Blowing It

by Judy Astley

  ‘I worry that they might … regret it.’ Clover fished in her bag for a tissue. She suddenly felt in danger of tears. ‘It’s been home for so many years – all their grown-up lives, really.’

  ‘And yours too?’ Harry said softly.

  Why couldn’t Sean be all sympathy and understanding like this? Clover thought, feeling fat tears overflowing onto her cheeks. Why did he have to be all insensitive and ‘good on ’em’ about it? All he saw was the likelihood that Mac and Lottie would spend a few weeks on a beach somewhere then come home and settle again, much as before, but with money in the bank instead of in high-maintenance bricks. He should know them better than that by now. Didn’t he realize the two of them could actually blow the entire lot, no qualms, no problems? Where, as Ilex worried, would their pension be then? Where (and she hated herself for it, but there it was) would her idea for family gatherings in a pink-walled French farmhouse be? Selfish, selfish, she told herself.

  ‘Holbrook House hasn’t been my home for quite a few years now. So really, it absolutely isn’t anything to do with me.’

  Clover tried laughing about it but only a strangled squawk emerged. It was eight years, two months and a couple of weeks ago to be exact that she’d moved out, though she wasn’t going to tell this Harry-person that. It sounded so juvenile. It was simply that she could date it from her wedding day. She’d never minded about not doing the girlie flat-share thing, having had plenty of territory of her own in the house, not to mention parents who were more likely to wonder if there was something wrong with you if you didn’t bring boys in to sleep with, rather than getting huffy if you did. And she’d so very much enjoyed not living with Sean before they got married. Dating, from home, in a rather nineteen-fifties American sort of way had been brilliant fun. Having quasi-illicit sex with him in his office, in hotel rooms, once on a freezing snowy night up on a sports pavilion roof outside Guildford (where the security lights had suddenly come on) somehow had turned out to be more thrillingly delicious than the real-life marital bed sort of stuff. It was probably her fault. Mary-Jane, when Clover had confessed this over sinful afternoon Chablis (and cake, of course – a walnut and coffee one that time) while the children were safely in school, had said she should fantasize more. ‘Buy yourself a big fat vibrator down at the Ann Summers shop,’ she’d suggested, quite straight-faced. ‘Or have a fling with someone else now and then – it sure gives your marriage an edge.’ So matter-of-fact, you’d have thought she was suggesting a logical remedy for too-tight shoes or something.

  She should have gone to Manchester when Sean had asked her that time. It’d been a sexy, back-to-the-old-days impulse and she’d blown it. He’d been a bit cool with her since then, a bit too hands-off. Mary-Jane would have gone. She wouldn’t have let a little thing like what to do with the children get in the way. Now Clover came to think of it, perhaps that answered the question of what Mary-Jane did with all her free time. She’d have to ask her, had she had a thing with the Hugh-Grant-lookalike school dad? Had she whizzed him back to her place after the school drop-off, hurled the piles of paperbacks from her bed and had him before the nanny got back from Waitrose? How did you learn to be that guiltless?

  ‘Home is where the heart is, don’t they say?’ Harry, now in Roehampton, turned the car down Clarence Lane towards Richmond Park. ‘I know it’s a cliché but you can’t be expected to watch the house you grew up in, particularly a house as special as Holbrook, being sold off without feeling a bit upset. I do understand, you know. I see it a lot. I’ve had to deal with vendors who need to have their fingernails prised from the front door on moving day.’

  ‘No, no. I should be over it. It’s fine. Really, it’ll be fine!’ Clover blew her nose and tried a smile.

  ‘And,’ Harry ventured, ‘if you want to talk about it, maybe even meet up, you can always call me?’

  Clover took the business card he’d pulled out of the car’s dashboard shelf and looked at it.

  ‘My mobile number’s on there,’ he told her. ‘Just call, anytime. And I’ll try really hard, I promise, to find your old home a caring new owner.’

  ‘You make it sound like an abandoned puppy.’ Clover laughed, stowing the card carefully at the back of her wallet. She felt strangely light and quivery and knew, though as yet for no discernible reason, that she wouldn’t be mentioning Harry, or this drive home, to Sean.

