by Judy Astley
He’d chuckled, Gwen recalled, as if somewhere deep down was their fulfilment of his own secret lost dreams. That was when he’d started to stay out for a couple of pints, the minute the pub opened in the mornings. Two pints just lasted through the sports pages of the Telegraph. ‘Except on Saturdays,’ he’d said unapologetically when she’d assembled the courage to ask what he thought he was playing at, ‘that needs a whisky chaser – there’s a few extra pages.’ She didn’t ask what it took to get through all the filthy magazines. Howard didn’t know she’d found those. He could hardly expect her not to, though: he knew her domestic routine and she wasn’t yet feeble enough to abandon the turning of the mattress once a fortnight. What her dignified God, the creator of all that was well-ordered, would make of it, Gwen couldn’t bring herself to think.
It was getting on for 9.30 a.m. and Melanie’s gardener was late. Max from Green Piece was due to bring round the finished plan he’d come up with after an initial discussion and a tour of the garden a couple of weeks before. Max, who, when they’d come to check out the job, had been the one of the Green Piece pair who’d done all the talking, had promised her 8.30 a.m. ‘At the latest’. After they’d left, she realized she should have changed that to ‘At the earliest’, then she’d have known what time it would be safe to get into the bath without dreading the doorbell going. As a lone woman employing a team of potentially leery workmen, greeting them on day one wrapped in a towel and dripping Clarins bath gel all over the floor wasn’t quite the coolly businesslike impression she intended to give.
Green Piece had been the fourth company she’d had round to quote for the restructuring of the back garden. The other three had been one-man businesses, and in turn each of these one-men had given her the sharp-intake-of-breath treatment, followed by a session of kicking at the crumbling garden path, a stamping on the threadbare lawn and a depressed shrug.
‘Palms and stuff is a lot of hassle. If you want low maintenance, you want nice shrubs: bit of spotted laurel, escallonia,’ the first decreed, adding – to bowl Melanie over with Latin – ‘but if it’s exotic you’re after, you’re sheltered enough for fatsia japonica.’ The second had barely looked at the garden but grumbled that he’d never get his lorry round the back of the house, and the third said he might be able to let her have a few days eighteen months on, give or take. There would have been a fifth if the proprietor hadn’t even refused to come out and take a look. ‘We don’t do Southernbrook Road,’ a sniffy voice from Gone To Earth had told her on the phone. ‘We are landscapers. Small back yards like Southernbrook are hardly that.’
Well fuck you, Mel had thought, plonking the phone down and going back to the Yellow Pages. Small back yard indeed. OK, her garden wasn’t exactly stately parkland but surely town gardens had plenty of chic potential? They certainly did according to Roy Strong – Mel had done her research and reading. Wait till Dying For It is peaktime viewing with an audience rating better than an EastEnders special and I’m the shit-hot new guest columnist featured in every magazine, she’d thought furiously. That prat from Gone to Earth would be knocking on the door begging to trim her hedge just so he could show off to his mates down at the swanky café-bar over his mozzarella and oil-drizzled tomato baguette with double espresso. She’d plunder the depths of Tina Keen’s sharpest vocabulary to tell him what he could do with his dibber.
The doorbell eventually rang just as Melanie was delving in the drawer for a pair of tights. She was otherwise fully dressed after the fastest possible shower and the flinging on of clothes to a body still just slightly damp.
‘Hi! Nice to see you!’ she said as she opened the door, then stopped, declaring, ‘Oh it’s you!’ on seeing Cherry, who, like Sarah, claimed to be her ‘best’ friend (they used to say ‘oldest’, it occurred to Mel, a term which seemed to have disappeared as soon as it became possible to construe it as not just meaning ‘long-term’).
‘Yes it’s me! Isn’t it just as nice to see me as whoever you were expecting? Can’t I come in?’ Cherry was carrying a small pink and white cake box containing at least, Mel guessed, 1,000 calories, from Madame Blanc’s patisserie. She flattened herself against the wall as Cherry pushed her way in and strode down the hallway towards the kitchen. ‘I thought you might be feeling a bit down now that Rosa’s gone so I thought we could go out and do something, you know, something girly just for ourselves. We can start with these.’ She pulled plates from the rack over the sink and arranged a pair of delicate apricot pastries on them.
