Hurriedly I scooped it up, scraped some more off the bedcover, and then, deliberately leaving my bag on the bed, crept downstairs. It was still very early and there was no one about as I tiptoed down the dew-soaked lawn to the summer house. Better take my laptop with me, I decided, pushing open the blistered green door. I could come back for everything else later.
I felt so sad unplugging it, stashing it away in its case, knowing I wouldn’t be sitting here ever again, tapping away and occasionally glancing over the treetops to the little boats bobbing about on the creek. Swallowing hard, I tucked it under my arm and headed back up the daisy-strewn lawn. David had threatened to mow it while he’d been here, but Matt and I had groaned, protesting that we liked the daisies and the dandelions, that it felt as if the lawn were taking a holiday too …
Breathing deeply and willing myself to think hard about the Euro debate, or even the Chancellor of the Exchequer himself, anything other than Matt and me sitting out here, laughing amongst the buttercups, I hurried into the kitchen where Flora was pouring her tea down the sink.
‘It’s cold. I’m going to make another one,’ she an -nounced, flicking on the kettle.
‘Oh! No, darling, have some orange juice, look.’ I reached into the fridge and hurriedly poured her a glass from the carton, sloshing juice everywhere. ‘Nice orange juice. And take it with you in the car,’ I urged, pressing it into her hands. ‘Come on, we must go!’
‘God, what are you on?’ she said incredulously as I bullied her out of the back door clutching her glass. I hastened her around the drive to the car. ‘I haven’t even had a pee.’
‘You’ll live,’ I muttered, opening the passenger door for her. ‘I’ll stop at a service station later. Go on, get in, I’m just nipping back for, er … a couple of things.’
‘So can’t I nip back for a pee?’
‘No!’
Gazing at me in wonder but, luckily, still half asleep and therefore unusually compliant, she flopped into the front seat with a face like thunder. I threw the laptop on the back seat, slammed the door on her, then, glancing fearfully up at the attic windows in case he’d heard the door, fled back to the house. Taking the stairs at a canter, I snatched up the bag from my bed, then nipped next door into Flora’s room. Rummaging hurriedly through her drawers and feeling a bit like Burglar Bill on speed, I crammed some of her shorts and T-shirts into my bag. Then I zipped it up, and hurried down the passage and back downstairs with my booty. As I got to the bottom step and turned to flee through the kitchen and make my escape out of the back door, I ran slap into Matt, coming out of the study.
‘AARRRGHH!’ I dropped my bag in fright.
He eyed it. ‘Going somewhere?’
‘God.’ I clutched my heart. ‘Um, yes. To Mum’s.’
‘Ah.’
‘I didn’t know you were up,’ I breathed, heart pounding. ‘Couldn’t sleep. Got up at about five and worked in the study.’
Oh no, so he’d been in there all that time; he must have seen me racing down the lawn like a lunatic, heard me bullying Flora in the kitchen.
I picked the bag up hastily and made to move past him, eyes down. I wouldn’t look at him. Wouldn’t. He put his hand on my arm. Forced me to look up. His eyes, when I met them, were gentle, sad, and very blue.
‘Is this wise, Annie?’
I gulped. Looked away. ‘Yes,’ I muttered. ‘It is. Very wise.’ And so saying I pushed past him and hurried, head down, to the car, aware that tears were taking their chance now and fleeing down my face. I threw the bag in the boot and got in, wiping my cheeks furiously with the back of my hand.
‘What’s up?’ Flora looked at me in surprise.
‘Hay fever,’ I muttered. ‘You don’t get hay fever.’
‘WELL, I’VE GOT IT THIS MORNING!’ I bellowed. ‘Must be the pollen count,’ I added, less forcefully.
‘Oh.’ She blinked, startled. Then: ‘What did you just put in the boot?’ she asked as I performed an extremely fast and furious three-point turn in the drive, gravel flying everywhere. ‘Blimey, steady, Mum!’
‘Just some coats. In case it’s cold.’
‘Cold? It’s going to be twenty-eight today!’
But I wasn’t listening. I was watching Matt, who was standing at the sitting-room window, watching me. His eyes steady, hands in pockets. Very still.
Flora saw him and waved. ‘Bye!’ she yelled.
He raised his hand slowly as we sped off down the drive. Flora twisted round in her seat, still waving.
