by Emlyn Rees
‘I disgust you!’ Ellen exhaled, astonished at his arrogance. ‘That’s rich! Look at you. Letting your daughter run off in a storm. I’d call that irresponsible!’
‘Ned?’
Ellen turned to see the door open behind her and a tall, beautiful young woman hurriedly stepping into the Portakabin with a coat held over her head. The dog who’d savaged Ellen’s coat ran in past the woman and shook his wet fur all over Ellen’s legs.
‘Is everything all right?’ the woman asked, looking between Ellen and Ned as she pulled away the coat. Even frowning, she had a glowing, earthy kind of beauty. She went and stood next to Ned, and Clara immediately ran up and hugged the woman’s legs.
Ellen looked at the family unit before her, three pairs of hostile eyes staring at her, accompanied by the low growl of the dog. Grabbing her jacket, she pulled the note from the dry cleaner’s out of her pocket and smacked it on the desk next to Ned. ‘You owe me,’ she said. Then she stormed out of the Portakabin, slamming the door behind her so hard that it bounced in the door frame and swung wide open.
A few moments later Ellen yanked open the door of the Land-Rover and hurled her jacket in the back. ‘We’re leaving,’ she shouted at Scott, as she clambered into the driver’s seat. Turning on the ignition, she revved the car hard.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Scott, turning down the stereo, as the Land-Rover lurched away.
‘Of all the lousy, pig-headed –’ Ellen began, gripping on to the steering wheel. ‘Words just ….ugh!’
‘Calm down,’ said Scott. ‘You’re soaked. Start at the beginning. What happened?’
‘I found his little girl,’ Ellen shot back, not calming down at all. ‘And that arrogant bastard –’
‘Who?’
‘Ned Bloody Spencer! Who do you think?’
‘You two still aren’t seeing eye to eye?’
‘He’s not a man you can deal with,’ Ellen ranted. ‘He’s beyond belief! Blinkered –’
‘Ellen, where are you going?’ Scott asked, gripping on to the dashboard.
Ellen ignored him. ‘He accused me of being irresponsible. Me! He’s obviously got some prejudiced nonsense from somewhere. He didn’t even give me a chance to explain about the documentary before he completely attacked me …’
‘Ellen,’ warned Scott again, lurching over and leaning on the steering wheel so that they narrowly avoided a bollard.
‘Where’s the gate?’ she shouted.
‘Over there,’ said Scott, pointing through the windscreen.
‘And that … that child bride of his!’ Ellen continued, swerving the car round towards it. ‘What kind of pervert is he, with a woman that young? It’s practically cradle snatching!’
She sped towards the gate.
‘Uh!’ screamed Ellen, as at that moment she saw Ned in an ancient left-hand-drive Beetle converging on the gate at the same speed. As she got closer, she could see the woman sitting next to him.
‘The child bride?’ Scott queried, peering through the window. ‘She’s hardly a child, but she is gorgeous.’
Putting her foot down on the accelerator, Ellen sped towards the gate to beat him to it, but Ned was accelerating, too. Seconds before they hit each other, Ellen and Ned both slammed on the brakes. As the cars stopped – barely inches apart – Ellen leant on the window button, seeing that Ned had opened his window, too. For a split-second, she glared down at him. ‘Wanker!’ she shouted as loud as she could, before furiously turning the wheel and driving round Ned’s Beetle to make it through the gate first. Then, looking in the rear-view mirror, Ellen snorted with satisfaction as she saw that Ned’s car had stalled, its windscreen completely obliterated by mud.
‘Take that, Ned Bloody Spencer!’ she yelled.
Chapter VII
TOO STUNNED TO speak, Ned Spencer found himself staring at the Beetle’s windscreen. Not through it, he noted, because that was no longer possible. All he saw was mud, weeping brown mud. It was as if a giant cow had crapped on the car. And in a way, Ned considered, one had. And what’s more, that cow had a name. And its name was Ellen Morris.
Ned noticed that he was still gripping the ignition key. The skin around his knuckles was blanched and he forced his fingers to relax and let the blood flow back through. ‘Is everybody OK?’ he finally asked.
