Blowing It

by Judy Astley

  Was Mrs Cresswell really interested? Might she be harbouring thoughts of carrying on the business herself, trusting it could be a convenient, part-time little number that would keep her amused between doing the school run and having lunch with her book club circle? She was probably already certain that she’d make a better go of it than Mac and Lottie, go in for some smart marketing, fancy labels with lots of cute descriptive detail, a pretty little water-colour of the house, all that. Maybe even a couple of goes at a Saturday farmers’ market. Perhaps Lottie should warn this so-elegant Mrs Cresswell in her DKNY denims and cream loose-knit Joseph cardi that there was more to supplying your family and a selection of the county’s finest restaurants with wholesome home-grown veg than swanning about on sunny mornings in baby-pink Hunter wellies, clutching a hand-crafted Suffolk trug. Really, at the very mention of the garden’s earning potential, Lottie should do the woman a huge favour and go, ‘Nooooo do not grow herbs! Weed out every floppy snail-magnet lettuce!’

  So to the second question it was no, Lottie would have no regrets about giving up this particular enterprise. Whatever had made them start it? They must have been crazy. Lottie was inclined to blame Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for making self-sufficiency look such an idyllic option on TV. Did he lie awake wondering if the weather forecast would mean drought or drowning for his flourishing veg patch? No, of course not. He had it all much better organized than that. Thinking back, she could date the beginning of this urge to nurture crops from the night she’d watched him (on TV, fortunately, not for close-up real) bedding down naked in his polytunnel to sleep among his seedlings. She must have been feeling a pre-menopausal tweak of earth-mother broodiness at the time, imagining she’d care deeply about whether her radishes were nourished to a plump juicy size and that she’d be lavishing this hand-raised bounty on an eager, benevolent band of grateful consumers. Hugh F-W hadn’t said a lot about slugs and snails, other than being shown looking very enthusiastic while he made his nightly torchlight collection of them seem like the second-best fun you could have in the dark. Nor did he seem to suffer the theft of entire beds of crops by rabbits. Maybe after he’d done the slug-round he sat in wait for the bunnies for the rest of the night, leaning against a wall, beneath a perfectly espaliered peach tree with a shotgun, a flask of his own nettle-leaf tea and a substantial slice of home-cooked rook pie.

  Annoying as the garden pests were, the customers were possibly the worst of the lot. It would be no loss if she never again had to explain patiently that Good King Henry was a salad ingredient not a forgotten monarch, or that experimental stripy yellow tomatoes deserved better than to be sneered at by people who considered themselves gourmets, and there’d be no more dismay at seeing plump yellow courgettes being poked at suspiciously by idiots who thought they were green ones that had gone off. There would also be no more realizing too late that sorrel and rocket should have been planted in the cooler of the long borders – the one that faced east – rather than in the warmer one where they wilted in the blazing afternoon sun and bolted to seed the moment you took your eyes off them. And, best of all, no more round trips of twenty miles to deliver two boxes of applemint that had been left out of the order for the Pimm’s promotion at the sodding Fothering Manor Hotel, only to find that ‘someone’ had, in the meantime, remembered that the hotel had a rampant patch of the stuff growing wild on the far side of their rose garden. If that was actually true; it could be that ‘someone’ didn’t want to admit they’d actually nipped out to Waitrose and bought up their entire pre-packed supply rather than wait for her to whiz all the way back with the forgotten delivery.

  ‘We still have the plans for the original planting in the long borders,’ Lottie told the Cresswells. ‘No vegetables there, obviously.’ She laughed, slightly nervously. Why were these people making it such hard work? There was an unmistakable air of slightly amazed disapproval about the two of them: a sort of ‘goodness, why on earth did you do that?’ It had started in the house, where the sight of the black-painted sitting room had brought a spluttered ‘Well, that’s, um … different!’ from Mrs C. Perhaps in future she’d simply go out for a few hours when viewers (if any more turned up) were due and leave the selling-side to the agent. Let Harry – or the next one, she hadn’t got round to sounding out another company yet – do his bit to earn his percentage. She’d already had to apologize for the sight of the miserable Ilex, sprawled flat out at midday on a bed wearing a motheaten old tartan dressing gown that he must have dug out from one of the blanket boxes on the middle landing. Not an attractive sight when you were trying to highlight the house’s better points.

