by Judy Astley
‘Didn’t you know?’ the woman next to her asked in disbelief as Heather gasped with surprise.
‘I’m afraid Suzy doesn’t say a lot,’ she told her, rather appalled at the lack of communication this proved about her family. But then, Kate was the one who communicated enough for six daughters, which didn’t leave much room for unassertive Suzy to get a word in. Heather wished Tom was there to see her, to be proud of his younger daughter, but she was used to his absences. She didn’t even have a clue, that day, if it was to Rio or Riyadh he was piloting a 747, and he was well-practised in experiencing home events at second-hand, with one or another of them shouting a précis version of family landmarks down the phone to him in anonymous hotel rooms.
Heather felt tense as Kate, defiantly sloppy in her uniform, with her shirt dangling below her sweater (even in this heat) and the ends of her sleeves chewed into holes, strolled casually up to the MP and collected her music prize. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she expected this to be a poignant moment. It went with the rest of the day – being old enough to have a silver wedding anniversary, old enough to have a daughter who would, that afternoon, have left school and also old enough, she added to the list, to have a husband whose thoughts had lately turned depressingly towards accepting an early retirement offer. She wasn’t sure she was ready for any of these, especially Tom’s retirement – he’d be home all the time and expect to join in with the gardening, as if just anyone could do it. He’d hang around in the greenhouses and decide he could re-organize her paperwork. Probably he’d unthinkingly recommend deadly datura and laburnum for gardens where small children lived, and proudly root two hundred fuchsia cuttings that nobody wanted.
Heather started fumbling in her bag for the tissues as Kate listlessly took her place at the front for the solo in the last piece of music. She casually flipped her hair out of the way and started playing. Heather waited to feel the usual mixture of pride and anxiety as her daughter played, thinking, more like Suzy than she would admit, What if a string breaks, what if she faints? But, amazingly for once, the music made no emotional impact at all, and Heather was beginning to think she was becoming numb until Kate suddenly caught her eye as the piece finished and the applause began, and sent her a rare and radiant, heart-tweaking smile.
‘I saw you. You were crying, everyone in the orchestra could see. You’re an embarrassment.’ Kate, loading her final batch of school possessions – art-work, folders of music, violin, books (most of which would have to be returned to the library with Suzy next term) – into the car, was accusing her mother. Heather didn’t argue, it gave the girl something to occupy her while her friends did all their ‘see you next term’ goodbyes, in which Kate could not join. Her great friend Annabelle hovered uncertainly between Kate and the other girls, her loyalties now divided. Celebratory tea in the school garden was still going on a few yards away, buzzing with conversation about planned holidays (the words Umbria and Algarve were trilled distinctly and frequently) and an undercurrent of speculation about how much the school fees were likely to go up next term. Demure hay-fever sneezes could be heard, and Heather’s professional eye noted that someone could have been more thorough about controlling both greenfly and rust on the roses.
‘Aren’t you coming back tomorrow for the leavers’ lunch?’ she asked.
‘Definitely not. I’m never coming back here again, not ever,’ Kate stated decisively. ‘Besides, it’s really for the Upper Sixth. They all love it because they get told how wonderful they are, getting into the best universities and all that.’ Kate shoved hard at her tennis racket, stuffing it into a corner of the car boot.
‘What about the ones that aren’t going to university?’ Heather asked, trying to re-organize Kate’s bags so there’d be enough room for Suzy’s. ‘What do they get told?’
‘They just don’t go to the lunch,’ Kate said with finality, ‘like me.’
Heather wandered off to look for Margot and Suzy, eventually finding Margot by the tea tent on the terrace, a cup in one hand and a strawberry tart in the other, and an expression of bewilderment as to how she was to eat it without a third hand. ‘Russell’s managed to get here at last, too late to hear Tamsin read her poem, of course, but there you go, I’m used to that. So we won’t need a lift back with you, thanks,’ she told Heather.
