Olivia's Luck

by Catherine Alliott

‘Probably?’ murmured Imogen, raising her eyebrows as he overrevved the car.

  He laughed. ‘All right, Miss Ice Maiden, I haven’t heard you complaining much.’

  She lit a cigarette and gave him a secret smile, and he reached across and squeezed her knee in return, territorial gestures that Molly and I were still getting used to.

  ‘Still,’ he mused, glancing admiringly at me in the rear-view mirror, ‘I can see where you get “the look” from, Liv.’

  ‘Oh, Livvy was born chic,’ commented Imogen. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if she was doused in Saint-Laurent talc as a baby and snapped into Chanel nappies.’

  I’d laughed, but I couldn’t help feeling pleased, too. I’d spent my entire youth wishing Mum wouldn’t stand at the school gates in navy-blue couture, complete with gloves, hat, and pigskin handbag, and be like the other mums in a tracksuit, trainers, a Sainsbury’s carrier in one hand and a buggy with a toddler in the other, but for the first time in my life, I felt a rush of pride for her. And of course, I liked Johnny all the more for admiring her.

  The venue that particular night was the McFarllens’ barn, and the occasion, the youngest sister, Tara’s, seventeenth birthday. Johnny had rigged the place up in a parody of a seventies disco, with flashing strobe lights and a juke box belting out Abba in the corner, and Tara and her friends were giggling in flares and headbands. Entering into the spirit of the thing, Molly, Imogen and I pranced about around our handbags, whilst the boys played imaginary guitars, shutting their eyes and banging their heads together in mock ecstasy. While we danced, I remember looking out through the open barn doors to the house beyond, which as usual was lit up like a vast beacon in the night sky. Through the dining-room window a dinner party was in full swing, with twelve or so people around a table awash with silver and crystal, and Angie and Oliver at either end. As I watched, I saw Oliver get up, take the decanter around the table, and pause to kiss his wife on the back of her neck before refilling her glass, laughing in the candlelight.

  Later, after we’d all piled out of the barn and into the swimming pool, hot and exhausted from dancing, they’d joined us; Angie, ostensibly leading her guests out through the French windows for a drink by the pool, but secretly anxious lest one of Tara’s friends had had too much to drink and sank to the bottom, and Oliver, puffing on a cigar, following soon after. I recognised a few racehorse owners from the yard: complacent, florid, mostly overweight men, pleased with themselves and laughing too loudly, with younger, trophy wives on their arms. They were all pretty tanked up too, and as they watched us swim relay races, one particularly loud, portly individual peeled off his dinner jacket and prepared to join us, making a fool of himself in his Union Jack boxer shorts. As he jumped in, suddenly a shout went up from Johnny, and he and his sisters rushed to ambush him, intent on debagging. Amid the inevitable splashing and shrieking, I crawled out of the other end, laughing and enjoying it all but, as ever, not wanting to get too involved. Oliver was beside me. He handed me a towel, and as I wrapped it around me, shivering – giggling as fat man got his comeuppance – I wondered where on earth my own clothes were. I knew it was pretty late and I had to get a move on. I turned to go.

  ‘Perfect, aren’t they?’ he murmured.

  I glanced back and followed Oliver’s gaze to where Johnny and his three sisters were still streaking through the pool, their tanned, lithe bodies glistening in the moonlight.

  I smiled. ‘Perfect.’

  Then I turned and scurried off, picking up a skirt here, a shoe there, a bra – where was my bra? – oh God, there, on the rose bush, then climbing back into them all before dashing back and badgering Molly for a lift home, living in fear of the navy-blue avenging angel arriving to collect her daughter, breathing fire over the hedonists in the pool, a rolling pin in one hand, pigskin bag swinging wildly in the other.

  I mention this partly because I remember it well. It was the last one, you see. Because a couple of weeks later, something happened that was to change all our lives. On an equally balmy, hot August evening, Oliver McFarllen left his stifling bedroom, wandered downstairs, and pausing only to get a drink of water, went out of the back door into the night. He walked quite a long way, apparently, right across his paddocks to the edge of his land, where, on reaching a far corner of a distant field, he put a gun to his head and shot himself.

