by Maeve Haran
Matthew was in the kitchen mixing himself a G and T. ‘Do you want one as well?’ he asked her. ‘I’m feeling rather pleased with myself.’
‘What’ve you been up to?’
‘Sorting out the concert. The tickets are all printed. Marquee booked for the band. The Glebe have agreed to do some food. The wine’s organized. Cloister Wines are offering free fizz if they can be official sponsors.’
‘For a concert in our garden? That’s amazing!’ Stella was genuinely impressed.
‘Fabia gave me a hand. She’s brilliant at this sort of thing.’
‘I would have thought she’d be too busy with the shop she got for zero rent thanks to our campaign.’ Stella couldn’t keep a slight edge of peevishness from her voice. This sudden emergence of Fabia the charity benefactor as well as everything else was too much to bear.
‘She’s been incredibly generous with her time.’
This was true but Stella was beginning to feel that if she fell under a bus Fabia would move in before they’d even called an ambulance.
‘We’re going to start looking for auction prizes tomorrow. That’s how you really make money at these things. Fabia’s been to loads of them.’
‘My, you have been busy.’
‘Stella,’ it was Matthew’s turn to be peevish, ‘I’m only doing what you asked me to do.’
‘I know,’ Stella conceded, realizing she was being a bitch. ‘I’m really impressed. It’s just with this business over Jesse I can’t think straight.’
Matthew shook his head. It was obvious it hadn’t even occurred to him to worry about his grandson. Was this just being a man, Stella wondered, or being Matthew?
‘I’ve decided that if he isn’t back I’m going to Brighton to look for him,’ Stella announced.
‘Stella, I realize you’re worried but it really isn’t anything to do with you.’
‘Of course it’s to do with me! He’s my grandson!’ Stella replied angrily, convinced this was another of Matthew’s emotionally autistic responses.
‘Imagine if my mother had suddenly interfered over Emma. How would you have taken that?’
This was a sore point, as Matthew well knew. When she was younger, his mother Marjorie had infuriated Stella with her continual criticisms of their parenting techniques. ‘That child . . .’ was a common preface to the usual carping comment about Emma’s unusual table manners, punctuality and general appearance.
‘But Emma didn’t run away!’ Stella protested.
‘And if she had? And Ma had steamed down to Brighton to look for her?’
This was such a ludicrous prospect that Stella almost laughed. Marjorie rarely put herself out for anyone and now she was too old anyway. And yet how would Stella have felt if she had done so?
‘You’re the first to point out that Emma and Stuart’s marriage is a bit shaky,’ Matthew persisted. ‘If you just blunder in it will look as though you think they don’t care. Can’t you see it could make things worse between them?’
Although she didn’t want to, Stella could see his point of view. ‘But Emma should be going herself!’
‘Then why isn’t she?’
‘I don’t know. She loves Jesse. Maybe it’s something to do with Hal. He could be telling her it’ll all be okay.’
‘What does Stuart think? He’s a sensible chap.’
‘He thinks they should see what the police do.’
‘Maybe you haven’t got the monopoly on caring. Had you thought of that?’
Stella shut her eyes, suddenly close to tears, which was ridiculous since she never cried. It was the inaction she couldn’t bear, while Jesse could be out there, lost, cold and in danger. Why did she feel as though she was the only one who could see it?
‘The only way you can possibly go is if Emma agrees. Besides, what about the concert? Are you just going to leave all that to Fabia and me?’
Stella could see the obvious pitfalls in that, but what should she do? Stay here and keep an eye on Matthew, or try and find Jesse?
‘You seem to have it well in hand. You might ask Suze to help as well.’
‘So she can keep an eye on me?’
‘Does she need to?’
Matthew turned round, his face unusually serious. ‘Come on, Stella, you know what’s going on. I haven’t tried to hide it. I look forward to getting up in the morning. I’ve started to play the sax again. Fabia said I should. I know we probably look odd – she’s so glamorous and I’m . . . well, I’m me, but we have a surprising amount in common. I feel energetic. Excited. And I tell you what . . .’
