by Claire Sandy
‘They’re for the kids!’ snorted Shen.
‘I sleep in the pink one,’ said Mabel, fresh freckles already crowding her nose.
‘The girly one,’ said Miles.
‘The girls can share,’ said Evie brightly.
‘Yay!’ Mabel applauded.
‘No!’ Amber’s sobbing was sudden, noisy, violent.
‘Darling,’ began Paula, folding over her like a closing umbrella.
Whispering hotly in Evie’s ear, Mabel said, ‘She’s always crying. I don’t want to share with her.’
Damn. Where was Mike when there was tricky parenting to be done? He was always around for food fights. ‘You’re sharing,’ she said firmly.
Evie might have brought a serpent to paradise, but her husband had brought something far worse: a metaphorical Redcoat’s uniform.
‘This,’ he said, waving a guide book to the local area, ‘is full of things to do in the vicinity.’
‘What’s a vinissitee?’ Mabel loved mangling new words.
‘The area round about,’ said Tillie.
‘My big sister,’ said Amber, in her hushed squeak, ‘knows all the words in all the books.’
‘So does . . .’ Mabel tailed off. ‘No. My big sister doesn’t. But she knows how to disable the parental locks on her computer.’
‘That you pronounce perfectly,’ said Scarlett.
‘I don’t fancy a vinissitee,’ said Mabel.
Earlier, among the crumpled sheets, Evie had prophesied that Mike would have trouble peeling the children away from the manifold delights of Wellcome Manor. The pool had been discovered not only to be whimsical (a brick-edged circle in the grass, alongside a cottagey pool-house),
but also relatively safe (no deep end).
‘I want,’ said Dan, ‘to do somersaults on the trampoline.’
‘May as well order the taxi to A&E now,’ said Evie, resisting the urge to comb the ginger – no, Titian – fright-wig on her son’s head.
‘Were trampolines,’ asked Mabel, ‘invented by tramps?’
From the terrace Clive snorted in amusement.
A mobile phone by the sink bleeped and Evie jumped a foot in the air, even though it wasn’t her phone. Shen peered over and read the message. ‘Zane. Won’t be here until lunchtime, apparently.’
‘The cheese museum,’ said Mike, soldiering on, ‘is open today.’ With a kids’ TV-presenter level of enthusiasm, he added, ‘They let you make your own feta!’
‘I hate feta,’ said Mabel, that throaty voice surprising everyone, as it often did.
‘Who is feta?’ asked Amber.
‘I think,’ said Evie diplomatically, ‘that’s a no to the cheese museum.’ What child, she thought, would say ‘yes’?
‘Hmm. Really?’ As a parent, Mike should have been aware of the average child’s innate lack of curiosity about cheese. ‘OK, then, how about a nice arboretum?’
Evie rather enjoyed the children’s faces. She shared a satisfying, don’t-let-Mike-see-us-smirking smirk with Shen.
‘I don’t know what that word you said is.’ Even Mabel wouldn’t tackle ‘arboretum’ this early in the day. ‘But it sounds boring.’
He persevered. ‘An arboretum is a tree – um – place,’ explained Mike. ‘A lovely place full of trees, where you learn about trees.’
‘You make a compelling case,’ said Evie.
‘It sounds even more boring than when I didn’t know what it was.’ Mabel had the finality of a hanging judge.
Amber looked tearfully at Paula. ‘Do I have to go to a tree place, Mummy?’
Dan was forthright. ‘Trees suck.’
The dogs made a sudden clamour in the hall, Patch’s berserk yammering loud above the bass-line of Prunella’s springy jumps against the front door.
Clutching her throat, Paula jerked Amber towards her. ‘Who’s that?’ she squeaked.
It was Jon, and from the way he ploughed through Patch and Prunella’s extravagant welcome, he wasn’t a dog person.
‘You were quick!’ said Clive.
‘What kept you?’ said Paula. ‘Can I get you something?’ She was on her feet. ‘You must be thirsty. A coffee?’
‘I’m fine,’ said Jon.
‘Perhaps a nice—’
‘I said I’m fine.’ Jon sat and looked at the stone floor just long enough to make everybody – possibly even the thick-skinned Patch – feel uncomfortable, before saying, ‘The village is rather quaint’, as if he’d been rehearsing that for a while outside the door.
