Wild Weekend

by Celia Brayfield

  Her phone rang. Her mother.

  ‘I’ll be over in an hour or so,’ Miranda said.

  ‘Don’t forget to pay the bill. You’ve got the cash on you, haven’t you?’

  Miranda opened her mouth to break the news, then hesitated. Did her mother need to know? Wouldn’t it just get even more complicated if she knew? And suppose she took it badly, wigged out and went on one of her rampages? Horrible thought.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mum,’ she said. ‘It’s all under control.’

  ‘Promise me.’ Her mother sounded rather weak. Almost pathetic, in fact.

  ‘Of course I promise. How are you, anyway? How did you sleep?’

  ‘They gave me a pill in the end. That American man – remember him? He said he was some kind of animal rights activist but I think he’s got some mental disorder. He talked for hours about saving bees from people making honey. Then when his people came and took him away, there was a person with Alzheimer’s from the main ward wandering about talking all the time. They’ve only got one nurse on at nights here. She couldn’t possibly cope. Rural health care. I had no idea.’

  ‘But that’s what your health insurance is for, so you don’t have to suffer like that.’

  ‘But ordinary people have to suffer like that.’

  Clare’s main concern about ordinary people had always been not to be one of them. Miranda decided her mother must be reacting to her painkillers. Especially when she said, ‘Don’t be late for breakfast, darling,’ before she hung up.

  The house seemed extraordinarily quiet, but those smells of coffee and bacon were drifting up from the kitchen. Miranda took a deep breath and went in search of somebody. Mrs Hardcastle and her son. Either would do, but she had a preference for Mrs Hardcastle, since the conversation with Oliver was going to be even more difficult.

  Mrs Hardcastle was planted in front of the Aga, shaking pans.

  ‘Good morning,’ Miranda began.

  ‘It’s a terrible morning! The sky is crying because you have to leave us.’

  ‘Look, this is really – well, I don’t know what to say here.’

  ‘Don’t say anything. Just tell me what you’d like for breakfast. Our waiter isn’t here yet, I don’t know why.’

  ‘He isn’t really a waiter. This isn’t really a hotel. I mean, is it?’

  Bel made a last attempt to override reality. ‘What are you saying? Of course …’

  ‘No, please. I know what’s been going on. One of your neighbours, the one who makes wine? He told me last night. And can I say – I’m really embarrassed about the way I must have behaved.’

  ‘You know everything about it?’ Bel tried, for the last, last time. ‘That boy, what’s his name, Florian, with the vineyard, he told you everything about our little play-acting here? Oh well. Oh dear. Why do people have to do all this telling?’

  ‘He didn’t mean anything bad. It was all sort of accidental.’

  ‘Oh, but you’re not angry at us? Or with Oliver? It was all an accident with us, you see. He thought you were friends of mine and I thought you were friends of his, and by the time we really talked about it, you were here and you had your rooms and it seemed that the best thing we could do was just go along with everything and hope for the best.’

  ‘No of course I’m not angry. I suppose it’s quite flattering really. Not angry at all. I mean, our rooms were just, beautiful. This is such a beautiful house. I just feel really silly.’

  Miranda was enveloped in a firm, bacon-scented hug. ‘What for, my dear! If anyone should feel silly, it’s us. But you know what these men are, when the heart is involved, they just can’t think properly. You’re really not angry?’

  ‘How could I be?’ Ignore that heart stuff. Trust a mother to get it all wrong. ‘You’ve been so thoughtful and we’ve had a lovely weekend. Really heavenly, until the accident.’

  ‘Ah, the accident. And your mother, the poor woman.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘I’ve just spoken to her, she’s not too bad. Oh, she doesn’t know. I’m not going to tell her. She’s in politics, you know. Things can get complicated. It’s best she doesn’t find out. She wanted to pay our bill in cash, for some reason so – here it is.’ Miranda held out the money, the notes just visible over the lip of the open envelope.

  ‘No, no, no,’ said Bel at once, waving away the money with her non-stick cookware. ‘Don’t be so silly. We can’t possibly take money, after playing this silly trick on you.’

