by Maeve Haran
Claudia was warm and sympathetic but happily married to the lovely Don. Sal would only say Simon had acted like all men do. She would call Ella.
Ella, of all her friends, understood loss.
Ella straightened her back which was beginning to ache. Digging was hard work. But it was also amazingly absorbing. Years ago a friend who’d had a nervous breakdown – which was what they called it in those days – had gone to a trendy hospital where digging was the first thing the patients were encouraged to do. Now Ella could see why. Turning the earth over and over until it broke up into fine soil ready for sowing seeds was deeply satisfying.
It was a perfect day, the kind she liked best, with a bright pale sky with high fluffy clouds, yet there had been a frost in the night and the ground was surprisingly hard. Without even knowing she was doing it, Ella started singing her favourite carol:
‘In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.’
Her globetrotting neighbours would be amazed if they saw her up to her ankles in mud. It suddenly struck her that maybe they might not want her coming in and planting stuff of her own. On the other hand, she’d just had a postcard saying they were going on to South America and could she keep it up a bit longer?
She leaned over to the young woman in the next plot, who was brightly dressed in a red jumper and jeans. ‘Excuse me, I’m allotment-sitting for Viv and Angelo, and I just wondered, do you think they’d mind if I dug this bed?’
‘Angelo hates digging.’ The woman smiled back. ‘It’d muss up his hairdo. They’ll be delighted. Just ask us before you chuck anything away that’s growing. Even if it looks like a weed.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m Sue, by the way.’
Another young woman, who could almost have been her twin, popped out from behind her. ‘Hi, I’m Sharleen!’
Sharleen had an effervescent quality that somehow reminded Ella of Miss Piggy with her habit of unstoppably popping up in everyone else’s scenes. ‘Pleased to meet you.’
‘Cup of tea, ladies?’ Bill’s mate Stevie had appeared with a tray and three mugs. He handed the first mug, adorned with the slogan I DIG PLANTS, to Sue. Sharleen was awarded GIVE PEAS A CHANCE and Ella got COMPOST HAPPENS.
‘Compost Happens, that’s really funny.’ Ella smiled.
‘Is it?’ asked Stevie genuinely flummoxed. ‘Why?’
Ella looked at him but he was clearly serious. ‘Well, you know, it’s a pun on shit happens.’
Stevie stared at it then buckled almost in two with laughter. ‘Compost happens!’ he repeated delightedly. ‘Compost happens! I’ll go and tell Bill, he’ll be tickled to death.
‘Not the sharpest tool in the shed,’ whispered Sharleen. ‘After all, it’s Bill’s mug.’ She glanced appraisingly at Ella. ‘Quite an honour, Bill making a cup of tea. He’s never made us one.’
‘That’s because we’re dangerous feminists,’ Sue pointed out good-humouredly. ‘Bill doesn’t approve of feminists.’
‘Or benefit scroungers,’ added Sharleen, grinning.
‘Or social workers.’
‘Or foreigners of any hue.’ They fell about laughing at the roll call of Bill’s dislikes.
The mention of foreigners reminded Ella that she needed to get home. Wenceslaus was coming round at seven and she wanted to make them supper. It would be nice to have a reason to cook. She’d got out of the habit since Cory had left home. It was easier just to chuck fishcakes in the oven and eat them with baked beans out of the tin. ‘I must be off. Someone coming to supper.’
‘Why don’t you take these aubergines?’ Sue suggested, handing over a glossy purple handful. ‘I’ve got a terrific recipe for aubergines Mr Barzani from allotment eleven gave me. He used to cook them on his hot coals in Kurdistan. Don’t tell Sharleen, though. Our home-grown aubergines are finished. These are imported ones from the greengrocer on the High Street. Against allotment rules.’ She grinned at Ella, producing a scrappy piece of paper with grease stains on it.
Ella read it out, suddenly envious of Viv and Angelo mixing with all these different kinds of people. ‘“Take two large aubergines. Slice thinly. Place on kitchen towel and pat till poison comes out.” Do aubergines have poison in them?’ she asked.
