So, indeed, it proved. Barney told her that his ex-holiday-rep friend Nita Davies was going to meet them at the airport. He wanted to check the time their flight got in.
‘That’s very kind of her. Are you sure she won’t mind?’
‘Don’t worry about Nita,’ said Barney airily. ‘She owes me a few favours. She’s happy to do it. Besides, while she’s driving you from Dalaman to Morning Glory she can fill you in a bit about the local area.’
‘That’d be great,’ said Jude. ‘Thank you very much for fixing it.’
‘No problem. Like I say, I can fix anything out there,’ said Barney. ‘Anything you need, just give me a call on the mobile.’
‘Thanks very much.’ And Jude gave him the details of their flight to Dalaman.
But then it became clear that obtaining practical information was not the only reason for Barney’s call. He sounded as bouncy as ever, but there was something almost surreptitious about his ebullience. ‘Jude, I just wanted to say that I will be out in Turkey during the time you’re there.’
‘Oh? Yes, you said you might be. Are you telling me that you’re going to need Morning Glory after all?’
‘Heavens, no. I’ve got plenty of other places to stay out there.’
‘Good. Well, Carole and I will look forward to seeing you.’
‘I will very much look forward to seeing you.’ The way he said it sounded warning bells.
‘Oh?’
‘Listen, Jude …’ His voice became deeper, more intimate. ‘It’s been really great seeing you again.’
‘It’s been nice to see you,’ she said cautiously.
‘When you came to the house last week with your friend, I was just blown away.’
‘By Carole? She’ll be very flattered,’ said Jude, hoping to joke her way out of what was about to come.
‘No, of course not by Carole. By you, Jude. It just all came back to me, how much we meant to each other all that time ago. Don’t you feel the same?’
‘My recollection,’ she replied carefully, ‘is that yes, we had a very good couple of months, which I look back on with pleasure. But it was a long time ago, and a lot has happened since. We’ve both been married twice, for one thing. You still are married.’
‘Yes, but things haven’t been working out with Henry recently.’
‘I don’t want to hear anything about that, Barney. Presumably Henry’s not going out to Turkey with you?’
‘No. Which is all the more reason why you and I—’
‘Look, Barney, if you’re going to come on to me while we’re out in Turkey, then we may as well pull the plug on the whole idea of going there – right now.’
‘Jude, I wouldn’t put you under any pressure to do anything you didn’t want to do.’
‘Good. I’m very glad to hear it.’
‘It’s just the thought of us both being out there at the same time and … well, it would be good to get together.’
‘I’m sure we will. Meet for a meal or something. But you seem to be forgetting, amongst other things, that I’ll have Carole with me.’
‘I’m sure you’d be able to get away from her for the odd hour.’
‘You don’t know Carole. She hangs on like a Rottweiler,’ said Jude, again trying to neutralize Barney’s advances with flippancy.
‘Jude, look, we’re both grown-ups. And I’ve got to an age when, if I feel an attraction for someone, I—’
‘Stop it, Barney. May I make it entirely clear to you that nothing is going to happen between us in Turkey?’
‘You say that now, but it’s a very romantic place. When we get out there …’
‘When we get out there nothing will have changed. And, Barney, will you please promise me that you will not come on to me at any point while we’re in Kayaköy?’
‘Very well,’ he said grudgingly. But in his voice there was another tone Jude recognized of old. Barney Willingdon was one of the most cocksure men she had ever met. It never occurred to him that any woman he fancied might not reciprocate his feelings. And, to her considerable annoyance, she found that she did still feel a small tug of attraction towards him.
His phone call unsettled her. The trip to Turkey and Barney’s generous offer of the use of Morning Glory had all seemed so straightforward. But now it had become potentially complicated. It’s true, Jude thought ruefully, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
She was also annoyed with herself for not posing some questions to Barney about something else while she’d had the opportunity. She’d liked to have asked him what happened to his first wife, Zoë …
SIX
Carole Seddon spent the Sunday before they left ticking things off the many lists she had made. Her tasks included taking Gulliver to the kennels she had chosen for him. The look of reproach he cast upon her as they parted made her feel as if she had been solely responsible for the Massacre of the Innocents.
Back at High Tor, Carole faced the decision of whether or not to take her laptop with her to Turkey. It was heavy, it was a potential target for thieves and it never under normal circumstances strayed from the spare room. But then again she was sometimes shocked by how much she relied on the machine. So many things were so easily googleable. And she wouldn’t like to be out of email contact with Stephen, Gaby and Lily. She decided she would take it. Besides, Barney had said that Morning Glory had broadband connectivity. The laptop would go in her hand baggage. So another item was ticked off a list.
And in between her packing and panicking, Carole brushed up on the handy phrases in Turkish which she had found online. She didn’t bother with how the words were written, concentrating instead on the phonetic pronunciations that were listed. Carole cracked ‘yes’ and ‘no’ first. They were respectively ‘ev-et’ and ‘hi-ear’. She felt fairly confident of greeting people with ‘mare-ha-ba’ which meant ‘hello’, but found that saying goodbye was more complicated. It depended on whether you were the person leaving or the person being left. The former said ‘hosh-ch-kal’, while the latter had to say ‘guu-leh guu-leh’. ‘Please’ was ‘lut-fen’, and ‘thank you’ ‘te-sh-qu-err ed-err-im’. More useful, Carole reckoned, would be ‘I don’t speak Turkish’ (‘turk-jeh bill-mi-yor-um’), ‘Do you speak English?’ (‘inn-gliz-je con-nush-or mus-un-us’) and, most useful of all, ‘I don’t understand’ (‘si-zi ann-la-ma-yor-um’).
But, search as she might, she couldn’t find the Turkish for the vital question, ‘Do you sell Imodium?’
Carole’s bags had been packed and repacked many hours before Jude started to think what she was going to take to Morning Glory. For her, the Sunday was a day of back-to-back healing sessions, which left her completely wiped out. When she said goodbye to her last client it was seven thirty in the evening. Before pouring herself a large drink and getting something to eat (she hadn’t had time for lunch), she checked for messages on her mobile phone. There was one, from Henry Willingdon, asking her to ring back.
Some final housekeeping detail about the villa, Jude supposed. She was wrong.
As soon as she got through, Henry said very directly, ‘I just wanted to warn you. Don’t get involved with Barney.’
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to. Getting involved with Barney is the last thing on my mind.’
‘He flew out to Turkey this morning. He’s going there because of you.’ There was a lot of tension behind the upper-class vowels.
‘He’s not going there because of me. I assume he’s got business out there.’
‘That’s just a smokescreen. It’s you he wants to see.’
‘I’m sure that’s not the case,’ said Jude, feeling rather wretched.