  ‘It would be lovely to restore all this,’ Mrs Cresswell mused tactlessly, ‘get it back to how it was originally with banks of lupins and lavender and lots of lovely clematis. And shouldn’t there be pergolas?’ She looked accusingly at Lottie.

  ‘Well there are, along the other border.’ Lottie pointed past the central terrace where the silted-up rill waited its turn to be shown off, if that was the right term.

  ‘The ones on this side had to be removed for safety reasons.’ The Cresswells had three young children. They surely wouldn’t want them at risk from tumbling, crumbling poles simply for the sake of symmetry.

  ‘I suppose it’s all a matter of the right staff.’ Mrs Cresswell now addressed her husband, who was looking thoroughly bored and slightly nervous. So far, his wife’s comments had added up to a hefty and expensive shopping list. If he mentally added up the cost of several refurbished bathrooms, an entire new kitchen, the mended roof (all authentic hand-cut tiles), plus a renovated garden, Lottie could only be surprised he wasn’t already revving up his Mercedes and roaring off in search of a cheaper county. He’d perked up at the sight of Mac’s studio though and had looked dangerously close to picking up one of the guitars for a quick strum but had thought better of it. It would serve Mac right if he had messed about with the instruments, Lottie thought, given that Mac’s one contribution to this first viewing had been to leave the house for an urgent visit to his drinking friends down at the Feathers – throwing her the not-helpful comment ‘Don’t let them touch anything’ as he left.

  After the Cresswells had gone, Lottie walked back down to the orchard. She stopped at the gate to look back at the house and tried to make herself rekindle the deep, loving attachment she’d felt for the place when she and Mac had first lived there. It wasn’t at all that she’d developed a dislike for it (who could?), but now that it no longer held a growing family it seemed to have a faintly disappointed air about it, close to accusing its occupants of carelessly under-using its qualifications, like a company MD reduced to doing the filing. If a building could have an expression, it looked as bored as a can-kicking ten year old in mid-August whose playmates have all gone away on holiday. Perhaps Mr and Mrs Cresswell could be the ones to cheer the place up, filling it with children and fresh new furnishings. The garden should have a sand pit again and one of those fantastic swing/slide/activity centres that all three of her own children had so loved. And another tree house. The one that used to be at the far end of the orchard had been Mac’s one and only hammer-and-nails enterprise. He, Al and George, equipped with a huge collection of newly bought equipment from B&Q and vague memories of school woodwork classes, had spent an intense weekend building the thing among the low-slung branches of an oak that leaned at a precarious angle from the side bank of the field. The plan had been to make the construction look like a cross between a fort and a fairy castle but it had ended up looking as if someone had carelessly dropped a shed into the tree from a great height and then tried to patch it up. Ilex and Clover had loved it all the same, although Ilex had fought a long and bitter war to fend off Clover’s attempts to pretty up the place with cushions and curtains. When the tree, its house and contents had all crashed to the ground on the night of Michael Fish’s ‘not a hurricane’ in 1987, the orchard had been festooned like a field of prayer-flags with her various bits of decorative cloth.

 
; Lottie wandered across the field to look at the tree’s replacement – a stout sapling grown from one of the original’s acorns. It was doing well – close to twenty years on – but it would be a long time, maybe another century, before it could hold a tree house. Whose children would be here then?

  ‘I don’t know what went wrong.’ Ilex was well aware that he was bleating his entire tale of woe – even down to the bit where Manda swooshed so dramatically out of the restaurant – to the wrong person, but it was Wendy’s own fault if she wouldn’t take no for an answer and kept following him around. If she wanted to settle for taking the ‘Just Friends’ role as she’d now (so contrary this – when would he ever understand women?) told him she’d decided she preferred, then she could bloody well behave like one and deal with the rough bits that came with the deal. He could hardly confide in his male friends, after all. They’d just study the floor in craven embarrassment and mutter about did he fancy another pint and wasn’t the Arsenal/Villarreal match a travesty? The metrosexual revolution might be up and running, according to the weekly Man-Style features in the Saturday papers, but he didn’t yet know any male who’d a) carry a handbag or b) voluntarily sit around discussing ‘feelings’ when they could be talking about the next Ashes series.

