Rosie Meadows Regrets...

by Catherine Alliott

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘And I wouldn’t have him back now anyway,’ she said fiercely. ‘Not after where he’s been. My dad says he wouldn’t put his walking stick where he’s been.’

  ‘No, well. Absolutely.’

  She sniffed. ‘Don’t matter, I was goin’ off him anyway. Didn’t like his friends much, all that black leather gear – I reckon he was into M and S.’

  ‘Er, don’t you mean –’

  ‘And I didn’t like the way he was wiv the twins, neiver,’ she said hotly.

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘Always coming up here and swearing an’ that, and when they was dressin’ up one day …’ Her eyes slid away. ‘Well, ’e was out of order. That’s all.’

  I gazed at the dark spiky head, the shaky hand holding the cigarette, the dark circles under her eyes. My gosh. I’d misjudged this girl.

  ‘So – do Joss and Annabel know about all this? About how it is at home?’ I said gently.

  ‘Yeah, and that’s why Joss keeps me on. He’s all right he is. Dead loyal to my dad. And I’m not useless neiver,’ she said fiercely. ‘I looked after the twins when Kitty died, did the whole bleedin’ lot when Joss went to pieces. He was a shambling wreck for a year and I brought them up single handed when they came home from that neo-natal unit at the ’orspital. He was that cut up about Kitty he didn’t know if he was coming or goin’.’

  ‘Oh – so you knew Kitty then? Did you work here then?’

  ‘She took me on a few months before she died, not as a nanny like, she didn’t want that, just to help her out. Didn’t turn out that way though did it. She was lovely she was,’ she said gently. ‘Lovely wiv Toby too. Never off her hip he wasn’t, just like you and that little nipper,’ she nodded affectionately at Ivo. She smiled. ‘She’d have him on one arm and wiv the other she’d be stripping walls and digging the garden an’ that, she did it all on her own. Old Joss, he didn’t make much money then, wasn’t famous like he is now, so they couldn’t afford any help. They took this old wreck on when her gran died, no one else wanted it. They were going to do it up themselves. You know, gradual like.’

  ‘But …’ I looked around, ‘they haven’t exactly, have they?’

  ‘No ’cos she died before she could get to grips with any of the fancy stuff. What she did is what you can’t see, like got the damp sorted out and all the rot in them beams.’ She dragged on her cigarette. ‘She did that front hall though. She said, “Martha, I’m going to start at the front and give a good impression, then I can entertain the neighbours out there and hope to God no one wants to come through and use the lavvy!”’ She smiled. ‘She’d just started to strip the walls with one of them steam machines – size of a house she was, wiv the twins – when she went into labour and died. Why d’you think it’s all hangin’ in tatters and everything’s back to the plaster?’

  ‘You mean … when she died, he left it like that? As it was?’

  ‘He couldn’t bear to finish it and her not see it. It was her project see, meant everything to her. She was going to have a beautiful house, lovely garden, lots of kids … but it all went wrong.’

  ‘So why didn’t he sell it?’

  ‘He tried. He put it on the market but no one wanted it what wiv it being such a mess inside, and he couldn’t bring himself to practically give it away, so –’

  ‘So he just lived in it? Exactly as she’d left it?’ I looked around at the tatty kitchen, then back at her in astonishment. ‘Good God, he’s done a Miss Havisham, hasn’t he?’

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘Well – you know, kept everything as it was, as if it never happened!’

  ‘Yeah and you should see her sewing room upstairs an’ all.’ She jerked her head up. ‘Beautiful room that is, right at the top of the house, through a trap door. Full of plans and drawings, half-made curtains and bedspreads – there’s still a bit of stuff in her sewing machine, just as she left it. He ain’t never touched it.’

  ‘And no one ever goes up there?’

  ‘Oh Toby does. Joss don’t know he does, but I’ve caught him up there. Not doing anything, not playin’ or nofin’, just sitting up there, in her chair at her machine.’

  ‘Oh!’ My hand flew to my mouth. ‘God how sad! Does he remember her then?’

  She shrugged. ‘Dunno. You know Toby, he don’t say much. He probably just thinks about how it might have been. You know, if she’d lived an’ that. I do that sometimes too.’ She stared into her wine. Of course, she’d lost her mother too.