‘We’ll be back by tonight, though, won’t we? Tod goes soon. I wouldn’t mind a bit more time with him.’
I licked my lips carefully. ‘Well, I thought we might stay. One night. Granny would be thrilled, and then … we’ll see.’
She swung back to face me. ‘We’re staying the night? You didn’t say. I haven’t got my things.’
‘I’ve got them,’ I said as we flew along the country lanes, all the time putting distance between us and that house, I thought grimly as I gripped the wheel.
‘Right,’ she said in surprise. ‘Does Granny know?’
‘She does. I rang her this morning.’
This much was true. I’d called her at six-thirty as she was having her breakfast. Five minutes late, by her standards.
‘Of course you can come, love,’ she’d said in surprise. ‘I’ll make up the beds. This is very sudden, isn’t it?’
‘Not really, Mum,’ I’d breathed down the phone. ‘I just felt the need to see you.’
There was a pause. ‘Funny that. Clare felt the need to see me a couple of days ago.’
I’d shut my eyes tight. Swallowed. No flies on Mum. ‘Well, I’ll see you in an hour or two, then.’
‘Righto, love.’
Flora eyed me now as I rifled through the glove compartment, searching for my sunglasses. I found them and shoved them on.
‘Seems like you’ve thought of everything, then,’ she remarked drily.
I pretended I hadn’t heard her and was intent on reading the road signs, aware that her gaze was upon me.
‘What were you and Matt arguing about last night?’ she said suddenly. ‘When I came to say goodnight to you?’
‘We weren’t arguing,’ I said quietly. ‘We were discussing.’
‘Oh.’ She was silent for a moment. ‘But you like him, don’t you?’
‘Of course I like him,’ I said lightly, reaching across her to the cassette box and popping in some Chopin. Joyful piano music filled the car. ‘What is there not to like?’
When we arrived at Mum’s an hour or so later, I felt heady with relief. After we’d slowly inched our way down the familiar track full of potholes, dodged the big ones, avoided the craters, and rounded the bend into the farmyard, I turned off the engine and leaned gratefully on the wheel. An ancient stone farmhouse with two small gables sat before us, and in the yard, encircled by a low, dry-stone wall, the chickens and bantams poked and strutted around. A delicious silence enveloped us.
‘Clare’s here,’ said Flora in surprise as she spotted her car in the drive.
‘Yes, she … had some work to do. Needed some peace and quiet, but didn’t want to traipse all the way back to London.’ Amazing the lies that tripped off my tongue these days.
‘Oh, look! One of the bantams has had chicks. It’s Madame Blanche.’ She got out excitedly as the pure white French Silky with elaborate pantaloon legs fussed over her chicks by the edge of the pond, urging them to drink, but not to follow the duck’s example and take to the water.
In the Dutch barn to the left of the yard I spotted Ted Philpot, the neighbouring farmer to whom Mum rented the land and sold the stock when Dad died, and who also had use of the outbuildings. He was pitchforking hay into a trailer – no doubt inexpertly, since, according to Mum, no one forked, or furrowed, or sprayed, or dipped and dagged, or for that matter did any manner of farm work or animal husbandry half as well as Dad had, but particularly poor Mr Philpot. She had her beady eye on him d
ay and night, muttering under her breath and bossing him around. He raised his hand when he saw me, and I waved back.
As I walked towards the house Mum appeared in the doorway. The last time I’d seen her I’d been quietly alarmed at how thin she was getting, the bones at the base of her throat sticking out, but I was relieved to see she looked a bit plumper. She was wearing a blue summer dress with a tea towel slung over one shoulder.
‘Madame Blanche’s had chicks, Granny!’ Flora called, dispensing with any formal greeting to her grandmother.
‘I know, love. I thought that would please you, but she’s that fussy with them.’
‘That’s because the fox got them all last year. She remembers.’ Flora abandoned the chicks for a moment to kiss her granny, and I followed suit.
‘Hello, Annabel, love. Everything all right?’ Her sharp grey eyes scanned my face anxiously.
‘Fine.’ I smiled. ‘Just woke up this morning and felt like coming to see you, that’s all. You look much better, Mum, you’ve put on a bit of weight.’ It was true, her face had recovered its bloom and her eyes were brighter. Dad had died four years ago now, but it had really knocked her for six.
