by Judy Astley
‘You see, I promised you roses.’ He smiled at her as they sat on the sofa.
‘Gorgeous.’ She sniffed at one. ‘And not pretend! Do you do this every day?’ she asked as he poured her a glass. This all looked pretty special – it surely couldn’t have been in her honour.
She put her hand up to stop him with the wine. ‘I’m driving, don’t forget. Just the teeniest one for me.’
‘No problem – there’s water here too. And no, I don’t; but this tent is on its way back to a prop house after a Moroccan-themed wedding in Suffolk – I couldn’t waste the chance to dress it up a bit, show off. Lunch is usually a cheese sandwich in the office if I can be bothered.’ He put his glass down on the table and turned to look at her. ‘But hey, tell me, Miss, Mrs or Ms Viola Hendricks …’ And for the first time he suddenly looked serious. ‘How come you are still living with your mum?’
Viola was just drawing breath to answer when a lean, tanned woman with loosely piled curly red hair hurtled into the tent, looking thunderously cross. She was teenage lithe but thirties age, in faded, dusty jeans and a creased blue shirt that she’d tied, old St Tropez-style, so it showed a small, vulnerable piece of flat brown tummy. ‘Greg, what the hell are you doing? I did tell you,’ she almost spat at him. ‘They’re coming to collect the tent at two. This thing’s got to come down right now.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten, just give me half an hour,’ he said, leaning back comfortably and showing no inclination to move. She was now standing with her hands on her hips in a decidedly don’t-argue stance. Greg was unlikely to be allowed three minutes, let alone thirty. But then, as if she’d only just noticed Viola, she put out a hand to her, smiled broadly, showing sparkling teeth like even slivers of bright ice, and said, ‘So sorry; how very rude of me – I’m Mickey. Mickey Fabian.’
EIGHT
‘MILES SAYS I should put my affairs in order,’ Naomi was saying to Viola. They were sitting at Naomi’s old cherry-wood kitchen table in the late hours of Wednesday afternoon, looking through a heap of paint charts that Marco had dropped off for Viola. The sun was reflecting little rainbows on the kitchen’s creamy walls by way of the crystals Naomi had hanging at the windows. ‘I always think it sounds like something a bit filthy. I asked him if he meant that I should make a list of old lovers and did he want the order to be alphabetical or by date, and he got quite snappy with me. You wouldn’t have, would you? You’re quite different.’
Viola laughed. ‘Miles is always so serious. And no, of course I wouldn’t get snappy. It sounds a giggle – listing lovers. Not that I’ve had, um, many … and certainly not that you’ve had …’ She stopped and gave Naomi a sharp look, realizing how little she knew about her mother’s earlier years. Really, you couldn’t assume, could you? And of course it was none of your business to.
‘Yer mum’s just yer mum,’ she remembered her friend Paula saying, back when they were fourteen and speculating on whether parents were allowed a past. Some parents might have been hugely, exuberantly promiscuous; others, virginal till the wedding dress came off. They weren’t going to let on to their children, not unless they were drunk and being embarrassing, and even then you couldn’t trust that they weren’t just being showy-offy for the shock value. The two girls had eventually concluded that parents weren’t allowed any sex life other than the minimal amount it must have taken to produce them and their siblings, and were quite relieved to leave it at that and never mention it again. Naomi had been a widow since Viola was very small, but if, when she’d gone out – and she was a social sort with many friends – she was with a man or men, the subject had never come up.
‘You don’t know,’ Naomi now teased, picking up a card of pink shades. ‘I could have had hundreds. I could have been a right scarlet woman in my day.’
‘Were you?’ Viola had to ask, slightly dreading the answer and recognizing that even at thirty-five there was still a trace of that adolescent self who definitely didn’t want to know about this. Rachel would probably feel the same.
‘Well, no, not quite scarlet. Not even when I was young and free – it was before the pill, you know,’ Naomi said. ‘I was only about that shade, maybe a bit paler.’ She pointed a beautifully painted silver nail at a little oblong in stick-of-rock pink labelled Cupid.
