Watching Charlie getting excited about winning a rosette for his first attempt at growing the largest marrow in the village was quite satisfying, and soon we were on first name terms with others gardeners locally. I must admit I was enjoying chatting about the plants I liked to grow with others, though I was always careful about quite what I said.
I don’t think you can imagine my shock when I woke one morning to find Charlie on his knees in the bathroom vomiting. Somehow, I managed to get him back into bed and called a doctor.
After the doctor had gone, Charlie told me to stop fussing. It was nothing, just a bug going around. Once I knew he was asleep, I went out to the greenhouse to calm my nerves, telling myself that there couldn’t possibly be anything seriously wrong with him.
Over the next few months his health went into decline. No matter how many trips we took to the hospital for tests they just couldn’t find anything wrong with him. I panicked. I argued that there must be something, as a healthy man didn’t just land up in a wheelchair without there being something seriously wrong.
The following night, Charlie took a turn for the worst and I rushed him into hospital. I wanted to stay with him, but they sent me home. Alone in our big bed, I sobbed my heart out, never before had I loved anyone as much as I loved Charlie, even my plants in the garden were beginning to suffer as I worried about him.
I just finished my breakfast when I heard a car pull into our drive. Peering out of the kitchen window, I watched as two men with a police officer strode purposely to my front door.
Shocked, thinking something had happened to my Charlie; I hesitated before opened the door.
‘Jennifer Underwood,’ the taller of the two men said.
‘Yes,’ I said stepping back from the door.
‘Mrs Jennifer Underwood nee’ Sanders, I believe?’
‘Yes. Sorry what is this about? Is my husband all right?’
‘Your husband is fine, but we are arresting you for attempted murder,’ he said as he led me to their car.
Me murder Charlie. After all the practice I’d had you would’ve thought I would have done it properly, if I were going too. Of course, it all came out at the trial. Charlie’s uncle had been my second husband. I couldn’t believe it. How amazing was that? The day in the library was my downfall. He had found the picture of his uncle in my father’s notebook. At least he hadn’t understood my coded notes.
Apparently there had been whisperings in Charlie’s family that his dear old uncle’s death wasn’t due to natural causes. Not wanting to suffer the same fate, he got in quick and set me up for attempted murder, which he had hoped would not only lead to a reinvestigation into his uncle’s death, but also a settlement on my property too.
What a fool he was to think it would all end there.
You see, I was ahead of the game too. I found out that he’d been losing large sums of money through bad investments and gambling.
The judge smiled at me, when the courts threw the case out. In fact, the verdict was attempted suicide, as Charlie’s fingerprints covered the poison plant selection of my gardening book. In the end, the police charged Charlie with wasting their time even though he told them about what had happened to his uncle.
We’re divorced now, and I even got a nice little settlement too.
Staring at the phone in my hand, I smiled softly, ‘Of course, hello my dear Molly. How are you?’
‘I’m fine, Jenny. Good to hear your voice after so long.’
‘How’s your dear husband, Harold?’
‘Sadly, he’s no longer with me. Passed away a few years ago.’
‘Oh dear so sorry to hear that, must be hard for you now you’re alone.’
‘My niece Jean and her son, Tom, come to see me whenever they can. Such a clever lad, he found your name and number on the net. He’s knows how to find anyone he wants, I think its part of his job, but he doesn’t like to talk about it... It’s beyond me how they do it. Anyway, how are you?’
‘Oh, I was wondering how you found me. I’m so sorry, but I cannot chat for long. I was on my way out,’ I said, realising that’s how the reporters must have found my phone number too.
‘Off somewhere nice, I hope,’ Molly asked.
‘Out for a meal with Samuel Fairfax, he’s such a sweet man,’ I said without thinking.
‘Isn’t he the judge who cleared you? I’ve been following the court case in the papers and on the television too. Should you be seeing him?’
‘There’s nothing to stop us now,’ I snapped. ‘Anyway, he’s asked for my help with a gardening problem.’ I softened my voice as I stared out at my beautiful garden. ‘I’m so sorry, Molly, I really must go. Lovely chatting to you after all these years, but his honour doesn’t like to be kept waiting. Call again soon.’
I lowered my phone ready to switch it off.
‘I wouldn’t rush into this one, Jenny, like you did with the others,’ she blurted out.
I felt my heart lurch and lifted the phone to my ear. ‘What are you talking about, Molly?’
‘What I said.’
‘If you’re talking about a garden, Molly, one must remember the saying; all good things come to those who wait.’
She laughed nervously. ‘I meant, where is Judge Fairfax taking you?’
‘Oh, to his. I’m helping him sort out his garden. It used to be his wife’s pride and joy before she passed away.’
‘I see. So he’s wealthy too?’
I detected bitterness in her voice. I laughed, trying to keep it natural. ‘What on earth are you suggesting, Molly?’
‘Jenny, you know what gossip is like.’
I watched the judge’s car turn round on my drive before I spoke again. ‘I’m so sorry Molly, I have to go. Samuel has just arrived. Are you still living at the same address?’
‘Yes. I am. Do come for a visit, Jenny. It would be lovely to see you.’
