by Judy Astley
Miriam’s garden path was a hazardous tangle of overgrown lavender, trailing nasturtiums and morning glory that had spilled down from its trellis and was snaking across the paving. Typical Miriam, Anna thought as she gently pushed the foliage aside with her foot. Miriam was exuberant, colourful of dress and uncoordinated of movement. If a garden could mirror the person, this had got it just right.
‘Come in!’ Miriam opened the door before Anna reached it and ushered her in, waving a full wine glass rather dangerously. Her hand hit the wall as she moved, but she salvaged the glass’s contents with long-practised skill. ‘Everyone’s here but some haven’t read the book. It’s not much to ask, is it?’ she said as she took Anna into the kitchen to get her a drink. ‘After all, the clue’s in the name: Book Group. It involves a group. And a book. You’ve read it, of course?’
Anna had. The person who last got to choose what they read had opted for Tess of the D’Urbervilles so Anna, who had last read it as a teenager but had recently seen the film, wasn’t completely lying when she said yes.
Women of a Certain Age, rereading the classics they hadn’t gone near since their schooldays, Anna thought as she took her glass into Miriam’s sitting room. It was like something from a Barbara Pym novel; all they lacked was a shy archdeacon to simper at. There they all were, eight or nine still-energetic lady pensioners doing their best to keep their brains active. Anna had a bit of a heart-sink moment. Was this what it came to, in the end? Finding things to do to keep you away from a couple of decades of daytime TV and a lonely decline? Mike had his music and she had her painting but even so … She told herself not to be so ridiculous. People of all ages met to discuss books. It was a thing and, besides, she enjoyed it. And yet, just as Miriam opened the discussion with a question about whether Hardy, if writing today, would come under the genre of domestic noir, Anna had a wistful recollection of the afternoons she’d spent in bed with Alec the previous year. Twenty years younger than her and so exciting to be with at the time – at least until she’d had to spend that Christmas week in Cove Manor with him and he’d turned out to be a bit mopey and wet. (Although, as it turned out, not so wet that he hadn’t managed to spend the nights secretly shagging Charlotte.) She’d never thought of herself as a woman who was brave or wild enough for an affair but it had been such fun, and, in the end, essentially pretty harmless, as Mike had been up to the same at the time with Charlotte.
‘You can hardly put Hardy in any “domestic” category, surely?’ Miriam said, waving her hand about. The hand contained a scone and crumbs and a blob of strawberry jam fell on the rug. A black cat rushed across and licked it all up and Miriam took no notice at all.
‘Well – it depends. I mean—’ Anna began but the doorbell rang and Miriam whirled off to open it.
‘Hello, Mum. You said it would be OK – I’m not intruding, am I?’ And there, in the doorway, stood Alec. Hair longer, a bit greyer, possibly a little less of it. He was wearing a cream linen jacket and old jeans and looking, well, probably what Thea would call ‘totes buff’. Anna could feel her face going pink. ‘Hi, everyone,’ he said, ‘I hope you don’t mind me joining in but Tess is one of my favourite books. Mum said I could come if I promise to behave.’ There were a few giggles and a general murmuring of approval. Then he crossed the room and sat beside Anna on the fuchsia velvet sofa. ‘Hello, Anna. You’re looking well. It’s been a while.’
SEVEN
‘So how was day one back at the chalk face? Survived?’ Sean called Thea just as she was beginning to water the big pots of Japanese anemones in the back garden. They were flagging in the heat and deserved a long cool drink, as did she, and she’d brought out a glass of ginger beer to have on the terrace once the watering was done.
‘It was fine, just. Two who wouldn’t stop wailing – they kept setting each other off. But there was only one pair of damp knickers, which is pretty good for day one.’
‘Were they yours?’
‘No!’
‘Oh. I’m disappointed. Does that mean you weren’t thinking of me at all?’
Thea giggled. ‘You are so naughty! And of course I was thinking of you but I’m not going to tell you that. It’ll go to your head.’
