Summer at Hollyhock House

by Cathy Bussey

  ‘They’re trying to work up the courage to talk to you,’ he said. ‘But they’re too afraid of me to try.’

  ‘He doesn’t like us talking about you,’ muttered one of the shuffling teens.

  ‘Go on then.’ Rik gestured at the teenagers. ‘Get on with it.’

  ‘What have they been saying?’ Faith didn’t know if she really wanted to know but she was curious why Rik would care what they said. ‘I guess it wasn’t flattering?’

  He smiled again, a genuine smile that reached the corners of his eyes. It was the first time he’d truly smiled at her since she’d got here, and she caught her breath and reached automatically for GT who was always close at hand. He nipped at her affectionately.

  ‘I think they think it’s flattering,’ he said. ‘But they’re only young and they get most of their information from the internet so they have strange ideas about what constitutes a compliment. Luckily, they’ve got me and Paul to set them straight. Do you want to ride again at lunch?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really,’ he affirmed. ‘It would be nice to actually catch up with you, Faith, find out what you’ve been up to all this time.’ He frowned. ‘I could do without the embarrassing shouty preamble, if that’s OK with you?’

  It had been embarrassing, she conceded, and quite shouty and when she’d yanked him round to face her she’d been so wound up she genuinely hadn’t known if she wanted to kiss him or take a swing at him. Although she was pretty sure whichever avenue she’d chosen, it would have ended the same way.

  ‘No more foreplay,’ she agreed. There was an awkward — well, awkward for her, anyway — silence. Faith wanted the ground to open up and swallow her whole. ‘God, sorry,’ she gasped. ‘Don’t know where that came from. I was just thinking about —’

  What had she been thinking about?

  ‘Thinking about?’ Rik prompted, clearly not willing to let her just leave the thought hanging.

  ‘James Bond!’ she said triumphantly. Her dad had been watching it last night. ‘That’s where it’s from.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That thing about foreplay.’ I need to stop this, she thought. I’m just making it worse.

  ‘Right,’ Rik said, as if this were an entirely rational discussion.

  ‘I need to get on,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ll see you at lunch.’

  By unspoken agreement they headed back up Fox Hill again. Faith felt her legs burning from yesterday’s efforts, and as they reached the top she bashed Rik’s rear wheel with hers and held up her hands for a time out.

  Once they had sat down she had no idea what to say to him. It’s an odd sort of limbo, this, she thought, because on the one hand we know — knew — each other so well small talk is really out of the question, but on the other hand I haven’t seen him in nearly a decade and I have no idea how we’re going to bridge that gap. She really wanted to ask him about the super-hot Lucinda but she supposed that might sound like she was fishing.

  She took her helmet off and shook her hair out absently.

  ‘So what do you do now?’ he asked. ‘For work?’

  ‘I work for a local authority in London,’ she said.

  ‘Doing what? Land management?’

  She shook her head. ‘Communications. Writing up minutes of meetings, sending out press releases, that kind of thing.’

  Rik looked surprised. ‘Do you enjoy it?’

  Faith sensed she’d disappointed him in some way. ‘Not really,’ she said, ‘but it pays the bills and Rob — my boyfriend — wanted us to buy a house.’

  ‘I always thought you’d go into garden design,’ he said, sounding regretful. ‘Or become a TV gardening expert. I kept expecting to see you pop up during the Chelsea Flower Show, gushing about daffodils.’

  ‘They’re not in flower that late. They’re spring blooms,’ she corrected. ‘Brought into life by the first welcome rays of sunshine after the relentless grey and bitter frosts, but they can’t handle the radiance of a real summer.’

  ‘See?’ he said. ‘You’d be a natural. How come you didn’t carry on with the gardening?’

  She sighed. ‘Too risky, I suppose,’ she said eventually. ‘Competitive, low pay, hard work, difficult to make a career out of it.’ She didn’t really feel like discussing why she’d abandoned her passions so comprehensively. ‘What about you? What kind of graphic art do you do?’

  ‘Very graphic, as it happens,’ Rik said. ‘Porn, mostly.’

  ‘God, really?’