‘I think he means that bitter juice stuff that comes out rather than actual strychnine.’
‘“Soak in olive oil and garlic. Heat pan till smoking. Cook aubergines three or four minutes. Turn. Squeeze juice half lemon. Sprinkle with fresh coriander. Eat with bread and thick yogurt and thank the Good God for life.” Anyone got any fresh coriander?’
‘Mine’s finished but Bill’s friend Les up by that green shed may have some, he grows it under glass. He doesn’t tell Bill he does, though. Far too fancy. Bill might have him blackballed from the magic circle.’
Bill was at the far end of the allotments doling out advice to Stan, a Jamaican of indeterminate age, who knew nothing about the theory of gardening, yet apparently had amazing results growing everything from sweetcorn to Scotch bonnet chillies, in astonishingly adverse conditions, just by instinct.
‘Do you have any coriander I could have, Les?’ Ella asked when she’d walked over to the green shed. ‘Just a few strands would do.’
Les pulled a small bunch from his herb plot and handed it over as if it were a banned substance. ‘Here you are,’ he whispered. ‘Really good in omelette fines herbes.’
‘Thanks. I’ll remember that.’ She waved goodbye to Sue. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t tell Sharleen about the aubergines,’ Ella said, laughing.
She really liked Sue and Sharleen.
As the sun began to set behind the misty banks of the River Thames, Ella walked home, glad to be part of this rich world she’d stumbled into without even knowing it was there.
She was also aware of something else, a feeling she was only dimly conscious of, rather like waking on the morning of a trip you’d been looking forward to when you lay in bed for a moment, eyes still closed, filled with pleasurable anticipation.
With a shock she identified the reason. It was because Wenceslaus was coming.
It would be a hard emotion to convey to anyone but another mother. Sal would ogle and say it was because of his looks. But that wasn’t the explanation. Ostensibly he was coming to live in her house to make sure it was safe, to look after her. Yet what she was really looking forward to was looking after him. Not in any clingy or creepy sense, but as a fellow human being, and one who was young enough to have been her son. Since Cory had moved out, the place had felt different. The mellowed wooden boards of the hall and the staircase were beloved and familiar. They still smelled of beeswax and a warm welcome, yet without Laurence and then the girls they had sometimes been empty and echoing.
Now there would be youth and life. Laughter. She thought about the idea of a dog, something she had been considering for a long time. Wenceslaus could help walk it.
‘Careful,’ warned a voice, ‘you’re starting to depend on him and he hasn’t even moved in yet. Maybe he won’t stay. Or maybe he’ll want to come and go as he likes and have nothing to do with you.’
She unlocked the door, switched off the burglar alarm, and started to cook the aubergines with the lemon and coriander, using Mr Barzani’s dog-eared recipe.
By the time the doorbell rang the food was ready.
Wenceslaus had only one small bag and a laptop computer.
Ella showed him his room and bathroom at the top of the house. It had a glorious view of the garden.
Wenceslaus stared out at the branches of the cedar which were right outside his window. ‘Lucky to have trees right in middle of city.’
‘Yes, we are lucky. Very lucky. There are lots of robins, a jay, two woodpeckers – you know, “Ha-ha ha Haa hah!”’ Ella tried to imitate Woody Woodpecker with mixed success. Thank God her daughters weren’t here.
&n
bsp; ‘Is very good,’ Wenceslaus congratulated. ‘I know at once what you mean. I have one question.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Do you have Wi-Fi? I do not mean to be rude, to presume.’
‘Wenceslaus,’ Ella replied, laughing and remembering her daughter’s complaints, ‘have you seen my phone? We’re about as hi-tech here as The Flintstones.’
‘And do you want to be? Would you like to learn about modern age? Blogging? Facebook? Twitter? Smartphone? 4G?’
Ella imagined the expression on the faces of Julia and Cory, and even her grandsons Harry and Mark and, best of all, her know-it-all son-in-law, annoying Neil, if Grandma got wired. Or wireless.
‘Do you know? I rather think I might. But look, for the moment, come and eat.’