‘Of course, I shall. We can chat about the old times,’ I stared out at my garden, my mind searching for just the right flowers. ‘I shall choose something extra special from my garden for you. The flowers look lovely this time of the year. Bye for now, Molly, see you soon. And thank you for calling.’
Fifteen Arthur Crescent
Kate North
Fifteen Arthur Crescent was a bargain. Not to be missed. To be snapped up, said the estate agent. The owners needed a quick sale. It was four floors high, lofty, spacious, old. It had an Aga, two lounges, a garden with well-kept beds, a shady canopy and a healthy lawn. It had a kitchen and a separate dining room, a games room and a cellar. The decor needed updating, but at such a low price it was to be expected. It had far too many bedrooms for us and it was in a nice part of town. The leafy part. Of course, we took it.
I remember the day that we moved in, it didn’t take us very long. We had been living in a small flat and our possessions looked so inadequate and funny when we got them inside the house. They looked like they belonged in a doll’s house. We put our two-seater sofa in lounge number one at the front of the house and it was completely over-whelmed by the cavernous room. We wanted to use lounge number two at the back of the house, but we didn’t want lounge number one to look bare to the outside world. We’re usually not like that, but when we were parading into the house we felt very observed. There was much curtain-twitching in the crescent that morning. This was not unusual in itself. We were fairly young newcomers to the area, women with barely any furniture, of interest.
After we unpacked we sat on the kitchen floor with our backs against our new, old kitchen cupboards. It was a hot summer and I put my hand on your knee and I squeezed it saying,
‘We can do what we like here. It’s perfect for us.’
You smiled and put your hand on the back of my neck like you do. It was very hot and I could feel a sheen of sweat forming under my hand on your knee already. You leant over and
gave me a long and sustained kiss, a deliberate and Zen-like offering. I felt light-headed when we parted and all we could do was just smile at each other for a while. After a moment I even shed one of my ridiculous, solitary tears and you laughed and wiped it away.
‘Let’s make a list,’ you said.
‘What sort of list?’
‘A list of things we need for the house. Furniture and stuff. What room shall we start with first?’
‘The loft,’ I said. ‘Lets start from the top and work our way down.’
We sat there for the rest of the afternoon and a good part of the evening making lists and talking about our plans for each room, right down to the colours we wanted on the walls and whether we wanted carpets or floorboards. We ate our first dinner in the house on that floor, a bowl of peanuts and a bottle of wine, and we made love there also when the wine was finished. When we went to bed that night you fell asleep first. You were wrapped around me and I listened to our elderly home creak and relax around us both in the cool of night. I remember thinking as I drifted off to sleep, I wish it were tomorrow already.
We had agreed on a space where I could be experimental and artistic with the walls. Deep down I had wanted to be experimental and brave with the design of the whole house but neither of us trusted in me that much. I’ve got quite a good eye for colour and that sort of thing but it’s the actual implementation of my bold ideas that lets me down. We were doing as much of the work on the house as was possible ourselves. If we didn’t then we would never afford to furnish the place. Neither of us was very experienced in terms of wallpaper hanging or cupboard fitting. We were going slow and sticking to simple, clean lines and colours, as advised by a television programme on doing up your house and a Guardian Sunday supplement.
The Guardian supplement had become invaluable to me and I had taken to stuffing it into my back pocket when I wasn’t reading it, a bit like builders do with their copies of The Sun. You didn’t want us to rely too heavily on it because you thought it would be awful to end up with a house that was all somebody else’s idea. I largely agreed with you, but it was ever so useful and there were even some stencils that came with it that I was considering using on my artistic wall. Or maybe I would just get some stencils of my own. Thousands of people would have bought the newspaper that contained the supplement so it would be a shame to go to someone else’s house and see the same stencilling. Ideally, I would make my own stencils but I’m not very steady with my hands. When I was younger I could never, ever colour in between the lines. It was like some awful pressure, having to try and stay inside those lines. Even when I was managing it, the moment I thought about it my arm would kick out in an involuntary spasm and crash through the borders with crayon. The legacy of this quirk carries through on into my command of scissors and craft knives. Getting me to cut a straight, deliberate or consistent shape with either implement is impossible. I would definitely have to buy my stencils if I wanted them.
I had the stairwell that lead up to the loft. This doesn’t sound like much and it’s not really, but if it all went wrong then it wasn’t going to be too much of a disaster. If it went well and my Michelangelo gene emerged, then it would be a very quirky and lovely detail on the way up to the loft, eye-catching.
I came up to the stairwell at regular intervals in between decorating the rest of the house. I would test colours on the walls from those small tubs that you can buy. It was constantly on my mind. When you were sanding the floorboards in one room and I was varnishing them in another I would be thinking about whether I should paint or paper the stairwell, and whether there should be a border.
A few weeks in and the house was really shaping up. When visitors came around they said things like, ‘Ooh! Well!’ and they would open their eyes really wide, brows all high and shocked in a pleased sort of way. People were impressed. It was all thanks to the clean, simple lines and colours. A fool could do it but it was very effective. One or two people, the ones who really aren’t friends but who had popped around just to be nosy, to see what a house on Arthur Crescent looked like from the inside, looked the most shocked and struggled to paint over their underlying jealousy with smiles. I liked it when those types popped around.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ I’d ask.
