by Beth O'Leary
13
Leena
“Are you sure you don’t want to just buy them a cake?” Ethan says.
I’m balancing the phone on top of Grandma’s vintage stand mixer while I try to bake please-like-me brownies. I’ve decided Roland and Penelope will be my first target in winning the May Day Committee around to my medieval theme. If a team have banded together against you, the best approach is to divide and conquer, and I sensed weakness from Penelope. Separated from Betsy’s influence, I think she might be quite friendly. She is letting me borrow her car, after all.
“No! I’m having a rural idyll up here in Hamleigh, remember? Baking is very idyllic and rural.” The knife slips across the cold block of butter and stabs me in the thumb. I try very hard not to swear, so as not to ruin the general air of domestic goddessery I’m trying to evoke here.
“Baking is also quite hard,” Ethan says mildly, “especially if you’ve never done it before.”
“I have a comprehensive blog post guiding me through,” I tell him, squinting down at the printout beside the mixing bowl and sucking my sore thumb. I open the pack of flour and it tears, sending a snowfall of self-raising down my jeans. “Gah.”
“Angel, come on. Just buy some brownies, put them on a plate, and do something interesting instead. Hey, I’ve been staring at this system requirements traceability matrix for hours and I’m getting nowhere. Want to dig your teeth into that?”
I brush down my jeans. I actually really don’t want to get my teeth into that—it’s been surprisingly great forgetting about Selmount while I’m up here. Also, even I don’t like system requirements traceability matrices.
“Do you mind if I don’t?” I say tentatively. “Sorry, I just feel like I need a break.”
“Whoa, turning down a spreadsheet! That’s got to be a first.”
“Sorry!”
“No worries. I should go, though—this is hours of work if I’m going it solo.”
“Oh, right. Sorry. You’re still coming this weekend, though, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, for sure, if I can get away. All right, angel, speak soon!”
“Good—”
Oh. He’s gone already.
* * *
That evening, Penelope answers the door and stares at the plate of very, very dark brown brownies that I have thrust toward her.
“Umm. Hello?” she says.
“Hi! I made brownies!”
I am relying on the “it’s the thought that counts” principle here, because these brownies are clearly burned.
“Look, I’m a horrible baker,” I confess, “but I really wanted to bring something around to say thanks for letting me share the car.”
Penelope stares at me blankly for a moment. “Roland!” she yells, so loudly I let out a little surprised eep. “Sorry,” she says, noticing. “His ears, you know. Roland! Roland! Marian’s girl is here, she wants to talk about the car!”
“Perhaps I could come in and speak to you both?” I suggest, as Penelope continues to shout over her shoulder. She has impressive lungs for a woman so small and frail-looking.
“Umm,” Penelope says, suddenly rather shifty.
“Penelope, dear!” calls a familiar voice from inside the house. “Come and look at these tropical cocktails Jackson’s made, they’re ever so fun!”
That was definitely Betsy.
My mouth drops open. Jackson appears in the hall behind Penelope.
“Oh. Hi,” he says. He is holding a cocktail in what I think may be a knickerbocker glory glass. It even has a small yellow umbrella in the top.
A small yellow umbrella takes planning.
“Are you having a May Day pitch meeting without me?” I say, fixing him with my steeliest glare, the one I usually reserve for men caught mid-perv on the tube.
Jackson steps back slightly. “No,” he says. “No, no, really not. I’m just making dinner for Penelope and Roland, I do it every week, and sometimes Basil and Betsy come along, and we just … got talking about cocktails.”
“You just got talking, did you?”
“Why don’t you come in, Leena?” Penelope says.
I step inside. The house is like a time capsule from the sixties: an autumnal patterned carpet in oranges and browns, dark oil paintings, three china ducks flying their way up the hall wall and past the stair lift. It’s stiflingly warm and smells of potpourri and gravy.
Roland, Betsy, Basil, and Penelope are sitting around the dining table, all clutching cocktails with variously colored umbrellas and slices of pineapple adorning their glasses.
