by Freya North
Vita looked out of the window. They were approaching Hereford Street. In the British Isles, Hereford was right the other side of the country from Durham but in Wynford, Hereford and Durham were neighbouring roads.
‘What did she say?’
‘Why don’t you ask her?’
‘I’m asking you,’ he said softly.
Vita recalled Suzie’s haunted look the other week. ‘Look – it was some time ago. I phoned – she picked up. I think you were in a pub or somewhere.’
‘What did she say?’
Vita thought back; a memory of how she had felt that evening spliced through her. She could go for it, really go for it. She was sure Candy would say, Oh, sod the Bank of Karma, let rip, baby! But a sudden rattle from the wasp catchers as Tim took a speed bump too fast jolted Vita back to how her week was unfolding. No. Be bigger. Just leave it all behind. ‘She just said Tim’s phone.’
‘That was it?’
‘How is Suzie, then?’ Vita asked, a strong instinct telling her not to inform Tim about her silent visit to the shop’s window. Tim made much of shrugging with a nonplussed look on his face.
‘It’s not what you think,’ he said.
‘I try not to think of it at all,’ she countered.
‘I mean, she’s – not you. She’s so not you.’
‘I know,’ said Vita.
‘It’s not what you think, you know,’ he said again, all ambiguous and in a serious voice.
‘What I do know is quite enough,’ she replied.
‘I regret everything,’ he said hoarsely, having to jostle under the box to put his hand on her thigh. ‘I miss Us. I want you back.’
‘I want to get out,’ she said. ‘Here’s fine.’
‘You said Durham Road – this is Hereford Street.’
‘It’s fine, it’s fine. Please, Tim – I just want to get out.’
‘Vita – can’t I just –? Please – can we –?’
‘No!’ She was agitated
He took his hands from the steering wheel in mock surrender. ‘Vita, if we could just talk?’
‘No! No!’
‘Babe – I lie awake and think of you. When I’m with her – I fantasize it’s with you.’
‘Enough!’
‘I miss your beautiful little toes.’ His voice was hoarse.
‘My toes? You hated my feet – you didn’t want them anywhere near you!’
He stopped the car and took his hands from the steering wheel, throwing them into the air. ‘Jesus wept, Vita – just come off your high bloody horse, will you? Just listen to me – you owe me that, surely?’
‘I owe you nothing,’ she mumbled, faffing with the seatbelt.
‘Here,’ he lifted the box to help her. He looked at the traps. ‘Are these samples? They’re a good idea for the shop. What’s the unit price? What do they retail at?’
She stared at him in disbelief. He was brilliant at this – a master of hurling her from the jagged peaks of acute emotions back down onto some kind of bouncy mundanity. It always caught her out.
‘They’re mine,’ was all she could think to say.
‘We should sell them.’
‘They’re mine,’ she said. ‘I’m keeping them.’
‘Where else is selling them?’
‘I don’t know. These are a gift.’
She was scrambling out of the car, leaning in to take the box, feeling that however durable the glass appeared, in Tim’s hands they could surely shatter in a moment.
He handed her the box.
‘Vita,’ he said while his mind was whirring over who was buying her gifts.
‘Thanks for the lift, Tim. Go home.’
‘Vita,’ his tone of voice pulled her gaze reluctantly back to the car. ‘Can we talk? Sometime? Meet for a drink? Something?’
She just stared, wanting to swear, to shout, to run.
‘Life’s too short,’ he was saying. ‘This isn’t a dress rehearsal, you know. We won’t get this time back. Life’s too short.’
And Vita felt very still as suddenly she thought of DeeDee. She nodded vigorously at Tim. ‘You’re so right.’
‘Please?’ he said.
She looked at him. ‘Check with Suzie first,’ she said, thinking that would be the end of it.
It didn’t spoil a thing. Vita refused to let it. She strode along with marching mantras adapted from phrases on her Post-its. For the first time ever, once she reached the beginning of the Tree Houses, she felt happy to be back. Pleased to be back. Pleased and happy to be – home. She’d stayed late at work because she knew she’d be in a dither waiting and waiting if she left too early. Now she had only an hour before Oliver was due. She took the box inside and then raced back out to the corner shop.
