by Jenny Harper
Chapter Twenty-two
If Violet had lived she’d be five years old. Five and a half. She’d be a pupil at Summerfield Primary School, one of the little girls skipping through his maze or holding hands with some new best friend on his friendship path.
There were times, working at the garden, that Ibsen found these thoughts almost too much to bear. Still, at least he didn’t have to face the challenges of parenthood that Kate and her husband were facing, maybe that was some consolation.
He dug his spade into the ground with such force that it took considerable effort to pull it out again. That argument was such rubbish. He’d give anything to have the challenges of parenthood ahead of him, and he knew it.
‘Hi, Ibs.’
He looked up, startled. It was windy and wet and he hadn’t expected any of the volunteers would join him. It wasn’t a volunteer, though – it was Melanie McGillivray her auburn hair half hidden under a hood, her nose pink with the cold.
‘Melanie.’ He straightened up. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Thought I’d see what you’re up to. Everyone’s talking about the garden.’
‘You haven’t picked the best of days to visit.’
She shrugged. ‘I had some free time.’
He’d only seen Melanie once since the episode of the dahlias, and that had not been a comfortable meeting. He stared at her, his eyes narrowed. She was up to something. She had to be. Melanie and an interest in gardens didn’t mix.
‘I’m sorry, you know. About the flowers.’
‘You said.’
‘No, but I mean it.’
He said nothing. After a minute, she tried again. ‘How’s the baby? Cassie’s little girl?’
‘She’s fine.’
‘Good.’
‘You got time for a drink?’
‘I thought you wanted to see the garden.’ This was mischievous, but the devil in him couldn’t resist.
‘Oh well, yeah, sure. Or you could tell me about it in the pub.’
Ibsen grinned. ‘Never change, eh Mel?’ He looked around. There wasn’t much more he could do here today anyway. ‘Give me a minute, then, till I get the tools locked away.’
Nothing had changed in The Crossed Keys, except that he hadn’t been in here with Mel in three months. When they walked through the door together, Davey Fegan turned and gawped. His mouth opened to shout something, but at Ibsen’s glare he clearly thought better of it, and shut his mouth again.
‘Peach schnapps and orange, Nora, and a coke.’
They settled in a quiet corner.
‘So,’ Ibsen said after Nora had brought the drinks over, ‘What is it you really want, Mel?’
‘You don’t miss nothing, do you?’ She slid along the bench as close as she could to him. ‘I thought we might get together again, Ibs. You and me.’
‘You did?’
‘We were good.’ She fluttered her lashes at him. ‘Remember? Curled round each other in that bed of yours? Best sex I ever had. You too, you told me.’
A man’s cock, Ibsen thought with wry amusement, is sometimes not his best friend. Memories of nights spent with Mel gave him an instant erection. He crossed his legs and shifted away from her. ‘That was then, Mel.’
She moved closer again. ‘Come on, Ibs, You know you want to. And don’t tell me there’s someone else, ’cos I know there’s not.’
‘Really? How?’
‘Not difficult to find things out around here.’
It was true. Summerfield was a small community. Ibsen was profoundly thankful that Mel and her spies hadn’t happened to glimpse him driving up to the moor with Kate Courtenay that night, because no doubt the fires of rumour would have spread in an instant.
‘Hmm.’
‘So how about it? You and me?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry.’
‘You said you’d forgiven me,’ she wheedled.
Maybe he had said that, but only to get her off his back because destroying his dahlia garden was something he’d never forget. He said, ‘I’m moving away.’
She sat back, gaping. ‘Moving? Where to? What’ll your folks say?’
Ibsen had no idea where the words had come from, they’d just emerged from his mouth. He improvised rapidly. ‘I’ve applied for a job down south. Northamptonshire.’
He’d seen a job advertised in one of the trade magazines. It looked interesting – head of a sub-team at a large estate, much more the kind of thing he’d trained for than the jobbing gardening he was doing right now.
Mel shut her mouth. It sagged open again. ‘But you’ve always lived in Summerfield. You can’t go!’