‘Why do people keep feeling the need to feed me up?’ Melanie asked, filling the kettle and reaching across to the dresser for mugs. ‘Sarah brought me a Chinese to make up for Roger getting married and now you’re consoling me for Rosa with cake.’
Cherry took a large bite of pastry, then, scattering crumbs, said, ‘Well, I just thought you might need cheering up. You’re not used to the lone life, not like me. Sorry if I’ve got it wrong. And I know I have because you were obviously expecting someone else.’ She looked around the kitchen, her head going this way and that like a cat that’s sure there’s a loose mouse hidden in there somewhere.
Oh God, Mel thought, some people are just so over-sensitive. She handed a mug of coffee to Cherry and sat down beside her at the battered old elmwood table. Rosa’s name was etched into the surface of the wood, down at the window end where she’d always sat for meals, first as a baby in her high chair then later in the cream wicker one, the arm of which she’d unravelled and snapped off in fronds by the time she was five. Melanie could see her vividly, twirling the broken-off strips round and round, curling them into rings round her fingers. It would be quiet without her, admittedly, but it was all right to have quiet, especially in the early morning, after all those years of ‘Where’s my homework? Who’s had all the milk? I need money! Quick!’
‘I was only expecting the garden designer. He’s late. He should have been here an hour ago and this isn’t a very good sign.’
‘Garden designer? Are you kidding? For a suburban oblong? What are you having done? Your garden always looks OK to me.’ Cherry went to peer through the window, adding, once she’d noted the garden’s obvious neglect, ‘or it would if you put a bit of effort in.’ Cherry turned back to face Melanie. ‘You’d find it really quite good company, now you’re on your own.’
Mel laughed. ‘What? The garden? Don’t tell me you actually talk to the plants, Chezza, that way lies royal madness.’
‘No, I mean it’s really absorbing, fascinating, watching the stuff grow, especially plants you’ve started from seeds. In spring, I race out every morning to see what’s come up. It never fails to be a thrill. And in the winter you just leave the most tender ones in the greenhouse and ignore them while it’s cold. All that’s a lot more than can be said for men.’
‘Ah now, men. I’m definitely not looking for one of those, not to keep anyway. Sarah thinks I should be leaping straight into the dating marketplace. I hope you don’t.’
‘Me? Hardly likely. You know me better than that.’
Mel smiled lazily. ‘Though I did see one I rather liked the look of down in Plymouth. And, you know, for one gorgeous moment I thought he was going to be spending the night at the same hotel as me. I was just getting all geed up about possibilities when . . . well, nothing. It wasn’t to be. Pity, I could do with just one little chance to see if I’ve still got any pulling power.’
Cherry put down the remains of her pastry and stared at Mel. ‘But suppose he had been going to stay at the same hotel? Just suppose you’d met him in the bar, maybe had dinner with him . . .’ Melanie watched, amused, as Cherry screwed up her face in concentration, forcing her imagination to take the scenario to its luscious and wicked conclusion.
‘Go on, Cherry, don’t stop now. We’ve had all this marvellous food, now what?’ Mel prompted. ‘Do I get offered another drink? Spot of brandy? Bit more champagne? Do we have it in the bar or take it up to the room? And are we heading for his room or mine?’
; ‘Yes but you wouldn’t have, not really,’ Cherry decreed, sipping quickly at rapidly cooling coffee. ‘Would you?’
‘I might have. What’s so wonderful is that there’s absolutely no reason why I shouldn’t.’
‘Apart from nasty infections, guilty conscience, a sort of shabby, used feeling the next morning?’
Melanie laughed. ‘No chance. For one thing, to deal with the first there’s condoms.’ She hesitated for a moment, for she didn’t actually carry a supply of those around with her. There’d been no reason why she should, so far, but perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to pick up a few in the supermarket, distribute them around her handbag collection. ‘And as for the rest of the list, well – I’m a free woman. I can do whatever, or whoever, takes my fancy. I have this awful feeling I’m going to end up like a car that spends all its time in the garage. The least I can do is rev it up now and then and take it out for a quick run, make sure the engine still ticks over.’
‘And to hell with the consequences.’
