by Judy Astley
What was supposed to happen was that, very soon, preferably during the next week (Wednesday night would be good), he had to take her out to dinner and, across champagne and a luscious dessert, all he had to do was simply take her hand – the one not holding the spoon, obviously – and ask her if she’d consider doing him the honour of becoming his wife. Perfectly simple – nothing to it. He was not to do any silly tricks with the ring (emeralds were lovely and would look superb with her hazel eyes) such as hiding it in the champagne glass; she knew a woman who’d swallowed a diamond solitaire that way. The nearly fiancé had insisted she get it back and there’d been a couple of days’ tense wait for sluggish digestion to kick in. Apparently she hadn’t felt the same about either the ring or the man after that (well, who would?) and they’d broken up soon after. No, Ilex could just take her out, the morning after she’d said yes and while they were still all after-glow from a tip-top bed-celebration, to choose something instead. That would be much better, not to mention very speedy, for in Tiffany’s the ring she wanted was in the left-hand display cabinet, nestling in white silk, third row down. It was all she could do to stop herself going in on her way home from work and bagging it with a deposit.
And now, on Manda’s non-wedding day, they were to go to Ilex’s parents in the smoothest depths of Surrey for Sunday lunch and face his sister Clover and her so-perfect pair of peachy-skinned, fair-haired daughters. Manda would look at them and see how they’d grown from the last time and wonder if they’d soon be too old to play with any little cousins that she might produce for them. At this rate, Sophia would be old enough to babysit by the time she and Ilex started their own family. She hated seeing Clover. Nice woman and all that, but she’d got Manda’s life.
Manda climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair as she did every morning to see if any tiny hint of grey had crept in overnight. It might – she was very nearly thirty-four – and it was time to be vigilant about these things. She wrapped her shell-pink satin robe round her and thought about getting ready for the day and what she’d wear. The shower had been running for ages. Ilex would use up all the hot water. She’d seen him take a magazine in there with him, which was ridiculous – it would get all soggy and he knew how much she liked the Sunday colour supplements.
‘Ilex? Are you going to be all day in there?’ She wandered out into the corridor and shouted through the closed door. Did that sound like nagging? She could have phrased it better. That might be something else she should start being vigilant about.
‘Won’t be long!’ he called back after rather a long pause.
Manda went back into the bedroom and gave her hair a vigorous brushing. It was still long and glossy and silky and an even shade of milk-chocolate brown, like the ears on a Siamese cat. And her body beneath the satin wrap was smooth and unlined and slender, just the way Ilex liked it. Manda smiled at her reflection and made a decision: this would be the year of the wedding. No question. One way or another she’d be looking at the end of next 12 May as the new Mrs MacIntyre.
On the far side of the bathroom door, and mindful that Manda had super-charged hearing, Ilex stealthily shifted aside the heavy marble shelf that covered the workings of the loo cistern. Into the tiny gap behind the tank he stowed out of sight the latest edition of his favourite reading matter, a slim speciality magazine by the name of Fuzz, featuring strong, burly girls and boys in (though mostly half out of) the police uniforms of many countries. He was fully aware that as time wasting went, this was about as crassly adolescent as you could get, possibly a notch down from lying in bed in the dark, freeze-framing the crotch-flashes from Sugarbabes DVDs. Grown men, he was sure, had long left behind this kind of thing and moved on to pretending they bought men’s magazines with slick-skinned barely dressed totty on the cover purely for the articles on designer luggage and must-have sunglasses.
She was a bit special, the American Fed in the ‘On the Beat’ centre-spread: a big chunky girl, with a bull-dyke haircut and an unashamedly lived-in body that had never agonized over low-fat options on a menu. If those thunder-thighs pinned you to the bed, you’d stay pinned. Just the way Ilex liked it.
