Summer at Hollyhock House

by Cathy Bussey

  Faith felt momentarily annoyed at her friend. How could she not know it would be an issue? Oh right, because she’d never told her, and from Minel’s easy tone she assumed Rik hadn’t either. Good as his word on that, at least, she thought wryly.

  ‘It’s not an issue,’ she said firmly.

  ‘So is next Monday OK?’ Minel asked. ‘You can sort out work and get ready to make a start?’

  It wasn’t OK in the slightest. But leaving Rob had left her with a definite sense of needing something — anything — to change. Maybe addressing the still unfinished business of Rik would help.

  Chapter 3

  When Faith arrived at Hollyhocks the following Monday morning she noted with alarm that her heart seemed to have upped sticks and moved into her mouth. It had been kicking around in that general vicinity all week, and as she’d stared blankly at her computer screen, listening to her boss grumble about the wildly late notice she was giving for her unpaid leave, she had put Rik’s name into Facebook over and over again, but not once had she been able to hit ‘enter’.

  I can’t even look at him on a computer, she realised. How on earth am I going to look at him in the flesh?

  It had been bad enough going over the plans with Paul, because they had been annotated in Rik’s unmistakeable spiky hand and Faith had felt like she’d taken a physical blow to the solar plexus. She had nodded gormlessly as Paul explained she would need to drain and fill in the pond and dig a new one, then move the rockery to the other end, and finally work through the borders and vegetable garden before finishing by re-turfing and removing the dandelions from the yellow speckled lawns.

  She had nodded again when Paul had admitted sheepishly he and Minel hadn’t maintained the garden since Ravi and Helena pushed off because they assumed it would all get trashed by the construction work anyway.

  She only remembered later that dandelion roots were absolute monsters, invasive and dogged, insinuating themselves into the ground and taking hold so firmly that she’d broken many a fork and trowel trying to remove them. The lawn was a good day’s work in itself, heaving all of those up and then removing every last tendril so they couldn’t simply start the cycle all over again.

  As she surveyed the mature borders and climbers, the Alpine plants spilling jubilantly out of the rockery, obscuring the stones almost completely, the suddenly enormous-looking, very deep pond, flecked with the diminutive green leaves of duckweed, and the relentless dandelions turning the lawns from acid-green to jaunty yellow, she half thought about getting back into the Land Rover and going home again.

  There was so much to do — an overwhelming amount of work, most of it intensely physical, and she didn’t have a clue where to begin.

  I’m going to need an army, she thought frantically as her head reeled with the enormity of the task ahead of her. She bent down idly to stroke Minel’s new puppy, which had rocked up and was sniffing eagerly at her ankle. She would go round to the site, she decided, and see if Paul was willing to discuss getting her some help, and if Rik was there she would just — well, she’d cross that bridge when she came to it.

  She could hear a great deal of high-pitched giggling and lots of general rowdy hubbub. Turning the corner past the stone wall, she found a rabble of excited-looking teenage boys spilling all over the patch of already broken turf Paul had marked out with pegs and string, shifting and lurching all over the place in constant collective motion, occasionally cannoning off each other, dropping the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and eating rather a lot of crisps.

  Minel’s puppy had followed her and he leaped yapping out onto the site, whirling around and around, his head going this way and that, his eyes popping out of his little head at all the excitement of so many new people. ‘Come here,’ Faith yelled at him, as he belted around snapping at ankles, hoovering up crisps and throwing himself bodily in the air to reach the packets. ‘Come here!’

  Paul, who was by the cement mixer, had noticed the commotion. ‘Get him out of here,’ he called to Faith. ‘Take him back to the house.’

  The little terrier, however, was so hopelessly worked up Faith couldn’t get her hands around him. Every time she got close he would spy somebody new to harangue and whisk away, barking his tiny head off, then he vanished altogether.

  ‘He went that way,’ Paul said, gesturing towards the drive. Faith hurtled down it, desperate to stop the puppy before he reached the main road. She scanned the drive anxiously then spied the puppy sniffing about at the edge of the copse and shot forward, scooping him up into her arms and chiding him affectionately.

