by Freya North
Starbucks is filling with teenagers. It’s time to go. Vita feels tired – but not half as exhausted as poor Suzie looks. At the door, she offers Suzie first her hand, then a hug.
‘Are you OK, Vita?’ Suzie asks, squeezing her tight. ‘You must’ve been through hell.’
Vita accepts the sentiment quietly. There’s a flurry of activity in her mind. Oliver. Pear Tree Cottage. Her mum and the legacy of her dad. Her friends. And Oliver, again. She really likes the answer she can give. ‘I’m doing OK,’ she smiles. ‘I’m very OK.’
Day Trippers
Time doesn’t always fly when you’re having fun. Sometimes, it does you the greatest favour by slowing right down so you can hold on to the hours, indulge in every passing minute, appreciate each second, sense it all with every fibre of your being, as though you’re moving in zero gravity, as though you’re floating. Wynfordbury Hall seemed so long ago – Oliver and Vita having seen each other often in the intervening fortnight. In some respects, with their relationship unfolding and so much newness coming into their lives, the world seemed different. In other ways, it was reassuringly the same. The weather was wonderful, business was quiet for Vita but busy for Oliver. The wasps were still as lively and as pissed off with the world as ever – but Oliver saw to the traps regularly and persuaded Vita that she really could keep her kitchen window open and let the summer air into the house.
‘Hey, Mum.’
‘Darling – I was going to call you later.’
‘When are you off?’
‘Day after tomorrow. How are you?’
‘I’m well – really well.’
‘And things? How are things?’
‘His name’s Oliver, Mum!’
‘I didn’t want to appear pushy, darling.’
‘Well – Oliver things are great. Exciting, lovely. We had fish and chips on the Essex coast last night – sat on a bench eating it straight from the paper, it beat any fancy restaurant I’ve ever been to. That’s why I’m phoning you – I suddenly remembered that crazy old oak tree that Dad loved. Do you remember it? I don’t know where it is – even if it’s still standing. But I thought I could find out about it. I thought I could take Oliver.’
‘The Bowthorpe Oak.’ Vita’s mother went quiet. ‘He did love it, your dad. I’m so glad you remember it. I’m so glad you want to go there.’
‘Where is it – can you remember?’
‘Lincolnshire.’
‘I wonder if I can Google it.’
‘No – I’d go by car. A lovely day trip. You could have lunch in Stamford. Or go for a stroll around Burghley House.’
‘I think I’ll make a picnic.’
‘How are the pears, darling?’
‘They’re still everywhere.’
Oliver knew Vita had planned a picnic, but she’d harped on about keeping the location a big secret and it tickled him not to know. Of course, he’d have to know at some point because he’d be driving, but for the time being he did as he was told and turned up at Vita’s early on the Sunday with a tank of fuel and travel sweets replenished.
‘Hullo, missy.’
They stood at her doorstep, kissed a little clumsily, grinned – still experiencing the tingle of apprehension and nerves which made the first few minutes both awkward and delicious.
‘I’m just making final preparations. Come in.’
Oliver came into Pear Tree Cottage. Something smelt good.
‘Chicken!’ Vita told him. ‘Come on through.’
He followed her. In the corridor he could hear The Archers on Radio 4 drifting through from the kitchen, as if familiar friends were in there, sitting at Vita’s table. ‘Do you want me to check the traps? Good God, Vita!’
‘Sorry?’
He was gesticulating towards the garden. ‘You’ve been out there!’
‘I know!’
‘With or without the Legendary Cagoule?’
‘With – silly!’
‘Are you hosting a village fête?’ He was looking out of the kitchen window, at yards of pastel-coloured bunting which Vita had strung along the fence and across the small paved area between the kitchen and the pear tree. ‘Is that the surprise?’
‘It’s bunting!’
‘I can see that.’
‘I’ll probably have to take it down soon – if we run out in the shop. It’s very popular, this time of year.’ She paused. ‘Village fête? You cheeky sod.’ It felt good to be relaxed enough in his company to tease him.
