Pastures New

by Julia Williams

  ‘Look Mummy, isn’t it cool?’ Josh said. ‘Brmmm, brmm.’

  It felt as though he and Ben were laughing at her. Amy screamed, ‘Get off there at once!’

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Ben. ‘He’s only playing. He won’t come to any harm.’

  ‘No it is not all right,’ said Amy. ‘Motorbikes are lethal machines used by stupid blokes whose dicks are too small. It is so not all right for my son to play on one. Come on, Josh, we’re going home.’

  She grabbed Josh and tore past Ben, hoping he wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes, slamming the garden gate shut.

  Ben stood watching her go, his mouth wide open. ‘Now what have I done?’ he said.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Saffron peeked left and right, making sure there was no one to watch her, before diving into Nevermorewell’s answer to Ann Summers: a discreet ‘lingerie’ shop that sold sex toys to make your mother blush. She had the pram with her. Oh lord, how dumb was that? Did other women take their babies out to buy sexy underwear? Was it some kind of bad parenting to take your newborn into an atmosphere rife with passion; a place that boasted Licked Up Love Juice and Pump Up Your Volume Potion? What if someone had seen her? She hadn’t even looked at anything yet and already paroxysms of embarrassment were screwing her up. Two cheerful French girls were chattering away, fingering lacy garments Saffron could barely look at, let alone touch, and she envied their insouciance.

  ‘Can I help you?’ Saffron nearly jumped out of her skin.

  The slim, twenty-something shop assistant appeared friendly enough, but to Saffron it seemed that there was a sneer in her smile: a sneer that seemed to say, What on earth is some fat middle-aged frump like you doing in a place like this? Who do you think you’re kidding?

  Who indeed? Saffron already knew this was a big mistake. But, happening to have heard a slot on the Jeremy Vine show about spicing up your sex life, she’d discovered that all she really needed to get her libido going again was to buy some sexy underwear. ‘You will feel sexy, he will feel sexy, and before you know it you’ll be falling all over each other,’ the cheery doctor chatting to Jeremy had promised, and heaven knows there’d been precious little of that in the Cairns household of late. So Saffron had decided that sexy underwear was a must.

  After a first nervous flit into the lingerie department in M&S, where she had spotted three mums from school, Saffron had lost her nerve and nearly called it a day. But the lingerie shop was on her way home, and even the sexy underwear in M&S seemed somewhat on the chaste side. Instinctively, Saffron felt chaste wasn’t what she was after.

  Which was how she’d found herself feeling like a total prat in front of a sneering girl nearly young enough to be her daughter, whose waistline was invisible, although her thong was not, and who oozed sexuality from every pore. Being the age she was, she probably took it for granted. You just wait, Saffron wanted to say, one day you too will turn to blubber.

  ‘Well?’ The girl was not just sneering, but impatient. Jeez, didn’t they send them on customer-care courses – Remember, ninety-five per cent of your customers are going to be embarrassed, so do try to put them at their ease (the other five per cent will be so uninhibited you will be hiding under the table).

  ‘Erm – well, er, canitrythatonplease?’ Saffron pointed to a busty black basque, complete with lacy bits and suspender belt. She hadn’t worn anything like it in years.

  ‘What size are you?’ The girl, who was all of a size eight, looked Saffron up and down in the certain knowledge that she must be at least an eighteen.

  ‘Er – fourteen, I think,’ said Saffron. Once upon a time she would have said ten, and after Becky and Matt she had trimmed back down to size twelve. At the moment she was nearer sixteen, but she was damned if she was going to admit that to this jumped-up ten-year-old.

  ‘Here you are.’ The girl handed over the basque. ‘Do you want anything else?’

  ‘No, that will be all,’ said Saffron, practically pulling the offending item out of the woman’s grasp. She pushed the pram to the changing rooms, and squeezed into a cubicle. She undressed, wincing a little at the sight of her naked body. Why were changing-room mirrors always so unflattering? She blobbed and sagged in places she didn’t know she had.

