by Maeve Haran
Fate was on her side and a lone cab hove into view with its light on.
Sal hailed it with all the joy and relief of a refugee getting the last berth on a transport ship out of some war-torn hotspot.
‘Middlebridge Crescent, please.’ They headed off for the rather sleazy enclave in North Kensington, on the borders of upmarket Notting Hill Gate, where Sal had managed to find an unfurnished flat thirty years ago, settling for four somewhat uninviting rooms in an unappealing road in exchange for the nearness of its glamorous big sister.
The truth was, although Sal gave every appearance of being the career woman on top of life, there were aspects of living she was hopeless at: mortgages, pensions, savings plans. None of these had ever caught her imagination like sample sales, freebies to exotic spas, London Fashion Week – these were what made Sal’s heart beat faster.
She paid the cab driver, and was touched that he waited till she had safely descended the steps to her front door, in case any marauding mugger should be concealed there. ‘Good night, miss,’ he called, although he knew and she knew that this description, though technically true, was an entirely generous gesture.
‘Good night,’ she responded, opening her grey-painted front door. Funny how grey front doors had suddenly become de rigueur on brick-fronted houses, and any other colour suddenly seemed strange and somehow wrong. That was how fashion worked, of course. Grey wasn’t simply the new black, as far as front doors went; it was the new red, green and blue.
She shivered as she turned her key, grateful for the warm embrace of central heating, which might not be as enticing as a waiting lover, but was a lot cheaper to run and far less temperamental.
October already. Incredible. She smiled at the memory of the photograph of the four of them and then recoiled at the thought of how many years ago it was. She had never imagined that here she would be, more than forty years later, living alone, paying her way, dependent for her standard of living on the whim of Maurice Euston and his daughter Marian, who had just been elevated to Managing Director.
It struck her as she sat down on her aubergine velvet sofa and shucked off her agonizing heels that the all-important Christmas issue would be out by the end of the month. Of course, the whole thing had been put to bed months ago. All those children simpering round the Christmas tree in cute pyjamas had actually been sweating in a heat-wave. All the same, she – Sal – still believed in the fantasy. It didn’t matter if they had to cheat a little to make the fantasy work. She had never felt cynical and bored, never wanted to shout: ‘Oh for God’s sake, I’ve heard that idea four hundred times before!’ at some hapless young journalist.
Sal loved magazines. When she was growing up on her Carlisle council estate, she hadn’t been able to afford them and had devoured as many as she could at the hairdresser when her mum had her Tuesday afternoon cheap-rate shampoo and set. They remained a gorgeous parcel of me-time. Gift-wrapped with glossiness and sprinkled with celebrity stardust, they brought pleasure to millions. Well, maybe not quite millions, that was half the problem, but thousands anyway. To Sal, a magazine was still something you held in your hand, savouring the thrill of flicking through the first pages, not something you summoned on your iPad or furtively consulted online during your lunch break. She knew you had to keep up, though, and had worked hard to make sure these options were there, and as inviting as any offered by Modern Style’s rivals.
Sal made herself a cup of green tea. She mustn’t let the magazine take up her entire waking life. She was no workaholic. She had other interests and passions.
Didn’t she?
Laura parked in the driveway of her solid suburban house. She had been careful only to have two small glasses so that she would be below the limit. Laura preferred driving to taking the bus or tube. Somehow it meant she didn’t have to leave the protective cocoon of home, and that was how she liked it. You could argue that the tube was more interesting. All those different nationalities. People reading books, e-readers, free newspapers, playing games on their phones. And the fashions. She liked seeing all the ways young women put their clothes together. But there were also beggars, stringing you some story, the noisy drunks talking out loud to themselves, and the exhausted, worn-out workers who made Laura feel faintly guilty about her easy life.
Tonight, though she knew it was awful, she also felt slightly smug. It was amazing that, out of the four of them, she was the only one who was truly happy with her life. Ella had had that tragedy, so utterly unfair, out of the blue like that; Sal never thought about anyone but Sal, which was why she’d ended up on her own; and Claudia had been married a long time, but she was always moaning about Don’s head being in the clouds, and they never seemed to be soulmates. Not like she and Simon were.