Stella steeled herself. He was going to ask for a divorce.
‘. . . we’re going to open a chain of dancing clubs – not just tango but salsa, rumba, merengue!’
If it hadn’t been so desperately sad, Stella might have smiled. It was so like Matthew to take passion and make it practical.
Fourteen
————
As Stella drove through Camley town centre she remembered that she needed more oil paints to finish her latest portrait, and there was a parking space outside the art shop she liked to patronize. They were incredibly helpful and it was having a hard job surviving the Internet. She found a parking place near the shop and nipped into it with neatness and precision. Matthew liked to say that she was a terrible driver, but, left to her own devices, she was remarkably efficient.
The usually bustling town centre was quiet since all the mums had gone off to the school gates and it was too early for the after-work scurrying for buses and trains.
Stella hummed as she walked past the Caffè Nero next to the art shop, then stopped, as if she had been Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt. Seated in two leather chairs, right in the window at the front, was Emma. She was in tears and, next to her, Hal was holding her hand tenderly and mopping her face with his Caffè Nero napkin. Stella didn’t think twice about what she did next. She walked straight in.
‘Emma, could you come outside a moment,’ she said, trying to keep her temper.
Hal stood up protectively. ‘I’m not sure this is your business, Mrs Ainsworth.’
On another occasion Stella might have been impressed by his desire to protect her daughter, however misconceived, but not today. ‘If you don’t mind, Hal, this is nothing to do with you. It’s up to Emma if she chooses to throw her marriage away. What I care about at this moment is my missing grandson and why no one has gone to look for him.’
By now all the other customers were staring at them, some from behind the coffee menu, others openly.
Stella walked out of the cafe and waited for her daughter. ‘Emma . . . darling . . . I know you’re upset, but crying on Hal’s shoulder isn’t going to help find Jesse, so why don’t we go to Brighton and look for this girl Kirsty?’
Emma burst into tears. ‘Stuart still thinks it’s all my fault!’ she announced in the tones of an operatic heroine. ‘He says Jesse’s going to miss his exams and screw up his future and it’s all because of me!’
Much as she liked her son-in-law and had misgivings about Emma’s behaviour she felt Stuart wasn’t handling the situation very well. Accusing Emma like this was simply driving her towards Hal. Besides, missing exams was hardly the point.
‘I’m sure he doesn’t mean it,’ she soothed diplomatically. ‘He’s probably feeling angry and hurt and he’s lashing out at you when he should be thinking about how to find Jesse. This is your son who’s run away, the baby you cradled in your arms! I can remember how much you longed for him. How you said he’d changed your life completely.’ She looked at her daughter evenly. ‘You said it was like falling in love.’
Emma reached out a hand to her mother.
‘Well, that’s how I feel about Jesse too,’ Stella said quietly. ‘And Izzy and Ruby. I love them for themselves, but I also love them because they’re your children. It’s as though the love has been doubled. So why don’t we go and look for him together?’
‘All right,’ Emma answered, still w
avering. ‘As long as Stuart will look after Izzy and Rube. I’ll come.’
‘Good. I’ll find somewhere for us to stay.’
Stella walked away from the cafe feeling shocked at herself. She had discovered that as well as loving her daughter, she could quite seriously disapprove of her.
The staff in the art shop were as helpful as they always were. Stella stocked up on both acrylic and oil paints, some white spirit, a new rubber and three pre-stretched canvases for the portraits she would need to complete in the coming weeks.
When she got back to the car the window of Caffè Nero was empty.
The bright sunlight bounced off all the hard surfaces in the street, so strong that shoppers dashed from shade to shade. One old lady was using her black umbrella as a sunshade. In front of her a toddler in a buggy was holding an ice cream that melted in the heat and slid to the ground. His tragic expression would usually have made her smile.