He came over to her, tucked her hair behind her ear and kissed her on the forehead. ‘You’ve been out in your garden,’ he marvelled. ‘I think that’s brilliant.’ And he felt chuffed, as if some of the credit was his.
‘I know,’ she said and she really looked so proud of herself. ‘Vita – One. Wasps – Nil.’
In the fortnight since they’d first slept together, tenderness had grown exponentially to the passion because, as much as they wanted to get naked, they wanted to learn about each other too. With these early dates came a sense of achievement – how nerves and an endearing artlessness at the start of a date could smooth out naturally into easy conversation and confident energy in bed. The monumental subjects weren’t returned to – DeeDee and Tim had been a necessary part of the trip to Wynfordbury Hall, paving the way for Oliver and Vita to progress onwards on their own. Since then, the more they found out about each other – whether it was over a shared love of brown sauce, not ketchup, on chips; or that Oliver had a dodgy ankle from an old windsurfing injury; or that Vita loved horror films; or that they both liked Springsteen and that they never missed Top Gear even though neither were that interested in cars – the more that fondness and desire blended and burgeoned. It was heady – the excitement of discovering the unique facets of the person they were each growing to like so much. They loved each other’s company. They fancied each other rotten.
For Vita, there was another emotion which she was experiencing – confidence. She had felt energized over this last fortnight, and that’s why she could go out into the garden with the bunting, that’s why she hadn’t written a Post-it in two weeks. For Oliver an emotion returned which he hadn’t felt for a long time – joy. He felt it when he was with her and he even felt it when the lads at work made references at his expense to ‘nice pears’. For Oliver, such lightness in his life was welcome. Michelle begged to meet him, Candy too. But Vita just wanted to spend time with Oliver. They were both engrossed in their jigsaw puzzle; the various pieces slotting into place, a great picture emerging with fine details and beautiful colour.
*
‘What are we doing today then? And when can we eat the picnic? It all looks great.’
Vita grinned. ‘We’re going to a place that’s special to me because my dad loved it. I haven’t been for years. It’s in Lincolnshire. It’s right up your street.’
He helped pack the basket, amused by her choice of Wotsits to go with the fancy bread and organic chicken drumsticks she’d roasted herself. They left Pear Tree Cottage laden.
‘Where to?’ Oliver asked once they were in the car, a tatty road map on his knee opened at Lincolnshire.
‘Well, funnily enough – it’s a place called Bourne. It’s my turn to take you to see a fantastic mad old tree.’
Called the Bowthorpe Oak, Oliver said to himself. He wouldn’t spoil it for Vita. He wouldn’t tell her that tree was like an eccentric ancient uncle to him, nor that he’d been the one to verify it for the Woodland Trust.
‘The Bowfield Oak!’ she declared.
So he wouldn’t correct her. He’d just drive. And they’d catch the last of The Archers en route. Oliver let Vita direct him all the way there, even letting her overshoot the small turning up a farm track; continuing on in the wrong direction for another mile or so, until Vita realized her mistake. Eventually, they arrived.
‘We have to give a small donation, apparently,’ she told him and he let her lead him to the farmhouse where, to Oliver’s relief, the elderly farmer appeared
not to recognize him. Vita pored over the photograph album of the tree over the decades before leading the way according to the farmer’s instructions, her memory kicking in much to her delight.
‘This way!’ she said to Oliver. ‘I remember this – it’s this way.’
It was wonderfully quirky – walking around the house and up through the farm garden, passing by a gate, going on alongside the raspberry beds until they came to a meadow in which a flock of geese paraded as if they were part of the entertainment. The tree stood at the top end. Or, rather, it squatted, gargantuan. One thousand years old, partly hollow and with a girth of over forty feet, it resembled a gnarled old cave crowned by a thick straggle of immense branches.
‘In the last century, apparently, you could sit and have dinner inside the tree. And it’s been used as a stable,’ Vita told Oliver who had put his hand tenderly over a nodule of bark. ‘Isn’t it brilliant? Have you seen a tree like this on your travels?’
How was he meant to answer that?
‘Don’t you like it?’ Vita asked. ‘Is it not a thousand years old? It is an oak, isn’t it? What?’ She looked confused while he tried to prevent his face from creasing in amusement. ‘What?’