‘There wouldn’t be any consequences.’
‘There’s always bloody consequences.’
Cherry had been bitter and bereft for too long, Melanie considered, as she poured more coffee. What was it now, six years since Nathan, her partner of fifteen years, had gone to visit his brother in Australia – ‘Just a couple of weeks, Chezzie, I’ll be right back,’ – had met an irresistible stewardess on the plane and married her in Hong Kong a month later. Cherry had wept and wailed tumultuously for over a year, giving herself up completely to sorrow, betrayal and anguish. Melanie and Sarah and many others had worried about her, concerned that she was turning her grief into her life’s work. She couldn’t have felt worse if Nathan had died, in fact she once told Mel after too much gin that she’d feel better if he had: ‘At least that way I wouldn’t feel so rejected.’ After a hefty legacy from her grandmother, she’d given up her job as a legal adviser and devoted herself to the solitary life of a slightly tragic widow, all kitted out with a pair of Siamese cats, life membership of the National Trust and Friend status at the Royal Academy, the Tate Gallery and the Royal Horticultural Society. She filled the hours that might have potential for loneliness with painting meticulous, highly detailed studies of small wild animals, every claw and whisker in disconcertingly perfect place. They sold well as greetings cards and she was starting to get illustration commissions. Cherry obviously now thought of Mel as being in the same boat as herself – or at least alone on a raft that made up life’s flotilla of solitary souls. It wasn’t like that at all. Mel was delighted to be alone; she’d chosen it. She was happy that she and Roger no longer had to play along with the roles allotted them in their long-ago wedding ceremony. Leonora could do all that stuff now. See if she liked being expected to function as a walking Filofax.
The doorbell rang again, breaking an edgy silence. ‘Oooh, my horny-handed man of the soil at last!’ Mel leapt up and raced to the door. She didn’t want to glance back and see Cherry making that familiar pinched face. It was enough that she could see it in her head as she went down the hallway: the glum, disapproving look, the determination never ever to consider as an option, not even just slightly, anything to do with sex, love or involvement with a man ever again. Mel wasn’t exactly looking for any of that either, but she wasn’t going to barricade herself emotionally against every thrilling possibility of dalliance. How depressing would it be, she thought, to shut up one’s personal sex shop permanently, to deny yourself the possibility of any kind of closeness to another human being ever again, just in case it all went so horribly wrong?
Roger didn’t like this much heat. When he stepped out of his fan-cooled hotel room into the blistering sun he felt immediately drained and exhausted. He held his wrist as he walked, checking his pulse, feeling that it must be rising closer to danger levels with every step he took. He could almost hold the steamy air in his hand, and drops of moisture trickled between his shoulder blades, seeped round the waistband of his shorts and behind his knees. He wondered, as he walked slowly towards the dining terrace for breakfast, how it was that everyone else looked as if they could function perfectly normally. The hotel specialized in luxury spa treatments and fitness programmes – some body-perfect fanatics were even getting up at dawn for God-awful sessions of what was unappealingly (and not jokingly) listed as Boot Camp in the exercise programme. How anyone could do press-ups, aerobics and a five-mile run to the town and back before breakfast was completely beyond him.
Leonora seemed to be blissfully content. She’d stopped feeling sick but hadn’t yet got to that cumbersome stage in pregnancy where women start to have miserable sessions of staring into the wardrobe, flicking the clothes up and down the rails, searching for something that fits. He’d named that the Expensive Stage – Melanie had hit the shops with the fervour of a desperate raider when she’d been expecting Rosa. And then after the birth she’d said she never wanted to see the clothes again – so it was a whole new set for the next pregnancy. He could understand that she hadn’t wanted to see those ever again, not after what happened. He’d taken them all to the nearest Oxfam shop in a couple of bin bags, handed them over to the gentle custody of a grateful volunteer. Mel had cried, told him he should have taken them further afield, afraid she’d have to face the poignant sight of her redundant clothes hanging in the shop’s window or drooping pathetically on the putty-skinned old-fashioned shop dummy with the stiffly posed fingers, reminding her that it had all been for nothing. The possibility of something as awful as the death of a baby happening again was something he and Leonora hadn’t discussed. She didn’t have a lot of curiosity and simply hadn’t mentioned it. He put that down to her being still young enough to be almost totally self-absorbed. And things went right for the young, didn’t they? They didn’t go round looking for life’s disasters – if they did they’d be born with zero ambition and terminal timidity.