But not today. Today she couldn’t help wondering whose marriage was going to survive, her own or her daughter’s? And then, another painful question, had she been right to interfere? If it hadn’t been for Jesse, she probably would have walked past and left Emma to sort out her own life.
She drove home, trying to stop these thoughts whirring uselessly in her head and found herself stuck in traffic at roadworks on the outskirts of Camley. By the side of the road, on some wasteland running down to the canal, stood a stack of about ten containers, faded and peeling, the kind you usually saw loaded into ships. The way they were piled on top of each other, balanced like a child’s bricks, so resembled the structure Fabia had erected in her shop window that they caught her attention. Next to them was a sign that they were offered for purchase or rental. She wondered how much of a market there would be in second-hand sea containers?
Just as the lights changed the thought came back to her of that young girl who had set up her office in a storage unit because it was the only cheap place she could find. It hadn’t been that long ago but somehow it seemed like years. And then she had a flash of excitement. Was there any way they could possibly be converted into cheap offices?
She stopped, got out her phone and began to search for ‘Containers as offices’. To her amazement there were clearly a number of container communities in and around London. One – calling itself The Box – was made of units just like these, all painted in different bright colours and sited on a canal in East London not unlike this one. It was full of young techie tenants who praised the sense of community it gave them – and especially the short-term leases which enabled them to start their own businesses.
Camley, of course, didn’t have the hip edge of East London, but the suburbs also cried out for cheap office space. The vast prices of London property meant that young people were living further and further from the centre and the cost of travel was so prohibitive they were desperate for local workplaces.
Stella pulled back into the traffic and sped off, grateful to have something else to think about, and full of a sense of challenge. She would have to find out the practicalities and discover how much was needed to convert containers. But she wasn’t an artist for nothing and was confident she could create a convincing mock-up to put to the council. She might even head over to The Box before she went to Brighton and have a look. Doing something constructive would take her mind off the fact that so much of the rest of her life seemed to be falling apart.
When she got home, full of plans, it was to find the house bursting with activity. Matthew had taken her at her word and got Suze involved, which was a relief as it meant she would not only know what Matthew and Fabia were up to, but also what was being planned for the concert in her own garden. Typical of Matthew; having said his piece, he would ignore the subject of their marriage from now on.
‘Oh, and we had another thought,’ Fabia added. Was that a malicious gleam in her eye as she said this? ‘We might ask Duncan’s new friend Amber to give us one of her paintings for the auction. What do you reckon about that?’
‘Good luck to you.’ Why should Fabia think she would mind about that? ‘Though I’m not sure Camley’s ready for Amber O’Riordan. People around here prefer art that goes with their wallpaper.’
Even Bernie had been drafted in to organize the teams of tent erecters, chair providers and clearer-uppers while Roxy had been as good as her word. There she was, her long legs draped over a chair, tweeting away at this very instant.
A loud argument broke out between Matthew, who supported practical plastic, and Fabia, who insisted on glass champagne flutes for the free fizz. ‘I will resign now this minute,’ Fabia announced dramatically, ‘unless we give out proper glasses. To do anything else would be an insult!’
‘I’m with Fabia on this one,’ Suze seconded. ‘Divine decadence, darling. Champagne has to be provided in a glass.’
All that was left for Stella was to make them all tea and consider sneaking off to her garden studio to think about the down-to-earth topic of converting containers. But first she turned to Roxy. ‘Could I ask you one really huge favour?’
Roxy looked up, intrigued.
‘Help us find our grandson? I’ve been reading up about this lovely young girl who disappeared in South London. She was only found thanks to celebrities tweeting about her. I wonder if maybe you could do the same with Jesse?’
‘Sure,’ Roxy replied, all sympathy. ‘I’m so sorry he’s gone off. I really like Jesse. He’s so kind to his little sister.’ Again Stella detected that wistful tone of the only child dragged from place to place. ‘Can you get me a photo? Plus a paragraph about him – what was . . .’ her pretty face flushed at her tactless slip-up – ‘is he like. Maybe I’ll make it funny. Sort of “Do you remember fighting with your parents and saying you’d walk out? Jesse actually did it.” It’ll get retweeted more if it’s entertaining. And maybe he won’t be so cross with you when you find him.’