  ‘You gave me a scare,’ she murmured. The puppy, entirely unconcerned, squirmed happily in her arms and rolled over, proffering up his belly to be scratched.

  Faith smiled. ‘You are a charmer,’ she sighed, rubbing the soft fur and watching the expression of unfiltered joy on the puppy’s little face. From this angle his needle-like teeth were visible in his jaws and the resemblance to Tackle was so uncanny the hairs on the back of her arms began to prickle and a wave of something indefinable yet oddly familiar washed over her. It was almost déjà vu and she blinked and examined him a little closer, to reassure herself she hadn’t accidentally scooped up an aged and shrunken Tackle instead.

  But the terrier in her arms was still a puppy.

  The person who had materialised by her side, however, was very much a grown adult. She hadn’t seen or heard a thing but she would have known Rik was standing next to her if she’d been blindfolded and had her ears plugged.

  Faith’s heart, already roused by the sprint to the drive, cannoned back into her mouth and her stomach twisted and shot upwards too, and she wondered for a terrifying moment if she was going to be sick. She leaned forward automatically, clutching the puppy, and took a couple of deep breaths. The hairs on her arms were now standing fully on end like the spines on a cactus. The puppy, feeling her hands tighten too much on his furry body, yelped.

  ‘Hi Faith,’ Rik said, glancing at her and then dropping his eyes to the puppy before passing them straight over her to a point in the middle distance. ‘Minel said you’d be here.’ He didn’t sound thrilled about it, but he didn’t sound disappointed either. He just sounded matter-of-fact. ‘Long time no see.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said breathlessly. No see indeed, but now she was seeing and it was an almost unbearable combination of feeling like she was seeing him for the first time but also, that she’d last been with him just yesterday. He had always been tall, but he had filled out since she’d last seen him and underneath his fairly close-fitting black t-shirt she could see his lean, streamlined muscles had become more defined. But not too much, she noted before she could help herself, he still looked like he would move gracefully and silently, which he clearly did given that she hadn’t heard him approaching. Still a ninja, she thought with a bittersweet combination of relief and pain. His jaw was darkened by stubble but she could still see his almost haughty bone structure underneath, and his thick eyelashes still curled relentlessly upwards over his very dark brown eyes, eyes she’d once thought she could read like a book. But there was no trace of the restless energy he’d always carried around with him, the sense he was working very hard to stay still. That had been replaced by a more forceful presence altogether and she could practically feel the heat emanating from him.

  ‘She said you’d be here too,’ Faith said, her voice sounding distant and unfamiliar to her own ears.

  He nodded. ‘I do live here,’ he said as if she didn’t already know that. ‘At least, I used to. Paul wanted some help. From somebody older than sixteen.’

  His eyes finally met hers. Faith could almost hear her heart hammering away in her chest and her lungs were squashed and constricted, like she needed to yawn to draw in enough oxygen.

  ‘OK then,’ he said. She steeled herself and forced her face into an expressionless mask. ‘I’d better get going. See you later.’ And as quickly as he had appeared, he was gone.

  Faith gaped at the empty space bes
ide her.

  That was all she was going to get, nine years of absence and heartbreak and it was just ‘see you later’?

  She stood motionless for a few moments, expecting Rik to come back so they could pick up their conversation, but then the puppy started squirming and wriggling in her arms and she supposed she’d better take him and herself back to the garden.

  As she wandered past the site she could hear loud guffaws and was half tempted to stop and see what all the ruckus was about, but she suddenly didn’t feel like putting herself at the mercy of Paul and a bunch of teenagers in front of Rik. She trailed on and set the puppy down on the grass, then looked into the murky depths of the pond.

  He’ll come over in a bit, she told herself reassuringly. Or I’ll go down to the site and grab him and we can take a few minutes. He’s not just going to leave me hanging like that, not Rik, that’s not how he is.

  How he was.