“Hello,” I say, as pleasantly as I can manage. “So. What’s on the menu tonight?”
“Just a roast,” Jackson says, disappearing into the kitchen.
Oh, sure, just a roast.
“And brownies for pudding,” he says.
I’m glad he’s no longer able to see my expression because I’m confident I have not managed to disguise my dismay at this news. I quietly set down my plate of blackened brownies on the Welsh dresser by the dining-room door, wondering whether there’s somewhere I can hide them so Jackson doesn’t see them. That’s quite a large pot plant over there. The brownies could definitely pass for soil if I put them around the base.
“What was it you wanted to talk about, dear?” Penelope asks, making her way back to her spot at the table.
“The car!” I say, after a moment of trying to remember what my cover story was for bringing around my please-like-me brownies.
“Oh, yes. Serving you well, is it?” Roland asks.
“Yes, I just wanted to say thanks—it’s been brilliant,” I lie.
That car is an absolute wreck. I have discovered in the last week of driving it that the air-conditioning switches inexplicably between sauna hot and see-your-breath cold, and no amount of reading the manual online can help me figure out why. It is definitely making me a more dangerous driver. I now regularly remove or put on clothing while at the wheel, for example.
“Let’s hope for Penelope’s sake that you’re better at parking than Eileen,” Basil chortles.
I frown at that, but Betsy’s snapped back before I have the chance.
“At least Eileen’s got enough sense to tie her shoelaces before she marches down the street, Basil,” she says tartly.
Basil scowls, rubbing his knee. “That fall was no laughing matter, thank you. And it wasn’t my shoelaces, it was the potholes on Lower Lane. They’ll be the death of us, I know they will.”
“It’s true,” Roland says. “I nearly toppled my scooter down there the other day.”
“Cocktail?” Jackson says, reappearing from the kitchen with the oven gloves over his shoulder and a fresh cocktail in his hand.
I eye the cocktail. It does look excellent. And it’s good to sample the competition. “Yes, please. Though if any future May Day pitching sessions are occurring, I would appreciate an invite,” I tell him, raising my eyebrows.
“It wasn’t a…” He sighs. “Fine. No more tropical cocktail-tasting without your knowledge. Happy?”
“Perfectly.” A thought occurs. “While I’ve got you all, actually, I’ve been meaning to ask something. Getting a sponsor for May Day—had Grandma decided against it, for some reason?”
“Ah,” Basil says, “Eileen’s latest project. She didn’t get anywhere with that one either, from what I remember.”
“And now she’s off in London, I thought we’d take it off your plate,” Betsy says, sipping her cocktail.
Basil shakes his head incredulously. “Eileen has some strange ideas, but taking off to London has to be her strangest. You know she’s living with a lesbian?” he tells Betsy. “And a pregnant one at that? Can you believe it?”
“Yes,” I interrupt. “That pregnant lesbian happens to be my flatmate and one of my closest friends. Do you have a problem with lesbians, Basil?”
Basil looks startled. “What?”
“Or perhaps you have a problem with lesbians having children?”
&nbs
p; “Oh, I…”
“Well, you might be interested to learn that children fare just as well if raised by a same-sex couple in a stable environment as those raised by a heterosexual couple. What matters, Basil, is being there for your child, loving them, looking after them—that’s what makes you a parent.”
I’m about to continue when Jackson stands abruptly and leaves the table, startling me into silence.
I watch him go. Did I offend him? Is Jackson secretly homophobic? That’s … disappointing?
“Jackson doesn’t have the privilege of being there for his child,” Betsy says quietly into the silence.
I turn to her. “What?”
“Jackson’s daughter. She lives in America.”
“Oh, I … I didn’t know.” My cheeks burn. “I didn’t mean you can’t be a good parent if you’re—let me—I should go and apologize—”
Penelope stands and puts a hand on my arm. “Better not,” she says, not unkindly. “I’ll go.”
* * *
“Grandma! How did you not tell me Jackson has a kid?” I ask as I walk home from Penelope’s house, cheeks still hot.
