‘That I doubt. Enid has taken to coming out with the most irritating questions. Who would win in a fight, a sabre-toothed tiger or a poison dart frog? Who would I prefer to be stuck in a lift with, Abigail’s mother or Indigo’s mother? The answer of course is 1) who cares and 2) Indigo’s father. And by the way thanks a bunch for sending that box set of Disney DVDs for her birthday. I’ve been refusing to buy them for years.’
‘What are godmothers for?’ I laughed.
‘If I hear that bloody song from Frozen once more I will probably lose it. Anyway, tons to do. Keep up the good work!’
She rang off and I returned to my task, filling in the gaps where Benedict’s stuff had once been and trying to make the flat look comfortable and lived in but also immaculate. I rang Jassy, told her what I was doing and then had a brief call with Christy to reassure her that the troublemakers had been dealt with. Then for the umpteenth time set off for Devon. This was by anyone’s standards getting a bit ridiculous. I’d spent nearly all my life in and around London and now it seemed I couldn’t wait to get away from the place.
Five and a half hours later I drove up the mud-splattered drive of Barracane House with a sense of utter joy. Everything about it from the rain-washed sky, the sturdy stone walls and the wind-blasted trees in the neglected garden filled me with unreasonable delight. Even the scrubby and untrained plant clawing its way over the porch and the iron bucket hiding the back door key seemed delightful. I think my rose-coloured spectacles must have been on high beam.
This was going to be it. This time I was going to get the first draft of my new book finished and I wasn’t going to be distracted by anyone or anything. Not the view out of the window or the crystal-clear skies at night. Not the sun sending magical beams through the stained-glass window next to the front door or the prospect of moonlight on the bedroom floor. Nothing was going to distract me. I was going to be frighteningly efficient, churning out the words like a machine. I would fill that blank and challenging screen with words of such beauty and power that it was quite possible I would win the Booker prize.
First I went to find the corkscrew and wondered what Joe was doing.
*
Of course, if I was about to retreat into my writing cave, I needed to make sure I had enough supplies and wasn’t going to run out of milk or dishwasher tablets or Wagon Wheels. Perhaps I would include them in the acknowledgements particularly if it encouraged them to send me a complimentary box? I wondered how many there might be in a box. Twenty? Fifty? Could I get through fifty?
I set off first thing the following morning to stock up, spending an enjoyable few minutes chatting with my old friend Maureen in Superfine, and wondering if I could include her as a character in my new book. She was in an ebullient mood as her daughter had recently brought forth twins, bringing Maureen’s grandchild count up to seven.
‘Little ducks, they are,’ Maureen said, misty-eyed, as she scanned my shopping. ‘William and Jennifer. Nice names, ain’t they? William after the prince and Jennifer after some actress she likes. Kyle wants to call them Willie and Jenny but I said you can’t do that, boy, them’s the twins from the Woodentops programme when I was a nipper; but he didn’t know what I was on about. How’s the book coming along? Have they sold the film rights yet? Sixty-three pounds twenty. All adds up, don’t it? I bet you only came in for some milk.’
I drove back at a leisurely pace, dithering slightly when I came to the fork in the road that could take me past Lower Tor Farm. I didn’t dither for long, and five minutes later I was progressing very slowly past, craning around to see if I could see Joe. I’ve never been very good at steering when I’m craning and I nearly crashed into him. He was coming towards me along the one and a half cars wide road in his Land Rover and I jerked to a stop. He hopped down from his seat and came to talk to me through my open window.
‘You’re back then?’ He looked rather pleased.
‘Seems that way,’ I said, blushing furiously.
He was muffled up against the wind in a thick tweedy coat and scarf and the hand he rested on my car door was red with the cold. I resisted the urge to take his hand between both of mine and chafe some warmth into it.
‘That’s good. Perhaps …’
There was a cacophony of noise from his car and he straightened up and shouted at one of his sheepdogs who must have been standing on his car horn with its front paws.
I tried to fill in the sentence.
… you would like to go out one evening?
… you could make me one of your delicious cakes?
