Strangers in a Garden

by Deanna Maclaren

  Nettled, Laura lit a cigarette. Penny had told her most of the tenants had been delighted with the spotless apartment. Some had already re-booked for next year.

  ‘It’s a Miss Lewis. Don’t know how long they’re staying, could be quite some time.’

  ‘They?’

  ‘Miss Lewis will be accompanied by her bodyguard.’

  Bodyguard!

  ‘I should put bread, cheese, ham, tomatoes, milk, eggs into the fridge. And two bottles of wine.’

  ‘Wouldn’t the bodyguard prefer beer?’ Laura asked, remembering her father’s notorious conversation with the builder.

  ‘No idea. Better get some, just in case. ETA mid-day, by car. You don’t need to meet them. The gardien has been alerted so he’ll see them in. It would be best if you just kept out of the way.’

  Laura wasn’t having any of that. At a quarter to twelve on the day of their arrival, she went over to the local shops. The girl in the pharmacie was busy cleaning the windows, so Laura chatted to her while keeping an eye on approaching traffic.

  She’d been expecting a Mercedes. What arrived at the Residence gates was a black Mini with blacked-out windows. Heavens, was it really big enough for all their luggage and a massive bodyguard?

  The gardien swung the gates open, and he led the way to the underground car park. A very smooth operation, Laura thought. Residence Lilas would provide a perfect hideaway for ‘Miss Lewis,’ who was probably some pampered foreign princess from Richard’s school. They came and went, these girls, and were loathed by the other pupils because they had endless time off for Father’s Ceremonial Birthday or an unmissable five-day wedding feast.

  By five o’clock, Laura couldn’t stand it any longer. She went along to apartment eight, and rang the bell. Laura was just about to ring again, when the door was wrenched open. There was something about the way this was done that gave Laura a shivery sense of déjà vu. Her mind whirled back down the years, to a door marked Drawing Room…

  It was Lol.

  And behind her stood Tom.

  Could have been worse, Laura thought. Could have been Adrian. Lol, she knew, had taken a fancy to him from the first time she met him.

  ‘We knew you’d be here,’ Tom said, when he’d kissed her. ‘Richard told me when I rang up. I heard about this place through a secretary of my agent.’

  ‘Look,’ Lol threw herself on the sofa. ‘You may as well know. Tom and I have run away together. Cressida’s kicking up rough, so what with her and the Press, we thought we’d better lie low.’

  ‘Obviously, I won’t say a word,’ Laura assured them, ‘but the gardien doesn’t miss a trick.’

  ‘Richard’s already dealt with that,’ Tom said. ‘I gather hush money – oh, and there’s one other thing. A publisher wants Lol’s life story. Incredible money.’

  Laura knew that Lol was now a stratospheric star. She’d seen her often on French TV. But her life story? Lol couldn’t be more than twenty-three. ‘How long will it take you to write, Lol?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t have to actually write it. A nice lady came along with a tape recorder, and I talked and now she’s gone away to write it.’

  Tom said, bringing Laura a glass of the dreaded rosé, ‘Until I’ve calmed Cress down, and Lol and I have sorted out the practicals of how we’re going to live, and where, it’s vital there are no leaks, and no sightings of Lol.’

  ‘You mean she can’t go out?’

  ‘Too risky.’

  Lol laughed. ‘Never mind. We can always play Consequences.’

  Laura took them both back to her place for some decent wine and leftover beef casserole. Tom leafed through her Cooking in a Bedsitter and said, ‘Time to raise your game. Beef stew’s all very well, but Hungarian goulash is tastier. I’m appointing myself chief cook, and you can watch, and learn, and skivvy. Not you, Lol. Your hands are on TV, in close-up. We can’t have you damaged and bandaged up.’

  He left them, to go and shop for more wine. Lol was sitting by the window, where Laura had stacked up books and magazines. Her artistic corner, she thought of it, where after lugging home a basket of veg from the market, she could put her feet up, light a cigarette and relax.

  ‘What’s this, Laura?’

  It was a few scribbled lines, in a notebook. ‘Oh, I was just messing around with something.’

  Lol read aloud, in the hauntingly beautiful Western Isles accent for which she was now famous:

  ‘We were strangers in a garden,

  Talking, as strangers do

  Of life, and love and heartbreak.

