Two Metres From You

by Heidi Stephens

  Like millions of others, she’d been nervous and worried about her finances all week, but earlier today the Chancellor had announced a government grant for self-employed people and she’d been able to relax again. The money wouldn’t be paid out until May, but in the meantime she had some cash saved from her years living rent-free. She’d planned to use it towards a deposit on a flat at some point, but if necessary it could keep her head above water for six months or more as long as her next place in London cost no more than she paid for her share of the mortgage at Fraser’s. Her savings were miles off what she would need for a deposit in London anyway; somehow she’d imagined she’d be settled by thirty-two and pooling her resources with someone else. There’d been a brief moment when she thought that someone else might be Fraser; they’d buy somewhere a little bigger, with a decent garden for Mabel, maybe further out in Beckenham or Sydenham or one of those other Zone 4 hams that were self-contained villages that had been subsumed into London’s urban sprawl. The future currently looked a little blurry on the relationship front, but that was the least of her worries right now.

  Gemma had heard nothing from Fraser since the initial flurry of messages on the night she’d left, and she didn’t expect that to change. She’d blocked his number so he couldn’t call or message, but he could have emailed if he’d wanted to. Gemma assumed he’d dusted himself down, as was Fraser’s way; he prided himself on his resilience and his ability to bounce back from life’s challenges, more energised and focussed than ever. By now he’d probably written a LinkedIn post that compared the stagnant property market to a failed relationship – a chance to regroup and re-evaluate, to plan for the future and learn from past mistakes, to re-think strategic imperatives. Gemma tried to feel some sympathy that Fraser would be entirely out of work right now, since non-essential building projects had completely stalled. But then she reminded herself that he would qualify for the same self-employed support as she would, and also he was a cheating shit who didn’t deserve nice things.

  At some point she would need to go to his place and pick up her remaining belongings; no doubt they’d be all boxed up neatly for a clean, unemotional handover. The only possessions she truly cared about were the few bits of jewellery Aunt Laura had left her, and these were safely at her parents’ house. If she found out that Fraser had thrown everything else she owned in a skip then so be it; there wasn’t much she could do about it right now anyway. The only thing she really missed about Fraser was the sex; he was surprisingly animated in the bedroom for a man who ironed his boxer shorts, even if it did sometimes feel like he was waiting for a standing ovation at the end.

  She also hadn’t seen much of Matthew since their awkward encounter on Monday, other than surreptitiously watching him carry lengths of timber from his van into the barn while she was putting yet another full-to-bursting paper hoover bag in the bin. Even at a distance of 15 metres she could see the hard muscles of his back and arms as he lifted chunks of wood on to his shoulder like they were made of foam. There was a military efficiency about his movements that made Gemma think of her father, and other aspects to Matthew’s appearance that didn’t make her think of her father at all. Gemma had a word with herself over it – getting a rebound crush on your country-boy neighbour was an embarrassing cliché prompted by nothing but boredom and too many romantic novels.

  She idly wondered if she might see him this evening, at the first Clap for Carers. It had been happening in other countries for a couple of weeks, and now someone in the UK had started a movement which invited everyone to stand on their doorsteps at 8 p.m. on a Thursday to give a UK-wide round of applause for NHS staff who were on the front line of the fight against coronavirus. Gemma was intrigued to see whether Crowthorpe would get involved; there was something rather un-British about a spontaneous public show of enthusiasm, so she wouldn’t be surprised if nobody here bothered. Still, it would be a good opportunity to get a sneak peek at her neighbours and show her support for her friends, several of whom worked in hospitals or clinics. Even if she was all alone on her doorstep, she’d be clapping. Perhaps her applause would be carried on a wave of noise all the way to London.

