Olivia's Luck

by Catherine Alliott

  I shrugged. ‘I suppose I like to get in there before anyone else does.’

  He grinned and lay down on top of me. ‘Oh, so do I.’

  I giggled and wriggled away. ‘Hang on, I thought you were about to hurdle some apple trees, race around the gallops like Champion the Wonder Horse!’

  ‘Still might,’ he muttered, grabbing me back, ‘but I forgot something.’

  ‘Please don’t say it’s your oats.’

  ‘You’ve talked me into it, you smooth-talking seductress you!’

  After an inevitable scuffle, the rest of the afternoon passed predictably enough, but later on, I thought about what he’d said. Actually, I knew I’d crept up on him. I knew because it had happened before. It wasn’t a deliberate ploy on my part, but I’d noticed, over the years, that guys I’d been quite friendly with at university and who I’d knocked around with in a matey sort of way, had suddenly had a habit of going into frenzied stares over their cooling fish and chips in the canteen, or popping up beside me in the library, shooting me hot looks over their Jean-Paul Sartres. I was never the obvious choice, I didn’t have the stop-the-traffic looks of Imogen, or the fizz and crackle of Molly, but mine, apparently, was more of a slow burn.

  Imogen had to be told, of course, and Johnny certainly wasn’t going to do it, so I wrote a long and guilty letter about how it had just sort of happened and how – since she was still with Paolo – I hoped she didn’t mind.

  ‘Go for it!’ came back her instant missive on the back of Michelangelo’s David.

  I couldn’t be more pleased for you, Livvy. You’re far more suited to him than I am and, apart from anything else, you won’t be bringing an enormous ego into the equation to compete with his!

  I allowed this veiled slur on Johnny, tucked the card discreetly into a drawer, and heaved a huge sigh of relief.

  Meanwhile, the motorbike rides, the pub suppers, the swimming, the larks, and the bedroom romps continued apace, until, that is, one Saturday, when I received a letter. I didn’t say anything, but later on that day, as Johnny was helping me scythe down some nettles in Angie’s wild flower meadow behind the barn, he stopped suddenly, put down his scythe.

  ‘What’s up?’

  I rested on my scythe for a moment, panting. ‘What?’ I squinted towards him, into the sun.

  ‘I said, what’s up?’

  ‘Nothing’s up, why?’

  ‘Well, you’ve been totally silent all morning. In fact you’ve hardly said a word since you got here. What’s occurring?’

  ‘Oh. Have I? Oh, well, nothing really.’ I shrugged and gave a half-hearted attempt at the nettles again. Then I stopped. ‘It’s just … well, it’s just, I got a letter this morning. I’ve got into Cirencester. I’ll start there in September.’

  He gazed at me for a long moment. ‘But that’s great,’ he said slowly.

  I swallowed. ‘Yes. Isn’t it?’

  We picked up our scythes again and worked away in silence for a bit. Then he put his down.

  ‘Marry me, Livvy.’

  I straightened up, gawped. ‘Oh, don’t be ridiculous!’

  ‘What’s ridiculous?’

  ‘You don’t mean that!’

  ‘Yes I do. Don’t go to Cirencester, marry me. Let’s stay together.’

  ‘Johnny,’ I said gently, ‘you don’t have to marry me for us to stay together.’

  ‘Oh, but I do. I don’t want to lose you, Livvy, and I know that if you go up to Cirencester, the chances are some beefy farmer will snap you up and take you off to his ghastly piggery in Shropshire or – or even worse, some stately pile in Scotland, and I just couldn’t bear that. You and I were made for each other, you must see that. We want the same things!’

  ‘We do? Like what?’

  ‘Like – all this!’ He swung his arm around and I knew instantly what he meant. Not the house exactly, but more the metaphorical hearth: the family, the unit, something I’d never had, and something he’d lost and desperately wanted to recapture. It was true, already we knew each other too well. Knew each other’s dreams.

  ‘And?’ I challenged, meeting his eye.

  ‘And I love you.’

  ‘You’ve never said.’

  ‘I’m saying it now.’ He walked forward and took my filthy hands in his. ‘I love you, Olivia Faber, with all my heart. Don’t give up on me, Livvy, don’t go away, please. Stay, stay with me, and do me the honour of becoming my wife.’

