Another time I’d popped in to take her some shepherd’s pie we had left over, and she’d opened the door and told me that she was ‘very disappointed in Tabitha’.
‘Why?’ I’d asked, bridling instantly, gripping my offering.
‘The other day, I came back from Waitrose with my shopping, and she was lying on the trampoline in your front garden, sunbathing.’
‘Yes, she does that.’
‘She just about managed to raise her head when she saw me and said: “Oh, hi, Granny.” Then she lay back down again,’ my mother told me, outraged. ‘Didn’t offer to come and help with my shopping or anything! Can you imagine?’ I could, actually. Had no trouble with that little vignette at all. ‘And when I told Josh that at some point I’d like him to get the logs in for me, for the winter, and then work out a thrice-weekly rota so that my log basket is always full, he looked so startled you’d think I’d asked him to rub sticks together and make the fire himself. Presumably he gets the logs in for you, Ella?’
‘Er … well …’ No, of course he didn’t. My children were bone idle. Wouldn’t know a thrice-weekly rota if it bonked them on the head.
I’d been ashamed and read the Riot Act that night, so that Joshua had filled the log basket, even though it was only August, and Tabs had gone across and said, ‘Sorry for not helping, Granny.’ But the next time Mum came, for Sunday lunch, she’d been so critical of Tabitha’s chipped black nail varnish and her unbrushed hair and the holes in her tights, that Tabitha had burst into tears. I’d been furious. And, actually, secretly pleased she’d behaved so appallingly. It gave me some vindication, I felt, for not popping round every five minutes. I’d surely done my bit merely taking her. Ottoline, though, would not be put off by a barrage of complaints or terse assurances that she was perfectly OK. She’d see a vulnerable old woman. The one I was pretending not to. I prickled with shame.
‘She’s tricky, Ottoline,’ I said quietly, by way of explanation.
‘Oh, I know. She pretty much told me to sod off. But I did ascertain that she’d found the butcher and doctor’s surgery, et cetera. It’s a blessing she can drive.’
‘Well, quite,’ I said, with a creeping sense of horror at the day when she couldn’t. When I’d have to fetch and carry for her, when, God forbid, she’d have to live with me. An entire, dizzying screenplay danced luridly across the horizon, with Josh and Tabs at university, or, worse, in flats in London; Sebastian with a string of lovers opposite; me still delivering his clean linen and no doubt rubbing Vanish on the stains – and my mother in one of the children’s rooms, berating me constantly. Me and Mum for ever. Oh, God. If anything was designed to make me run away with Ludo it was this. I had a horrible sensation of time slipping through my fingers: a sense that, in the blink of an eye, here I’d be – and there Mum would be. At my chair at the kitchen table. The more comfortable one at the head, with the arms and the cushion. I went cold.
‘Ottoline, this is a mistake, isn’t it?’ I gabbled breathlessly. ‘Having her here? She needs to go home.’
‘Oh, no, I think it’ll do her the world of good. I’ve already talked her into coming to my pottery group next week.’
‘Really?’ I was astonished.
‘Well, she said no, but I insisted. She’s got to get out, Ella. Can’t stay cooped up in that cottage all day in her twinset and pearls, looking like there’s a nasty smell under her nose. Even she can see that. Shall I feed the chickens?’
And she strode off in her puffa jacket to get the swill bucket from under the kitchen sink where I kept it. That was what I loved about Ottoline, I thought, watching as she added some stale bread from my breadboard and strode back outside. If something needed doing, she just did it. If Sebastian needed a sitter, she stripped. If a stubborn old woman needed bringing out of herself, she’d do it. If the chickens needed feeding, she’d feed them. She just got on with it. She was the sort of person who could probably plough a field with her bare hands if she had to. I watched her small, round frame march across the yard, pail swinging from her hand. She had no time for naval gazing, for gossiping, for chewing things over for hours with other women. Some would say she lacked sensitivity, but I thought she was ultra-sensitive. So sensitive she knew life just had to be coped with, whatever it threw at you.