  The party line was that it had been an accident. That he’d been climbing over a fence and had fallen on top of his gun which he’d propped up carefully on the other side, and that it had simply gone off. But Oliver McFarllen had been handling a shotgun since he was twelve; he shot regularly on the Scottish and Irish grousemoors, he hosted a corporate shoot on his own land, and apart from anything else, he’d been found alone, in the middle of the night, in his dressing gown. Accidental death didn’t hold much water, so suppositions abounded. Some suggested that Angie had taken a lover; others, that it was Oliver who had, and some scandalmongers even claimed that he was gay. Another rumour went that he’d lost all his money, that he was bankrupt, a broken man, living on credit, but like most tall stories, they all turned out to be unsubstantiated and baseless, because the fact of the matter was that no one knew why on earth he’d done it, least of all, Angie.

  The grief almost swallowed her whole. She clung to her family, but their world had gone black too, and they fumbled around in the dark together, reaching for each other, not believing, not understanding. The house, which I eventually timidly visited – knocking on the front door, getting no answer, finding it open and tentatively tiptoeing down the familiar long corridor to the kitchen – was silent. Where once it had throbbed with vitality, it now seemed full of Oliver’s shimmering absence. Grief had washed over it and I found the McFarllens clinging to the wreckage. Tara had locked herself in her bedroom whilst the other two girls were down at the stables, weeping into their horses’ necks.

  Angie, meanwhile, was in the kitchen, sitting at her huge oak table, her beautiful face pale but composed, as she said goodbye to a neighbouring farmer who’d called to offer his sympathies. As he left, pink-faced, his hat twisting nervously in his hands, she reached out and caught my hand.

  ‘Livvy, so sweet of you to come,’ she whispered, ‘so sweet.’

  I mumbled how sorry I was, not knowing whether to hug her or run away, not wanting to intrude on her grief, but as she motioned with a trembling hand for me to sit down, I sat beside her, dumbly. At that moment Johnny appeared silently in the doorway. As he stood there, his face white and drawn, jeans and T-shirt creased where he’d clearly slept in them, I realised with a jolt that actually it was Johnny for whom the world had really stopped turning. His beloved father, whom he believed himself to be so like, only not so magnificent – to have ended it all in this terrible way. As he stumbled towards us, his blue eyes helpless and staring, wide with misery, I held out my hand and he clutched on to it. For a while there he stood motionless, gazing straight ahead, and then he sank down into a chair, put his head in his hands, and wept. Angie stroked his blond head absently, staring abstractedly out of the window to the paddocks beyond, her face full of longing, full of other days.

  Imogen came back immediately, of course. She’d just started a post-grad fine arts course in Florence – had beaten countless hopefuls to get the place – but she put down her paintbrush and was by Johnny’s side for the funeral. Elegant in a long black suit, weeping quietly into her hanky, she was right beside Johnny in his grief, and for a couple of days after, too. But then, of course, she had to go back. Life goes on, and all the other usual clichés, and she couldn’t just abandon her course.

  Johnny understood. Weeks went by, and he too had to struggle on as normal, making his daily trudge to the City where he’d started in the corporate finance department of a large investment bank. But more than six weeks later, with plenty of weekends in between, still Imogen didn’t return. Johnny, too proud to ask, sent a cryptic postcard, which read: ‘They paved paradise and put up a parking lot’, to which Imogen �
� perhaps not knowing that the previous line of the Joni Mitchell song went: ‘Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?’ – had written back: ‘Well, they’ve got to park somewhere.’

  Johnny, baffled, flew out to Florence, and took a taxi straight round to her flat. Hot and dishevelled from his journey, and having climbed a million steps to get to her tiny, top-floor apartment, he was greeted at the door by a swarthy young Latin called Paolo, who, wearing nothing but a towel and a cynical smile, had informed him that Imogen was busy. Johnny, furious, didn’t stop to find out more and flew straight home, whereupon Imogen, distraught, phoned every hour, begging him to believe that Paolo was just a friend – a neighbour, actually – whose hot-water tank had broken down, and who was just using her shower until it was fixed. But Johnny was like prosecuting council, questioning and cross-examining, pushing her to admit that the Italian wasn’t a neighbour at all, or even a friend, that he was a lover, and that she was having an affair. Finally, she broke down and admitted she was.