  Well, what could I say? It was an undeniable truth that I loved him completely and uncritically and always had done, so I was on a hiding to nothing. I didn’t even pause for breath, didn’t let my heart skip a beat, didn’t waver for one moment. I just looked into his bright blue gaze and said – yes. Yes, Johnny, yes, of course. Marriage was not something I’d envisaged being even remotely on the cards, but now you came to mention it … Mrs Olivia McFarllen? Oh sure. Oh yes, I wanted that more than anything in the world.

  Johnny told Angie privately, in the kitchen, with me shaking with nerves in the greenhouse. Eventually she came out to find me and declared herself delighted.

  ‘Really?’ I gasped, looked anxiously into her hazel eyes.

  ‘Really,’ she assured me, smiling. ‘I know you’ll make him very happy.’

  My face split in two with relief. ‘Oh, I will, I will,’ I beamed back, not pausing for a moment to wonder if he’d make me happy, or even, whether that mattered.

  My own mother, of course, was another matter. Her back was to me as she scrubbed the life out of a pan at the kitchen sink, her dark bob shaking with the effort, not even deigning to look at me.

  ‘So you got him,’ she sniffed. ‘You “bagged” him, as they say. It all paid off in the end, all that hard work. Jolly well done, Olivia.’

  ‘Mum, listen –’

  ‘No,’ she swung round, ‘no, you listen. You make your bed in the McFarllens’ household, young lady, and you’ll live to regret it. No one takes a shotgun to a field, puts it into his mouth, stares down the barrel and pulls hard without very good reason, my girl!’

  ‘What’s that got to do with my marrying Johnny!’ I screamed.

  ‘It’s got everything to do with your marrying Johnny!’

  ‘But you hated them before any of this happened! You’ve always hated them!’

  ‘And with damn good reason, so it turned out!’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  But she wouldn’t say. In fact, tight-lipped and pale, she said very little, right up to the day of my wedding.

  In my heart I think I knew Angie wasn’t entirely happy, and I certainly knew Mum wasn’t. As she helped me get ready on the morning of my wedding, I turned in delight at the reflection of my ivory gown in her bedroom mirror, and suddenly thought how small and fragile she looked beside me, standing watching me in her dark blue coat. I swooped to hug her but, to my dismay, tears poured down her cheeks.

  Johnny and I were ecstatic, though, and not even Mum’s distress could dampen our spirits. Nothing could detract from our delight. We couldn’t take our eyes off each other, and as I swept out of that little Catholic church on the village green with Molly, Imogen and Johnny’s three sisters in shocking pink behind me, I thought I must be the happiest girl alive. We’ll prove them all wrong, I thought as I smiled confidently into the camera, tossing the confetti from my hair. They’ll see, we’ll show them!

  And so we did. We moved into a tiny basement flat in Hammersmith, which was all we could afford, and were blissfully, ridiculously happy. Johnny continued to trudge to the City, but he began to enjoy it more. He was in Futures now, and he enjoyed watching the millions roll back and forth, riding on the waves of adrenalin, hardly bobbing when it rolled the wrong way, unlike some of the nervier, less sharp boys. As for me, Cirencester forgotten, I got a job at a very smart nursery in Chelsea, which amused my mother no end.

  ‘A garden centre! You’ve got an English degree and you end up as a shop girl!’

  ‘Not for long,’ I assur
ed her sweetly, and it wasn’t. Within a year or so I was managing the place, which to my fury, amused her even more.

  ‘Ah, so now you’re the manageress!’ she hissed happily.

  I gritted my teeth and swore to God I’d own the bloody place before long, set up a flipping chain of them just to show her, but before I could embark on my grand, horticultural Empire, a spanner was chucked smartly in my works. All of a sudden I was throwing up in the staff loo, feeling faint at the smell of egg sandwiches, and having trouble with the zip of my jeans. Johnny was delighted.

  ‘But this is what we wanted!’ he declared, leaping up on to our terrible old sofa and bouncing about like a child. ‘This is marvellous!’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a bit soon?’ I said doubtfully, peering at the wholly conclusive Predictor blue line.

  ‘Of course not!’ He jumped off and hugged me delightedly. ‘The sooner the better! A family, Livvy!’

  Imogen and Molly were not so enthusiastic.