‘You must have missed Dad, though.’ Viola took the shade card and put it on the pile with the others she didn’t want. She didn’t much fancy the wall behind the dresser being the colour gauge of her mother’s past love life. If she chose Cupid there’d be weird and unsuitable images in her head every time she reached for a plate.
Naomi thought for a moment. ‘I missed him as the man who was your father, but by then I didn’t miss him as a husband. He drank – which is what made him ill in the end; he’d get nasty. He’d make bitter comments that put me down, especially in front of other people. But he’d been good with Miles and Kate when they were small. Less when they hit their early teens. He were so very old-fashioned, thought they should be out of school and working from sixteen, like he’d been. Especially Kate – he didn’t see the point of staying on at school for a girl. He said she’d only get married and it’d be a waste, and that she’d do better getting a little job that had a skill, like being a florist or a hairdresser – something she could easily come back to when any babies were grown. I wasn’t having that. He called me a silly women’s libber. But anyway, as it turned out he were gone by the time she was doing her A levels. Funny though, she did end up working at something that was a practical skill. It wasn’t her BA in Geography that set her up in soft furnishings.’
‘I know it’s awful, but I can remember Uncle Olly better than Dad.’ Viola had a sudden vivid memory of the day they’d moved into this house. She’d been about four, and very confused with everything being in boxes and then not in boxes, furniture everywhere, a kitchen’s worth of kit to be sorted. Books in heaps in the hallway waiting to be arranged on shelves, clothes in folded piles on unmade beds. The man she’d known as Uncle Oliver had taken charge, telling the removal men where to put boxes, bossing Kate and Miles around and making them be helpful rather than slumping about sulkily. He smelled nice – sometimes even now in the garden when she caught the scent of lemon verbena she could remember him that day, his big warm hand taking her small one and quietly leading her away from the removal chaos to give her a tour of the rooms. He showed her the one that would be hers, with its high, curved-top window overlooking the big back garden, and the little flat at the side which Naomi later rented out to actors who were on tour at the local theatre.
She could recall hardly anything from before they moved in here, some months after her father had died. Oliver Stonebridge’s paintings started turning up as they all settled into the house. Miles hadn’t liked them and thought they were too big and overwhelming, so Naomi had hung them in the hallway and up the stairs where he only had to pass them, not gaze at them. She remembered Oliver had rehung two of them in the sitting room very soon after Miles left for university. Bits of plaster had fallen from the walls as he bashed the picture hooks in with a hammer, and she’d combed the white dust out of her hair in her room that night.
‘That’s not so awful. It can’t be helped. Oliver was around when you were coming to that age when you start to collect the things in your head that you’ll remember for life.’
The sun through the window caught Naomi’s eyes. They were glittery with tears.
‘Mum? Are you …?’
‘A little glass of something, I think,’ Naomi interrupted briskly, avoiding the hand that Viola reached out to her. ‘And yes, I know it’s a bit early.’ She got swiftly out of her chair and opened the fridge. ‘White wine? Or a G and T? Don’t let on to Miles and Kate that it’s before six o’clock – they’ll tell us we’re doomed.’ Naomi bustled about with ice and glasses. ‘So – these affairs Miles says I’ve to put in order,’ she went on, quickly recovering her composure as she sliced a lemon. ‘I know it’s just another term for “Have you so
rted your will?” I’m not daft, I know what he’s like. Won’t call a spade a spade if he can call it a metallic delving implement or something.’
Viola laughed. ‘He means well. I expect he just doesn’t want you to worry about the future. It’s why he wants me and Rachel to stay on here.’
