by Jo Verity
She turned to look back at Llangennith on the hill, the roadside hedges marking her route down to Hills End. From this distance the campsite might have been a scale model, perfect in every detail, ready to be placed alongside a model railway track.
Ben and Alex had briefly, with Laurence’s nostalgic encouragement, become hooked on model railways. They must have been a year or two younger than Jordan and still able (along with their father) to retreat, unashamedly, into boyhood. They’d squirrelled away pocket and birthday money to buy track and rolling stock. They’d spent hours painting miniature signal boxes and engine sheds, gluing lumps of this to bits of that, arguing about how the track should be set out, and where to locate the station and the over-bridges. After weeks of communal endeavour she would hear, from the loft, the rackety clack of trains tearing around the track, an event which signalled the end of the real fun and the need to start all over again. The harmless fixation had gripped them for a year or so, then locomotives were overtaken by electric guitars and girls, and Laurence forsook Hornby for Le Creuset.
Turning back towards the sea, she leaned into the wind. It supported her for a split second before gravity took over. Gathering pace, she made a reckless descent, stumbling and slithering, the tips of the thin-bladed marram jabbing through her trousers and into the flesh on her legs. She reached the beach and, unable to stop, lurched forward, ending up kneeling on the sand, her heart thudding as she checked herself out – no damage done – thinking how easily she could have wrenched an ankle.
She slipped off her sandals and, dangling one in each hand, began jogging across the powdery sand. When she came to the bank of bladder wrack denoting the high-water mark, she stopped. Trapped amongst the seaweed’s tendrils, was evidence of man’s thoughtlessness. A yellow plastic bottle which had contained bleach. A see-through cigarette lighter. A chunk of polystyrene. A knot of nylon fishing line. The sea had spewed up these foreign bodies, dumping them back on dry land as if to give anyone with a conscience a second chance to dispose of them responsibly.
She squatted, prodding the seaweed with the toe of a sandal and stirring up a frenzy of sand hoppers. Ughh. She crossed the tangled mass in two hasty strides and continued towards the sea, her heels sinking into the spongy sand. As she neared the water’s edge, the wind became stronger, slowing her to walking pace. Her eyes watered, blurring her vision and spilling tears across her cheeks, the wind drying them before they reached her chin. She stood still, the frothy waves cascading across the sand towards her, gasping as the first one lapped over her toes. The shockingly cold water and the shush shush shush of the folding waves made her want to pee.
An hour ago the beach had seemed the obvious place to head for but now she was here she didn’t know what to do (and there was the matter of her nagging bladder). Twenty-two hours without sleep was starting to take its toll. She felt that she was on a boat, undulating gently, side to side, up and down. It was making her feel vaguely queasy. On top of that, the wind, buffeting her hair and howling across her ears, was giving her a headache. She should get back.
She ought, perhaps, to have left a note to let them – Dafydd – know where she had gone in case they – Dafydd – were concerned for her. She pictured Diane waking. Seeing her empty bed, Diane, being Diane, would assume that she was sharing Dafydd’s bed. Where else would she be at this hour? Walking along a beach, watching the sun rise? Alone? Yeah, yeah. She felt in her pocket for her phone, already knowing that it was lying on top of the chest of drawers. Damn.
In case she needed proof of her early morning walk, she picked up a crab’s claw that was being pushed up the beach by the incoming tide and dropped it in her pocket then walked back up the beach, the wind helping her now. She recrossed the seaweed and strode along the dry sand. The dunes were steeper and more daunting from this side and, not feeling up to the climb, she needed to find the ‘official’ way through. There had to be one. They couldn’t expect – wouldn’t want – people scrambling over them as she had done. As if to prove her right, a couple of wetsuited figures appeared from a cleft in the dunes, trotting towards the sea, surfboards hoisted above their heads, and she spotted a duck-boarded track which led her through to the car park.
Diane was still asleep when she got back to the house and Dafydd’s bedroom door was shut. After a couple of paracetamols and a drink of hot water, she slid, fully clothed, into her sleeping bag.
20
THURSDAY: 10.35AM
Diane was standing in the doorway, holding two mugs. ‘Coffee?’
‘Wonderful.’ Elizabeth heaved herself up in the bed. ‘What’s the time?’
‘Ten-thirtyish. Dafydd must have taken the girls to Swansea. His car’s gone.’
‘Jordan?’
‘No idea.’ Diane sat on the foot of her bed. ‘What time did you come to bed?’
‘Not long after you. We talked a bit about the party. I didn’t know what to advise really, except that it would be best to let the dust settle.’
Diane shrugged. ‘He can’t expect them to stay “Daddy’s little girls” forever.’
Although it came as no surprise, Diane’s airy dismissal of Dafydd’s concerns irritated her.
‘Give the man a break. He knows the theory – he’s not witless – but it must be hard, seeing the proof that they’re young women.’
‘Well, he’s going to have to face up to it. They’re going to do it, sooner or later, so my advice would be to cross his fingers and put his trust in contraception.’
‘You’re such a sceptic.’
‘I’m right though, aren’t I? And I’m disappointed in you two. I thought you were going to make a night of it.’ Diane winked.
