‘OK. Here’s where we start. The furniture is depressing. I will contact your landlord and arrange to have it moved or disposed of, there’s probably an empty room or an attic or something. We’ll draw up a list of the minimum you need and I will get it, in consultation with you. My clients don’t usually have the time to come with me. We work to a budget. Everything will be new, clean, safe for Finn. We’ll get a box of toys for him to keep here, and in consultation with Caroline, something so he can stay over. A pull-out bed that would fit under yours might be best, but something with an air of permanence, nothing makeshift.
‘You will have to paint. White or cream would be fine. I often suggest a sunny yellow, but you don’t strike me as a very sunny yellow person.’
Al grinned in what he hoped was a cute and appealing way.
‘These are just the physical things, the surroundings, the backdrop. If we get these things right, the rest may follow. But you have to start using a diary, for all of your work, gigs, and particularly for Finn. Don’t agree to anything unless you’ve checked it. Write everything down. Insist that Caroline tells you when any school or pre-school or doctor’s appointments or whatever for Finn are. Then go to them. Go instead of her if she’s busy. You have to act like you are responsible. Equal parenting, all that sort of thing.’
‘I am responsible,’ he said. This was getting quite offensive. He wondered if she would keep the pace up like this for ever, if this was a ‘first visit to a client’ persona, or if she was always like this. If she was then he might have made a mistake.
Flora smoothed the golden tendrils away from her forehead. It was quite hot and stuffy in the room. She wondered if the window was painted shut, something else she would fix. She slipped off her jacket which was denim, lined with a Liberty print, and reluctantly hung it on the back of the chair. She got out her notebook, and Al caught a whiff of her alluring clean citrusy scent. How could anyone smell so clean? It filled him with longing.
‘There’s a pub down the road,’ Al said. ‘We could adjourn there.’
‘Fine. I parked just down the road from it,’ said Flora. She really had had enough of his place.
Flora found it astonishing that people were in the pub on a weekday afternoon. Why on earth weren’t they all at work? What could they possibly be doing? Perhaps, she surmised, she had stumbled into the shooting of a government ad for benefit fraud snitching.
‘What can I get you, Al?’ she said.
‘No, let me.’
‘Really, I insist. You are the client.’
‘Oh cheers. Pint of Stella.’
‘Pint of Stella and a sparkling water,’ she said to the barman. ‘Bit early in the day for me …’ she told Al. ‘And of course, I am driving.’ Al was utterly condemned.
They agreed the plan and an initial number of hours. Flora was to call in a few days later with some catalogues so that he could OK the replacement furniture. Al didn’t actually give a damn what it looked like, it was, after all, just somewhere to get his head down, but he thought he wanted to see her again soon, even though he suspected that he was about to waste a lot of money. He said goodbye to Flora outside the pub, and then pretended to go into his block. He stood just inside the front door for a few minutes, until he was sure she would be safely gone. Then he went back to the pub. Drinking just one pint in the afternoon was so unsatisfying, so pointless. He might as well carry on now, the evening was only a few hours away. He sat and thought about Flora. She had looked gorgeous. It was defintely worth a try. He wouldn’t let on to Frank yet. What a tangled web, eh, he thought, as he drained his glass.
Flora had twenty-three minutes before her next appointment and a drive that would be fifteen minutes, at most. She sat in the car and looked over her planner for the next week. Then she made sure that her make-up was still perfect. There was a tiny smudge of mascara under her left eye that had to be dealt with. So it was that she saw Al in her rear-view mirror heading purposefully back into the pub. She wondered if his drinking was an issue that he would like her to help him tackle. It wasn’t one that she had helped a client with before, or would ever want to. She thought of her father. How not to lead a life.
Flora thought it possible that Al had ulterior motives in hiring her. There was no way that she would get involved with him on anything but a professional basis. Profession, profession Al, she wondered if people made weak jokes about it to him.