  ‘But you must. Please. You’ve been to so much trouble …’

  In this game, Miranda was definitely the weaker player. Bel remonstrated, protested, waved the frying pan, flapped a tea towel and refused in a dozen different forms of words.

  ‘My mother absolutely insists,’ said Miranda, her final throw.

  Bel played confidently for the match point. ‘And I absolutely refuse. If you don’t want your mother to know, you can buy a new dress. Two new dresses. And some shoes, probably. Now you’re not going to make me get angry here, are you?’

  So Miranda conceded. She allowed herself to be seated at the table and given a large cooked breakfast, with second helpings. Bel commanded her to eat this. It gave her the opportunity to deliver an entertaining, if not very subtle, lecture on the merits of her son. Which gave Miranda even more cause to believe that this brilliant, wonderful and utterly desirable man couldn’t possibly have liked her. No, she decided as she sliced into her second sausage, he must have just been playing along in his role as a sexually harassed waiter. Florian had it all wrong. Men had no idea about love, anyway. Nor did mothers.

  ‘Goodbye, dear. No, no, I mean – au revoir. You’re not embarrassed, are you? We should be embarrassed! I don’t know how we managed to make such fools of ourselves. But if you like weekends in the country – why don’t you come again. You’re always welcome. No, I mean that …’

  Miranda extricated herself as politely as she could and got into her car. Slowly, slowly – well, it was pouring with rain still – she drove away down the lane. And past the cottage. His cottage. Where he was. Probably. Definitely, since there were three vehicles outside, the car, the pick-up and the tractor. So he was there. Such a pity that he didn’t really fancy her. But that would make things easier. Although it was going to be a bloody tricky conversation, all the same. After all, she fancied him. Still. Actually, more.

  She could still drive on. A worm would drive on. A woman would go in and say what she had to say. Miranda turned the steering wheel and felt the car slither around on the muddy road and slide into the farmyard.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, when he opened the front door and saw her there. He looked like a man who had recently had a really bad night and was now following it with a really bad hangover. Or a man in the third stage of a personal epiphany, in which the sufferer recognises that it’s all his fault, accepts a wholly excessive amount of blame, decides that he has definitively screwed things up with the only woman he could possibly fall in love with ever, and consumes a proportionately excessive amount of alcohol.

  ‘Yes, it’s me,’ she said. ‘I’m just leaving but I think we should talk.’

  ‘We don’t have to,’ he said. ‘I know I’ve been a complete prat and I apologise without reservation.’

  ‘It is raining out here.’ She felt water trickling down her neck. ‘I’d much rather come in.’

  ‘If you have to, I suppose you have to,’ he said, leading the way through the hall to the room that was called the living room although no living whatever was done in it and most of its capacity was taken up with books on shelves, a large sofa devoid of cushions and the fireplace, in which some logs were burning briskly. ‘I’m sorry, that was rude.’

  ‘So you know I know,’ Miranda began, sitting on a hard chair next to a table, which was piled high with leaflets and the official forms to which they related. Some of the forms, she noticed, were half-completed, but all of them were dusty and yellowed. Evidence of paperwork-phobia. A touching weakness, re
ally, in someone said to be brilliant, wonderful and utterly desirable.

  ‘And now I know that you know that I know,’ he said. Click. Sweet as a nut. Amazing that stuff was working again.

  ‘And I’m really embarrassed about how I behaved,’ she said.

  ‘You’re embarrassed,’ he said.

  ‘I made all kinds of assumptions. I was bang out of order.’

  ‘You were out of order.’ This was getting ridiculous. He demanded better from his compromised mental powers. ‘It was all entirely my fault. Truly, Miranda, you’ve got nothing to apologise for. It started out as a misunderstanding between my mother and me but then it just got totally out of control and there’s nobody really to blame but me.’

  They said a few more things of the same kind, after which a silence threatened, because most of the skills that they would normally have employed in a conversation, the hearing, the seeing, the empathy, the subtexting and the body language, had wilfully deployed themselves on another mission.