  ‘How awful,’ I murmured. ‘Poor you. And poor Toby! But – doesn’t he get on with his stepmother?’

  She looked at me blankly. ‘Annabel? Stepmother?’ She snorted. ‘Blimey, she don’t know the meaning of the word! No, as far as she’s concerned she’s just their dad’s wife and the fact that he’s got kids is a blimmin’ inconvenience.’

  ‘But – how can he love her?’ I blurted. ‘I mean, if she’s so uncaring, so different from his first wife?’

  She gave a strange smile. ‘Yeah, well you’ve not seen her yet, have you? She’s enough to knock any man sideways she is, my Gary spat his beer across the room when she walked in, and she knocked Joss for six all right, he’s mad about her he is. She’s bleedin’ mental though. All that chantin’ and meditating and funny food, and all those wacko books she writes about how to live your life.’ She snorted derisively into her wine. ‘What does she know about life? She don’t know nofink she don’t, just does it to be famous. She likes all that see, that’s why she went for Joss.’ She sighed. ‘Reckon she’d like to see the back of me though.’ She picked gloomily at her black nail varnish. ‘I ’ope to God she’s not back for Christmas. Joss says she might stay with her mum in Boston. I bleedin’ hope so. Sharon Fairfax down the Spa says she’s out for me. Says the next wrong move I make I’ll be out on my ear. Dunno what I’ll do then.’ She began to shake slightly. I closed my hand over hers on the table.

  ‘Right, now listen to me, Martha, you’re not going to be out on your ear because here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve saved my life by letting me use this kitchen, so now I’m going to help you. You let me cook everything up here which will save me traipsing up and down to the cottage, and I’ll give you a hand with the children until Joss and Annabel get back. I’ve got Ivo so I may as well have the others and I want you to go and spend some proper time with your dad and then have a sleep. I’ll come up here first thing in the morning so you can whizz off and come back about tea-time, all right?’

  Her red-rimmed eyes gazed at me. ‘Why would you do that for me?’

  ‘I’ve told you, you’ve helped me, and actually, it suits me not to be working in two kitchens, so it suits both of us, doesn’t it?’ I smiled into her exhausted, grateful face.

  A silence fell. God, she was so young to be coping with all this, I thought as I watched her pick her nails. And so frail-looking too. As I drained the end of the bottle into our glasses I wondered when was the last time she’d had any fun.

  ‘What do your mates do for a laugh around here, Martha?’ I said at length.

  She came back from her thoughts. ‘Eh? Oh, they go down Cheltenham way. There’s some new club down the mall, Saturday nights is happy hour so –’

  ‘Right, you’re going.’

  She smiled. ‘Nah. It’s miles away and it’ll be a late night and –’

  ‘Nonsense, you’re going. I’ll baby-sit the children, I’ll even stay the night if needs be, but you’re going to get out and have a bop, okay?’

  She gazed at me. Gulped. ‘I faught you was going to be a right snotty cow. Faught because you had a kid you’d tell me I was doing it all wrong, but I could see you weren’t like that after a few days, it was just … I couldn’t get back then. Once I’d been rude an’ that, d’you know what I mean?’ She looked at me appealingly.

  I grinned. ‘It’s okay, I misjudged you too, Martha. It was only later when I realized how fond the children were of you and how nicely brought up
they were that I knew I’d got my wires crossed somewhere. I feel bloody guilty too if you must know.’

  ‘So we’ll start again eh?’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea.’

  We smiled at each other over our glasses and I realized that, but for the purple hair and the body mutilation, she was really quite a pretty girl.

  ‘Your husband died, didn’t he?’ she said suddenly.

  ‘Yes, yes he did.’

  ‘I’m … sorry.’

  I smiled. ‘Well to tell you the truth, Martha, we were never exactly soul mates.’

  She looked at me in surprise, then grinned. ‘Oh so it’s good riddance, is it? My Aunt Dolly married someone like that, she hung the flags out the day a loose slate knocked his head off. Hangin’ by a thread it was. Still, there’s talk round here that you won’t be on your own for much longer anyway.’

  ‘Really? Why’s that?’