… you’ll come round to mine for some hot bedroom action?
‘… we could meet up?’ he finished. ‘My mother was very impressed with you going to the book club in the village hall. I don’t think they’ve stopped talking about it since. And nor has Ivy. You’re a real hit with her.’
My heart gave a little jump. ‘Really? How wonderful.’
‘Oh yes, and Mum’s got a load of extra Brownie points thanks to you.’ His blue eyes twinkled at me.
‘That’s nice to know. I thought she was lovely.’
‘She’s great, and she’s a godsend looking after Ivy.’
‘How is Ivy?’
‘Fine. Pretty soon she’ll have forgotten all about being ill. Ah well.’ He stood up, as though he was about to get back into his car.
‘Would you like to come round one night? I mean, one evening?’ I said.
Idiot.
‘That might be fun,’ he said. ‘Look I’d better go. Meg gets a bit boisterous – she’ll be standing on the horn again in a minute.’
What? Oh, the dog.
‘Well look through your diary and let me know. I’m going to be around for a while. Any night, I mean any evening would do. Or – well – whatever.’
I got a bit dithery and vague at this point. Perhaps I was having a mini-stroke with the excitement?
‘Are you okay?’ he said, frowning slightly.
‘Yes of course, I’m just a bit – you know, tired. I had a nightmare journey back here yesterday. Traffic queues and road works and hold-ups all the way.’
Lies, all lies.
‘Okay, well, I’ll be in touch. I’ll back up into the gateway, so you can get past.’
He gave a little wave and walked back to his car where the dog was woofing and bouncing around like a wound-up toy.
A few minutes later I was home and unloading my bags, going through every detail of our conversation like a thirteen-year-old. What had I said and what did he say and what did he mean by that? Hopeless.
Eventually I forced myself to get on with some writing and after a few minutes got into the groove quite nicely. I decided to do some character studies. My hero was tall and rugged and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Not that I’ve ever met anyone who did by the way. He was calm and competent and he would be a well-respected doctor, teacher, university professor builder.
Yes of course! He would be a builder with a suede tool belt and extra long FatMax ruler for measuring things and he’d say things like: ‘Well I’ve not seen it done like that but it’s your money. Now where shall I erect these poles?’
He’d have big steel-toe-capped boots and a van filled with manly stuff. Drills and boxes full of screws and rawlplugs and the pockets of his jeans would bulge with bunches of Allen keys. Woof woof!
He’d build shelves that were level and talk about ordering some two be four whatever that was. He’d talk knowledgeably to my heroine about damp courses and manholes and ask about her inspection chamber. I carried on into the afternoon and then realised with a snort that I had written fifteen hundred words of innuendo and a couple of filthy double entendres. It was a pity the Carry On films were no longer in production.
I didn’t think this would win me the Booker prize after all.
I sat and thought about this for a few minutes.
Could love be light-hearted? Could the attraction, romance thing be mixed with giggling at the wrong moment? Perhaps it could.
Maybe the falling in love, getting together with the hero and first-date sex could be amalgamated with falling out of bed and laughter? I felt a prickle of excitement and went to find some salt and vinegar crisps before washing them down with a large glass of wine.
Chapter Nineteen
Two days later I had worked out a plot that I thought would work. I made some more notes.
My heroine, an English teacher provisionally called Sophie, was to fall in love with Brett Jack Sam who would be the tall, thoughtful, sexy builder with a massive tool bag and smears of plaster across his chest. They would meet when he was working in the school constructing a shelving unit for the children’s books in Sophie’s classroom. They would share many a lingering glance over the two be four and she would be so impressed with him that she’d ask him to come and do her bathroom. No, too personal and it would involve too much reference to pipes and plumbing. So he would work on her conservatory where she liked to sit and read and mark her pupils’ books.
