The Time of Their Lives

by Maeve Haran

  In for a penny. Maybe it would help her find out why he seemed to be finding it hard to settle in Minsley.

  It didn’t take long. Don wasn’t a natural dissembler. Two months ago he had signed up to Friends Reunited and made contact with an old school friend called Marianne. Their communications, just a few at first, had grown and grown until they were emailing each other ten or twenty times a day. From reading the emails, Claudia was amazed to find that they hadn’t actually met up yet. They were having a cyber-romance and it was fuelled by Don’s revelation that his wife cared more about her friendships than her marriage.

  She was so angry with Don that she could only just stop herself throwing his laptop out of the window. He’d been so keen for them to leave London and all her friends so that they could start again and now he was being unfaithful, at least via email, and, for all she knew, probably more than that soon. The thought that she wasn’t behaving too well herself knocked on the door of her unconscious, but she wouldn’t let it in.

  Her next reaction was to pick up the phone to ring Ella. With a shock she remembered how Ella was off-limits because of her own bad behaviour.

  What was the matter with everyone?

  She grabbed Vito and dragged him out from his nice warm bed in the kitchen to go for a walk so that she could think.

  She was halfway down the village street with Vito shivering behind her when she stopped dead and almost squashed him.

  Coming towards her, in old clothes and an anorak, holding a bunch of flowers and a basket full of muddy-looking veg, which matched the rest of her, was Ella herself.

  The sight of Ella, so out of context, and looking full of contrition, jolted Claudia out of her rigid mindset. Ella looked so ridiculous in her mud-caked clothes and boots, with arms loaded down with leeks and cabbages like a contestant on Crackerjack, that Claudia found she couldn’t hold on to her anger.

  ‘Ella!’

  ‘Claudia! She filled Claudia’s arms with the veg. ‘It’s so great to see you! I can’t tell you how stupid I feel!’

  ‘Quite right too. Have you said sorry to Laura?’

  Ella nodded.

  ‘Good. She was more hurt than any of us. Except maybe Sal.’

  ‘Oh, God, Sal! She still won’t return my calls. Do you think I should go and see her?’

  ‘I suppose you could go to her office.’ They walked back towards Claudia’s cottage. ‘Oh look, a snowdrop!’ Ella pointed to a tiny clump of the delicate flowers that had just pushed their way through the hard ground by the garden path. ‘Spring must be on the way.’

  ‘Trust you to notice.’ Claudia smiled. ‘It must be all this messing about at the allotments.’ She bent down and picked one. ‘They are lovely, though. Symbolic. New beginnings and all that.’

  ‘And has it been a new beginning?’ Ella asked, standing back to admire the pretty cottage with its white wooden porch. ‘Winter jasmine too. How gorgeous.’ She pointed to the delicate sprays of yellow. ‘You weren’t exactly keen to come.’

  ‘Dragged kicking and screaming, you mean. I am quite enjoying it, actually. I’ve joined a choir!’

  ‘Claudia! I didn’t know you could sing.’

  ‘Neither did I but I’m not too bad. I’m going to be the countess in The Sound of Music!’

  ‘Well, get you!’

  ‘And I’ve signed up to help with a charity that takes singing to underprivileged kids. It’s run by this charismatic choir master.’

  ‘Is it, now? Good for you. And how about Don?’

  ‘Oh, God, Ella, after all the song and dance he made, I’m not sure he’s happy. He won’t admit it, but I think he misses his friends as much as I miss mine.’

  ‘He probably needs a Grecian Grove. Men don’t think friendships matter, but they do.’ She gave Claudia a significant look.

  ‘I think he’s been passing his days linking up with an old school friend via some website.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Female. A Marianne.’

  Ella raised an eyebrow. ‘You want to put the lid on that before it boils up. They’re really powerful, these reunion sites. People trying to rekindle all that innocent passion and one thing leads to another and the house burns down.’

  Claudia took Ella on a tour of the cottage which took just five minutes flat. Ella listened for a moment. ‘My God, it’s quiet!’

