by Judy Astley
Heather felt irritable. If she and Kate had been alone, this could have been just the moment to tell her all about the earlier marriage, about the journalists who’d rushed to photograph the Squire and the Schoolgirl, and pestered furious Delia for photos of Heather in her school uniform. Such stories had appeared quite often in those days, though theirs was a variation on the usual Wild Heiress And Her Garage Mechanic. They could have giggled together about the silly romance of it all, at the starry-eyed pre-feminist fantasy of it, at the same time making sure that Kate knew that the rules about instant Gretna Green weddings had been changed since those days, in case she was tempted to turn it into a family tradition. She could have laughed off the whole ridiculous marriage as ‘no more than the length of time you might stay interested in a boyfriend’. Kate would have been terrifically amused, probably dashing off to phone Annabelle with this crazy tale of how wackily fallible, amazingly so in fact, hippy-generation parents could be. Now the moment had passed, and finding a quiet time to talk about it would seem too deliberate, give the story an importance that she’d spent twenty-five years denying to herself it had, as if it had been so delicately special she’d had to wait all this time for both Kate and herself to be ready for the telling of it.
Back at home, Tom looked as if he hadn’t moved all afternoon. Only the untidy collection of lager cans on the table in front of him showed that he’d got up occasionally to visit the fridge. Slumped across the sofa with his bare brown feet dangling over the arm, and the cushions squashed to shapelessness beneath him, he still gazed at the cricket on the television, with the sound turned down and the radio commentary on.
‘Not doing so badly,’ he murmured as Heather came into the room. ‘How was the old man?’
‘Old,’ she said, falling onto the other, neater sofa with a depressed sigh. ‘Very old. And I know what they mean by wizened now. Strange place, though. It seems to be full of ill people without any of the trappings of illness. It’s so discreet. It’s as if you pay all that money just so no-one has to acknowledge that your insides are turning into a mush. There must be rooms somewhere, where they keep medical equipment, and things that relate to functions, but I didn’t see any. I wonder what they do with the really decrepit ones? There are probably floral-patterned incontinence pads knocking about . . .’ She stopped and looked from the television to her husband. Tom was dozing as the final wicket fell, and England were all out for 268. He hasn’t heard a word I’ve said, she realized. How interested would he be in old Edward forgetting he existed? In the old man recalling only his briefly there and never met predecessor? Probably not in the slightest, she decided, and not surprised either.
Suzy and Tamsin sipped ice-cold Coke in the treehouse and wished they had boys with them. Lisa Gibson had two moodily attractive brothers, one of whom was fourteen and newly returned home from Care, on the condition that he stopped vandalising cars. He had acquired an exotic glamour from his enforced absence, one that affluent village boarding-school boys such as Simon couldn’t even begin to match. Shane Gibson strutted about the village green and terrorized the recreation ground as cockily as if he’d just completed a full-scale outward bound course, or yomped bravely across some empire outpost, liberating it single-handedly from invaders.
‘I saw him this morning,’ Tamsin told Suzy. ‘And he looked at me. Right at me, in that way he does, you know.’
‘Yeah, I know!’ Suzy lied, as she was expected to. She didn’t know. Shane had never, ever noticed her that she could recall, not treated her to one single, accidental acknowledgement of her existence. Not even a withering, lip-curling, ‘What d’ya think you’re looking at’ sneering glance. Tamsin, who was ten months younger than Suzy, had a figure developing at an amazing rate and would quite soon not need the help of her adored black Wonderbra to give her a cleavage to rival her mother’s. She looked forward to Becoming A Woman, which should, they both thought, happen any day now.
That morning, she had sneaked them both past the film security men into the rectory to show the highly envious Suzy the collection of sanitary-wear she’d already amassed in her bathroom cupboard, each packet selected after careful advertisement research, from the Feminine Hygiene section at Boots in Oxford. She had pads with wings, pads without, tampons with flushable and unflushable applicators, and teeny mini panty-liners (‘for the lighter days’) in gift-wrap packing that was supposed to make it a matter of jolly, unembarrassing fun if they fell out of your school bag on the bus.
