that’s all she could find in the garden.

  “It’s perfect,” he said. “I wouldn’t have chosen it, mind, but it’s exactly right. I think this house is better with you in it,” he said, still staring at the cloth. “It’s been waiting for you for a long time.” He turned to her slowly, “So have I.”

  “Don’t say it, please don’t say it,” she begged.

  She saw a flash of impatience along with the sadness. “How can I not say it? You know it’s true as well as I do. You belong here. You work well, you’ve made friends, we’ve found each other. Why can’t you cancel your ticket home and stay?”

  “You make it sound so easy, but it’s not you being asked to give up their life. It’s me. Would you give up this? The pub? Your house? Your friends and come home with me if I asked you?”

  He regarded her. “Are you asking me?”

  Her heart felt like a moth flapping around a hot light bulb. Stupid, foolish, and determined to be incinerated.

  “I don’t know. Love hasn’t worked out that well for me in the past.”

  “Of course it hasn’t,” he said with contempt. “Any more than it has for me. You think you’re going to find what we have again? This,” and he gestured back and forth between them, “this happens once in a lifetime if you are very, very lucky.”

  “I wish I
knew what to do,” she said softly.

  “You’d best tend to whatever you’ve got burning on the stove.”

  She gasped and turned to find the fancy oatmeal she’d made from Women’s Weekly was scorched. Perfect.

  Just perfect.

  She left after breakfast but when she got to Stag Cottage she was too restless to write. Arthur had broken the unspoken agreement between them. Well, she supposed she had first when she’d blurted out her love, but surely some allowances could be made for a woman in mid-climax.

  He’d asked her in the cold light of day, however, bringing up not only love, but a future. A family, meals stretching for their lifetime around that toile-covered table in the parsonage kitchen. Or around the sleek glass and chromium table in her Seattle kitchen with the granite counters and the stainless appliances.

  Two homes. Why not?

  It was such an appealing image, and so terrifying she couldn’t even bear to consider it seriously.

  She stopped at Stag Cottage only long enough to drop her bags and change into walking clothes, then she headed out, needing to think.

  Her path took her, as it often did, beside the river. The walking path was a favorite. There was a pair of swans who hung around and she took out the whole wheat bread she’d brought specially and tossed them a few pieces.

  Behind her was Hart House, as elegant and grand every time she looked at it. The village had to be the prettiest in England.

  She and Arthur and Maxine and George would be best friends all their lives and have children together. She’d write part of the time in England and, of course, give in to Maxine’s demands that she run a writers’ retreat here.

  And they’d live part of the time on her side of the pond. She could certainly be as flexible as she wanted to be and Arthur had intimated he could be, too. Although she hadn’t put him to the test by asking him.

  But the solution was perfect. Frighteningly so. Joe, the other bartender would likely be thrilled to take over the pub part of the year.

  And perfect scared the hell out of her. Life was messy and fraught with disaster. In her books the minute things were going too well was the time her characters should be looking over their shoulder because terror, disaster, death were creeping up behind them as sure as it was chapter four.

  She didn’t hear herself hailed until a hand grasped her shoulder. She swung round to find Maxine, out of breath and half laughing. “I had to chase you miles, yelling your name. What’s up?” Then the smile faded. “Oh, honey. What’s wrong? You look like shit.”

  “I feel like shit.”

  “Is it Arthur?”

  “Of course it’s Arthur. Who else can wreck a perfectly good day like the man you’re in love with.”

  “Don’t tell me he doesn’t love you back, because if you tell me that then one of you is lying.”

  “Oh,” she flapped her hands, “of course he loves me. It would be so much easier if he didn’t. Or I didn’t.”

  She kicked a stone out of her path and into the water, plop. Bringing the greedy-assed swans floating back.

  “Ah,” Maxine said, with the tone of a woman who has been there. “It’s the go or stay dilemma, isn’t it?”

  “No. I thought it was, but we could easily spend part of our year in each country. It’s not that. It’s me.”

  “What about you?”

  She tipped her head back and looked up at the gray, brooding sky. “What do I make my living off?”

  Maxine gazed at her like this was a trick question. “Books? Unless you have some secret trust fund I don’t know about.”

  “What’s in the books? Why do you read them? Because they keep you up at night. Fear. That’s what I write about. It’s what rules me. Fear. It’s why I’ve always gone with men who seemed safe. But Arthur’s not safe.”

  “So, what are you going to do? Walk away from a guy who makes you glow?”

  “No…” She glanced up. “I glow?”

  “Like Rudolph’s nose.”

  “Oh.”

  “If it’s any consolation, Arthur’s glowing too.”

  “I left a man who was controlling. Who made me lose confidence in myself. It was so bad I stopped being able to write. I can’t go through that again.”

  “I’ve sure seen how much your confidence has been suffering since you got here. And the writing’s definitely not going well.”

  “Gaaaggggh!” Meg yelled, so the swans, who were still hanging around the bank, floated off with their beaks in the air. “Weren’t you scared?”