Paula didn’t seem to have heard this conversational gambit. ‘Or a croissant? There’s some—’
‘Not hungry,’ said Jon. A touch late, he tacked on ‘darling’.
‘I could do you a nice omelette.’
Jon made no reply, looking at his wife as if she was talking a foreign language.
‘I’d love an omelette, Mum,’ said Tillie.
Good girl, thought Evie approvingly. Tillie had saved her mother from an awkwardness that her father either didn’t notice or didn’t care about.
Clive said, ‘Mike here is looking for takers for the cheese museum.’
‘Sounds great!’ said Jon.
‘You’re both mad,’ said Clive. ‘Buzzing off to museums. I work far too hard all year round to do anything but lie in the sun on my hols.’ He put on some sunglasses that probably cost more than all the sunglasses the Herreras had ever owned, put together.
‘Yeah, well,’ said Mike, hyper-casual, ‘you old blokes deserve your rest. No point trying to keep up.’
Clive’s eyes were invisible behind his shades, but Evie noticed his tummy shrink as he pulled in his gut.
The pool was a magnet, drawing all the Wellcome Manor iron filings to it. Clive stretched out, magnificent tum already a fetching shade of flamingo, as Scarlett swam lazy lengths in a frilly two-piece beneath a sun that blazed in a most un-English manner.
On a modishly industrial sun-lounger Paula neither lay down nor sat up; she’d invented a whole new awkward position of her own. Evie felt naked in her utilitarian navy cossie next to Paula, still in shapeless skirt and shapeless blouse, feet still in sensible courts.
‘Where’s Amber?’ asked Paula, with an anxiety that suggested they were living under siege, rather than in a luxury holiday rental.
‘We sold her to a passing circus,’ said Shen. At Paula’s horror-struck look, she relented and said, ‘Oh, Paula, it’s been years since I sold a child to a circus. She’s playing pong-ping.’
‘Ping-pong,’ corrected Clive sleepily, popping his panama hat over his face. ‘And don’t tease Paula, darling. She’s not at home to Mrs Sarcasm.’
‘No, no, I don’t mind. I just . . . I . . .’ Paula dribbled to a halt and shifted slightly, so that she looked even more awkward and uncomfortable than before. She clearly hadn’t been at school the day they covered How to Enjoy Your Hols.
Evie gave herself up to the sun’s relentless seduction and shut her eyes. Two minutes later she was shaken awake by many small hands.
‘It was amazing!’
‘Table tennis rocks!’
‘Patch ate a ball!’
‘Did you,’ asked Evie, rising up and squinting, feeling the toxic itch of sunburn across her chest, ‘give Amber a go?’ The recessive little girl might struggle to hold her own against Miles and the raucous brother/sister combo.
‘She won!’ shrieked Mabel.
‘Lovely. Stand back a bit, though, eh?’ said Evie; one day they’d get the child’s volume control sorted out, but for now Mabel whispered in crowds and made like a megaphone in church.
‘She beat Dan,’ said Miles. ‘Really beat him. Really, really.’
‘Well done, Amber,’ said Evie, charmed by the flush on the girl’s pinched face, which transformed it from anaemic to bonny. Paula’s attempt to create a morbid mini-me wasn’t quite working; Amber was as full of pep as the other kids.
Like a baby newsreader, Fang had a gaze that was level and steady as she le
t Elizabetta wipe her dimpled hands. They were alone in the kitchen.
‘Let’s get your pretty little hands clean,’ said Elizabetta. She patted the baby’s nose with the wet wipe. ‘And that naughty nose!’
Fang laughed. A lot. She found noses hilarious. As she laughed and laughed and laughed, her nanny ran water over the dishes in the sink.
‘I love to wash the plates!’ said Elizabetta in that wide-eyed, over-enunciating manner that people use around a baby. ‘I don’t want to lie by the pool! I don’t want to walk about in the expensive bikinis! I don’t even want to sleep. I really, really enjoy being up all night with you, because Madame Shen is too lazy to get out of bed and hold you.’
Fang’s head jerked around at a sudden, sharp buzz.
‘Somebody left their phone,’ Elizabetta said to the baby. ‘They have a message. It is private, Fang.’ She reached up to a shelf, found a phone among the plates and beakers and read the screen. ‘Listen to this, Fang.’ In her heavy accent, Elizabetta read out the message: ‘I refuse to be your dirty little secret any more xxxx.’
