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with the utmost seriousness said, ‘Tell me, Alice, is the Birdcage still the best place in town for lunch?’
Ally’s eyes widened. ‘The Birdcage? Is that the place that looks like a birdcage? That has birds? In cages.’
‘That sounds like the place.’
‘I’m not sure I approve of birds in cages,’ she said. ‘Can they fly about? Not just hop around like Savannah’s budgie?’
‘Why don’t you ask your mother? She used to go there all the time when she was your age.’
‘I went there once!’ Claire said, with a glare that warned him that making plans for her was one thing, making them with her daughter was quite another. ‘And there is still a problem.’
‘Why am I not surprised?’ There was nothing in his voice, his manner to betray him and yet she sensed his impatience. He had a plan and she was messing with it. Tough. ‘If you’re worried about timekeeping I’ll swear it was a working lunch.’
‘What else would it be?’ she snapped. Dammit, lunch with Hal should have been… Nothing. ‘Unfortunately, and I’m really sorry about this—’ it wouldn’t hurt to apologise, no matter how insincerely ‘—but I imagine you were planning on going by car?’
‘I wasn’t going to walk,’ he said, using the fob he was holding to unlock the doors of a glossy black Range Rover parked at the kerb.
‘Well, that’s it, you see. Ally doesn’t have her booster seat with her and, as I’m sure you know, it’s against the law for a child to travel in a car without one.’ She waited for the count of three. ‘I suppose, if your heart really is set on The Birdcage, we could catch the bus?’
‘The bus?’ Hal appeared to consider it. ‘That’s a possibility,’ he said. ‘Or Alice could use the booster seat that Bea had fitted for her little girl.’
He lifted an eyebrow, inviting her to counter his check.
Claire had none to offer. Her only thought was that the plum-voiced Ms Webb had a daughter who visited often enough for Hal to need a booster seat in his car.
No more than her journalistic antenna twitching. His relationships were news. There was no other reason for her to be interested. At all.
‘Well…’ she said. ‘How great is that, Ally? I wasn’t much older than you the one time I went to the Birdcage.’ Emphasis on the ‘one.’
‘My mistake,’ Hal said, as he lifted Ally up. She scrambled across onto the booster seat and quickly fastened her seat belt before any more objections were raised. ‘Your mother talked about it so much that I assumed it must be a regular event. According to my mother,’ he stressed, presumably to establish that he was not in the habit of gossiping with her mother. As if. ‘Didn’t you have a good time?’
She concentrated on checking Ally’s seat belt then shut the door before turning to face Hal. ‘Truthfully?’
‘What else?’ he asked.
‘I hated every minute of it.’
‘Really? Well, you weren’t with me on that occasion,’ he said as he opened the passenger door for her.
‘My mother would never have invited you out to tea with a bunch of little girls.’
‘With or without,’ he agreed, with a wry smile. ‘I was definitely not her type, a sentiment I returned with interest. But little girls would have been safe enough.’
‘I don’t doubt it. You had bigger fish to fry.’
She caught his eye and despite doing her best to be cool, she discovered that what she wanted to do most of all was smile right back at him.
Despite the bad start, the prospect of lunch with Hal North at a pretty riverside restaurant had a ridiculously uplifting effect on her. Which was, well, ridiculous.
‘Let’s see,’ she said, doing her best to keep her feet firmly planted on the ground. She had to remember that he hated her father, was messing with her career and she knew practically nothing about his life since he’d left Cranbrook Park. Who knew what ulterior motive was driving him? ‘It was my eighth birthday so you must have been about fourteen or fifteen…’ She pretended to think about it, but she could remember exactly what he’d been doing—or at least who he’d been doing it with—the year she was eight.
She’d seen him from the back of her mother’s car that day. She’d been dressed up for her tea party in a pink frilly nightmare of a dress and as they’d driven through the village she’d seen him standing at the bus stop with his arm around a girl in a skirt so short that her legs had looked ten yards long.
Her mother had kept her eyes on the road, but there had been a distinct ‘tut’ as they’d passed.
She, on the other hand, had been green with envy, turning round in her seat to stare until her mother had spotted her in the mirror and told her to sit up straight before she creased her dress.
‘That,’ she said, ‘if I’m not mistaken, was the year you were going out with the incredibly, um, precocious Lily Parker.’
‘Was it?’ His eyes creased into a smile that warned her she’d said too much, remembered too well, betrayed an interest she would have denied with her last breath. ‘Possibly, although I can’t imagine that even Lily, with her undoubtedly precocious assets, lasted an entire year.’
‘So many girls, so little time,’ she said, as he held the door and then as she hesitated at the high step up, placed his hand on her bottom and boosted her up into the front seat. For a moment their eyes locked. It was like descending on a roller coaster. That sensation of falling, leaving your stomach behind…
Working with Hal North Rule Number Three: Don’t make eye contact.
‘I was desperately envious of her red-leather skirt,’ she said, just so that he’d know that it was Lily she’d noticed, rather than him. ‘I always swore I’d have one exactly like it when I was fourteen.’
‘And did you?’
‘Oh, please! Do you think my mother would have allowed me out of the house wearing something like that?’
‘A clever girl like you would have found a way. Did you never climb out of your bedroom window?’
‘Is that what Lily did?’
‘That would be telling.’
In other words, yes, but by the time she was old enough there had been no one to be bad with. Make that no one she’d wanted to be bad with.
She shook her head. ‘I had too much homework to spend my nights hanging around in Maybridge,’ she said, turning away to pull down her seat belt. ‘Okay, sweetheart?’ she asked, twisting in her seat to smile at Ally as he shut the door and walked around to take the seat beside her.
Ally nodded but she was sitting very still, clearly anxious not to do anything to make this unexpected treat go away. She was really missing Savannah, but refused to talk about it.
‘Okay?’ he asked, when she’d called Penny.
‘Fine.’
Not fine. He’d offered Penny a full-time job and she’d turned it down because she needed someone to look after Ally. She paid her, but not as much as Hal, who had apparently put all the estate staff on the same pay scale, and with the same benefits, as his HALGO staff. She couldn’t match that kind of hourly rate.
‘I’ll talk to her about working full-time when I see her,’ she said. ‘So, what’s wrong with your ceilings?’
‘My ceilings?’ He shrugged. ‘A combination of old age,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to check the traffic before pulling out, ‘and a leaking roof.’
‘Ouch. That sounds expensive.’
‘It