  Mac crossed Piccadilly quickly, dodging stop-start traffic, and went into the courtyard of the Royal Academy. He just wanted somewhere quiet to sit by himself, to collect his thoughts before he set out for home. If he didn’t, he’d be mulling over the lunchtime conversation to the point where he’d probably walk absent-mindedly straight onto the track at Waterloo. He went and sat on the steps, to the side of the entrance, attracting some wary looks from a small group of ladies who’d come to visit the tea room and check out the dates for the Summer Exhibition. He didn’t blame them. With his scraggy, thinning hair and in his old jeans, sockless Docksiders and unlined linen jacket (several years old but a classy Victor and Victoria number in its day) they probably had him down as one of London’s homeless thousands and about to ask them for cash. The very idea made him smile. If they only knew the kind of money that had been discussed over the Wolseley’s finest; the synchronization fees over the oysters and the performing rights royalty predictions over the shepherd’s pie. He lit a cigarette and tried to calm his heart’s busy fluttering. He really mustn’t get carried away – he’d been (almost) here before. His old compositions had seen some action in adverts for ketchup, a major used-car dealer, dog food, a lawnmower and for tampons. Fortunately for Sorrel, as she had been only twelve at the time and sensitive to playground teasing, that particular one had been rejected after a regional trial run and no one outside Plymouth had known about it. His music had never yet, till now, come up as a contender for a major international film. He tried hard not to get over-excited, not to think of what happened with the revived ‘Love is All Around’ when it went into Four Weddings … Knowing his luck, this lunch with Doug and his music publisher would represent the beginning and end of the whole deal. Next thing he’d hear was bound to be that they’d decided to go with an old-but-good number written by a musician who’d been careless over losing his copyright. Or somebody long dead. So much cheaper that way and in spite of mega-million budgets, there was always some careful money-wallah in a production office watching the costs.

  Mac stubbed his cigarette out on the step beside him and stood up, stretching his aching legs. Cold stone, even in late May, wasn’t the most sensible thing to sit on. He actually felt chilled, right through the worn denim. Perhaps he should take a cab down to Harvey Nicks and stock up on some new threads. He made his way, rather stiffly, and feeling mildly dizzy, out into the bustle of Piccadilly and back towards Green Park station. Possibly he’d had more to drink than he’d thought – though he was sure Doug had drunk the bigger half of the claret, and they’d each only had the one glass of champagne with the oysters. The dizziness receded, now he’d picked up pace towards the station, though his head was starting to throb and he hoped he wasn’t going to turn into one of those people who, as they age, start picking up weird sensitivities and allergies to all the things they’d most enjoyed in life. What was that all about? You heard about it happening – Mike on the pub quiz team couldn’t eat soft cheese any more – it made him wheezy. Lottie had a friend who’d suddenly gone allergic to her own twelve-year-old cat. Was it some kind of celestial revenge, some paranormal way of telling you that you’ve drunk/eaten/smoked quite enough of whatever it is for one lifetime?

  Mac hesitated outside the station. The dizziness briefly kicked back in and then out again, leaving him feeling nervously certain that if he ventured down the steps he’d be sure to lose his footing and tumble down at least half of them. Instead he walked to the roadside and hailed a cab, giving the driver the address of Holbrook House and feeling relief and gratitude that the driver accepted the thirty-five-mile journey wi
thout a quibble. Well, it was worth it, Mac thought. He couldn’t wait to see Lottie’s face when he told her that this time next year, as the Del-Boy saying went, they could be millionaires. Again.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I HOPE THERE won’t be fish. I hate fish.’ Gaz was sprawled low in the Mini’s passenger seat with his feet twitching away on the dashboard more or less in time with Gorillaz. Sorrel hated him doing that. OK, so her car might rattle with empty Diet Coke cans and Pringles tubes and the seats might be mostly hidden under various items of clothing, books and odd pages from magazines but that didn’t mean she also wanted the dusty imprint of huge trainers all over the vinyl. She made a conscious, calm decision not to say anything about it, as practice for when they went travelling. If she picked on every little thing he did that just slightly annoyed her while they were away, they wouldn’t last three days together, let alone three months. Perhaps it would rack up some good karma, as her mother would put it, if she bit back on negative comments and saved her grumbles only for things that might actually be dangerous. One of these was that Gaz always messed around with door handles. He’d once fallen out of the Mini when she’d first had it. Luckily they’d still been on the Holbrook House driveway at the time, rather than doing seventy on the A3. His excuse had been that he liked to check he could get out in a hurry, in case of a crash or something. If he mucked about with the doors on the plane to Australia she’d definitely have something to say about it. She thought briefly of warning the crew that he’d need watching, in case he started trying to do the Doors To Manual thing thirty thousand feet up, but that would have them on full-scale nutter-alert and the two of them would be sure to get bumped off the plane somewhere in Germany.