  Most nights Gemma was in bed by 9.30 p.m., and now that her short-term financial worries were resolved, she hoped she would sleep better, letting herself be swallowed by the darkness and silence of the village. Usually the birds woke her at dawn, pecking at the moss on the roof tiles above her head, presumably hunting for soft bedding to line their nests. She liked to lie in bed and listen to the day start, remembering what she’d read about mindfulness and being present in the moment. The usual routines that dominated her life had been stripped away – no alarm clock, no schedule of meetings, no buses to run for, so she had the opportunity to get off the treadmill for a few weeks and let go of all her old stresses and anxieties. The pressure of city life would return soon enough; she should enjoy the calm while it lasted.

  Just before 8 p.m. Gemma put on a giant cosy jumper and stood on the tiny path between the front porch and the white gate. She was preparing herself to do this alone and trying not to feel self-conscious about it, when doors started to open up and down the road and people came out – some alone, some with partners and families. Everyone looked like they were waiting for someone to start, so as 8 p.m. ticked over Gemma began to clap. A few followed, tentatively at first, then others followed their neighbours’ leads and joined in. The sound grew and multiplied like a symphony, the noise echoing off the old buildings as a few teenagers added half-hearted whoops and cheers which prompted a few dogs to start barking, so Mabel joined in. It made Gemma’s heart feel full and tears prickled at the corners of her eyes; however long she ended up staying here, she knew this was a moment she would remember for a long time.

  Gemma looked to her left to see Matthew standing about 20 metres along the road, between West Cottage and the driveway to the next house. He was alone, clapping enthusiastically with those big, powerful hands that Gemma suddenly wanted to get a much closer look at. She wondered why he hadn’t stood by her side gate, but perhaps he wanted to avoid potential gossip about the two of them or give her a bit of space. Perhaps he’d decided she was mildly crackers after Monday and didn’t want to get into conversation, which would be disappointing but entirely understandable.

  As the noise died away, Gemma’s neighbours smiled and waved and headed back into their houses. She stood and watched for a while, as doors closed on some and others hung about to chat. It was something she couldn’t imagine happening where Fraser lived in London; in the six months she’d lived there she hadn’t really spoken to any of his neighbours, other than the German woman upstairs who liked to play Brahms concertos at odd hours of the day and once met Gemma in the stairwell and asked if she minded. Gemma actually quite liked her music, as long as she played it during daylight hours. It was the only time she’d ever seen the woman in six months.

  ‘Hey.’

  Gemma jumped and turned to see Matthew leaning on the side gate. It was the first time she’d seen him up close since Monday, when she’d been hungover and mortified and didn’t really take in the details beyond the straw-coloured hair and the scruffy beard. He had green eyes and nice teeth.

  ‘Sorry. You looked miles away.’

  Gemma sighed. ‘I was thinking about an old neighbour who liked to play Brahms concertos over breakfast. I think maybe that’s something I’ll miss.’

  Matthew smiled. ‘That was an uplifting bit of community togetherness. It’s nice that you joined in.’

  Gemma shrugged, suddenly conscious that she hadn’t engaged meaningfully with a mirror since Monday morning and probably looked dreadful. She shuffled back to the door, wondering if the porch bulb was casting her in a soft, flattering glow or lighting up her pallid skin like a bad waxwork. ‘Goodnight, then.’ She quickly closed the door behind her and turned off the light. Matthew walked down the path to the garden, his brow furrowed and the ghost of a goodnight on his lips.

  CHAPTER SEVEN
<
br />   Tuesday, 31 March

  To Do

  Buy more food

  Stop eating all the food

  The final day of March felt like a milestone for Gemma, a mental turning of the page to something new and uncharted. April had always been her favourite month of the year, full of purpose and possibility; even living in London you could see nature pushing forward with enthusiastic vigour. Spring showers and sunshine gave the city a different feel, washing away the grime, purging the air of winter and bathing everything in an effulgent light under a huge blue sky. Warm days in April brought everyone outdoors, but the absence of wasps, instant sunburn and sticky humidity gave people the inebriating freedom to bask outside for longer, soaking up vitamin D like human sponges, getting their ankles out for the first time in months.