‘You’ve got a one-track mind.’
Elizabeth disentangled herself from her sleeping bag and stretched.
Diane pointed at her crumpled clothes. ‘How come you’ve still got your clothes on?’
‘Oh. Too tired to get undressed.’
‘You looked wrecked.’
‘Thanks.’
After Elizabeth had showered and dressed, Diane asked ‘How d’you see the morning going? I can’t imagine they’ll be back from Swansea before mid-afternoon.’
‘I might sit in the garden. Read. Pull up a few weeds. You?’
‘I was going to go off with my sketch pad for a couple of hours. Coming?’
‘I’d better stick around here, I think. Keep an eye on Jordan. Anyway, you’ll get more done without me.’
‘Look, Lizzie, you must say if you want to go back to Cardiff. I realise the week’s not panning out as you’d imagined.’
‘No. I’m having fun. Honestly. Off you go.’
After Diane had gone, Elizabeth went into the garden. It was too hot in the yard near the house so she took one of the garden chairs to the far end of the lawn, near the tent, where a hazel tree cast dappled shade. The sun glinting off a bedroom window further up the hill dazzled her and she closed her eyes.
She wondered how the cat was faring. He must hate her for closing the bedroom doors and denying him his territory. In this heat, he would spend the week sprawled beneath the laurel bush. And the garden must be suffering. Pots and baskets would need watering both morning and evening. She hadn’t heard the forecast for several days – or the news, come to that – but the heatwave must surely break soon.
For goodness sake. What on earth was the matter with her? She had her own in situ weatherman. Why hadn’t she asked Dafydd for a forecast?
Elizabeth realised that she didn’t actually know what being a TV weatherman entailed. Did they work out the forecast themselves or was someone else in charge of that side of things whilst they simply delivered the information? Weatherwomen were always decorative (if bizarrely dressed) whereas weathermen were generally plain and dressed like her father. Dafydd, on the other hand, was handsome and although she’d never seen him on television she was sure that the camera would ‘love him’ – wasn’t that the expression they used? And he did have a particularly s
eductive voice.
The sound of throat-clearing startled her out of her daydreams.
‘You were snoring.’
Jordan was sitting on the grass outside the tent.
‘Did you sleep well? Have you had breakfast?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘Which?’
‘Both. Someone was yakking all night. Kept me awake.’
She glanced up at the open dormer window. Could their voices have been deflected into his room?
‘The girls have gone to Swansea with Dafydd,’ she said.
‘I know.’
‘And Diane’s gone off sketching.’
He trailed her back to the house and watched as she placed cereals, milk and orange juice on the table. Still without speaking, he filled a bowl with Cheerios, added milk and sugar, and munched his way through it, staring at the wall behind her seemingly able, at will, to render her invisible.
‘Did you see the girls before they went?’
‘…’
‘Jordan?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everything okay?’
He shrugged. ‘’Spose.’
He poured orange juice into a glass, raised it to his lips and gulped it down in one fluid movement.
‘Have you spoken to your mother recently?’
‘What?’
She sighed. ‘What d’you think I said?’
‘What?’
It was threatening to be a long morning.
Remembering her promise to Dafydd, she went in search of gardening tools. The garage was locked but she’d noticed an assortment of keys dangling from a row of hooks inside one of the kitchen cupboards. Scooping them up, she took them out and the third one turned sweetly in the lock.
It wasn’t a garage at all but a mini warehouse where ‘Dad’ stored his plumbing and building supplies. Several tiers of shelving ran down the sides, neatly stacked with copper and PVC piping, tins of paint and putty, lengths of timber and huge tubs of nails, screws and washers. At the far end, a purpose-built rack housed hammers, screwdrivers, saws, files and pliers. It smelled like an old-fashioned hardware store – woody and earthy and metallic. When she looked around, she saw a hard-working, meticulous man whose orderly life had been overturned by his beloved wife’s dementia.
She thought of her own parents, gathering their lives tighter and tighter around themselves, limiting themselves by fears of draughts and rich food and power plugs left in overnight, fretting themselves into near inactivity. They were so fortunate. They were in reasonable health, their brains and memory still functioning. Yet they seemed ready to let others do the thinking for them. Lunch clubs. Bus trips. Concerts specifically for ‘seniors’. It made her cross and sad that they were voluntarily loosening their grip on the steering wheel. (A product of their timid DNA, their cautious genes, perhaps she should feel apprehensive, too.) She and Rosie really must have a serious talk about their parents and their future. Soon.
The garden tools were in a small bay divided from the rest by a section of wooden trellis-work. This area wasn’t so tidy. Clearly things had been grabbed and returned in haste in hurried efforts to keep the garden under control. She located what she needed – secateurs, long-handled loppers, a fork and a rake, and a pair of business-like leather gauntlets.
The privet hedge was flowering in places, heads of white florets giving off their sickly scent. Certain that ‘Mum’ wouldn’t have tolerated flowering privet, she set about trimming off the stinking blooms and reducing its height by a couple of feet, pausing occasionally to rake the trimmings into a pile.
