He followed. ‘No, I scraped out of it. So, how’s work going?’
Oh, right, that’d be it. She swung on him, teeth gritted. ‘Look Olly, it’s my work and it’s my money that I earn from it. It’s not going into your pocket or Guy’s. I’m not looking for any non-fee-paying lodgers, either! OK? So you might as well sod off.’
Olly almost smiled, his blond hair lifting in the breeze. ‘I’m not on the scrounge.’ He looked away, looked back. ‘In fact, I’ve got a job, done what I always said I wouldn’t do and gone to work for some huge faceless firm at the same desk in the same office every day, to do as I’m told. I’m a project leader in a soft drinks company. I’ve given up everything I was so intent on but I’m getting paid OK and others take the strain and the shit. I’m making enough to live. Most of my equipment’s gone back to the leasing companies and I’ve started paying off the credit card companies. Those bastards are remorseless when they’re clawing their money back.’
Olly’s eyes were still a brilliant colour when he smiled. He was smiling now.
She scowled to avoid her face breaking into the congratulatory response he obviously wanted. ‘So you’ve had a personality transplant, you’re not sponging and you’re not here for a fight – what’s brought you up country this weekend?’
Olly fidgeted. Then his mouth lifted at the corners, lighting his eyes with new brilliance. ‘I miss you. A bit.’
‘Posters ready? Got to get them up around the village, in Port-le-bain and this side of Bettsbrough. Can I see? Are they nice?’ Carola closed the door and was in Tess’s kitchen, fine white hair shining, eyes alert, buttons buttoned, neat from top to bottom.
In an old sweatshirt, hair corkscrewed up in a butterfly clasp, Tess felt like an old conker husk. ‘Ah.’ She shifted feet and felt her colour bloom. ‘I’ll bring you them tomorrow.’
Carola cocked her head, firing off rapid guesses. ‘There’s a problem. You’re too busy. You’ve forgotten. You hated the idea but were too kind to say. Shall I go away and get them done quickly somewhere else? And does this jeopardise the raffle prize? Because the bulk of the tickets have already been sold and to be honest that is a difficulty.’
Huge guilt, partly because Carola was right that she hadn’t really wanted to do the posters, partly because Carola was prepared to give her all to the Feast but was totally understanding when other people weren’t; it made Tess feel humble.
She shook herself. ‘Let’s rough out what you want.’ Pulling the ever-present pad off the dresser, she fished in her top pocket for her pencil. ‘Won’t take long to do something on the Mac and print it off.’
‘Oooh, can I see how? I’ve only ever used a PC.’
So they were up in the workroom designing a poster.
Middledip Feast 6th May, Tess typed in. Stalls, competitions, bouncy castle. Village Hall 2-5 p.m. Don’t miss the Buffet Dance and mega-raffle, 7.30 p.m. till late. She let Carola choose fonts and colours.
Carola, childlike, soaked up the new information, full of energy. ‘How big can we have these?’
‘A4,’ firmly. ‘Any bigger will get ripped by the wind.’
‘OK, can we have sixty?’
So that was how Carola got people to do what she wanted, she simply asked and never displayed disappointment if refused. A lethal combination, difficult to resist. So, as well as doing damage to her ink cartridge supplies, Tess found herself driving off to Port-le-bain with ten posters for telegraph poles and shop windows. Then there was still the raffle prize.
The Feast profits this year were for the village hall exterior decoration. She scribbled ‘village hall’ and ‘maintenance – decoration, cleaning, painting, preparation’. Tapped her teeth with her pencil and thoughtfully began evolving sketches of animals in overalls or smocks. Badgers painting, deer wielding blowtorches, rabbits on ladders clearing gutters.
She took a board and stood on the cricket pitch to sketch the side view of the hall. For the first time in weeks she sank into her work, right until she lost the light. Then she felt the familiar urge to call at Rotten Row. Which was a good move or bad, depending, because there was Carola drinking coffee, poring over lists of jobs to be matched with volunteers.
‘Ooh! The very person!’ Carola exclaimed. ‘I’m looking for a darling artistic type to be in charge of decorating the stalls. We normally get some of the village children to help.’