It was an object of pride to Laura that Simon loved her and his home as much as he did, that they were perfectly happy in each other’s company. Of course she loved her friends, but Simon came first.
And she knew he felt the same about her. In fact, the only source of friction between them was their children. When Bella had become a Goth, Simon was appalled. Laura, on the other hand, rather admired her for it. She knew that she herself was a boringly conservative dresser and partly blamed this for Bella needing to express her individuality by clothing herself like the heroine of a Hammer horror film in a silk top hat, veil and Victorian riding gear. When Bella had dyed her silky blonde hair inky black, Simon had almost cried.
And she knew that their son, Sam, quiet, heavy-metal loving Sam, who loathed all sports, was a disappointment to Simon too. Simon had been so thrilled at having a son that he had plonked him in front of the TV for Match of the Day from the moment he was born. And the only result had been that Sam hated football until he was at least twelve.
Even though it could be stressful at times, Laura was still grateful that both her children lived at home. Home and family were the same thing in her book. And, Laura had to admit, their children were especially precious after all the fertility problems they’d had. There had been times when Laura had almost given up. Simon had argued the whole thing was taking too much of a toll on her, though she’d felt that he was referring to himself. He had hated all the rollercoaster of hope and disappointment of assisted conception even more than she had. And then, finally, at forty, to find that she was pregnant with Bella! She would never forget that positive pregnancy test as long as she lived. And to make their world complete, Sam had come along two years later.
Ever since their arrival, she had wanted to be here for them, not out at work, but providing a safe and happy environment. She relished being home when they came back from school and shouted, ‘Hi, Mum, I’m back.’
Still hugging herself at how much she loved them she went up to bed. The sight of her bedroom always made her happy. It was so exactly what she’d wanted. Soft carpets, crisp white linen, roses in a vase. The air in the room was cold since Simon, the product of boarding school, liked the window wide open. It was one of the few things besides the children that they argued about. Fortunately, he slept like a corpse so she could get away with closing it as soon as he nodded off. If she remembered, she would guiltily open it a few inches in the morning before he woke.
As she slipped into bed he murmured and turned. She thought perhaps he was feeling amorous and experienced a wave of guilt as he shifted back to the wall, eyes closed.
The sheets had been clean this morning, which always gave her a dilemma. There was something seductive about clean sheets, but, equally, did one want to spoil them with the messiness of making love? Not that they had much of that these days. Simon seemed perfectly affectionate yet rarely pushed for sex. Laura had even wondered about Viagra.
‘With my husband we had to wait forever for it to work,’ warned Susie, her tennis partner. ‘Not to mention me having to wank him like a Thai hooker all the time unless he did it himself. And then, just as you’re nodding off, there it’ll be, poking into your bum. And once it’s up, it’s up for hours.’
; Laura had giggled, imagining an erotic puppet show with Mr Punch using his willy instead of the usual stick and chanting, ‘That’s the way to do it!’
On the whole she was glad Simon was sound asleep.
CHAPTER 2
‘Hello, Claudia dear, is that you?’
Claudia’s mother Olivia had the habit of shouting down the phone as if it were her daughter rather than herself who was slightly deaf. Claudia supposed that at over eighty you were allowed a few foibles. Olivia had plenty.
‘Yes, Mum. How are you?’
‘My bones ache in the morning. Takes me a good half-hour and a hot bath to get going. Let me give you some advice, darling. Don’t grow old.’
‘I’ll do my best. How’s Dad?’
‘Not too bad, considering the alternative.’ This was the joke her father made every time anyone asked how he was. ‘Now look, darling, I’m ringing about Christmas.’
‘Of course.’ Claudia felt a flash of guilt. Her mother always liked to get Christmas settled early. Usually by Boxing Day the year before. ‘Are you coming here as usual?’
‘Well actually, darling – not this year.’