  Wendy was perched opposite him on a bar stool in the King’s Head in Putney, dangerously close to Manda-territory. What if she came in right now? Ilex wondered, looking at the door in half-hope. That would show her – she’d see he was capable of a life without her. Look at me, he’d be bragging, I’m fine, see? Got your replacement sorted already – it’s what happens when you fling your beloved’s stuff down the stairs and won’t answer the phone. She’d be begging him to come back home, if she could see him now. She’d be desperate to get him away from this scary, bosomy rival. Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d come in with some big, bronzed pilot she’d pulled at Gatwick, a man who’d say all the right things over a restaurant table and whose pants wouldn’t be decoratively dangling from banisters down two flights of stairs, unless they’d been in such a hurry to get them off him … Ilex groaned at the thought. The idea of her in bed with someone else, doing all that stuff that was just Manda-and-Ilex, didn’t bear thinking about.

  ‘Do you really not know what you did wrong, Ilex?’ Wendy smirked, taking another sip at her Bacardi and Diet Coke. She’d stopped calling him Lexy, which must mean she was moving herself out of range. She’d also left a vivid lipstick imprint on the glass. He wondered if she’d leave a similar imprint on his dick. A couple of weeks ago and he’d hardly been able to keep her from trying – now she’d gone all hands-off and ‘let’s just talk’. What was this? A sneaky new tactic? Something she’d read about in one of those ‘Bag Your Man’ features?

  ‘You asked your long-term girlfriend if she’d like to get a cat? Think about it!’ He shook his head and sighed dejectedly yet again. The evening wasn’t going well. He should have stayed down in Surrey and watched back-to-back repeats of Dinner Ladies.

  She leaned forward and put her hand on his leg. ‘I’ll try it out on you,’ she murmured. ‘I’ll start to ask you a question and you see if you can finish the sentence for me …’

  She leaned closer. Ilex could see the lace edge of a lime-green bra down the front of her black top. And lots of pale, soft flesh. Wendy had the kind of cleavage that you could hatch an orphaned egg in. It crossed his mind that as he was technically a free man, he could, if the mood took him, go back to hers and indulge in an idle night of guilt-free passion. Maybe, feeling sorry for him, she would even be understanding about the uniform thing. Sadly, it was typical of his luck that not only had she suddenly shifted her personal goalposts, the mood, unfortunately, didn’t take him. A mercy-shag might be just the thing to perk the spirits. Right now though he could barely raise a smile, let alone anything that would impress Wendy in the bedroom department. Even if a whole troop of fully uniformed Policewomen of All Nations came marching through in formation, he’d prefer to look at the bottom of his beer glass and mull over his troubles.

  Wendy, strangely, now suddenly seemed to be doing her best to change this. She was whispering close and warm into his ear and her fingers were working their way higher up his leg. Her voice had gone all sultry and she was purring the words: ‘You know, Ilex, what I’d really, really like to do to you is …’ Then she pulled herself and her hand away suddenly, asking, ‘OK, now you tell me … what is it I’d really, really like to do to you?’ She licked her lips, not in an obvious come-and-get-it way, but almost obliviously. So sexy – did they practise that?

  Ilex felt very pink and looked around, flustered. The pub was busy for a Tuesday. ‘I can’t say it here! There’s too many people!’ He looked at the lipstick mark on her glass and thought again about possibilities. Sadly, even now, after a thigh-mauling, and the view down that cleavage, it barely caused a stirring. If Manda had really gone for good, he hoped this situation, too, wouldn’t prove permanent.

  ‘Oh really?’ Wendy raised her eyebrows and smirked knowingly. ‘So you assume it was rude and suggestive, do you?’

  Ilex smirked.

  ‘Wrong!’ She slapped a hand on the bar-top. ‘I was going to say I’d really, really like to tell you to get lost and go and do your oh-poor-me whinging somewhere else!’ Ilex shook his head, trying to settle confused thoughts.

  ‘Now do you see what I mean?’ She sounded triumphant. ‘You think I’m on track to say one thing, but really it’s something completely different. Think about it from your dippy girlfriend’s point of view. I must say,’ Wendy sniffed, ‘she’s a bit of a saddo. Why can’t she tell you what she wants instead of waiting for you to ask? She’ll still be waiting this time next century, dozy cow.’