  ‘A baby!’ shrieked Molly. ‘Bloody hell, what’s the matter with you two? You’re only twenty-three! God, if you carry on taking life at such an alarming rate you’ll be taking P&O cruises when you’re thirty!’

  Perhaps she had a point, but there was no going back now, and Claudia was born that Christmas. Six weeks premature; tiny, delicate, sickly, unable to sleep, unable to feed from me, and perhaps, not quite what Johnny had in mind.

  ‘Why won’t she sleep?’ he said as we lay in bed together, exhausted, listening to her scream.

  ‘Because she can’t, I suppose.’

  ‘Is she always going to scream like that? I mean, all night?’

  ‘Of course not,’ I said, hauling myself out of bed, numb with tiredness. ‘She’ll settle down. It’s just these first few weeks.’

  But it wasn’t the first few weeks, it was eighteen months before Claudia settled into anything like a routine, and even then, she was always fragile; an asthmatic, sickly child, susceptible to any bug going, allergic to milk, totally distraught if left with anyone other than me – an exhausting child. We adored her unreservedly, of course, but longed for a bright, bouncy boy to pep her up a little, spark her off, put a bit of colour in her pale cheeks with his boisterous games, save her from being quite so precious, and more like Johnny’s little sisters had been, exuberant tomboys, full of life.

  Nine years later we were still longing. Strangely, while Claudia had been an accident, suddenly, there was not a sausage, not even a glimmer of a Predictor blue line upon the horizon. I suppose it’s fair to say we were disappointed, but we weren’t obsessive about it, perhaps because Claudia had been such hard work. And equally, whilst I wouldn’t say our marriage floundered during this time, it’s also true to say it went into remission.

  We’d moved to a little house in Fulham and I no longer worked at the nursery but looked after Claudia full time, too nervous of her disposition to leave her with a nanny. Johnny was working harder and harder in the City and now earned a deal of money, but I felt his heart was no longer in it. It was as if he was going through the motions, and if, at times, he became more distant at home, I learnt to cast around to provide some distraction to take his mind off the present, and possibly even the past.

  Strangely enough, it was my mother who provided the necessary diversion. She rang one Sunday afternoon as the three of us were slumped in front of an old black and white movie, steadily working our way through a tin of Quality Street.

  ‘Good news, darling! Your grandmother’s dead!’

  ‘Mum!’ I was deeply shocked.

  ‘Oh, you won’t be so pi when I tell you the really good news. She left you the house.’

  ‘What – her house? To me? But why?’

  ‘Well, she wasn’t going to leave it to me; she hated me.’

  ‘But she didn’t even know me.’

  ‘Which is precisely why she didn’t hate you too!’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  There was something disarming about her lack of hypocrisy, though, and I have to say, Johnny and I were secretly thrilled. We’d sell it, of course – some ghastly terraced house just north of Watford with a bypass whizzing by its nose, no doubt, and then we’d sell our own poky house, and with the proceeds, move to somewhere central and spacious and light and, oh golly – Holland Park maybe, or even Notting Hill! It was just the boost we needed; it would be a turning point in our lives.

  Full of plans we leapt into Johnny’s old Bristol – and in fact Oliver’s old Bristol – and went off to see it. Amazed that it took us only half an hour to get to this old Roman City of St Albans, we then spent another half-hour trying to find the wretched house. Finally, when we’d walked every cobbled backstreet, grudgingly admired the pretty period buildings, peered in antique shops, climbed the steep hills and marvelled at the ancient, towering Abbey, we found a lane, tucked away behind some cloisters, which led to a crescent of beautiful Georgian town houses. Just as the crescent ended, almost tacked on as an afterthought, was a high old brick wall, with green, double barn doors, slap bang in the middle.

  ‘This must be it,’ I said doubtfully, consulting my instructions and map. ‘Orchard House, The Crescent.’

  ‘Aptly named for a house in the middle of a city,’ said Johnny sardonically.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I said, lifting the latch on one of the doors and pushing on through. ‘It might be – Oh crikey, look at this!’

  We both stopped still and caught our breaths.

  ‘Bloody hell,’ muttered Johnny.

  There, before us, was the most exquisite little Queen Anne house; white, perfectly proportioned, pretty and low, and surrounded by about an acre of tangled, unkempt garden. On one side was the remains of what had most certainly once been an orchard, and to the other, an overgrown rose garden, which fought with ancient clematis, honeysuckle and the inevitable elder. Even from here, one could see that down at the back, the lawn – which was dominated by a huge old cedar tree – swept down to a stream fringed with bulrushes, which in turn flowed across and along the back of The Crescent. All was walled, all was totally private, and all was a million miles from what either of us had been expecting.

