The Not So Perfect Plan to Save Friendship House: An uplifting romantic comedy

by Lilly Bartlett

  Nick’s face has slipped into sadness as I’ve been talking. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Now I’m getting nostalgic!’ he says with a laugh.

  ‘Isn’t that a good thing? Because it means we don’t have to look backward to be happy. Our happiness lies ahead of us.’

  ‘Phoebe Stockton, you have a way of making me see things differently. I love that about us.’

  Us.

  My heart starts to speed just as my phone vibrates across the worktop. ‘Sorry, it’s my dad,’ I tell him. The man with the worst timing in the world. ‘Hi, Dad.’

  ‘Phoebe, this is your father.’

  ‘Yep, hi.’ He’s never going to get the whole phone thing.

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘Yes, but that’s okay, I’m glad you rang. What’s up?’

  ‘I wondered when you’re coming next,’ he says. ‘The flowers on Mum’s grave are getting wilted.’

  ‘Oh… I assumed you’d be changing them every week?’ He only works ten minutes from the cemetery. The man runs a building company. Surely buying a few flowers isn’t beyond his abilities.

  Silence on the line.

  Maybe it is beyond him.

  Nick sips the last of his tea and jerks his thumb toward the dining room.

  ‘I’ll just be a sec,’ I tell him, but he’s already on his way out.

  ‘You’re here?’ says Dad.

  ‘No, I’m not there, Dad, I’m in Framlingham. I didn’t mean— I was talking to my colleague.’ I watch Nick go. ‘Okay, I can come visit this weekend.’ It’s my Saturday off. ‘Has Will been over to see you?’ Or even to visit Mum’s grave, I want to ask. He stayed for about two hours after the funeral before coming up with some bogus excuse to get back to London. Of course, Dad let him do it.

  ‘Your brother is very busy,’ says Dad.

  ‘Too busy to visit his father? I’m busy too, you know, Dad.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re not coming?’

  ‘No, no. I’ll make the effort. Unlike Will. I can bring something for dinner, okay? You don’t have to worry about cooking.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ says Dad. ‘See you Friday.’

  Nick had said ‘us’. Us! But when I go into the dining room, he’s not there.

  If only Terence were the type of person we could sneak in quietly, then maybe the women would see that he wasn’t any trouble before they even noticed him here. But Terence isn’t a quiet bloke.

  Nick drew the short straw and had to go get him. I’m not sure why I thought that would only involve a suitcase or two and maybe a lamp or a few photo frames.

  Nick staggers through the door with what looks like a fridge box. ‘Don’t drop it!’ Terence barks as Nick struggles to set it down without a crash.

  ‘Have we got any small boxes?’ he says to me with a grimace. ‘I think I put my back out.’

  ‘What’s in there?’ It says Frostbite Zero Degrees on the side. Surely Terence won’t have a fridge in his bedroom.

  ‘Books,’ says Nick. ‘All hardbacks.’

  ‘That’s because paperbacks are rubbish,’ Terence says. ‘They’re cheap pulp not worth reading.’

  At least Dot didn’t hear that. Her love of literature doesn’t discriminate between formats. She’s just as happy reading on her Kindle as she is a signed first edition. The important thing is the story. As I’m sure she’ll tell Terence the first chance she gets. If she ever speaks to him.

  ‘Easy for him to say,’ Nick grumbles. ‘He didn’t just carry them all up the lawn. We’ll have to repack the rest into smaller boxes for the next trip. I could barely lift this one.’

  Terence is standing with his hands on his hips, glaring around the hall. At least his hands aren’t in his pockets and his fly is zipped. I’m grateful for small mercies. He doesn’t look the tiniest bit grateful to be here, though.

  ‘You’ve changed the walls,’ he says. ‘Why yellow?’

  ‘They were that colour when I started,’ I tell him. ‘I guess they thought it looked cheery.’

  ‘Hmph, cheering them up as they wait to die, eh? White was always good enough for us.’ He perches his wire-rimmed glasses on the end of his nose and looks up through them.