  Johnny was not a man to take infidelity lying down, as it were, and against a backdrop of his father’s death, there was no mitigation, no room for forgiveness. A wall of silence went up between them, made worse by the fact that Imogen continued to see Paolo. Molly and I were appalled, but she was adamant that she was the victim.

  ‘He cast me aside, don’t you see? If he’d loved me he’d have forgiven me one small indiscretion.’

  ‘Yes, but you’re still seeing Paolo! You’re making it a huge indiscretion now – what’s he supposed to think?’

  ‘Well, what am I supposed to do, live out here like a nun while he’s on the other side of Europe? He can think what he bloody well likes!’

  And Johnny did, indeed, think a great deal. When I met him for our customary lunchtime drink in the City, where I was doing a poxy secretarial course and he was shinning up the greasy banking pole, he was erudite on the subject.

  ‘She’s a tart,’ he said simply. ‘She’s not getting it from me and she can’t go without it. She’s always been highly sexed.’

  ‘Oh, Johnny, that’s unfair,’ I murmured loyally, uncomfortably aware of her nun reference.

  ‘It’s true, Livvy. She doesn’t love him, does she? Has she told you she loves him?’

  ‘Well, no but –’

  ‘So what’s she doing with him then?’

  I sighed. This was typical of Johnny. If you weren’t wholehearted, what was the point? Wholeheartedness had been part of his father’s make-up, and therefore part of Johnny’s. Oliver had raced horses to win, not to come second; he lived in the most spectacular house, was married to the most beautiful woman, and had the most sought-after, glamorous children – what was the point of being a runner-up in life? But then, I thought, picking at some candlewax on the checked tablecloth in front of me, if one’s standards were so high, surely one was destined to be disappointed?

  ‘How’s Angie?’ I asked, changing the subject.

  Johnny reached for the bottle of Chardonnay and refilled our glasses.

  ‘Sad,’ he said simply. ‘Sad and quiet. Come and dig with her this weekend, Livvy. You know how she loves that. Come and stay.’

  I smiled. It had been a long-standing joke from way back, this eccentric – at my age apparently – love of gardening. Like his mother, I liked nothing more than to be down amongst the slugs and the earthworms, sowing and separating and potting on, and this secretarial course was really only to mark time until I got up the nerve to tell Mum that that was what I really wanted to do – to take a course in garden design that I’d applied for at Cirencester. She’d be horrified, of course.

  ‘I don’t know where you get this strange, earthy streak,’ she used to say, wrapping her cardigan tightly around her as she watched me trowelling away in our two square foot of back garden. ‘Must be your father’s side. There’s nothing remotely agricultural about the Du Brays.’

  Yes, well, there was nothing remotely human about the frigging Du Brays either. My maternal grandmother had fallen out with my mother years ago, and although she lived only a matter of miles from us, in the centre of St Albans, as a child I was forbidden to see her. I did try to make contact once, when I was about sixteen, but had been told very sternly by the elderly woman on the other end of the phone in a heavy French accent that ‘your grandmother ees not at home’, although it was quite clear it was she I was talking to. As I’d put the phone down I’d had a sneaking sense of regret for Mum. With a mother like that, was it any surprise she’d ended up as she had?

  Yes, so Mum was sniffy about my gardening, but Angie McFarllen, on the other hand, had treated it as a wonderful surprise. She’d found me, early on in my days at her house, crouched down in her herbaceous border, pulling a few weeds from around the tender young shoots of her aspidistras, and had recognised that same, avid light in my eyes. She’d pounced.

  ‘Good God, Livvy, are you one of us? Are you a secret horticulturist?’

  ‘Well, not exactly,’ I’d blushed, sitting back on my heels. ‘Mum and I haven’t exactly got much of a garden. I’m just an enthusiast really.’

  ‘Then for heaven’s sake come and enthuse with me! No one else in this wretched family does. They’re all too busy playing tennis or fiddling with their stupid vintage cars. I’ve got acres here, and no one to attack the weeds but poor old Ron, who’s on his last legs, and I certainly haven’t the heart to tell him, poor devil. Come on, let’s get cracking. Help me separate these flaming day lilies before they take over the garden like triffids!’

