‘Oh, he can come and play with Mia,’ I said at once. ‘Sorry, I should have thought of it before. I’m lucky, working at the school I don’t have to worry about holidays. Let’s compare our diaries. Mia will be going to Lanzarote with her dad for ten days in the middle of the holiday, but the rest of the time she’d be pleased to bits to have Eddie with us.’
‘Are you sure? I’ll pay you whatever the holiday clubs would have charged me—’
‘Don’t be silly. It’ll keep Mia happy. I’m sure you’d return the favour if I needed it.’
‘Of course, and you’re an angel. It’d be a weight off my mind, even if it’s just for one week.’
‘I’m sure we can do more than that. If you can work it that you, or your mum, has Eddie for the weeks Mia’s away with Josh, we can cover the whole holiday between us.’
She paused. ‘But aren’t you going away yourself at all?’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Can’t afford it, to be honest. I don’t mind. It still feels a little bit like a holiday, being back here in Furzewell.’
‘Then you and Mia must come to Cornwall with us. Yes, really, I insist. Mum and Charles – my stepdad – would be happy to have you, I know. They’ve got lots of room, and they live near the beach. It’ll make me feel better about you having Eddie for the other weeks.’
By the time we left for home, we had our holiday all arranged, and although I wasn’t going to tell Mia about it yet, I felt a lightness in my heart just at the thought of it. At my insistence, Louise had called her mum while I was still with her, to make sure it really was OK with her. And as soon as I got home, I checked with Mum that she could look after Smartie for the week. A week by the sea with our new friends really was an unexpected bonus.
Already I’d come to think of Louise as a good friend. We might not have known each other for long but we’d developed such a strong bond. We understood each other’s problems, both being mums bringing up our children without their fathers. I had to admit, I had more in common with Louise now than I did with Amber – who suddenly didn’t seem to understand me quite so well at all. The realisation made me feel a bit disloyal; it had been so exciting to be reunited with my old friend, and already I was drifting closer to someone new. Well, there was room in life for more than one good friend, I told myself firmly. Nothing to feel guilty about. Amber and I still enjoyed our walks together with our dogs, and we went back a long way – even if our lives were now so different.
Eddie was back at school for the last two days before the half-term holiday, and as school broke up, the weather changed for the better again, filling us all once again with the optimism of summer. The trees that had been beaten down by rain were now shining in the sunshine with their fresh green leaves. Fields were scattered with cornflowers and by the end of the week, as we turned into June, even the first poppies were beginning to appear.
Mia had an extended stay with Josh during that holiday week, from the Saturday to the Tuesday, and to my surprise I found that it didn’t hurt so much now when she ran out to his car, waving goodbye. I was slowly getting used to it. Even more surprisingly, Josh waved to me himself as they drove off, and when he brought her back on the Tuesday evening, we chatted for a few minutes on the doorstep. In fact, I’d found myself thinking, afterwards, that the conversation had been quite nice: he’d sounded genuinely interested when he’d asked how I was settling down in Furzewell; he’d smiled and nodded and seemed in no rush to leave. It was nice that we could be like this with each other, for Mia’s sake, although it had left me feeling a bit wistful, and almost lonely, after he’d gone.
I still found it hard, though, to accept the way he took Mia out for expensive treats and brought her home, every time, with presents. Was he bribing her to look forward to seeing him? I tried to put myself in his shoes, to imagine how he felt, but every time, it just came back to this: he’d never made any effort when we lived with him. It was too late to start now.
For the remainder of the week, Mia and I went for long walks with Smartie, sometimes with some of the other dog walkers, sometimes with Louise and Eddie, who also often came to play with us in the garden at Eagle House.
‘You’re welcome to come to mine instead, obviously,’ she said, ‘but it’s so lovely here, with all this lawn and trees, and shrubs, compared with my little postage stamp of a garden.’ She laughed. ‘And anyway, until I get around to doing something with it, it’s just an empty space. I really need a gardener to put in a few flowerbeds. I’m clueless myself and I haven’t got a lot of spare time.’