Clara’s reflection nodded at him in the rear-view mirror; Wobbles continued to lick the door handle obsessively; and Debs – to Ned’s right in the passenger seat – nodded too, before staring fixedly at her knee-length black patent boots.
‘Good,’ Ned said. Then, ‘Did you –’ he began, before lapsing back into silence again.
Suddenly he became aware that his window was still open. He wound it up and turned to Debs, who was now looking away from him, across the churned-up turning circle where the building materials were always unloaded.
In the distance, the west wing of Appleforth House shimmered spectrally in the rain, as gloomy as a prison. Closer by, a buzzard perched stoically on a fence post like some harbinger of doom. All that was missing, Ned thought, was the Grim Reaper himself, rising up out of the ground with a swish of his scythe to let Ned know that his time was up and things really couldn’t get any worse.
‘Did you see what that woman did?’ he finally uttered.
Debs’s shoulders trembled. Probably shock, Ned deduced, beginning to shiver himself now as his adrenalin kicked in, bringing with it a fresh wave of self-righteous indignation.
How dare Ellen Morris have done this to them?
How dare she have put their lives at risk? How dare she have nearly rammed him? If it hadn’t been for his speedy reactions, they might have …
It didn’t bear thinking about what might have happened, if he’d failed to stop in time.
‘She gave me the finger,’ Ned said. ‘Me,’ he went on in disbelief. ‘At my own place of work. In front of a child. In front of – my God – in front of my daughter.’
Debs’s shoulders were now shaking even more forcibly than before, Ned observed. Her long auburn hair shifted across the surface of her acrylic blue puffer jacket with a hiss as she leant forward. She rested her head in her hands.
‘Are you all right?’ Ned enquired, placing his hand on her arm in a gesture of reassurance, suddenly concerned that she might have suffered whiplash.
‘Mm,’ she half said, half whimpered, before finally turning to face him, her hands cupped over her mouth and nose.
It was then that the realisation hit Ned. ‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.
But he had no other choice. Her high, pronounced cheekbones burnt the same healthy red as whenever she got back to the house after her evening run. The tips of her wide smile were plainly visible above her perfectly manicured forefinger and thumb. Her tiny nose wrinkled and her nostrils flared.
Ned spoke slowly, so there could be no mistake: ‘you – actually – find – this – funny?’
Debs shook her head furiously, her straight fringe slanting across her wide brow as she dipped her head once more.
‘Nn—’ he heard her say.
‘Good,’ he snapped, ‘because if you did then you’d leave me with no other option but to –’
But the rest of his warning was drowned out by the great burst of laughter that escaped from Debs’s mouth and nose. ‘I’m sorry!’ she wailed helplessly, the force of her declaration exaggerating her usually understated Edinburgh accent. She rubbed at her shining eyes, smudging her mascara and leaving her looking like she’d been out partying for a week. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she went on. ‘It’s just …’ Gasps punctuated her words. ‘… your face …’
‘My … face?’
Debs rocked back, gripped by a fresh and uncontrollable spasm of mirth. She was pointing at him now as if he were her own personal circus clown who’d just slipped on his fifth banana skin in a row. She writhed in her seat, gasping for air.
Ned twisted the rear-view mirror violently round so that he could see the reflection of his own fac
e. ‘Oh, yes, how hilarious,’ he growled, making no attempt to wipe the streaks of mud away, ‘how terribly bloody amusing for you.’
‘No!’ Debs gasped again. ‘Not the mud … You … What you were saying … it made you look so … so …’
‘So?’ Ned prompted. He attempted to glare her back into maturity; he failed.
‘Pompous!’ she blurted out at him, before curling up in her seat, unable to look at him for a second longer.
Clara slotted herself into the gap between the driver and passenger seat. ‘What’s a wanker, Daddy?’
Debs snorted with laughter. Ned tried the ignition again. The engine turned over, once, twice, then failed.
Debs cleared her throat and let out a long sigh. ‘It’s a word used by grown-up people when they’re angry,’ she interceded on Ned’s behalf.
‘Like an idiot?’ Clara asked.
‘Yes’, Debs explained, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘Only a lot ruder than that.’
‘Like a prat? Or a berk? Or a greaseball?’
