by Judy Astley
‘Ha!’ Clover laughed. ‘And now you sound like Bill Clinton! Please don’t tell me any more, I can fill in the rest of the details for myself, thanks.’
‘Again, all wrong! If you’d just fucking listen … it was all about France.’
‘France? What about France? Who’s going to France?’ Clover bent to pick up the courgettes and went to push past Sean but he wasn’t moving. She was almost leaning on him, shoving against him with the box. Bloody France, bloody houses. Another dream kiboshed along the way. Your own fault, her conscience mocked at her, your own stupid fault. Sean’s hand reached tentatively for her shoulder. She shrugged it off, but without much conviction.
‘We were going to France, Clover. All of us: you and me and the girls. For six weeks, this summer. And if anyone else in your family wanted to come for part of it, there’s room for them too, just the way you always wanted it.’
‘Yeah, right. You won’t get round me that way, promising something after the event. It’ll take more—’
‘It was to Mary-Jane’s place in Provence, you dim tart. She’s lending it to us. Or she was, till you got the wrong idea and suddenly took off.’ Sean took the box of courgettes out of her hands and put them back on the ground, then pulled her towards him. He smelled of hot sun and home and safety; everything she missed. No wonder it was called a broken heart – hers really, really hurt.
‘But I saw you with her outside the school. Laughing and kissing her and—’
‘I didn’t kiss her, not even close. If you hadn’t been so crazed with suspicion you’d have seen I just hugged her. And I only did that because she’d just said yes, that it was all sorted. Yes, we could borrow the house. She and Lance have got to go to New Zealand this summer for a huge family reunion. They do it every five years, she told me. I thought … well, I thought I’d get it fixed up on the quiet and then surprise you. It was so that we could go and try out a whole summer holiday in France and see if we really like it before we commit to buying somewhere. I thought you’d be so happy – just shows how wrong you can be.’
He looked about fifteen, she thought. Anxious and frightened. He wasn’t the only one – hell, what had she done? She’d had a stupid, idiotic one-night fling out of petty revenge. A bad enough reason on its own; how much worse was it that it turned out she’d had no reason at all?
‘Sean, I … I don’t know what to say.’ She should say a huge, almighty sorry, but then he’d wonder what for. Well OK, he’d understand she was apologizing for not hearing him out, for overreacting, but how to hide a much bigger ‘sorry’ in the middle of that? You couldn’t. She had to stuff that horrible night, the whole Harry-event, at the back of her conscience and try to forget about it. Clover had made a leap into a more grown-up, more complex world than she’d been used to: perhaps most people carried a dreadful secret something inside them that counter-balanced the good, well-meaning side. It would be her penance, that she’d know what she’d done but could never let it out to be dealt with and forgiven. Well, they were even now – but Sean must never, ever know.
SEVENTEEN
IT WAS SOMETHING Susie Granger had said. Susie was Mac’s last visitor of the day; last hospital visitor at all, actually, for he’d be on his way home early the next morning. She’d put two ideas into Lottie’s head with one short, condemning sentence, unthinkingly uttered as the two women had left the hospital the evening before: ‘Of course now you and Mac won’t be travelling anywhere, you won’t be selling Holbrook House, will you?’
Lottie had replied with no more than a vague murmur, which Susie should feel free to interpret any way she wished, but after they’d parted outside the door to the X-ray department, she had waited for a while in the Audi, thinking. She saw Susie, all elegant straw-coloured linen and a bronze quilted Chanel bag, climb into her sassy little blue Mercedes, watched while the car’s roof slid back into the boot space and Susie drove away into the low evening sunlight, her cocoa-coloured hair barely rippling in the light, warm breeze. The scene reminded Lottie of a song, one that Marianne Faithfull used to sing. She delved into her memory for the title and eventually trawled it up: ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’. What an annoying song that was – about a young, suburban wife who’d given up on the dream that she’d ever drive through Paris in a sports car on a summer’s night. For God’s sake, what was with the giving up, at thirty-seven? What kind of age was that for whining about things you’d concluded you could never do? Especially simple, easily achievable things like a fun little car trip? What was Lucy’s problem – did she think it depended on some man to make it all happen for her? OK, granted, the dream represented a certain romantic euphoria, but what made her so defeatedly decide it was all over? Fictional Lucy, you just wanted to shake her, to tell her life was all still out there for the taking and ask her what she thought age had to do with anything.
