Page 71 of All Summer Long

Marsh sighed and rolled his eyes as he stalked past Robinson. ‘Then you better put your prettiest smile on for the cameras and keep that big mouth of yours well and truly shut, sweetheart.’

Lena glanced at Alice one last time and then followed Marsh across the kitchen. She paused beside Robinson.

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, baby,’ she murmured, low and sultry. ‘I’ll make sure he books first-class tickets. They have beds.’

Robinson closed the kitchen door and turned his back against it, and Alice, in the way that only a true Brit can, put the kettle on for tea that she didn’t especially want.

They sat down at the kitchen table, both of them subdued and wary in a way that they’d never been with each other up to now.

‘Reality bites,’ she said after a while as she slid a mug of tea in front of him.

He nodded, sipping it even though it wasn’t a drink he could ever imagine being fond of unless it was Long Island Iced.

‘We always knew it would,’ she added, when he didn’t speak.

‘Not like this,’ he said, raising his eyes to hers. Up until Marsh’s arrival those striking green-gold eyes had looked untroubled; right now they were dangerous tropical storms. ‘Not with a pack of hyenas on your driveway and your husband and my wife bunked up half a mile up the road. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.’

Alice couldn’t disagree. They were kind of under house arrest.

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ he said suddenly, standing up. He crossed to the fridge and threw things in a bag and then opened the back door. ‘Come on. Bring your camera.’

Alice followed Robinson out across the back lawns, wishing she couldn’t hear the press out the front still having a frenzy over Marsh and Lena’s departure. They jogged quickly over into the cover of the tree line, and he led her beyond the Airstream and through the woods.

‘Where are we going?’

Marsh slung his arm over her shoulders.

‘On a date.’

They paused to give Banjo a handful of carrots, and then skirted around the meadow towards the lake. The back of the boathouse loomed into sight, the same as always but subtly different, and Robinson tugged her down the side of it and around onto the deck.

‘Oh,’ she said, drawing the tiny word out on a long whisper. ‘Oh, Robinson.’ She pressed her hands to her cheeks. She hadn’t been down to the boathouse for weeks, not since the day she’d pulled her dad’s camera from the cellar of the manor and sat out there to look at it. She’d noticed at the time that some of the deck boards were rotten. Not any more. The deck had been repaired and yacht varnished, and the whole frontage of the boathouse had been restored. New panes of glass where there had been broken ones in the wide doors, fresh antique green paint on the clapboards, even a window box spilling with wild, trailing flowers. She looked around in wonder.

‘When did you do all of this?’

He smiled his bashful, crooked smile. ‘Here and there. I needed to fill my time.’

It was such an understatement it left her reeling.

‘Can I see inside?’

In answer Robinson pulled a key from his jean pocket and unlocked the door.

‘It’s not completely finished inside,’ he cautioned. ‘I thought I had more time.’

The boards on the floor were all sound now, as were the shuttered windows and the pitched roof, and in one corner a tiny kitchenette had been hand fashioned from reclaimed wood.

‘Did you make this?’ she said, running her hand over the mellow wood surface.

Robinson reached over and clicked on the radio he’d had in there over the last few weeks and looked at his hands, rueful. ‘Once a carpenter, always a carpenter.’

‘I love it,’ Alice said straight away, admiring his craftsmanship, but feeling so much more than that too. It would have taken him hours and hours, days to do all of the renovation work he’d done here, trained carpenter or not. It was eighty per cent done, and already she could envisage it furnished and decorated, another perfect romantic retreat for her expanding collection.

‘I don’t know what to say,’ she said, turning to him in the middle of the room. ‘Thank you.’

‘You’re incredibly welcome, Alice,’ he said, drawing her hips into his. ‘You’re so very, incredibly welcome.’

Her hands slid up around his neck as he dipped his head to kiss her, and they stood locked together in the centre of the boathouse, wrapped around each other like wartime lovers on a train platform. Something sentimental played low on the radio, a love song.

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