Sunshine Over Wildflower Cottage

by Milly Johnson

‘Oh cheers,’ replied Stel with a disgruntled click of the tongue. ‘Do I look that bad?’

  Linda felt slightly guilty for her over-reaction then. ‘No, don’t be daft. It’s just a . . . a shock. I don’t think I’ve ever seen you without the full slap on.’

  Stel passed over two plates of sandwiches and small cakes. It was her turn to do the catering today. ‘I thought I’d have a change. New man, new image. He likes me better like this.’

  ‘Going well, is it?’ asked Caro, thinking that Stel didn’t look like Stel today, in her tight skirt, pin-heels and a pale, bare face.

  ‘Wonderful,’ grinned Stel.

  ‘Well, I’m glad somebody’s had a good week,’ said Linda with a sigh and a very pointed sideways look at Iris, who was the picture of innocence as she sat on the sofa drinking tea.

  ‘Sounds ominous,’ Stel answered. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Ask Kofi bloody Nannan over there,’ and Linda tilted her head towards her mother.

  ‘What have you done then, Iris?’ asked Caro, on tea-pouring duty.

  Iris opened her mouth to speak, but Linda spoke over her. ‘She took it on herself to go and see Enid Pawson. You can guess how it went if I tell you that we are now totally banned from even speaking to Freddie on the phone.’

  ‘Oh, Linda.’

  ‘She stunk of cheap gin,’ snarled Iris. ‘That woman and that bloody fish-pond and that giant vomiting concrete gnome combination is an accident waiting to happen. I thought I might be able to talk reason to her. Grandma to great-grandma.’

  Every other woman in the room exchanged telling glances at the notion of Iris Caswell as a diplomatic force.

  ‘Now, of course, we are totally knackered. Rebecca screamed at me down the phone. I’ve got a pile of presents ready for Freddie’s birthday but she’d smash them and return them if I deliver them, she said.’ Linda felt herself close to breaking-point, but she took a deep breath and pressed her hands down as if pushing on a physical plane of rising distress. ‘I am not going to cry today, I am not going to cry today,’ she recited, a mantra she was unfortunately too familiar with.

  ‘I don’t know what to say. Words fail me,’ said Gaynor. ‘The . . . the bitch.’

  ‘I can’t blame Mum for trying,’ said Linda, sinking to the sofa. ‘I think Mother Teresa would have ended up throwing C-words at the Pawsons if she was in our shoes. I think they actually enjoy the power trip. I just can’t wait until Andy gets home.’

  ‘Won’t be long,’ said Stel, reaching over to give Linda’s hand a tender squeeze.

  Linda allowed herself a further moment’s sadness then shook her head. ‘Look, I refuse to pull the mood down. Someone tell me something nice. Gaynor – anything good to report?’

  ‘No.’

  They all thought that Linda probably shouldn’t have relied on Gaynor to lighten things up.

  ‘These are lovely,’ said Iris through a mouthful of tuna sandwich.

  ‘I’ve got the magic touch,’ chuckled Stel. ‘I’ve switched to diet mayo though.’

  ‘Good,’ said Linda. ‘I can’t understand why I’m putting weight on but not eating any more than I usually do.’

  ‘That’s the menopause for you,’ said Iris, reaching for a miniature pork pie. ‘I went from a size twelve to having an arse the size of Russia in six months. I was all right once I cut out bread and potatoes. I lost it easily.’

  ‘Thanks for not giving me your genes then,’ tutted Linda. ‘I’m built like Dad.’

  ‘Your father had a very sweet tooth, Linda. I was never that bothered about cakes, although I am very partial to those macaroon things that look like little biscuits.’

  ‘Macarons,’ Gaynor corrected her with an over-egging of French accent that made them all want to giggle. They decided against it though as Gaynor was super-sensitive at the moment.

  ‘I never had a sweet tooth before I hit the menopause,’ said Stel. ‘Now I could mainline chocolate for a living.’

  ‘I hate the bloody menopause,’ spat Gaynor. ‘I’m sick of waking up at night and having to change the sheets; I’m sick of interrupted sleep; I’m sick of feeling on edge all the time.’

  ‘And being so stiff after sitting down for a bit that you can’t get up without making that Ooof sound,’ chuckled Linda.