Lottie eventually started up the Audi and drove out on to the main road towards home. As she approached the village green, the Major’s pretty house with its forlorn For Sale sign caught her attention. The garden was, after a couple of months of being abandoned at the height of the growing season, starting to show signs of serious neglect. The front lawn looked as if someone who’d become obsessed with Monty Don’s gardening style was attempting, and failing, at a meadow effect and instead of a delicate sprinkling of poppies, daisies and cornflowers, had found the grass being invaded by fat dandelions, many of whose heads had ripened to bloated, tatty fluff. Bindweed was threaded through the roses that hung over the fence, and the foxgloves and delphiniums had run to tall, rusty seedheads. Just as at Holbrook House, the clematis had triumphantly clambered to the roof and was making its steady way towards the end chimney.
Lottie parked by the bus stop at the side of the green, rummaged among the CDs in the glove compartment and found a pen and an old petrol receipt. She copied down the estate agent’s number.
‘And those leylandii will definitely have to go,’ Lottie startled herself, saying it out loud.
‘I’d better do a count-up. How many of us will there be?’ Sorrel opened the dresser drawer, took out a heap of cutlery and counted out a handful of forks.
‘Ten?’ Lottie said, looking up from measuring out olive oil for the marinade. ‘Or is your friend Millie staying for lunch too? That’ll make it eleven, I think.’
‘You, Dad, me and Gaz, Clover and her lot, that’s eight, Ilex plus Millie, ten.’ Sorrel added them up on her fingers.
Lottie looked round to see if anyone else was in hearing distance. ‘And Manda as well. She’s coming too but she doesn’t want us to let Ilex know, so make sure you don’t tell him.’
‘Is she? Wow! What, definitely for lunch or just to drop more of Ilex’s stuff off?’
‘She’ll be staying for lunch, she said. Though she did say she was bringing something for Ilex. If she’s intending to stay and be sociable then I don’t imagine it’s a bag of socks. Let’s hope it’s all back on again.’
‘Whatever. Anything that puts Ilex in a better mood. Hey, maybe she’s—’
‘Sorrel, don’t start on that one again!’
‘I was only going to say maybe she’s missing him! Can’t think why, he’s a miserable git. And someone really ought to drop him a hint that she might be coming over so that at least he makes an effort. He’s starting to look like a crusty. He’ll be drifting with the winos down at Guildford station with a dog on a string soon. Can’t you do the mumsy thing and tell him to take a shower?’
‘He’s a grown man, Sorrel.’ Even to herself she didn’t sound very convinced of that. When was the moment when anyone could be deemed to be grown up? One blip and even the most stable and responsible person could be reduced to childlike insecurity and a juvenile sulk.
‘Yeah, right. We’re really seeing signs of that lately, aren’t we?’
Lottie started on the garlic, crushing it with the back of the knife, chopping it neatly and adding it to the oil, lemon and coriander. She stirred in yoghurt and the cubed lam
b went in next.
‘And if it is all back on, why doesn’t Manda just phone and tell him?’ Sorrel went on, delving into the drawer again for knives. ‘Maybe then he’ll stop moping around. Ever since he got here, he’s been looking like somebody took all his toys away.’
‘Yes, well maybe the only call he needed was a wake-up one. Most people do, now and then.’