  ‘No,’ he said, laughing a little at the shocked expression on her face. ‘Websites, logos, that kind of thing. The occasional graphic novel.’

  ‘You mean comics.’

  ‘Comic,’ he agreed. ‘I still love them. Not ashamed.’

  ‘Minel says you travel a lot.’

  He nodded. ‘I can do most of my stuff remotely, and I pick up clients all over the place.’

  ‘Whereabouts?’ Faith felt a pang of envy. She would have loved to have travelled, she always thought she would, actually, with Rik. They’d agreed they would take off, doing all the usual student trails, which invariably involved Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam then Australia and New Zealand for all that outback biking.

  And she’d always quite fancied South America, trailing down the Amazon and stopping off in La Paz, that mythical-looking city in the clouds. She and Rik would have sat somewhere on top of the mountains, gazing down at the metropolis below with swirling white masses floating above it and they would have wondered aloud what it would be like to just jump straight through them and feel that collected rainwater and mist soaking their skin.

  ‘All over, really,’ he said. ‘I spend quite a bit of time in Germany. Hamburg, mainly.’

  ‘Do you speak German?’ Faith asked.

  ‘Ja!’ Rik boomed, and she started. He giggled. ‘Apparently I sound quite dictatorial, and my grammar is awful.’

  ‘It’s quite a dictatorial sort of language,’ she said, wishing she spoke more than just English. She’d always liked the idea of learning a language but she’d forgotten all her GCSE French within seconds of the exam and on the rare occasions she had been abroad she’d always relied on the good old ‘speak English loudly and slowly’ school of communication. ‘Where else?’

  ‘Slovakia, although that wasn’t for work.’ Faith presumed he must have had a central European girlfriend and felt another stab of envy. ‘Sweden.’ Had he notched up a blonde Viking conquest too? she wondered automatically. ‘Singapore, Japan, the States…’

  Jesus Rik, she thought, just how many women have you slept with?

  ‘Sounds fun,’ she said, noting that now her tone was a little acidic.

  ‘I always thought you’d travel too,’ he said. ‘You seemed keen on the idea.’

  ‘It seemed too risky.’

  ‘What’s risky about it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Didn’t have anybody to go with, I suppose, and I don’t speak any languages, and it’s expensive.’ She must sound like a total bore.

  ‘So what have you been doing then?’ He was looking a little confused. ‘Other than writing press releases?’

  ‘I got into track cycling for a while. I used to meet up with an awesome bunch of girls every Saturday for a skills session. But I stopped.’ God, she thought, I don’t just sound like a bore, I sound like an old woman.

  ‘Was that too risky too?’ Rik asked. ‘Worried you’d bore yourself to sleep with all that mindless round-and-round?’

  ‘Actually it’s very enlivening,’ she said, affronted. ‘And it definitely does good things for the mind, the centrifugal force just pulls all the stuff you don’t want out and sends it on its merry way. Clouds dispersing to make way for the sun, seeds scattering to implant themselves into the waiting ground.’

  ‘And you think you wouldn’t be able to make it as a gardening pundit,’ he said, sounding amused. ‘You’d be like that woman we used to laugh at on my parents’ dreadful food and drink show, sniffing wine
and getting pissed live on air and talking about “wheelbarrows of watermelons”. And we would all be very proud. We’d turn to each other and say “I knew her when she was a mere dandelion, now she’s a blazing sunflower”.’

  Faith giggled. ‘More of a dandelion still,’ she said self-deprecatingly. ‘Although at least dandelions have those roots.’ Which she would have to break her tools and probably her arm heaving out.

  ‘Sounds like you have too, if you’re buying a house with your boyfriend.’

  ‘Ex-boyfriend,’ she corrected automatically.

  Rik looked startled. ‘You’re moving in with your ex? Ron, was it?’

  Ron! He made him sound like somebody’s granddad, sitting on the sofa reading his newspaper and blowing his nose on ever-present tissues and droning on about cars. Actually that wasn’t far off the mark, she conceded grudgingly.

  ‘Not any more,’ she said. ‘We just split up.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry.’

  She shook her head. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘He asked me to marry him,’ Faith said regretfully.