  Betrayals you know too.’

  Laura fiddled around closing the curtains. ‘I just – I just wanted to see if I could write a poem.’

  ‘This isn’t a poem. It’s a song. I can do the music. If you could write a bit more, I could put it on my new album.’

  ‘But it’s not in Gaelic.’ At a time when the Beach Boys and Tamla Motown were racing up the New Musical Express record charts, Lola Lolita singing incomprehensible lyrics had charmed the nation.

  ‘No, my record people want me to do an English album. Strangers in a Garden would be perfect – if you’ll let me have it. I’ll pay you, of course.’

  This from Lol who used to sleep at a rock-bottom price in the Dorm. Who stole breakfast baps to wolf down at lunchtime.

  Now she had ‘record people’ conjuring up to Laura an entourage of make-up artists, hairdressers, dressers, drivers, Uncle Tom Cobbley, the whole showbiz rigmarole.

  ‘Lol, what’s it like being famous?’

  Lol grinned. ‘You should know. You’re the one who’s been all over the News of the World.’

  ‘That’s not fame. It’s notoriety. Tell me about fame.’

  ‘Lol sighed. ‘Well the money’s extraordinary, but you don’t get all of it. There’s transport, food and accommodation for the crew. Then there’s the taxman, your agent, your insurance company, they all get a slice of the action. And then, you have to be so careful all the time. People expect me to look elfin and, at the most, a little bit flirty. I can’t be seen in a restaurant with gravy running down my chin, I can’t fall out of a restaurant blind drunk and I certainly can’t run off with the Countess of Ashcroft’s husband.’

  Suddenly, Lol and Laura were back at Arundell House, giggling uncontrollably.

  ‘Who would have thought,’ Lol choked, ‘that we’d both end up in the South of France!’

  ‘I was so hungry all the time,’ Laura said. ‘Miss May was valiant, of course, but all those stairs. I lost nearly two stone.’

  Lol tucked her legs under her. ‘You want to hear all about it, of course. Tom and me.’

  Well no, Laura didn’t. Why did everyone assume that if you weren’t in love (oh, Adrian!) if you didn’t have a boyfriend, then you were panting for every detail of their romance. Especially when it featured a man you used to sleep with.

  She decided to cut to the chase. ‘How did Cressida find out?’

  ‘Came home and found us in bed. Big scene. She threw all my clothes, shoes, everything, out of the window. Next day, she tried to run me over. I was crossing South Audley Street and she came screaming along in this huge car and just drove straight at me.’

  ‘Perhaps she just didn’t see you.’ Laura didn’t mention that when Cressida had tried the same stunt on her, it had been the start of her affair with Tom.

  ‘Oh, she saw. And I saw the triumphant smile on her face. She’s mad, you know. Evil and mad.’

  ‘I’ve lost Lol,’ Tom announced two days later, when Laura arrived to skivvy the veg for the goulash.

  ‘But she’s not supposed to go out.’

  ‘Exactly. She said she wanted to work on your song and she was going to find a piano.’

  Laura wondered if Lol was turning into Cressida. Was this part of Lol’s appeal for Tom?

  ‘She wouldn’t have taken the car?’

  ‘She can’t drive in traffic. When she was taking her test, a TV crew shot her doing it on Arran, because there a
re so few roads and no traffic lights.’

  She took a coffee into the sitting room. There, on a side table, was Adrian’s latest novel. Paradise Park. As she reached out for it, her attitude, she was aware, was as if she were reaching for the Turin Shroud.

  Tom said, ‘Take it if you want. Lol finished it on the plane. She said it was funny and tender and made her cry.’

  Laura untied her apron. ‘We must go and find her.’

  ‘I’ve looked. Been out in the car. She might –‘

  The front door banged open, rattling the glass. For a waiflike person, Laura thought, Lol was always clumsily noisy with doors.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Tom demanded.

  ‘Downstairs. In the basement. There’s this warren of little rooms down there.’

  ‘The French word is caves,’ said Laura. ‘They’re used for storage.’

  ‘Well they’re heaving with little men,’ said Lol. ‘Like gnomes. And they’re all sawing and drilling, like they’re turning the caves into little palaces.’