FOUR
THE CLEMATIS HAD collapsed again. Lottie could see it flapping limply against the kitchen window as if it knew there was little hope of her racing out to rescue it. This was the fourth time this spring it had done it and given a stout ladder and better secateurs than the ones that lay rusting in the kitchen drawer, she would have ruthlessly chopped the whole lot down to ground level, pouring on a dose of something lethal and possibly illegal just to make sure. But as these wicked plant-murdering thoughts crossed her mind, she knew that even such desperate measures wouldn’t kill the bugger, for it was a strong and resolute thing and survived her worst efforts at obliteration with sly perseverance. It was also one of the few survivors from the garden’s original Gertrude Jekyll design and even Lottie could only admire the stealthy guile with which it managed to get the better of her horticultural incompetence and keep inching determinedly in the direction of its prey – the crumbling undersides of the fragile roof tiles.
When had this war started? she wondered. This series of skirmishes between her home’s fabric and its occupants? When did the house become bored with its simple role as safe and solid refuge and begin showing signs of troublesome rebellion? With only three of them now living in it (and Sorrel so often in that mysterious teenage place called ‘out’), the house was far too big. More than one person had commented that next year when Sorrel had gone to university, she and Mac would rattle around in it as if they were a couple of loose, forgotten balls on a wonky pinball machine.
The problem was that Holbrook House was becoming as cravenly high maintenance as an ageing movie star. According to the estate agent when they’d bought it thirty years before, this was ‘Classic Lutyens in the Surrey Vernacular’. Mac and Lottie hadn’t had a clue what he was talking about, seeing only the family-raising potential in the solid H-shaped building, the large, light rooms along with acres of beautiful flower garden, leading down to an orchard, meadow and woodland. But it didn’t come cheap, keeping in good repair sharp-angled, low-hipped gables, tall, fancy-patterned brick chimneys and over-sized multi-paned windows that were heavily chequered with lead. If a downpipe fractured you couldn’t just run down to B&Q for a bit of plastic replacement. You had to look things up in the heritage book, plead with the miserable sod who guarded the local architectural salvage yard as if every inch of ironwork was solid gold and then pay well over the odds for a very slow craftsman who would remind you that his was a dying trade and charge by the millisecond.
And then there was the garden … It was all very well for Ms Jekyll to lay it out as a charming series of delightful rooms, amusingly linked by pergolas, mellow brick walls and with a gently trickling rill running from parterre to orchard – back in 1901 she would have employed an entire team of skilled gardeners to keep it all perfect. At first, mindful of the responsibility of taking on one of Gertrude’s precious gardens, Lottie had employed a full-time man for the job. The rot had started, quite literally, the minute he’d retired and Al, a former Charisma roadie, had decided he could take care of it, no problem, two or three days a week. He was still there, doggedly putting in the hours in return for fairly minimal cash-in-hand pay and free eggs from Lottie’s chickens. Looking back, she and Mac had simply been far too young to take on premises as demanding as this. A childhood spent making mud-pies, growing mustard and cress and squeezing snapdragons in the vicarage garden of Lottie’s early years hadn’t been anywhere near enough practice for dealing with flower-planting on this scale. Slugs and snails ate the delphiniums. Swathes of lupins vanished thanks to greedy fat bugs. Black, green or possibly purple fly chewed holes in the hostas and Lottie was amazed to discover that roses as well as cars could be afflicted with rust. Al was terrific for loyalty and no alarmingly obsessed Charisma fan would get to the front door past his smoking-lair between the
gates and the house, but he had limits, horticulture-wise. He wasn’t keen on subtleties of colour, preferring plants that gave you your money’s-worth in eye-watering brightness rather than Gertrude’s choice from nature’s more gentle palette. He’d sneaked in displays of lobster-pink begonias and scarlet geraniums. He favoured lollipop marigolds and hanging baskets of vibrant fuchsias and he loved sitting for hours smoking rollups on Mac’s fancy mower. Gradually the rill stopped trickling and silted up with blanket weed. Between the magnificent York stones of the sunken terrace grew a stubborn crop of dandelions and moss. The yew hedges, which Al longed to obliterate entirely in the interests of extending the lawn (and time spent mowing), became as overgrown, shaggy and untameable as Mac’s hair circa 1973. But the paddock now housed three polytunnels full of herbs that supplied several restaurants across the county, the orchard flourished somehow and was home to an ever-growing collection of mongrel hens and the long herbaceous border in front of the warm mellow wall was now (just about) successfully stocked with Lottie and Mac’s latest venture – organic home-grown vegetables, proof, according to a sceptical Sorrel, of the seductive powers of Friday-night TV gardening programmes. What those programmes failed to put across was the mind-numbing dullness of daily contact with … vegetables. If you planted them, then could simply come back a month or so later and marvel at how they’d grown – the way you did with a rarely seen small child – then that would be fine. But obviously you couldn’t do that. You had to watch them creep to maturity, a day at a time, as you tended and watered them. It was almost literally like watching paint dry. They should, Lottie sometimes thought, have gone in for huge competition blooms. Agapanthus would have been a good choice – huge bluey-mauve heads of flowers, like the ones that grew wild all over the sandy dunes of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly.