  But spring in London was nothing compared to Crowthorpe; here it felt like Mother Nature had got absolutely wasted and gone on the rampage, stuffing every verge, hedgerow and woodland floor with a verdant chaos of cow parsley, hawthorn blossom and wild garlic. Even the nettles had a youthful freshness about them, and it all looked so impossibly, implausibly green, like everything had its own Instagram filter.

  The prospect of March rolling into April made Gemma feel like the end of lockdown was tantalisingly close – at some point in the coming weeks she would be able to go home. Right now she felt like a plane in a holding pattern – floating aimlessly in ever-decreasing circles, waiting for permission to land, slowly running out of fuel. She really needed to draw a line under Fraser and get on with her life, even if that meant adapting to a different kind of London in a bonkers new world.

  The new month also marked the end of the project that had been occupying most of Gemma’s energy for the past week – deep-cleaning Caro’s cottage. Yesterday she had tackled the windows, including leaning precariously out of the loft skylights with a wet sponge to scrub away the green mould and bird poo. Only the outside of the upstairs windows had defeated her, but she was avoiding asking Matthew if she could borrow a ladder on the basis that he’d probably insist on holding the bottom of it, which would give him an incredibly unflattering view of her bum and thighs. She couldn’t decide if she was more annoyed that this bothered her, or that she hadn’t made more effort to have a less spongy bum and thighs.

  Even with dirty upstairs windows, the cottage had been transformed from a dusty, gloomy place that smelled of abandonment and decay, to a home that felt loved and lived in. Every room had been scrubbed and polished, and all the storage cupboards and hidden nooks and crannies relieved of mouse corpses, woodlice and dead flies. Gemma had even borrowed some Danish oil from Matthew and oiled the wooden floors – he’d offered to help, but the banging and power-tool noise coming from the barn whenever she took Mabel into the garden suggested he was pretty busy right now. Clearly the space was divided between his living area and his workshop somehow, but she’d never seen inside.

  Now the house was fit for human habitation, it was time to tackle the garden. Up to now Gemma had been avoiding it, mostly because she knew absolutely nothing about gardening and really didn’t know where to start. Nobody ever bothered to plant anything interesting in the gardens of military homes, because you’d never be around long enough to enjoy it. Aunt Laura’s flat had some dwarf shrubs in containers and window boxes full of seasonal bulbs, but all they needed was water and the occasional prune when they started to look like triffids. The garden in Norfolk had been managed by a local gardener who visited once a week, although Aunt Laura liked to stroll around watering everything in the evening, holding a hose in one hand and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc in the other. Most of the border flowers were destined for filling the house with scent and colour; her preference was blowsy, ostentatious flowers like peonies and irises and snapdragons, with no thought for colour coordination or symmetry. Reds and pinks and oranges would all be plunged into huge jugs of water together; an approach to flower arranging that definitely was not subtle, but delightful in Gemma’s eyes. She had wanted to grow some flamboyant blooms in Fraser’s tiny garden this summer as a tribute to Aunt Laura, but he’d fobbed her off with ‘we’ll see, babe’, which was code for ‘not a fucking chance’.

  So the garden was her priority tomorrow, which meant Gemma needed a crash course in what to do with a lawn, apple trees, rose bushes and overgrown borders. She briefly considered calling her mother, who had embraced gardening in retirement as a way to kill time and avoid Gemma’s father. But she couldn’t face the level of detail, the demand that she write everything down, the unspoken implication that if she’d settled down like a functioning adult instead of lounging around in Aunt Laura’s fancy London house she would know all this stuff already. Gemma was actually quite proud of her achievements in her twenties – she could hang a shelf, roast a chicken, get rid of Jehovah’s Witnesses and put on a superking duvet cover, all without assistance. These were all important life skills.

  Gemma jumped as her phone alerted her to a WhatsApp call. Earlier today she’d taken some photos of the cottage and sent them to Caro, so she wasn’t surprised to see her friend was calling her back.

  ‘Hey, Caro. How are you?’

  ‘Awful, everything’s shit. But never mind that, I’m ringing to express my undying love for you. My house looks AMAZING.’