‘Or to my … No, sorry. I just can’t help it. I’m missing you like crazy here. I have to keep getting in the sea. Woody is looking well fed up with me running down the beach the whole time. He’s bored with following me down there and stands on the top of the dune, miaowing crossly.’
‘Aw, sweet. I miss him. You too, of course, but definitely him more.’
‘Heartless woman. I’ll be up at the weekend to remind you what you should be missing most. But anyway, how is Emily and the sprog? Have you seen them yet?’
‘Not yet. She wants a few days of settling, she said, but on Friday night she and Sam have invited us all there for a takeout supper and some baby-gazing. Will you be here by then? And if you are, could you bear to come too?’
‘Of course. Can’t miss an opportunity to show your folks what good husband material I’ll be, can I?’
‘Brilliant. Just don’t go mentioning things like damp knickers though, OK?’
‘Oh go on, just once or twice? Please?’
Before Thea could answer, she heard a click and the side gate opening. She was sure it had been locked that morning when she’d left for work but maybe she’d forgotten. She looked round quickly, suddenly nervous that she’d be face to face with an on-the-off-chance burglar but instead a dog came racing towards her. A big apricot poodle. Benji. He woofed a delighted greeting at her and she reached out to pat him. He leaned against her, thrilled to see her, his big woolly head lolling and his tongue hanging out.
‘What was that? Did I hear something?’ Sean asked as Thea looked beyond Benji. He wouldn’t have arrived alone.
‘Oh, er … nothing. A dog just got into the garden. I’d better go and shoo it out,’ she said. ‘Shall I call you back later?’
‘Yes, do. Love you, Thea. Can’t wait for the weekend.’
Rich came through the side gate and was in the garden as if he had every right to waltz in as he pleased, a year after he’d moved out.
‘Love you too, madly, deeply and always,’ she said to Sean, slightly more loudly than she normally would. Whatever Rich wanted from her, he definitely wasn’t going to be left with the impression that she hadn’t moved on.
‘Hello, Thea.’ Having breezed in through the gate as if he still lived there, Rich now waited by the kitchen door.
‘Did I miss hearing the doorbell?’ she asked him. ‘I was watering the plants.’
‘Er … no, actually. I didn’t ring. It just seemed natural to come in this way, like I always used to.’
Thea didn’t say anything, neither did she smile, nor did she move towards him.
‘Sorry. Another time I’ll remember to ring the bell,’ he said, getting the gist of her body language.
‘And I must remember to keep the gate locked,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, what are you doing here? I don’t think you left anything behind when you moved out.’
‘No … er, I was in the area and just wondered how you are?’ He looked awkward and Thea had to admit she was rather enjoying the situation. This was, after all, the man who broke her heart but could no longer get to her. The man who had said that her miscarriage had been ‘just as well’, because he didn’t want children. What a difference a year made – and whatever had she seen in him?
‘You wondered how I am? I’ve still got the same phone number, Rich, same email address. You could have phoned, emailed. Why turn up out of the blue?’ Benji was running around the garden, scrabbling at any bare patches of earth he could find, just as he always used to when he lived here. If he dug around a bit he’d probably find old toys of his that he’d buried, and possibly even her pink espadrille that he’d stolen from under the bed.
‘We were together a long time,’ he said. ‘I’m allowed to remember we had some good times, aren’t I? I always hoped we co
uld end up as friends.’ He smiled and added, ‘Your hair is pretty drastic, isn’t it? What made you cut it?’
Thea put a hand up to it, feeling as if it needed protecting from him.
‘I like it short. It’s more fun.’
‘It suits you. I like it too. It’s just so … different. I don’t suppose you fancy a swift one? For the old times?’
‘What? Are you mad?’ Thea backed away.
‘I meant a drink. At the pub. Early-evening glass of vino, like we used to,’ he said, pushing his fingers through his hair, smoothing it back. She’d never noticed before what a girly gesture that was. Or maybe it was a typically male one – checking for a receding hairline, possibly.
‘Oh, I see. Right.’