  Oliver started leaning against the doorframe, and watching Miranda as if she was the most fascinating creature on the planet, which, to him, at that moment, she was. And Miranda, who found she had to comb her damp hair out of her eyes with her fingertips, felt his interest like rays of sunlight warming her skin. But no, she told herself, she must be mistaken. And anyway, it was too late to save the situation now.

  ‘So,’ she said, the autopilot being unable to change the flight plan. ‘I’d better be off.’

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He wanted desperately to say something to stop her, but his brain seemed to have turned to polenta and there was nothing witty or compelling or even coherent in it.

  ‘No hard feelings.’ She offered a handshake. ‘We’ll probably laugh about this one day.’

  ‘No hard feelings,’ he said, accepting the offer. ‘I’m sure we will. Laugh about it.’

  Twenty seconds later, he was standing in the pouring rain, shutting her car door. She started the engine, he stepped away. He waved to her to turn, wondering if she could see him in the downpour. She put the car in gear and set off to reverse exactly as suggested.

  The car balked and slithered disobediently off at a tangent. Oliver saw that the tyre nearest to him was no longer fully circular. He let out a yell and she wound down her window.

  ‘You’ve got a flat,’ he said, pointing to the back of the car, where he could see clearly now that the tyre was nothing but a crust of deflated rubber. ‘Jump out, go inside. I’ll change it for you.’

  No normal man enjoys the opportunity to change a tyre in a muddy farmyard in the pouring rain. At this point, Oliver, as he even admitted to himself, was not a normal man. His blood was running through his veins in a trail of stardust and his heart was doing the macarena. He found himself grinning at the wheel nuts as he bashed them into motion and chuckling at the spare tyre as he heaved it into place. At least another fifteen minutes with this wonderful, adorable woman. A last chance! Why, anything could happen now.

  Then, as he picked up the deflated tyre, a Pete Tong element in the situation became clear. The cause of the puncture was obvious. It was a nail. A nail he knew. A nail he had bought himself, and used, not six months ago, to fix the carved walnut pediment above his mother’s front door. A nail that told him more than he wanted to know.

  Miranda was sitting on the sofa in the living room, aware that her pulse was racing. She’d never had this feeling before, but there was no mistaking it. Nor was there any mistaking the way Oliver had been looking at her. Florian was perhaps not completely wrong about everything. Amazingly, this terrific man seemed to like her. In spite of everything. And now they had been mysteriously bonded for another ten minutes or so by a freak accident. She looked out of the window, and saw him twizzling a bit of metal with the macho grace of a great matador flourishing his cape. Never in her life before had Miranda formed a relationship with a man who could and would change a car tyre. She was dazzled by the sight.

  Besides, she felt the hand of destiny stirring things up. They had failed to seize the day, and the day was giving them a second chance. Dido would have considered this as proof positive that a happening of huge importance had been preordained.

  Soon Oliver shouldered through his front door, soaked to the skin and in a peculiar mood. She noticed only the first of these phenomena.

  ‘Do you realise,’ he began from the kitchen, where he picked up a towel to scrub his head dry, ‘do you realise what that was about?’

  ‘My flat tyre?’ How could a flat tyre be about anything? She was mystified.

  ‘My bloody mother,’ he said, appearing in the doorway of the living room. ‘That’s what this is about.’

  ‘Your bloody mother?’ said Miranda. ‘I thought we had enough problems with my bloody mother.’

  ‘Well exactly. They’re an absolute pair. Let me see if I can explain,’ he went on. It seemed acceptable to sit beside her on the sofa. ‘OK, the hotel stunt was my idea. But do you realise that my mother actually told your mother what was going on yesterday, and then the two of them, having decided that you and I were going to be some kind of dream couple, then decided to keep the whole thing going?’

  ‘You’re not serious. My mother did that?’

  ‘Well, I’m sure my mother talked her into it, but yes, she did. They had this whole conspiracy thing going. But then my sister told me what was up, and you obviously found out anyway, and we thought that was going to be the end of it. But then my mother, once the game was over, went out and put this nail,’ he produced the guilty hardware from the pocket of his wet shirt, ‘under the tyre of your car, so that all this would happen and you wouldn’t be able to escape until … well, until all this.’

