Summer at Hollyhock House

by Cathy Bussey

  Get some action, more like, Faith thought as she eyed Lucinda’s radiant face. I’m not apologising to you now. She stomped off to the garden.

  She couldn’t even be bothered to joke with Lofty, who greeted her eagerly and with several unintentionally comic asides. She sent him off to move the rockery, and picked up her shovel. After a couple of intense hours she decided to wander up to the house and make some tea. GT had shot out delightedly when she showed up and was now dozing in the still early morning sun, one eye on her in case she dared run out on him again.

  Minel wasn’t in the kitchen but there was bloody Lucinda, wafting around looking far too happy and most definitely at home.

  ‘Hi Faith,’ she said, sounding much more chipper. ‘Come for a tea break?’

  ‘Hi,’ Faith mumbled, avoiding eye contact. Stop being so childish, she ordered herself. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ She flicked on the kettle and reached for a cup, deliberately ignoring the new-looking bone china Lucinda had chosen in favour of the cracked stripy mugs she was willing to bet were older than she was.

  ‘Good weekend?’ Lucinda asked conversationally.

  ‘Yeah,’ Faith said. ‘Went to a track meet. I ride bikes,’ she said by way of explanation. ‘What about you? How was your christening?’

  ‘Lovely,’ Lucinda said, ‘although we were a bit late.’ She giggled. Ugh, Faith thought, no prizes for guessing why. Does she have to be so obvious?

  ‘Get up to much else?’

  Lucinda giggled again. ‘Just spent some time catching up with Rik,’ she said, and sighed dreamily. Faith sloshed water into her cup and half thought about flinging the kettle at Lucinda’s despicably smug face. I hate her, she thought helplessly, and it’s not her fault in the slightest.

  It wasn’t just that Lucinda got to sleep with Rik, she thought longingly, it was all of it. She got to be with him, to do all those normal everyday things that suddenly seemed so much better when he was around. She got to spill the contents of her mind at him without censoring herself and she could just reach out and kiss him whenever she wanted and she got to wake up in the morning with his arms around her and — no, she wasn’t going there.

  ‘Sounds nice,’ she said to Lucinda noncommittally, stirring the tea and squeezing out the bag, before tossing it towards the bin. It missed.

  ‘It was,’ Lucinda said, still in that dreamy tone of voice. ‘Gosh, he must have missed me after all. Oh, I’m sorry,’ she said, sounding very genuine. ‘How thoughtless of me. Rik says you’ve just broken up with your boyfriend. Awful having other people shoving their happiness in your face. I know when I split up with my last boyfriend I couldn’t bear to be around a happy couple for months. I hope I don’t sound too smug.’

  You do, Faith thought, but that’s only because you are. She poured milk into her tea. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘How’s it going in the garden?’

  ‘Slow progress,’ Faith said. ‘Glad I’ve got Lofty doing all the heavy lifting for me.’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ Lucinda said. ‘Bit of a dreamboat, isn’t he?’

  ‘Not my thing,’ Faith said. ‘But he’s good value, I suppose.’

  ‘I’d be half-tempted myself if I wasn’t with Rik,’ Lucinda said conspiratorially, and she winked. Faith wanted to be sick into her tea. ‘I’d best go and find him,’ Lucinda said. ‘Missing him already. Hope he’s still got a bit of energy left.’ She floated out of the kitchen, giggling.

  Faith stormed furiously back down to the garden, kicking several stray plant pots outside the greenhouse on her way. They made a satisfying clattering noise and she picked up a metal watering can and hurled it across the lawn, watching it catch the sunlight as it bounced upon landing.

  Rik didn’t show up to ride with her at lunchtime and Faith hung around with Minel instead, giggling at GTs antics and eating the raspberries that were starting to ripen on the tangle of canes next to the greenhouse. Then, as she returned to the rockery, she was greeted by a beaming Lucinda who was wearing the same denim shorts but had changed into one of Rik’s t-shirts. Faith didn’t want to think about what circumstances had led him to take it off in the first place.

  ‘I thought I’d give you a hand,’ Lucinda said.

  ‘Not much happening here really,’ Faith said dubiously. ‘Digging, shunting, that kind of thing. Not really much fun for you.’