  She placed the basque over her head, and immediately got entangled in bits of lace and ribbon. She tried to pull it off and realised to her horror it was stuck. She pulled it this way and that, just making out a vision of herself in the mirror, a big fat blob with a bright red face incarcerated in a mesh of black lace. Tugging just that bit harder, she heard a ping, and a button popped off, but it was enough to give her the leeway she needed. She pulled the basque over her head, and panting in disgust she looked at it more closely. On a second glance, she realised she could actually undo the basque at the front, so she duly popped it round her, and tried to do it up again. It was tight going round her tummy, but by the time she had got to her boobs she could barely breathe. It looked like every blobby bit of her was straining to jump out of the bloody thing. Sexy it was not.

  ‘Are you all right in there?’ the ten-year-old called. ‘I can get you a size sixteen if you want.’

  ‘Over my dead body,’ muttered Saffron, before calling, ‘Fine, thanks.’

  Size sixteen? Size sixteen? She was buggered if she was going to buy size sixteen. What did it matter what she looked like anyway? Pete was only going to take the wretched thing off. Well, with any luck he was – that was unless he’d died laughing first. With the last remaining shreds of her dignity just about intact, Saffron swept out of the changing room, saying, ‘I’ll take it’, and in a totally unwarranted spirit of bravado she grabbed two pairs of silk stockings, some Licked Up Love Juice and a bottle of Pump Up Your Volume Potion, while staring the ten-year-old out. The ten-year-old, sensing the change in temperature, sensibly demurred, and if she had been going to point out the missing button, she was quickly stilled by Saffron’s icy look. Saffron grabbed the bag, and shoved it under the pram, before walking out of the shop with her head high. It was only when she rounded the corner that she glanced at the receipt. Christ, she’d spent a fortune. She just hoped Pete would think it was worth it.

  ‘So, you’ve no idea what caused Amy to run off?’ Harry and Ben were sitting in Harry’s shed on the allotments sharing a cup of tea, staring out onto the plots, which were bathed in the cold bright light of a low winter sun. Ben had had a late surgery that morning and had sought Harry out.

  ‘None whatsoever,’ said Ben. ‘One minute we were getting on like a house on fire, the next she’d run off. She seemed to be upset about Josh going on my motorbike.’

  ‘There must be some reason,’ said Harry. ‘Amy doesn’t strike me as the hysterical type. But she has been through a lot. Maybe there are things we don’t know.’

  ‘You might be right,’ Ben conceded. ‘She tore my head off the first time we met because I nearly ran Josh over on the bike.’

  ‘Amy’s very vulnerable,’ said Harry. ‘She could do with the support of a fine young man.’

  ‘Harry, if I didn’t know you better, I’d suspect you of matchmaking,’ said Ben.

  ‘Now would I do a thing like that?’ replied Harry, his eyes twinkling. ‘Mind you, now you come to mention it, you’re a good-looking young chap. She’s a beautiful young woman …’

  ‘A beautiful young woman who is also still grieving,’ said Ben. ‘I doubt very much she’s even thought of me like that.’

  ‘There’s always time,’ Harry reassured him.

  ‘As I haven’t heard from her since Sunday, I think it’s unlikely she’ll be speaking to me again in a hurry,’ said Ben.

  ‘Hmm, that is a pity,’ said Harry. ‘Joking aside, I do think Amy needs help. Maybe you should make the first move?’

  Ben, who had been thinking exactly the same thing, but who had been too anxious about Amy’s reaction if he had called round, shook his head.

  ‘Harry, you’re incorrigible,’ he said. ‘You’re prob
ably right. I’ve got to go and walk Meg before work, but I’ll try and catch her later.’

  ‘Good man,’ Harry replied. ‘Ah, Bill, have you got some elderberries for me?’

  One of Harry’s winemaking buddies was poking his nose round the door, so Ben made his excuses and left. Harry was right. Amy was vulnerable. Something had set her off like that. It wouldn’t do any harm to discover what.

  Amy sat on the bench in the graveyard overlooking town. It was a peaceful spot, high on the only hill in the area, and from her vantage point she could see the River Bourne gleaming brightly in the bright winter sunlight. The graveyard itself was ramshackle and meandering, with old paths winding their way between moss-stained graves. The bench she was sitting on was under an ancient yew. Amy found it restful here, so different from the sterile modern cemetery where Jamie’s urn was interred in a wall, with just a simple plaque to remember him by. She wished she’d stood firm against Mary and buried Jamie somewhere like this, but like so many things she and Jamie had never discussed their preferred method of interment and Mary had insisted cremation was more practical and what Jamie would have wanted. At the time, Amy hadn’t thought it mattered.