Lottie, geeing herself up for preparing a full-scale family Sunday lunch, glared at the flapping clematis and dared it to fall down in a heap. While it clung stubbornly to life it at least served one useful function: it obscured the crumbling brickwork. The cost of repointing that lot using a hundred-year-old mortar-recipe didn’t even bear thinking about.
If, as Lottie suspected, Sorrel had still got Gaz holed up in her room with her from the night before, and if, as teenagers always did, they’d troop downstairs claiming near starvation as soon as the scent of cooked food wafted up the stairs to tempt them out, that would make a total of ten for lunch and they all came with their various catering requirements. When did they get so picky? Lottie was sure she hadn’t raised her children to turn up their noses at potatoes (Clover), all kinds of bean (Sorrel) or anything that looked as if it might have an aubergine hidden in it (Ilex). You’d think that now they were adults (even Sorrel) they’d have left that sort of faddiness behind long ago. And that was only hers. Clover’s husband Sean could only eat fish if it had no trace of skin, bone, eye, fin or tail and absolutely no sauce or other covering in case that was hiding the other five. Possibly only Captain Birds Eye prepared seafood the way he liked it. Ilex’s long-term girlfriend Manda shuddered at the very idea of anything connected with chickens – especially eggs.
‘It’s where they come out from,’ she’d once whispered to Lottie, as if she had, at past thirty, only recently discovered the shells weren’t, after all, individually hand-crafted from super-fine organic pastry in a stylish – though pleasingly rustic – Conran-esque kitchen. Gaz, bless him, would eat a knitted tea-cosy if you poured enough gravy on it, and thank you for it.
Lottie was tempted to lie on the squashy pink kitchen sofa browsing idly through the Sunday papers until they had all arrived and then simply hand them the sheaf of pizza emporia flyers off the dresser and let them phone for a delivery. Instead, here she was taking out her clematis-wrath by stabbing a sharp blade into two legs of lamb and inserting slivers of garlic and rosemary into the cuts. This, she thought as the knife pierced the flesh, must be close to what it physically feels like to murder a human. There would presumably be that same initial light resistance, then the ‘give’ into soft yielding tissue till the knife stopped short against solid bone. Horrible. She hurriedly washed the knife under the tap as if scrubbing the evidence. Where did such awful thoughts come from? They happened frighteningly often, these days. Only a week or so ago, bored while waiting for the delayed tube at Oxford Circus with Sorrel, she’d looked along the platform to pick out the person she’d be most likely to select to push under a train, for no other reason than that it passed the time. Surely a sane person would have read the cinema posters or peeked over someone’s shoulder at the Evening Standard headlines?