‘Just as well, I think we’re full. You should see the stuff Kate’s bringing home. You’d think she was moving house.’
‘I was wondering,’ Margot said, looking around and finding a ledge for her tea, ‘does she still want a job in the kennels for a few weeks? It’s just that I could do with the help, the place is going to be chaos. Russell and I and the kids are going to move into the old garden cottage. You’ve heard they’re using the village to make a film?’
Heather had heard something about it; half the village had been complaining (in the pub) that the place would be full of trippers gawping around and getting in the way, while the other half wondered how much money they could make out of the venture. Margot had been one of the latter.
‘Anyway, they want to rent our house for a whole month, so you can imagine . . .’ She waited for Heather to say the right thing.
Heather smiled. ‘Oh yes I can imagine,’ she agreed, acknowledging yet another of those moments where the English, so politely, Do Not Mention Money.
‘Anyway,’ Margot continued, ‘Simon is back from school on Saturday and I thought, if he and Kate could share the dog-walking, morning or evening, I don’t mind which, they could earn themselves a bit of pocket money, couldn’t they?’
Heather thought for a minute about the awful prospect of a pair of bored teenagers with eight idle weeks and not enough to do and agreed. ‘Good idea. And they’ll be company for each other.’
Kate smiled all the way home. She opened the car window wide and beamed crazily at startled pedestrians. She grinned at her sister Suzy, who immediately worried in case it meant anything sinister. ‘I’m going to have a wonderful summer!’ Kate declared, shaking her long pale hair free of dust, heat and five years of school. ‘I’ve got absolutely nothing to do, and it’s bliss. No revision, no essays, no maths.’ Her face, Heather could see in the mirror, suddenly looked ecstatic with realization. ‘No maths ever again!’
‘You might need to add up your change in a shop,’ Suzy pointed out.
‘Or calculate VAT,’ Heather contributed. Or plan a kitchen or work out a carpet area— She stopped herself condemning Kate to future domestic tedium.
‘Boring. I shall rely on honest check-out people and I’ll never ever have the kind of job where I have to do VAT,’ Kate retorted scornfully.
I used to feel like that, Heather thought. She half expected Kate, glorying in her early release from the seven-year sentence of school, to start flinging her uniform out of the car window, somehow feeling that perhaps it ran in the family. She’d have to stop her if she did – the chewed sweater might be a jumble-sale candidate, but the rest could hang in a cupboard till it fitted Suzy. Besides, she thought, slowing the car as they entered the village, Kate hadn’t got in her bag a handy little purple satin Biba frock to change into as she herself had had all those years ago. Nor, she reflected thankfully, was Kate sitting next to a man of few scruples who was too old for her, believing without the slightest lurking qualm or sensible doubt, that he was whirling her away to a fairy-tale life of idyllic romance in his castle of perpetual delight. Kate, thank goodness, would never be that stupid.
Chapter Two
Friarsford, arranged prettily between the River Thames and the Chiltern farmlands, wasn’t really a village any more. Heather felt conscious of this every time she drove through it; too many little collections of housing, overcoming token resistance from the Parish Council, had been tacked on over the years, to call it anything but a small town. The main road sliced through, dividing a chic and tiny Georgian high street that, unlike most rural communities, had actually added to its range of shops over the past ten years. These were stylish and
tempting, but not of much practical everyday use, apart from the delicatessen, the inevitable Spar stores and a wily greengrocer who lured in customers, who’d otherwise defect to Sainsbury’s, with six varieties of mushrooms and out-of-season asparagus. With antique shops, a hi-fi dealer, an interior design showroom and an eclectic gift boutique only a hundred yards from her gate, Heather could order from a choice of fifteen styles of sofa in the latest Designer’s Guild fabric, but could not buy a leg of lamb. If she needed to, she could also pick up an early Victorian water-colour, a Senseless Things CD, a hand-embroidered Tibetan bathmat or a fringed cushion cover in three shades of unbleached raw linen, but had to drive five miles for a plug for the hairdryer.