  ‘What a bastard.’

  She smiled absently. ‘He wasn’t a bastard. He just wasn’t very —’ Very what? ‘He was a bit too sensible,’ she said eventually. ‘He wanted security and stability and to settle down, and I didn’t.’

  ‘I would have thought you liked sensible,’ Rik said. ‘Well actually I wouldn’t have, but I wouldn’t have thought you thought gardening and travelling were risky either.’

  She knew what he was saying and he was echoing the thoughts she’d begun to have herself recently. ‘I did get very risk averse,’ she conceded, ‘after that shock with my parents and everything. I got a bit too focused on making sensible choices.’ She frowned, because she hadn’t actually consciously thought this at the time, but there had been that strange moment just before Ron — Rob! — had proposed when everything had gone a bit blurry and slow-mo. ‘When Rob actually got down on one knee and popped the question — in front of all our friends, which was highly embarrassing — I just had this moment.’ She could remember it a little more clearly now. ‘I thought, is this what you want your life to be? Safe, sensible boyfriend, safe, sensible husband, safe job, safe life, quiet life…’ She shook her head, it was like a pendulum at the moment. ‘I thought, no. Enough is enough.’

  Rik was watching her very intently and she thought she could see a flash of something in his eyes, something a little bit less disappointed. Or was he just confused? ‘That probably made no sense,’ she said. ‘I’m a bit absentminded these days. Even more than I used to be. I follow trains of thought quite happily, just drift along taking whatever comes up.’ She giggled. ‘Like Tackle. I wish I’d seen him again before he died.’

  ‘He adored you,’ Rik said. ‘We had that in common.’

  She felt a wave of sadness, drifting over on an invisible breeze, and the hairs on the back of her neck stood on end. Rik was silent too, his eyes very soulful, and she swallowed awkwardly. You’re going to have to get used to this, she told herself sternly, you’ll be chatting away with him quite happily and then suddenly something will remind you of the way things used to be and you’ll have to deal with it, you’ve got to learn to let it go. Think about something else.

  An image flashed into her mind of a naked Rik, lying back underneath her, gasping at her to —

  She felt a jolt in her groin. Stop that, she told herself firmly. That had never run its course, after all. They hadn’t had a chance for the novelty to wear off, it was only natural, surely, that being around him might provoke some of those sorts of feelings. It didn’t mean anything, he had the super-hot Lucinda after all.

  And she was hardly a catch, she conceded, sweaty and dishevelled and downbeat and a little bit curvier, although that wasn’t the right word because her lean frame didn’t lend itself to curves and instead she had just picked up a bit of a belly and her thighs touched at the top and her breasts had grown a cup size. He might like that, actually.

  ‘Rik?’

  ‘Yes?’ His eyes were still misty and faraway.

  ‘We should get going.’

  Hollyhocks must have joined Rik in forgiving Faith, because she made steady but noticeable progress with the pond that afternoon. Maybe it really was punishing me, she thought ruefully. It knew the truth and it wanted me to know too so it persisted in conspiring against me, forcing me into awkward and uncomfortable and downright exposing situations with Rik until all the pieces of the puzzle finally fell into place. The rain had made the ground softer and more malleable, and she dug easily, feeling a new strength in her body as she hauled stones aside and burrowed deeper into the no longer resistant earth.

  ‘I’ve told Paul to get you some help,’ Rik said, as she wandered past the site to say goodbye once her shift was finished. The sun was lower in the sky, and the halo-ish effect it created around his body made Faith’s eyes hurt in more ways than one. ‘He can’t spare any of that lot so we need to get somebody else in.’

  She glanced past him to the mob of teenagers, who were all rolling cigarettes and talking enthusiastically about their upcoming night at the pub.

  ‘He did offer right at the beginning,’ she said. ‘I should have taken him up on it. I really had no idea how hard this would be.’ She pulled a guilty face.

  ‘You’ll do a great job,’ Rik said and she felt a surge of fresh hope at the conviction in his voice. It really is going to be OK after all, she thought hopefully. We’ll have a lovely, fun summer and at the end of it I’ll wish him well and we’ll both move on knowing we can be a part of each other’s lives.

