by Lucy Dillon
On the plus side, there was the smell of toast and coffee.
Lorna had to concede that that was one thing in Tiffany’s favour as a flatmate: she didn’t slob around in bed until all hours. She’d trained herself out of lie-ins when she’d opted for childcare as a career. She also made excellent coffee. Usually with the expensive beans Lorna used to hide in her lunchbox, but even so.
She leaned over to see if Rudy was still asleep in his basket. He was – his nose tucked under his paws, exactly as he’d been since Tiffany had crashed into the flat the night before, along with her six bags, one suitcase and, troublingly, a guitar case. He looked as far in denial about the new addition to their household as Lorna felt.
‘It’s only for a few days,’ Lorna whispered. She told herself not to be so mean, curling her resentment up into the duvet. Despite her dramatic personality, Tiff was popular with her agency and worshipped by the children she looked after; they’d find her another live-in job by the end of the day. There would be wealthy families begging to have her and her six bags of junk shipped into their Elle Decor houses.
Lorna heard feet coming up the stairs, followed by a cursory knock on the door. ‘Are you awake yet?’
‘No.’
‘Yeah, you are.’ The bedroom door was kneed open and Tiffany appeared, bearing a plate piled high with toast and two mugs of coffee, which were spilling on the carpet. ‘Budge up, your flat’s bloody freezing.’
‘It’s not freezing. You’re just used to millionaires paying the heating bills.’ Lorna wriggled into a sitting position as Tiffany made herself comfortable on the bed.
‘Whatever. This place is massive.’ Tiffany gazed round at the paintings Lorna had hung in her room. She’d chosen her favourites, the ones she wanted to keep closest: a detailed Victorian engraving of a bustling Paddington Station, an abstract in dreamy lilacs and gold, and the one painting of Cathy’s Lorna had chosen to wake up to every morning – a magnificent Queen of Cups standing proud over a roiling sea of marine detail. ‘Your spare room’s about the size of our old flat.’
‘Don’t exaggerate.’ Lorna paused for effect. ‘The spare room and the kitchen together are about the same size as the old flat.’
‘Are you planning on taking in lodgers?’ Tiffany went on. ‘Because you could get, what? Four people in here. Coining it in.’
Lorna folded a piece of toast in half. She had to admit, it was actually quite nice to have someone else make you breakfast. ‘Nope. It’s for me.’
‘What? You’re crazy. Do you know how much you could be making doing Airbnb?’
‘Don’t care. I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. I can do what I like, when I like, and there’s no one to give me a hard time about anything.’
‘No one?’ Tiffany nudged her. Now she was safely out of the French family war zone, last night’s jumpiness had vanished, to be replaced by her normal cheeky confidence. ‘Still?’
‘Meaning?’
‘I mean, you let things fizzle out with that chef who was after you?’
‘It didn’t fizzle up .’ She reddened. Last time she’d spoken properly to Tiff she’d been vaguely seeing one of the chefs from the restaurant opposite her flat; Max was cute, half-Kiwi, and he could chop an onion in under ten seconds, but he was also keen to settle down, and Lorna wasn’t. She couldn’t imagine being with Max for ever, so why set him up for the inevitable heartbreak?
Tiff looked disbelieving. ‘But he wanted to take you to Paris! To show you his galettes!’
‘I’m sure some other girl’s enjoying them by now. I’ve got a dog instead. As you can see.’ Rudy had waddled into the room, emboldened by the smell of toast. ‘I prefer him, to be honest. He never ever tells me how to reverse park.’
‘You know, after what I’ve seen of relationships these past few months, I think you’ve got the right idea,’ said Tiff. ‘You’re independent – just you and your big old sausage dog. Hello, doggo!’ Tiff waved at Rudy and he stared back, startled. She chucked him her toast corner, and nudged Lorna to pass her another bit.
Lorna offered her the plate, and they ate toast in silence, while Rudy was hoisted onto the bed to nibble Tiffany’s leftover crusts. Tea and toast felt like the better of the old times. Sometimes they’d spent entire Sundays watching boxsets on her laptop and working their way through a loaf of bread with a jar of Nutella. Tiff claimed she’d had a lecture confirming Nutella’s nutritional value, and Lorna’s course, a sensible degree in Sociology, didn’t have a counter argument.
