5. A Bailiff Calls
The house was finished. Even Bel admitted it. Most people would have considered it finished some time earlier, but when it came to her own home and her own future, Bel was on a mission and so it was not until she had placed the ultimate and final embroidered pillow for the second guest bedroom that she was mentally prepared to sign off the enterprise.
And then there had been the garden. She who had been confined to window boxes all her life broke free and bought clipped box bushes by the lorry-load. Followed by mature roses, full-grown trees and an instant herbaceous border. ‘Shouldn’t you wait for it all to grow?’ Oliver had asked.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ she had answered. ‘You sound like that silly little man on the television who thinks he’s a sex symbol. Nobody waits when they’re restoring a house. You can’t tell a buyer that it’ll be a great garden in ten years’time. They want it now and if you can give it to them – boom! Up goes the price.’
As if to make her point, she made him drive her to a specialist poultry breeder many miles away, and came back with six speckled hens whose empty little heads were ornamented with idiotic pom-poms of white feathers, as if their useless brains had been extruded into cocktail hats. The birds lived, not in a chicken coop, but a Wendy house painted pale blue outside and inside decorated with the wallpaper offcuts from the Rose Bedroom. Oliver feared the day that Colin and Jimmy would discover this feature. All the same, he liked the chickens. They made him laugh.
As the final gesture, Bel changed the house’s name, and had it carved in a discreet stone plaque by the door: The Manor House. ‘Manor’, she thought, was worth a good ten grand more than ‘Farm’.
The building which Oliver had first known as a heap of rubble was now a small mansion of rose-red brick that loomed majestically at the end of a gravel drive. Inside, its walls were painted a rich cream, ample curtains flounced around the windows and a full complement of newly acquired heirloom furniture stood about, glowing from the energetic application of pure beeswax polish.
Outside, the former dairy, henhouse and piggery had been reborn as a series of walled gardens, where flowers could riot in safety, protected from the vicious North Sea winds. The big trees had been skilfully lopped and a new avenue of pleached limes led away across the sweeping lawn to the site of the proposed swimming pool.
Bel set out to create this magnificence with a massive mortgage and the firm idea that the house would provide her pension, something which neither of her husbands had given thought to, despite their shared illusion that being masculine and older than she was had conferred great wisdom upon them. When Bel realised that she was unmarried, likely to remain so, with no marketable skill other than that of creating beautiful homes, and that, furthermore, she was hurtling towards the age of sixty at frightening speed, she spent a year in a state of panic before putting her faith, and her money, and her borrowing power into The Manor House.
‘I’ll turn it around and sell it on in a year,’ she announced to Oliver. ‘Then I can do something clever with the capital and be a merry widow.’
‘Good plan,’ he told her, while guilt like a samurai sword virtually disembowelled him because he was now in no state to take care of his mother. And at that point in economic history, even Oliver could think of nothing clever that anyone could do with their capital.
No sooner was the new damp course being drilled in the house’s dank walls than Bel forgot whose money she was spending. Her husbands had both enjoyed being the big man who paid the bills, and she had adored the illusion that they had been taking care of her. A chequebook of her own was an awesome weapon; she would have felt more confident picking up a loaded Kalashnikov. Credit cards she saw as magical mischief-makers, as nasty little imps who would hop out of your wallet and cause havoc if you weren’t careful.
A budget, she knew, could keep everything under control, but budgets were what you did for a client. When Bel sat down to write out a budget for herself, she felt hideously lonely, her confidence drained away and her pen faltered on the paper.
I have nobody to take care of me now, she thought. I’m on my own. Oliver’s in worse trouble than I am. Toni’s running wild. It’s all hopeless. I can’t think.
She went outside, and stood in her new garden and felt the weight of the sky pressing down on her head. Tears started in her eyes. No, she told herself, you can’t give in. This isn’t happening. You’re just lonely because you’re in a new place. It will all be all right. It will.