‘Ha! That’s so he doesn’t have to worry about the future! No, you two go back to your own house and don’t let him bully you. I can see right through him there. But with the will, what’s there for me to worry about? When I’m dead I won’t be bothered about anything, will I? You can tell him when you see him that it’s all done and dusted, though I don’t trust him not to want to come and see for himself to make sure he’s not been disinherited. No, on second thoughts,’ she put two generously filled glasses down on the table and gave a wicked giggle, ‘I’ll tell him I’ve left it all to Battersea Dogs, then you and me’ll have a bet on how long it takes him to suggest I give him one of those power of attorney things.’
‘I don’t like talking about wills, especially yours,’ Viola said, feeling the room grow cooler as the sun went behind a fat rain cloud. Thoughts of death were always hugely unwelcome visitors in her head, but she knew only too well that those you cared about could vanish with cruel suddenness.
‘Don’t be so soft,’ Naomi said gently, patting Viola’s hand. ‘I won’t live for ever, but I’m not planning to go anywhere yet, not for a long time. That’s the best any of us can hope for, isn’t it?’
‘First day of exams. Just look at this lot,’ Amanda said to Viola as they watched Viola’s English pupils and Amanda’s Business Studies candidates trudge sleepy and yawning into the exam hall to take their places at the allocated desks. Sandra Partridge, the principal, was bustling about looking nervous and rechecking that the entrants had handed over their mobile phones.
‘She’d frisk them if she thought she could get away with it. I’m surprised she hasn’t got an airport-style metal detector,’ Viola remarked, watching Benedict Peabody’s pair of acolyte girls piling up their hair into scrunchies to keep it out of the way as they wrote. Each of them then pulled out a little mirror to check her reflection, tweaking at her fringe, pulling a curl into place and eyeing Benedict to see if he was noticing her. But Benedict lounged back in his chair, faced the ceiling and closed his eyes.
‘He looks like he’s been up half the night,’ Amanda commented.
‘If he has, I bet he won’t have been doing a last-minute read-through of the T. S. Eliot,’ Viola said. ‘All we can do now is hope they actually read the questions properly and have remembered a pen.’
She wished her pupils luck and then had to leave them to the mercy of the examining board’s questions. She was surprised how nervous she felt herself, as if it was her own future that depended on how well they did today, not theirs. She’d done her absolute best to teach them, to get them to kick-start their own brains when it came to literature, but with one or two it was a struggle, and you had to wonder why they had opted for English Lit when you were pretty sure that they’d never again choose to read anything except Grazia magazine and tabloid headlines.
‘You didn’t need to come in today, did you?’ Amanda asked. ‘Effectively, you’ve finished for the term, you lucky thing. I’ve still got three more sessions with the Economics group.’
‘Sandra’s asked me to supervise the first half of this morning with her, and also I thought I’d stop by to give them a bit of encouragement on all their exam days,’ Viola said. ‘I know they mostly seem cocky and don’tcareish but one or two look like they could do with a hug, virtual though; it’d have to be. I won’t be here when they come out though; Sandra’s taking over and I’m off to have lunch with my brother.’
‘And that’s … good? Bad?’
‘Bit of both, I think. I know he doesn’t mean to, but he somehow always makes me feel like a naughty child. I’ll let you know tomorrow. Are we still going out to see this band?’
‘We are. I’ll pick you up at about eight, OK?’
‘Fine. I’m looking forward to it but, Manda, I’m absolutely trusting you not to be setting me up with anyone. You’re not, are you?’
‘No. I promise I’m not.’ Viola looked quickly at Amanda’s hands – her fingers weren’t crossed but then she added, ‘Well, not this time anyway.’
NINE
LUNCH WITH MILES was going to involve a glass or two of wine, so Viola left the Polo at home and caught a bus. She sat behind two middle-aged women who were talking loudly and frankly about their love lives, giggling so much that their substantial flesh was shaking in a fascinatingly jellyish way. ‘So I’m lying there,’ the one by the window was saying, ‘feeling like a fat, frilly whale in my basque and suspenders, and he’s there, bollock naked, by the bed with a massive hard-on and carefully folding his socks!’
‘Could be worse, he could have kept them on!’
‘Oh don’t!’ the other one howled.