After hugging Angel briefly in unspoken apology for having been so reclusive recently, Tess flopped down at the kitchen table. ‘Cutting out leaves from green card and posies from crêpe paper, that sort of thing? OK.’
‘And you know where to get the materials, I expect?’
‘Yes.’
‘So can you?’
‘Yes!’
‘And the raffle prize ...?’
‘Give me another week.’
Carola added a series of ticks to her list. ‘Now, it’ll need to be framed ...’
Tess laughed and held up her hands in surrender. ‘OK, OK, I’m sure that’s my job, too!’
And she actually began to feel real interest because Middledip was fortunate to have a wonderful village hall and every villager expected it to be available for wedding receptions, funeral teas and engagement parties.
‘And,’ beamed Carola, ‘you might book it for your wedding reception!’
So when Ratty popped his head round the back door and smiled, Tess was laughing at such a preposterous idea and didn’t have to coax her facial muscles to work, at all.
‘I wanted to, kind of, apologise.’
Tess tapped the end of a brush on the table and adjusted the phone in her hand. ‘I thought you had. Kind of.’
‘Yeah. Well.’
Silence. Tess listened to nothing down the phone. ‘So what’s on your agenda today? I’m busy.’
‘How many times am I supposed to say sorry before you speak to me nicely again?’
Tess threw down the brush, which spattered tiny flecks of cobalt around it. ‘To be honest, you being humble is too weird.’
He laughed, and she was suddenly transported back to the days before they’d even been engaged, when Olly had laughed quite a lot, and been fun. She heard him take a deep breath. ‘I’d like to take you out to dinner.’
‘No thanks.’ She didn’t even have to think about it.
‘Come on! Let me redeem myself, make amends. A nice restaurant, a meal, a few drinks. Have you got plans for tonight?’
She let the words revolve in her mind. Plans for tonight? Not many. Like eating at home and sitting in front of a television to avoid calling on Angel and Pete and having to watch Ratty slobber over Franca.
She rubbed the tip of her finger over the specks of paint that were drying already, comparing staying in alone with going out with someone she’d once adored. ‘There’s nothing in it for you. No money, no home, no bed to sleep in or have sex in.’
‘Just a meal. Old friends, no hard feelings,’ he confirmed.
And it was OK, in the end.
All the tense, condescending parts of Olly seemed to have wandered off somewhere. He picked her up, took her to a reasonable restaurant where she felt OK in her blue fitted dress with a cobweb-lace shrug thrown over. He didn’t try to change her mind about what she ordered, he didn’t choose something himself that would take extra time to prepare, he told her she looked nice without suggesting some way she could’ve looked better. He asked how her parents were and told her a bit about his job.
It almost began to feel familiar, being out with him, with his not-a-hair-out-of-place appearance. She even enjoyed talking about all his mates in London who she’d once known.
‘So,’ she said, after he’d ordered her a brandy and she felt pretty relaxed. ‘What’s this all about?’ Her gaze caught on his fine lips for a moment when he smiled.
‘Don’t be so suspicious.’ He glanced across the tables covered with red cloths and all the chattering diners clustered around them and became serious. ‘This is the new me.’
<
br /> She laughed. ‘When did you realise you needed renewing?’
His smile faded. He shrugged. ‘Partly because of our recent encounters, I had a look at myself. I didn’t like the way things were going, so I looked for a solution.’ He would do. ‘I’d got surly and nasty and suspicious of everyone. But things are better now.’
Tess let her disbelief show on her face. ‘Incredible. What did it take?’
He sat back, met her eyes. ‘I admitted to myself that I couldn’t do it.’
She shook her head. ‘Do what?’
He spread his hands. ‘The whole freelance thing. Finding my own work, setting my prices, dealing with the problems, debt collections, insurance, repairs, taxes, accountants. I tried hard, but it didn’t come off. I networked and I back-stabbed, the whole thing, but I made a balls of it.’ His hands clenched briefly on the tablecloth. ‘It’s impossible to properly explain. You can’t appreciate the amount of crap you have to wade through, unless you do it.’
Tess sat forward so suddenly that she rocked the table. ‘What do you think I do? Wave a magic wand? I’m freelance just as much as you were!’