Bel had acquired the habit of being spoiled, and at the back of her mind there was still a man born to indulge her, pottering quietly offstage somewhere, ready to emerge and make everything sunny. She felt the company of a conceptual husband, who admired her creations and financed them from his ever-open chequebook, almost as warmly as a real one. No matter that she had searched for this ideal all her life and never found him. It will all be all right, she assured herself, drying her tears and going inside. Bel still had faith, and in that faith, she spent money like – well, just like her son.
Soon the bills came in, from architect, builder, decorators, auction houses, department stores, garden centres and a marvellous little woman in Lower Saxwold who made curtains. Never, in Bel’s imagination, let alone in reality, were these bills totalled, let alone paid. Her mind was entirely occupied with swatches, colour charts, room schemes and bidding, at an auction in Norwich, for a carved walnut pediment that would fit perfectly over the front door, and an eighteenth-century chiffonier that really was the finest piece of its period and style she had ever seen.
Once these finds had been delivered in triumph, Bel cajoled Oliver into fixing the pediment over the front door, which he did with bad grace and a barely adequate complement of nails. She installed the chiffonier in the drawing room and put the bills into one of its drawers, where they disappeared from her consciousness completely.
Over several months, the bills were joined by reminders, statements, threatening letters and a note, in writing so tiny that Bel could not read it without spectacles, from the marvellous little woman in Lower Saxwold, deploring the attitude of a rich bitch who felt able to exploit a poor artisan so shamefully. Bel hated her spectacles; they made her feel unnecessarily competent. She used them only to read the menu if she was lunching with a woman friend.
It was the little woman of Lower Saxwold who first went to court to claim her debt, and on her behalf, one drizzly afternoon just before Easter, a muscular man in denim rang the doorbell. Hoping for an opportunity to outrage a stranger, Toni answered the door.
‘Mrs Annabel Hardcastle?’ the large man asked.
‘Nah. That’s my stepmother. She’s out,’ Toni growled. The man had a certain look about him. He had a sheaf of cheaply printed forms in his hand and the weary air of one who was lied to day in and day out. Toni scented officialdom. She smelled wrongdoing. She changed her approach, switched her threatening slouch for an appealing simper, and asked, ‘Is it anything I can help you with?’
The large man was taking in the lion’s head knocker of polished brass, the discreet sign reading ‘The Manor House’, the classical black-and-white tiles in the hall, the mingled aroma of lavender and beeswax and the impressive half-moon Empire-style console that Bel had been unable to resist at her last auction. ‘I think your stepmother may have just overlooked a little bill,’ he hazarded, his thick lips framing the dainty words with a struggle. ‘If I give you this,’ he handed over one of his forms, ‘you could just give it to her and tell her someone from the court came round.’
‘Someone from the court – are you a real bailiff?’ lisped Toni.
‘The unreal kind don’t collect much money, unfortunately,’ said the large man.
‘You are a real bailiff!’
‘It’ll be a week or so before I have to come back,’ he told her, adding a weighty wink. ‘But I will have to come back, mind. So don’t forget to tell her.’
‘I’ll give her the message,’ Toni promised.
‘Are you sure, dear?’ Bel brazened with a daffy toss of the head.
‘HE’S COMING BACK IN A WEEK SO YOU’D BETTER PAY UP,’ Toni broadcast to the nation.
‘Don’t be so dramatic,’ Bel dismissed her.
‘IF YOU DON’T BELIEVE ME YOU CAN READ THIS!’ Toni waved the smudgy document under her stepmother’s nose. Oliver, who had put the shopping in the kitchen, emerged with aching arms and grabbed the paper.
‘Let me look at that.’ His tone was lofty and disbelieving. He adjusted it at once. ‘Ah … oh. Sorry, Mum. It is from a debt collection firm. It is – well, it’s a notice to pay.’
‘It says that at the top,’ scoffed Toni.
‘I must have forgotten somebody’s bill,’ Bel twittered, trying to disguise a guilty blush.
‘Two thousand, eight hundred and something, and their costs, making three thousand and twelve, fifty.’