In fact, she’d be a surprise hit at Lottie’s touchy-feely Holistic Centre, I thought as I went inside. Whilst Lottie couldn’t wait to wade in and give advice, had to sit on her hands and desist, Ottoline would be just the opposite. Would listen quietly, a hunched little figure in her faded jeans, patched sweaters and puffa jackets. Years ago, at the end of one of my classic, shoulder-shaking, cheek-soaking rants about Sebastian’s infidelity, she’d handed me a man’s spotty hanky and said: ‘Yes, I do see. How awfully difficult.’ Or something equally, marvellously, understated. Then she’d got to her feet, brushed down her denim knees and told me to follow her. We’d headed down the garden collecting a trowel apiece from the potting shed, and as we’d energetically weeded the lower bed together, I’d found myself almost embarrassed that I minded having a failed marriage, when, clearly, what mattered most was getting the bindweed out.
She was no thug, though. She threw the most beautiful plates and bowls in her studio at the Dairy: wide, slim platters which she glazed in subtle and translucent tones of duck-egg blue and green, or very pale white, when one thought white was just white. She could paint designs on them too, although she’d gruffly admitted to it only when I saw some at the back of a cupboard one day, before she’d quickly shut the door. Yet it was Ottoline who’d put down that paintbrush and defiantly take the tractor out in heavy snow to get groceries for the elderly from the village shop when the farmer said the road was impassable; or who’d dig an allotment when the tenant was in hospital, worrying about his cabbages. I suspected, too, that Ottoline made appointments with Lottie knowing her client list was thin. She took a rather dim view of alternative medicine but how like her to join the queue if necessary. I, on the other hand, although glad to support Lottie, had hoped for results.
As I gazed reflectively out of the window, mulling over all of this, my mother gazed back from her cottage. I jumped. Shit. You see? Always there! Panic-stricken I plucked my phone from my pocket and rang my sister. After the briefest of pleasantries, and going against everything I’d just been considering – and what Ottoline might hopefully have taught me – I said: ‘The thing is, Ginnie, I think Mum could do with a break. Why don’t you invite her round?’
‘What, today?’
‘Well, why not?’
‘I’ve got the fair today, you know that. For Save the Children. It’s impossible. I’m still here now, on my stall. Yes, those gloves are fifteen pounds, but they are pure cashmere.’
‘Tomorrow, then,’ I said, undeterred. ‘Have her tomorrow, Ginnie. Maybe she could stay the night?’ I was still at the window and could see Mum still hovering at hers. I knew she wanted a cup of coffee. Knew too, though, that if she came in I’d have to use all my life force not to scream as she picked holes.
Ginnie lowered her voice. ‘Ella, I had her over last Monday, if you remember. And she criticized everything.’
‘Well, she criticizes everything here, too!’ I yelped.
‘Yes, but in front of Richard.’
I shut my eyes. Always Richard. Always she wheeled out the husband. The trump card. Which I didn’t have.
‘Wanted to know why I had so many plates on the walls, and that stag’s head over the Aga, which Richard shot in Scotland, and which she said was a dust collector. “When did you last get up there to do it?” she asked. And when I told her my girl did it, she wanted to talk to Linda about not just dusting it, but getting a bucket of soapy water to it. Trust me, Ella, Linda will leave if Mummy even speaks to her, let alone tells her off. She’s terrified of her. No, I just can’t risk it.’
Husband and staff. Two trump cards lacking in my hand.
‘What – so you’re not going to have her at all? No
t ever?’
‘No, of course I will! I’ll take her out, like I said I would. But, you see, I’ve got the fair tomorrow and the next day, so I’m afraid this week is impossible. Yes, it’s a little cot blanket. It is rather darling, isn’t it?’
‘Well, that’s an outing in itself, isn’t it? Take her with you to that,’ I said angrily. ‘It’s at Celia’s, isn’t it? She’d love a snoop around Longhorn Manor.’ I’d been to one of these fairs: lots of stalls filling the interior of a grand house, so plenty of nosing round the bedrooms. ‘You can park her on a chair at your stall, get her to wrap stocking-fillers or whatever you’re selling, surely? She’ll love it. Love meeting all your friends!’
‘It’s too long a day for her, Ella,’ she said patiently. ‘I’m here until eight this evening – oh, hi, Lucinda! Two minutes. Literally, two minutes. Tonight? The Spencer-Cavendishes? Yes, we are! Oh, good!’ She came back to me. ‘And then tomorrow I’m here from ten until nine. Be reasonable.’