In the comparative cool of the dining terrace Roger helped himself to mango, pawpaw and pineapple from the buffet. He was hungry now and quite fancied a proper cooked breakfast – he could smell crisp bacon, toast, hash browns. He would be sixty-five when his new child was fifteen: ‘An old pensioner – if you live that long!’ Leonora thought it amusing to remind him, whenever he fancied something dangerously cholesterol-filled. She seemed to think it was a huge joke. But it wasn’t funny at all, not when you really, really wanted a couple of fried eggs, sausages, tomatoes and a big helping of potatoes sautéed with onions.
‘Are you there? I’m eighty-one!’
‘Jesus H., what’s that?’ Max wheeled round at the sound of Mrs Jenkins from her side of the fence. The orange poodle yapped a more hostile greeting. Melanie wouldn’t have fancied Max’s chances if it chose that moment to wriggle under the fence and go for his leg. It amazed her that this tall, gangly, wild-haired (weren’t bleached blond dreadlocks a tad unexpected on white blokes past forty?) man, with a quiet, rather intellectual demeanour more suited to a speciality book dealer, should be perfectly capable of serious ground-clearing, heavy duty earth-shovelling and the installation of concrete posts where necessary. Beneath his ancient soil-encrusted guernsey (and it was darned! Who darns, these days? Did he live with his aged mum?) he must have muscles like Geoff Capes.
‘That’s my neighbour, Mrs Jenkins,’ Melanie explained, turning to seek what the lilac curls bobbing about just beyond the fence needed. ‘Are you all right?’ she called.
‘There’s a man in your garden, dear.’ Mrs Jenkins was glaring through the tangled roses at Max.
‘Yes, it’s all right – he’s here to look at the garden, see what needs to be done.’
‘You should let me have a word then. You were never any good with plants. You can’t go wrong with delphiniums.’
Melanie rather thought she could – she’d bought any number of them over the years and every single one had gone to fatten the slugs and snails in gardens for miles around. She was convinced they made special journeys, tipped off by garden-centre slug-spies
that she’d just parted with another sixty pointless quids’ worth of fresh leaf-stock for them to munch. Perfect Patty, only four houses away, had an entire bedful of delphiniums, immaculate flower-spikes pointing obediently heavenwards.
‘I tell you what, I’ll pop in and see you later,’ Mel told Mrs Jenkins. ‘Tell you what Max and I have decided,’ she said, disentangling herself from what could become a decidedly cross-purpose conversation.
Max consulted the drawing on his pad. ‘If you think you could run to a couple of pretty decent-sized Washingtonias over there,’ he pointed to the corner by the back gate, ‘plus a clump of those classic Cornish palms, the Cordyline australis, fast-growing and not too pricey, and some of the biggest phormiums, that should soon screen the garden off from the alleyway and the backs of those garages in the next road.’
‘What about the manky cherry tree by the back gate? It’s been unhappy for years but don’t you have to get permission to cut it down?’
‘It’s a fruit tree, so it’s no problem. And those young sycamores can go, they’re just weeds.’
‘Right. So what’s staying?’
Max looked at her over his reading glasses. The look was an amused one, as if all this time there’d been some major, important point that she’d been missing. ‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing? Not the roses, not the clematis or the horrible lavatera?’ This was bold stuff. Her father would have heart failure.
‘Absolutely nothing,’ Max insisted. ‘Your garden is having a completely fresh start.’
* * *
Melanie sent Tina Keen up a ladder in a dusty attic room above a coffee shop from where she peered out of the window between the slats of a chrome Venetian blind. Melanie stopped typing and thought about how much the scent of cappuccino would take the edge off her detective’s concentration. She could have let her have a coffee and a sandwich sent up from downstairs – but then someone on the staff would have had to know she was there, and that someone might just be the killer. Perhaps she could have brought a flask in with her, before the evening shift in the café had started. But Tina wasn’t the flask type, not unless it was of the hip variety and filled with five-star brandy against an evening stake-out chill.