She chuckled. ‘Eating too much, probably. So used to baking for a family, I do it out of force of habit, then eat it all myself.’
There was something sad about her doing that, I thought: making enough scones for the four of us when there was no one to eat them with, but she looked happy enough. ‘And with all the exercise I’m getting, I should be pounds thinner,’ she went on, ushering us in. ‘The sheep got out the other week and I was all over the county roundin’ them up. Right over to Tom Toper’s land at Fenstorm they went.’
‘Mr Philpot not fencing them in properly, then?’ I teased, ducking my head as I followed her through the low doorway.
‘Oh, he’s not doin’ too badly. It was his idiot boy. Left the gate open.’
‘Oh, right,’ I said, surprised not to get the usual tirade about how he only banged in post and rails and didn’t use the more traditional dry-stone walling, but perhaps she was getting more tolerant in her old age. And of course she was getting older too, I thought anxiously. Perhaps Clare was right, perhaps she shouldn’t really be all on her own down here in such a remote spot, but there was no shifting her. This was her country and she loved it; she’d been born and raised at a farm across the valley which she still called home. It wasn’t up for discussion; as far as she was concerned, she’d die here.
Inside, the kitchen gleamed. The waxed terracotta floor shone up at the solid-fuel black Rayburn that Mum still filled and stoked by hand, which sparkled at the blue and white delft china on the pine dresser on the opposite wall. The kitchen hadn’t changed since Mum, who’d inherited it from Gran, had given it what she regarded as a radical facelift in the seventies. She claimed she was still getting used to the tiled work surfaces and the ‘jazzy’ yellow curtains at the window. Ralph, the border collie, was snoozing peaceably by the Rayburn, thumping his tail on the floor by way of apology for being too old to get up and greet us properly. All was exactly as it should be: home. I sank gratefully into the Windsor chair by the Rayburn with its faded gingham cushion, and Flora bent to make a fuss of Ralph.
‘No Clare?’ My eyes drifted to the open window where the green hills rolled away into the distance, dotted with sheep; similar to the Cornish landscape we’d passed through but, to the connoisseur’s eye, much lusher and gentler, more forgiving.
‘She’s upstairs tryin’ some clothes on. We went into Exeter yesterday and she went mad.’
I smiled. Mum wouldn’t be used to Clare’s style of shopping: panic-buying everything in sight while she had an hour away from her desk or her children.
‘Any other babies, Granny?’ asked Flora, still crouched on her haunches, stroking Ralph’s grey muzzle.
‘Yes, love, there are ducklin’s out back, an’ if you go right into the far corner of the barn you might find Cinders with yet another litter of kittens. She can’t keep away from that tom up the lane, the little hussy. Must get her spayed.’
Flora slipped off eagerly, persuading Ralph to accompany her.
‘So how is she?’ I asked as Mum poured boiling water into the old brown pot waiting on the stove.
‘Cinders? Or the other little hussy?’
I grinned. ‘The other. Clare.’
‘She’s fine,’ she said shortly. ‘Now. She wasn’t though, when she came. She was beside herself for a bit. Haven’t seen her like that since she got a low mark in her geography mocks on account of flu. And I haven’t had her open up to me, neither.’
‘She did that?’
‘Not entirely. But a bit. Well, she said she’d had an altercation with Michael, and you know Clare. That’s shorthand for he’s left me.’
I looked up. ‘She told you that?’
‘No, but I guessed as much.’ She settled down opposite me in the other Windsor chair and let the pot sit on the Rayburn between us for a bit. ‘All that walkin’ she’s been doing since she got here, been goin’ for miles, she has, an’ you know Clare, she never walked further than the library. An’ she’s not herself, either: not tellin’ me what to do and where to live and what to eat. Been better company, actually,’ she said thoughtfully, getting up to pour the tea.
I smiled. Mum told it like it was. ‘And as I say, shoppin’ like her life depended on it yesterday. Like a thing possessed. Treated me to a bite to eat, though. At the Regal.’ She handed me a cup and saucer.
‘Oh, lovely.’
Mum regarded the Regal in Exeter as the ultimate in so ph istication.
‘But always tryin’ to cover up, you know? Chitter- chatter chitter-chatter over the crème caramel, an’ her eyes much too bright and tense. Holdin’ herself together.’