“Oh, the Greenwood family have had a very interesting few years,” Grandma tells me, dropping into the lower-octave, this-is-really-juicy voice she reserves for her finest pieces of village gossip. “When Jackson’s mother left Arnold she … Sorry,” Grandma says, “I’m getting a message on my phone, let me just…”
Dial tone. I sigh, wait ten seconds, and call her back.
“Did I cut you off, love?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry—you were saying, Jackson’s mum…” I say, turning onto Lower Lane. Basil’s right, actually, these potholes are dangerous; I make a mental note to call the council about sorting them.
“Ooh, yes. So she ditched grumpy old Arnold and went off with Denley from Tauntingham. You know, the one with the house in Spain that he probably bought with dirty money from his father’s used-car business?”
I laugh. “Grandma, I’m only just getting a handle on the gossip in Hamleigh. I can’t broaden my range to the whole of the Dales just yet.”
“Oh, you’ll get the hang of it all in no time, just have Betsy around for coffee once a week. She can fill you in on everything you need to know.”
I make a face to myself. I don’t get the impression Betsy wants to come for coffee once a week. “Go on, Grandma—Jackson’s kid?”
“At this point Jackson was living with Arnold—I never got to the bottom of that, but Jackson’s always seemed strangely fond of Arnold—and so I knew he was stepping out with a bouncy blonde girl called Marigold from Daredale who fancied herself the next Hollywood starlet. I knew she was a wrong ’un,” Grandma says, suddenly sounding a lot like Betsy. “She wore these awful high-heeled shoes that were always getting stuck in the mud on the driveway and she’d squeal until Jackson heaved her out.”
“Wearing high heels, eh,” I say. “Whatever next!”
“Oh, don’t try and make me sound old-fashioned,” Grandma says. “I’ll have you know Fitz took me out shopping yesterday and I bought all sorts of trendy things. And I borrowed your high-heeled boots to go out for cocktails afterward.”
I widen my eyes in alarm. Is she steady enough on her feet to be wearing my heeled boots?
“But this girl went everywhere in stilettos and tight skirts she could hardly move in. Jackson was always opening doors and helping her into cars and carrying her bags and she never liked to lift a finger for him. Then they ended things, or at least I think they did because she stopped coming by, and then she turned up six months later round as a Rolo.”
That makes me laugh. “A Rolo?”
“Exactly,” Grandma says with relish. “Pregnant! Then next thing we know, Jackson’s off to Daredale half the time looking after the baby. This was all, ooh, three or four years ago, maybe? Then—and this is the real gossip—Marigold moved to LA for her big break as an actress, and she took the little girl with her. Jackson hardly gets to see her now.”
Oh, God. Poor, poor Jackson. I feel so bad about what I said at Penelope’s house that I don’t even feel angry with him about the sneaky cocktail-making anymore.
Well, not very angry about it, anyway.
My phone buzzes. This phone is a relic from the era of floppy discs and Game Boys, and it takes me a while to realize what’s happening: I’m getting another call.
“Got to go, Grandma—speak soon, love you.”
“Oh, bye, love,” she says, and I hang up and switch to the call waiting.
“Hello?” comes a wavering voice from the other end of the line. “Is that Leena Cotton?”
“Yes, this is she.” I definitely just did my work voice. It felt a bit weird.
“My name is Nicola Alderson,” the lady says, “and I’m calling about an advert I saw in the grocery store, about lifts?”
“Oh!” I drove out to Knargill and posted a few flyers (well, printouts from Grandma’s computer) yesterday—I’d not expected quite such a speedy response. “Hello, Nicola, thanks for calling.”
“Are you sure it’s free?” Nicola asks. “This is all very … good. My grandson’s always warning me about those emails that say you’ve won some money, and an offer of free lifts might come under the same category, I’d say. No such thing as a free lunch, and all that.”
I nod. This is a fair point—actually, I wish my grandma was this suspicious about these sorts of things. We had a scare a few years ago where she mistook some junk mail for an official letter from the bank and almost transferred her savings to a mysterious Russian bank account.