‘Yeah … um, right. Bit deep for me, that. I’ll just take this lot out to the garden, do the table,’ Sorrel said, heading for the French doors. She didn’t want to think about wake-up calls. Hadn’t they all had enough of that this last couple of weeks? She’d got through the exams, just, but it hadn’t been easy. Gaz had been right about Carly’s lot at school – but only partly. When it had been about her folks selling the house, sure – they’d been too interested, too wanting to know stuff. But when they’d heard how her dad had almost died, it had been different. She’d felt that the sympathy was genuine this time. She’d explained to ever-cynical Gaz that it had to be because anyone could relate to something as awful as almost losing a parent, whereas the thing about moving from a multi-million-pound pad was gossip-worthy but hardly a tragedy. There’d been small examples of new kindness, such as when she’d forgotten to take a bottle of water into the second French paper, Carly had been the one who’d immediately given her one from her own supply. Stacey had asked her in the lunch break if she’d like her to pick her up for the next day’s exams on the way to school, sensing that Sorrel might not be feeling up to driving herself with so much to think about. School staff, who’d rather tended to leave her to her own devices over the years, had asked every day how Mac was and whether she needed it mentioned to the examination board that she was having to deal with a traumatic family time. It was all a bit late, of course; school was over now, for ever, thank God, but it was a comforting note to go out on.
Lottie went into the garden to sort out the seating. It was the most glorious June day – even given the haphazard standards of Holbrook House’s garden maintenance, the place was looking wonderfully full-bloomed. The lupins seemed to have triumphed, this year, over the annual invasion of fat aphids, the self-seeded Cosmos, antirrhinums and ancient clumps of blousy scarlet peonies kept the long borders’ vegetables more or less out of sight of the terrace. If Gertrude Jekyll came visiting to check out her original creation, she might, just for today, manage to concede a generous B-plus rather than the usual better deserved D-minus.
The battered old table out on the terrace was plenty big enough for them all but chairs would need to be brought out from the kitchen to supplement the garden benches. Usually it was Clover Lottie could rely on for this kind of help but although Sophia and Elsa had been up and playing in the garden since the early hours, Clover and Sean seemed to be still in bed. Good. Enjoy it while you’ve got each other, she thought, glancing up at their window in the east wing; you never know when the fates will stop your roundabout and chuck one of you off your painted pony.
Her sister Caro had shrieked when Manda told her that Ilex had proposed and had phoned every day since to demand an update. ‘You can’t leave it too long,’ she’d insisted as the days passed. ‘You have to give men an answer pretty soon before they forget they’ve asked you anything at all.’
Manda had left out the bit about him being in handcuffs at the time and was now wondering two things: first, if he’d only asked her under the duress of the arrest, as a desperate bid to get the police on-side, and, second, that she had actually mistimed her reply after all, leaving it far too late. There was a difference between having a dignified interval between question and answer and leaving it so long that he could only conclude she’d considered him beneath contempt as a marriage prospect. It was possibly her own fault that he was now convinced she’d flounced out of his life for good, but something had had to be done to shake him up. If she’d given in after a couple of days, that would have set a pattern for the rest of their lives together. If they had one. She wasn’t going to be a doormat wife, oh no. All the same, if it all worked out, she would keep the half-brick with its now desiccated pair of roses that he’d tied to it as a memento of Ilex’s great moment of high romance. If he never gave her another crazy episode to outdo that one, she’d have that brick as a single silly treasure to remind her that when it came to it, Ilex could get her up there with the daftest mushy movie moments that had her damp-eyed and sniffing at the cinema as the credits rolled.
Now – important things: what to wear. The day was a hot one, the lunch was to be a casual garden barbecue to celebrate Mac’s return to health and to home. Manda opened the wardrobe and chose her newest dress, a simple sleeveless bluey-grey strappy number she’d bought that week in Whistles. Very demure. And it would so exactly match the present she had for Ilex. Whether he decided he still loved Manda or not, he’d so completely, utterly, adore what she had chosen for him.
So easy, a barbecue, Lottie thought as she sat beneath the sunshade, idly stirring the dressing through the salad. Ilex, Mac and Sean were standing around the fire, wielding spatulas like daggers and occasionally poking at the food that was sizzling over the coals. The lamb and chicken kebabs were being turned so competitively often they were practically being spit-roasted. It was such a prehistoric male thing, the fire and the food ritual. Whoever had first confined fire to safe, closed-in quarters had a lot to answer for, in Lottie’s opinion, effectively trapping several centuries of women into domestic servitude.