Jordan emerged from the house and watched her for a while. ‘C’n I have a go?’
His request was unexpected but it wasn’t precision work and he was old enough not to cut his own fingers off.
‘Okay. Concentrate on the tallest spikes. Like this.’ She caught a wayward shoot in the jaws of the loppers and pushed the handles towards each other. ‘Don’t twist it or you’ll ruin the blades. Here.’ She handed him the loppers, watching and advising until he’d perfected the technique.
Turning her attention to the rose bed at the side of the path, she tugged at bindweed and couch grass. The ground was baked hard and although she tried easing them out of the soil with the fork, they snapped off, leaving their invasive roots in the soil, waiting for the first shower to galvanise them into life. They carried on, working within yards of each other yet not talking. Now and again she glanced across, checking his progress, waiting for him to lose interest, but he stuck at it and appeared to be doing a good job.
‘Let’s take a break. Have a drink. When it’s hot like this it’s important to keep up the fluids.’
‘Yes, Miss,’ he mocked.
They sat in the shade of the hedge, drinking apple juice and eating digestive biscuits and again, despite being still, she felt that she was drifting on a slow swell.
Jordan was saying something.
‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I was miles away.’
‘They wouldn’t come back.’ He stripped the seeds from a stalk of grass. ‘The girls? Last night?’ His face was flushed and the back of his neck was red where it had caught the sun. ‘I tried but they wouldn’t.’ He spoke quietly but he was ripping at the grass.
‘It might have been a good idea to have explained that last night.’ She wondered whether she should hug him or something, to let him know that she’d forgiven him but she wasn’t sure how he would take it. ‘Dafydd has to work things out with his daughters. The important thing, as far as I’m concerned, is that you came back. So why don’t we say … ten pounds?’
He pulled his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around his legs. ‘Okay.’ Lowering his forehead onto his knees so that she couldn’t see his face, he added ‘Then, of course, there’s my gardening pay?’
‘Jordan.’
He grinned. ‘Joke.’
Four days, and she wasn’t much nearer to knowing what made him tick. Diane was right when she said that he would be less trouble to look after away from his home territory. Okay, they’d had a couple of runs in but, had they remained in London, he would doubtless have been off gadding with his mates, leaving her in a constant state of anxiety.
A few years ago, a work colleague had been overtaken by a domestic crisis – she couldn’t recall the details – and had asked Elizabeth if she could look after her thirteen-year-old son for a weekend while she dashed off on a mercy mission. The boy – Rupert – had arrived complete with typed lists covering his daily routine, habits, homework, food preferences and what he was allowed to watch on television. Kate had phoned three times each day to check that he (and she) were surviving. Jordan, on the other hand, had been dumped on her without any form of instruction pack. Was that the way a caring parent behaved? Okay, Vashti couldn’t have known that Charlie’s granddad was going to die but, once he had and she did, she should have called off the stupid tour and come back to London. And Alex was as much in the wrong.
‘Alex phoned last night,’ she said. ‘I told him that everything’s fine.’ She risked another try. ‘Have you spoken to them recently?’
He shook his head.
‘I expect the signal’s bad … wherever they are.’ She picked up their empty glasses. ‘I’m going to have a nap. Will you be okay on your own?’
He ignored her question.
*
A car door slammed. It took the first seconds of wakefulness to remember where she was and then the following several minutes to do her hair and apply a touch of makeup. Dafydd was in the kitchen, unloading shopping bags.
‘We stopped at the supermarket in Penclawdd. Stocked up on a few things.’ He smiled his uncomplicated smile.
‘How was your visit?’
‘Good. It was good. They were thrilled to see the girls. ’Specially Dad.’
‘I’m glad. And the girls?’
‘They’re suitably contrite. We didn’t get into the fine detail – visiting a grandmother whom they adore and who no longer re
cognises them was enough for them to deal with without having to discuss sex with their dad. I took the “you have a responsibility to your guest” tack. They were very apologetic.’
‘Guest?’
‘Jordan. Jay. They’re out in the garden now, patching things up I think.’
She went to the window. Jordan, Angel and Mimi were sitting together outside the tent.
‘I had a word with him,’ she said. ‘I think he could see the way things were going at the party and he feels rotten that he didn’t manage to persuade them to come back with him.’
‘He shouldn’t. It wasn’t his place to do that, but it was good of him to try.’ He caught her hand. ‘Did you have a lie-in? I was hoping we didn’t wake you when we went out.’
His touch made it impossible for her to think straight and, although she didn’t want to, she removed her hand from his. ‘You didn’t.’
‘Where’s Diane?’
‘She’s taken her paints down to the beach.’
He held up a pack of chicken pieces. ‘We decided we’d have a barbecue this evening. Good idea?’
She nodded. ‘Lovely.’
He took a step towards her, leaving barely a hand’s-span between them.
‘Stand up straight,’ he said. ‘You musn’t slouch to make me feel taller. I may be a short-arse but I take size eleven shoes. And you know what they say.’
Diane was at the beach, the kids in the garden. This might be her only opportunity to clear up any misunderstanding between them.
‘About last night. I don’t usually … don’t you have a girlfriend or something?’