  She grinned. ‘Don’t give me that. You know damn well that vet’s got the hots for you, seems he can’t stop finding laminitis in the horses’ hooves or some other flimsy excuse to get up here. Blimey, I nearly crash into him every time I go down the drive!’

  I blushed, thereby admitting to a grain of truth in this. It hadn’t entirely escaped my notice that Alex Munroe had taken an inordinate amount of interest in the horses of late. In fact, it seemed that hardly a day went by without him coming up here on some pretext or another, popping in to report on this mare’s fetlocks or that gelding’s withers. Yes, these past few weeks, the horses had surely never been so well looked after. Personally I had mixed feelings about this. On the one hand there was no denying the fact – as my family had been so quick to point out – that he was a very attractive man. Besides this, as I’d got to know him, I’d grudgingly come to recognize a ready wit, an easy, relaxed manner, an above average intelligence, and yes, a nice guy who was undoubtedly a lot of fun. On top of all this, if the gossips were to be believed, he was clearly rather taken with me. In other words, in the space of a few short weeks, he seemed to have fallen quite effortlessly into my lap. So pick it up and run with it you might say. Except there were other things to take into account here. Other things to consider. It was, after all, only a month or so since Harry had died, and although there was little love lost, there was still a husband lost, and I wasn’t convinced I wanted the attention so soon, nor the local tongues to wag so vociferously. Having said that, it was also true that over the past weeks, all that had got me through the long days of solitary cooking was that tap on the back door, followed by his tousled head as he came in, stamped the mud off his boots, swore about the weather and asked if there was such a thing as a cup of tea going in this godforsaken place? Then he’d sniff the air, remark that something smelled good, and if it was one of my ambrosial casseroles simmering in the oven, was there any danger of some of it coming his way? Seeing that Martha was never there at lunch time, it had then seemed as natural as anything for him to pull up a chair and join me and the children for lunch.

  Later, when the children had left the table and run off, he’d stay and watch as I put the finishing touches to my dishes. He’d dip his finger absently in pudding basins and pick at mincemeat as I chopped away at the table, asking me a bit about Harry, about my life in London. But he never probed, and because of that, I was grateful to talk. I told him about my unhappiness prior to Harry’s death, and my mixed feelings and guilt about it after. He seemed to understand, and it seemed to me that, despite his jokey manner, here was a man who’d been hurt himself. I remembered Philly mentioning a girlfriend and when I dug a little deeper, I discovered that there had been someone; someone he’d lived with for two years but who’d never completely fallen in love with him, but whom Alex had hoped, rather desperately, to keep through the confines of a joint mortgage rather than love.

  ‘Silly bitch dithered for two years then up and left me,’ he said cheerfully, popping a raisin in his mouth. ‘She wasn’t quite cut out for the country. The dirt got into her nails and she got bored with scraping the cow pats off her Gucci shoes.’

  ‘But you miss her?’ I asked as I separated some filo pastry.

  He smiled wryly. ‘Not enough to become a city vet. Not enough to spend my time looking after old ladies’ pekes and chihuahuas which is what she wanted me to do. She saw herself in a town house in Chelsea with a little mews attached for my surgery and a window box full of geraniums. She’d like me to have nipped home for lunch every day and then whisked her off later for cocktails and quails’ eggs in Knightsbridge.’ He shrugged. ‘The truth is we were going in totally different directions when we bumped into each other in the first place, we just took a ridiculously long time to disentangle ourselves. Wish I’d never met her actually,’ he said gloomily.

  I eyed him as I assembled my strudel. ‘You do miss her.’

  He narrowed his green eyes into space, considering this. ‘I miss having someone around,’ he said finally. ‘But I’m not sure if it’s her I miss, or just the idea of her. D’you know what I mean?’

  I did. Being alone night after night, the empty evenings stretching ahead of me and the silence echoing around me was not exactly a barrel of laughs. And the curious thing was, I hadn’t felt that way in the beginning. Back then I’d relished the solitude, but I was beginning to wonder whether solitude had turned into loneliness. Whether I’d crossed the divide. Alice and Michael had come down once or twice and taken me out to supper, but somehow, being a threesome had just reinforced my status. When Alex had pointed this out, I’d just bitten my lip and avoided his eye, as I now avoided Martha’s.