  Gemma smiled; talking to Caro always made her feel better. ‘It’s all done. Just the garden tomorrow.’

  ‘Honestly, you’re a magician. Those years cleaning up mine and Joe’s filth at uni were not wasted. I’m so glad you’re there.’

  ‘Me too. I’m off to the village shop in a bit, it’s the high point of my day.’

  ‘You’ll be on the cover of Country Life soon,’ Caro laughed as Gemma heard a child scream in the background.

  ‘Do you need to get that?’

  ‘Nah, Tony can deal with it. Only one of them is screaming, that’s usually a good sign.’

  ‘Is everything OK with you?’ Gemma couldn’t imagine how Caro and Tony were juggling full-time working from home with caring for their kids; it sounded like hell.

  ‘No, it’s horrendous. But I find it’s easier to pretend it’s not happening if I don’t talk about it.’ On cue, a second scream joined the first. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. I have to go. Happy gardening, and thank you for showing my house some love.’ Caro blew kisses down the phone and hung up.

  Gemma smiled and checked her watch; it was already 4 p.m. and she needed to get to the village shop before it closed at 5. It was only a ten-minute walk, but a week’s experience had taught her to leave at least half an hour to get there. She could be waylaid by any number of villagers out taking their government-mandated exercise or tending their front gardens, and they all expected her to stop for a socially distanced chat.

  She grabbed her shopping list and a couple of bags and gave Mabel a nudge with her foot. She was dozing in her favourite afternoon-sun patch in the dining room and didn’t seem terribly impressed at being woken up, particularly without a food-based incentive. Mabel’s exercise levels had increased significantly in the past few days – she now had a walk with Gemma first thing, and another with Matthew after lunch. Matthew had stuck his head in the kitchen door on Friday and offered to take her on his walk each day, which meant Gemma could now go early and not make Mabel wait until lunchtime. She appreciated Matthew’s offer, and Mabel didn’t seem to mind either.

  This walk counted as a shopping trip, so it was in addition to the four or five miles Mabel had already walked today, which was at least double the exercise she got in London. She was also able to run off the lead here, an opportunity she had enjoyed all the time in Norfolk but wasn’t an everyday thing in London – it was really only an option at quiet times in the park, when Gemma could keep her away from the bushes. Once in Burgess Park Mabel had slipped her lead and disappeared into a hedge, emerging a few seconds later with a mouldy baguette and a used condom, which was both mystifying and horrific in equal measure. Thankfully the bushes here contained fewer surprises,
so they could let Mabel zoom around the fields and woods chasing magpies and squirrels. More often than not she’d come back when called, especially for a dog treat.

  As a result of all this exercise, most days Mabel was ready for an extended snooze by 4 p.m. and wasn’t remotely interested in a walk to the shop. ‘Don’t be lazy, we’re going,’ grumbled Gemma. ‘You’re a country dog right now, make the most of it. You’ll be back in London soon and then you’ll be sorry.’ Mabel glared resentfully at Gemma for a few seconds, then huffed her way on to four paws.

  As expected, it was after 4.30 p.m. by the time Gemma made it to the village shop. On the way she’d acquired some wildlife wisdom from Barry a few doors down, who had a meandering way of telling stories about woodpeckers and local deer populations that would put even Chris Packham into a coma. She’d also bought half a dozen eggs from Grove Farm that she didn’t have any cash to pay for, but Hilary said she’d put her name in the book and she could settle up before she went back to London. She’d exchanged idle corona chat with a woman called Cookie who lived in one of the eighties houses that fronted the main road, her name being short for something Indian that she’d given up spelling years ago, instead telling everyone ‘just call me Cookie’. As far as Gemma could tell, the estate had about eighty houses, and seemed to be a mix of private ownership and council tenants. She had always imagined places like this to be full of wealthy retirees, or well-to-do couples who commuted to Bristol or London and sent their children to private schools in Bath. Gemma had seen plenty of those, but the majority of the village population seemed to be pensioners and young families getting by – it was clear that Crowthorpe had its share of rural poverty.