  Chapter 4

  This, Faith thought as she stared at the half-drained depths of the pond, the disturbed water swirling darker and murkier than ever, is a total nightmare.

  She put her lips around the end of the hose pipe again and sucked as hard as she could, pulling and pulling until she was completely out of puff and then clamped her thumb over the end of the pipe, preventing any more air from leeching its way inside and undoing her good work. She took a few deep breaths and returned to the attack.

  Her face was burning and her eyes were practically bugging out of her head with the effort as she sucked once again, drawing the painfully tenderised flesh on the inside of her cheeks against her teeth as she coaxed the reluctant water ever closer to her mouth. This was the third time she’d had to restart the siphon this morning and it was getting harder to create the necessary vacuum between the hose and the water. She gave it one last, almighty suck and felt filthy pond water flooding into her mouth, and she flung the hose down triumphantly and watched the dark greeny-brown liquid begin to pump out of the other end. She spat out the liquid, grimacing, and seized a bottle of water, rinsing out her mouth and spitting that out onto the lawn too. Then she ran the hose down to the nearest drain, listening to the contents of the pond gush into the depths below.

  Thank Christ that was over. Now, back to the nightmare.

  This wasn’t panning out at all as she had expected. She was already way behind, completely thrown after seeing Rik again and her parents were acting weirder and more stilted than ever. Faith could have cut the atmosphere at home with a knife, in fact she’d been half tempted to just to see if there was anything alive in there. Judith and Jeff made polite conversation over dinner, but it would all become strained and Faith felt sure it was loaded with double-meanings.

  I know all about double meanings, she thought, I specialised in them once. Something’s going on. But she couldn’t put her finger on it and any time she asked her mother Judith insisted she was fine and returned to drinking her apparently bottomless cup of tea.

  She had barely seen Minel, who was finishing up at school before the summer holidays and seemed tired and distracted. Preoccupied, no doubt, by her and Paul’s struggle to conceive, and Faith wished more than anything she could say or do something to help, but she felt it would be tactless to inquire and Minel seemed reluctant to discuss it much.

  At least she had Sara, or so she’d thought. But the one time she’d seen her usually wisecracking friend she was vacant and distant and even looked different, like she was fading round the edges. Sara had always been so earthy and vibrant, a glorious ruby-red rose, sexy and provocative but sweet to the very core. But her petals were curling and drying out at the edges. She had deeper lines over her forehead than Faith remembered, her usually shiny dark hair was distinctly less glossy and Faith had even spotted the odd tell-tale flash of grey at the roots.

  Sara was the one person Faith had thought she could rely on to provide a positive, sassy spin on her current dismal situation, even if it would mean she had to avoid mentioning the suddenly extremely pressing situation with Rik.

  What was she going to do about Rik?

  She wasn’t sure what she’d expected from him. Defensiveness, maybe. An awkward, strained atmosphere. That would have been fine, she could handle a strained atmosphere. She could have handled it — very nicely — if he’d just tried to turn it all into a big joke. In fact she could have handled anything, anything at all, except — nothing.

  A big, fat, gaping great hole of nothing.

  He’d looked disinterested and mildly affronted any time she’d crossed his path, dismissing her with a nod or shake of his head or making an entirely boring, closed statement and turning away. His eyes always seemed to be elsewhere and if he was forced to look in her direction, he looked straight through her as if she wasn’t even there.

  It’s almost like he’s annoyed with me, she thought in bewilderment, or he’s blaming me for something. And if he is, if he’s really trying to turn this all around onto me and make out it’s somehow my fault we haven’t spoken in nine years then he’s prepared to stoop even lower than I thought he would.

  The worst part was, it actually seemed to be working. Faith found she couldn’t ignore him. She had fully intended to occupy the moral high ground and remain cool and distant and composed and watch him slowly become more agitated until eventually he would just spit it all out, like the cold, rancid pond water she had just spat onto the grass. And then she could have made an informed decision about whether or not she was prepared to allow him any wiggle-room into her life or finally tell him straight that he’d disappointed her beyond all repair. Either way, she would be able to feel the weight of whatever Rik-related trauma she’d been carrying around with her all these years lift away, leaving her free to carry on with her life as if he were nothing but a minor blot in the far distant horizon.