‘I’ll just keep trying them all till I find the ones that suit me best,’ Tamsin had told her, while Suzy was envying not only the collection but also the fact Tamsin had her very own pretty pink bathroom, complete with a lightbulb-surrounded make-up mirror, just like a theatre dressing-room. The effect wasn’t unlike being inside a My Little Pony plastic grooming parlour, a toy which Suzy would not quite yet allow to go to the church jumble. ‘And you can have all the leftover ones I don’t like,’ Tamsin had continued with an attempt at kindness, but adding, unforgivably, ‘When you actually start, that is, if ever.’
Suzy tolerated Tamsin’s jibes with quiet stoicism, simply overlooking such comments as if she’d never heard them, and calmly practising the adult skill of Rising Above It. There weren’t that many girls of her age in the village, or, she admitted, of her type; everyone from the comprehensive hung mockingly and loudly around in the terrifying bus shelter. When she passed by on her slightly too-small pony, they tended to call out to her in mock aren’t-we-posh voices, or run up behind shouting ‘Gee up Neddy’. No-one ever treated Tamsin like that, and Suzy had already worked out that that was because Tamsin was a different kind of rich, the flashy and glamorous sort the others all wanted to be. She reflected that her own family, rather sadly, believed in being careful with money, and that flaunting it was vulgar. Tamsin had something else to provoke envy and keep Suzy slave-like as a friend, something to which Suzy secretly dreamed of having unlimited access – her brother Simon.
Heather saw Iain a couple of days later. She was sure it was him when she spotted the car, and it made her insides lurch in a way that unsettled her breakfast toast. She was in the Renault, waiting at her gateway to pull out into the main road on her way to Nigel’s nursery, when the stream of traffic up on the High Street slowed to a stately pace, like a royal procession, led this time not by a black limousine, but by a cherry-coloured Mercedes – the sort of thing that Russell would give pride of place in his flagship showroom. It was probably the biggest you could buy, Heather thought as she waited, tapping impatiently on the steering wheel for the thing to pass her gate. In the very next second it occurred to her that it could only belong to Iain. He’d always used his car as a kind of personal selling point, she remembered. It had been as if, having displayed, like a strutting cock-bird, his Granny Takes a Trip velvet suit and hand-made Deborah and Clare shirt, casually mentioned his forthcoming first novel and his to-be-inherited title, the bright pink E-type snug against the Chelsea kerb would be a sure-fire into-bed clincher. Heather watched the scarlet Mercedes hesitate opposite Margot’s gate before turning into it. She was sure she had been right, and she pulled out into the traffic, driving quickly away from the village towards the anonymous safety of Nigel and his plant-filled poly-tunnels.
The early summer party, where she had met Iain, was going vividly through her mind as she drove. Barbara, who at school claimed to have some terminally fashionable extra-curricular friends that would have been the envy of the fifth form, had they not suspected she’d invented them, had invited three chosen schoolmates to what she promised – swore – would be the party of the year. It was in London, to start with, not just ‘quite near’ as in, vaguely up the Southern Region line towards the the Richmond direction from dreary Staines where they lived, but with a proper postal district: SW3 to be exact, the one they’d all heard of and yearned to exist in. She guaranteed them the presence of a Rolling Stone at the very least, possibly even a Beatle, though that was actually less appealing to H
eather. Heather had secretly felt quite certain that if she got the opportunity (and Barbara didn’t always lie) she would gladly forget about such a momentous occasion being ideally one of true love, non-school knickers and foregathered contraception, and enthusiastically donate her virginity to Mick Jagger. This she promised herself, even though she was still under age and so fearful of committing crimes that she never even tried to get away with half-fare on the bus. It was a long way to go from Staines, to be disappointed, especially after complicated telephoning to make sure that each set of parents thought the girls were innocently staying the night somewhere else, and the four of them were thoroughly determined to enjoy themselves and act as if they were too sophisticated to care or notice that neither a Stone, Beatle nor even a humble Herman’s Hermit was present, or likely to be, in the cramped, gloomy attic flat just off (very off, really, by several streets) the King’s Road.