‘Yes please,’ they’d say.
‘I’ll just pop the kettle on the Aga then,’ I’d say. I loved saying that.
I had painted over the wood panelling on the way up to the loft because it wasn’t a very fashionable wood and you couldn’t really paper over it. Even though it wasn’t a fashionable wood, I don’t know what sort but it was very light in colour, it would have been a shame not to have taken advantage of its lovely, knotty texture. So that is what I did as I coated it thinly in a bright and snappy yellowy green. It was certainly daring. I had also decided on my choice of stencil. It was a fluid looking shape that was a bit like a wave but not so defined. I wanted it to crawl up the stairwell mirroring the handrail on the opposite wall. It was going to be a sharp lime colour.
I had done everything I wanted in the stairwell by now except for the stencilling. It was late in the afternoon and the natural light was melting away. I would leave the stencilling to another day. I wanted to get it perfect and I needed the light for that. I placed the stencils, the lime green paint and the sponge with which I would apply it on the bottom step of the well.
I went up the stairs to have a look around the loft. Although we had explored it when we first moved in, we hadn’t been up much since. It was the first room we had talked about decorating but we decided that it should be the last we would actually tackle. It was a huge space, like a ballet studio or a hayloft. We were considering making it into a guest suite with a shower and a bathroom but that depended on our funds. At first I thought it would be perfect as my study. I liked the idea of being perched up high away from things. The problem was that it was so hot. Far too hot when the sun hung directly above the skylights late morning. It generated a heat that lingered all day and intensified throughout the afternoon. It was so hot that I suspect you could have grown tomatoes up there.
As well as the skylights there were a number of other windows that looked down onto our small gravel drive. I heard your car pulling into it and I walked over to the window to watch you arrive home from work. You had turned off the engine but you weren’t getting out. You would have been collecting your stuff together. Perhaps you were listening to a voicemail or reading a text? It was quiet in the loft and I stood there wilting, waiting to see you appear from the car. I could have gone downstairs to meet you when you came in but I just stayed there, in silence. What were you doing? You were certainly taking your time. I concentrated on breathing in and out. It must have been minutes and there was no sign of you. I couldn’t see into the car from my position so I still had no idea what you were doing. By now I decided that you must have been taking a long phone call from a friend. I pushed the window open, placed an arm either side of its frame and stuck my head out to get some air. It was better than a cold glass of mineral water. It was clean and fresh and I laughed out loud. I thought it was so strange that from my neck down I felt as though I was trudging through a desert, yet my head was enjoying an atmosphere that was as crisp and clear as a mountaintop.
You placed your hand on my shoulder, I screamed and jumped, hitting my head on the top of the window frame. I turned around and saw it was you. By now you held me from the waist.
‘What are you doing?’ I yelled.
‘Shhh. Shhh. Are you okay?’
‘I could have fallen out the bloody window! What were you doing?’
‘I’ve been calling you for ages.’
‘But you haven’t even left your car.’
You looked at me quizzically. You took your right hand from my waist and placed it over my hand on my head where I was instinctively rubbing at the rapidly swelling lump.
‘You’ve had a nasty knoc
k. You should lie down.’
‘I don’t want to lie down. What happened?
‘You hit your head.’
‘Yes, I know I hit my head. Why were you creeping about?’
‘I wasn’t creeping about. When I came up here and found you, you were quite far away. What were you doing?’
‘I wasn’t doing anything. I was waiting for you.’
Then I told you about hearing the car on the gravel and the fact that I hadn’t seen you get out. You said that it was strange but that perhaps I should lie down anyway. Later, after dinner when we were curled up on the new three-seater sofa, you suggested that maybe I had just gone to the window too late and that you had probably already left the car by the time I was peering at it. That was the most logical explanation. It didn’t feel like it though, not to me.
That weekend we pottered about the house seeing to details. I went to the supermarket and bought all the ingredients for something I could cook slowly. Something that would fill the whole house with a smell like a real home, a stew. When I came back and set to work on the stew you came in through the back door to tell me what you had found in the shed. An ancient lawn roller, some rusty old tools and a selection of terracotta plant pots. We discussed what we should keep and what we should get rid of. We weren’t convinced that we’d use the lawn roller, but it was too bulky take down to the tip. Perhaps we could Freecycle it and someone would come and take it off our hands? Did anyone use lawn rollers any more?
I put the stew on a low heat set to cook for the rest of the day. You went back down to the shed and I decided that I would finally complete my stairwell with the stencilling. When I got to the stairwell I saw that the stencilling had been started. The first segment had been painted on and the stencil was smudged with the lime green paint. I wondered why you had decided to begin it, especially when we had agreed that it was my project. I was annoyed and even thought about how I could justify completely losing my temper. I checked to see if the stencilling was begun in the place I had wanted it. It was, so I couldn’t even storm down to the shed and declare that you had done it incorrectly. It was a rather neat start and I carried on where you had left off.
Flock of Shadows Page 12