  But as it was she found herself scanning his face desperately for a flicker of recognition, for a moment of warmth, for just the slightest inkling that she’d once meant something to him. The blanker and more inscrutable he became, the more anxious she was to prove to him and to herself that she had at one point mattered to him, and belonged here at Hollyhocks.

  And then there was the small matter of her disloyal eyes.

  Are you that shallow, she fumed at herself, that despite everything he put you through you’re sidetracked by the fact that he’s still hot? Hotter than ever, her eyes would insist, he’s turned it up by several degrees, don’t you think?

  ‘It must be nice for you guys, catching up again,’ Minel, who had popped home for lunch and unwittingly saved Faith from yet another predictable and borderline troubling argument with her own ocular nerves, remarked. They both watched Rik cycle off down the gravel drive, bouncing the bike slightly to test his suspension. ‘Aren’t you joining him for a lunchtime jaunt?’

  He hasn’t offered, Faith wanted to say. ‘He seems quite busy,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘We haven’t really talked much.’

  ‘He’s got loads of work on,’ Minel said guiltily. ‘He’s straight back over to the cottage after dinner, burning the midnight oil. He never complains,’ she said quickly, ‘you know Rik.’

  I don’t, Faith wanted to scream, I don’t know this shell of a stranger at all. He looks like Rik and sounds like Rik and moves like Rik but I get the feeling if I put my hand on his shoulder it would just crumble and disintegrate beneath my fingers — he would turn to dust.

  Sara had turned up and as she walked over, cackling to herself about something, Faith’s face lifted. Maybe Sara had just been tired the other day, she thought hopefully, and now she’s back to normal she can inject some much-needed comic relief into this otherwise joyless situation.

  But whatever it was that had amused Sara, it had faded by the time she joined them. ‘Hey,’ she said wearily. ‘What’s for lunch?’

  ‘Sandwiches,’ Minel said. ‘Come up to the house. It looks like a bakery in there.’

  Half-cut loaves of bread and various fillings were cluttering up th
e marbled countertops. Minel scraped together some offcuts and dumped a plate unceremoniously in the middle of the table. ‘I made fifteen rounds of sandwiches for those teenagers this morning,’ she said. ‘You guys can just take what you’re given.’

  ‘So Faith,’ Sara said, still in that same weary tone. ‘You never did tell me what happened with Rob other than you saying “I don’t” to his offer of “I do”.’

  ‘It just ran its course,’ Faith said. ‘With hindsight I should have ended it when we moved, but I thought I should work at it. It turns out,’ she said glumly, ‘that’s not the kind of work a relationship needs. You shouldn’t have to work at wanting to be with somebody.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’ Minel asked sympathetically.

  Faith shrugged. ‘It wasn’t bad. It was just boring. So boring.’ She chewed on a particularly thick crust reflectively. ‘We were more like brother and sister, and not in a fun, having adventures together kind of way.’

  ‘I never had adventures with Rik,’ Minel said, wrinkling her nose a little at the thought. ‘Other than winding up Mum and Dad of course.’

  No, Faith thought. He had adventures with me, instead. If Rob had been anything like Rik, then maybe — then maybe he would have broken my heart too, she reminded herself irritably.

  ‘How do you mean, brother and sister?’ Sara was leaning forwards in her chair.

  ‘Lots of low-level bickering, but again, not the fun kind,’ Faith said. ‘More the repetitive, tedious, why can’t you be a different person kind. And we never had sex.’ She flushed guiltily. ‘Although that was really more my fault than his.’

  ‘Why not?’ Sara looked more interested than ever.

  ‘I just didn’t want to,’ she confessed. ‘It felt completely wrong. I had to steel myself any time we did go through with it and there was no real feeling in it on my part.’

  ‘That’s normal though,’ Sara said. ‘After a while. It’s not like it was at the beginning.’