  Amy had been sitting here for an hour already, but she seemed unable to move from the spot. She’d had a fairly useless start to the day. Josh’s teacher had called her in to tell her that Josh didn’t appear to be settling very well, and, worse still, seemed to be hitting a lot of the smaller children. Amy was shocked and upset. Josh had never behaved like that at nursery. The move must have unsettled him more than she had thought. Promising to have a word with him, Amy had gone home to start work on Saffron’s leaflet, only to discover her printer had run out of ink. So now she was ostensibly on the way into town to get some more, but the need to sit still and think had become overwhelming.

  So she had sat down and stared at Nevermorewell below her, wondering again if she had made the right decision to come here. Josh was unsettled. She was unsettled. Her reaction to Josh sitting on Ben’s bike now seemed over-the-top and hysterical. Was she losing it completely? Meeting the first person she had even liked since Jamie’s death had set her out of kilter somehow. Ben was a magnetic presence, and despite her embarrassment at the thought of seeing him again, she knew that she did want to see him again. And that inevitably created a conflict. Could she allow herself to be attracted to Ben? She’d never thought there would be anyone but Jamie. And now suddenly there was. And Jamie wasn’t here …

  Ben was walking Meg through the graveyard, as he normally did, when he stopped short. Sitting with her back to him, on the bench, below the tall yew tree that dwarfed the graveyard, was Amy. Ben paused. She might not want to see him. He should turn round and go before she noticed he was there. Then she turned to look at him, and the look pierced him so completely that it no longer mattered whether she wanted to see him. He wanted to make things right between them more badly than he had wanted anything in a long time.

  ‘Sorry, I’m disturbing you,’ he said.

  ‘It’s okay,’ Amy replied. ‘I was just thinking I owed you an apology.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘The other day,’ said Amy. ‘I’m really sorry I overreacted.’

  ‘I suppose you did a little,’ said Ben.

  ‘A little is very kind,’ said Amy. ‘But I think I owe you an explanation.’

  ‘Explain away,’ said Ben, hovering awkwardly, before Amy motioned for him to sit down.

  ‘I never told you how Jamie died, did I?’ Amy said.

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  ‘Jamie was always keen on bikes, you see,’ said Amy, dreamily remembering her first meeting with him, when he’d roared up to the pub she was sitting outside, astride a Suzuki, a vision of unrepentant bad-boy glory. She was pretty much smitten from that moment, and when the bad-boy bit turned out to be an act, it made her like him all the more. ‘He’d always ridden them. The bigger the better. I used to get a buzz out of it when I was younger, but I don’t know, as time went on I got more nervous about the bike, and kept hoping he would grow out of it – especially when Josh came along.’

  ‘But he didn’t?’ prompted Ben.

  ‘No, he didn’t,’ said Amy. ‘More’s the pity. If he had, he’d still be here …’ She trailed off. Was it ever going to be easy to tell this story?

  ‘… Anyway, to cut to the chase. He came off it one day. They said he died instantly, which was something of a comfort. I haven’t gone near a motorbike since. And I certainly won’t let Josh near one.’

  ‘So when I let him climb on my bike …’ began Ben.

  ‘… I went off at the deep end,’ finished Amy. ‘Oh God, I feel such a fool. You weren’t to know.’

  ‘Don’t even think about it for a second,’ said Ben. ‘I was cross because I thought you didn’t trust me with Josh.’

  ‘Oh God, no,’ said Amy. ‘Of course I do. Despite being the most neurotic mother in the universe, I do recognise it’s good for him to have male role models.’

  ‘I think you’re more entitled than most to be a neurotic mum,’ said Ben. ‘And you’re not that bad. You should see some of my patients. I’ve got one woman who comes in every week with her baby. So far it’s had asthma, peanut allergies and a haematoma. I keep telling her the baby is fine. And still she comes.’