  ‘Your mother did that?’

  ‘Yes. My mother does stuff like that all the time. Complete power-freak.’

  ‘Snap,’ said Miranda, with feeling. Feeling of many kinds.

  There took place a free and frank exchange of mother stories which, since both the mothers in question had committed many crimes of both maternal and non-maternal natures in their children’s lives, lasted a long time and caused them to laugh a great deal. This in turn engendered a feeling neither of them had ever had before. It was warm, and soft, and so connected they felt almost blended, as if they had swapped pieces of their souls.

  The room was suddenly quiet. The noise of the logs smouldering was enormous. They felt something pulling them towards each other, something they couldn’t find any reason to resist. His face was cold from the rain. Her face was warm from the fire. The kiss seemed to last about two hundred years.

  When they separated, Oliver spent about half a lifetime looking at Miranda’s eyelashes, which he found were uniquely long, and glossy, and magnificent. Through the arm that was most around her, he could feel her heart beating. It made him feel reckless. ‘Look,’ he said, picking what seemed to be the simplest part of the issue. ‘Do you really have to go back to London today?’

  ‘No,’ said Miranda. ‘Not tonight, anyway.’ And maybe not ever, said the look in her eyes. Except for shopping, now and then.

  ‘Could we … I mean, would you … maybe we could see each other? I mean, just because our mothers thought it was a great idea, that doesn’t mean they were totally off-beam, does it? We shouldn’t let them run our lives, should we? I don’t know how …’

  ‘We can work something out,’ said Miranda, for once grateful that she had the gift of sounding certain about things when she really had no idea what was happening. ‘You’re right, we can’t let this go, can we?’

  Then it seemed the most natural thing in the world to lean into the warm mass of his chest and get started on another kiss.

  Outside the cottage it was still raining. On the crest of the hill, on the edge of the copse, a doe hare was sitting motionless under a gorse bush, her coat the colour of the damp earth. Sensing these words, and the actions which followed them, she flicked her ears and decided that at last it was safe to go home. Some mo
rtals were a whole lot easier to enchant than others, especially in these choice-rich times, but, being a goddess and sure of her divine powers, she had never really been worried there.

  ‘Have you heard anything?’ Bel paced in front of her sitting-room window, every five seconds pausing to peer out into the blinding rain and look for a car, while calling Clare on her mobile.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Clare. ‘She was supposed to be here hours ago.’

  ‘She hasn’t rung?’

  ‘No. What’s going on?’

  ‘She drove off but she can’t have got far. Her car broke down. She had a puncture. She hasn’t rung?’

  ‘No. I haven’t heard anything. How do you know she had a puncture?’

  ‘I know. Trust me. Well, in the normal way, she would call you, wouldn’t she? So, she’s with him. She must be. I don’t count my chickens – what am I saying, I haven’t got any chickens, poor things. But to me, it looks good. I’ll say goodbye. Keep me posted.’

  She rang off and looked around for something to do to take her mind off the situation. Anything. It was raining, she couldn’t do any gardening. It was a bank holiday, she couldn’t do any shopping. There was nothing on the TV except sport. The Archers wouldn’t be on the radio until the evening. What she really wanted to do was plan the wedding. But of course, the girl would have her own ideas. Especially being the way she was, so determined. And with a lot of style about her. But it couldn’t hurt to dream a little. Otherwise she was going to die of anxiety.

  Toni’s moped droned to a crescendo outside, then was silent. The kitchen door crashed open. The noise of boots was heard on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Don’t go one step further in those wet things,’ ordered Bel as she rushed to the kitchen.

  ‘All right, all right,’ her stepdaughter shouted. ‘Give me a break here, will you.’

  Toni was standing in the middle of the room, pulling off her rain cape and her sodden leather jacket. Her jeans, where the cape had not covered them, were almost black with water. Her helmet was already on the table, raindrops still running off it.