‘So it’s over?’ her friend managed to ask through her spluttered laughter.
‘Over? What d’you think? If all he can think of at a moment like that is aligning his footwear, can you imagine what he’d be like to live with?’
The two women got off the bus, still happily shrieking with laughter, and Viola continued, more or less alone. She found herself thinking about Gregory Fabian, who, she recalled from Monday, hadn’t been wearing socks at all with his tatty, dusty Docksiders. And when he did, she reckoned he was absolutely certain not to be a folder-upper when it came to moments of passion. Not that she was actually speculating. Not that she even wanted to. Especially as there seemed to be a Mrs Fabian. Would she ever see him again? Probably not, though she still had unanswered questions she’d meant to ask about the late-night gardening.
Mrs F. had effectively broken up the lunch. He’d been seethingly furious with Mickey for her stroppy interruption, but then what had it looked like to her? Her husband blatantly entertaining a strange woman on their shared work premises, in a gorgeously arranged tented bower with wine and food, surrounded by flowers? Ah but – why wouldn’t it be surrounded by flowers? It was, after all, the family business. No, of course Mickey had every right to be thoroughly pissed off with him – the hell she’d have given Greg the minute Viola was off the premises wasn’t hard to imagine. And no way did she ever want to be taken for some predatory Other Woman. If that was what Mickey had concluded, she couldn’t be more wrong. But realistically, Viola probably wouldn’t see him any more anyway. She’d sent a text to thank him for what had turned out to be an inch from the glass of wine and two pieces of pitta dunked in hummus, before she’d taken the hint from the glowering Mickey and fled. He’d apologized all the way to her car, but hadn’t exactly pleaded with her not to go. Probably very sensible of him.
Miles was there first. Viola could see him through the restaurant window, over by the far wall, already at the table, flicking a napkin about at a tiny flying bug. It was a dark little place, all oak panelling and hushed voices and serious-looking portly men in dark suits. Women preferred somewhere brighter, more contemporary. Here there were way too many gloomy paintings of dead, unplucked, unskinned game. Surprising choices for decoration, she thought as she walked through to meet him: they’d surely put people off their food. You wouldn’t much fancy the pheasant casserole if, while you were eating, you had to look at a picture of one of its relatives, all feathered and bloody with its dead eye accusing you.
‘I was beginning to give up on you,’ Miles said by way of greeting, looking at his watch in an ostentatiously grumpy way.
‘I’m not that late: only about three minutes. I had to call in at the college first, check the students in for their first A-level exam, make sure they’d actually turned up and then stay to supervise for a while,’ she told him. ‘Have you ordered any wine? I’m gasping for a drink.’
‘Car?’
‘No car today. I came by bus.’
Miles frowned. ‘You’re not drinking too much, are you, Vee? It doesn’t ma
ke anything better, you know.’
Viola unfolded her napkin and gripped the edge of it tightly, stopping herself from snapping at him. Were all big brothers so bossy like this? Or was it the twelve-year age gap that made him treat her like a small child who was needing to be kept in order? He’d been lovely to her when they were younger, teaching her to ride her bike, how to fish, to play chess, patiently letting her join in garden cricket games with him and his friends. He’d happily babysat for her and let her stay up watching unsuitable films way past her bedtime when Naomi had gone out. Kate had been sure she’d end up with an older man, entirely because of hanging out with her brother and his pals, but it hadn’t happened.
‘Don’t be silly, Miles. I don’t think fancying a couple of glasses of wine with lunch makes me a candidate for rehab, do you? I already know the balance, thanks. When you’re feeling down it’s the last thing that’ll cheer you up, once you’re past that first half-glass.’ Now she was sounding sulky and defensive. Maybe she should go out to the pavement, come back in and start again, breezy, smiley and determined to let any negative comments go straight over her head.
‘Sorry,’ he said, looking round for the waiter. ‘I just don’t want you to get any more tough deals in your life. After Marco and Rhys, the last thing you want is …’