  ‘And my memory has shrunk to the size of a peanut,’ said Stel. ‘I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gone upstairs for something, forgotten what, had an automatic wee, come back downstairs and then remembered what I’d meant to do in the first place.’

  Linda slapped her hands together. ‘Sod tea, I’m having a vodka. Anyone care to join me?’

  ‘Not for me, thanks,’ said Gaynor.

  ‘Count me right in,’ said Caro. ‘I’m stressed to hell today.’

  ‘Here, Caro.’ Linda got up to fetch a bottle of Grey Goose. ‘What do you want in it – orange, tonic?’

  ‘Another bloody vodka,’ replied Caro. ‘Eamonn has decided that the kitchen needs tiling and he’s turned the house into a building site. He can’t believe I’m moaning about it. Splash of tonic please, love. His idea of relaxing is to start renovating things. The man cannot sit still. He always has to be “doing”.’

  ‘They have no idea,’ said Stel. ‘Although I could have put up with that after having Darren, who listed his hobbies as stagnating and vegetating.’

  ‘What about the new fella, Stel?’ Caro gave her a wink.

  ‘Totally the opposite. He’s perfect,’ Stel smiled.

  ‘Thank God we have this group on a Sunday,’ said Linda. ‘I’d go mad without it. Dino drives me bonkers with his untidiness. He thinks he’s faultless.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Gaynor with a curled lip.

  ‘Come on Gaynor, what did you hate about Mick?’ said Stel, unsure whether she should ask, but then Gaynor would get the hump if she were left out.

  Gaynor thought for a few moments before answering. ‘He used to make a noise with everything he did. He’d chink ice in glasses, constantly crinkle newspapers when he was reading them, drop things. He couldn’t do anything quietly. He couldn’t shut doors, he had to slam them. And he couldn’t whisper to save his life.’

  So many things had annoyed her about Mick but they were everything she missed about him now. If he came back to her she’d never moan at him again. He could chink and crinkle and slam to his heart’s content.

  ‘Have a vodka, Gaynor,’ urged Linda, and wouldn’t take no for an answer. So Gaynor drank it and along with the men-bashing and buffet her pain was dulled for an hour or so and it galvanised her into thinking positively. She’d always felt Mick would come back, when he worked this temporary madness out of his system. She just wanted to touch his face and tell him that she loved him.

  *

  Viv was totally and utterly flaked out that night. Her eyelids felt as if there were lead weights tied to them, but she had decided that there was no way she was going to bed without finding the missing component of Geraldine’s copy perfume. She made herself a strong coffee, which might give her half-an-hour’s spark at best, and sat at her makeshift lab on the folly’s dining table. She pulled the bung out of one of the test-tubes resting on the rack with the Geraldine’s Perfume labels on them and inhaled. It was some sort of herb. Her mind scurried over the files of aromas stored in her head: thyme, sage, basil – no, all wrong.

  Something caught her eye outside the window. It was the bedding she had put out on the line to dry and had forgotten about. She downed tools to unpeg the sheets and bring them in. They’d been hanging up since the morning and were loaded with all the scents that the breezes had picked up. As Viv pressed her nose into them, a thousand-watt lightbulb switched on in her head. How stupid of her not to know. She’d fixated on that missing part being something far more complicated and exotic, but it was simply cut grass. She threw the sheets down on the sofa and opened up her box of phials. She had three cut-grass oils in her box, uncomplicated base scents made by people who had the same devotion to
their jobs as herself. She chose the May grass: green fat blades plumped by sunshine and warm summer rain. And that was all it took, just two drops added to the mix and Geraldine’s perfume had been replicated perfectly.

  Chapter 53

  As Gaynor was hunting for her keys the next morning, the postman slipped a letter through her door and it slid to the floor addressee upwards. Just what I bloody need to start off the week, she thought, recognising the solicitor’s stamp at the top. She snatched it up, ripped it open and read it.

  Dear Mrs Pollock

  Can you please contact us at your earliest convenience to discuss a matter of great urgency and delicacy.