So Oliver had to confess. And with mock indignation, Vita found a section where she could clamber up so she sat there and pulled her face into a theatrical pout. But she let him reach up his arms to her, to help her down and, with the massive tree affording them privacy, they kissed while the geese bickered in the background. Vita thought, Am I falling in love? She thought, Is it safe to do so with this man? She thought, I don’t need to answer.
On the way home, after the picnic had been plundered and then walked off in the grounds of Burghley House, Vita felt pensive. She thought back to that first date at Wynfordbury Hall during which it had felt easy, right, to speak of the profound times they had experienced before meeting each other. She thought how, since then, she and Oliver had focused on their newly combined here-and-now, on lovely happy dates. If Tim or DeeDee were mentioned it was fleetingly, conversationally, which felt natural and appropriate. But on the journey back from Lincolnshire Vita wondered whether they had consciously veered away from weighty subjects. But hadn’t it been so uplifting just to explore and discover and enjoy and be happy?
As they drove back to Hertfordshire, she thought about how Jonty was staying at his friend’s – yet there had been no mention of her and Oliver going back to his house that night. They’d be watching Top Gear at Pear Tree Cottage. Later, they’d make love in her bed. They’d wake with the parakeets, make love again, doze off until the alarm went. Then she’d bring him up a cup of tea in the morning before he left her to return home; to change into work clothes, to swap his car for his truck, to pick up Jonty on his way to work.
‘How’s Jonty?’ she finally asked halfway down the A1, unnerved that such a simple question had taken miles and miles for her to voice.
‘Having a ball,’ Oliver said.
Vita couldn’t let the pause last too long for fear of it turning a question into an issue. ‘Does he know about me?’
‘Yes,’ said Oliver, ‘he does.’
‘I’d like to meet him,’ said Vita, ‘properly.’ There was another pause she was quick to fill. ‘At some point,’ she qualified, trying to sound light.
There was only a split second of silence, but it was loaded. ‘Of course,’ said Oliver, wondering when.
And it crossed Vita’s mind – is Oliver perhaps not as ready for this as I am?
Tim and Vita
Vita’s mum went to Amsterdam with her friend Lorna.
Michelle and Chris took the kids to Disneyworld.
Candy’s sister rented a house in the Lake District and the extended family all decamped there.
The shop was quiet, but it always was, this time of year. Oliver was busy, as was customary in August – as if nature was helping him to stockpile income now, in preparation for the more meagre midwinter months. He had taken to popping into That Shop occasionally during the working week. One time, he brought Vita plums from a client’s overladen tree. The old lady had been in the shop that time and Oliver had offered her a handful too. She still stole the candy-coloured measuring spoons. On another occasion, he came in with Boz who bought a pair of cherubs, just on the cool side of kitsch, to send home. When Boz brought them to the counter, while Oliver was fiddling with a dog trying to put it back into its clog, he had touched Vita on the arm.
‘Thanks, miss,’ he said, giving a flick of his head in Oliver’s direction, ‘for him. Cheers.’
Vita hadn’t known how to respond but she was so moved, so flattered, that she gave Boz a twenty per cent discount.
Jonty continued to work with Oliver all the days not beginning with a T or an S. He knew about Vita and once or twice his dad had asked if he’d like to pop into the shop to say hullo on the way back from work. Though Jonty was cool with the concept, the beauty of a teenager’s summer holiday was earning a bit of money and then hanging out with mates. So, thus far, he’d had his own plans which had clashed with his dad’s suggestion. But it worked both ways now; Oliver was a little less fussed if Jonty asked to stay over at friends because it gave him a whole night asleep with Vita. At Pear Tree Cottage. Vita had shelved any previous anxiety about why her place was their sole base. It felt more and more like home now and, with the garden generally under control and blistering July replaced by a more benign late August, she was starting to love being there, inside or out, on her own or with company.
As for Tim, Vita hadn’t seen him in over a month. Phone calls had been kept to a minimum, texts had all but dwindled. Their relationship was being conducted over emails focusing purely on business and Vita had stopped noticing the times when he signed off with an ‘x’ and the times when he didn’t. When he called into the shop, unannounced, he really was the last person on Vita’s mind.