‘I should have got wine.’ Wenceslaus looked truly apologetic at this lapse in etiquette.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get some from the cellar. My husband was quite an enthusiast.’
She found a bottle of red that needed drinking anyway or it would go off. As she wiped the bottle she thought of Laurence, and how he had bought it with the thought of sitting in the kitchen enjoying it with her and how bloody unfair life was.
She had a feeling he would have approved of Wenceslaus.
They ate Mr Barzani’s aubergines, which were entirely delicious, though next time she’d cook some lamb to go with them.
She raised a glass. ‘To our digital relationship!’ She hoped that hadn’t sounded inappropriately cougar-like, and decided it hadn’t. She intended to be entirely straightforward with him and simply ask him to do something whenever she needed it done and not to start agonizing if he’d mind or not.
‘I am very grateful you give me room. I will make sure everything runs like house on fire. Maybe that not good way of putting it?’
‘That’s a perfect way of putting it. Now if you could put the dishes in the dishwasher that would be lovely.’ She’d never trained Laurence to do this but she felt she owed it to the next generation to do her bit with Wenceslaus.
She had just sat back, put her feet up to ease her now aching back, when the phone rang.
Before a word was spoken Ella knew from the sobs that it was Laura and that somehow she had found out about Simon’s infidelity.
‘Where are you now?’
‘Still at the hotel in Brighton.’
‘And Simon?’
‘I asked him to go, so presumably he’s gone to her.’
‘Oh, darling Laura, I wish I were with you. And on your anniversary too.’ She didn’t know why that made it so much worse, but it did. ‘Bloody men and their bloody predictable stupidity.’
‘Not all men. Laurence would never have done this to you.’
‘Laura, that’s silly. We don’t know what Laurence would have done. What are you going to do now?’
‘I’ve chucked him out. He’s coming to get his things tomorrow. And we have to tell the children. Oh, God, Ella. What are we going to tell them? They had no idea about any of this. But neither did I. How incredibly blind and stupid was that?’
‘Stop that. You trusted him. That’s why you managed to stay married for twenty-five years in the first place. That’s quite a record these days. So who is she, this other woman?’
‘A colleague. Can you believe it, she’s called Suki? He says she’s really in love with him and she wants him to live with her.’
From what Sal had said, Ella recognized the type. The type who thought wives were boring and marriage didn’t mean anything. Until they got their claws into some poor woman’s husband. Then they got him to divorce his wife double quick and married him before he had a chance to miss his family. She’d seen it over and over.
‘Oh, Laura, you poor lamb.’ The warmth of Ella’s sympathy made Laura start crying again. The thought of telling Bella and Sam, who had always felt safe in their parents’ marriage, and whose lives would be affected almost as much as hers, was so dreadful she could hardly bear to think about it.
‘Promise me you’ll come straight round the moment you can,’ Ella insisted, ‘and I’ll administer a big hug and a large glass of Sauvignon.’
‘Sounds wonderful.’
‘That’s what friends are for. To pick you up when you feel like shit. It’s in the rulebook.’
Laura smiled despite everything. ‘One thing, Ella, don’t tell the others. I don’t want everyone knowing all the gory details.’
‘Of course. I won’t breathe a word.’ Not that she needed to. Sal had told them all already. But there was no reason for Laura to find that out.
Wenceslaus knocked on the door, interrupting her reverie. ‘I go to bed now.’ He seemed to notice her preoccupation. ‘Everything OK?’
Ella looked at him. He seemed so kind. So nice. And so handsome. Would he behave towards some woman one day the way Simon had to Laura?
‘I don’t suppose I should ask you this, but why do men leave their wives of twenty-five years?’
Wenceslaus sighed, as if this were a perfectly reasonable question to ask someone you had known only a couple of days. ‘Because men are stupid. Because they think grass always greener. And sometimes,’ he shrugged apologetically, ‘because women let them.’
Was Laura letting him? Should she be fighting tooth and nail to keep him, or was there some part of her that said, if that’s what he’s like, then let him go?
