The Forgotten Village. Lorna Cook
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It occurred to her now that he hadn’t even asked where she’d been all day.
Guy waited for her to finish her sentence and when she didn’t, he asked, ‘Come with me tomorrow if you like? The photos in the church are wonderful too. A real eye-opener. You should see them before you finish your holiday.’
What would she be doing tomorrow, waiting about for Liam to grace her with his presence after surfing? And she did want to take a better look around.
‘All right then, yes,’ Melissa said, ‘if you don’t mind me tagging along?’
He beamed. ‘It would be a pleasure.’
She looked at him and wondered how she’d got into this position. She was sat having dinner with a minor celebrity, albeit one she’d never heard of, who she’d only met a matter of hours ago and she was arranging to meet him again tomorrow.
Melissa felt a stab of guilt about Liam and then tried to quash it immediately. Liam was making her feel, well, a bit crap actually and Guy Cameron was making her feel very at ease. They were only going to look at some photos. It was hardly a date.
They ate their dinner and talked. Guy revealed he lived on the fringes of London where town just about met country and she confessed that she lived in a very unsexy part of town where London met Essex.
‘And what do you do, when you aren’t holidaying in Dorset?’ he asked while they waited for pudding.
‘I’m currently in between jobs,’ she said, trying not to sound too embarrassed. She didn’t really fancy telling him she’d jacked in her job in a fit of idealistic madness and was now temping.
‘Oh right?’ He was clearly waiting for more.
‘Just office work. Admin really. Nothing very exciting. How did you get into TV presenting?’ Melissa asked, attempting to move the conversation on quickly. She just couldn’t admit to this incredibly successful and rather good-looking man how much of a failure she was.
The waitress brought their pudding over. They’d decided to share one of the restaurant’s famous soufflés. Guy didn’t have a sweet tooth, but he was happy to make the meal last a bit longer. He was enjoying Melissa’s company. It was the first time he’d been out with a woman in a long time.
‘I don’t know, really. I suppose I sort of fell into it. Someone suggested I’d be good on a radio segment and it all spiralled from there.’
‘I’ve got to confess that I’ve never actually watched any of your programmes,’ Melissa said, pushing her spoon into the soft, pillowy pudding and obviously avoiding his eye contact.
He smiled. ‘Well, thank you for being honest.’ He was so used to people approaching him because he was in the public eye, believing they already knew him. It was refreshing talking to Melissa. She didn’t gush compliments at him.
‘And also, until I read your name on the leaflet this morning,’ Melissa continued, ‘I hadn’t actually heard of you either.’ He watched her spoon soufflé delicately into her mouth.
He laughed now. ‘Believe it or not, that’s music to my ears.’
‘Really?’ she asked. ‘I did wonder if it was exhausting being a celebrity?’ Guy grimaced at the word celebrity and Melissa continued. ‘Whether you had to watch your back all the time in case someone papped you; whether you could go on a real bender in the pub without someone telling the Daily Mail?’
‘Ah, no one cares about a Z-lister like me,’ he said. ‘I get photographed a lot by lovely middle-aged women who just want a nice picture to show their friends. And I’m far too clean-cut to have anything I do end up in the gossip rags,’ he said with a wink.
‘Shame.’ She gave him a sideways smile. They looked at each other for a few seconds before she turned to signal the waitress for the bill. ‘I should be getting back.’
‘I’ll get this,’ Guy said. ‘I insist.’
‘Are you sure?’
He nodded, pulling out his wallet.
Melissa put her purse away with a reluctant look. ‘All right,’ she said slowly. ‘But you have to let me buy you lunch tomorrow then. Even if it’s only a plastic sandwich from a service station after we’ve been to Tyneham.’
‘It’s a deal.’
Melissa stood to leave and he held out his hand to shake hers to seal the deal.
She shook it with a smile. ‘Erm, 11 a.m. okay for you? At the main entrance?’
‘See you then,’ he said.
She turned and gave him a little glance from the door. He waved goodbye and then sat down and cringed at himself when she was out of sight, pushing the rest of the pudding away. Who shakes hands after a nice dinner like that?
He glanced around him. A few people had recognised him and were smiling as he caught their eye. He nodded to politely acknowledge them. One lady was taking a sneaky picture of him on her phone. Oh well, not giving Melissa a friendly kiss on the cheek had perhaps done him a favour.
Melissa stood by the bookings desk for a few seconds, rifling in her bag for her car keys. The keeper of the bookings diary was off wielding her power over someone else and so Melissa did something she knew she was going to regret. She grabbed the diary and scanned through the list of names. She found what she was looking for in seconds and then put the book back before leaving the restaurant.
As she walked to her car, she felt cold and it wasn’t due to the temperature. Liam’s name was in the book, listed against an earlier booking. Table for two.
Melissa knew what she had to do. She and Liam needed to have ‘The Talk’.
But the idea of speaking to him about it created a hollow feeling in her stomach. This kind of thing had never gone down well at home. As a child, she’d spent far too much time in her room listening to her parents fight, listening to her mother plead with her father over one thing or another. The muffled tones rarely gave away what the argument was about, but her mother’s crying at the end of almost every row had certainly been audible. But Melissa was stronger than her mother. She was sure of it. And at least there were no children hiding in an upstairs bedroom if a fight did break out between her and Liam.
She stood in the shower the following morning, thinking for far too long, letting the hot water run over her. Melissa considered her track record with men. It wasn’t great. She knew that. Before Liam, six months had been her absolute personal best when it came to relationships. She knew it must be something she was doing. Or not doing. Perhaps that was a throwback to watching her parents kill their own relationship one fight at a time.
Liam had been asleep by the time she’d got in last night and Melissa was secretly grateful that he’d already left to go surfing by the time she’d woken up this morning. Although whether they spoke about their issues, including Liam’s mystery restaurant booking, tonight or tomorrow, this delay was only putting off the inevitable. Things weren’t working and Melissa wanted to know why.
She had hoped this holiday was going to fix whatever it was that had already gone so horribly wrong, but it was only highlighting that they really weren’t very compatible at all. Somehow, none of it seemed quite so horrific during the daily grind of working life when they only saw each other a few evenings a week.
Maybe that was the problem. Maybe he’d lost respect for her having jacked her job in. But she hadn’t been out of work for that long and she was on the hunt for something more suitable. It certainly didn’t help that Liam was silent a lot of the time these days and that Melissa did most of the talking, often to fill the silence. He’d never been a big chatter and his silent brooding was one of the things that Melissa had originally found attractive about him. But now his inability