‘She can drive herself. Come home if it’s too long a day for her.’
‘She’ll get lost. It’s all windy lanes. And she hates the satnav I bought her, doesn’t like somebody telling her what to do, apparently. I’ll have her next week.’
But I knew, with rising panic as I put the phone down, that next week would be Ginnie’s turn to do Riding for the Disabled, or to sit on the Macmillan Cancer committee. Twenty women round a huge dining-room table in some other stonking great house, their credentials for raising money all indisputable, but … didn’t charity begin at home? With her mum?
‘She’s a great do-gooder, isn’t she?’ said Lottie drily, some hours later, as I lay on her slab at the Holistic Centre. Lottie was clicking around her tiny consulting room in her L K Bennett’s, fiddling with an Adele CD which she said soothed her, although I couldn’t help feeling I was the one who should be soothed. She crossed to a trolley to line up her needles and then, worryingly, to consult the manual on her desk. Lottie could never resist a swipe at Ginnie, whose lifestyle she derided but probably rather envied. I realized I should never have said anything.
‘Yes, and she’s brilliant at it, actually,’ I said, changing tack in sudden defence. ‘I can’t tell you how much money she’s raised. Thousands. She works incredibly hard.’ Funny thing, family. Fine for me to knock, as hard and as often as I liked. But not my friends.
‘No one asks her to do it,’ she said lightly. She turned. ‘Didn’t I say take your trousers off?’
‘Um, yes, you did,’ I said nervously. ‘But I thought it would just be in the ankles? Like last time? Fine to just roll them up a bit?’
‘No, it changes now. I’ve got to do knees, and um … somewhere else.’ She frowned back at her textbook, surreptitiously consulting it again.
‘Right,’ I said weakly, slipping out of my jeans. At least I had an afternoon slot. Lottie said she got better as the day wore on and I so badly wanted to believe her.
‘Is she still doing all that charity-ball stuff?’ she asked with a small, secret smile. Ginnie would send Lottie invitations to countless fairs and bazaars, but not the charity balls, which were very much for her own crowd, having a jolly time in black tie, outbidding each other for skiing holidays in the auction.
‘Yes. That’s where they raise the most.’
‘I’m sure it is. It’s just …’ She wrinkled her brow thoughtfully. ‘I think I’d have more respect for her if she worked in the Oxfam shop in town, like my aunt does. You know, for free. Sorting through people’s smelly old jumpers and paperbacks.’
Well, of course Ginnie wasn’t going to do that. Rather exhausted, I said surely it didn’t matter how they raised the money as long as they did, and at least Ginnie wasn’t lolling by her pool, ordering her staff around.
‘No,’ she said shortly. ‘At least she’s not doing that.’
And there we left it. With me wishing I’d never mentioned my sister. I knew Lottie felt aggrieved at never having once set foot in Ginnie’s house, having heard so much about it, and in the very early days, when we’d just moved in, she’d even had Ginnie over to supper. She’d given Ginnie six dates so it had been impossible for my sister to refuse. Sebastian and I had been at the occasion too, but it hadn’t been a towering success. Lottie was a terrible cook and had only two dinner-party dishes in her repertoire. One consisted of bits of anaemic chicken floating in a creamy goo, which Sebastian christened ‘Chicken in a Spunk Sauce’, and the other was a sort of brown slop, involving mince, strange pulses and God knows what, which he called ‘Labrador Sick’. That night Lottie had surpassed herself. She’d done both. Labrador Sick was served in ramekins to start with and Chicken in a Spunk Sauce followed, on top of solid white rice. Lottie was also a very sweary cook, and after much clashing of pans at the sink, and clouds of billowing steam as she drained the rice, which burned her hands, she brought the boiling plates to the table amid cries of ‘Fuck! Fuck! Fuckit!’
Richard, paling under a skiing tan, and used to lightly grilled turbot or possibly partridge at this time of year, had pushed the food around his plate in the tiny, steamy kitchen in wonder. Ginnie asked if she could open the window and lunged to do so, and Sebastian and I did what we always did and got roaring drunk so as not to notice the food. Ginnie had never asked Lottie back, and even though Lottie had invited her to numerous open days at the Holistic Centre, with special offers attached, she never came.