  ‘I don’t mind.’ Lucinda smiled persuasively. ‘It’s better than loafing around by the pool while you all toil away. Also, it would be nice to spend a bit of time with you, Faith. I have the feeling we didn’t really get off to a great start.’

  That’s your fault, Faith thought irrationally, with your acquisition of my man. Even though he absolutely isn’t.

  Lucinda was still smiling, her china blue eyes lit prettily and her dainty lips stretched over her perfect teeth. ‘What can I do?’

  Faith plastered a smile on her own face. ‘Why don’t you start going through these?’ she suggested, gesturing at the reams of potted plants that she had ordered in. ‘I’ve got a list somewhere of what’s going where.’ She dug around in her pocket and pulled it out, brushing some stray compost off it. ‘There. If you can sort them and then water them, and let me know if any look like they’re struggling, that would be great. Thank you.’

  ‘No problem.’ Lucinda took the scrumpled piece of paper and smoothed it out. Faith sent Lofty over to help Paul for the afternoon then picked up her fork and began to attack one of her infernal piles of earth, which was rock-hard and tightly packed. I can just pretend it’s Lucinda’s face, she decided, and the afternoon will fly by.

  ‘This looks like hard work,’ Lucinda, who was watching her, said sympathetically. ‘Look, Faith, I hope it’s not too weird, having me around.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Faith said.

  ‘I mean, I know you and Rik have a bit of history,’ Lucinda said idly.

  Faith flinched. Did she really? He must have told her everything after all — oh, why had he told her? Talk about making things awkward.

  ‘Yeah, we were all good friends when we were kids,’ she said.

  ‘Faith, it’s OK,’ Lucinda cut her off and flashed her a kindly sort of smile. ‘I know about you and Rik. He told me.’

  That still wasn’t conclusive. ‘Seriously, don’t worry about it at all,’ she said firmly. ‘It’s not weird in the slightest.’

  ‘I think it’s quite sweet, that you two are still friends,’ Lucinda, undeterred, carried on. ‘I certainly wouldn’t want to be within a million miles of any of my exes, let alone working with them.’

  Faith had a vision of spending all summer stuck with Rob and shuddered exaggeratedly.

  ‘Suppose it’s ancient history now,’ Lucinda remarked.

  Faith shoved her fork viciously into the mound of earth, feeling the iron prongs protesting as she rammed it forcefully down with both her feet, then heaved it back and forth. One of the prongs gave way and she tossed the fork aside irritably and reached for another one. She was going to get through all of Helena and Ravi’s tools at this rate and the bill to replace them would be astronomical.

  Lucinda fingered a rose thoughtfully. ‘You obviously meant a lot to each other.’

  Faith shrugged. ‘Pretty formative time, one’s teenage years. We all helped to build one another. Minel, Sara and I were like sisters under the skin. Sisters from another mister,’ she said idly.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like Rik was very brotherly,’ Lucinda observed, still petting the unfortunate rose, which Faith could swear was already beginning to wilt. ‘I never did that with my brother.’ She shot Faith a cheeky, conspiratorial look.

  ‘He wasn’t into cycling then?’ Faith said evasively. ‘That’s what Rik and I were into.’

  ‘I wasn’t talking about the cycling.’

  Why is she still pushing this? Faith wondered. What does she want from me? She raised the new fork threateningly and, presumably cowed by the fate its predecessor had met
, it slid into the ground without protest.

  ‘How old is your brother?’ she asked Lucinda, hoping to change the subject.

  ‘He’s older than me,’ Lucinda said. ‘Thirty.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Faith said. ‘I’d have loved a sibling. Bet he had loads of hot mates.’

  Lucinda laughed. ‘One or two,’ she confided. ‘Although obviously I wouldn’t have dreamed of acting on it. You’re an only child?’

  Faith nodded and Lucinda looked at her sympathetically. ‘You must have been lonely, growing up. I can see why you spent so much time here.’

  ‘Who wouldn’t?’ Faith asked, sweeping her arm around the land. ‘It’s like something from a dream.’

  ‘It’s just stunning. A little bit magical.’