  Max must take after his mother’s side because there’s hardly any resemblance between Terence and his son. Terence’s hair is full and wild, dark and peppered with grey. His eyes are grey too. Grey hair, grey eyes, beige wrinkled chinos that bag at the knees and a khaki shooting shirt. It’s only his ruddy complexion that saves him looking washed out. I can see that he would have had a good face when he was younger, possibly even attractive, but now he’s too miserable to be appealing.

  ‘Where’s Patricia?’ he asks.

  He means the painting of his wife, rather than the actual person.

  ‘We’ve hung Mrs Greene in the living room,’ Nick says. ‘People are in there more than they are here, so we thought we’d move her.’

  ‘She always loved being around people,’ he says.

  Unlike you, you ropey old fart.

  June hurries towards us. ‘Sorry, sorry, I got stuck on the phone. Welcome, Terence. Shall I show you to your room? We can bring your things up.’

  ‘Why the hell would I need you to do that?’ he bellows at my poor best friend, even though she’s only trying to help. ‘This is my house! I know where my own room is. For God’s sake, don’t be stupid.’

  ‘Now, there’s no need to be insulting,’ Nick says. ‘She was only trying to make you feel welcome.’

  ‘In my own house,’ he mutters. ‘Don’t you forget that, girly.’ Then he notices the women standing in the hallway that leads to the living room. They’re trying to look like they’ve got a reason to be there, perhaps inspecting the paintwork in the bare hall. ‘Well, hello, ladies,’ Terence says, with none of his usual venom. ‘Don’t be shy.’ He beckons them over.

  Sophie leads Laney and the others into the hall. You’d think they were approaching the gorilla cage.

  Terence isn’t shy about his appraisal of our very own Sporty Spice pensioner. ‘Don’t you look like a fit one!’ he says to Sophie.

  ‘Sophie loves Zumba!’ Laney answers, oblivious to Terence’s innuendo. ‘She’s fitter than all of us. Do you like Zumba?’

  ‘I don’t know who she is,’ Terence says. ‘Sounds foreign.’

  That sends Sophie into a fit of giggles.

  Terence does seem slightly tamer inside. Maybe he can be house-trained after all.

  ‘Are you Ruth and Shirley’s brother?’ Laney asks. Then she looks confused. ‘I mean husband. One of their husbands. No, that’s not right, either…’

  ‘Laney, this is Terence. Max’s father,’ June explains. ‘Remember? He lived in the cottage out back?’ She doesn’t mention his other traits: pisser of bushes, groper of waitresses.

  ‘Oh, I see.’ Laney smiles, glad to have that mystery cleared up. ‘Terence, yes of course. Who are you visiting, Terence?’

  ‘He’s going to be living here, Laney,’ Nick says.

  Her forehead wrinkles. ‘Living here?’ She turns to Sophie. ‘But he’s not a woman. You’re not, are you? One has to ask these days, you know.’

  ‘I’m a man,’ says Terence. ‘Come here and I’ll show you, if you like.’

  Luckily, he doesn’t make a move for his zipper, but June shoots him a warning look anyway. ‘Terence. You cannot speak to the residents like that.’

  ‘I cannot? I’ve got news for you, girlie. I can do what I like and you’ve got no say about it.’

  ‘Stop calling me girlie. You know my name is June.’ Her voice is dangerously quiet.

  ‘You seem like more of a girlie to me.’ He glares, daring her to keep challenging him.

  ‘Come on now, everyone please calm down,’ Nick says.

  ‘Everyone?’ says June, shooting him a withering glance. ‘No, not everyone, Nick. There’s only one problem here. If you’ll go get the rest of his things, we can get this over with as fast as possible. Terence,
why don’t you go to your room?’ As she turns on her heel to leave she mutters, ‘And stay there.’

  ‘Do you want help with those boxes?’ I offer.

  I will feel no guilt about using the trauma of Terence’s arrival to snatch a few extra minutes with Nick. There were weeks, after the supper club fiasco, when we avoided each other. Plus, Nick was angry. It’s hard to imagine him angry, isn’t it? He’s normally so happy, so even-keeled. Well, believe me, he was.