A weekend sensation spread over her morning mood, making her feel sunny inside. Except – she suddenly remembered – it wasn’t a weekend. It was Thursday, and Mary was away playing doubles golf with Keith.
‘I’ve got to get up.’ Lorna sat bolt upright. ‘I’ve got so much to do. Are you any good at mopping floors?’
‘The best.’ Tiffany nudged her. ‘Thanks for letting me stay, mate. I’ll get on to the agency this morning – I’ll be out of your hair before you know it.’
Lorna nudged her back. ‘No rush,’ she said, and meant it. ‘It’s good to see you.’
Her memory gave her a brief flash of the bathroom from their shared house – the smeary mirror, the cascading windowsills, the piles of towels – but she decided to ignore it. For the time being.
True to her word, Lorna went back to Much Yarley a few days later to walk Bernard again. The weather had turned grey and gloomy, and a few degrees colder, but she realised Bernard had got used to a little extra exercise. It felt cruel to stop – and she didn’t like the thought of Joyce coping with his excess energy in the house.
There, she thought to herself, that’s what owning a dog’s done to you. It’s made you walk in the bloody drizzle for the sake of other people.
If Longhampton town centre was grey, there was no sign of spring arriving in Much Yarley either. The sky over the fields that she drove past was colourless and everything else was a washed-out green, with nothing budding in the hedgerows apart from the odd scrap of litter. Even the sheep on the hillside looked grubby.
Lorna collected Bernard from the door and took him and Rudy up the lane towards the Osbornes’ land. She didn’t see Sam, or Angry Simon, but still kept both dogs on the lead, despite Bernard the psycho teddy bear’s insatiable desire to dive into the undergrowth in search of rabbits. Rudy didn’t have a lot of clearance for his short legs, and Lorna was trying to keep him as clean as she could, since she’d wrestled him into a woollen jumper she’d started to knit while the gallery was quiet.
Lorna had struggled to follow the pattern, but it felt like something nice to do for the little dog, who didn’t ask for much. He shivered a lot, and she worried that he was cold or scared. She had strategies now for dismantling his anxiety, but none would work overnight, and she’d read on the internet that swaddling nervous dogs helped to calm them down.
Plus, as Tiffany pointed out, Rudy looked very cute in a jumper.
‘Are you going to knit him a hat next?’ Tiffany had asked, in all seriousness, as Lorna tugged the front legs into place. ‘That would look so cool with a beanie. Sophie bought one of these for her friend’s Shih Tzu – it cost nearly a week’s wages. It’s another world, Lorn, seriously.’
They’d spent the next hour looking on the internet for patterns to knit dog hats. There were lots. The best ones, they agreed, were the hats for dogs with cats’ ears on them. The gallery had indeed been very quiet.
Joyce Rothery, unsurprisingly, didn’t share Tiffany and Lorna’s feelings about dogs in clothes.
‘What on earth is that poor dachshund wearing?’ she asked when Lorna returned Bernard to his owner, tail wagging and half covered in mud from where he’d barged through several puddles. Rudy was clean, and his tail was whipping happily.
‘It’s a jumper. I couldn’t find a coat in the pet shop that fitted his back, so I tried to make one myself. He’s a funny shape.’
‘You made it, did you?’ Joyce pursed her lips in what could have been a s
mile. It was sort of amused. Then she gestured towards Rudy, with an impatient flick of an arthritic hand. ‘Let’s have a look.’
Lorna dutifully picked Rudy up and lifted him so Joyce could inspect her handiwork. The old lady ran her hand over the ribbed section at the back, where Lorna had tried to knit a skull and crossbones. It hadn’t worked. It looked more like a smiley face.
‘I know there are a few places I went a bit wrong,’ she admitted, as the knobbly fingers went straight to every single one of her mistakes. ‘I normally knit squares.’
‘I can see … You’ve dropped a stitch or two here.’ Joyce poked a finger through the hole that Lorna had tried to tack together as a ‘feature’ and wiggled the loose ends. ‘Still, on the plus side, you won’t lose your sausage dog. He’ll leave a trail of yarn behind him wherever he goes and you can reel him back in. Or maybe that’s the plan?’
‘I don’t think it’s a bad first attempt,’ said Lorna stiffly. ‘It’s not easy teaching yourself to knit from YouTube.’