‘Perhaps I should have her to supper again?’ she’d mused once, and before I could stop myself I’d said, ‘No.’ Too quickly. Lottie’s lips had pursed.
I knew she was hurt, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. Ginnie, like my mother, chose her friends forensically. She didn’t deviate from a very narrow path.
‘Your sister thinks I’m common,’ Lottie had observed to me once and I’d cringed with horror, because that very morning, in my sister’s kitchen, when I’d asked, with a smile, if she liked my lovely friend Lottie, Ginnie had wrinkled her nose and said: ‘Bit common.’
‘She does not!’ I’d lied roundly to Lottie, remembering too the furious row that had ensued between the sisters over Ginnie’s granite work surface. I’d told her our own family were no great shakes, look at Auntie Doreen. Hardly a countess. What gave her the right to say that?
In fact, it was probably that very insecurity which had prompted Ginnie to say something as snobbish as that, as she carefully covered her own tracks. But as Lottie picked up her needles and approached, I did hope she didn’t have my sister in mind.
‘Knees, you say?’ I said nervously, although, actually, before I knew it, she’d popped one into my left one. Seamlessly.
‘Well done,’ I said admiringly, thinking: Good. I’ve picked a good day. I relaxed slightly as she moved around the end of the bed and popped another one in the other knee, again achieving that strange, slight tugging sensation which spread down the limb and meant she’d got it right. That it was working.
‘Mmm … yes,’ I murmured, knowing she’d like that.
‘Good,’ she murmured back.
Sometimes it was hard not to get the giggles with all the murmuring and the music. Me, that is. Not her.
‘Those are your tension points for insomnia,’ she murmured.
‘Ah,’ I murmured gratefully, shutting my eyes. ‘So now I just lie here for, what? Twenty minutes?’ As Ottoline said, this was the great thing about acupuncture. The little shut-eye one got after. The quid pro quo, as it were.
‘In a sec. I’ve just got to put one in your head.’
My eyes snapped open like nobody’s business.
‘In my head? Why?’
‘Because that’s where it goes. Don’t panic. I’ve done it heaps of times.’
‘Whereabouts in my head?’
‘In the middle of your forehead. Between your eyes.’
Shit.
She hovered, needle poised. Then she hovered some more. Came closer. If she couldn’t see the fear in my eyes, I could certainly see it in hers.
‘Um, Lotts, look,’ I said quickly, mouth dry. ‘The insomnia’s not so bad these days. In fact, last night I slept like a baby. Nine hours. Surely the knees are enough?’
‘They won’t work without the head.’ She was swallowing quite a lot. I could see her throat bobbing about.
‘Well, never mind, they don’t need to. As I said, nine hours solid and – Christ! What was that?’ Something cold slipped down my face, just missing my eye.
‘Sorry – sorry. Just slipped out of my hand. Your head’s a bit sweaty, that’s all. Couldn’t get purchase.’
My fault, of course. The next attempt was on target, but we were both shaken.
‘Thank goodness it was you,’ she said, breathing heavily. Gustily, even. She stepped back from the bed as I lay there, pierced and immobilized, like William Tell’s assistant on a bad day. She then got very busy, bustling round the room in her clicking heels to check heaters, the sound system – apparently I was to have Joe Jackson now – adjusting the blinds at the window.
‘Don’t move, will you?’ she instructed, composure restored. Hers, not mine.
As if I could.
‘And I’ll be back later.’
Oh, splendid. Hopefully with more weapons of torture. The things I did for my friends. Which, as we know, is not quite true. The things I did to try to ease my mind, to still my buzzing brain. To shut it down and give me some respite from life. As I lay there, half naked and liberally speared, Lottie wobbled from the room in her heels, softly shutting the door behind her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
‘Meet me for a coffee?’ Ludo was suggesting casually some days later, as I painted the broken fence at the bottom of the garden, mobile clamped between shoulder and ear.
I laughed. Oh, that it were that simple. ‘Why not?’ I agreed, entering into the spirit, although a bit of me knew he was serious. ‘Or dinner at that new Italian everyone’s talking about?’
My Husband Next Door Page 16