  And so had begun our horticultural relationship. In the days before Oliver’s death, we’d dug away furiously together, breaking forks in her hard, uncompromising chalky soil and roaring with laughter at yet another broken prong, but more recently, as Angie went quiet and withdrawn, just on our knees, weeding around the scented pelargoniums and the lavender, silently and companionably.

  On one of these latter, quieter days, I’d looked up from the greenhouse where we were pricking out and potting on more peonies, to see Johnny, charging around the paddock in an open-topped Land Rover with two squealing sisters in the back. I’d straightened up from the bench where we were working, and shaded my eyes to watch. He’d always loved speed, whether it was careering round on a quad bike or performing wheelies on a clapped-out old motorbike he’d found in the back of the barn. In the old days, we’d all ridden in turn on the bike behind him, tearing down the drive, eyes shut, numb with terror, and I remember flushing with pride one day as he’d careered to a stop in front of the others and said: ‘You know, Livvy’s the only one who’s got the guts to lean into the curves. The rest of you are dead weights, like carrying a sack of potatoes. Just watch and learn!’

  Well, this was the first time I’d seen him back in the driving seat, as it were. Just for fun, for a laugh. I’d caught Angie’s eye as she set aside a seed tray.

  ‘Almost like old times,’ I’d murmured.

  ‘Almost.’ She’d paused. ‘Except his heart’s not in it. He’s still very vulnerable, Livvy.’

  Perhaps she hadn’t meant it as such, but I’d taken this as a warning shot across my predatory bows. I buried my face in the baby peonies and took up my trowel again.

  Later on, though, as I looked at him across that half-drunk bottle of Chardonnay in that dark City wine bar, I realised that actually she was right. Death had changed him. I hadn’t thought that I could be any more attracted to Johnny than I already was, but vulnerability could be awfully attractive, especially in such a confident man.

  ‘OK,’ I said, putting down my glass, ‘I’ll come this weekend. I need to sort out your herb garden, anyway. The ground elder’s practically taken over there. It’s a disgrace.’

  He laughed. ‘Sometimes I think we ought to pay you for this.’

  ‘Of course you should.’

  He looked startled. ‘Oh! Oh well, Livvy, why didn’t you say? I mean, I’m sure Mum –’

  ‘Oh, don’t be r
idiculous. Belt up, Johnny and pour me another drink. If anyone owes anyone anything, it’s me.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ I slid away from his blue gaze. ‘For offering me a glimpse of another life, I suppose. A different sort of life.’

  He didn’t say anything, but as he dropped his eyes to the table, I spotted recognition in them. He’d seen my mother, of course. And he’d seen Hastoe Villas.

  To tell you the truth, I’m not entirely sure how it happened – how one weekend’s gardening turned into another, and then another, which in turn led to pub suppers alone with Johnny, then trips home on his motorbike under the stars, with me really leaning into those curves, and finally, of course, trips to bed. To me it seemed entirely natural – after all, I’d been dreaming about it for years, so it didn’t exactly take me by surprise – and it was utter, utter bliss, but I suppose if it took anyone by surprise, it was Johnny. He sat up in bed one summer afternoon as I lay back on the pillows in his bedroom overlooking the fields, and raked a bewildered hand through his hair. He blinked out of the window.

  ‘D’you know, Livvy, you’re an absolute tonic. I swear to God I feel like a new man, I reckon I could jump out of that window, clear that apple tree and race right around those gallops! And I mean – Christ, who would have thought?’

  ‘Who would have thought what?’

  ‘Well, you and me!’

  He turned, and I narrowed my eyes at him from my nest on the pillows. ‘What, you mean Johnny the grand fromage from the big house and little old Livvy?’

  He threw a pillow at me. ‘Bugger off, I didn’t mean that at all. But you must admit, you’ve crept up on me, Liv. You’re a dark old horse.’

  ‘Ah yes, that’s me,’ I smiled. ‘The rank outsider. Long odds, not much to look at in the paddock, pretty dodgy pedigree, but coming up hard on the rails at fifty to one.’

  He frowned. ‘Why d’you always do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Put yourself down?’