‘That much,’ Bel marvelled.
‘Is it going to be a problem?’ Oliver asked gently, his mind’s eye quite dazzled by metaphorical flashing lights. And drenched with guilt in his turn because if his mother had overspent, as she usually did in doing up her own homes, he was in no position now to help her out, as he’d always done before.
Bel’s blue eyes filled with tears. She tried to say ‘yes’but found that her mouth wouldn’t co-operate.
‘You’ve done it again, haven’t you?’ Oliver asked. She nodded.
‘And are there any more of these that you’re expecting?’
Bel was about to shake her head when Toni intervened. ‘There’s hundreds of them, I should think. Every time the phone rings it’s somebody else about a bill. She keeps them in that thing.’ And she pointed a scornful, black-webbed finger at the chiffonier.
Oliver pulled at drawers until one resisted him. He pulled it firmly and a fountain of papers sprayed out. ‘Oh Christ,’ he said.
‘I have paid some of them,’ protested his mother. ‘I’m sure I have.’
When Oliver had finished examining the bills, and marrying them up with his mother’s chequebook and credit cards, he found that she had, indeed, paid the £325 for passementerie, which represented the five red silk tassels on the keys to the drawers of the chiffonier. Everything else that could be unpaid, the builder, the plumber, the electrician, the mural painter, the landscapers, the garden centre, the gas, the electricity and the telephone, was unpaid and had been so for several months. In the case of the utilities, he discovered the ultimate final red-bordered bills, lying urgently on top of the pile.
‘Angel, I am on the cadge,’ Dido declared, appearing in the kitchen area in the middle of a Saturday morning. In Miranda’s flat, that meant that her friend had made the supreme effort of flopping off the day bed, attaining verticality, and skating, in her baby-blue angora socks, across over three metres of floor to within conversation distance of the kettle.
‘Oh yes? So what else is new?’ Miranda dunked her tea bag. Fennel, this morning. Fennel tea was what she chose when she had that nasty feeling that someone was tying knots in her lower oesophagus. A feeling of being choked and then some.
‘You know you’re going off with your mother next weekend?’
‘Could I forget?’
‘And you know you took me to that market thing and I met this lovely man who was just s-o-o-o-o-o fit?’
‘The man who made the filthy wine.’
‘Well, yes. The wine was a problem. But he was lovely, wasn’t he? You thought so, you said so?’
Miranda sighed. Dido fell in love quite often. About once a week, fifty-two weeks a year. Miranda knew this because she had a memory. Dido had a memory too, but so many things happened to her that her memory got stuffed up and didn’t work properly. She darted through life like a shubunkin in a fish bowl, fluttering her gorgeous outgrowths and never wanting to know if she had swum this way before.
‘He makes wine, angel. Isn’t that perfect?’
‘No, it tasted like screenwash. You know it did.’
‘You’re so critical! Who cares if it’s good? He looks like that actor.’
‘What actor?’
‘You know. The gorgeous one.’
‘Martin Kemp.’
‘No, not mean. Just gorgeous. In films and things.’
‘George Clooney.’
‘Sweetheart, can’t you be serious?’
‘Well, anyway. I remember him. You met him.’
‘Did I ever meet him.’
‘And you need a favour.’
‘Don’t rush me. Yes, I need a favour. You see, I need a lift. You’re going to Suffolk next weekend. Did I get that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘To some lovely hotel.’
‘I hope it’s lovely. It was in all the guides.’
‘And the man I met – he lives in Suffolk. Don’t you remember?’
Miranda remembered the appallingly designed sign, and the labels, and the tea towel, all reading Château Saxwold. ‘I suppose.’
‘And he invited me to visit,’ Dido went on, now trying to hop around the end of the bed like an excited child and slipping in her socks.
‘He gave you that card.’
‘And I called him up, you know.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Well, we can’t all be in control all the time. You know I’m weak.
I just had to call him. There was a number, he must have meant it. We were on the phone for just hours. But he doesn’t know.’
‘What doesn’t he know?’
