Love, Lies and Lemon Cake

by Jayne Bartholomew

  Penny supposed that she shouldn’t have bought the magazine at the supermarket; it was a careless indulgence and unsuited to what people generally thought vicars’ wives should buy. The articles were geared for a younger crowd, not for women who had been married for twenty-four years. Apparently married women were supposed to know all about this sort of thing. She turned another page and paused, before tilting her head to the right, to better understand how the “position of the week” was physically possible without having being born double-jointed.

  She sighed and sipped her tea. She knew her husband still loved her because he told her regularly but, well, not to put too fine a point on it, he didn’t show her very often these days. If it wasn’t the floral society it was the church roof fundraising committee. If not a wedding then a funeral and she didn’t even want to start thinking about the regular Sunday sermon preparation. Penny was very proud of his unswerving devotion to the community and the way that nothing was ever too much trouble, but she would’ve liked the same consideration shown to her needs.

  At some point over the years the spark seemed to have fizzled out of their relationship, through too much work or from paying too little attention, and like a glass of fine champagne that had been left on the side overnight, the marriage was no longer palatable to her tastes. She loved Edward so leaving him was certainly not an option but there just had to be a way to wake things up a bit, didn’t there?

  Outside, the rain slowed from a torrential downpour to a dull mist. According to the papers it had been the wettest summer for thirty years, and had almost put an end to the hosepipe ban imposed earlier that year due to the driest winter for twenty-six years. Honestly, who had time to keep track of that sort of thing? The annual summer fete had been a wash-out and the only highlight was when the marquee hosting the cake competition sprung a leak and Hermione’s apricot drizzle cake had taken on a whole new meaning.

  She reluctantly closed the magazine and sifted through paperwork on the table to find her To Do list. If they could only have a little time to themselves she was sure it would help but they had no money for anything as extravagant as a holiday. As it was they had an annual long weekend with the bishop (and boy did it feel long), a week in Wales with a disabled children’s charity and if they were really lucky they had a week with his elderly aunt in Scotland. The closest she got to a dirty weekend was the six-monthly cleaning of the vicarage guttering.

  She did her best as a vicar’s wife and everyone said what a good team they were but occasionally, just occasionally, she would like to be seen as an individual. Her clothes came from the regular jumble sales held in the musty village hall and her hair was cut by the local mobile hairdresser who, even if she didn’t smell of alcohol, still had worryingly shaky hands. When they had a few precious moments to themselves it was spent slumped, exhausted, in front of the TV with a ready meal or, more often than not, an unseasoned casserole that one of the parishioners had thoughtfully dropped off.

  Penny bit her lip and tried to find gratitude for all the meals and other offerings that the elderly ladies of the parish insisted on gifting Edward. She was finding it very hard.

  Under her To Do list, on the back of an out-of-date newspaper, was a prize crossword competition. The lucky winner would walk away with a laptop and a year of free Wi-Fi broadband connection. Penny picked up a pen and idly started filling in squares. The effort of nudging her brain into thinking of the answers soothed her and the next fifteen or so minutes passed in peaceful scribbling.

  She looked at the completed crossword with something close to pride. Should she send it off? Of course she wouldn’t win; people like her didn’t, did they? But what would it hurt if she popped it in the post box anyway? She rummaged around the paper stack until she found stamps and an envelope and quickly filled out the address, dropped in the completed crossword with her contact details and sealed the envelope. After staring at the ceiling lost in thought she put some coins from her purse into the Christmas for Orphans donation box to compensate for the cost of the stamp and envelope. It really was no fun being good.

  Her hand reached into the biscuit tin for an almost stale bun left over from Sunday school and her fingers felt only crumbs. Strange, she could’ve sworn that there were at least two left. As if in answer, the waistband of her trousers cut in tightly and she wriggled to find a more comfortable position. Her skirt had obviously shrunk in the wash. Not that Edward actually noticed what she wore any more, she was pretty sure she could wear a black sack and he’d simply give her that infuriatingly happy grin of his, and say, ‘That’s nice, dear’.