If she could make things better for him though, be a means to restoring his relationship with his son, help him get his life back on track, then she would be pleased. She applied some of her favourite rosewater hand lotion. Her hands needed a lot more maintenance now, and she had noticed that they seemed to have taken on a permanent smell of lemon Cif. Her next client wanted help with organising a surprise fiftieth birthday party for her husband, as well as wardrobe and storage solutions. It was potentially a big job and Flora didn’t want to smell like the cleaning lady. That night she would get on with her favourite part of any job, the making of an Ikea list for Al. She would not allow him to come with her.
As she drove off along Lodge Road and then got stuck at every set of lights in Portswood she was struck by the number of teenaged girls who were wearing kerchiefs and brown crimplene trousers or A-line skirts. She remembered Aunt Is saying, ‘I was brought up to believe that people with large bottoms (and I include myself in that) shouldn’t wear tight trousers.’
Judging by the kerchiefs, there must have been a huge influx of Plymouth Brethren into the area. Strange that they were all going in and out of New Look and Select. Some of them were smoking, others pushing buggies and talking on their mobiles. It was jolly odd. They were more usually spotted choosing dress patterns in John Lewis or fabrics in the Laura Ashley sale. Then she noticed that some of them had ill-advisedly exposed their midriffs or were wearing very short skirts. She realised that these were not Plymouth Brethren at all, but young people. To have become so illiterate when it came to fashion must mean that she was now the wrong side of frumpy, and was accelerating away from the junction towards middle age.
Frank didn’t believe in Valentine’s Day which meant that Posy would not get a Valentine unless she persuaded the children to make her one. She knew that Frank’s feelings came from having grown up in a card shop. He had once explained to her that he preferred to make spontaneous romantic gestures throughout the year, not limit them to the day of the capitalist lurve fest. He hadn’t noticed that he had now ceased to make any spontaneous romantic gestures. Posy thought that just a card might have been nice, just so that she could hold her head up at Toddlers if anyone asked. She remembered what it had been like at school.
‘How many did you get?’
‘Oh just the three … sackfuls!’ was the standard reply. Plus ça change. She wondered how many Flora had got. She usually had some mystery ones from besotted clients, people who might or might not realise that Flora was in a league of her own.
When Flora had been seventeen, and Posy sixteen, they’d had Saturday jobs at Laura Ashley. This was back in the olden days, the age of Lady Di, when jumpers with sheep on and stripy blouses with the collars turned up, and short strings of pearls were desirable. The uniform at their sixth-form college had consisted of a brightly coloured Benetton jumper, and a cardigan, also Benetton, knotted around the shoulders in a scarfy, shawl-like arrangement. This was quite useful as the college was always freezing. Flora’s wages went mostly on clothes. Posy’s clothes were a bit more gothic, Oxfam chic, but even she sometimes wore her Laura Ashley uniform allowance clothes to college, and made use of the staff discount. Nearly twenty years later there were still plenty of flowery skirts lurking in her wardrobe. It had been a Saturday job to warp the tastes (sometimes the girls would find themselves thinking that a lacy sailor-collared blouse was rather nice), but it had given them an invaluable skill - measuring up for curtains. (Height times number of drops plus pattern repeats and seam allowances for each drop.) They could estimate the amount of fabric for ki
dney-shaped dressing table covers, pelmets and valances, Roman blinds, Austrian blinds with and without flounces, and round tablecloths too. The dithering customers that they sent away with neat little diagrams of what to measure, and plenty of fabric swatches to choose from, always returned.
Flora was clearly management material. The manageress, whose breath smelt of Liebfraumilch, tried to persuade her to stay on full-time after her A levels; but Flora had other plans. When Flora closed her eyes, she pictured herself alone on a bicycle spinning down some pretty tree-lined street in Oxford or Cambridge or Durham or Exeter. Flora alone, a long way from home in a place without crisis or melodrama. She would rise on wings like eagle’s, make good use of her Young Person’s Railcard, and they wouldn’t see her for dust. Posy and Mum could visit her if they liked, but she would find some sort of part-time job, perhaps assisting a kindly professor with her research. This job would preclude returning home except for the very shortest of breaks.