  Chapter 8

  It’s inevitable. Whenever I go to my parents’ house, I travel back a hundred-odd miles and ten years. By the time I get through their front door, I’m a (less elastic) seventeen-year-old again. There must be a foldy bit in the parental space-time continuum.

  ‘Hello?’ I call down the long, wide corridor that leads to the kitchen. ‘Anyone home?’ My tummy clenches as I realise I don’t need to say ‘anyone’. It’s only Dad in the house now. ‘Dad?’ Kicking off my shoes, I readjust the cool bag on one shoulder and my weekend tote on the other.

  ‘In the great room,’ he calls. I guess that name is going to stick, with or without Mum here to remind us.

  She was always the enforcer in the family, in good ways too, not just pretentious ones. Take holidays, for instance. We never got away with anything mundane. Mum was the unerring cheerleader for an entire week off at the end of the year, packed with Christmas family fun. I did love it when I was little, until my teenage self would rather die than be seen with my parents. A little sullen animosity never put Mum off, though. She booked plays and museum visits and made us go on forested walks come rain or shine. Mostly rain. When the Christmas markets became a thing – crowded stalls full of gaudy knick-knacks and grown-ups desperately trying to pretend they were in Bavaria, not South Bank – we trudged around them while Mum and Dad got tipsy on overpriced mulled wines. At home we did the newspaper quizzes and crosswords and watched Bad Santa, where Mum and I mostly drowned out the dialogue arguing over whether Billy Bob Thornton was hot (Mum) or not (me).

  I’ve grown to love mulled wine, even overpriced, and don’t even mind a walk in the forest. Who’s going to make sure we do that this Christmas? Who’ll argue with me over Billy Bob?

  Dad’s sitting on the sofa with a plate balanced on his tummy. I say tummy. I mean his fairly-fit-for-fifties midsection. He’s never been fat, though he’s solid. I do think he’s lost weight lately, though.

  He’s still in his usual white dress shirt and jeans from work. Mum always tried to get him into proper trousers or even a suit at the office, but in this one thing, she didn’t get her way. Dad might come across as pliant, but the more he’s bent, the faster the cement hardens in his head, till it takes a bulldozer to shift him. I learned this first-hand from age zero to sixteen.

  His shoes are under the coffee table and a selection of jackets are piled on the reading chair that Mum had covered in raw silk and never let anyone sit in. ‘You haven’t ruined your appetite, have you?’ I say, bending to kiss his cheek.

  ‘Always room for more,’ he says, handing me the plate littered with Babybel waxed casings.

  ‘I could get you some good cheese, you know, Dad. The supermarket even sells it, right where you found these. They’re the ones that look like they’re for grown-ups.’

  He smiles at my lame joke. Genetics might have been unfair about my brown eyes and squat legs, but at least I got Dad’s big, toothy smile. ‘Babybel is fine for me. What’s for dinner?’

  ‘Stuffed chicken breasts and mashed potatoes. It’s stuffed with cheese,’ I say, because I can see the question on his lips. ‘Heart attack special.’ Then I feel a jolt. It’s still a bit early to joke about that in our family.

  ‘That beats a takeaway,’ he says. ‘Makes for a nice change.’

  I throw myself down into one of the chairs opposite the sofa. This was the year Mum wanted to change the upholstery again. It won’t happen now. Somehow, I can’t see Dad sifting through fabric swatches. ‘You know it’s never too late to learn to cook,’ I say. ‘You do have a daughter who does it for a living. I could show you a few things.’

  But Dad shakes his head. ‘I hate cooking as much as your mother did. We always joked that we needed a wife for that.’

  Even overlooking the casual sexism, there’s so much wrong with what he’s just said. ‘Mum didn’t hate to cook. She loved it,’ I say. Everyone knows that. She did it all the time, and she let me help her. I probably wasn’t much actual help in the early years, but that’s how I came to love it too. I had my very own stool in the kitchen to reach the worktop. They’ve still got it in there, even though I didn’t need it by the time they moved to the new house. It’s one of those retro chrome step chairs, with fold-out rubber-topped steps and an aqua seat.