‘You’re not?’ Claudia was flabbergasted. They always came. ‘Where are you going?’
‘We thought Istanbul.’
‘Istanbul? Why Istanbul?’ Claudia asked incredulously.
‘I found this wonderful offer on the Internet. And Dad’s fed up with the vicar. Told him we were going to have a Muslim Christmas. Just to annoy him.’
Claudia giggled. She adored her dad. And the vicar was one of those who went on and on about Christingle. ‘Do they celebrate Christmas in Istanbul?’
‘Apparently there’s this lovely little Christian church your father’s found right in the middle of the city. He’s also got this idea of watching three ships go sailing by on Christmas Day in the morning, like in the nursery rhyme. From the Bosphorus. There are hundreds of ships there, apparently. It’s quite a sight.’
‘Right.’ This did indeed sound like her father, she had to concede. He adored watching ships. ‘When do you go? Maybe we should have a pre-Christmas Christmas?’
‘That sounds nice.’ Claudia could hear the doubt in her mother’s voice. ‘Though we are rather busy.’
Knowing her mother and father, Claudia knew this was an understatement. Her parents, Olivia and Len, had a social life that was far busier than Claudia’s own. Their life seemed to be a whirl of bridge evenings, pub quizzes, and dinner parties. In fact, her parents had time for all the things Claudia would like to do herself but never did. The latest addition was Olivia’s passion for Internet offers of cut-price meals, spa days and outings to garden centres which seemed largely to be taken up by silver surfers. Claudia had once accompanied her mother to a three-course lunch with champagne when the entire clientele had white hair and Zimmer frames. The food had been diabolical but Olivia had quipped, entirely without irony, ‘I know, dear, but it is half-price.’
‘Gaby will be really disappointed if we don’t do something Christmassy,’ insisted Claudia.
‘We’re free on Monday the sixteenth in the evening, if that’s any good,’ offered Olivia generously. ‘I’m sure I could find us a Christmas offer.’
‘No, no. I’ll cook.’
For a moment she wondered if she would still be working by Christmas but she wouldn’t worry her mother with that. ‘Will you, dear?’ Olivia sounded dubious. She had given up cooking altogether since discovering the Internet with all its tempting restaurant deals. ‘Are you sure you want to go to the trouble?’
After much negotiation over how long they would stay, all of it due to her parents’ busy schedule, they finally agreed their arrangements. It struck Claudia, depressingly, that her mother was probably more Internet-savvy than she was.
‘Of course, you could always come here for Christmas, if you wanted a change,’ her mother offered. ‘The house will be empty. Gaby might like it.’
‘Thanks, Mum,’ Claudia said, rather too quickly. It wasn’t Gaby who’d like it, it was Don. She could just imagine it. He’d become a man on a mission and hang around estate agents’ windows.
After they had rung off, Claudia sat at the kitchen table thinking about her mother. There was something strange about Olivia’s manner. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but her intuition told her something was not quite right. She seemed to be almost gabbling in her eagerness for these offers. There was a breathless enthusiasm, a heightened sense of glittering excitement that was hardly merited by spa outings and trips to the garden centre. She didn’t have much time to think about it, since Gaby came back from work pale and distraught because her current boyfriend had suggested they take a break.
‘Do you think it’s over, Mum?’ Gaby raised eyes that were smudged with mascara. Black runnels of misery marked her cheeks, producing an overwhelming tenderness in her mother. The answer was yes, but she would never say that. It was best just to listen.
Gaby had a habit, along with job-changing, of falling for unsuitable older men who seemed wildly exciting but who nearly always ended up breaking her heart. Claudia worried that it was some fault of her upbringing. Nice normal types like her father didn’t appeal to Gaby. Only the difficult and unattainable. Maybe, as she was an only child, they had expected her to adapt to an adult world instead of entering into the fun and silliness of the child’s. Even when she had been eighteen, Gaby had preferred twenty-five-year-olds to her own age group.
