Chapter Forty-Five
Sunday 28th July
Growing
They'd agreed on another lunch the following Sunday. He hadn't spoken to her much during the week. She'd come over on Wednesday evening, even offered to cook, it was a pierce the lid and microwave affair, but Harry wasn't complaining. With every day she seemed to gain colour and more substance. The walking ghost that had screamed at him when he'd rung her doorbell a month or so back was fading and a softer more alive Nikki was emerging.
She'd needed to do several loads of washing and after a couple of glasses of wine waiting for it to finish she had decided to sleep in the spare room. The atmosphere between them was changing. Now the house was empty of much of Leo's stuff, Nikki was coping better or maybe it was because the fractures in their relationship were beginning to heal.
He still wondered about the reaction he would receive as he rung her doorbell.
"It's growing!" she said excitedly as she flung the door open to him. "Come and look!"
Harry followed her through to the kitchen to see a small green shoot; the seed case still attached emerging from the earth in his pot.
"It actually grew!" she squealed excitedly.
"Yes it did," Harry agreed with a big smile.
The pub this week was busy but not heaving, they took a table outside on the bank of the Thames. The weather was almost as hot as New York, up in the thirties.
"I thought about joining a rowing club." Harry admitted as they watched an eight row smoothly passed them.
"Do you think you'll have time?"
"I'd have to make time, I think I was worried about being isolated, as much as I didn't like people getting in your face and strangers talking to you in America, I thought London might be lonely if I worked on my own all the time."
"So why haven't you?"
"Because after cutting Leo's hedge with the world's heaviest hedge trimmer and battling the foot high grass, if I exercised my arms any more I'd look like Popeye!"
Nikki laughed and gave one of his biceps a squeeze, and raised an eyebrow at him. "You don't want to find somewhere else you could sing?"
Harry shook his head.
"But why not, you were so good, you are good."
"I can't."
"You could if you wanted to. You won't," she said perceptively. "It would remind you too much of them? You really do miss them don't you?"
"I really do," Harry admitted and then laughed.
"I don't know what they'd make of this place."
"Not there style?"
"Not a bit."
"None of them are!"
They sipped their drinks in silence.
The work they had done last weekend had done much to restore their friendship, but in all that Harry was sorting out, one thing remained and that was the question of where to set up his office. The sale of his flat had gone through. The tenant was due to move out at the end of the month and there was already a buyer lined up to move in from the 1st of August. He'd soon have the capital he just needed a property.
"So what's so difficult about finding office space?" Nikki asked. "Show me what you've looked at."
Harry pulled his tablet from his bag and showed Nikki the houses he'd seen that week and listed what exactly was wrong with them.
"Too big, too small, wrong location, too much renovation, no parking, no office space, office space but terrible living accommodation." Harry rattled off, clicking through a series of screens.
"Alright grumpy."
"It's just so depressing," Harry whined. He was beyond frustrated with his fruitless search.
"Maybe you're just not looking for the right thing?"
"What do you suggest?"
Harry clicked back to the homepage to type in the new parameters.
"You don't really want to live above a shop do you?" Nikki asked.
Harry paused, he had been to see a number of properties like this, they seemed to make the most sense but the flats were uniformly grotty and depressing.
"What about locations? Have you specified locations?"
"I've tried to keep them within a twenty minute drive of the Lyell," Harry fixed the postcode and distance variables.
"Oh give it here," Nikki demanded. "It can't be that hard." She quickly tapped in some numbers and looked at the results.
"No, no, no, no," she muttered her finger flicking across the screen. She tapped in some more, Harry was bored. He'd been giving himself Sunday afternoons off, no house clearance, no cleaning, no setting up work stuff just some space to clear his head.
"What about this?" Nikki asked.
"It's a family house, has an annexe that was once used as a dental surgery, it has parking, it's fifteen minutes from the Lyell. Look it even has a garden!" Nikki said excitedly.
"I don't believe you, you're making it up. I have estate agents phoning me every ten minutes during the day thinking they've found me the next wonder property and none of them have mentioned an old dentist's."