  From underneath the ironing pile Penny could just make out the sound of insistent vibrating - her ancient phone announcing an incoming message; Penny tried to ignore it. Wasn’t she allowed a few moments of free time as much as the next person? She tried to concentrate on her To Do list but the phone called silently to her and she reluctantly got up to fish out the battered brick of a mobile and call up the message.

  List forgotten she rushed out of the door to find her husband. He was needed at the hospital, urgently.

  Andy sat on the hard, plastic seat outside the operating room and stared at his hands; a coffee and an untouched newspaper lay discarded on the chair next to him. He’d been up all night and caffeine had stopped having any effect about two hours ago. Dog-tired but wired as hell he flexed his fingers and tried to find something, anything, to distract him from the endless waiting.

  He leaned forward and put his head in his hands, trying not to think about what was happening. Yesterday, not twenty-four hours ago, his life was complete order. He knew where he was going to be, at what time and who was going to be with him. Laura always teased him about how his planning was spilling into an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and he always kissed her on the forehead and ignored her. Ironically she was the one who had planned on having a caesarean.

  A man in a white coat came through the double doors and approached Andy. It took a few seconds before he recognised him as Dr Ribbean, his wife’s obstetrician. Andy began to stand but he was waved down. Dr Ribbean carefully moved the coffee cup and paper from the chair before joining him. He paused, dark circles under his eyes, smoothed his trousers and cleared his throat.

  “I’m pleased to say that your daughter has been delivered healthy and well. She’s being taken to the baby unit and I’ll take you down there in a moment.”

  A rush of emotion flooded Andy and he broke out into a huge grin. “That’s amazing! How’s Laura?”

  Dr Ribbean hesitated again and Andy felt his stomach drop to the floor. “She’s in recovery. There were… complications; Laura reacted badly to the anaesthetic and unfortunately she haemorrhaged. She lost a lot of blood. We’ve put her in a medically induced coma to give her body a chance to recover completely before we bring her round. At this point, I do need to make you aware; we are concerned about her long-term health prospects.”

  “Concerned in what way?”

  “She had a grand mal seizure on the operating table. It’s very rare but does happen and right now we don’t know what caused it. There will need to be tests to rule out tumours. When we tried to bring her back once the procedure was over Laura wasn’t as responsive as we expect patients to be. You need to prepare yourself that it might be that there has been some neurological damage. We’re doing everything we can, and right now that means keeping her in a state of total rest to give her body the best chance of healing. I’m very sorry.”

  Dr Ribbean stood up, a full day of patients and clinics ahead of him. “It’s early days and we’ll know more as the week goes on. I know that it’s a lot to take in but come with me, let me take you to your daughter.”

  “Can I see my wife?”

  “As soon as she’s out of recovery and onto the ward, then yes.” Dr Ribbean started walking down the corridor and Andy felt his legs follow him.

  “Are you here alone or did I see your mother-in-law earlier?”

  Andy struggled to think st
raight. “Just myself at the moment, Hilary’s gone back to her house to get a few things. When Laura booked for the caesarean her mum said… she said she’d stay with us for a bit to help look after the baby.”

  “That’s good; you’ll need an extra pair of hands. As a precaution we’ll monitor the baby for a few days before she goes home but everything looks fine at the moment.”

  Andy felt a tsunami of fatigue begin to wash over him. “Laura will want to see her as soon as she comes round.”

  Dr Ribbean assessed Andy closely. “Of course, but the baby will be going home before Laura. Perhaps your mother-in-law could take you home for a brief rest before you see your wife? You’ll be having enough sleepless nights with this little one to miss out on a chance to rest when you get one.”