‘From you what ?’ Joyce inserted maximum disdain into each syllable and an audible ‘h’ into ‘what’.
‘From the internet. Anyway, I’ve got another on the go, in stripes this time. Red, white and blue. Rudy’s first owner was very patriotic. I think this one’ll be better,’ she added, but it didn’t sound convincing. ‘I like it, anyway.’
Knitting always reminded her of where she was at the time, and Rudy’s jumper, Lorna knew, would remind her of the first weeks in the gallery – the excitement, the bursts of ideas, the panic, the smell of the fresh paint. The liberating sense of being herself, and being responsible for the small, hairy life sitting under the desk.
Joyce stopped stroking Rudy’s ears – she’d moved on from the jumper – and glanced up. ‘Have you got it with you, this other jumper?’
‘Yes. It’s in my bag.’
‘Well, I’d better have a look at it,’ she said, ‘so your poor German sausage isn’t forced to put his little legs through the wrong holes.’ She stepped back, opening the door two inches wider.
‘Are you sure?’ Lorna knew Joyce’s eyesight was failing; Keir had confided in her that it was one of the reasons she was on the social services’ radar, living on her own so far from a neighbour. Surely her knitting would be even more erratic than Lorna’s? But it was the first time Joyce had invited her inside. How could she say no?
Bernard had already barged his way back in, and Lorna could hear him running around the kitchen, slurping from his water bowl and skittering across the tiles to check nothing had invaded his kingdom while he’d been out. He’d be getting everything covered in mud.
‘Come in, if you’re coming in,’ said Joyce impatiently. ‘You’re letting the heat escape.’
The sitting room at Rooks Hall was small but stylishly furnished, with a low grey sofa along one wall, and two high-backed armchairs on either side of a tiled fireplace where a fire was burning. It smelled Christmassy, maybe from the logs in the basket by the grate, and the two hammered silver dishes of dusty pot pourri that sat on the pale oak sideboard.
Lorna was surprised by how modern the room felt; the cottage’s olde worlde exterior had led her to expect heavy antique chests and musty carpets, but the furniture was mid-century and elegant. The walls were a perfect mushroom colour, a subtle shade that changed as the light moved. Piles of books sat next to each chair, thick reference volumes of art and places. It was a room to live in, a room that had been loved.
‘Sit yourself down,’ said Joyce, indicating the chairs by the fire. ‘Don’t worry about dog hairs, Bernard’s not allowed up. Now, hand over your knitting.’
With a slight groan, the old lady settled herself on the chair nearest the window and accepted the scrap of knitting from Lorna’s hands. Lorna perched on the edge of the opposite chair and watched her take the needles easily into her hands, running her fingertips up and down the rows, her thin lips moving as she counted the stitches. While Joyce communed with the wool, Bernard sauntered in from the kitchen, his ears still flecked with burrs that had stuck to his ears while he terrorised the hedgerows. He gave his owner’s feet a quick sniff; then he curled up into a ball next to the tapestry footstool and went to sleep, a teddy bear once again.
Rudy stayed very close to Lorna’s ankle as she sat further back in her chair. She could feel the anxious rise and fall of his ribs slowly lessen until he too let out a huffy grunt and curled up against her foot.
Lorna glanced around the room, trying to absorb as many details as she could without looking nosey. There were pictures everywhere, but arranged in a clever way that didn’t overwhelm the space – something Lorna was never sure she’d got quite right in her own flat. She’d expected heavy oils, like Joyce’s own work, but there were more abstracts than oils, studies in colour and shape, and a trio of understated but intense block prints that changed the more Lorna looked at them.
But the painting that drew the eye most was the one hung above the fireplace, and she could tell immediately it was one of Joyce’s own: a striking coastal landscape of a simple white cottage set near the edge of a cliff, the surging tide flicking foam on to the streaked rocks, while a thunderous purple sky loomed overhead. The house itself was small and still, a quiet spot in the centre of the storm, and it gave Lorna a familiar, snug feeling.
‘Our old house,’ said Joyce, concentrating on the knitting. ‘Mine and Bernard’s. The first Bernard, obviously. The human one.’
How did she know Lorna was looking at it? ‘Is it in Wales?’
‘Pembrokeshire.’ Joyce glanced up, suddenly interested. ‘Do you know the area?’