"Just have a look Harry." She scrolled through the pictures starting from the garden and the back through the house. She was moving them so quickly Harry could hardly keep up.
"Hang on, that must have had three bedrooms!" Harry gasped. "Why would I need a house with three bedrooms?"
"Stuff the number of bedrooms Harry and look at the annexe."
"It'll need updating, they haven't even shown a picture of the kitchen and you know what that means…"
"Look at that house Harry!" Nikki cooed as she reached the front picture. A smart double fronted white Georgian detached house stood proudly at the front of the screen, all it would need would be a trailing rose and it was the archetypal English house.
"That house is not in London," Harry scoffed. "Are you sure you didn't hit Londonderry by accident?"
"I don't think there are houses like that in Derry," Nikki said.
Harry grabbed the computer and looked at the address.
"It's close to the river, you could still do your rowing and it's not far from Kew Gardens." Nikki prattled on.
Harry scratched his head; there was something too good to be true about this property.
"It says it's on St Cecilia Road…There's probably a massive church next door with over enthusiastic campanologists. I don't want to be woken up every Sunday at the crack of dawn when they start to ring the bells."
Nikki shook her head at him and the waiter arrived and delivered their meals.
"Nikki!" Harry screeched making the waiter jump, and spill some of Harry's beer.
"Sorry," Harry apologised.
"Err, enjoy your meal, the teenager muttered and promptly disappeared."
"You changed the price. That house is £850,000!"
"It's beautiful though isn't it?"
"It doesn't matter it's out of my price range. I was working as a teacher in New York, we didn't get crazy bonuses. If we were lucky we got a pen and some NYU post its."
Nikki had grabbed the tablet back and was trying to get a google earth picture of the house in between eating mouthfuls of salad.
"Why don't we drive over and see it later?" she asked.
"Nikki you are insane! I can't afford it; I can't even get close to affording it."
"But you do like it? It is what you were looking for?"
"It's exactly what I was looking for," Harry admitted enjoying his Yorkshire pudding. He did miss a decent bagel but Yorkshire pudding was worth being in England for.
"Let's go and see it," Nikki begged.
"Why? What good will it do?" Harry asked.
"Well maybe it will inspire you to take on a business partner. Someone to help fund your start up costs?"
"The point of doing all this, was to be my own boss not be beholden to someone else." Harry stopped chewing, his roast potato sticking to the inside of his mouth. He took a sip of his beer and looked hard at Nikki. She was smiling and her eyes were smiling. She was smiling in a way that he hadn't seen her smile for a very long time. Not since she'd shown up unannounced at LaGuardia.
"Nikki?"
She continued to smile.
"I promised I would not take your share of Leo's money. It's yours. I won't take it."
"What if I want to give it to you?"
"Why? To become my business partner?"
Harry took another sip of his drink, something was moving between them and he had to get his answer right, he had been playing a careful game up until now, trying not to upset her, trying to help her through the dark days before asking her what he really wanted to ask her.
"If you'll have me," she said shyly.
"You know I don't want you as my business partner…" Nikki's eyes snapped up to his, hurt and anger already hovering in her eyes. "You do still know that I want more? I want it all. I don't want you just to be my business partner. I want you as my life partner Nikki. And I want that decision to be yours when you're ready, not because I can't find office space."
He watched her bite her lip and push salad around her plate for a while.
"I think," Nikki began, remembering a conversation they'd had a couple of weeks back.
"I think I might be ready soon, to make up that dance we missed."
Harry closed his mouth realising it had dropped open when he had started to stare at her, and prayed it wasn't still full of food.
"If I make an appointment to go see this place, will you come with me?"
Nikki nodded. "I will," she smiled.
"How's the salad?" he asked.
"I'm enjoying it, it's good. How's the roast?"
"It's good too, I haven't had a Sunday roast in ages!"
"Worth coming back for?"
"What this roast? There might be a few other things I missed more."
"A few?"
"No," he replied. "Not a few. Just you." And just as she had in the pub a fortnight ago she held his gaze and smiled.
Lots of things setting up in these three, let me know what you have figured out : )