Perhaps there would be a leak and he would come and fix it. How long would that take? Not long. Okay he would come and replaster a wall in her sitting room before he laid some wooden flooring. This would mean he had to be there every day for at least a couple of weeks surely? It would have to be in the school holidays though, which meant she probably wouldn’t be marking her pupils’ work. Perhaps she would be doing lesson plans? Plenty of time for her dull deputy headmaster Donald – who also had designs on her – to realise he had stiff competition. In every sense of the word. Which would mean he would try to bully the heroine by threatening her job. Sexual harassment! Yes that would be fab. Well not actually fab obvs, but it would be a good plot mover and a great reason for Sam to confront him and protect Sophie from Don’s increasingly unwelcome advances.
I could almost picture it; Donald would be making an unwieldy lunge for Sophie in the kitchen as she spiralised some courgettes and Sam would find them locked in an unsightly embrace.
Let her go, you swine, and get out or I’ll be forced to use this wire brush.
And then there would be some suggestive malarkey involving a concrete vibrator or some boning rods. I wasn’t sure what these things were. I looked them up on the ScrewFix website, but they sounded distinctly possible. Then at some point someone was going to have to fall into something. A patch of cement or headfirst into a bucket of paint. And all the time there would be this marvellous undercurrent of sexual chemistry and repressed urges until eventually, with his carpenter’s pencil still tucked behind his ear, he would make passionate love to her over a Black and Decker workbench. No that didn’t sound too comfortable. Perhaps on a pile of dustsheets while the kettle boiled suggestively on a Primus stove behind them, ready for their post-coital builders tea.
Excellent.
I started work, only pausing to make coffee and eat my new snack love-interest, some maple pecan bars that were so hard they had to be healthy. The wrapper had a picture of a happy, glossy-haired couple laughing like maniacs in front of a backdrop of maple leaves and waterfalls. Perhaps they would have sex once they had cleaned the nuts out of their teeth?
I pressed on with my character studies all day, creating a character in Sophie who was cheerful, accident-prone and just out of a relationship with a sports teacher called Paul. Reading back through my notes I realised Paul was little more than a character assassination of Benedict with his quinoa salads, ionically balanced water bottle, bicycle and kale addiction. Perhaps libelling a barrister wasn’t the best thing to do so I toned things down a bit for fear of legal reprisals and made him a history teacher instead. And took out the bit about the kale.
I emerged from my fantasy world to find it was Friday and I hadn’t thought about Joe more than once an hour, which was something. I had filled pages of my new notebook with notes, thoughts and random jottings. I’d even roughed out a scene involving a digger and a cement mixer. I seemed to have strayed out of plotting a romance and into revenge accidents when Benedict Paul was accidentally covered in mud, smacked in the face with a floorboard and fell backwards into a water-filled trench.
I went out to the kitchen and pulled the kettle onto the Aga hotplate. The evening meal was going to be the remains of a stew I had made the day before. I seemed to be in the habit of eating the same thing for two or three days in a row. I made some coffee and was about to go rummaging in the biscuit tin when I heard the front door open and someone come crashing through with a shout of ‘Mind the paintwork for God’s sake! That’s Farrow and Ball!’
Oh God. What the …?
‘Sally!’
‘Hello, here we are! Did you get my message?’ Sally said cheerfully, dumping a large canvas holdall on the floor and nudging her daughter’s leopard-print Trunki forward with one foot.
‘What message?’
‘I sent you a text two days ago. To say Enid had a half-day and we would be down for the weekend. No? Oh well the phone reception here is a bit patchy I guess. Never mind, we’re here now. Nightmare journey. I mean Night. Mare. Enid, stop opening the cupboards and take your case upstairs.’
Enid was basically Margaret Thatcher in a six-year-old body. She gave her mother a sour look.
‘I’m starving,’ she said with feeling.
‘You might be hungry, Enid sweetie, but you’re not starving. We know the difference. And you had the lovely sandwiches that Daddy made, didn’t you.’
‘They were crappy.’
‘No they weren’t, they were lovely. And we don’t say that word,’ Sally said.
‘Well you say it all the time when you’re reading those books you get sent.’