  “Of course, I was. I still am when I realize that no one in this country understands the concept of the Super Bowl. And these people fry bread. In bacon fat. I’m telling you, you look at an English breakfast and your arteries clog.”

  She smiled. “I’m scared. If I move here, what do I do if I’ve made another mistake?”

  “Have you asked him to move to the States?”

  She thought about how he’d dared her to do exactly that this morning and panic washed over her anew. “I wish I hadn’t come here. There was a darling stone cottage in Wales.”

  Maxine laughed at her. “No, you don’t. You’re a big girl, Meg. Act like one.”

  And finally, in despair, she stalked back to Stag Cottage and did exactly that. She acted like a big girl. She wrote the final chapter that she’d been putting off because it seemed symbolic that when her story ended, when the villain she’d recognized the moment she saw Arthur, was no more, then her romance would as effectively be over.

  And Arthur was a villain. He’d stabbed her in the heart as effectively as her murderous psycho.

  Her computer hummed and the words danced in front of her eyes for a few minutes. She felt like a drowning woman with her life flashing before her eyes as she wrote herself to The End.

  Meg wasn’t one to plot her books ahead. She knew writers who had systems, with color-coded charts and diaries for their characters. She admired that kind of organization and knew she would never write a book if she charted the whole thing out first, already knew her characters intimately.

  For her, that was the point of writing the book. It was the voyage of discovery as she came to know these people and their story. Sure, she was the one creating the world and the people in it but she discovered that world by writing it.

  So she typed her villain to his justly-deserved doom.

  And never had she killed off a villain more unwillingly.

  But there he was, as she’d always imagined the last chapter. He had the heroine with her back, literally and figuratively, to the wall. He’d toy with her a little. Because he had the luxury of time and privacy, and because he believed that she of all people would appreciate his brilliance, his subtlety, his daring.

  He’d been her patient. He’d had her attention, her clinical diagnoses; occasionally, her smile. But he’d never had her respect. He wanted it, ferociously.

  And when he didn’t get it, he grew angry, exactly as the psychiatrist had hoped. Her only chance to get out of here alive was to use her knowledge of his diseased mind against him. So, she taunted him, shamed him, ridiculed him. It was a dangerous tactic, but she didn’t have any other weapon.

  Finally, he snapped. She’d been watching his eyes, so she knew the second he lost control. When he rushed at her, he was no longer the cool madman, but an overgrown boy in a vicious tantrum. She kneed him hard in the balls as he came at her.

  It wasn’t enough to save her from the knife, but the move saved her life. By the time the police arrived, she had her attacker at gunpoint, having retrieved her handgun from her purse, called the cops from her cell, also in her purse, while she staunched her bleeding arm with her Hermes scarf.

  When the detective with whom she was having an on-again-off again affair arrived on the scene, there was some catchy banter about women and their purses. He offered her a lift to the hospital. She said, only if you hang around to see me home.

  Behind them, the villain was carted away, raving and furious. />
  But he wasn’t dead.

  Chapter 9

  Meg stared at the page, the final page of her novel.

  It wasn’t often that the ending surprised her. Not like this. How could the villain not be dead? All along, she’d envisioned that final desperate fight. The psychiatrist would get to her bag, she’d reach in it for her gun, which she shouldn’t even have in her purse, but the detective had warned her to be extra careful and so she’d tucked it in there this morning.

  Of course, the weapon had fallen to the bottom under the lipsticks and the pack of tissue. Oh, there it was – no, shit, that was her sunglasses case.

  And the madman would be almost upon her when she’d grab the gun, fumbling for the safety and boom, she’d shoot him through the bottom of her Fendi bag. Shot through the heart, they’d discover in the autopsy, in a nice bit of irony.

  How could it not have ended that way?

  Meg read the final scene again, her hands shaking, from too much coffee probably.

  Had she cheated? This new final scene, was it some manipulation by her own psyche?

  She re-read the entire chapter. And then she saw what she’d missed with her clever bit of shot-through-the-heart irony. The quick, clean death wasn’t enough of a punishment for this guy. No. Prison. Lack of control. No privacy. Being looked down on, ordered, insulted. Forced to perform menial tasks. Oh, how her villain would suffer. It was a much more fitting punishment.

  Her new ending was the perfect one.

  In every way.

  She stretched back in her chair, reached her arms up to the ceiling and stretched.

  Done. She was done. Of course, she needed to read and polish it a few times, but her story was told.

  She walked to the tiny village, humming under her breath. She stopped in at the Newsagents. The shop carried a couple of international papers, always a day or two late, but she rationed herself to the Sunday New York Times.

  Tramping back across the fields, with her paper, a pint of milk and a loaf of fresh bread, she stopped for a moment and took a slow, luxurious turn. It took no imagination at all to picture this as it had been a hundred years ago, two, three hundred years. Block out the cars and trucks and the telephone poles and the scenery would have looked almost precisely the same. Sun glinted off fields while sheep munched quietly, barely bothering to lift their heads as she walked by on the common footpath.