  She smiled happily at him, squinting a little against the sun.

  ‘Help will be very welcome,’ she said. ‘That rockery is going to be a nightmare to shift.’

  Help arrived the following morning in the form of an extremely tall, very blonde young man with bulging muscles who introduced himself as Henry but the teens immediately and inventively dubbed ‘Lofty’. Faith guessed he couldn’t have been more than twenty. ‘There you go,’ Minel said gleefully as Faith took in her new apprentice. ‘You asked for help, we got you He-Man.’ Lofty, she explained, was the son of one of her senior colleagues and doing manual work over the summer while on holiday from Cambridge. ‘Clever and handsome,’ Minel nudged Faith pointedly. ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘Bit young for me,’ Faith protested. ‘And a bit,’ she eyed the strapping youth who was currently hefting two of her gigantic bags of slime effortlessly. ‘Bit plastic-looking.’

  Lofty, who seemed to find Faith mesmerising, couldn’t have been happier about the arrangement. He relayed her endlessly with tales of his antics at Cambridge, in a deep but distinctly plummy voice that belied his privileged roots.

  Rik came over to check out the newest addition. ‘I’m pretty sure I drew him in at least three comics,’ he hissed to Faith, who was thinking how much more attractive he was than the conventionally handsome young buck she was supposed to be supervising. Rik still hadn’t shaved and his hair was now practically grey with dust, and he looked feral and a bit rough round the edges. He’s still going to be gorgeous as an old man, Faith thought wistfully, the grey brought out his skin tone and made his eyes sparkle more enticingly than ever.

  ‘I know what you mean,’ she murmured back. ‘He’s like a caricature, isn’t he?’

  Rik looked vindicated. ‘Ride again at lunch?’

  She nodded.

  He glanced at Lofty again. ‘Let me know if he gives you any grief.’

  Lofty, however, couldn’t have been more charming. ‘Can’t have a lovely lady like you dragging all this around,’ he said gallantly to Faith. She hated being called a lady, it sounded so old and pompous. He beamed at her winningly. ‘I’m at Cambridge,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘You told me several times.’

  ‘I’m studying astrophysics,’ he said.

  ‘Stardust,’ she said dreamily.

&nbs
p; ‘Actually,’ he said earnestly, ‘you’re not far off the mark. We study the physical and chemical nature of stars and other heavenly bodies.’

  He has a heavenly body, Faith thought, if you like that kind of thing. Every muscle in his body seemed to bulge and strain as he easily hefted yet another bag over his shoulders. His vest rode up as he did so and she saw that he, of course, had the waist of his pants on show. White Calvins, and she bet his were the real deal. Lofty was good-looking, she conceded, but he was heavy and cumbersome, it looked like an effort for him just to shift his significant mass into the correct alignment.

  I would hear Lofty coming a mile off, she thought, crashing and stamping around. She never heard Rik coming except of course when he actually was coming, because she had learned the warning signs pretty quickly, like the way he would shake and…

  ‘You need to hang around this evening.’ Rik had turned up again, either to supervise or to gape at Lofty. Faith leaped guiltily and shifted on her feet, looking around for GT to calm her, but for once the puppy had gone to pester some other ankles. Would you stop being so grotty for a moment, she told herself sternly, and concentrate on the fact you’re supposed to be his friend?

  They had gone up Fox Hill again at lunchtime and further out, not stopping this time but instead chatting as they rode. It had reminded Faith of all those times they had headed out together with no destination in mind, no real idea of how much time was passing, and no particular topic of conversation on the agenda. It was those times that had seen their burgeoning friendship turn into a deeper bond, through incidents and hitches like getting completely lost and having to find a way home, falls and cuts and grazes, and punctures and various other mechanical failures. Those were the times, she thought, when we realised how well our minds worked seamlessly together to solve problems, we never blamed or got annoyed with each other, we just got on with it and got each other through it. And that is why, with the benefit of hindsight, I fell in love with him, slowly and over time, so subtly and seamlessly I never even realised. It was only when we kissed at that stupid party that it all caught up with me.