Padding past the pool, Scarlett held her iPhone so close to her face that it was almost up her nose.
‘Give that here,’ said Evie, from her deckchair.
‘Give what where?’
‘The phone. Give.’
‘What?’ Scarlett looked confused, then amused, then horrified. ‘You’re not serious, Mother.’
‘Hand it over. It’s only a phone. You’re not in Sophie’s Choice.’
‘Think about what you’re doing, Mum.’ Scarlett gathered her resources to fight this terrible injustice. ‘This isn’t a phone. It’s my life.’
It might have struck Evie as funny, but instead it struck her as sad that her daughter could genuinely believe her life could be compressed into a SIM card. ‘Give.’ She held out her hand.
‘My friends . . .’ Scarlett held out the phone; she knew her mother’s face as well as she knew her own. One was ancient, of course, but the raw material was the same, and Scarlett knew by her expression that Evie wouldn’t back down.
‘There’s a friend over there.’ Evie gestured to a distant bench beneath a willow, where Tillie sat, the book in her hands every bit as inevitable as Scarlett’s phone, her retro ruched swimsuit and men’s shoes the polar opposite of Paula’s bland camouflage. ‘If you can be bothered to make the effort.’
‘God, Mum, you go on as if you know everything.’
If Mike were around, that ’tude wouldn’t go unpunished, but Evie remembered the hormone hurricane-years better than he did and was consequently more forgiving. ‘You’ll thank me for all my nagging one day.’ When you’ve learned that the resources in your head are far superior to the whirling party on your phone.
‘Not today, though, Mum.’ Scarlett’s self-righteous stomp was spoiled by her flip-flops.
‘Wait for me.’ Dan sped after her, Patch at his heels with a Müller Light tub stuck to one ear, reminding Evie of how a family break without the dog had felt unthinkable; now that they’d arrived, Patch was a hairy liability, bound to break something costly, or to poo in something antique.
In less than half a minute Dan was back; evidently there’d been a sisterly request along the lines of Bog off.
‘Never mind, honeybun.’ Evie ruffled her son’s hair, relieved that he still allowed such sappy behaviour, and shaded her eyes with her hand as she watched Scarlett, her outline dappled in the haze, nonchalantly approach Tillie beneath the tree. With equal nonchalance Tillie got up, and the two disappeared through an arch in the hedging.
‘Want to stretch your legs, Shen?’ called Evie across the azure pool.
‘Sure.’ Shen rose with one fluid movement, nothing like the carthorse-in-labour struggles of Evie escaping from her low seat. ‘Let’s find that grotto.’
‘Count me out,’ said Clive, flopped onto his back.
‘Nobody asked you.’ Shen put her arm through Evie’s, leaning in, confidingly. ‘Zane texted again. He won’t make it for lunch. Says to expect him at dinner time.’ She pulled a face. Even grimacing, she was pretty. ‘He’s going to ruin the holiday. I feel it in my bones.’
‘Give him a chance.’ Evie had heard the odd bulletin about Zane’s exploits. ‘How does his mum cope with him?’
‘We don’t really speak. And, no, I didn’t have a row with her. She can’t forgive me for being younger than her.’
‘I assume you mean she can’t forgive you for shamelessly nicking her husband.’
‘If you leave diamonds lying on the carpet, don’t complain if somebody takes them home.’ Shen spotted Elizabetta gently bumping Fang’s buggy down the terrace steps and summoned her with a wave. ‘Did you know she’s married a toy boy?’
‘I also know the age difference between them is half the difference in your marriage.’ Mrs Clive #2 was a Pakistani beauty, whose allure had only deepened as she entered her fifties. What’s more, the woman had been gracious and welcoming to the upstart model who’d waltzed off with her husband, via an accidental pregnancy. ‘You Clive-wives could all be friends. You have a lot in common.’
‘Correction: we have nothing in common,’ said Shen, taking Fang and kissing the top of her downy head. ‘They lost Clive. I intend to hang on to him.’
‘They probably felt the same,’ said Evie. ‘What does a grotto look like?’
‘We’ll know it when we see it,’ said Shen, as the polite lawn gave way to Wellcome Manor’s version of a wilderness. As wildernesses go, it was tidy, the wild flowers and grasses startled to have been let in. ‘My marriage is different. Clive’s got it right this time.’