‘That bloke over there looks like Peter O’Toole,’ Barbara had whispered to Heather, ‘don’t you think?’
Heather looked at him. ‘Not really,’ she’d said, not quite truthfully, because he did have an actorish sort of face, but determined not to let Barbara off the hook for the complete lack of celebrities present. She wasn’t going to allow her to get away with merely producing people who might just very slightly, perhaps in a deeply darkened room, resemble the fashionable famous. She herself had ironed her wavy blonde hair so flat that she rather expected to be mistaken for Marianne Faithful, but it wasn’t far off midsummer and, in spite of indigo tie-dyed drapes all over the walls, not quite dark enough.
She’d sipped her cider and pouted uninterestedly in the direction of the Peter O’Toole character, while Barbara composed her face into her well-practised ‘I’m definitely a lot older than sixteen’ smile, at the same time arranging her feet so that she looked cutely pigeon-toed and appealingly baby-dollish, the way she’d seen Patti Boyd modelling in Honey. Much too old for me, Heather was thinking, mentally comparing him unfavourably with the attractions of a widely fancied local bad boy, currently suspended from the grammar school for having his hair permed à la Jimi Hendrix.
‘He’s coming over, look, no don’t look!’ Barbara hissed excitedly beside her, nudging her so hard with her elbow that Heather’s cider, on its way to her mouth, splashed all down the front of her new plum crêpe Bus Stop dress.
‘Allow me,’ a smooth, deep voice had said.
Did people really say that? Heather, now driving along the rough track to the nursery, wondered. She was sure that he had, just as she was sure that it had been a reassuring voice that sounded accustomed to being very much in charge. These were, she recalled, the days when no-one watched James Bond movies for their comedy value. She was also sure that Iain, who’d introduced himself to her but not to the envious Barbara, had produced a pink-and-mauve spotted silk handkerchief from his velvet pocket with an extravagant magician’s flourish. She’d treasured it since that night, right up till months later when it had been the only thing available on the train home from Edinburgh with which to mop the blood as her barely-formed baby had started its fall from her body. How naïve she must have been to have felt so impressed by him, by the fact that he didn’t take the opportunity to dab and swab at her cider-soaked breasts but had handed the handkerchief over to her with what she sweetly took to be gentlemanly restraint. Boys of her own age wouldn’t have done that. They’d have prodded and rubbed and taken a crafty look round to make sure that their envious friends were watching.
Heather pulled up on the gravel outside the largest of Nigel’s greenhouses with that awful feeling that she couldn’t in the slightest recall how she had got there from home. I could have run over a cat, or a child, she thought as she climbed out, appalled at her lack of concentration. She couldn’t remember at all whether she’d taken the lanes behind the recreation ground and past the primary school, or driven through the new houses behind the High Street. It would have been Iain’s fault if she’d crashed, she decided unreasonably.
Nigel was at the far end of his big greenhouse, hidden away, attaching ‘special offer’ signs to unsold specimen clematis, and blending in perfectly in blurred muddy colours of woodland. His Barbour pockets overflowed with twine and casually gathered weeds, and were stiffly corrugated with the dried blood of slaughtered wildlife.
‘You always wear camouflage green,’ Heather complained cheerfully as she picked her way across a tangle of hoses. ‘Do you enjoy making it hard for customers to find you?’
‘Of course I do. Hiding from the frightful masses is part of the fun,’ he told her, emerging from a row of Nelly Mosers. ‘In order to find me they have to search through my entire stock. That way, they often come across just the thing they’ve been needing to fill that little gap by their horrible mock-Regency double garage. I want their cash.’ He rubbed his earth-covered hands together greedily and smiled welcomingly at her. ‘But customers like you I treasure, of course – you spend such a delicious lot of other people’s money. I’ve got your camellias. I hope they aren’t for Julia Merriman, her garden is far too chalky. Coffee?’ Nigel strode ahead of Heather towards his office.