Stella tried to smile at Roxy’s light-hearted certainty. But she had picked up that tell-tale slip. She couldn’t let herself think like that, but her relief was intense that she was actually doing something to find him, even if he and his parents would resent her for it.
She found a photo for Roxy then left them to it and went to her studio to look up B & Bs in Brighton, which turned out to be remarkably expensive. Brighton’s image as the dirty weekend capital of England seemed to have morphed into something altogether classier and pricier. The average room per night seemed a lot more than she’d hoped to pay. She’d have to paint a lot of pets to pay for a week in Brighton.
Eventually, she found a last-minute hotel room in a Regency square near the seafront for a remarkably reasonable price. It offered only a double bed, which Emma would moan about sharing but would have to put up with, tea-making facilities and a shared rather than an en suite bathroom. It had been longer than she could remember since she’d had to walk down a corridor to share a bathroom, but for that price she would be prepared to share a toothbrush too. The large message on the hotel’s website made her laugh: THE HOTEL DOES NOT ACCEPT STAG OR HEN PARTIES. She could well imagine the problems which sharing a bathroom with a stag or hen would throw up.
She was just about to book when she stopped for a moment. Was she certifiably insane to throw Matthew and Fabia together, after what he’d told her, and then disappear for a week? She could already hardly recognize the beaming, clean-shaven, well-dressed person masquerading as her husband since Fabia had come on the scene.
But, as Duncan had suggested, if she couldn’t trust her husband after all these years, what was their marriage worth anyway?
She pressed the button to book the room. There, it was done.
An irritating advert jumped up in the margin. Ten Things to Do in Brighton. After a visit to the pier, a stroll round the Lanes, admiring the madness of the Brighton Pavilion, and a swim in the English Channel, the next suggestion was to drop in to ‘the most talked-about art show of the decade’. Beside the ad popped up another of Amber’s horrible brightly coloure
d wombs. This one featured both the uterus and ovaries illustrated in fluorescent Mediterranean blue. Underneath was the seriously stupid statement: Blue is the colour of Heaven.
Stella blitzed it with her mouse. ‘Not if you’re in it, Amber!’
She heard Matthew shouting to her and emerged gratefully from Amber’s blue womb.
Matthew was standing at the garden door, his arm round their granddaughter.
‘Izzy, darling, what a lovely surprise,’ Stella greeted her, feeling full of misgiving. Izzy must have walked here on her own. It was only about twenty minutes but she wouldn’t have done it unless something was seriously up.
She took in Izzy’s tearstained face and held her firmly by the hand. ‘Come on, let’s go inside.’ Thankfully Fabia and Roxy had retreated to the expensive luxury of The Glebe, presumably funded by Cameron.
Only Suze remained and she was tactful enough to remember a sudden engagement.
Stella took Izzy to the sofa and pulled her down next to her into its comforting softness. ‘OK, what’s been happening?’
‘It’s Mum and Dad. They’re shouting at each other all the time, and, Gran, I so miss Jesse. When they shouted before he used to just wink at me and we’d go off and watch EastEnders. It always made it seem all right because the people on the telly were shouting even more than Mum and Dad.’ She started to cry again. ‘When’s he coming back, Gran?’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Stella held her close, ‘your Mum and I are going to Brighton to look for him. We think he may have gone to find his friend Kirsty.’
‘The policeman came round yesterday and Dad shouted at him too, because they don’t seem to have done anything. And he said to Dad that maybe they should be asking themselves why Jesse left, and that made Dad tell Mum it was all her fault because of that stupid handbag.’
‘Everyone’s very overwrought at the moment. It’ll help once we really start looking for him. You do know the police think Jesse’s probably fine? He’s not a child. And between you and me, I think Jesse’s pretty sensible. He’s not the kind of boy who’d take drugs or go wild.’