‘So he should, after all that practice.’ Evie easily dodged Shen’s swipe. ‘How is it different?’ Marriage was on her mind. Good ones. Bad ones. Shaky ones. Her own.
‘We do more together, as a family – you know?’
‘Like what?’
There was a pause. ‘We went to Harrods last week.’
‘If we leave out shopping, what do you do together?’
‘We’re here, aren’t we?’ Shen’s temper, never particularly elastic, began to twang. ‘Clive and I are for keeps.’
‘So you trust him?’ Evie wondered if his first two wives had trusted Clive.
‘I let him have his secrets,’ she said. It was a statement. It didn’t invite comment.
Evie had to comment, however. ‘Not sure I could manage that with Mike.’
‘No,’ said Shen, archly. ‘You two have no secrets then?’
‘Fair enough.’ Evie bowed her head, as if Shen had cuffed her. Shen knew all – thanks to a long night of Pringles, house-red and empathy, just before they’d come away.
‘Listen, Evie, all women – even past-it ex-wives – are a threat. I maintain a scorched-earth policy with all women.’ She reconsidered. ‘Obviously not with you,’ she said kindly. ‘Clive would never fancy you.’
‘From anybody else,’ said Evie, ‘that could sound rude.’
‘I was going to add,’ said Shen, ‘that – besides – I love you, you fool.’
As they delved deeper into the manor’s grounds, Shen turned that last admission over in her mind. It was true; it was also unlikely. She travelled lightly, never getting too attached. Not a navel-gazer, she left the self-analysis to others, preferring to drive a tank through her life, rolling over obstacles and never looking behind her. But Evie was necessary to her.
I trust her, Shen thought. Evie had saved Shen from the Ubers, who, frankly, were the most tedious ragbag of stapled-together old bats that Shen had ever encountered; their polite titters over coffee didn’t compare with the belly laughs she and Evie shared.
And I love her. Shen thought it again, for the sheer joy of experiencing the feeling. Even though, she thought, Evie’s hair’s a shocking mess. And I’d happily burn every garment she owns – cut-off denims, seriously? And nobody has to look their age nowadays, yet she won’t let me pay for Botox. And obviously she’s too good for Mike, although that’s no
reflection on him; all women are too good for their husbands.
‘I think the grotto’s just a myth,’ said Evie. ‘Shall we give up?’
‘I never give up,’ said Shen. ‘Let’s make a strategic retreat.’
After lunch, Evie went to the summerhouse, a product of the gingerbread-house school of architecture, with a thatch and a low front door. The sounds of her extended holiday ‘family’ were distant here, just the occasional faint scream of an eight-year-old or the irritated yap of a twenty-nine-year-old. Setting her laptop on a rustic table, Evie yanked her mind round to her work.
Or Mum’s ‘work’, as the Herreras called it; the inverted commas were audible.
Distracted for a while by the cottagey interior – the computer looked all wrong, as if Hansel and Gretel were about to LoL at YouTube – Evie applied herself.
Her deadline loomed. And the title bothered her: Love Finds a Way. Too slushy, she thought. Not sexy enough.
Because sex was the name of the game, in Evie’s line of business – the post-Fifty Shades of Grey, raunchy online publishing business. At the beginning, when she’d gingerly written her first sex scene, face aflame, legs knotted with embarrassment, she had entertained daydreams of fame and wealth.
After publication of His Masterly Touch, the first novella under her pen name of Lucinda Lash, the daydreams were downsized, but she still looked forward to a long-haul holiday, with one of those butler people bringing her cocktails by a private plunge-pool.
Reality struck. By her eighth title – Don’t Be Gentle – Evie knew to expect pin-money from her ‘work’. Even she was doing the inverted-commas thing now, but writing had saved her life. That was really how it felt.
When she and Mike had met, it was Evie who had the career. No inverted commas. Possibly a capital letter. She was a young gun in advertising, a junior copywriter who relished the sitting up late, drinking stinking coffee and throwing ideas off the walls/her colleagues’ heads.
Mike had wondered how she found satisfaction in such a shallow industry, but then he also wondered how she could spend an hour in the bath or cry at Pixar films. (They’re computer graphics, he’d say; you’re an unfeeling monster, she’d sob.) Scarlett’s arrival, unplanned but as welcome as if she was a lorryload of cream teas, had thrown a spanner in the works of Evie’s career, but she’d intended to work twice as hard to catch up, after her maternity leave.