He laughed. ‘You surely didn’t think I meant—’
‘No, I didn’t; don’t be ridiculous.’ Of course she had thought he meant sex but only for a millisecond. She also knew he’d been deliberately ambiguous, which would be his idea of being funny, perhaps testing her. But even Rich, whose instinct for tact and diplomacy was pretty much absent, wouldn’t seriously suggest a bout of sex after so long without even a conversation. He looked hot and bothered. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a shiny silver tie and an air of someone who’d spent the day doing things that involved tedious meetings and getting overheated in the London dust. She thought of Sean, who existed pretty much entirely in T-shirts and flip-flops, his longish curly hair windblown and sun-bleached at the ends. She was pretty sure he didn’t own a tie apart from a black one for emergency funeral use.
Thea was about to tell Rich it was an absolute ‘no’ but Benji came running up and nuzzled her hand. It was definitely good to see this lovely dog again. So many times they’d walked the few hundred yards to the pub with him on his lead, pulling them in through the bar-room door as if he knew the drill exactly. He’d liked the pub; Benji was the sort of dog that drew complete strangers to come up and talk and he loved attention. Rich had always been a bit short with those who did this but Thea had enjoyed it. What was there not to like about anyone who approached to express admiration for such a gorgeous dog?
‘Well … OK, maybe just for half an hour,’ she agreed, giving in to what she had to admit was overwhelming curiosity about why Rich had turned up. ‘Hang on there for a minute and I’ll get my bag and keys.’
He may have lived here once, shared her bed and her home, she thought as she locked the back door after her a few minutes later, but she really didn’t want him inside the house now, somehow sullying the air that Sean would be breathing at the weekend. No – he was out of her life, and he could stay out of her house.
‘So who is he?’ Rich asked once they were settled in the riverside garden of the Old Swan with glasses of wine.
‘Who is who?’ Thea asked.
‘The person you were telling you loved down the phone.’
‘How do you know it’s a “he”?’ she teased.
‘Ah – well, if you’ve joined the other team that would go with the short hair, I suppose.’
‘Working the old stereotype then, Rich. You’ll have noticed I’m wearing sensible shoes too.’
‘But not dungarees.’ He was looking her up and down, appraising her dress, her body. It felt a bit uncomfortable.
‘Anyway, it’s nobody you’d know,’ she told him. This evasive tone was a mistake and she felt like a sulky schoolgirl. But she didn’t want to tell him about her new life with Sean. Rich was firmly on the outside of everything she did now.
Rich chuckled. ‘OK, as you like. Good to see you’ve moved on though.’
‘Are you surprised? Did you think I’d pine for the rest of my life?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I suppose not. I just know … and I’m sorry … but I realized at the time that getting married, living with someone as a couple on a for-ever-and-ever basis, children and all that … just wasn’t for me.’
She relented a little, as he actually looked quite regretful about it. ‘Well, I’m glad you decided before we got married rather than after. Simply packing and walking out like you did was at least pretty uncomplicated. How is your sister, by the way?’
‘Oh, you know Elizabeth …’
‘I don’t really, though, do I? She never wanted to be close enough for us to get to know each other. I don’t think we ever had a conversation in which she didn’t tell me I wasn’t good enough for you.’
He frowned. ‘Well, your family are pretty much a closed shop too, I seem to remember.’
Thea thought about the spring just past: of Sean teaching Elmo how to fish in the sea down in Cornwall; of him coming up to London and helping Mike shore up the tumbledown back wall of his painting shed; and of him and her mother laughing crazily together over a whole evening of old Yes Minister repeats they’d found when flipping through TV channels. Not so closed shop. Not at all.
‘So what are you doing down in London?’ she asked. She took a large glug of wine, eager to get home. It was getting chilly now and she was starting to feel hungry.
‘Er … just a bit of work stuff. Meetings and so on.’
‘And you took the dog with you?’ She watched Benji paddling in the river’s shallows, eyeing the ducks, which kept safely out of reach.
‘Oh, there’s always a willing girl on reception who’ll mind him for the duration.’
