Page 65 of Husband Material
Two hours into a four-hour journey we stopped at a service station so that Rhys could have, in his own words “a slash and a sarnie.” I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and grabbed one of the family-sized bags of Skittles that they were, for some unfathomable reason, selling at a discount in W.H. Smith. Once we’d taken our welcome break at the Welcome Break, we piled back into the minibus for the second and, as it turned out, more complicated part of the journey.
Coombecamden, the technically-a-city-because-it-had-a-cathedral-even-though-it-was-actually-tiny of which Miffy’s father was apparently Earl, was situated a little way south of Liverpool, right by the Welsh border, but Rhys’s mate’s house was a little way west ofthatand a fair distance into the countryside. Which meantthat we spent the next very long time on narrow, windy roads occasionally blocked by sheep, trying to navigate by a bickering consensus of low-resolution satnav, poorly understood maps, and guesswork.
The rain didn’t help. It had started drizzling as we passed Birmingham. By the time we hit Stoke-on-Trent, that had upgraded to pissing down. And, once we left the M40 and were into the bit of the country where there were hedges instead of pavements and everywhere was called something like Muclestone or Wetwood, it was raining so hard that the windscreen wipers were just making ripples on a pond.
Eventually, Rhys pulled over on a stretch of grass that I wasn’t totally sure he should have been pulling over on, but was too much of a city boy to challenge, and announced, “Here we are,” with thoroughly unearned cheerfulness.
“Where is here, exactly?” I asked.
“Charlie’s house.”
I peered out of the window, but between the rain and the fact that the sun had set an hour ago, I couldn’t make out anything except wet and bush. “Are you absolutely certain?”
Rhys tapped his phone, which was showing a little blue circle inside a big blue circle. “Google Maps never lies.”
“No,” I admitted, “but it’s sometimesveryeconomical with the truth.”
Oliver patted me gently on the leg. “Perhaps one of us should get out and take a look?”
One of us, we all knew, meant Oliver. I certainly wasn’t about to go, and Rhys didn’t seem to be up for it either. Besides, getting your bearings after a long minibus journey seemed far more like Oliver’s skill set than mine in that it was a useful life skill, rather than the brand of occasionally helpful bullshit that I preferred to trade in.
Clambering past me and out through the front of the bus,Oliver vanished into the night, only to return a few moments later with his hair plastered to his head, his jacket wet through, and his trousers damp to the shins. “Thereisa house there,” he confirmed. “But it’s on the other side of a rather large field.”
“Ah, that’ll be it.” Rhys’s aura of cheeriness had never really gone away, but it had ebbed slightly when it had looked like we might be stuck in the dark and houseless. Now it was flowing back with a vengeance. “The Google Maps do that sometimes in the countryside. They put you in the right general place, but they can’t work out where the roads go. I suppose it’s because they’re hard to see from space.”
Ana with onenreached out an affectionate hand. “I’m not sure that’s quite how satnav works, sweetheart.”
“Either way, it seems to be our best option,” said Oliver. “So I suppose we should all grab our things and get going.”
At the back of the bus, Barbara Clench glowered. “This wasnota well-planned excursion.”
Rhys was still grinning. “No, but it’s been an adventure, hasn’t it?”
“I’m not sure ‘got wet walking across a field’ counts as an adventure,” I pointed out.
“You know the difference between you and me, Luc?” asked Rhys. And before I could reply, he said, “Attitude. If I want to have an adventure, I’ll bloody well have an adventure.”
While everyone was disembarking and Rhys was locking up the minibus, I checked our surroundings. We’d pulled into a sort of dip in the hedgerow next to a gate that wasveryfirmly chained shut. Up and down the road I could see precisely nothing except water and darkness. On the other side of the gate I could see… I mean, I assumed it was a field. But the way the moonlight was gleaming off the surface made it look almost like a lake. A big, square lake with a cottage on the other side of it.
“The plan,” I yelled over the increasingly insistent sound of the rain, “absolutely can’t be to wade acrossthat”—I pointed at the aqua field—“to get tothat.” I pointed at the cottage.
“I agree with Luc,” said Barbara Clench. She’d agree with me on something about once a year. I think she just did it to throw me off. “We’d be better off in the bus.”
Ana with onenshrugged. “The absoluteworstplan is to stand here debating. Come on.” With her jacket over her head and her overnight bag under one arm, she clambered over the fence and set off. To my relief, she wasn’t immediately swallowed by a hidden bog—the water actually only seemed to come up to her ankles—but I wasn’t particularly keen to follow her. Rhys, of course, was, which I suspected was only partly because they were dating and mostly because he was the kind of person who genuinely enjoyed doing this kind of thing.
I gave Oliver a pleading look. “Is it too late to go home?”
“Significantly, I’m afraid.” Taking me by the hand, Oliver climbed elegantly over the fence and then waited for me to do the same. Well, to do the same in that I also climbed, but I was way less elegant about it.
Squelching down on the other side, I let Oliver wrap his free arm around me, leaned my head against him, and tried to believe that Rhys was right and that this was an adventure. Not just a gigantic pain in the arse.
RHYS HAD NOT BEEN RIGHT.This was not an adventure. My feet were wet. I was trying really hard not to think about what happened when you partially flooded a field full of cowpats, and like most bits of the countryside in the dark, the house was much farther away than it seemed. Or I walked much slower than I thought. One of the two. Probably the second one. I was both tired and unfit.
Rhys found the key under the mat because apparently we were in a part of the world where you could still do that without having your TV stolen, and we all hurried very gratefully inside. Well, nearly all.
“I’ll join you soon,” said Professor Fairclough. She was at least as drenched as any of us, but it didn’t seem to faze her at all. Hell, it made her look like the heroine at the end of a romantic comedy, waiting for some jerk to show up and do a big apology scene at her. “Large areas of stagnant water attract mosquitoes, and I’m interested in observing how the weather affects their behaviour.”
“Have a nice time, then,” said Rhys, who seemed to have decided that since this was his friend’s house he was host by proxy. “Everybody else, who fancies a cuppa?”
