No reply. She put her head into the drawing room and the kitchen – the obvious places – then went up to the bedroom they’d been stripping. The walls were now bare plaster and a great pile of paper scraps lay in the centre. Her eye rested on the little message and then she blinked rapidly, trying to expel it.
Jason was not here. He must be painting in the attic.
But the attic was empty too, the great mural paintings surrounding a vacant space.
Jenna told herself not to panic, to breathe normally, to stop assuming the worst. Descending the attic stairs, she called his name again.
When no reply came, she ran in and out of every room, her pace increasingly hectic, her hands increasingly shaky. He was nowhere to be found. Finally, just as she was about to drop to the kitchen floor and sob, she noticed that the back door was open.
She ran out in the wilderness of garden and found him, sitting on the low wall that bordered the kitchen yard, drinking a can of beer, with his shirt off and Bowyer purring at his side.
‘Jesus,’ she gasped, holding the lintel of the door for support. ‘Thank fuck. Oh, God. Don’t do that to me again.’
‘Do what?’ He squinted at her. She still held the paper bag from the sex shop.
‘I thought you … I thought … Gone. Been taken. Or just gone.’
She doubled over, panting out the remains of her panic.
‘Oh, come here, you daft thing,’ he said, crumpling the beer can and throwing it, with deadly accuracy, into an ancient water butt. ‘I’m not going anywhere, am I?’
She joined him on the wall, subsiding against him, welcoming the reassurance of his arm around her waist, cradling her head on his bare, sun-kissed shoulder.
‘If you’d gone,’ she whispered, ‘I don’t know what I’d have done.’
‘Looked for me, I hope,’ he said. ‘Hush.’ He kissed her hair, pulling her tighter into him. ‘I only came out to look for Bowyer. He hadn’t eaten all day and I was starting to worry.’
‘He seems fine,’ remarked Jenna dryly, observing the dark grey cat stretched out in the sun in a state of blissful laziness.
‘Yeah, he’s just found himself a favourite bush, that’s all. Can’t say I blame him.’
‘Oh, stop it.’
‘It’s a nice day, though. Thought I’d join him, that’s all. Nobody can see into this back garden and, if they could, well, look around you.’ He sang the opening bars of Guns ’n’ Roses’ ‘Welcome to the Jungle’.
‘It’s a risk, though.’
‘Barely. Better than when I was skip-diving, before you moved in.’
‘I suppose.’
‘What do you think of that?’ He nudged his toe at a paving slab. It had a clump of weedy overgrowth on it that, when pushed aside, revealed a rusty iron ring.
‘Oh! The cellar? Do you think?’
‘Nah. I’ve tried pulling it up but it’s no good. I thought it might be though.’
On impulse, she threw her arms around his neck and made him kiss her. He had no objections to this, and they smooched in the mellowing sunshine, until the paper bag slipped off her lap and on to the flagstones.
‘You haven’t showed me your shopping yet,’ he said, with a sly smile.
‘No, and I’m not getting it out here,’ she retorted. ‘Not in front of that cat.’
Jason laughed. ‘He won’t mind. That cat’s seen stuff’d make his fur curl. I’m surprised it hasn’t.’
‘Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’
She shuffled off the wall, picked up the paper bag and walked demurely back into the kitchen.