She remembered that tactless friend who’d told her she was lucky to have her marriage end in death, not divorce, because she still had the memories. She glanced at her wedding photograph, propped up on the mantelpiece. Would you and I have been all right, I wonder, or would we have ended up like Laura and Simon, dragging each other through the divorce courts?
She put her finger to her lips and brushed it across the photograph, missing him more powerfully than she could ever remember.
She brushed away a tear for the lost years they would have had together, then sat and listened to the silence and was glad that its quality had changed. It no longer felt empty but occupied and purposeful.
Tomorrow she would ask Wenceslaus to give her a lesson on the computer.
Sal was feeling more nervous than she had for years as she dressed for her interview at Oakmore Resorts. Since she had left the magazine she had applied for hundreds of jobs and, to her shocked amazement, today’s was still her only interview. And this despite taking Ella’s advice, which she had rather resented, that she play down her experience and streamline her last salary so that it wasn’t higher than the current job was offering. ‘No one trusts someone who’s prepared to take a drop in salary,’ Ella had insisted.
Sal had a bad feeling as soon as she walked through the door of their head office. It wasn’t the deep pile of the beige carpet or the fact that the place was so impenetrably silent that unnerved her, it was the staff. From the receptionist to the discreet sales assistants, they were all so young. What’s more, they were all dressed in neutral colours, just like the walls, in a palate that ran the gamut from ivory all the way to bone.
Sal began to wonder if her Savannah Miller animal-inspired jumpsuit and wedge-heeled trainers had been such a good idea for a job interview in this temple of taupe. The thing was she always felt so good in them. But she could see it might be construed in this environment as weird rather than witty, her favourite fashion attribute. She hoped they knew how much the jumpsuit cost, or would have if she’d paid the full price. At least she had had the sense to leave her beloved black leather biker jacket at home.
‘Come on, Sal, old girl, pull yourself together. These are all babies. None of them have your sophistication, your experience, your savvy,’ she told herself.
Or your wobbly jowls, added her subconscious meanly.
‘Ms Grainger?’ the receptionist enquired, a bright smile pinned to her face. ‘Would you like to come through here?’
To her horror she saw that the interview panel were all sitting not round a table where she could sit up with a nice straight back but loungi
ng on ludicrously low harem-style couches. This meant, as she took her seat – or couch – that Sal had to lean forward, thus exposing several inches of ageing bosom.
‘Perhaps we might start by introducing ourselves. I’m Suzanne Walton, Head of HR, this is Bridget Ripley, Director of Operations, and Angela Harley, our Resorts Co-ordinator, and of course Ben Wilson, from Communications. So, Ms – Grainger – what does Oakmore Resorts say to you as a brand?’
Sal cast her mind back to the press trips she had been on as a guest of Oakmore. ‘Understated luxury, unobtrusive service, always there when you want it but not one of those irritating places where they straighten your towel when you go swimming . . . great locations . . .’
Actually, the truth was that Oakmore Resorts were, rather like their offices, the bland leading the bland.
‘And what about any negative aspects? Things we might improve?’
The make-up remover pads weren’t replenished as generously as Sal might have liked but she thought this might not be what they had in mind.
‘Colour,’ Sal waded in bravely. ‘I would introduce some boldness into the brand, both in your décor and how people see you as a company.’
‘And how would you do that?’ Ben Wilson asked, nervously eyeing her Savannah Miller print.
‘Purple orchids,’ Sal announced with a sibyl-like stare. That should give them something to think about. She could expand but decided against it. Let them imagine the orchids were a metaphor.
‘I see.’
‘And how would you promote Oakmore across the various platforms?’
How she hated bloody platforms, but at least she was ready with an answer. ‘You have to be everywhere these days. Social media. Blogging. TripAdvisor. Twitter. Apps. Obviously liaising with websites and magazines for promotions, contests, offers.’
‘Tell me, Ms Grainger,’ Angela Harley was asking, ‘on your online application you were asked if you were stranded on a desert island what two things you would want to take. Do you recall your answer?’
‘My sarong and Ray-Bans,’ as I recall.