‘Oh.’ No, well, clearly she hadn’t opened up that much, and I’d hoped she would, to Mum.
‘But then again this morning, well, I don’t know,’ she pondered, taking a moment. ‘She seems a bit perkier. More relaxed, somehow.’ She paused to sip her tea.
‘Perhaps country air and home cooking is finally working its magic?’
‘Oh yes, it’ll do her the power of good, but it won’t mend hearts.’ She eyed me beadily. ‘How’s David, love? Knows you’re here, does he?’
I breathed in sharply at his name. ‘Um, no. Not yet. I’ll ring him.’
‘I should.’ She reached out and passed me the phone from the side. ‘Or he’ll worry.’
I stared at it in my lap. ‘Yes. Yes, he will.’
‘Only I know you’ve got your mobiles an’ that, but if he rings that house in Cornwall an’ finds it empty …’
‘Well except it’s not empty, there’s someone else – someone else staying there,’ I faltered.
‘Oh yes. Clare said.’
She sipped her tea quietly, watching me. I could feel my face burning. I took a deep breath and tapped out David’s direct line under her steely gaze. Thank God. The answer machine. I didn’t have to speak to him and feel even more duplicitous than I already did. I cleared my throat.
‘Um, David, hi, it’s me. Just to let you know I’m staying at Mum’s for a few days, so you can reach me here. I’ll speak to you later. Bye!’
‘A few days?’ said Mum in surprise when I’d hung up. ‘Well, I’ll … see how it goes.’
‘Ah. That’s just what Clare said. Said she’d – Ooh, look, talk of the devil.’
The door opened and Clare appeared in the doorway, looking as if she were going to Ascot. She was wearing a shocking pink suit, black stilettos and a huge black hat. ‘Da-daa!’ She struck a pose, then nearly tottered off her heels when she saw me. ‘You’re here! Blimey, you’re early.’ She laughed. ‘You weren’t supposed to see this!’
I boggled. ‘What have you come as?’
‘I’ve come as the sister of the bride,’ she declared, giving a twirl. ‘Like it?’ She struck another pose, hands on hips, head thrown right back, supermodel style. ‘It’s for your
wedding.’
‘Oh!’ I spilled my tea in the saucer. ‘Mum and I went into Exeter yesterday and we went completely berserk. I have to say I had no idea the shops down here were so terrific. Almost as good as London. Has this just been made?’ She took the lid off the pot and peered in suspiciously.
‘Just this minute, love.’
‘And you should see what Mum bought,’ she said, helping herself to a cup. ‘Honestly, Annie, I’ve never seen her look so smart, it’s stunning. And a bag too, and shoes to match – and a hat!’
I turned to Mum, feeling the colour drain from my face. ‘But I thought you’d decided … since it was Claridge’s …’
‘Oh, that was just nerves talkin’.’ She brushed some crumbs briskly from her lap. ‘No, I put down that phone and said to myself: Marjorie Hooper, what a ninny you are. Of course you won’t miss your daughter’s weddin’ on account of it being in London and havin’ nothin’ to wear, and Ted said the same.’
‘Ted?’
‘Philpot,’ put in Clare, giving me a look. ‘No, I wouldn’t miss it for the world, love,’ went on Mum smoothly, ‘and I apologize if I gave the impression otherwise. It’s all decided now. I’m stayin’ with Clare for two nights an’ I’m all set outfit-wise, too. Clare’s seen to that.’
‘Honestly, Annie, Claridge’s!’ Clare said incredulously. ‘I nearly fell over when Mum told me. It’s so un-you.’
‘Thanks.’
‘No, but you know what I mean. So smart.’
‘It was David’s idea,’ I muttered, sinking into my tea. ‘Well, obviously. Now come on, Mum, show her your things,’ Clare urged.
‘Later, love,’ Mum demurred. ‘Oh no, go on, now! Tell you what, I’ll get them. Don’t move!’
She teetered out of the kitchen and off up the stairs on her heels. We heard her clip-clipping across the landing above us. I stared dumbly into my tea. A moment later she was back, holding a dove-grey suit from a hanger, a hat box, and a pair of blue shoes. Mum stood up and Clare held the suit against her.
‘What d’you think?’ Mum asked shyly, taking the hanger.
The Wedding Day Page 29