She stuck the cleaned knife back on the rack, covered the prepared legs of lamb with a tea towel and moved them further along the worktop in case she was overcome with an urge to go crazy, savaging them till they were shredded and inedible. Never mind the delicate tastes of her children and their various partners, she wasn’t sure if even she could eat them now. Calming herself, she decided she would roast a huge dish of potatoes – sweet ones that brought to mind sweaty Caribbean markets, as well as sensible English King Edwards, freshly dug up early that morning. Clover could surely compensate with other vegetables. Plus there were to be Delia’s cauliflower and leeks with cheese sauce (so calm, Delia, you couldn’t imagine her considering the casual slaughter of innocent strangers, or even a clematis), and, as the courgette plants in the greenhouse were well ahead, she’d pan-fry some of those with tomatoes, garlic and lemon juice. Not an aubergine, bean, egg, chicken or fish in sight. Unless … an elfin streak of temptation flittered across her mind. Manda surely wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t even think to question, how the pastry on the rhubarb and apple pie came to look so glossy, would she? How much would a little bit of egg-yolk glaze hurt? It wasn’t as if the girl was actually allergic to the things, just strangely squeamish about them. Lottie took the uncooked pie out of the fridge and put it on the worktop, then took an egg from the box by the window and checked the felt-tip date she’d written on it. What would it matter, a lovely bit of free-range, organic home-laid bantam egg? But fearful of karma – for one day this egg-phobic Manda could well wield power as the mother of Ilex’s children – she put the egg back. There was nothing wrong with a matt finish on a pie. In the interests of being kind it could go without a glossy burnish: she wasn’t bloody Nigella Lawson.
They really didn’t care. Sorrel couldn’t believe her parents sometimes. Didn’t they want her to get brilliant A levels and make it into her first-choice uni? How was she supposed to get the grades for Exeter, burdened with parents who kept such slack, undisciplined habits? Did they even care she’d got Gaz in for an overnight? Suppose there was a fire and she was rescued unconscious and they didn’t know he was in there to send the fire fighters in?
She lay beside Gaz in her bed staring at the sloping attic ceiling on which the greying stain from a long-ago burst pipe seemed somehow bigger than last time she’d given it a proper look. It was roughly the shape of the Queen’s profile on a stamp. She’d get Gaz to go up a ladder and paint a face and a crown on it. And maybe draw round it, see if it changed and really was getting bigger. Someone had to keep an eye on these things. That pair of irresponsible old hippies wasn’t likely to. That was the trouble with being the afterthought child: they’d worn out all their parenting skills (such as they were – she had an opinion on that too) with Clover and Ilex and sort of imagined Sorrel would somehow bring herself up. She hadn’t done too bad a job so far, Sorrel considered, but now and then any seventeen year old could use a bit of a telling-off, a bit of No You Can’t and Because I Say So, like her friends at school got. Her mum hadn’t even asked her if she was on the pill. Suppose she got an embolism and collapsed and they couldn’t answer questions at the hospital about any medication she was on. She might die and end up with ‘Parents couldn’t be arsed’ as cause of death on the certificate.
Sorrel prodded Gaz in the ribs. He was a real gold-medal sleeper. And not only that, he specialized in waking up really q
uick and wanting sex, like instantly. Not attractive in a boy, she and Millie at school had concluded. You wanted someone who’d give you some conversation and a bit of a lead-up. He could at least clean his teeth. She prodded him again, harder, then leaped out of bed and across to the door before he could pounce. He could stay shag-less this morning, she decided. She had better (well, other) things to do. If her folks weren’t going to get on to her about her exams and the state of her room and what was she doing having boys in all night at her age then she’d have to take responsibility and deal with things herself. There was the big trip to plan. She’d got the clothes and the guidebooks and the websites, it was just a matter of sorting the itinerary. And, if he was really serious about coming along as well, sorting Gaz.