  ‘It’s the country. Come on, let’s see what we can find for lunch. With all those veggies you brought there ought to be something. And we could open a bottle of wine!’

  By the time Ella left two hours later the bonds of friendship had been re-tied almost as strongly as ever.

  Laura sat at her familiar kitchen table, the possessions that she had built up over the years all around her – a silver picture frame with a photo of Simon and her on holiday; a vase she’d been given as a present by Bella; a shell found on a faraway beach, the calendar made out of pasta by Sam aged six. Until a few months ago, these would have seemed the evidence of a happy and successful marriage. Now she hardly noticed them.

  The truth was, she wouldn’t really mind moving and starting again. Here there were memories round every corner waiting to pounce on her; things they’d bought together. Simon had been more interested than most men in choosing his surroundings. Most of her friends’ husbands had left it all to their wives, considering a trip to a furniture shop as a living death, but Simon had loved Saturday visits to IKEA, even relishing the Swedish meatballs for lunch in the café, watching other couples fight over the self-assembly and blaming each other for forgetting the dimensions of the mattress they’d come to buy.

  Sam, she knew, felt differently. His home really mattered to him; it was at least here, even if his parents’ marriage had imploded.

  Laura decided to do something Rowley Robinson had expressly told her not to do.

  She called Simon and arranged to meet him in a coffee shop a long way from LateExpress or his office.

  ‘The thing is,’ she explained as she ordered the coffees, latte for her, macchiato for him, like they always had, ‘I’m really worried about Sam. He won’t get out of bed. Not at all. Ever.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I’ve tried everything. Threats. Bribery. Bella’s boyfriend has bought computer games. None of it works. Simon, I think it might be to do with the house.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Laura, don’t blackmail me.’

  ‘Simon, my lawyer would kill me for saying this, but I don’t really care about the house. Sam does, though. What I wanted to ask was, could we come to some agreement, nothing to do with lawyers, that I could stay there just till he’s got over the split? A few months more. I mean, go ahead with the divorce, but just not sell the house yet.’

  ‘Does he still hate me?’

  ‘I think he’s just confused. He can’t see what went wrong, he says, and that’s what’s making it hard to accept.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I didn’t poison him against you, you know. I think that’s despicable.’

  ‘You didn’t need to. I managed that all on my own.’

  ‘I’m sure he’ll come round. Eventually.’

  He considered her for a moment, silently. ‘You’re a nice person, Laura.’

  ‘Yeah, well, nice people finish last, as they say.’

  ‘You haven’t finished last. You made a stable home for them.’

  ‘Perhaps.’ Laura shrugged. ‘Bella’s having a baby with no job and no money and Sam won’t get out of bed.’ She gave him a small, wry smile. ‘And here you are, starting again. Brave.’

  ‘Or foolhardy.’ For a moment he looked very old. ‘About the house. I’ll see what I can do.’

  When she got home, Ella sat in her kitchen feeling grateful that she was forgiven, at least by Laura and Claudia. Sal would be far more difficult to convince because she felt even more betrayed.

  Ella made herself a cup of coffee in the individual pot she’d hardly used all these months. Since Wenceslaus had left, the house seemed emptier than ever. She
’d almost pressed him again to come back when she’d visited his coffee shop, but she knew he wouldn’t accept. Pride went deep with him. Ella looked around at her familiar surroundings. She might criticize Julia for clinging to a fantasy but wasn’t she doing the same with this house?

  She was so deep in contemplation that she hardly even heard the doorbell as it rang through the echoing spaces, but as it persisted through several more rings, it finally penetrated her consciousness and she stood up and went to answer it.

  The last person she expected to find on her doorstep was her son-in-law, Neil.

  ‘Hello, Ella, may I come in?’

  ‘Of course.’ Ella knew her voice was frosty, but then it was Neil’s fault that Wenceslaus had moved out. ‘How is Julia?’

  ‘It’s about Julia, or rather us, that I’ve come to talk to you.’

  Ella stood back, stunned. ‘You’ve come to talk to me about your marriage?’