  ‘They’ve probably been sent out so they don’t get under their wives’ feet,’ Tom said dryly. ‘Like in England they get banished to a garden shed.’

  ‘But why are they all so wee?’

  ‘They’re probably Provençal.’ Laura tied on her apron. ‘Provençal men tend to be squat.’

  ‘It was like that poem’ Lol gabbled on, ignoring Tom’s black look over her disappearance.

  ‘Up the airy mountain,

  Down the rushy glen,

  We daren’t go a-hunting

  For fear of little men.’

  ‘Who wrote that?’

  ‘William Allingham,’ Laura supplied.

  ‘I wonder if it’s in copyright? I could do something with that.’

  ‘May I remind you,’ said Tom, ‘you don’t read music and you haven’t got a piano.’

  ‘I have! I knew I’d find one. There wasn’t a piano at Arundell when I got there, but then some benefactor left us one in his will. Fine instrument, actually.’

  ‘Where, exactly, did you find the current piano?’

  ‘The gardien. Isn’t he nice? He saw me wandering about and asked if I was all right and we got chatting and he said his wife got a piano for his son to learn but all the kid wants to do is play with his catapult so he said I could use it.’

  ‘We can go just after four,’ Lol went on. ‘Not before, because he has his siesta. And at four his wife goes to collect the monster child for his English tuition.’

  ‘Everything AOK?’ Richard demanded. ‘Everything on course with Operation you-know-who?’

  Laura said carefully, ‘Going swimmingly.’

  ‘Bang on. I don’t want anything to go bad with this show. She hasn’t been out, has she?’

  ‘No. And I haven’t told her I’m going to the lemon festival tomorrow.’

  ‘And this bodyguard, minder chap she’s got. He’s not throwing his weight around – har, har har!’

  Oh Christ. Richard obviously didn’t know that Lol had run off with the Earl of Ashcroft . Cressida must be biding her time about breaking it to the British Press.

  She said, a little croakily, ‘He does the shopping and does the cooking.’

  Laura wanted to find out how much Richard knew about his illustrious tenant.

  ‘Er, Richard, how did you happen to find this particular tenant?’

  ‘I was rung up by the Publicity Director of the – people – she works for. I imagine there’s some big international deal in the pipeline and she has to be kept hush-hush for the time being.’

  Not quite there, Richard. It’s her life story and as soon as it’s in manuscript the publisher will sell it to the paper bidding the most. We’re talking, Tom had said, a lot of noughts.

  ‘Glad you’re on the spot, Laura. We need to rely on you not to let us down.’

  The word ‘again’ was left unsaid, and to Laura’s surprise, he didn’t actually sign off with ‘Roger and out.’

  Laura wondered when it was that her brother had started to adopt the persona of Biggles. They had both, in their teens, been addicts of the Biggles stories, along with Bunter, Swallows and Amazons and Just William. Laura had preferred the latter, but she remembered Richard and his foul, smelly friends wetting themselves over Biggles. There was one called Biggles Flies North, giving rise to endless schoolboy mirth about Biggles Flies Open.

  And now Richard, in his thirties, a family man in line for the headship of an important boarding school, was speaking to her as if receiving an urgent despatch from the front line of a war zone.

  The twenty-foot cat was made of oranges, with lemons for paws, a lemon-studded collar and lemons for eyes. It looked so crazy, Laura burst into demented laughter.

  Menton was en fête for a fortnight. La Fête du Citron. Already, the town was starting to fill up with coaches, and Laura imagined her quiet, genteel town heaving with tourists.

  The parade was coming her way. She shot down a side-street and realised she was in a holding bay for the groups of majorettes accompanying the bands and floats. Laura couldn’t help laughing as she regarded those girls. They clearly resented spending Sunday togged up in tight costumes, exposing chilly legs. They were sulky, hulking-thighed lassies and as they set off to follow the bands, Laura saw they didn’t have a clue how to march in step, let alone twirl a baton.

  She drifted along with the cheerful crowd and then into view, surrounding a golden lemon cactus, came a troupe of majorettes that outshone them all. Dressed in black leotards, their only adornment were pert gold crowns ingeniously gripped into their bouncing hair. Their leader was a ravishingly lithe girl, wearing a sunshine yellow leotard stretched tight to reveal her disciplined, supple body. What a joy to watch, those girls. They could throw their batons high and catch them, they could march and twirl in perfect time. They were a class act and the crowd, especially the men, adored them.