Beyond the north side of the High Street was the functional section of the village: the green (with pond), primary school, church, cricket pavilion and recreation ground. A crescent of neat and weathered council houses, now mostly privately owned, faced the far side of the green, giving the inhabitants an enviable view of the weekly summer cricket match, and a less attractive view of the bored and brawling youth of the village doodling obscenities on the bus shelter. Nearer the road, but tucked unobtrusively behind the High Street, was a small development of modern homes built in what Tom described scornfully as ‘architect’s rustic’, with varying additions of wood cladding, dainty gables, local stone and a hardwood window option. Lonely women, whose fraught husbands commuted to London or Oxford, lived here, disappointed that the sacrifice of urban careers to bring up their children in a rural idyll had isolated them in cosy coffee-morning territory. More than one pined with miserable guilt for the bustle of Notting Hill, for the traffic fumes and multi-coloured people and the chance of a creative job only a couple of tube stops away. Raising funds to mend the roof of a church they did not attend couldn’t even begin to compensate. In winter, villagers complained to each other how dreadfully quiet it was, and in summer, that you couldn’t get in the garden of the riverside pub for tourists.
Between the road and the river, sheltered by spiky, burglar-resistant greenery and high, defensive gates, were houses such as Heather’s – the Desirable Riverside Properties, treasured darlings of estate agents who shamelessly lined the High Street, like gathering vultures, with their BMWs and chattering mobile phones whenever there was a rumour of a potential sale. They would have described Heather and Tom’s house as ‘superbly-appointed’, trusting that prospective buyers would become instantly besotted with the garden and not inspect the building too closely. The house was large, an overgrown Tudor cottage with sagging floorboards and no right angles, squatting under a huge, ancient roof of patched and creaking thatch, where war was waged on squirrels breeding in the attics. Outside, there was a swimming pool with a sly, untraceable leak and the little riverside dock, where Suzy kept her boat and where Tom intended one day to build a replica Edwardian steamboat. It needed a good deal of expensive shoring up, having been eroded by the wash of speeding hire-launches.
The garden, though, was Heather’s exquisite success and obvious delight. It had to be, as she insisted to the family on long summer evenings when supper had to wait till she’d finished the mulching, it was her showroom, her workplace, her sampler. With well over an acre, plus the pony paddock, to play with, and all sloping down to the river, she had created a series of separate gardens-within-the-garden, outdoor room-sets linked by lawn paths. Potential customers, dithering over whether to call in Heather the expert, or muddle around with expensive garden-centre mistakes by themselves, asked around for advice. ‘You should just see her autumn bulb garden’ they might be told when wondering what to do when the summer bedding was abandoned to the compost heap. Or, ‘If you’re thinking about herbs, look at Heather’s chessboard lawn.’ New river-frontage residents, eager to make the most of the flood-area alongside the water, once they’d discovered that the river may not be tidal but that wasn’t to say it didn’t go up and down, were always sent to Heather to marvel at her deceptively wild marsh marigolds, water-buttercups, gigantic gunnera and graceful feathery astilbes. Unless they visited in the sodden, dreary depths of February, Heather didn’t find it difficult to persuade them that in the long term, which was the only way, she told them, that gardens should be thought of, they would actually save themselves money by employing her to do their design and layout.