  The baby lay on her back with a healthy colour and a screwed up expression; she was partly covered with a white blanket. Andy leaned over and gently stroked her face with his finger, marvelling at how small she was. While he gazed down at the baby she slowly focussed on him and as he drowned in her beautiful blue eyes he knew that his life was no longer his own. All it needed was his wife beside him and he would be in paradise.

  “Hello Suzie,” he whispered softly. “I’m your daddy.”

  Hilary stood silently, immaculate in a powder-blue suit, as a nurse explained what had happened to her daughter and the treatment plan that the doctors had recommended. Occasionally she nodded or murmured something generic to show she was paying attention. But she wasn’t. All she heard was that her daughter was in a coma. Nothing else really mattered after that.

  She had been brought up in a very well-to-do family and married a commissioned officer in the army, she had not been raised to crumple under adversity or show weakness in front of those she did not know. If a stiff gin and tonic couldn’t fix a problem, or at least make it matter less, then the end of the world had arrived and the problem was no longer important. She would have given anything for a gin and tonic at that point.

  The nurse reached out to touch her arm, a simple human gesture, and Hilary felt herself involuntarily take a step back. She could be strong until someone was kind to her and then the flood gates would open and she’d be lost. Luckily the nurse had seen this reaction before and took no offence.

  Hilary followed the nurse to where her new granddaughter was and stood at the doorway, uncertain of her next move, watching Andy fall in love with the baby. She knew that feeling well, felt it now more keenly than ever. Each pore of her body was screaming out that there had been a mistake; Laura was fine, as her mother Hilary could make everything better.

  She didn’t want to be on her own, couldn’t be, she had to feel useful and keep busy. Hilary had been so pleased when her offer of help had been accepted without hesitation and Laura and Andy had actually looked grateful at the prospect of having her around.

  A plan was slowly forming in her mind. At some point Andy would want to be rid of an interfering mother-in-law, although he’d be far too polite to put it that way so she needed to become as invaluable as possible without being intrusive. Tricky, but there was bound to be a balance to be found somewhere.

  She was a mother and there was mothering to be done. While Hilary would not dream of encroaching on her daughter’s home normally, she had no doubt that she would be able to morph into a modern-day version of a 1950s’ housewife and lull Andy into a false sense of normality. Maybe she could stay for a while after Laura was able to return home to help her convalesce.

  Andy looked up for the first time and gave her a distracted smile, beckoning her over. She struggled to manipulate her face into something that she hoped looked cheerful, pulled herself together and went to meet the new arrival.

  Hilary was a woman of action and this would be her finest hour.

  September

  Mark’s taxi pulled up outside his parents’ house and he felt the familiar rush of warm emotions. He could almost see the old gang rushing up the front path to watch after-school TV; bonfire nights huddled around a fire in the garden roasting marshmallows on sticks; squeezed into mum and dad’s tent telling ghost stories. No childhood is ever picture-book perfect but he felt his had been pretty close. It was the kind of start in life he’d like to give his children although, with Tamara, it didn’t look like he was going to have the chance now.

  His mother opened the door before he’d had a chance to ring the bell and went on tiptoes to give him a hug. He grinned and gave her a peck on the cheek. He was almost two feet taller than his mother but she would always be the one in charge.

  “Have you had lunch, love?”

  “I had a sandwich on the train, thanks, Mum. Where’s Dad?”

  “Oh, he’s in the garden trying to work out how much of the shed to take with us. I keep telling him that we’re not going to have any room in our little flat, but you know your dad. If it can tighten, loosen or cement then it’s a necessity. I’ve told him that if he thinks he can use my kitchen cupboards to store his nails in he’s got another think coming. He’s allowed one packing box and that’s it. Tea?”

  “Great, thanks.” From the kitchen window Mark could see that his father had taken out the entire contents of the shed and had strewn them on the lawn. He couldn’t see where the packing box was but guessed his father would try and weld an extension on to it when his mother wasn’t looking.