‘Maybe you’ve just given me the best reason of them all. I need a change, Mel. And a challenge.’
She used the biggest weapon she could think of. ‘What about Daisy Rose?’
Ibsen’s hand clenched round his glass. She thought she was being clever, but she’d picked the wrong line of attack. He would not be blackmailed. He finished his coke.
‘Nice seeing you again, Mel. All the best.’
He stood up.
‘That’s it? You’re going? Just like that?’
‘Well, not tomorrow,’ he admitted. ‘But I’m moving on, that’s for certain.’ Moving on from you, if nothing else.
‘You’ll never get a better lay,’ she shouted after him as he strode across the pub.
By the bar, Davey Fegan snorted with laughter, but Ibsen didn’t care. He was thinking of Kate Courtenay. Now that had been precious.
Trouble was, he couldn’t get rid of the memories of Kate. He’d felt such closeness, up there on the moor. She’d been smart, taking him up there to show him the wind farm rather than just talking about it.
The damned Summerfield project was driving a wedge through the whole community. Ian and Cassie were against, because Ian, as an oil worker, couldn’t see past oil as the answer to the energy problem. His Pa was all in favour, because he liked the idea of energy that came from nowhere and worked on nothing more than a puff of air. A lot of Summerfield folk wanted it, because all they could see were pound signs. There’d be work for quite a few of them and more money rolling in than they could spend on local projects once the AeGen sweeteners – blood money as Frank called it – came into play. Frank and quite a lot of the Forgie crowd hated the whole thing. The Cousins woman was a professed environmentalist who didn’t want the scenery spoiled, though there were other people who called themselves environmentalists who said renewable energy was the only way to protect the planet.
‘You’ve kept very quiet about it all, Ma,’ he said to Betty, as he was putting up some shelves in his parents’ kitchen.
Betty waited till he’d drilled the holes for the rawlplugs. ‘I think I’m with your father,’ she said carefully, when Ibsen glanced over at her, four screws held between his lips ready for screwing the shelf into place. ‘I like them. I find them peaceful.’
Ibsen’s eyebrows rose, but he wasn’t in a position to speak. He turned his attention to the shelf.
Betty said, ‘They’re hypnotic and quite graceful. But I understand how you feel, son – you know, ’cos we said goodbye to Violet up there. I know what that means to you.’
He finished the last screw and stood back to survey his work. The shelves would accommodate Betty’s saucepans so that she’d be able to get them up out of her way – she’d been tripping over the old stand and moaning about it for years.
‘How do they look?’
‘Great. Thanks.’ She patted the seat next to her at the kitchen table. ‘Sit down, love.’
Ibsen tested the shelves by wiggling them sharply. They were rock-steady. ‘They’ll do. Want me to put the pans up for you?’
‘No, I’ll clean them first. I want you to sit down.’
He sat.
‘I don’t like you getting involved with that crowd up at the protest.’
‘Ma, I—’
‘Violet’s gone, love. She’ll never be gone from our memories, o
r our hearts, but she’s gone. Whatever you think about wind farms, you mustn’t take up a position on Summerfield because of that.’
‘I don’t—’
‘I don’t like it. Lot of unwashed thugs, moving around the country making a nuisance of themselves. They’re protesters all right, but it’s just a game for them. They’re professionals, not locals.’
Ibsen opened his mouth to say something, but Betty interrupted.
‘Now, I don’t want to hear another word.’
Ibsen closed his mouth. When his mother took that tone, there was nothing more to be said. If he were to get involved, it would have to be with great care.
‘You needn’t worry,’ Ninian said to Kate, ‘that I’ll do it again. It was rank.’
They were sitting on the bench under the willows, sharing a rare moment of quiet. When Ninian had been little – a rumpled, energetic, bright-eyed four-year-old – they used to come down here to weave daisies into chains and makes wishes on the puff of a dandelion head.
‘Do you remember asking not to be brought home?’ She had to know, because this sliver of information had needled into her flesh and was festering there.
There was a shrug. ‘Sort of.’