‘What do we do about Manda?’ Clover whispered to Lottie. ‘Is she definitely coming or not? I thought she’d be here by now.’
‘She said she was coming. We’ll just shove up the bench a bit when she gets here. Unless …’
‘Oh don’t say she won’t come … I’d so love Ilex to be happy again.’
Like you, Lottie almost said. Clover looked radiant – about five years younger, softer. Lottie recognized that look. She remembered she and Kate used to giggle about it on the road with Charisma, the mornings after they’d stayed in a hotel more lusciously appointed than usual. They’d meet up in the reception area for the check-out and murmur ‘POG’ at each other – an acronym for post-orgasmic glow. Sorrel had recognized it too, had summed it up with typical conciseness when she’d found Clover and Sean making coffee in the kitchen late that morning and had blurted out, ‘Ugh, per-lease! You’re all loved-up!’
‘I was going to say, unless they just disappear together. They might prefer to go off on their own.’
‘But that would … No, Manda wouldn’t do that. She knows this lunch is all about Dad coming home.’
‘And it’s about Sorrel and Gaz and Millie finishing their exams,’ Lottie reminded her. ‘Clover … Mac’s illness …’
‘Oh Mum, I do know. I know it was such a close call.’ Clover reached across and took Lottie’s hand. ‘But we’re all here and we’ll all take care of you. Imagine how it would have been if we hadn’t all been able to be here with you?’ That wasn’t what Lottie meant at all; but just now there wasn’t time.
‘Ah … well, OK,’ she said instead. ‘We’ll maybe talk about that later. Food’s ready. I’ll go and call Sorrel and the others and I’ll get the rice and the courgettes while I’m in there.’
Oh lordy, Lottie thought as she picked her way across the uneven terrace, why did Clover have to make things so complicated?
‘You’ll have to have your blood checked three times a week? How long for?’ Sean asked Mac over lunch.
‘God, that’s, like, sooo rough? You won’t have any left,’ Gaz said, looking queasy at the thought. ‘How much do they take?’
‘An armful,’ Lottie and Mac said both together, spluttering laughter. All the younger ones looked at them, blankly.
‘A line from Tony Hancock? “The Blood Donor”?’
‘Oh. I saw that. Once. I think.’ Gaz didn’t look convinced.
‘No, really, it’s not that bad,’ Mac reassured him. ‘They only take a tiny bit to check the clotting levels and make adjustment
s. And it’s just for a few months, till everything’s stabilized. Maybe even less.’
Clover looked worried, Lottie thought. She hoped she wasn’t going to become ridiculously morbid over Mac’s illness. If she started treating her parents as if they’d suddenly morphed into old, frail people, they were all going to come to grief, one way or another. Mac was going to get better and real life would gradually come back. She and Mac had no intention of becoming frozen into a sad still-life of inactivity and over-anxiety. There would be changes – but ones they’d chosen, not, thank the president of the immortals, had forced on them.
Ilex felt a bit like a spare part. Never before had he seen Clover so tactile with Sean. The two of them sat together, hardly able to keep from touching each other. It should have been something he was happy about but instead it made him feel the loss of Manda even more. Sorrel and Gaz were bickering at the table like an old married couple and Millie looked perfectly happy not to be attached to anyone. Not that he’d even consider … she was only eighteen, for heaven’s sake.
He got up from the table and carried plates into the kitchen, simply to escape from the very awful suspicion that, given the horribly lonesome way he was feeling right now, he’d soon have to stop himself asking Millie out to the Feathers that night, simply to have someone to pour his soul out to over a couple of pints. What were you supposed to do with yourself at thirty-seven when your girlfriend hated you, had (justifiably) taken over your flat and you’d slunk home to Mummy and Daddy? He looked in the mirror over the rusty Aga and made an L for loser sign on his head. And in the mirror, he caught sight of a beautiful girl with long sleek hair the colour of cappuccino. Manda was in the room, holding a cardboard box.
‘I hope I’m not too late,’ she said. She sounded slightly breathless, the way she did – and he so wished he hadn’t thought of this – during sex.