  ‘Oh, Johnny, it’s heaven!’ I breathed.

  ‘Hardly. It’s completely dilapidated and that’s just the outside. Don’t get excited, Livvy.’

  ‘I won’t,’ I promised, but I already was. That garden – oh that garden!

  Obediently I followed him inside. It was, of course, just as an old lady had left it, with a general air of death and decay, lots of heavy oak furniture, antimacassars on every chair, a frayed rug in front of a gas fire, and chipped Formica and sliding glass doors on the cupboards in the kitchen. But I saw none of that. I saw, like a dolls’ house, four, perfectly square and symmetrical rooms downstairs and four above, all with working fireplaces, floor-to-ceiling sash windows, cornices and picture rails, and all, what’s more, with views of the garden.

  ‘There’s no central heating,’ warned Johnny, gazing around upstairs, but I could tell he was impressed. He was jangling his change in his pocket, which was always a good sign.

  ‘OK, so we’ll put some in.’

  ‘Oh, it’ll need more than that. It’ll need gutting, rewiring, replumbing, a new bathroom and a totally new kitchen. We’re talking big-time building works here, Liv.’

  ‘So we’ll sell the house in London and use the money to renovate it.’

  ‘Lots of money. Lots of time too.’ But the jangling continued.

  ‘Fine!’ I laughed. ‘We’ve got plenty of both now! Oh gosh, you can see the cathedral from here! Look, Johnny, there, across the rooftops and – oh! Look!’

  I had my head well out of the window now, marvelling at the view, but suddenly I popped it back in. I grabbed his hand and ran downstairs, pulling him out through the French windows, across the terrace to the lawn. As we slid down the bank on the other side together, we came to a halt at the bottom, panting. Johnny stared. There, tucked away behind a tall holly he
dge and beneath a riot of ivy, was a small, brick-and-timbered barn. It was ancient, its roof was clearly rotten, but it was still standing, albeit by the skin of its teeth.

  ‘I could keep the Bristol in here, maybe get Dad’s old Lagonda in too!’ he said excitedly. He walked in and peered up at the beams.

  ‘Quite!’ I squeaked. ‘And you’d never get a double garage in London, no matter where we lived!’

  He bit his lip thoughtfully, patted the thick old walls. Then he turned to me. ‘We’ll see, Livvy. Let’s go home and think about it; do our sums, and see, OK?’

  ‘OK!’

  We did, but I knew then he was as smitten as I was. The idea of being half an hour from Central London – which let’s face it, one could still be in Camberwell or Clapham – and living in a pretty period house with an acre of garden for me, and plenty of garaging for classic cars for him, was not to be sniffed at. We dutifully did our sums, consulted a few intelligent people who told us we were barking mad – and jumped in with both feet.

  That autumn, Orchard House became our home and we were blissfully, ridiculously happy. So what if the eccentric East End builders we’d employed, together with their Greek sidekick, had practically moved in with us? So what if they watched our television, monopolised and stank out our lavatory, smoked my cigarettes and fundamentally ruled our lives? So what if the fires smoked and we were freezing to death, huddled in front of smelly blow heaters? So what if there were rats in the cellar and bats in the attic – all these problems were minor, could be sorted by Mac and the boys, and jolly well would be. Johnny surprised me by being very enthusiastic in the DIY department, I was ecstatic in the garden, squealing with pleasure as I uncovered more and more neglected plants, and Claudia was positively flourishing, happy at her new school, not needing her inhaler nearly as much, loving the garden, delighted to have trees to climb, a stream to fish, and plenty of friends to bicycle with in The Crescent. So all was fine. All was peachy. For a while, anyway.

  Until … something happened, something … that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, but as I say, I reckon it happened about five months ago. Something went wrong. And despite my frantic attempts at Twickenham tickets and ballooning weekends in France, my husband continued to stare out of rain-soaked windows. I’d lost him. And now as I sat here, at our kitchen table, in my paint-spattered checked shirt, staring at a photograph on the fridge that was taken seventeen years ago, I realised I was about to find out why.