“Absolutely. So basically, my grandma had this idea about helping isolated people get around more, and I’m staying at her place at the moment, looking after all her projects, and … I just thought this was the simplest way to help. I’ve got a car and I’ve got time, so…”
“Is there some way I can check you’re not about to drive me off into the woods and eat me?”
I splutter out a laugh. “Well,” I say, “I could ask you the same, really.”
“That’s true enough,” she muses.
“I do have a DBS certificate, if that would make you feel better?”
“I haven’t a clue what that is,” Nicola says. “But I think I’d probably be able to judge by looking at you. Shall we meet at the church? You’d have to be a real piece of work to murder me there.”
“Lovely,” I say. “Just tell me when.”
14
Eileen
It is ten o’clock at night. I am kissing a man on his doorstep. I’m wearing high-heeled boots. Tod’s hands slide beneath my jacket, and his thumb trails along the zip of my long linen dress, as though finding its way for later.
Since meeting Tod I’ve felt like I’ve opened a door to a part of myself I’d entirely forgotten about. Yesterday I caught myself giggling. I’m not sure I giggled even when I was a young woman.
It’s lovely. It really is. But underneath it all there’s a dark, guilty whispering in my belly. I’ve been doing so well putting Wade behind me, but ever since Tod and I have started stepping out together, I haven’t been able to put him out of my mind quite so easily.
I think it’s just a matter of breaking the habit. After all, I’ve not kissed a man who wasn’t my husband for fifty years. Tod’s lips feel so different; even the shape of his head, his neck, his shoulders seem strange under my palms after so many years learning the lines of Wade’s body. It’s like trying on somebody else’s clothes, kissing Tod. Strange and disconcerting, yes—but fun.
I pull away from his arms reluctantly.
“You won’t come upstairs?” Tod says.
“Not yet.” I smile at him. “We’re only on date three.”
That was my stipulation. I agreed to all Tod’s terms for this relationship of ours, but I said I wouldn’t go to bed with him until we’d been on five dates. I wanted the time to decide if he was a good enough man for that. I’m all for a bit of fun, but I don’t plan on—what was
it Fitz called it?—“getting played.” Sex does mean something to me, after all, and I don’t want to share it with a man I don’t much like.
As it happens, though, I seem to like Tod very much. So much that this rule feels rather …
He quirks an eyebrow. “I know a wavering woman when I see one,” he says. He gives me another long kiss on the lips. “Now get yourself in a cab home before we do something we might regret, hmm? Rules are rules.” He winks.
Good lord, that wink.
I’d better get myself a cab.
* * *
I sleep late the next morning and don’t wake until eight. When I walk out of Leena’s bedroom, I find Martha on the sofa in tears.
“Oh, Martha!” I hesitate in the doorway. I don’t want to march in and embarrass her. But she turns her tear-stained face my way and waves me over.
“Please, come and sit with me,” she says, rubbing her belly. “Crying alone is a new low for me. Normally I have Leena to weep on.” She sniffs as I settle myself down beside her. “You look well, Mrs. Cotton. Ooh, were you out with your silver fox last night?”
I feel myself flush. Martha smiles.
“Don’t get too attached, remember,” she says, wiping her nose. “Though I’m only saying that because you told me to remind you. Personally, I think he sounds like a catch.”
“Don’t you worry about me. What’s the matter, love?” I hesitate. “If you don’t mind me asking?”
“Yaz and I are close to exchanging on a house,” she says. “I don’t like it, but she says we don’t have time to be picky now, and I said it’s such a huge decision I don’t want to rush it, and…” She’s crying again; the tears drip off her chin. “I’m so worried I won’t be able to do this—that I’m not ready for a baby—and Yaz being all Yaz about the other stuff isn’t helping. The baby will be here soon, and Yaz just thinks we can still be how we were before. But we can’t, can we? Everything’s going to be different. And scary. And we’ve really not got everything ready. Oh, god…”