FIVE
MANDA WASN’T THE only one with a wedding on her mind. Lottie found that memories of her own and Mac’s came to her as they all ate lunch together (and surprisingly delicious the lamb had turned out to be, considering the vicious stabbing it had been treated to. It must have had a tenderizing effect). It was the paired-off arrangement of her children at the table that made her think of it: Manda within hand-patting distance of Ilex, Clover across from Sean and the stringy, pallid Gaz smirking unsubtle sexual complicity down the table at Sorrel. The long-ago wedding day had been a perfect one: as sunny as any loved-up teenage bride could want – at least weather-wise. Her mother had worn a huge mushroom of a hat in a fate-tempting shade of unlucky green – defiantly eager to hex this marriage in the hope that her daughter would eventually come to her senses and settle with a solid civil servant. The Revd Cherry had bravely overlooked the way Lottie’s scarlet and purple Ossie Clarke dress bulged like a full-sail spinnaker over the lump that was very soon to be Ilex. He’d managed to welcome in the many parishioners who’d turned up uninvited to the service ‘to wish them well’, so they said, but really to see their bossy vicar get his comeuppance by having to marry off his pregnant daughter to a hairy, dissolute rock musician. He’d even chivvied press photographers off the graves outside the church without entirely losing his temper. He must truly have been in a mood of profound relief, Lottie recalled, for back then wayward girls were such a dire responsibility for a parent. What to do with them? How to deal with a girl who refused point blank to turn out just like her mother? And yet now, what seemed only a few brief years later, here was Lottie, assembling her own family round the scratched old elm table and being pleased that the lamb was the right shade of pink. For several seconds she had a flash of utter unreality, half-wondering who all these people were who seemed to have originated via herself and Mac. Where had they come from? Because in her head she was still an eighteen year old all geed up about life’s possibilities and couldn’t be anywhere near old enough to have produced a grown-up family, plus partners and children. And what unlikely people they’d turned out to be, with their proper occupations (Ilex with a slick Chelsea office suite and two assistants) and ordered family lives (Clover colour-coded her bedlinen). Lottie’s parents would have been thrilled, right through to the next generation with this pair of almost unnaturally pink and tidy granddaughters. Impossible ever to imagine Sophia being busted for smoking dope at school or Elsa throwing paint round her bedroom (across furniture, carpet and all) in the manner of Jackson Pollock, as Lottie had. Would these little girls ever take off on a Friday night, not to the pub as planned but hitching lifts in lorries to Scotland on a whim to see a band? And what staggeringly well-mannered children they were, Lottie thought as she watched the girls sitting prim and straight in their matching polka-dot Mini Boden dresses and tidily eating the lunch she’d prepared. Surely they weren’t stunned to silence because for once they were eating in Holbrook House’s rarely used dining room instead of in the haphazard muddle of the day-to-day kitchen? It was certainly a quirkily imposing room – a mixture of dark wood panelling, blood-coloured paintwork and many unfathomable splashy abstract paintings (left over from Lottie’s short-lived phase as an artist), none of which should give a qualm to a pair of lively under-tens. How come they didn’t shout or squabble or slop their food about or knock over their drinks? They did not wield their knives and forks awkwardly like medieval daggers; they didn’t whinge about not liking garlic and they never forgot to say please and thank-you at the appropriate times. Much as she loved them, Sophia and Elsa reminded her of Midwich Cuckoos – small perfect aliens planted in a community to unnerve the residents. They certainly unnerved Lottie. Clover (who as a seven year old herself had eaten all her meals under the table, convinced she was really a poodle puppy) must have painstakingly drilled Table Manners into these two from the day the breast-feeding stopped. Lottie caught Manda studying the children from across the table as if taking in exactly what a four and seven year old should be like. They’re not all like this, Lottie wanted to tell her; this isn’t even close. Go hang out in any shopping mall, look over the fence of your nearest primary school, see the tantrums and the rampaging and the off-the-scale energy. Not that Manda would. When (if) Manda had children they, just like these two, would be hurtled between Tumble Tots and Monkey Music and Kodali violin and be fed on Baby Organix and the wholesome, child-friendly recipes of Annabel Karmel. And Lottie would sadly acknowledge that when she and Mac volunteered to take them on their customary muddy annual adventure with their tepee to Glastonbury, Manda would be ready with well-rehearsed reasons as to why not, just as Clover always was.