  ‘There won’t be fish,’ Sorrel promised him. ‘I told Clover you don’t like it so she won’t be cooking it. She’ll probably play it safe with chicken. Either that or she’ll be ordering in a Chinese delivery from The Good Earth.’

  ‘She might do fish. She might do it on purpose. She might hate me.’ Gaz was now gripping the sides of the seat. Sorrel smiled to herself, put her foot down and overtook a builder’s van, narrowly missing the central reservation, and sending adrenalin lurching. She didn’t risk taking her concentration off the road to look at Gaz but she imagined he had his eyes tight shut and his fingers crossed. Sometimes it was quite cute that he was such a wuss, like when he needed her to take spiders out of the bath or opened her bedroom door so warily in case a bat had got in, but in the car it was really infuriating and counted as a definite criticism of her driving.

  ‘Why would Clover hate you? Why would you think that? She invited you tonight, didn’t she?’ Sorrel wasn’t having this. He’d been willing enough to come to her sister’s for this loony siblings’ dinner where they were apparently (according to Clover) supposed to hold some kind of secret top-level talks about the parents’ plans for selling up and running out on them all. He’d said he was really pleased Clover had asked Sorrel to bring him along (Sorrel wasn’t going to tell him that it was probably because Clover couldn’t face the thought of a dinner that didn’t conform to the equal-numbers male and female rule). All Gaz had to do now was try to have a good time. Not a lot to ask.

  ‘Manda will be there,’ she continued. ‘You like Manda, don’t you?’

  This was like soothing a three year old. This had so better not be a new role he was thinking of taking on: the whingy, hang-back boyfriend, borderline agoraphobic. Next thing, he’d morph into one of those weird stay-home adults who never went anywhere because they ‘wouldn’t know anyone’. Lazy, that’s all that was. That friend of her parents, Kate, the one who was married to junkie George, the guitarist from Charisma who’d died, she’d gone through all that. Sorrel remembered Lottie phoning her every time there was a party on somewhere, or to see if she fancied going to the theatre or out with the women or whatever and Kate always said no, because it might involve new people, new places. Lottie had lost patience eventually. Sorrel had sat on the stairs cuddled up to the dog for comfort (she couldn’t have been more than ten, she recalled the soft, shaggy wolfhound had been so huge) and listened in excited alarm to her mother shouting down the phone, something she’d absolutely not normally do: ‘Kate, stop bloody thinking everyone’s going to be looking at you! They’re not, OK?’ And then the next thing, Kate suddenly married an earl and moved to a Scottish castle. That probably counted as one top result: living on a remote Highland rock, it was more than likely that finding anyone at all to socialize with (apart from sheep) was pretty much out of the question.

  As she parked the Mini, it occurred to Sorrel that Clover’s house looked like something made by the My Little Pony people. It had plaster mouldings like icing-sugar flowers and was so birthday-cake pink and white. The top of the wall to the small front garden was planted with a froth of pale blue forget-me-nots and at each side of the front door there was a pink pot painted with white spots and trailing with something that looked to Sorrel like tiny starry daisies. She supposed that was what you did when you were a mother with no job – you spent your time prettifying your surroundings. Would she do that? On balance she rather hoped she’d have a career that left her just that bit short of free time (journalism was the current choice, something comfortable in a magazine office, preferably with lots of clothes and make-up freebies thrown in) so that she wouldn’t have to do stuff like gardening. But hey, it worked for Clover. Clover was a born nest-maker.