‘Greaseball?’ Debs asked. ‘Where did you get that one from?’
‘Tommy Carey called me it when I put salt in his yoghurt at Friday lunch,’ Clara began to explain, ‘but only because he broke my pencil on purpose by stamping on it,’ she added, ‘when he thought I wasn’t looking …’ she went on, ‘only I was,’ she concluded.
‘OK, OK,’ Debs said, pulling a Kleenex from the box on the dashboard and stretching over to wipe Clara’s nose, ‘we get the message: Tommy Carey had it coming.’
Ned glared at the windscreen. Ellen Morris had called him a wanker. A wanker … him. How could she? He was one of the least wanker-like people he knew. All right, so perhaps he shouldn’t have gone off at her like that in the Portakabin. Perhaps that had been a little wanker-ish, a tad wanker-esque. And, fair enough, he certainly shouldn’t have done it in front of Clara. But he hadn’t done it on purpose, so much as … well, so much as because it had just happened. What Ellen Morris had said, it had … it had made him see red, hadn’t it? And something inside him had snapped.
But as for what she’d just done in return … well, alongside that his own behaviour now seemed positively mild.
‘The only wanker around here is Ellen Morris,’ he stated aloud.
‘Ned!’ Debs said.
‘Dad!’ Clara gasped.
‘Well, it’s true,’ Ned announced, ‘and what’s more, I should report her to the police.’
He pictured Ellen Morris’s face at the moment of her arrest: the outraged stare; the attempt to justify her psychotic driving. But the police wouldn’t listen. On with the handcuffs and into the back of the van – that’s what would happen to her. Oh, yes, it was a picture Ned could hang on his wall and never grow tired of looking at.
‘But she hasn’t done anything illegal,’ said Debs.
‘I like her,’ said Clara. ‘I was freezing and wet, and she gave me her coat.’
‘All she actually did was beat you to the gate,’ Debs pointed out.
‘It’s not what did happen,’ Ned said, ‘it’s what could have happened.’
Debs clicked her tongue in stolid disapproval. Clara tut-tutted and Wobbles, bored now of licking the door handle, started to whine, rolling his good eye round and round in its socket, while his blind eye locked on Ned, as lifeless and impenetrable as a glass marble.
With a growl of frustration Ned tried the ignition again. This time the engine fired and kept running. Ned switched on the windscreen wiper, which moved no more than a millimetre before whining to a halt in shuddering protest. He switched the engine off. ‘Incredible,’ he said, though it was more of a curse than anything else.
He got out of the car, leant over the arched bonnet in the pouring rain and began the messy task of scooping the mud clear from the windscreen with his bare hands.
As he looked through the glass at Debs and Clara talking, and Wobbles repositioning himself on the back seat and starting to chew his paw, however, the anger that had consumed him began to dissipate. Maybe it was the fresh air and the rain on his neck cooling him down, or maybe it was simply that, looking at this scene as an observer from the outside, he suddenly felt incredibly blessed.
Ned turned towards the estate entrance through which Ellen Morris had triumphantly sped not five minutes ago. The ruts left by her car’s tyres were already filling with rain and would soon be obliterated. But something else about her remained, something he couldn’t see, but could still feel. Life force, that was the only way he could think of to describe it. It was as though all that energy she possessed had stamped its signature on this place and, indeed, on him. ‘Incredible,’ he repeated, though this time it wasn’t a curse at all.
Back in the car, he looked Debs and Clara over. ‘Change of plan,’ he said. ‘It’s obviously not going to clear up out there, so the beach trip’s off.’
‘Oh!’ Clara groaned.
‘But don’t worry,’ Ned continued, starting the engine and turning the car round in a wide arc, so that it faced Appleforth House, ‘I’ve got a much better idea.’
The conservatory was a recent addition to the property, insisted upon by Jonathan Arthur, and pushed through the planning permission authorities by Ned on the back of a mountain of paperwork.
Ned had resisted the idea at first, feeling that it went against the spirit of his initial brief: to restore Appleforth House to its original condition. But now, sitting inside it on the polished teak floor, with the rain drumming down on the extravagant pattern of glass panes he’d commissioned from MapleLeaf Conservatories, he felt pleased with the way it had turned out. Thanks to the crisp white paintwork of the wooden frame, the room was light and airy, and would soon, he hoped, produce a perfect harmony between people and plants.