  Faith nodded eagerly. ‘I couldn’t believe this place, the first time I came here. I had never seen anything like it. The space, the setting, the peace and quiet, the wildness spilling out just beyond the drive. Heady clouds of cow parsley lining the road, the way the trees almost touch together to form a roof over it, so close that squirrels can jump from one to another. The freedom,’ she said yearningly. ‘Minel and Rik moved into the cottage not long after I moved here,’ she said, ‘and we had so much fun, all of us. Helena and Ravi were so trusting. They gave us free run and I knew every inch of this place like the back of my hand, from the stream that cuts off this land from next doors to the secrets hidden down in that copse. The more I knew it, the more I felt it knew me too. Do you know, from time to time I was sure this place was enchanted. Some days I could actually feel the magic, just beneath the surface, vibrating on a frequency just beyond our reach, drifting in from the copse along with the scent of the wild garlic…’ She supposed she must be sounding like a mad hippy and stopped abruptly.

  But Lucinda looked transfixed. ‘I always wanted to find fairies living at the bottom of my garden,’ she said, ‘I doubt they come in as far as north London.’

  ‘There are some lovely parts of London,’ Faith said. ‘North in particular. Hampstead Heath and Primrose Hill. You’d definitely meet some fairies up there.’

  ‘Picnicking on toadstools,’ Lucinda agreed. ‘The red and white ones. I don’t know what they’re called.’

  ‘Fly agaric.’ Faith thought maybe she could warm to Lucinda after all. ‘Very poisonous, and hallucinogenic in small quantities. Not that I’d know, and I couldn’t imagine hallucinating anything more magical than Hollyhocks.’

  ‘Magic,’ Lucinda repeated. ‘Obviously worked on you and Rik.’

  ‘Only for a bit,’ Faith said, thinking she’d often suspected the same herself. ‘Not long at all,’ she added wistfully.

  ‘Of course.’ Lucinda nodded. ‘Silly of me really, thinking it would still be weird.’ She pulled her phone out of her pocket and sighed. ‘Even while I’m on leave, they still bother me. So sorry Faith. I have to go and reply to these emails.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Faith asked. She didn’t actually know, shame on her for not even finding out something so basic about Lucinda. She was almost starting to think perhaps she wasn’t such a horrendous bitch after all.

  ‘I’m a journalist,’ Lucinda said absently. ‘Always on, even when I’m off. I was glued to this ghastly thing all weekend.’ She frowned at her phone.

  All weekend? Faith thought as Lucinda marched off. But surely she’d spent all weekend ‘catching up with Rik?’ Something felt distinctly off, she was prickling a bit. She surveyed the ground meditatively. What was it? Her hackles were undoubtedly up, she almost felt like she’d been had in some way. But how? She hadn’t told Lucinda anything she didn’t already know — she’d barely done any of the talking until she started waxing lyrical about Hollyhocks.

  She poked tentatively at the ground again. She was a press officer, she was always having to fend off nosy journalists. Something about Lucinda must have reminded her of work, she concluded. That was all it was. She raised the fork, and watched the ground shift around to make way for the inexorably descending iron prongs.

  The romantic diatribe to Lucinda about magic had awakened something within Faith — reawakened, anyway — because she was treated to a night of steamy and astoundingly graphic dreams about Rik. She lurched awake at 3am, her heart pounding, drenched in sweat, after another toe-curling but frustratingly inconclusive encounter with him.

  I need to get a grip, she thought. Lucinda was still floating around, although her appetite for girly chit-chat with Faith had thankfully dissipated just as quickly as it had arrived, and she rode alone on Tuesday, hoping the relentless churning of her legs as they powered her up hill after hill would somehow ease her equally relentless internal torment. GT, instinctively attuned to any bitch on heat, had leaped on her ankle so many times she’d had to banish him to the greenhouse so she could get on with some work. He howled plaintively if she tried to put him in the house, out of sight, and the noise drove Paul crackers.

  ‘Sorry if you’re the wrong person to put this on, but I need to get laid,’ she sighed to Sara that evening over a bottle of Prosecco at the Blacksmith’s. They had appropriated the table at the end of the garden and were sharing a plate of mezze, Faith eating most of it because she seemed to be constantly starving and Minel’s sandwiches barely scratched the surface at lunchtime. ‘All my appetites have increased exponentially,’ she confessed.

  ‘At least if you do I can live vicariously through you.’ Sara popped the last olive into her mouth. She had touched up her roots and was wearing a bright red sundress. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Bad,’ Faith said.

  ‘Anything prompted this?’ Sara inquired.