‘Hey.’
Vita had just discovered Laurie Graham and was galloping through the author’s backlist, currently enchanted by Gone with the Windsors. Reluctantly, she hauled herself out of the 1930s and looked up to see Tim. She hadn’t heard him at all.
‘Hey,’ he said again. He looked different – smaller, somehow. Not healthy. That haircut was not good on him. And what’s with the sideburns, Tim – where have they gone?
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘hi.’
‘May I?’
That was a first – asking if he could come over to the till and reach across to print off a balance. Vita stepped down from her stool and went to tidy a table that didn’t really need it. Tim read through the figures and sighed heavily, staring levelly at Vita as if she was mostly responsible.
‘It’s on a par with this time last year,’ Vita told him, ‘which really isn’t bad considering it’s August, we’re in a recession, the flower shop on the corner has shut down and Tiley’s are constantly having sales and promos to shift their crap.’
Usually, Tim would have huffed off out of the shop at this juncture, with some withering aside. But he didn’t go. He lingered, staring at two customers who’d just come in as if they were of a lowly caste. Vita returned to the till, took money, gift-wrapped a glass storm lantern and gave the customer a scented tea-light for free. The other bought a greetings card for £1.99 and asked for a plastic bag. All the while, Tim loitered like a useless store detective. Once the shop was empty, he spoke, tossing a froggie beanbag from hand to hand.
‘It looks to be a nice evening,’ he said. ‘Do you fancy a quick drink?’
Vita stared at him blankly.
‘A drink, Vita – tonight? With me?’ Was that a little-boy-lost look he was giving her?
Vita realized she was frowning. She straightened her brow and attempted to sound as neutral as possible. ‘No – Tim. Sorry.’
And then it came. She wasn’t doing as she was told, she wasn’t reacting as she should, as she used to, and Tim wasn’t having his own way and therefore he wasn’t having any of it.
‘How long
are you going to give me the cold shoulder?’ He dropped the beanbag back on the pile as though it was contaminated. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Sorry?’
‘But are you?’ Tim let it hang. ‘You continually blank me these days – you’re only in touch about work, and that’s only by email. You never phone or text. I haven’t seen you since God knows when. You just ignore me.’
‘Tim?’ It was as if he was midway through some imagined heated discussion between them.
‘What’s the point you’re trying to make?’ He was pleading now. ‘I know I fucked up – and I regret it. But there’s only so many times I can say it, Vita. So why are you still up there on your lofty Moral High Ground doing your whole Mortally Wounded act?’
Vita stared at him in disbelief. She hated his tone and she hated his deluded conviction in the nonsense he was spouting. ‘I have other plans,’ she kept her tone level. ‘And Tim, you have a girlfriend.’
‘Jesus wept,’ he said, ‘not that again.’ The whole world seemed to wind him up.
‘She’s not a that,’ said Vita, ‘she’s a Suzie.’
‘We don’t get this time back, Vita,’ he said to her, ‘these months we’ve lost. I made a mistake.’ He was raising his voice. ‘I cocked up.’ Vita found she had to stifle a giggle. ‘How many times do you need me to say sorry?’ She really had no answer for that. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ He sounded like a kid. He could see it wasn’t working. He changed tack. ‘I never wanted us to be over,’ he added pitifully.
Vita had heard enough. Not just today, but over the years. And now she’d had enough. Look at that beautiful day outside, rapidly in danger of becoming tarnished. She closed her book and placed it slowly on the worktop. She had one chance to say this and, more importantly, to say it right.
‘What you did to me, how you treated me, how you abused everything I tried to give you – my trust, my self-respect, my beliefs, my self esteem – I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy.’ Vita thought about that. She thought of Oliver. She thought of Suzie. Even of Rick. So much had changed already. She thought, So much has happened and there’s so much on the cusp of happening. And she thought, I don’t want to go back in time, I want only to go forwards. And she thought, Time has been on my side after all. ‘I’ve changed,’ she told him.