Jam and Lager, Jam and Lager. She marched to the words.
Was it French jam? Or French beer? What kind of jam? She couldn’t remember if Oliver had specified. The shop had fancy conserve and bog-standard jam. She went for the cheaper option but bought strawberry, raspberry and apricot – in case wasps had a preference – and then she stood and pontificated on how much beer it took for a wasp to drink itself to death. There were six-packs on offer. But they were cans and Oliver had said bottles so she forked out before clanking her way home, the bags bashing her legs in her haste.
‘Simpsons, Dad,’ Jonty called as Oliver swilled plates and cutlery under the hot tap. He’d made supper, eschewing the selection of frozen meals filling their freezer, for chops, rice and peas which he’d cooked from scratch. He knew he was compensating and he knew he was an idiot. It had been Jonty’s idea, after all. He’d had his son’s blessing without even asking for it. He should go, he didn’t like being late.
‘Dad – it’s starting.’
He should go.
‘Coming.’
He sat down next to his son. The Simpsons was a ritual. The Simpsons was genius. The Simpsons was about family and The Simpsons was religion for him and his son. He hoped Vita would understand. He’d only be half an hour late. But when Homer cracked open his Duff beer, Oliver couldn’t concentrate. He could only think of Vita’s rickety kitchen table, imagining jam and beer and DeeDee’s wasp traps set out on it. He turned to Jonty.
‘Jont,’ he said, and he put his hand on his arm. ‘I’m – if it’s OK with you – I said. I would. But – you know – not if it isn’t.’
‘That makes a lot of sense, Dad. Not,’ Jonty laughed, not taking his eyes from the screen.
Oliver took a deep breath. ‘I said I’d go and help – the Vita lady – with the. With Mum’s wasp traps.’
His son looked at him. ‘Did you take them, then?’
‘Yes,’ Oliver said.
‘Today?’
‘Yes – today. That’s where I went at lunch-time.’
‘Ah – so it wasn’t just about sausage rolls.’
‘No.’
‘You told her – about Mum?’
Oliver nodded. Then Jonty nodded. Then Oliver asked his son if he was cool about him popping over there. Just for an hour. And Jonty thought, When has my dad ever used the word cool in a sentence? Suddenly Oliver really didn’t want to leave his boy at home.
‘Do you want to come with me?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t you come with me?’
‘Er,’ said Jonty. ‘Der!’ He really stretched the word.
‘Shall I just pop over then?’
‘Der!’ Jonty said again.
‘OK,’ said Oliver, but he sat just as he was.
‘Dad!’ Jonty protested. ‘Just go.’
‘Yep,’ said Oliver.
‘Go!’
‘OK,’ said Oliver.
Jonty knew the one failsafe method to see his dad off the sofa and out of the room in an instant. He flicked channels to MTV.
* * *
And so here he is, driving up the Tree Houses as slowly as he can without stalling. And, in the cottage at the end of the street, Vita is trying not to glance at the clock, at her watch, at the time on her mobile p
hone, every two seconds. It hasn’t crossed her mind that she might be stood up – Oliver just doesn’t strike her as that kind of man. But he is late. Not very, but late all the same. She’s pinched her cheekbones for a healthy glow because she remembers an actress doing so in a film. She has boiled the kettle a dozen times, she’s checked on the wine in the fridge and the whereabouts of the corkscrew. There’s been a slight breeze today so the cottage isn’t as stifling as it has been recently. She has put the jam and beer on the kitchen table. She has taken the wasp catchers out of the box, arranged them in a semicircle and then rearranged them in an arbitrary configuration. She hasn’t even looked outside to the pear tree. But she has looked outside to the front intermittently, from the safe distance at the back of the small room upstairs, to see if he’s here. Now she can hear a car. She can hear that the engine has stilled. Footsteps up her path. Oh God – he really is here.
And Oliver rings the bell saying under his breath, Here goes.
‘Hullo,’ he says. A skirt. Cowboy boots. Those nice knees again – and she’s all flushed.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Come on in.’