After the stifling formality of the school speech day, she was eager to be out in the garden, busy with harvesting courgettes and peas, not with her memories about Iain. Out in the late afternoon sun, she could hear Kate and Suzy shrieking and splashing in the pool, sounding more like a pair of toddlers than teenagers. She rushed to abandon the silk outfit in the cool, pale green bedroom, quickly pulled on her oldest pair of wash-faded linen shorts and a T-shirt, and strode through the vegetable garden to the home-from-home toolshed where she kept tea-making equipment, a portable phone and her gardening magazines. ‘You look just like an old man on his allotment,’ Margot had giggled when she’d come to collect her pre-planted hanging baskets in spring, and had caught Heather, complete with battered hat and old cane chair, taking a break between carrot-hoeing and lettuce-planting. Harvesting her own produce was a thrill that never palled. Somehow she found it was always exciting to dig carefully into the soft earth and find that, as if by nature’s magic, at the end of all the plumey stalks there really was a bunch of carrots. Pea-pods always curled outwards slightly at the perfect moment of ripeness, as if offering themselves for the picking, and secretive strawberries always had just a few more fruit slyly hidden beneath their leaves. Courgettes, though, were sneaky, Heather knew as she fetched her trug from the shed and went to inspect the plants. However careful she was to pick them at the perfect, succulent six-inch size, there was always one under the leaves that was quietly escaping, growing secretly to the size of a prize marrow and greedily sapping the energy from the plant. Triumphantly, she bent and pulled one of these out from its hiding place, and was just wondering if there were enough of the flowers to make it worthwhile picking them for frying and then cooking in an Italian omelette, when the phone in the shed rang.
‘You know what day it is?’ Heather heard her mother ask.
‘Thursday,’ she replied stubbornly. It was years since Delia had mentioned That Date. Heather wasn’t prepared to revert to the days of her late teens when her mother had spent that particular day each year in tight-lipped silence and the strenuous revocation of the shame her daughter had once brought her. There was a vivid memory of her indulging in energetic housework, their chilly, thin-walled 1960s house full of the sound of the vicious beating-up of cushions. From every open doorway had flashed the darting, meaningful glances at her wicked daughter and the expectation that she should join in commemorating the great mistake. Heather had soon learned simply to absent herself for as much as possible of each 10 July, even if it meant sitting in the station café for three hours after college, staring at a cold cup of coffee.
‘It was Kate’s last day at school today,’ Heather continued cheerily, making an effort to deflect her mother on to another topic. She couldn’t, surely, have called just to wish Heather a happy silver ex-wedding?
‘Can’t think why she won’t stay where she is till she’s eighteen,’ her mother said tersely. ‘After all, it’s not as if she’s got to go to the college for her A-levels, like you had to.’
Heather sighed. There seemed to be no re-routing this conversation. It reminded her of other, even more unlucky, teenage brides of her youth, the hushed, delicious gossip – ‘Of course she had to get married.’ ‘Was there a particular reason for calling, only I’m about to pick some vegetables for supper,’ Heather asked, rather brutally.
‘Oh, yes, well. It’s your Uncle Edward: he’s fading very fast. I’ve got him into the Millthorpe Clinic near you, so if it’s all right, I’ll need to come and stay for a little while. You won’t mind, seeing as Tom’s away.’ Tom was always away, she implied, making it clear that this was the most satisfactory arrangement a husband could possibly mak
e. Her own had long ago achieved this by dying. The ‘you won’t mind’ was clearly an instruction, and Heather was at a loss to come up with a speedily convincing but kind reason as to why she definitely did mind. ‘It’s not as if you’re going away anywhere,’ her mother went on with disapproval. In her opinion, the school summer break was the only acceptable time to have a holiday. That’s what it was for. Heather and Tom never took one then, there was too much going on in the garden, and generous air-fare concessions meant that Christmas or February in the Caribbean or Australia was preferable. Heather’s mother was suspicious about this, considering winter holidays (except skiing, which she thought was healthy exercise, ignoring all the alcohol and the après) as somehow undeserved, the over-indulgence of the work-shy, pampered rich.
It was only later, while Heather was hoeing between the rows of strawberries, that she realized her mother hadn’t said how long she would be staying. Presumably as long as it took old Uncle Edward to die. Tom, when she told him later, would call that a ‘thin end, as in wedge, situation’, and ask if his mother-in-law had put her house on the market and re-organized her pension arrangements for collection at the village post office.