  ‘Aren’t they sensational? I’m sure they’re from Monaco.’

  At the sound of his voice, Laura felt a stab of fear and a sluice of loathing.

  He was staring at the orange cat, now completing its second circuit. ‘Clever. I thought they’d skewer the fruit onto the float. But of course, that would be messy. Bit dangerous, p’raps. No, I’ve just realised, they fix the fruit with rubber bands.’

  Laura regarded Rex Salter with distaste. He of the matinee idol hair, he it had been who had aimed his camera flash to try and startle the magnificent Mackenzie.

  ‘What are you doing in a back-street in Menton, Rex.’

  ‘En route to Monaco. Always drop in, keep up my contacts. Mark my word Laura, something big is going to happen there one day. And I want to be ahead of the pack. Anyway, what are you doing here?’

  ‘Holiday.’

  ‘Fancy a drink?’

  ‘Oh yeah? I bet your idea of a good time is probably a pint of lager and a punch-up.’

  The children at the Fête were throwing streamers that stuck in old mens’ ears and clung, endearingly, to the perms of the elderly ladies. The atmosphere wasn’t at all the horror Laura had expected. Everyone was relaxed and good humoured, applauding the bands, the floats, even the sullen majorettes, before leaving for home, their arms laden with mimosa.

  Rex Salter, sensing he had lost her attention, glanced at his watch. ‘Got to be somewhere.’

  ‘Sure. Well, see you, Rex.’

  ‘You never know your luck.’ Lightly, he hugged her to the battered black leather of his jacket. ‘Take it easy, love.’

  Within sight of Residence Lilas, she stopped to retie one of her shoelaces. As she stood up, she caught a glimpse of a thin man darting behind a car. She told herself this was paranoia. There were loads of men in Menton wearing leather jackets against the chill wind. And why should Rex be bothered following her?

  She ran. Raced to the side-gate, got it open and with a surge of triumph slammed it firmly shut.

  Then she made herself turn to look through the big gate fronting the road. And
there he was, the loathsome Salter, not bothering to try and look agreeable, his eyes assessing the height of the gate, the spikes on top.

  You’re too old for hurdling over gates, Laura told him silently. It’ll do your knees in. She screeched, ‘What do you want? Leave me alone. That business with Hugo is OVER!’

  He raised his camera, and Laura backed off, stumbled, then picked up speed as she tore down the drive towards the safe gloom of the underground car park. She knew she hadn’t got long. Rex would get in. He’d just wait for one of the residents to drive through, and he’d slither through the gate behind them.

  What Laura had on her side, though , was her familiarity with the mazey layout of the car park. She’d lost her way in there so many times, searching for the iron trolley to carry heavy shopping to the lift, she now knew her way so well she didn’t need to press the light buttons. So she fled in the dark, confident of losing Rex for long enough to get help.

  She listened for footsteps. There were none. Rex was the type who wore rubber-soled shoes.

  She was in sight of the lift, when he caught hold of her. She screamed. She hated herself for that, but she couldn’t help herself.

  He was grinning. From the back of her jacket, he took a plastic phial. Laura realised he must have stuck it there during that so-called friendly goodbye hug.

  ‘Expensive but worth it.’ Rex said. ‘Every thirty seconds, out falls a tiny pellet. Hits the ground and shatters into fluorescent fragments so I can follow you.’

  ‘Neat.’

  ‘Yeah. Had a bit of a problem with all those jerks showering mimosa all over the pavement. But it worked a treat in the underground car park.’ To Laura’s relief, he turned away. ‘I’m going to keep an eye on you, Laura James. You seem to have a knack of always being where the action is.’

  Certain she’d got rid of Rex, Laura ran up to Lol’s apartment, thrust the mimosa at Lol and told them what had happened with Rex. Tom fetched her a brandy and poured one for himself, with a glass of rosé for Lol. She had arranged the mimosa for the dining table and the room was heady with what Laura could only think of as winter sunshine.

  Laura was relaxed on the sofa, listening to their account of their successful excursion to the gardien’s piano, when the peace was disturbed by a hammering on the door.