  He smiled bitterly. ‘I know you don’t like me, Ella. You think I’m conventional and bigoted and probably selfish, and absolutely nothing like Laurence was.’ He waved away any protest she might offer before she even made it. ‘Let’s be honest. You’ve never approved of me, and you hate the fact I’ve sent the boys to boarding school. You probably also think I’ve got a filthy temper. I jumped to conclusions about your lodger and probably quite a lot of other things. I’m sorry. The thing is, I’m really worried about Julia.’

  She took him into the sitting room. He stood by the fire-place, with one foot on the fender, staring into the flames. In his tweed sports jacket, twill trousers, check shirt and yellow tie, he looked the picture of the country gent of thirty years ago. Ella wondered where he even found clothes that were so ruthlessly conventional. It was hard to see Neil as young, yet he couldn’t even be forty.

  ‘The thing is, I love Julia and I didn’t know what to do about her and that bloody Pole . . .’ It was as if he forced himself to put a name to his rival and accept him as a person. ‘Wenceslaus. I knew she trailed about after him like a lovesick teenager.’

  ‘How did you know that?’ Ella asked nervously.

  ‘I followed her.’ He looked so miserable that Ella softened a little towards him. She noticed that his tie was twisted up under his shirt and almost reached out to straighten it as she would a small boy’s. ‘She stayed in that café for two hours. And then there was the photograph business.’ He sat down across the table from her. ‘Do you think his girlfriend is right? That I pushed her into his arms, that I can’t make her happy?’

  ‘Neil, if it’s any consolation, I think it’s more of a crush, and I’m pretty sure nothing’s actually happened between them.’

  ‘That’s not the point though, is it?’ His answer surprised her. To many men it would have been exactly the point. ‘She went to him for something she wasn’t getting from me.’

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but I think the problem is she’s lonely.’

  ‘Lonely! But she’s got us.’

  ‘Yes, but the boys are away and you’re very busy.’

  ‘She could get a job. Do some volunteering.’

  ‘She has this notion of being a good wife. I think it’s my fault.’ As Ella said this, she saw that it was probably true. ‘I was always working. My generation were the first to have careers. We were in love with the idea of proving ourselves, being women in a man’s world. When I had Julia I went straight back to work. I only took a month or two off and then she had a nanny. She was quite a nice nanny, but she wasn’t me. Years later, Julia told me how much she’d longed for me to pick her up from school.’ The thought made Ella suddenly tearful. ‘And then her father died, and I had to work then. I had this place to keep up.’

  She glanced at her beloved home. ‘Maybe I should have sold up, moved to a flat, given up work, but you know, Neil, when Laurence died it was work that saved me. Just having to get out of bed in the morning, put my clothes on, go to the office, think about something other than his stupid bloody wasteful death, got me through. But maybe I should have thought more of the girls. When they were children, funnily enough, Julia was the strong one, it was Cory who collapsed when Laurence died. Julia really helped Cory.’

  ‘It must have been really hard for you all.’

  She looked him in the eye and saw a Neil she hadn’t glimpsed before. A conventional man, certainly, but not such a closed-off one as she’d imagined. ‘So you can see why Julia might desperately want to make a proper home.’

  ‘I was sent away to school at six,’ he said suddenly. ‘My parents got divorced and they quarrelled about who should have me. The funny thing was – neither of them wanted me.’

  Ella glimpsed a sad small boy packed off in shorts and a blazer with a trunk, not knowing where he could call home. No wonder he clung to convention; perhaps it made him feel safe.

  ‘And yet you’ve sent the boys off to school as well.’

  ‘Not at six!’ He looked out of the window. A young robin was sitting on the bird table, fluffing out its feathers in the cold. It looked tiny and vulnerable. ‘You think you’re doing the best for them.’ And then he added, defensively, ‘It’s a really good education.’

  Ella had no idea why but she suddenly asked Neil something. ‘Actually, I’ve got a problem of my own. Maybe you can advise me.’

  ‘Me?’ Neil looked thunderstruck. ‘Julia says I’m emotionally illiterate!’

  Ella tried not to smile. She was glad they were at least talking about things.