  “Now, you will come and visit us, won’t you?” said his mother for the hundredth time that month. “We’re only a short drive away from Malaga Airport and Spain’s only a few hours away by plane. There’s a sofa bed in the lounge and you and Tamara are welcome there any time, you know that, don’t you?” His mother paused from decanting homemade biscuits onto a tray and looked anxiously up at him.

  “Absolutely. You get settled in and then just try and stop me!” He gave her another kiss on the cheek, grabbed a biscuit and went to see his dad before his mum started asking when Tamara was going to be visiting again.

  On their last visit Tammy had been polite, he had to hand it to her that she had really given the meet-the-parents’ thing her best shot, but Mark had spent the entire time on edge trying to read her face to see what she was thinking. She’d given his parents a beautiful crystal vase that he knew his mum still kept in the box, terrified of breaking it, and his mother had given her a proper Sunday roast with all the trimmings that Tammy had moved onto his plate when no one was looking. Tamara would be too polite to say anything rude to his face about sleeping on the sofa bed but there would be much texting to friends and he would suffer in the long term.

  His father was backing out of the shed with a collapsed workbench and a carrier bag of ripped rags his mother had discarded from the kitchen years ago.

  “All right, Dad?”

  “Hello, Mark, good timing.” His father put the bags down and gave his son a man-hug with his free hand; as he stepped back he passed Mark the bench. “Here, help me with this, would you?”

  Mark found himself holding the heavy item as his father wandered over to a pile of tools by the roses. He looked around for somewhere to put it before giving up and plonking it on the ground.

  “So the clearing’s going well then? Mum told me you were only allowed the one box.”

  His father flashed him a grin. “I’m clearing nothing! It’s all going in the back of my van and you’re driving it away for safekeeping until your mother decides she doesn’t like the weather or the food, and we come back.”

  “What am I going to do with a van?”

  “Remember all those Saturdays I took you to football practice and stood in the freezing cold or pouring rain to support you?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, this is payback. You said your apartment in London has a car park and since you don’t have a car you’ll hardly notice it’s there. Here, put this box in the van while your mum’s not watching.”

  As Mark took the box he wondered when would be the right time to tell his parents he was unemployed. Probably when they were safely in an
other country and the sale of their house in England had been finalised.

  Jobs in the field that he was familiar with were harder to find than he had anticipated and even though he’d done nothing wrong there still seemed to be some stigma attached to having been made redundant. For the first week he’d been a human dynamo, sending out his CV and arranging meetings with agencies but then the momentum tailed off. In the second week he found his calls weren’t being returned and when he caught himself watching daytime TV to kill the interminable minutes between the phone calls he wasn’t getting and the emails he wasn’t receiving he decided to take a different approach.

  Something would turn up - it always did; he was lucky like that. So rather than mope around feeling sorry for himself he decided that he might as well sell off some of the junk that had been accumulating to top up his dwindling savings. Mark had been amazed at how much stuff had been chucked into the back of cupboards and drawers that was actually quite valuable. The first thing to go was a designer watch Tamara had insisted he bought but was easily the size of a small saucer and put him at risk of carpal tunnel. From that sale he bought her a huge bunch of flowers to apologise for not joining her in New York the previous weekend, and a train ticket to see his parents.

  There was something very comforting about being home again. He’d felt calmer as soon as the train pulled up at the station. Life had been a lot simpler before he and his friends had decided to make their own ways in the world. As Mark loaded up his father’s van he wondered if his friends would look down on him now and if he’d be able to see Andy’s new baby before he went back. He also wondered what his London neighbours would think when he parked the van among their Ferraris and Porches. Perhaps he could say he was getting some work done.

  Mark closed the van door and leaned up against the side of the vehicle, breathing in the clean air and savouring how quiet the neighbourhood was. The contract on his flat ended next month and if he was still unemployed he would move back to the village for a while, the saving on his London rent alone would mean he could stay afloat financially for a bit longer.