  Your sincerely

  Edgar Leadbetter

  Well, there were no prizes for guessing what that was all about, Gaynor growled to herself. She’d changed her email address, home telephone and mobile numbers the previous week to make things even more awkward for Mick and his solicitor to bully her into signing the divorce papers. She could make a detour on her way to work, call in to Cripwell, Oliver and Clapham, Solicitors at Law, and give that snidey little shit Edgar Leadbetter a piece of her mind. She had knickers in her drawer older than him, so she would tell him face to face once and for all that SHE. WAS. NOT. SIGNING. ANY. DIVORCE. PAPERS. FULL. FRIGGING. STOP.

  Gaynor seized her keys, locked the door roughly and drove aggressively into town. There were no vacant spaces outside the solicitor’s office, which didn’t help her mood. She flew into the reception area and announced herself to the young receptionist with all the regality of the Queen of Sheba.

  ‘Mrs Gaynor Pollock for Edgar Leadbetter. I do not have an appointment but he’ll see me.’

  ‘Right, right. Would you like to take a seat. I’ll . . . I’ll ring through to him.’

  Gaynor was too wound up to sit and chose to pace up and down instead. She expected Edgar Leadbetter to keep her waiting but he didn’t; he arrived quickly, holding out his hand in readiness to greet her.

  ‘Edgar Leadbetter, Mrs Pollock, how good of you to come in,’ he said. Gaynor shook the hand, but not very enthusiastically. She managed to convey in the action that she was extremely pissed off. ‘Please come into my office.’

  She followed Edgar Leadbetter out of reception and across the hallway. He didn’t look old enough to be a fully fledged solicitor. Actually, he didn’t look old enough to be a school prefect.

  ‘Please, have a seat,’ he gestured towards one of the two chairs at the other side of his desk. He appeared nervous. As well he should, thought Gaynor.

  ‘It’s good of you to come,’ he said, running his finger between his thin neck and collar. A blotchy rash was pushing up through his skin there.

  ‘Isn’t it,’ replied Gaynor sarcastically.

  ‘Can I get you some tea?’ asked Edgar.

  ‘No thank you,’ said Gaynor, her tone clipped. It would take more than a cuppa and a sodding jam ring to make her play the game, if that’s what he was thinking.

  He cleared his throat before speaking next. And his chair creaked as he rocked nervously back and forwards on it. She remembered those little details later. That the chair needed an oiling, that his fingernails were bitten to the quick and there was a slight brown smudge on his shirt as if he’d spilt a drink on it and dabbed off the worst of it.

  ‘I’ve been trying to ring you, but without success. I er . . .’

  ‘Mr Leadbetter.’ Gaynor pushed down on her rising fury and started calmly, intending to build up to a crescendo he wouldn’t forget in a hurry. ‘I think you might be fully aware by now that I have absolutely no intention of cooperating with you or my husband. If he wants to divorce me then he will have to do it without my consent and I will fight—’

  He cut her off. ‘Mrs Pollock, I—’

  She cut him off back. ‘I will not be persuaded, cajoled, blackmailed, pushed, forced or otherwise into making this easy or pleasant for Mick Pollock and his scruffy, stupid, common little tramp of a girlfriend. However, I do have every intention of costing him as much money as possible, of causing him as many sleepless nights as I can. I will not acquiesce. I will make these divorce proceedings feel as long as my thirty-year marriage if I can. I will cause him expense and frustration. I will rejoice at every new grey hair he sprouts as a result of his stress. I will do everything I can to reduce the perfidious bastard to rubble. I will rip the innards financially and emotionally out of him and cause him so much destruction that they will name the next hurricane in Mexico after me. Now, what do you have to say to that, Mr Leadbetter?’

  The aftermath of silence rang in the air. Mr Leadbetter’s fingers threaded together in a tight ball and he gave Gaynor a strained smile of sympathy.

  ‘Mrs Pollock, the reason I needed to get in touch with you was that Mr Pollock died on Friday. I am so sorry.’

  Gaynor felt a ping noise in her head, as if something that kept her from feeling that the world was spinning had stopped working and the full impact of its movement hit her like a wrecking ball. She put her hand out on the desk to steady herself.

  ‘Mr Pollock had a massive heart attack,’ said Edgar Leadbetter, his voice sounding echoey as it bounced off the inside walls of her head. ‘He died instantly. He didn’t suffer at all.’ His fingers made an absent click as if that’s how long her husband had taken to die. Gaynor’s brain was telling her this wasn’t true, that she was dreaming, to buy her time to compute all this, but simultaneously she knew she was conscious and that it was real and that it had happened.