Posy was not management material. Sometimes she had an attitude problem. She found the afternoons so long, or the sale days so tiring that she found herself giving the customers alternative names for the designs.
‘Oh yes, “St Vitus’ Dance” in rose will be perfect for a spare bedroom’ or ‘I’m afraid that the alopecia colourway is going to be discontinued after the sale, but if you buy all that you need now you should be all right’, or ‘That pigeon and peach border tile is also available in the porridge’. The customers never said anything - Posy looked the very essence of a Laura Ashley girl - but they studied their catalogues when they got home. They must have misheard her.
Rufflette tape and curtain-lining estimation had become second nature to them. They would pass the time by calculating how many rolls of wallpaper it would take to do the room they were in, or how many metres of fabric they would need for curtains or blinds, or, say all of the walls were windows, how much would that take? They need never be bored again. A dull evening at the theatre could be spent doing the mental measurements for new curtains for the stage, and was the safety curtain really just a giant roller blind? How much fabric would that take? Would the flame-retardant coating be the same stuff that came in cans with the Laura Ashley kits? They knew the names of all the company’s fabrics and wallpapers and which way up the co-ordinating boarders were meant to go. Kate, Mr Jones, Shirt Stripe, Emma, Bloomsbury, Cirque - they could still recognise them all at five hundred paces.
‘We’ll be in adjacent chairs in the nursing home, muttering with Alzheimer’s, “Rosy Swag in primrose”, “Hey Diddle Diddle border with co-ordinating bed linen and lampshade” …’ said Posy.
‘“Bring us the crackle glaze lamp base and the eglantine coolie shade” …’ said Flora.
‘ “Cushion pads, no more cushion pads. Cushion pads are extra!” we’ll whisper as they stand ready with a pillow to hold over our mouths,’ Posy added, making Flora snort. But they both stopped laughing abruptly, remembering their mother’s last weeks and days, and the search for the right home or hospice. The name of one of them in South London had always stuck in Posy’s mind, ‘The Home for Incurables’. The building looked beautiful. She had come to think of it as ‘The Home for Incurable Romantics’. That was where she should end up.
March
Melody had a phase where sometimes she wanted to talk to Frank several times a day. (This was very tricky, he had to sprint for the phone, try to leap subtly across rooms to get there first.) Then for a while she couldn’t be bothered to talk to him, and if he phoned her, Anita or Mark told him that she was either too busy or too tired to talk. So he gave up phoning for a while.
Frank could hardly bring himself to speak to Posy or Al or anybody. This went on for weeks. He knew that he was behaving badly, that he was a hopeless, useless husband and a failure as a dad. All daddy jolliness was lost. He knew that he should call Melody again, find out if she was OK, but he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Better to do nothing, to let things ride. Meanwhile his self-loathing became like an extra member of the family, some hateful Old Man of the Sea who had moved into the spare room, came silently to mealtimes, sulked at family gatherings, who had to stay in bed late and be taken things on a tray. The Man was someone with bad legs who had to be waited on, who left piles of dirty Kleenex Mansize balled-up around his chair, who was tiptoed around, but must be invited to everything, and whose fussy appetites had to be satisfied. Frank knew all this, but there seemed to be nothing he could do about it.
His whole life now was like something foisted on him. It was a mangy old black Labrador with one eye whited out.
‘Promise me you’ll look after Mutty,’ The Old Man of the Sea had said, clawing and grabbing at Frank’s wrist.
‘Of course, of course,’ Frank had replied. He’d promised and now he was stuck.
Mutty had been MOTed at the vet’s, his coat deburred, inoculations brought up to date, injections given for arthritis. The vet said that all being well, Mutty was good for many more years yet.
Mutty came with a dog bag. He liked to lurk in it after walks. It was meant to dry his coat, but only served to mat his fur and seal in the mud and river water. If anyone tried to take it out of his sight he howled and howled. One day it was seized and put in the washing machine. It clogged the filters and caused a flood. Mutty whined and whimpered throughout the proceedings and snarled during the mopping up. The dog bag didn’t come out any cleaner.