She bit her lip. The little boy who blew wishes on dandelion seeds would have wriggled onto her lap in times of distress, and burrowed his head into her chest for comfort. ‘Can you explain why?’
‘Mu-um.’
‘You think we would have been cross?’
‘Well? Wouldn’t you?’
Of course they would have been angry, and worried and – probably – unsure how best to handle it. She had never been into the drugs scene, she’d been too busy being Miss Smart-Ass, the top-of-the-class engineer. As for Andrew, Kate thought that the summit of his experience was the rat-end of the odd toke at arty parties in the eighties.
‘Ibsen was so cool.’
‘Really?’
‘He sat with me all night. I don’t think I was pretty.’
‘He should have phoned me.’
‘I’m sure he did.’ Ninian screwed up his face in concentration and again she saw again the small boy, this time doing his sums, crayoning a drawing from a colouring book, building houses of cards. She wanted to fold him in her arms and roll back the years so that she could play her part in his life differently. ‘Sure as I can be.’
‘There was no message, Ninian.’
The events of those few days were etched in her memory. Lisa’s call, her visit to the protest camp and her impassioned outburst, triggered by worry over Ninian and – here her mind halted in its tracks and challenged her to acknowledge the truth – all right, she conceded, by her hurt at discovering Ibsen among the protestors. Then there had been her suspension and rapid departure from AeGen’s forest-green offices.
Her suspension!
Her eyes widened and she thumped her hand on her thigh. ‘Oh, Christ!’
‘Don’t swear, Mum.’
‘My phone. I gave him my business card, so he’d have called my work mobile.’
‘So?’
‘I don’t have it any longer. It’s in the office.’
Ninian looked at her as though something had just registered in his brain. ‘Why aren’t you there, anyway?’
‘They suspended me.’
‘What?’
‘Suspended. You know, as in told me to go home and not come in to work.’
‘Wicked.’
‘You don’t get it, Ninian. I’m in disgrace.’
‘What about?’
‘For shouting at you up at the camp. Someone filmed it and it got on the news.’
‘So?’
‘They believe I’ve brought the company’s reputation into disrepute. It doesn’t look good.’
‘That’s pants.’ As the news sank in, he said, ‘Bloody hell. Was that because of me?’
‘I lost my temper, Ninian. I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘But you were cross because I’d gone up there. Shit.’ He ran his hand through already messy hair. ‘I didn’t mean you to get screwed, Mum. I was just— Cuzz’s Mum said— and I was pissed off. About everything, I guess.’
‘I know.’
‘Will it be all right? At work?’
‘I don’t know. Hopefully.’
They both fell silent. A neighbour somewhere was cutting the grass and far, far above them, an aeroplane left its vapour trail in a clear blue sky. A bird trilled from a bush near the garden wall. The small sounds of everyday life.
Ninian said, ‘Sorry, Mum.’
The words were sweeter to Kate than any birdsong. ‘Never mind.’ She studied him. He was taller than her by a good ten inches these days, and strong enough already to pick her up easily. But in all the realities that mattered, he was a child – her child – and she had failed him in so many ways. ‘I should say sorry to you too, Ninian.’
‘What for?’
‘Everything.’ She tried to be more specific. ‘For not being here for you when you needed me. For working when I could have been a better mother. For not realising how hurt you were feeling. For—’
He laughed. It was the first time she’d seen him laugh properly in an age, but now it was her turn to be puzzled. ‘What?’
‘That’s not lots of things, Mum, that’s one thing.’
‘Well then.’
He looked at her, his chestnut eyes so like Andrew’s. ‘You should apologise to Ibsen, you know. He’s an okay bloke. He looked after me.’
‘I’m glad he did.’
Truth be told, she longed to apologise to Ibsen. She longed to speak to Ibsen, full stop. More than that – she wanted to be in those arms, wrapped up close to the shirt that read ‘You Can Use Me Again and Again’, and doing just that. But Ibsen Brown wasn’t into relationships, he had a serious commitment problem, and for very good reason.
Whatever spark there was between them, it was no more than a sexual frisson. And nice as it had been, the man had made it very clear that it was not something he wanted to repeat. Full stop.