‘Thanks. They are for Julia, as it happens, but she wants them in great big pots on her terrace, so no problem.’
Nigel flitted about his untidy room, moving the cash box from where the kettle needed to be, and the kettle from where a pile of receipts and bills awaited his reluctant attention.
‘She would. Why can’t people accept what is and what isn’t growable in the earth the good Lord in his wisdom has put in their gardens, and not keep nancying about wanting something else? I blame all those glossy gardening magazines. Every one of the chattering classes from miles around comes running in here, demanding exactly the myrtle they’ve just seen featured in the RHS mag, and they never know its proper bloody name, either. Their gardens will all one day be identical and I shall be able to lie on the sofa ordering all my stock based on the weekend columns in The Times and Telegraph.’
Heather moved a large, bored black cat from the window seat and sat patiently waiting for the end of Nigel’s ranting. He was always like this, furious that he was in trade for a living, and furious that, having battled with his grand family to establish his nursery on the edge of their crumbling estate, he’d discovered he truly loathed having to deal with the ignorant public and with their grubby money. ‘Born to be idle and to potter, that’s the real me,’ he’d once told her on one of his previous tirade-days. She felt quite cool in the office that had once been part of a stone stable block. The floor was cobbled and covered by an unravelling old embroidered rug worn so thin that it moulded itself over the shape of the floor, forming ripple patterns like ebb-tide sand. Nigel seemed to glory in untidiness, as if it was an art form he had spent many years perfecting. Seed catalogues were piled on the floor next to the telephone, plant labels – some written on, some not – were scattered across the papered surface of his desk as if he’d started to work on them months ago, and then forgotten what he was supposed to write. The top drawer of the desk itself was open, revealing a stapler collapsed into two halves and a large bag of Everton mints spilling empty cellophane wrappers out onto the floor.
‘Chaos,’ Nigel murmured, by way of description rather than apology, catching her glancing round as he handed her the coffee. ‘Fancy a mint?’
‘No thanks, Nigel. And I’m not deceived either.’ Heather grinned at him. ‘I know it’s all an act and that your computer is stuffed with every possible business-aid gadget. You never let your fax machine run out of paper, and I know that you know exactly where to get any plant I want and where it will and won’t grow. All this muddle is just so people won’t realize you’re making a hefty profit out of them every time you so kindly discount a boxful of winter pansies.’
Nigel pouted then smiled, acknowledging her perception, then flounced rather camply over to the fridge for more milk. That was another little piece of deceit, Heather considered, the fact that he tended to mince. Sh
e remembered when she’d first met him at the school, collecting his daughter from an after-hours hockey match, and had been surprised that he actually had a family. She’d assumed he lived with a male interior designer in the kind of exquisitely restored cottage (‘found the Adam fireplace in a builder’s skip, so lucky’) that rates a five-page feature in Country Homes and Interiors.
A friend who had once visited the nursery with her had said afterwards, ‘Oh he’s married, is he? Well you do surprise me.’ Heather secretly suspected his campness was both a ruthless pursuit of the pink pound and left over from having been rather a tart at his public school: he must have been extremely pretty in his early teens. Even now, when you could get him to forget his cantankerousness and smile, the weather-tanned edges of his deep blue eyes crinkled into sunrise lines and his teeth gleamed stunningly.
It crossed her mind that Iain had probably been rather attractive to the other boys at his own, decidedly rugged boarding school. Perhaps, she thought, that was why he had pursued not only her, but later a widely-reported series of young impressionable girls, rather than real, grown-up women who would have expected to be on less adoring, equal terms. The last one the gossip columns had mentioned had been only eighteen, with Iain now, she reckoned, being well into his fifties. She didn’t need to wonder how he did it, fame and fortune had their own pulling power, and no-one would deny the erotic quality of a title. ‘Sir’ wasn’t quite on the same quasi-orgasmic level as ‘Earl’ or ‘Marquis’ but it was enough in most susceptible girls to cause just a touch of internal dampening.
‘Have they asked you to do plants for this movie that’s taking over the village?’ Nigel asked.