  Faith thought how perceptive Sara was and how honest she’d been with her about her situation with Tony and how desperately she wanted somebody with whom to talk to about it all.

  ‘Oh Sar. I’m in a muddle.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About Rik.’

  ‘What about Rik?’ Sara frowned. ‘What — you had him in mind as a potential outlet for your current rush of blood to the…’ she tailed off.

  ‘Something like that,’ Faith admitted. ‘Seeing him again threw me a bit.’

  ‘He’s grown up, that’s for sure,’ Sara mused. ‘Very easy on the eye, especially after the tops-off zone on Friday. It was practically raining abs over there in amongst all that swimming-pool water. Is that what’s got you thinking about him?’

  ‘Not really,’ Faith said. ‘That’s actually not the first time I’ve seen Rik with his top off. Although it is the first time in a very long time.’

  Sara sat up very straight. ‘Don’t tell me you did more than just eat his face off at Minel’s birthday party? You said you didn’t even remember.’

  Faith sighed. ‘I do remember. And I didn’t tell you what happened after that,’ she said, still feeling residual pangs of guilt for keeping something like that from her friend. ‘We didn’t tell anybody but yes, there was some tops-off action and that wasn’t the only time.’

  ‘Ohhh.’ Sara’s eyes were sparkling again. ‘Oh. You and him, eh? What happened? Why didn’t we know?’

  ‘You would have done, I expect, if it had gone on for much longer,’ Faith said. ‘I was a bit embarrassed about it at first, him being younger and Min’s brother, I thought you’d all laugh at me.’

  ‘Oh, we would have,’ Sara said, ‘but we’d have been pleased for you, god knows you needed some fun, and Rik was a good kid, bit annoying and lippy but obviously that didn’t bother you.’ She looked delighted to have a new piece of gossip to mull over. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.’

  ‘Didn’t go on for very long,’ Faith said again. ‘Not that much to tell.’ Not much and so much.

  ‘Come on then,’ Sara said. ‘Dish.’

  ‘We were friends for ages,’ Faith said, ‘and then there was Minel’s 18th. And after that,’ she could still remember the impact of that kiss, that feeling of discovering a new side to her friend. ‘We hung out a bit. Messed around.’


  ‘How messy did it get?’

  ‘About as messy as it can get,’ Faith admitted. ‘It got quite messy in your house once actually. But then I ended it and I basically never spoke to him again.’

  ‘Why?’

  The million-dollar question. ‘I thought he cheated on me,’ she said. ‘I was absolutely sure he did, actually, but it turns out,’ she sighed again. ‘It turns out he didn’t after all.’

  Sara frowned. ‘So why did you think he did — what happened?’

  Faith explained briefly. ‘I didn’t think to check,’ she said. ‘I just assumed it must have been him and if it wasn’t for that conversation we had in the kitchen last week, I would never have realised.’

  ‘Oh,’ Sara said.

  ‘Oh indeed,’ Faith said. ‘Which means that what actually happened was, I dumped Rik for no reason whatsoever with no explanation and I haven’t spoken to him, until this summer, in nine years.’

  ‘Oh.’ Sara’s eyes grew very wide.

  ‘I’ve told him now,’ Faith said hastily.

  Sara ate a few olives and Faith waited patiently for her to hone in on the most pertinent of the facts she’d just given her.

  ‘Did you shag him?’

  Always focused on the important details, Faith thought with amusement, and she nodded.

  Sara gasped. ‘Really? You went all the way?’

  ‘All the way,’ Faith confirmed. ‘Just one night — well, most of the night actually. And the next morning.’

  Sara looked taken aback. ‘Christ. You two didn’t do things by halves.’

  ‘We were teenagers.’

  ‘Agonisingly horny teenagers.’ Sara chortled merrily. ‘But hang on — I thought you lost your virginity at university? To that guy who cheated on you. Joel.’

  Faith shook her head. ‘No. It was with Rik. Joel was just a fling. I made up all that stuff about him cheating on me — well I didn’t make it up, I just swapped his name for Rik’s. The rest of it is all true. At least I thought it was true.’

  ‘All right.’ Sara held her hands up. ‘Let’s get this straight. You were with Rik, and then you dumped him for cheating on you, and now it turns out he never actually cheated on you at all and this is the first time you’ve seen him in nine years and you’re getting on — how are you getting on?’