‘We used to go there on holiday.’ The memory was unfolding inside Lorna the longer she gazed at the painting, like a fern spreading out tendrils of forgotten smells and sense. ‘Me and my mum and dad, and my sister. We used to stay in a cottage a bit like that.’
‘Oh, yes, there are lots. Old fishermen’s cottages, mostly. Simple but solid. Do you like it?’
‘Yes, it’s making me think of …’ Her voice trailed away as the images appeared, somewhere between her head and her heart.
Lorna remembered the thick stone walls and the hollow roar of the wind in the chimney at night, listening from under a pile of scratchy wool blankets, next to a snoring Jess. The wilder the storm, the cosier the bed felt. They’d been scraped-together holidays – damp holiday homes borrowed from their parents’ wide circle of friends – but between the squabbles and sunburn there had been moments like nuggets of sea glass in Lorna’s memory: when Mum had charmed some mackerel from a fisherman (swapped for sketches dashed off in an exercise book) and Dad had cleaned and cooked them on the beach, right in front of them. Frowning and concentrating, as neat as possible ‘out of respect for the fish’. They’d eaten them together, the four of them, sharing the surprise of Dad’s skill.
‘It looks … safe,’ she said, remembering her mum singing and washing up while she and Jess dried their sand-gritty feet by the cottage fire. She had a good voice, and Lorna couldn’t remember hearing her sing much at home after that. Why? Dad had sung too. Them singing, the coal fire, the spread of warmth over her clammy skin – safe, that was the feeling. Safe inside the arms of her mum and her dad and her sister, under a blanket, dozing to the sound of singing. A shared memory, created by the four of them.
‘Do you think so? Most people look at that and say something ludicrous about what it must have cost to heat the place. Or how cold it must have been in winter.’
‘I think it looks snug. Like when you’re watching a storm coming, but you’re tucked up inside.’ And that was the sense memory replaying in her imagination now, Lorna realised. A safe fear. The sea-salt smell of the white cottage filled her mind, and she blinked away tears as she felt her hand in her mum’s again, Jess on the other side, holding her dad’s as they ran four abreast, barefoot, along the deserted beach – a family, having fun together. Together.
She turned her head; Joyce was looking at her. She wi
ped her eyes hastily with the back of her hand. Maybe Joyce’s eyesight wasn’t sharp enough to spot her tears.
‘It was snug, you’re exactly right,’ said Joyce matter-of-factly. ‘We were very happy there.’
‘I can tell,’ said Lorna. ‘I would be too.’
They sat in silence for a few more moments while Joyce continued to poke and pick at Rudy’s jumper. Lorna racked her brains for something intelligent to say. None of the easy conversations she’d relied on in the hospice – ‘Tell me about these lovely grandchildren!’ or ‘Have you been watching the tennis/Olympics/Coronation Street ?’ – seemed appropriate here. She wanted to talk about Joyce’s paintings, but now they’d had the ‘no’ conversation she didn’t want to make it look as if she were being pushy.
But then Calum Hardy popped into Lorna’s mind and the ambitious side of her knew that getting Joyce Rothery in would be a real coup, and this was her chance.
Do it, urged the brisk Betty voice in her head. What’s the worst thing she can say? No? She’s already said that. What are you scared of? It’s only words. Count to three and ask.
Nggh.
Lorna struggled, trying to find a way of phrasing it, but she couldn’t. The fear of Joyce’s disapproval, combined with her awe of the lady’s talent, tied her tongue.
Fortunately, Joyce spoke first. ‘You’ve gone wrong with this row.’ She began hooking the wool out in loose loops, carrying some on the tips of her fingers while she dived in and out with the needles, resetting the pattern.
‘How can you tell what to knit without the instructions?’
‘It’s only counting.’ Joyce’s movements were nimble, even though her fingers seemed arthritic. ‘Counting and feel. There.’ She flipped the jumper over, felt it, then flipped it back and added a couple of stitches.
‘Oh! Could you show me what you just did?’ Lorna leaned forward without thinking, so close she could smell the old lady’s scent. She wore L’ Air du Temps on the silk scarf round her neck.
‘What did I just do?’
‘You started the leg. Can you knit a leg hole for me, so I can copy it? It’s so much easier when someone can show you where you’re going wrong.’