‘Actually, one of the dog walkers – Simon – is a landscape gardener. If you like, I’ll ask him to call round and give you a quote. He’s been doing quite a few gardens on your estate.’
‘That would be great. Thanks, Nic.’
On the last day of the holiday we took the two children to the Fox and Goose for a pub lunch, sitting outside in the sunshine. I asked Mum if she’d like to join us when she finished at the shop, but she said she was going straight to Plymouth after work to meet a friend for lunch.
‘It’s so nice here,’ Louise sighed as we enjoyed our drinks and sandwiches at a table in the shade of the big oak tree.
‘Yes. It was our favourite thing – me and Josh – back when we lived here before. We were still kids, really. We lived in the flat over the shop, and there wasn’t much money to spare after we’d paid the rent, but once a week, on a Saturday, we came here for lunch like this. Funny, I don’t remember it ever raining or being cold enough to sit inside the pub. It must have been, obviously, but in my memory it was always sunny.’ I glanced across the table at Mia, but she and Eddie were chatting and laughing so loudly I didn’t think she’d overhear. ‘And we were always happy,’ I added quietly, feeling my eyes smart with unshed tears.
Louise put her hand over mine. I hadn’t really talked to her much about Josh before.
‘And you’ll be happy again,’ she said. ‘I’m sure of it. You’ve got Mia, and Smartie, and your mum and gran here in Furzewell. And you love it here, don’t you. You belong here.’
‘Thanks, Lou.’ I smiled at her. ‘I know, you’re right, I’m lucky, really. Things could be much worse.’
‘Yes.’ She laughed. ‘You could have had a whole brood of kids – imagine how hard that would be, on your own. I must admit I’m glad now that I only had the one.’
I nodded and took another bite of my sandwich. Louise couldn’t possibly have known why I had a lump in my throat at the mention of that.
CHAPTER 18
Mum didn’t come home from Plymouth until halfway through the evening. Mia was in bed, Smartie asleep at my feet and I was dozing in front of the TV when I heard her key in the door.
‘Hello!’ I said, jumping up as she came in. ‘Did you have a good time? Want a cup of tea?’
‘Yes, please.’ She yawned and smiled. ‘Sorry I’m a bit late.’
I laughed. ‘It must have been a good pub lunch.’
‘Yes. It sort of … turned into dinner.’
I looked at her. She had a kind of glow about her, a contented smile on her face and her eyes were sparkling. She was wearing a new dress, too, and I couldn’t help noticing how nice she looked – not overdressed with too much make-up, the way she sometimes was when she went out with the Gruesome Twosome. This was no girly get-together she’d been to, that was for sure!
‘So it was nice?’ I asked again carefully as I filled the kettle.
‘Very nice, thank you. And before you ask – or try to avoid asking, because I can see you’re dying to know – yes, it was a date. But don’t worry, it’s nothing serious.’
‘Why would I worry? You have to live your own life, Mum, and if you meet someone, and it’s serious, well—’
She held up her hand to stop me.
‘That’s not going to happen. I don’t want a relationship with a man. Going out for lunch, for dinner, whatever, is fine. But I’m never living with anyone again.’
The kettle boiled
, I poured water on the teabags and it wasn’t until we sat down together that I’d worked up the courage to ask her why.
‘You know why,’ she retorted – as I knew she would.
‘Because of Dad. Yes, but not every man you meet will be like him, or behave like him. There are good men out there, Mum.’
‘I know. I just had dinner with one of them.’ She smiled. ‘But that doesn’t mean I want to live with him.’
‘Fair enough. I feel the same way myself so I don’t blame you.’
‘Well, there you are, then. Once bitten, and all that. And anyway, I like my life just the way it is. I want to have fun, go out with whoever I want, and enjoy myself. Not be shackled to someone again and have to wash his smelly socks.’
I laughed. ‘So there’s never been anyone serious for you, all these years, since Dad left?’