Claudia opened her arms and patted her daughter. First, she’d worried about her mother, now she was worrying about her daughter. The price you paid for being part of the swinging Sixties and delaying childbearing as long as humanly possible was this. You were the sandwich generation who worried about your parents and your children both at exactly the same time.
Ella stood looking out at her garden with its large lawn dominated by a vast cedar of Lebanon. Usually it was a scene she found calming. She remembered her excitement at finding a document in the house stating that the tree had been planted in memory of one Samuel Browne, the house’s first owner, and that the said much-loved Samuel was buried beneath it. Ella imagined the person who had effected this unusual burial-site was Samuel’s wife and what a struggle it must have been with Church and state to be allowed to do this.
Behind her sat the source of her lack of calm. Her daughter Julia. Julia had taken up a post at the huge kitchen table and was consulting her laptop. ‘God, Mum, your WiFi signal is crap here. You really do need to emerge from the eighteenth century!’
Julia was thirty-two and had married young, so that her two sons, Harry and Mark, were already into their teens. To Ella’s disapproval they had been sent off to their father’s old public school, and though she loved her grandsons, she feared they were fast becoming as pompous and narrow-minded as he was. She knew Julia had opposed Neil at first but she’d been worn down by his endless arguments that their sons’ futures would be blighted by going to the local school and that she was being selfish to resist.
Laurence had always lectured Ella about being less disapproving of Neil and giving the boys a chance, they were her grandsons, after all, and Ella did try. It was just that she thought they would be much nicer and more tolerant of other people if they had been sent to a normal school instead of the ludicrously expensive and ultra-traditional boarding establishment which seemed mainly to teach them that they were superior to everyone else on the planet.
The cost of fees for this dire place was so huge that Julia and her husband Neil were permanently looking for ways of paying up. And this house, Ella’s beloved home for all her married life, was their perpetual target.
‘Look, Mum.’ The laptop was open at Zoopla. Julia, it seemed to Ella, was obsessed with house prices – especially the price of this particular house – and seemed to spend half her life on websites which detailed exactly how much every property nearby had gone for. ‘Look, that’s Number twenty-two.’
Ella studied the house on the screen. It
was indeed the house four doors down, where the Lamberts had lived for thirty years. There hadn’t been a For Sale sign up and the Lamberts hadn’t mentioned anything about moving. But that was what the ludicrous situation with house prices did to people – it made them behave like characters from one of the Molière plays she’d studied at university. In this case The Miser. Everyone was terrified that other people would find out how much they’d made. Well, Ella had to concede, property-price websites had put an end to that worry.
‘My God, it went for nearly two million!’ Julia squawked, too stunned to hide her excitement.
‘That’s nice for the Lamberts. I expect it’s their pension,’ Ella conceded.
There was a pause during which Ella had to stop herself grinning, Julia was so transparent. ‘What about you?’ Julia enquired hopefully. ‘Won’t you need to downsize too?’
‘No. I have a company pension from my time as a lawyer.’ She almost added ‘Sorry to disappoint you’, but thought better of it.
Julia had less sense. ‘I mean,’ she blundered on, ‘this place is far too big for you without Dad. And it’s so full of wood that needs endless polishing . . .’
‘I love the wood,’ Ella said quietly. ‘I love the square. I love the garden. I love the tree that makes me think of Dad. I rescued this house and maybe that’s why I love it so much.’
‘Yes, but think what you could do with two million . . .’
‘What you could do with two million,’ Ella thought but didn’t say. She loved both her daughters and of course she loved her grandchildren; she would like to give them a helping hand with money, even though she had never had one herself, but not yet. She would give them a sum to help them buy their own home, but not for school fees to that particularly pig-headed school which seemed to live in a previous century, as did Neil himself. Especially since she suspected Julia was the one who suffered from her sons’ absence. And certainly not if it meant giving up this house with all its treasured memories. She might make Cory understand that the house kept Laurence alive in her heart, but Julia would just say that was a bad thing, another reason to sell. ‘You should move on, Mum,’ would be her instant advice. But Ella thought moving on was over-rated.