  ‘Now that Wenceslaus has gone, this house is feeling very empty. Do you honestly think I should sell it?’

  Ella had expected him to simply rubber stamp the idea, but Neil seemed suddenly uncertain of everything. He was unexpectedly sheepish, his usual strutting demeanour seemed to have been left on the doorstep. ‘I should never have accused him like that. I just wanted Julia to see he was no knight in shining armour who would rescue her. She was so obsessed with him.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Ella, but she wasn’t going to forgive him.

  ‘To be honest, I’m not sure I’m the best person to advise you. I thought it was madness that you wanted to go on living here, but you seem to love the place so much. I suppose I can see now that it’s your link to Laurence and all your memories.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s time I broke that link. I’ll still have the memories.’

  ‘You were very happy with him, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yes, which is why I want you and Julia to be happy too. I didn’t choose for my marriage to end and I suppose it makes me angry when people don’t see what they’ve got.’

  ‘I haven’t tried very hard to make Julia happy.’ The harshness in his voice made Ella look at him.

  ‘Maybe it isn’t too late.’

  He smiled. It was funny, Neil was such a jerky, brusque character that she’d never even noticed he had quite a sweet smile. He would never come near the extraordinary beauty of a Wenceslaus, but for a conventional Englishman, he could be quite appealing.

  As soon as he’d left, Ella felt emotionally wiped out. She had no idea if Neil and Julia would be able to save their marriage or whether she should stay on here alone.

  For now she would have a bath. And a very large glass of wine.

  CHAPTER 20

  Sal had a message that Rose McGill had been looking for her when she got back to the office in Kensal Green.

  Rose was often at general meetings, or those called to discuss company-wide issues, but she had never requested a one-to-one before and the news made Sal jumpy.

  As far as Sal could tell, her editorship had been going well. Official circulation figures weren’t out yet but the unofficial soundings Sal had made were good and subscriptions, previously in decline, were gently climbing. Their website was also popular and proving a useful tool for keeping in touch with their readers. Nothing to worry about that she could see.

  ‘Sal, good to see you. Earl Grey?’ Rose, resplendent in purple jersey, was proffering the teapot she always
filled religiously at four every day.

  ‘Thanks,’ Sal sat down. She was wearing both wig and sunglasses, but these appeared to be accepted as a new look and rarely even remarked on. It was just assumed by the staff that they were an eccentricity in the Anna Wintour mould. Thank God she’d gone for the really expensive wig.

  Rose, Sal suspected, had a sharper eye, but she didn’t seem to be staring or studying Sal with extra interest.

  ‘I asked you in because I wanted your opinion.’ Rose sat in one of the two easy chairs opposite Sal. ‘The thing is, we’ve had an approach.’

  ‘What kind of approach?

  ‘From Mayflower Publishing in New York. They’ve been watching New Grey over the last few months and they want to buy a stake in the company. The idea would be to start a US version, with our input of course.’

  Sal was flattered and scared in equal measure. Flattered because it was a sign of their success under her editorship and nervous at what would be involved, especially given her precarious state of health. Had she been well it would have been a terrific opportunity for the magazine to branch out.

  ‘And what do you think?’ Sal asked cautiously. Rose was famously suspicious of conglomerates.

  ‘If it had been any other group, I would have told them to take a running jump, but Lou Maynard is different. I know him from old. And Lou’s already so rich he’s not doing it just for money; he’s genuinely interested in the idea of ageing.’ She laughed. ‘He’s no spring chicken himself. He must be at least seventy.’

  ‘What does Michael think?’

  Rose shrugged. ‘Michael’s in two minds. He can see the appeal of making some money, obviously, but he’s worried that in a big organization he’d be a smaller player.’ She sipped her tea. ‘It’s true Lou would eclipse any other male on the horizon.’

  ‘You sound as if you like him.’

  ‘Everyone likes Lou.’ Rose’s laugh conjured up smoky night-clubs with jazzy music and heady cocktails, possibly in the company of this Lou Maynard. ‘Now I shouldn’t really be telling you this, but Jonny Wheeler isn’t planning to come back.’