‘No. Well…’ She hesitated for a moment, and I looked up at her, surprised. ‘Well, not really. There’s one person, only one, who I was seeing for quite a while. I could have been tempted, I suppose.’ There was that little sparkle in her eyes again, just for a moment. ‘But no, it’s not what I want, Nic. I’ve made up my mind. I don’t want to be tied down.’
‘But did he – this man – want it to be more serious?’
She smiled again. ‘He still does. He’s the one I saw today. We still see each other sometimes – we’re still friends. He’s a lovely man, but he understands and respects my feelings about it.’
‘But he’d jump like a shot if you changed your mind?’
She shrugged. ‘I won’t.’
And with that it was clear that the subject was closed. But it was the most Mum had ever told me about her feelings regarding relationships. And I couldn’t help feeling a bit sad about this mystery man who seemed to mean so much to her – but not quite enough to melt that bitterness in her heart about my dad.
It happened when I was only eleven years old and we were on a family holiday. Mum had always wanted to visit Ireland. Her ancestors, several generations back, had come from Dublin, and it had always held a fascination for her. Seeing the place for herself had been a kind of romantic dream, and I can still remember her excitement that summer as we packed our cases. That was what made it all the harder.
On about the second or third day, we were strolling around the Temple Bar area when it began to pour with rain. We dived into a pub. It was lunchtime, and luckily they served sandwiches, so we settled at a table and I sipped my orange-juice while Mum and Dad had a pint of Guinness each.
‘Oh, lovely, they’re going to play some traditional folk music,’ Mum said delightedly as we noticed a group of people at a nearby table picking up their instruments – a bodhran, tin whistle, banjo and fiddle.
The girl playing the fiddle was tall, slim and beautiful. She had waist-length auburn hair, bright green eyes, and a smile that lit up the room. To me, a skinny, awkward girl on the cusp of adolescence, she looked like a fairy-tale Celtic princess. I couldn’t take my eyes off her, watching her every move and carried away by imagining how it would feel to be like this vision of perfection myself. I was so entranced by the lilt of her accent as she announced each song and thanked us for our applause, by the way she looked and the way she played, tapping her foot, swinging her body as her bow flew across the strings, her short blue dress swaying with the rhythm – that I didn’t even notice my dad’s face, his mouth dropping open, his eyes out on stalks as he stared at her so intently, until I heard Mum say, laughing:
‘Stop slobbering, Phil!’
Mum wouldn’t have laughed if she’d been able to see into the future. When the band stopped for a break, Dad was instantly up on his feet, heading to the bar to buy them all a drink. He perched himself on a bar stool next to the auburn-haired girl, and within minutes they were chatting and laughing together.
‘Look at him,’ Mum said, mildly amused. ‘Silly old fool.’
Dad wasn’t old, of course. He was thirty-seven at the time, and (from what I remember, and from looking at old photos), a charming, good-looking man. Siobhan was twenty-two. And although Mum had been condescendingly tolerant of him making a damned fool of himself over her that lunchtime, teasing him about it when we left, what she didn’t know was that they’d already exchanged contact details. That they’d arranged to meet up that evening, when Dad went out from our B&B after dinner for his usual quick stroll and a pint. Or that within days, he would have told Siobhan he was besotted with her and nothing was going to stand in the way of the two of them being together. And then he told Mum the same thing.
It was horrendous for both of us. Mum went into a kind of catatonic state of disbelief. At first she thought he was joking and was in denial about it, then convinced herself that it was just a silly infatuation, that he’d come to his senses by the end of the holiday. But he left us immediately, moving out of the B&B and into Siobhan’s flat, phoning his boss to resign from his job, getting work as a barman in the very pub where he and Siobhan had met. At only eleven, I couldn’t appreciate the full extent of what was happening, and didn’t have the maturity or the words to comfort my mum – I just felt bewildered and frightened by her distress. At the end of the week we flew home, just the two of us, and that was when it really hit me what was happening. My own state of shock and grief, now I understood that Dad was actually staying behind, was almost as deep as Mum’s. We both kept trying to tell ourselves that he’d soon be back, begging for forgiveness. But the weeks went by and at first there were terrible rows over the phone, then his number was abruptly changed, Mum’s angry letters started coming back stamped ‘gone away’, and then there was nothing. Nothing, ever again. Nothing for her and nothing for me, his only daughter, either.