I’ll bet there is, she thought. Good old Rich, putting on the suave charm. She could imagine him, all big toothy smile, handing the lead over and saying, ‘Would you mind? I’ll only be half an hour.’ He might even call her ‘sweetie’, gambling on her being the sort who’d smirk at this and not glower and want to clout him. And it would all be a done deal before the girl could even think of protesting that she was scared of dogs or allergic to fur or simply had too much to do.
‘Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave him with your sister?’
He frowned. ‘Not really. I don’t actually live up in Cheshire any more, you see. It didn’t work out. So that’s what I was doing in London – I went for a new job and I’m moving back down this way. I’m bunking down in a mate’s flat over in Kingston till I find a permanent place to rent.’ He smiled at her and raised his glass in a mock-toast. ‘So you see, we’re practically neighbours.’
‘That Belinda from the agency phoned,’ Mike said to Anna over supper. ‘She’s got some people who want to see the house – or “effect a viewing”, as she put it, if that’s OK with us. What do you think?’
Anna thought for a moment. It had jolted her a bit, that afternoon at Miriam’s. She’d seen the future and wasn’t sure she liked it. The gentle pursuits of the retired lay in wait, looking far too much like the horribly patronizing ad for insurance for the ‘elderly’ she’d seen on TV. It had featured a smiling grey-haired man in a yellow V-neck jumper, saying that ‘the missus loves pottering in the garden with the grandkids’. Pottering. Would life really come down to ‘pottering’? It wasn’t that she’d even been tempted to think of rekindling the old affair with Alec but seeing him had left a wistfulness, a feeling that such excitements were unlikely to be available to her in the future. After all, the queue of men hoping to woo women in their sixties was a very short one. She could see herself with a wallet full of cards that would tell anyone who went through them after she’d been run over by a bus that she was a Friend of every worthy art gallery. There’d be discounted pension afternoons at the local theatre. Books. Poetry readings. Her painting. None of these were unappealing in themselves, not at all, but so far in her life she’d preferred to be doing rather than viewing. And she definitely didn’t potter.
‘Mike, would you ever consider going on one of those European river cruises?’
He laughed. ‘What, the ones that are advertised during old episodes of Morse? No, I don’t think I would. My idea of hell, actually, though I’ll admit the scenery looks great. And, besides, we’re not old enough.’
‘The thing is, we are.’
‘We can’t be. We’re the genera
tion that saw the Stones in Hyde Park the first time round and you could sit in a tree and watch for nothing. We went to the first-ever Glastonbury. Hell, I played at the first-ever Glastonbury. Our lot don’t do old.’
‘It creeps up,’ Anna said. ‘Those godawful ads for funeral-insurance plans and tooth fixative, they’re about us.’
‘But we’ve still got our own teeth.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
‘I’m not paying for my own fucking funeral while I’m still alive. I can think of better uses for a couple of grand.’
‘Can you? What?’
Mike thought for a moment. ‘Whatever it is, it won’t be a river cruise. Or any cruise. I wouldn’t mind a trip to New Orleans. And I’d love to go to Nashville and buy a Dobro.’
‘A what?’
‘Steel guitar, like the one on the front of that Dire Straits CD. As played by Ry Cooder and others – you know that rich, twangy sound. I’ve been wanting one of those for bloody years.’
‘You see, we can do that, Mike. Once the house is sold we can do anything. We can put everything in storage and just travel. There’s no need to settle to living in one place immediately, is there? We can even rent if we want to.’ Anna was starting to feel excited at the prospect of being rootless. Ageing, gracefully or otherwise, in the same suburban area, the same house, they’d occupied since they’d met all those years ago, was not compulsory. Well, the ageing bit was but not the staying put. It was an exhilarating feeling.
Mike poured them both some more wine. ‘Are we going to be wanderers? At least for a while? It sounds fun. Studenty, young.’
‘Yes. After all, wherever we are, we won’t be more than a plane-ride away from the family if they need us.’
‘Or if we need them.’
‘And they’ve got each other. And Thea’s got Sean now, so she’s not on her own any more, not that she wasn’t perfectly capable when she was, but it’s great to see her so happy.’