  ‘Nice gaff,’ Gaz commented, looking up at the windows. Sorrel felt more optimistic. Either he meant it (good) or he had decided to make an effort at last (very good).

  She slid her arm round him and gave him a soft, slow kiss. ‘It’ll be all right. You know them all and they won’t bite you. I might though …’ She sank her teeth gently into his bottom lip and he pulled her closer but she opened her car door and backed away from him.

  ‘Later, maybe!’ she teased. ‘But only if you’re good.’

  ‘Aren’t I always?’ Gaz grinned at her, climbing out of the passenger door.

  ‘Perhaps you are,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t tell you, in case you get conceited.’

  ‘It’s times like this I really wish we had a nanny,’ Clover grumbled to Sean as she ripped up basil leaves to scatter onto six individual tomato tarts. Sophia and Elsa were playing a boisterous game that involved weaving in and out of the chair and table legs, rolling around on the floor and squealing at the tops of their voices. What she’d give right now to have some kind, capable girl take the two of them off her hands, lead them to their rooms to be bathed and put to bed and have a chapter of Peter Pan read to them. If she ever did get one, the nanny would have to be able to read English really well – a good grounding in classic children’s books was something Clover believed in devoutly: these were stories that stayed with you through your whole life, along with cosy memories of who read them to you and where you were. Her earliest story-memories somehow mixed Peter Rabbit with the scent of cannabis, someone playing a guitar and lights flashing by in the Mont Blanc tunnel, but when she thought of Holbrook House, she could conjure up the Bambi figures patterning her white nightdress, the pinkish glow from the toadstool bedside lamp and Lottie, cosy in a purple velour Dance Centre outfit, reading her and Ilex to sleep with The Wind in the Willows.

  There was another piercing shriek from Elsa and Clover wasn’t quite fast enough to stop her landing a hefty punch on her sister’s arm. Any minute and it would be all-out battle-stations.

  ‘Could you take them upstairs for me, please, Sean? Settle them on our bed with a DVD or something? They’re so hyper, they’re driving me mad. There’ll be tears.’

  Probably mine, she thought to herself. Why couldn’t he think of it himself? It was obvious she was up to her eyes in the cooking. He was willing enough to join in and do his bit with the girls whenever Clover asked him but sometimes she really wished he’d see what needed to be done and take the initiative. It was so exhausting, thinking of everything. All Sean’s thinking-proce
sses were kept for his work. Ask him to organize a full-scale bells-and-whistles launch for a major new product or a multi-celebrity post-premier party for a West End show and he’d be Mr Organization. But on his way home he pressed a sort of ‘delete’ button in his brain. Her own fault, she supposed as she drizzled olive oil on the tarts, for making the house so decidedly her own territory. But then could you blame her? She needed a secure comfort zone. It was her citadel against Sean once more pressing that other ‘delete’ button: the one labelled ‘fidelity’. If it happened again, at least she’d have her … what? For a moment it crossed her mind that the proper term for what she hid behind was nothing more profound than soft furnishings. She felt all her confidence wavering. It wasn’t just soft furnishings. No. Her home was a lot more than that. It was about heart and soul – all those things Sean would think soppy. That was what Holbrook House was all about and the reason for this dinner.

  ‘Jeez, Clover, you’ve gone to town a bit, haven’t you?’ Sean said as he came back into the kitchen after depositing his daughters in front of Chicken Little. ‘The table looks like something out of the Harrods fine china department. I didn’t know we had that many glasses! It’s only your family, isn’t it? Looks more like you’re expecting Charles and Camilla!’

  Clover froze. ‘It’s not too much, is it? I wanted to do it properly. They won’t …’ She bit her lip. ‘They won’t laugh at me, will they? I know I wouldn’t usually – it’s just—’

  ‘Course they won’t, princess!’ Sean gave her a swift kiss. ‘They’ll love it! Especially Manda – right up her street. I bet Ilex’s idea of a posh home dinner is using a fork for his pizza. Come on, let’s you and me have a sneaky glass of fizz before they get here. Just a livener, get us in the mood.’ He gave her a fond hug and nuzzled her hair. ‘You smell gorgeous,’ he murmured. ‘And you’re doing a great job in here – I’m starving.’