‘That I’m going to surprise him.’
Surprises upset Miranda. In her own life, she planned to avoid being surprised as much as possible. On the other hand, if Dido had to go a week without a surprise, she wilted like a dying flower. Dido wasted days plotting to induce extra serendipity into her life, and the lives of everyone she knew, whether they liked surprises or not. What was a birthday without a surprise party? How could anyone resist April Fools’Day? Why bother to get out of bed or go out of the door, unless you were absolutely sure you’d bump into someone you weren’t expecting to see?
‘Suppose he doesn’t like surprises,’ she suggested, knowing how Dido would respond.
‘I lo-o-o-o-o-ve surprises,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait to see his face when I walk into his wine-tasting. And – here’s the thing – it’s next weekend. Easter. Look.’ She held out the invitation card, and Miranda saw that it was true. ‘And what‘s even more amazing … it’s got to be near where you’re going. That place, what did you say its name was?’
‘The Saxwold Manor Hotel,’ Miranda said. Beside Dido’s bed was the Country House Weekend Guide to Britain, open, face down, with a mug on it. Her friend had been browsing.
‘Yes, I looked it up. I’m not completely idiotic, am I? It’s actually in … ta-daaa, somewhere called Lower Saxwold. And his domaine – is that what they call them? His place, anyway, where they do the wine, it’s in somewhere called Great Saxwold. Look!’ She flourished the card. ‘It’s got to be almost the same place, hasn’t it?’
‘I suppose,’ said Miranda. Coincidence wasn’t as bad as surprise, it wasn’t as deeply upsetting, or so horribly worrying, or quite such absolute proof that the nature of life was fundamentally mischievous and unpredictable, but she didn’t much like it, all the same.
‘Well they can’t be far away. Angel, isn’t it brilliant? If I can get a ride with you, and book a room, and … well, I was passing, I thought I’d drop in. He’ll be so totally surprised.’
‘You were just passing his vineyard in Suffolk. He does know you live in London.’
‘He won’t think of it that way. He did invite me, angel. I could say I was staying with friends. It’ll be sort of true, won’t it? So I was thinking you could maybe give me a ride to Suffolk. Next weekend. You are going to drive, aren’t you?’
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��We were going to drive down together. Ye-es.’
‘Together – oh God, your mum! This isn’t going to work, is it?’ And Dido suddenly crumpled up like an incinerated moth because, as she had been aware for twenty years, Clare Marlow disapproved of her. Maybe it was the icy voice on the phone that had given her the clue when she rang Miranda up at home, or that tomb-effigy grimace that passed for a smile of greeting on the very rare occasions in which she had actually met Mrs Marlow.
Miranda remembered the directive her mother had issued on the last day of school. ‘There’s no need to keep up with everyone you knew here. Nobody expects it. Stick with the first team, of course. Your real friends. You can keep up with the others with Christmas cards and things. Everyone will understand.’
So Miranda had edited references to the friend who had been so emphatically damned as excess baggage on the flight to achievement, and allowed her mother to believe that they had gone their separate ways. If she knew that Dido was practically a permanent fixture in her flat, things might turn ugly.
On the other hand, Miranda knew, from lifetime experience, that as soon as Dido found that man again, she would be gone and you wouldn’t be able to find her even if you wanted to.
Dido was drooping, visibly. Her nature was as sweet as banoffee pie and manipulation came hard to her. But this was an emergency. The man of her dreams was in Suffolk. Simply going there did not occur to her. Getting on a train, taking a taxi? Unthinkable. Where would she find a train, how would she buy a ticket, what would she have to say to a strange taxi driver? She had no experience of independent movement. If you wanted to go, you went with a friend. Or lots of friends. Then all the love around you just bubbled you all along to where you were going. A friend with a car was best, of course.
‘I don’t have to check into your hotel,’ she said to Miranda humbly. ‘I wasn’t thinking of that. There’ll be a pub, there’s bound to be.’
Miranda sighed. The other thing, of course, was that she had never fallen in love.
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