  ‘He had changed his will to make Miss Bellfield his next of kin but I thought you had a right to know.’

  More words. Something about Danira arranging Mr Pollock’s funeral service and Gaynor was expected to respect her wish that she was not to come to it. That she didn’t have to worry about not being financially secure because Mick had made sufficient provision for her in his revised will. Words that floated around in her head, refusing to be pinned down and absorbed, except for three which thundered and flapped and looped and took up the whole space in her skull. MICK IS DEAD. MICK IS DEAD. MICK IS DEAD.

  ‘Is there anyone I can call for you?’ asked Edgar Leadbetter, his voice soft, bringing her back into his office, as if drawing her from the depths of a trance.

  ‘No, no, I’ll be all right,’ Gaynor said, wondering why she wasn’t crying. She wanted to, she wanted to howl and scream but her eyes were dry, her insides were dry. She felt hollowed out by grief from this revelation.

  She remembered writing down her new contact details for Mr Leadbetter. There was a blank after that, then she was in her car, putting the key precisely into the ignition. Then she was setting off, pressing the button that connected her phone to the car by Bluetooth. Then she was speaking to Janet, her fellow receptionist, and telling her that she wouldn’t be coming into work today because she had just become a widow. The word belonged to old women in black veils. It lent respect and dignity. But all Gaynor could feel, as she drove on automatic pilot, back to her house, the house she had shared with her husband for thirty years, the house he had carried her into as a young bride, the house she now moved around in like a ghost looking for him, was pain.

  Chapter 54

  The weather started to change that Monday and it was not the only change that was happening in Ironmist. As each hour passed, the air cooled more, the clouds thickened, their soft whiteness muddied and the sunshine over Wildflower Cottage faded. The ground mist formed into discernible swirls and the colours of the love-in-a-mist seemed to intensify to an almost electric violet.

  Heath rested from brushing Keith to look over at the next enclosure. The big horse blew out a shudder of breath as if telling him to hurry up and start again. He stood there patiently waiting for the scratch of the bristles to resume. Viv was showing Armstrong how to groom Wonk, avoiding her front flank as Wonk didn’t like the feel of the brush near her false leg, and how to put her at ease. She’d found all this out herself as Wonk wasn’t usually very tolerant of the brush, but when
you talked any old rubbish to her in a soft voice, she allowed it.

  Viv had come far in matters of animal care since she’d arrived at Wildflower Cottage, thought Heath. She didn’t even flinch now when walking through the geese to lift their eggs. And as for the growing relationship between herself and Ursula, it was touching to watch. More than touching – beautiful. One minute, Viv was throwing up on the grass at the thought of cutting up meat for the birds, the next she was flying nearly as high as they did on the wave of their acceptance.

  Maybe he had been wrong, maybe she really was here ‘for experience’ as she put it. He had to give it to her, she was a damned hard worker. She had cooked, she had washed, she had dealt with the paperwork and helped with the animals without a single murmur of complaint and then gone back to the folly at night probably to mix her potions, like a white witch. He noticed that the folly lights were still on past midnight sometimes.

  She was the same age as Sarah had been when they first met, yet Sarah was like a skittish colt, girly and giggly. Antonia Leighton was serious, dark and moody. He knew that a large part of her allure was that she was so different to Sarah, or so he thought, but then similarities began to surface. Sarah was pretty, knew it and used it. Antonia was all too aware of her beauty. Both of them were adept at attracting people to them but once he had seen past their polished veneer, what remained was not enough to hold him.

  Viv was laughing, reaching behind her, securing her caramel hair back into the band from which it had escaped. He rarely saw her without a smile playing on her lips, a light dancing in eyes as blue and warm as Antonia’s were blue and glacial.

  Talk of the devil and he’s sure to appear. Or rather she in this case.

  Antonia Leighton was riding down his drive. She was dressed in black and looked as if she were part of the horse, as if she had ridden out of a dark fairy tale, a wild malevolent spirit with bad powers. The horse slowed to a trot, her body rising and falling in rhythm with it. There was no smile on her face, there never was. Antonia Leighton’s beauty was one which sat best on a scowl and Heath wondered what madness could have ever persuaded him to think of her in romantic terms.