‘Sorry I’m late.’
‘Late? Are you? Come on in. Tea? Coffee?’ she pauses. ‘Wine?’
‘I’m driving,’ he says.
‘Oh. Yes. Tea, then?’
‘Just a small glass, perhaps – of wine, that is. Not tea.’
And they smile at each other, a little awkwardly.
He follows her into the kitchen. While she pours wine and curses herself silently for having no nibbles and thinking it would be ridiculous to offer chocolate digestives with wine, he is making himself very busy inspecting her shopping.
‘I’d suggest strawberry jam for starters,’ he says. Then he assesses the beer. ‘This is rather posh.’
‘You said bottled French lager. It was that – or Stella. They only had cans on offer.’ Vita pauses. Then she tells herself, He was honest with you – he was open. Do the same, woman. Do the same. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to buy Stella. My ex used to drink it.’
‘Stella can have quite an unpleasant effect on some people,’ Oliver says.
‘I’ll second that,’ Vita says.
‘Say no more,’ Oliver shrugs sympathetically. ‘Oh – unless you want to say more?’
‘Suffice it to say San Miguel was his lager of choice at the start of an evening – and Stella was his poison by the end of the night.’
She gives Oliver a glass of wine and he chinks it thoughtfully against hers. They say, Cheers! and beam a bit and take a good sip or two to calm their nerves.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says.
‘Sorry?’
‘If you had a hard time – with your ex.’
Vita nods. ‘How long ago?’
Come on. ‘I left him last autumn.’
‘Did he leave you for Stella?’ Oliver’s humour was gentle.
Vita smiles. ‘No – for Suzie. But Stella will always be a part of his scene.’
‘And a thousand other Suzies – no doubt.’
Vita shrugs. ‘He cheated on me before – early on.’ She pauses. ‘Love is blind.’
He pauses. ‘Love is a very good thing.’
‘Hopeless romantic, me,’ Vita says as if she’s ashamed.
‘Hope is a very good thing too.’ Oliver pauses again. ‘His loss, how careless,’ he says, chinking her glass again. ‘Here’s to you, Vita – and your future happiness.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, ‘thanks.’ She thinks how she’s told Oliver more truth in two minutes than she ever told Rick. She wants to ask him more about his wife – it all seems unfathomably tragic. But this isn’t a situation of ‘you tell me your sad story, I’ll tell you mine’. It’s an evening for being tentatively positive, for feeling light, an evening for beer and jam and wasps and wine.
‘Right,’ says Oliver. ‘Let’s get cooking. Do you have a jug?’ He mixes the jam and the beer and pours a dose into each trap. ‘Come and see. The funnel in the base of each lures the wasps up – but then they can’t fly out.’
‘I suppose, if you’re a wasp and you have to die it’s not a bad way to go.’
‘Such equanimity for a woman who thinks wasps are agents of the devil.’
‘My friend Candy bangs on about karma.’
Oliver laughs.
‘Be careful out there,’ Vita says as he goes into the garden with the stepladder. She watches him climb up and position the jars, not just in the pear tree but at the back of the garden too, as well as in the branches of Mr Brewster’s ash which bends over into Vita’s garden like a neighbourly handshake.
‘There,’ he says, back inside, washing his hands at the kitchen sink. ‘Let’s see how that goes. I’ll come back in a week and sluice them out.’
I want to see you before then. Vita wonders what to say. ‘Tea?’
He looks at his watch. He’d love to stay. ‘I said to Jonty – I’m sure he’d be fine – but I said to him I wouldn’t be long.’
Vita is looking out at the garden but it’s dusk now, and difficult to see if the wasps are out there. She turns back to Oliver. In her head she can hear how Michelle and Candy – even her mum – would be begging her to do something. There’s no awkwardness, there’s just shyness. They can detect each other’s body heat. They don’t dart away from eye contact. But they’re tentative. It’s both silly and yet a mark of the people that they are and the pasts they’ve had.
‘So,’ he says and he’s moving away from the kitchen. ‘Thanks for the wine.’