Gran and Grandad urged her to hire private detectives to try to track him down, and her friends felt she should talk to solicitors and try to get money out of him – maintenance payments to help with my upbringing – but she refused. She cleared out all his stuff, and at the same time seemed determined to wipe out his memory. He simply disappeared from our lives. The whole thing was horribly distressing and confusing to me. It felt almost as if he’d died but worse, in a way, because then at least we’d have talked about him. We’d still have had his photos around the house, instead of them being taken down and torn up. We’d have shared happy memories of him and eventually that could have eased our grief. But this felt almost as if he’d never existed, as if I’d never had a father at all, one who’d appeared to love me and love my mum, and act like a normal dad, like other people’s dads – until Ireland happened.
So yes, I could understand Mum’s bitterness, her refusal, even now, to talk about him. I could easily have grown up hating him myself, but instead I only ever thought of him with bewildered puzzlement, regret and a sense of loss. How could he have done that? Did he really feel nothing for us? Even now, I could understand the falling in love, the crime of passion as it were – not condone it, but understand it – but I couldn’t understand the complete shrugging off of a wife and child as if they were nothing. Within the family, he was never even mentioned now.
The next day was Saturday and that evening we were hosting our public meeting about the park at the village hall. Mum had offered – despite the rug disaster on the previous occasion – to look after Mia and Eddie again, so that Louise could come. Like before, I felt a bit guilty about her having to cope, not only with the extra noise and mess involved in having a small child and a puppy in her house, but also our increasingly frequent guest in Eddie. But she was insistent.
‘You and Louise both need to be there. You can fill me in with all the news, whatever gets decided at the meeting,’ she said. ‘I’m just as keen as you are to stop this nonsense about selling the park.’
It seemed, as we sat at a table on the stage, facing the crowd gradually filling the little hall, that everybody in Furzewell felt the same way.
‘We’ve run out of chairs,’ Louise reported back to us, having gone down into the auditorium to see how Si
mon and Craig were coping, ushering people in at the door.
‘Well, that can only be a good thing,’ I said. ‘As long as people don’t mind standing.’
On the dot of eight o’clock, Sara stood up and greeted everyone.
‘It’s fantastic to see so many of you here. I’m sorry some of you are having to stand at the back,’ she said. She had no need of a microphone. Her voice could have carried all the way to the park. ‘Perhaps you’d like to raise your hand if you really do need a seat, and maybe if there’s anyone young and fit sitting down they might be kind enough to give theirs up for you.’
‘Nice touch,’ Craig, sitting next to me, muttered. ‘Showing her human, compassionate side at the start of the meeting. Didn’t realise she had one.’
Once the seat-shuffling had finished, Sara swiftly outlined the most important points of the meeting. First of all, the petition: it was on a clipboard on the table at the back of the hall for anyone who hadn’t signed it online, so that the council could receive it as soon as possible. Secondly, the use of the park: imperative that we all increased this, despite the state it was in, and the lack of facilities. We should think of ways to make the most of the open space. Hold family picnics, kids’ activities – didn’t we all need to get them away from their screens, especially now summer was here? – and perhaps the leaders of local clubs like the Brownies could hold fun sports days there. And finally – she’d built up to this with increasing volume and passion as she waved aside interruptions, promising everyone a chance to have their say when she’d finished – the main event. The committee, she announced – and the rest of us up on the stage looked at each other in surprise at having been called something so official – were arranging a pet show, to be held in the park on Bank Holiday Monday, and we needed all the support we could get, to make this a success.
The Lonely Hearts Dog Walkers Page 14