‘It’s not the same,’ he said automatically, his chin going in the air, the old hardness reappearing suddenly around his eyes.
She let her eyes blaze into his. ‘It. Is. The. Same.’
He stared for a moment. Then dropped his eyes. ‘If you say so,’ he muttered.
Tess downed her brandy and returned to the wine. ‘You’ve got a little way to go with the new you, Olly.’
After a moment he laughed again and she joined in.
So, it was OK. OK with Olly, an OK kind of evening. She went home feeling happier than she would have been spending the evening in front of the television. And some people made do with OK all their lives. OK was OK, especially if you’d made up your mind that friendship was safer than a heart that cartwheeled and hands that grew clammy whenever a certain someone crept into your thoughts.
Chapter Twenty-One
Nice to be working with Slinker, Slider and Winder again now the second anthology had been given the go ahead. Tess could pin up the layouts and study the brief, pin up earlier character sketches for the sake of consistency. Pause at sketches of Farny, the broadness of the lizard-man’s chest fanned with dark curls. Look out over at Pennybun.
Lucasta’s rhododendron was lovely this May, its blatant vermilion glowing above other shrubs. Ratty’s rhododendron now.
At Pennybun, most of the remedial work was finished, damp proofing, rewiring and plastering. The new windows were lovely. Yesterday, she’d let in the joiner to measure up for the kitchen just as Ratty growled up in his Caterham. She’d turned to watch as he levered himself from the austere lines of the open-topped sports car he’d built, dark green and quirky. It seemed a long time since he’d driven her anywhere in it, flying and bouncing along like a fart in a hurricane, two inches from the floor.
Must he really look at his watch as he rapidly selected mouldings, finish, worktops? The Pennybun project had been fun, before, but it was a bit of a bind now. OK for Franca, safe in conference at a chemical works on Peterborough’s outskirts, with no danger of being asked to let people in.
Ratty finished with the joiner, checked his watch again, tossed his keys and smiled at Tess. ‘So, Carola involved you with the Feast, in the end?’
‘It was more fun than I’d expected.’
‘Thought it would be.’ He’d checked she was well, how work was going, that the Freelander was behaving itself. Folded himself back into the Caterham, reversed, and was gone.
He hadn’t mentioned seeing her being driven out of the village by Olly, when he’d given a wave, a quirk of the eyebrows and carried on down Main Road, apparently unsurprised and undisturbed by her choice of companion. She’d quite expected her mobile to ring, to hear his sharp, ‘Are you OK?’ It hadn’t rung, though she’d made sure it was on.
If he’d shown any interest at all she would’ve mentioned that Olly had just been on the phone before she’d broken off to let Ratty’s joiner in. ‘I’m ringing you from work. That’s cool, isn’t it? I can stop work and doss about and it’s not me losing money.’
He’d enjoyed dinner, he said, he’d enjoyed her company, was regretting more and more the way things had ended. Eventually he wound up to, ‘So, how do you feel about doing it again, sometime?’
After several moments she’d answered, ‘Maybe. OK.’ After all, her dance card was hardly full.
She shook herself into the present as Ratty’s Caterham blasted out of sight. Time to meet Carola at the village hall to check the decorations. The making of them had been jolly, shrill kiddies cutting leaves from thin green card, the defter mastering crêpe roses to make into swags.
The raffle prize picture was awkward under one arm; she shifted it as she walked. Spring had sprung, would it be dry on Saturday? Spring showers had been more like torrential deluges lately. More people would turn out if it was dry. So much effort, the Feast deserved success.
‘She’s got it, she’s got it! I knew she wouldn’t let me down!’ Carola ran across the hall, clapping pleased hands. ‘Look, look, everybody! Isn’t it marvellous?’
Tess stood back and let them drop their swags and skirts for the stalls and gather to exclaim. A nice bit of whimsy, the watercolour was of the hall worked on by a band of animal tradesmen. She grinned as they found ‘themselves’ – a badger in a brown smock like Hubert’s, a tiny white rabbit with Carola’s thin and geometric bob, a deer with Angel’s hair but wielding a blowtorch instead of a hairdryer.