‘Thanks for the company,’ she says, ‘and the present.’ And she was going to end it there. He’s already opening her front door and then it’ll be too easy to round it all off with a cheery goodbye. So Vita leaps in. And she surfaces just fine; no need for a deep breath. ‘Oliver – would you like to, I don’t know, perhaps we could – do this again? Not the wasps and jam and mediocre wine from my fridge – but something else?’
‘Something else?’ Is he musing over her phrase or the concept?
‘Yes.’
They both pause.
‘I don’t know what,’ Vita shrugs.
‘I’d like to see you again,’ says Oliver, finding that Vita’s obvious nervousness has taken the edge off his. She smiles, reddening a little.
‘Like a date?’ she says shyly.
‘Daft word, isn’t it,’ Oliver says, picking at some loose mortar near her front door.
‘Perhaps before next week? Before you come back to empty the traps? Maybe we could – well, anything really. Have a meal. Climb a tree.’
Oliver stops fiddling with his words and Vita’s masonry and he laughs. A big proper laugh, open and natural. It is such a great sound, ringing out after the tiptoeing voices they’d been using. ‘Climb a tree. I love that.’ He looks at her for a moment. ‘I know where we could go.’
‘Where?’
‘You’ll see. Are you free – on Friday, perhaps?’
‘I am,’ she says.
‘It’s a date,’ he says.
‘A date,’ Vita says and he likes the coy lift to her voice.
‘I’ll pick you up – early, though. Say six-ish?’
‘OK. Where are we going?’
‘You’ll see. Oh – and don’t wear high heels.’ He looks again at her boots and at her knees. Very nice knees.
She likes the idea of you’ll see.
‘Bye, Vita.’
‘Bye Mr B.’
Roots
Vita liked the way that when she thought of Oliver, she didn’t construct scenarios or veer off into fanciful imaginings, she simply enjoyed playing back the real scenes, the actual conversations, between them. She found she could physically conjure both the feel of his hand between her shoulder blades when she’d had a funny turn at the yard, and the feeling in her stomach that his prolonged gaze could cause. It was the real Oliver firmly in Vita’s here and now. And they had a date at the weekend, and that was exciting.
‘It really is a date d
ate – we both said so!’ she effervesced to Michelle.
‘What’ll you wear?’ Michelle asked. ‘I’ll lend you my Stella McCartney top if you like? It would look amazing with your hair colour. Talking of which, you should treat yourself to a cut, lady – it’s a bit nothingy at the moment.’
Vita touched her hair self-consciously. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had it cut because she’d told herself she was growing it. But Michelle was right, it was no longer an outgrown bob, it was just shapeless and dreary.
‘I’ll bring it over, I’ll bring Stella McCartney to the shop.’
Vita laughed. ‘Michelle, it sounded like he’s taking me to the great outdoors – I was thinking jeans and trainers!’
‘Don’t you dare!’
‘We’re going for a walk. If you ask me, he seems to be the type of man who walks with purpose over fields and through woods – I need to be suitably attired.’
‘Well – which jeans then? And say it’s as sweltering as it is today? You’ll end up walking like John Wayne! What about your soft grey cropped trousers?’
‘That’s an idea. But I’m comfortable in jeans.’
‘Well, your trainers are awful – haven’t you some cute walking boots?’
‘That’s surely a contradiction in terms?’
‘What about my Belstaff boots? Just slip in an inner sole. I’m telling you, trainers are a no-no.’
‘You forget, he’s seen me in wellies and Dad’s old cagoule – and he still wants to take me on a date.’
‘What time’s he picking you up? Right – I’m going to phone you an hour before and, depending on the weather, we’ll make the final decision then.’
‘Whose date is it!’ Vita laughed.
‘Yours,’ said Michelle. ‘That’s the point. And I’m not having you scupper your chances in inappropriate clothing.’
Oliver was going to tell Jonty he might be home a little late and he was half hoping his son would ask why so he could tell him, but as it was Friday night and the school holidays, his son already had plans of his own, including staying over at Mark’s. So Oliver said nothing and the only thing Jonty asked about was whether his dad could pick him up sometime tomorrow.