Chapter Twenty-three
It was a time of struggles. If the first struggle was the important matter of parenting, the second was the altogether trivial mini-war between herself and paint, which nonetheless took on monumental proportions. Kate had thought that painting the kitchen would be an easy, perhaps even a calming, activity, but she could not have been more wrong.
First of all, the paint she chose was described as ‘butter’. It looked nice and creamy in the illustration. The kitchen shown in the paint chart gleamed softly. It was fresh and inviting, like a cold glass of milk on a hot summer’s day. When she got it home, however, she discovered a sickly yellow in the can.
‘What’s that?’ Andrew asked, horrified.
‘Butter, it’s called. Look.’ She shoved the paint brochure in front of him. He glanced at the picture.
‘That’s not the same colour.’
‘It’s supposed to be.’
He put on his glasses and inspected the illustration. ‘The paint here is called Buttermilk,’ he announced, ‘with the wall behind the shelving picked out in Butter.’
Kate groaned. ‘Oh, God. I must have read it wrong.’
‘Take it back.’
She put the lid on the can and pressed it down by dint of leaping onto the tin and stamping around the edge. ‘Tomorrow,’ she said dispiritedly. Her enthusiasm for painting the kitchen was rapidly receding, but in the light of Andrew’s scepticism at her abilities, she felt she had no choice but to plug on.
The way things were going with Andrew was, of course, her third struggle. She’d been right in her suspicion that he was still seeing Sophie MacAteer.
‘She’s very persistent,’ he said, by way of excuse.
‘I’m very persistent,’ she countered, ‘and I have prior claim.’
Andrew seemed flattered to be battled over and, given the general comfortableness of life at Willow Corner and the fact that he loved the house almost as much as she did
, Kate suspected he might have tried to conceal the Sophie affair until – possibly – it fizzled out. His problem was that now she was at home, rather than out all day, concealing telephone conversations with the Maneater and slipping out to see her had become so difficult as to be nigh on impossible. He knew Kate wouldn’t tolerate it and Sophie didn’t seem about to let go either.
Kate despised snooping. They had always respected each other’s space, or at least she had thought that was one of the founding principles of their relationship until she realised that she’d never had anything to hide. Now, when Andrew slipped out to the village for the papers, or down to the pub for a drink with Mike Proctor or other friends, she was onto his computer like a shot, to check his emails and to read the latest episode of Martyne Noreis and the Witch of Lothian.
‘Ellyn had discovered the truth about Martyne’s absences. He knew it first from the change in the fare put before him at night. “Plain gruel? No meat?” he asked, puzzled.
‘ “Only honest men eat meat,” Ellyn answered cryptically, her blonde plaits swinging ferociously as she added a quarter of cabbage to his bowl. The statement was so patently untrue that he was forced to consider its underlying meaning.
‘Later, when he tried to bed her, she rolled away from him and turned her head to the wall. It was unlike Ellyn, who had always shown ardour. At first he cared little, for Ethelinda was providing him with all his needs, but she was in the next village, and with child, and Ellyn was his wife, and should obey him.’
With child? Kate scanned the paragraph on Andrew’s computer again. Ethelinda was pregnant? She checked her watch quickly, and shut down the computer with hands grown suddenly cold. Fifteen years ago, that was what had happened to her, and a marriage had been turned upside down. Was history about to repeat itself?
This furtive searching for information was a peculiar kind of torture. It dripped toxic suggestions into her mind, where they lodged and suppurated and could not be lanced – and besides, her prying lowered her estimation of herself.
She started painting the kitchen. She was covered with Buttermilk from her attempt at rollering the ceiling when Andrew put his head round the door and said, ‘I’m off to town.’
She was too proud to beg him not to go. ‘Going to see the Bishop?’ she asked sarcastically from the top of the ladder, aware that though she might be splattered in paint, this did not make her an oil painting. If she was to compete with Sophie MacAteer, she had to address the matter of the lines at the corner of her eyes and the growing number of gray hairs on her temple.