‘Grace, this badger’s got your flowery overall!’
‘The rabbit with the bucket’s got Sarah’s new perm – and that one has Kelly’s bandaged finger! Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘If you want me to sign it as it’s presented, the glass will have to go in later.’ It might be shallow but Tess got a kick out of their admiration. Feeling respected and wanted had kept her at the hall when she’d wanted to run over the hill and far away.
And anyway, despite initial misgivings, she enjoyed helping, had begun to understand Angel’s pleasure in community activity, the kiddies racing round and getting in the way, the giggles. The alliance.
So she agreed meekly with Carola’s suggestions that she help erect and decorate the stalls on Saturday morning, man the door on Saturday afternoon when it was all (hopefully) happening, be early – so Carola had one less thing to worry about – in the evening when she was, of course, presenting the first prize for the raffle.
Angel was the next to find her a job to do. ‘Any chance you could babysit on Thursday evening, Tess?’
Toby and Jenna, bless them, were a comfort. Tess loved entertaining them. Babysitting was fun: crazy bath time, a pyjama’d wrestle, a bedtime story (or eight). ‘’Course. Going somewhere nice?’ She peered down from the stage where Carola had insisted she stand to ‘get the feel of it’. Actually, she didn’t like the feel of it at all. Too high, too exposed.
‘A meal at The Pheasant.’ Angel looked unenthusiastic, though normally she’d be wild to dress up for the expensive and over-booked restaurant.
‘Posh! What have you done to deserve that?’
‘It’s a bribe,’ Angel shifted uneasily. ‘I have to do something unspeakable – pretend to like something I don’t.’
Tess rolled her eyes. ‘Wish I had a sex life like that!’
Angel giggled. Then stopped, suddenly.
Ratty looked up as Angel rocked the buggy and swung Toby’s hand, gazing down Main Road as Tess disappeared in the direction of Honeybun Cottage. ‘She agreed to babysit on Thursday,’ she said. It was obvious where Angel’s sympathies lay.
He commiserated. ‘Hell, isn’t it?’
Angel switched her baleful gaze to him. He was her husband’s best friend and employer, her children loved him, she probably cared for him best in the world apart from Pete and the kids. But she covered Toby’s ears to declare, ‘You’re a shit, Ratty. You could’ve done
things differently. You better be right.’
He stared down at the coked-up spark plugs in his oily hands. ‘Yes, I better had.’
Angel sniffed and covered Toby’s ears once more. ‘You know she’s been seeing that ultra-arse, Olly?’
‘I saw them together.’
‘He’s promised never to slap her again. He’d better not.’
Ratty looked up and met her eyes. ‘I don’t think he will.’
Angel tugged the buggy round, angrily. ‘You realise she might sleep with him again?’
Silence.
‘He’s bad for her. I’ll bet you didn’t think he’d be back on the scene, did you?’
Ratty rolled the spark plug from one hand to another. ‘No. They’re not sleeping together, are they?’
‘They might be.’ Angel glared for several seconds, then softened. ‘OK, they’re not. She says that’d be far too far, far too fast.’
Ratty sighed. ‘Well. She’s got a lot of sense.’
Tess wouldn’t have agreed to babysit if she’d known. OK, she’d have had to agree, but at least she would’ve known. It wouldn’t have been such a shock. Or she could have pretended to be ill, with something horrible, like shingles. In fact, shingles would’ve been nicer.
She’d been lounging on the grey sitting-room carpet, drawing on a magic slate, watching Jenna wiping Toby’s drawings half done, laughing at Toby’s outrage, chatting as Pete waited patiently for Angel to appear. When, from upstairs, Angel yelled, ‘They’re here!’
And Ratty waltzed in, hand in hand with a radiant Franca.
Tess’s flabbergasted eyes met his, were held to their brilliance until he looked away. Hair trimmed, he must’ve wet shaved to subdue his customary stubble to that degree of smoothness. Pretty powerful.
Behind him hovered Jos and new girlfriend Miranda, a shy dab with oval glasses and an Indian print skirt.
Franca broke the silence in her really excellent English, complimenting Tess on her kindness in babysitting whilst everyone else went out.
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