It was unfurnished at the moment, but wouldn’t be for long. Plant pots and a wrought-iron dining table and chairs were on order, as well as a rare and intricately ornamented garden seat by Thomas Chippendale, which Ned had secured through Sotheby’s, and which currently lay in storage in Park Royal.
This lack of furnishing suited Ned fine, though, because as far as he and Clara and Debs were concerned, this wasn’t a conservatory at all right now, but a beach. And it wasn’t raining either; it was a sultry summer afternoon.
On the other side of the tartan picnic rug, which Ned had brought in from the car, sat Debs, with her boots off, her trousers rolled up over her knees and her shades perched jauntily on top of her head.
Her toenails were bubblegum pink from where Clara had just finished painting them and glittered under the bare high-wattage bulb which Greg, the chief electrician, had suspended for them from an aluminium stepladder. Debs pulled an apple from the wicker picnic hamper at her side and, biting into it with a loud crunch, picked up a copy of Heat and started to read.
Clara was sitting beside Ned, waggling her toes in the warm draught of the fan heater. She held her flattened hand up to her brow and peered beneath it like Robinson Crusoe out to sea. Above the hum of the heater came the occasional clang and shout of the men and women working in the main house.
‘But hang on! What’s that over there?’ Ned cried out in a shabby attempt at a pirate accent. He was pointing beyond the double glass doors at the front of the conservatory, to where piles of timber were stacked beneath blue plastic tarpaulins. ‘Sails, by God! It’s the rescue fleet sent by the Queen to find us! We’re saved!’
‘Watch out!’ Clara shouted back, pointing to the left, along an avenue of beech trees which terminated at a ha-ha, the sunken ditch of which was overgrown with a glossy barrier of cherry laurel. ‘Here comes a massive wave and it’s going to knock all the boats over! Whoosh!’ she shouted, cackling with laughter. ‘All the boats are sinking!’
Just then, Dan the foreman’s head came into view, then his shoulders and the rest of his body, as he hurried up the steps leading from the garden on to the stone terrace at the front of the conservatory.
‘But look!’ Ned retorted,
determined to give the story a happy ending, in spite of Clara’s aspirations towards naval tragedy. ‘One of the sailors has swum all the way to the shore!’
Noticing them sitting inside, Dan hurried over and pressed his blotchy square face up against the outside of the glass. He then roared demonically, sending Clara into a fit of the giggles, before disappearing from sight once more.
‘He’s a ghost!’ Clara shrieked, getting her way after all.
As Clara continued to laugh, Debs peered over the top of her magazine at Ned and rolled her eyes. Ned smiled, then watched as Clara signalled her boredom with their game of shipwreck by rolling on to her stomach and starting to pick at the remains of the potato salad on her plate.
Ned sighed, gripped by a sudden sense of longing. It was easy sometimes to delude himself over what a great family unit the three of them made. It was easy sometimes to forget they weren’t a family at all.
‘Is everything OK?’ Debs asked.
‘Yeah,’ Ned acknowledged, remembering the first time he’d interviewed Debs after his own mother had – quite unknown to him – placed an advert in The Lady three years ago, asking for ‘a capable and experienced nanny, prepared to take care of two messy kids: Clara, aged two, and Ned, aged thirty-three’.
Ned gazed across the room at a delta of water that had formed on one of the glass panes. Mary, Ned’s wife of six years and Clara’s mum, had died a year before Debs had started working for Ned, just after Clara’s first birthday.
That next twelve months of coping on his own had been like being trapped inside a sped-up piece of film for Ned. He’d found himself changing nappies, pitching for new business, pushing prams, cooking meals, waking at six and flaking out at midnight – all at an impossible, incomprehensible speed. It had happened in a blur and he’d done none of it well. And he’d done it all while attempting the impossible task of coming to terms with Mary’s death.
Debs’s arrival had saved both him and Clara from himself. He was certain of that now and he couldn’t imagine life without her. She was a mother to Clara and a good friend to him. Even if it wasn’t a family, it was as close as he could manage for Clara at the moment.