  ‘Actually, Martha,’ I said, clearing my throat, ‘the horses have been rather unwell lately, what with all this snow. The cold gets into their joints you see, makes them seize up, and if Alex has had the odd cup of tea in the kitchen it’s because he’s frozen to death out there too. That’s all.’

  ‘Bollocks!’ she scoffed expressively. She waited, but when it became clear I wouldn’t be drawn, she sniffed. ‘Well you could do worse, you know. He’s got a bit of money he has, and what wiv a kiddie an’ all, maybe you shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.’

  God she didn’t beat about the bush, did she? And I was just about to tell her so when there was a tap at the back door. It flew open and Gift Horse himself stuck his head round.

  ‘Hi!’ he announced cheerfully.

  ‘Hello, Alex.’ I reddened and sank into my wine.

  Martha folded her skinny arms and nodded triumphantly. ‘Talk of the devil.’

  ‘Oh really? Should my ears have been burning then? Shall I pretend to go out again and listen at the door? Oh, I say, a bottle of plonk, an empty bottle of plonk what’s more, and that can only mean one thing,’ he looked thoughtfully at the two of us, then grinned. ‘A thaw has taken place with young Spikey Spice here. You see, Rosie? I told you she’d come round sooner or later.’

  At that moment Vera staggered down the back stairs, having come to the end of her exhausting few hours. ‘Cor blimey, I need a cup of tea,’ she gasped, rubbing her back. ‘Ooh look, a party and, good gracious, if it isn’t you again, Mr Munroe!’ She looked meaningfully at Martha. ‘Off you go then, luv, the kids are wanting you upstairs and these young things will want to be alone!’

  Martha slipped up the back stairs with a huge grin at Vera and a wink at me. God, it was a bloody conspiracy!

  ‘Cup of tea, Mr Munroe?’ said Vera, bustling over to the kettle. ‘Then I’ll leave you in peace, eh?’

  ‘No thanks, Vera, I can’t stay, I just popped in to say – well, to ask actually, if you were doing anything on Saturday night. Only there’s a jazz band playing in the pub. Should be fun.’

  ‘Me?’ I blushed.

  ‘Well not Vera. I’m not tangling with old Vic.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I blushed some more. God, what was I, sixteen? ‘Well I’m not sure, that’s the night before Christmas Eve isn’t it and I promised Martha I’d baby-sit.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Vera will ba
by-sit, won’t you, Big V?’ He threw an arm around her ample shoulders.

  ‘Course I will, if I get ’is tea on first.’ She jerked her head in the direction of her husband’s ever-demanding stomach. ‘Strewth, that reminds me,’ her hand flew to her mouth. ‘I want to get him a bit of brisket from the butcher’s and then I’ve got to be home to catch the post.’ She abandoned the kettle and hastened to the door for her coat. ‘Our Beryl’s sending me a knitting pattern,’ she went on. ‘She posted it yesterday, so like as not it’ll come in the second post. If I don’t get my skates on he’ll widdle all over it.’

  ‘On what?’

  ‘On the letters, luv. Soaks ’em so I can hardly read them.’

  ‘Vic? Pees on the post?’

  ‘Lord luv us no, not Vic, although he’s that incontinent I shouldn’t think it’ll be long, he only has to cough and he’s had a tinkle – no, our Randy. The bugger.’

  I stared, uncomprehending. Randy? The bugger?

  ‘Our old Jack Russell,’ she said patiently. ‘’E’s only got to hear the postman coming up the path and the letters dropping through the door and ’e’s widdling all over them, all excited like. Have to race him to the doormat every morning.’

  ‘Have you never thought of a mailbox, Vera?’ inquired Alex, his mouth twitching.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A box,’ I explained, ‘on your front gate, like they have in America.’

  ‘Gawd luv us, no, I don’t want anything American, I’m too old for all that malarkey, so’s my Vic.’ She sighed and shook out her hat. ‘He’s never really been the same since he had ’is testicles off, poor devil.’

  I sincerely hoped we were back to Randy.

  Vera tied her corrugated rainhat firmly under her chin and eyed me sternly. ‘Now you mind you get out to that pub of a Saturday night, luv, you’ve been workin’ far too hard. Do you the world of good.’