  ‘That makes me feels so much better,’ laughed Amy. ‘I didn’t want you thinking I was the madwoman on the allotments.’

  ‘Far from it,’ Ben assured her. ‘You’ve had a rough time. I don’t want to intrude, but have you ever had counselling or anything? It can help sometimes.’

  Amy pulled a face.

  ‘I did go and see someone for a while, but, well, I don’t know … It helped to talk about Jamie. And you get to the point when you think you’re boring people, so it was nice to offload on a total stranger. But then it seemed a bit pointless, after a while. No amount of talking will ever bring him back.’

  She looked so sad as she said this that Ben had to resist an overwhelming urge to take her in his arms. But he knew that resist he must. It was clear Amy was a long way from getting over Jamie.

  ‘Sorry,’ Amy said. ‘I shouldn’t go on about it so much. Really, it’s fine. And things are much better since I’ve been here.’

  ‘I don’t think you should be sorry about anything,’ said Ben. ‘Grieving isn’t a finite process. And however hard you bury it, it has a habit of resurfacing. I should know.’

  He paused, as if he were about to say something else, and Amy looked at him expectantly.

  ‘Oh?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen it happen to many of my patients,’ said Ben. He had been on the verge of confiding in her about Sarah, but thought better of it. Amy had enough troubles of her own. She didn’t need to be burdened with his problems. ‘All the clichés are true, you know: time is a great healer, things do get better. But any time you want to talk, you know where I am.’

  ‘That’s really kind of you,’ said Amy. ‘You don’t know how much better that makes me feel.’

  ‘My pleasure,’ said Ben, smiling. ‘I’d best be off now. I’ve got surgery in a minute.’

  ‘Go on,’ said Amy. ‘We don’t want to keep the good folk of Nevermorewell waiting.’

  Ben laughed and, whistling to Meg, who had wandered off and was rooting about in the bushes, he left Amy sitting there. He cast a look back as he made his way out of the graveyard. She seemed so lonely and fragile. He just wished there was a way of making her happy once and for all.

  Saffron was fuming. Sodding Gerry had been supposed to have the kids the previous weekend, and he had let them down again. Something to do with his mum, he said, but Saffron suspected it was more to do with her replacement in Gerry’s bed – the third leggy blonde he had been with since leaving Saffron, who was definitely not the childrearing type. The net result was that Becky had sobbed herself to sleep for the previous two nights and Matt had wet the bed again – something he always did at the slightest introducti
on of emotional stress.

  All of which had put paid to Saffron’s best-laid plans in the bedroom department, which hadn’t been helped by her attempt to introduce Pump Up Your Volume Potion. She had managed to spill it all over a towel, and discovering that it stained everything a rather delicate shade of pink, Saffron had ended up chucking it away. She hadn’t dared try the Licked Up Love Juice. Lord alone knew what that would do.

  Gerry really was the limit, and he had just rung up to say airily that he couldn’t have them for the next two weekends either because of work commitments, and did she mind explaining. When she had told him he could tell them himself, he had just got cross and said that as usual she was being unreasonable. Unable to cope with his idiotic intransigence any longer, she had simply put the phone down on him. The guy was a total moron. She couldn’t imagine now what she had ever seen in him.

  A ring at the door heralded Amy, swiftly followed by Saffron’s mum, Elizabeth (after whom Ellie was named), who had come to babysit. Elizabeth had high Gerry Alert Antennae, and promptly asked what That Man had done now. When Saffron told them both, trying to make it appear funnier than it was, they spent the next ten minutes devising ways of punishing Gerry, mostly involving his genitalia and lots of boiling oil. As a result, when she and Amy finally left the house, Saffron was feeling much better.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Gerry always has that effect on me. Does your ex do the same to you?’

  With a shock, Amy realised that she hadn’t got round to telling Saffron the true state of affairs in her home. She had kind of been relying on Josh to do it for her. He had a tendency to announce rather matter-of-factly to perfect strangers that his daddy was in heaven with baby Jesus.

  ‘Oh, I thought Harry or Ben might have told you,’ she said. ‘I don’t have an ex. Jamie – that’s Josh’s dad – died two years ago.’