Pam squeezed Emily’s shoulders and planted a kiss on her head.
“Come on, Emily, my love,” she said. “Let’s leave poor Annie here to eat her dinner and give the local politics a rest.”
Emily stood and arm in arm went back to the bar with Pam.
Bill placed a cruet set on the table and said, “Enjoy!” before he too left her in peace at last.
* * *
—
Happily stuffed and having received texts from both Alex and Peter to say they’d each arrived home safely, Annie headed out of the pub. As she pulled open the porch door, she was confronted by a man wiping frantically at a gray slick of bird shit on his head with a supermarket receipt.
“Happens to the best of us,” she said as she let him pass. He grimaced at her, and as the door squeaked closed she heard Bill’s voice ring out through the pub: “Shit on?”
Annie parked herself on one of the benches on the lawn and listened to the birds noisily settling down to roost.
The Pomegranate Seed was closed on Mondays, so the waning of a Sunday （one of their busiest days of the week） was always plump with the promise of liberation. Habitually, she felt that promise now, and then she reminded herself that it wasn’t just Monday she had off but Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday . . . it was a lot to comprehend. What would she do with all that spare time?
She thought back to when Alex and Peter were little. Annie would drop them off at school or nursery with hugs and kisses, and then she’d race home to get the house straight before work at eleven. At three o’clock, she would dash back to the school gates to pick them up. A play in the park, help with homework, cook dinner, do bath and storytime, brief the babysitter, and head back to the restaurant by seven fifteen p.m. to oversee the dinner service.
School holidays were a whirlwind of guilt and self-loathing.
“You’re amazing!” people would say. “I don’t know how you do it!”
And Annie would think, If only they knew what a fraud I feel most of the time. She was forever waiting for them to realize that she was making it up as she went along.
Boisterous melodies from a live folk band burst out of the open door to the Captain’s Bounty along with the smell of roast beef and potatoes cooked in duck fat, rooting her back in the present. The joyous sounds of banjo and fiddle seemed to suit the landscape. It was a little before six, the Captain’s Bounty’s turn to feed the masses. Annie determined to test the Captain’s hospitality soon.
There were a couple more weeks before the evenings would start drawing in earlier. But although it was light, it was cooler now than it had been at the same time even three weeks ago, and Annie was glad of her sweater. She walked slowly down the hill, soaking in this beautiful place that would be her home for the coming months. And she felt, well, she felt lucky.
Chapter 18
The next morning, Annie was woken by a strange squeaking sound and the tinny clatter of metal. She was momentarily disoriented until, remembering where she was, she pushed the discombobulation of sleep aside and opened her eyes. The wallpaper was a festival of pink tea-rose posies tied together with lilac ribbons in repeating patterns around the walls. The morning light permeated the cream jacquard curtains. Annie stretched and rubbed the sleep from her eyes, carefully so as not to encourage more wrinkles.
There came another metallic clatter. Annie padded out into the hallway in her blue scotty-dog pajamas, scratching her bird’s-nest head as she went. She yawned loudly as she walked into the sitting room and came face to face with an unfeasibly tanned man looking at her from the other side of the glass.
Annie screamed and threw a scatter cushion hard at the window. The cushion thumped dully at the window and flopped onto the window seat. The tanned man looked down at the cushion and then up at Annie, bemused. Annie dashed back into the hall and stood with her back to the wall, panting. Her brain clicked back into gear, and she realized it must be the third Monday of the month, which meant the man at the window was Paul, the window cleaner. Jeez! Where is the time going? she wondered.
Annie mussed her hair into what she hoped was more beach-tousled than sweaty-bed, straightened her pajamas, and walked back into the sitting room with as much dignity as she could muster. Paul was laughing, hands held up—one holding a squeegee—in surrender, the way only a person supremely confident at the top of a ladder could do. He had a friendly face. His skin was the color of a well-roasted chicken, and a career spent outside had given him wrinkles around his eyes and mouth that deepened into well-worn creases when he smiled.