Ah, Frank thought, the black dog.
If he wasn’t playing his bass then all he ever seemed to do was look after the children or get quietly drunk or stoned on his own. The only thing he and Posy did together was eat their dinner in front of the TV. They couldn’t even be bothered to sit at the table now. There was never anything they wanted to watch, but still they felt compelled to have it on.
Posy liked Gardener’s World, and Frank liked Rachel de Thame; but it always seemed to be Alan Titchmarsh. Here he was now making an Alpine Garden in a series of square planters made from black planks. Frank couldn’t fathom why Posy was finding it so interesting, just those planks and the gravel would be beyond the Parousellis’ means, let alone any silly little plants.
‘Pull back some of the surface gravel…’ Alan Titchmarsh told them. ‘They need topping up. Use a mixture of John Innes Number One and some sharp grit.’
‘Ah. Sharp grit,’ Frank said, finishing off his second vegeburger, putting a handful of crinkle-cut oven chips into another Somerfield sesame seed bun. ‘Sharp grit. That’s what I need. Sharp grit. You don’t hear about that much nowadays, do you? Sharp grit.’ He took a slurp of red wine, put a noisy squirt of American mustard on to the chips. ‘Don’t hear about it at all really, do you?’
‘It’s all pea shingle now, isn’t it,’ said Posy. ‘Maybe B & Q would have some.’
Frank was really too full for this final bap, but he struggled through it. Ah, they were back to Rachel de Thame; he exhaled expansively and forgot about the grit.
A show with Will Self kept them sat there for another hour, apologising to each other for laughing out loud at the TV. So why didn’t I get Will Self’s life, Frank wondered. I’m tall enough, aren’t I?
April
April 2nd was Frank’s birthday. He couldn’t believe what an escape he’d had. Thank goodness his mother had laboured for those extra few hours. He had been born at 3 a.m. Only just not an April Fool. He often wondered if he was really an April Fool, and they had falsified the documentation out of kindness. An April Fool growing up in a card shop. It would have been just his luck to have that as a birthday. But it pleased him to be near one of the few festival-type things that didn’t have any associated greetings card.
Frank tried to insist on his birthday being a low-key event. No cards by request. But the children still made him some, and he got them from his family, and Posy, and something at once tasteful, ironic and amusing from Flora. The Wild Years never sent birthday cards. All they would do was raise an extra glass, and that suited Frank just fine. His prese
nts were the usual things, T-shirts, pants and socks from Posy and the children, the sort of things that she thought he needed and that he would never buy himself, her twice yearly attempt to smarten him up.
Melody sent him a card. He hadn’t known that she knew when his birthday was. He had no idea when hers was. He had doubtless missed it and offended her at some point, or else he soon would. Nobody was paying much attention to him opening his cards. Posy deemed it necessary to buy the children each a little present on his birthday and they were all too interested in those. He felt quite sick. He quickly put the card in the pile with the others. He made no comment. Posy didn’t even notice. Perhaps, he thought, he should break with tradition and arrange the cards on top of the piano himself, but that might be more suspicious. The smart thing to do would be to abandon them all in a heap on the bed as usual.
They didn’t do much in the day. He had a couple of pupils. There were thundery showers. It was what Mrs Parouselli senior would have called ‘a monkey’s wedding’, and Mrs Parouselli junior was now calling ‘a gorilla’s birthday’: rain and sunshine at the same time. Frank went to get the children from school. A double rainbow was pinned out in front of him, making him feel absurdly happy as he approached the playground. He couldn’t help singing.
‘ “You won’t be seeing rainbows anymore”,’ he told Karim’s grandfather who held the school gate open for him.
‘ “You’ll see lonely sunsets, after all”,’ he told Mrs Fleance as she marshalled the children who were going to the after-school club. He did a capering little dance when Poppy and James came out. Poppy ran into his arms, and bashed him on the legs with her Barbie lunch bag.
‘ “It’s over, it’s over, it’s over … It’s over”,’ he told them.
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