  Ilex sighed. Would he ever understand how women’s thought processes worked? No wonder ‘what do women want?’ was the eternal question. There was just no eternal answer. He’d made Manda think he was going to ask her one question and somehow it was all his fault that he’d asked her the wrong one. OK, he had been going to ask her the big one – but she couldn’t possibly have known that, could she? No way could she have seen it coming. Not then, not till he’d actually come out with it as a big surprise. So what she’d flounced out of the restaurant over remained a mystery. Only one thing he knew for certain: whatever Manda wanted (a holiday? More bloody shoes? A bigger flat? Eternal love, babies and the whole shebang?), it definitely wasn’t a cat.

  Clover took the card out of her bag for possibly the fiftieth time that day and thought about calling Harry. She’d have to come up with a good reason – although he’d seemed to like her, quite a lot, he was probably like that with all his clients and she didn’t want to make a total idiot of herself. Maybe she could ask him about the Cresswells – see if they’d come back to him about buying Holbrook House. But then he’d probably wonder why she didn’t simply ask Mac and Lottie. Or he might not. If Harry was anything like Sean he would be a simple soul and not much given to analysis of the emotional stuff. That would be why Sean hadn’t really understood why she’d made such a ‘song and dance’, as he’d called it, years ago when he’d cheated on her. As far as he’d been concerned, it had been a simple episode of out-of-character madness and was all over. Enough said. He didn’t get it about the emotional fall-out that she was left with. All the same, she put the card back in her bag and picked up her car keys to go and collect Sophia from school. She didn’t really think she had it in her to start an affair. There were too many people who could be hurt.

  It was only as she was edging the Touareg out on to the main road that it came to her that Sean had told her he’d pick Sophia up on his way home from the dentist. And he really had gone to the dentist – she’d phoned the surgery on the pretext that he’d forgotten his appointment time and she was just checking for him that it was for 2.30, not 3 p.m.

  Clover couldn’t see Sean’s BMW at first. It was just as well she’d turned up. He must have forgotten. Either that or he’d been persuaded into some mus
t-have dental treatment. He was probably lying back in the chair while some sultry hygienist leaned over him in a short white coat and fluttered her mascara at him, persuading him that for a mere thousand pounds he could have teeth so white he’d need sunglasses just to look in the mirror. Surely someone would have called her? Wouldn’t he need her to know, for Sophia’s sake, that he’d be late?

  The Hugh-Grant-lookalike dad gave her a friendly smile as he walked past her car towards the school gate. Nice man. Had he really fallen prey to Mary-Jane, as she had hinted? She hoped not. She hadn’t seen his wife very often (one of the corporate lawyer brigade, rushing late into the carol service with a bulging briefcase and time-management issues) but she seemed a woman who would have no truck with marital silliness in her over-busy life. Lucky her.

  And, as Clover climbed out of the Touareg, there was Sean’s car after all. It was parked a little way past the school, at the far end of the long line of parent-mobiles and behind a big unfamiliar dark green Ford, covered in bright corporate logos. So, Clover realized, Mary-Jane was using her Wimbledon courtesy car to pick up Polly in her work hours, something Mary-Jane had already mentioned as being strictly forbidden. Nice one – Polly would enjoy that, sitting in the back having people peering in at the traffic lights to see if she was actually Maria Sharapova. Still, at least it was probably a better use for the vehicle’s down time than Mary-Jane parking it up by Wimbledon windmill so she could have some hot moments down among the ferns on the Common with a third-round drop-out in need of consolation.

  Clover hung back for a moment, reaching into the car to collect the bag of Iced Gems she’d brought for Sophia. As she straightened up, her head swam slightly and she wasn’t, for a moment, sure of what her eyes were seeing. There, in the middle of the pavement, were Sean and Mary-Jane, arms round each other, hugging and laughing. Just as quickly, they pulled away from each other and crossed the road, separate now but still laughing together. The Hugh-Grant dad, waiting outside the school gate, looked across in Clover’s direction and smiled at her again, but this time a little uncertainly. Clover ignored him and his sympathy, her eyes blurry with furious tears. She climbed straight back into the Touareg, started the engine and did a furious three-point turn, not caring that impatient school-run cars were speeding at her from all angles. If she got home in the fastest possible time, she could be packed and have her own, Elsa’s and Sophia’s bags ready to load into the car by the time he came home. Home! So much for that! Home is where you run to, where you feel safe and secure. She’d be on the A3 down to Holbrook House before Sean could get the first sentence of an excuse out. Bloody Mary-Jane with her perfect bloody idle life and her nanny and her fabulous place in France and her ‘Everything all right?’