Sally laughed rather manically and shepherded her daughter out and upstairs with the promise of a lovely tea in no time. I thought this was unlikely unless Enid’s idea of a lovely tea was two-day-old lamb stew or, failing that, random biscuits and a glass of Merlot.
‘I do sometimes wonder what I’m doing having a house so far from London,’ Sally said, coming back into the kitchen and slumping onto one of the kitchen stools. ‘Henry says it’s about time we sold this place and then we could buy somewhere more exciting. Somewhere with the vague possibility of sunshine more than three days a year. I’d forgotten what a bloody long way it is to Devon and the roads here are just awful, aren’t they?’
‘Well they can be bad, especially on a Friday afternoon,’ I said. ‘Actually you have made really good time. Now would you like a glass of wine?’
‘Is the Pope a Catholic?’
I poured her a generous glass full and passed it over. She took a hearty slurp and sighed with pleasure.
‘Henry not with you?’ I said.
‘No, he had some football thing to go to tomorrow. Knows a chap who knows a chap who has a director’s box somewhere. Could be Wycombe Wanderers? I wasn’t going to be responsible for ferrying him there and collecting him afterwards beerified and whisky-frisky. Anyway, Enid has yet another day off school on Monday so I thought we might as well come down here. Get some country air into her London child’s lungs for a change. How is the book coming along?’
‘I’m plotting and doing some other stuff. Newly single teacher meets builder, scuzzy deputy headmaster gets his comeuppance.’
‘Jolly good, look we passed that pub on the way here that always looks rather nice although I’m ashamed to say I’ve not been in for years. Shall we go there for an early tea? I don’t think I can bear to do anything domestic this evening and to be fair Henry’s idea of a lovely sandwich is probably not Enid’s.’
‘The Cat and Convict? Well it’s very good.’
Sally laughed. ‘That’s the one – is there a convict?’
‘No but there is a cat.’
‘Then Enid will love it.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Five thirty. Do you think it’s open?’
We got to the pub ten minutes later.
*
‘Yere she is, the famous author!’ Pete shouted across the bar as we came in. He was looking rounder and more red-faced than ever and
was polishing a beer glass with his favourite tea towel. ‘And she’s brought a friend for me, like as not!’
Sally looked around rather flustered while Enid, like the six-year-old she was, ran to stroke the pub cat who was curled up like an ammonite on its favourite chair by the fire.
After a great deal of debating and argument Enid agreed that sausage and mash was not gross and Sally and I decided to take advantage of the Friday Curry Night offering although we both declined the pint of Cat’s Piss that went with it.
‘So you’m brought a chum to meet us?’ Pete said, lingering by our table with a wistful expression. ‘That’s nice. We like a bit o’ glamour.’
Sally frowned for a moment until she realised Pete was being serious and then she relaxed in the warmth of his admiration.
‘From London, are you?’ he said, applying his trusty tea towel to the horse brasses hanging beside the fireplace. ‘We don’t see you too often; you’re the lady who owns Barracane? We’d like to see you a bit more, pretty duck like you.’
‘I come down as often as I can,’ she said, bridling with pleasure at the compliment.
Sally’s older than I am, and you would think she was a bit more resistant to such clumsy flattery. Apparently not.
‘And who’s this dear little maid?’ he said, nodding at Enid so his chins wobbled.
‘Enid Mary Gardener,’ Enid said. She pointed at a glass case that was snarling over the mantelpiece. ‘Is that a real fox?’
‘Well ’un was once,’ Pete said.
‘Fantastic Mr Fox is my favourite,’ Enid said. ‘I saw a run-over fox once.’
‘Well yon fox isn’t fantastic. And down here we don’t mind foxes being run over so much. They is something else beginning with an F if truth be told. And I wouldn’t be surprised if your Joe’s in later,’ Pete continued, ‘regular curry lover, he is.’
Pete went to put another hefty log on the fire and tell Enid that the cat’s name was Puss, a fact she obviously found unimpressive by the look on her face.
‘Something beginning with F. Is his name Fluffy Fox?’ Enid asked him. He gave a guffawing laugh in reply.
The Mini-Break Page 18