  When one of the local magazines featured the bistro for our five-year anniversary, the journalist did an interview with me about my influences. That’s right. I had influences. She’d asked all kinds of questions, and I’d totally planned to mention the Michelin Star chefs that I idolised, but before I knew it I was walking down memory lane in Mum’s kitchen. And that’s what made it into the article: how she encouraged me not only to love food but to experiment with my own cooking. So, eat your heart out, Michel Roux Jr., my mum got the namecheck.

  ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you but trust me when I say: she hated cooking,’ says Dad, unpeeling another Babybel, cool as you like, as if he isn’t shattering my entire childhood.

  This can’t be right, when I’ve got such vivid recollections of us together in the kitchen. They’re good memories, some of my happiest when it comes to my mother. The kitchen was the one room where she usually left her criticism at the door.

  ‘She called it lino prison.’ Dad drives in another nail. ‘We argued over it a lot. Barb, babe, I told her, life’s too short to slave over a hob. But you know your Mum.’

  Obviously I don’t, not nearly as well as I’d thought, because what I remember is someone who was always volunteering to bring something for the neighbourhood picnics and barbeques. People raved about her food. That always made me so proud. I wanted to be just like my mum.

  ‘She always had to be perfect,’ he says to explain away Mum’s delicious contributions. ‘She didn’t want people thinking you kids grew up on ready meals.’

  We did sometimes eat them, but that’s neither here nor there right now. ‘But she used to say she loved it,’ I murmur. She loved cooking as much as I did. We were miles apart on most things, but we had that in common. Dad can’t take that from me, now that I’ve got no chance of finding any other way to feel close to Mum.

  Dad shrugs. ‘What can I tell you? She didn’t love it. I can probably count on two hands the number of times she made meals after we moved. We get takeaway or go out.’ He catches himself. ‘We… did.’

  ‘Hang on, Dad, no, that can’t be right. I rang home loads of times when Mum was in the middle of cooking.’ I couldn’t have imagined that. I’d ring. Mum would be distracted, in the middle of getting dinner ready. ‘And how do you explain that she used to send me recipes she’d made?’

  He shrugs. ‘She hated to cook. She didn’t use recipes. Phoebe, does it really matter whether she did or not? There are lots of things she didn’t like doing.’

  That gets my attention. ‘What else?’ I ask, though I don’t know if I can hear any more right now. I’ve got enough going on, what with the dismantling of my childhood memories and all.

  ‘God, I don’t know.’ He scratches his temple. ‘Socialising with our office. Killing spiders, cutting the grass. Riding horses. She was terrified of them. And the spiders.’

  I knew all that. Still, I feel cheated. That’s super, Mum, thanks very much. Lie about the one thing that always connected us. ‘But you’re not trying to deny that we did cook together, right? Because that’s why I’m a chef now.’

  ‘I’m not disputing that,’ Dad says. ‘I’m only saying she didn’t like it and it doesn’t matter. You ended up being a cook anyway.’

&n
bsp; ‘It does matter! It matters because…’

  Because why? Because this goes against what I knew about Mum. Not what I thought. What I knew. That’s unsettling, to say the least. And it’s not like I can get her in here to tell us the truth.

  ‘Who says you get to be the authority on Mum now that she’s gone?’ I say, exactly as petulantly as I would have at seventeen. See what I mean about travelling back ten years? ‘You don’t own her, you know.’

  Why can’t my memories be the true ones? And if she did lie about something as fundamental as daily meals, what else did she lie about?

  The weekend is starting off well.

  We eat our dinner from trays balanced on our laps in front of the TV. It’s clear no one has sat at the dining table since the funeral, though neither of us mentions this. We don’t talk about Mum at all, and that feels like we’re avoiding her. But I can understand why Dad would want to. He’s got a huge network of business contacts to deal with every day – clients and suppliers, plus the company’s accountants, bank managers and various official people. He’s taken on all of Mum’s jobs, so when people first get him on the phone instead of her, he’s got to explain why and then listen to how sorry they are. Then he’s got to make them feel better, even though it was his wife who has died. That would wear anyone out, and especially someone who is not a fan of emotion. Plus, most people mean well but, as I quickly saw at the funeral, sometimes condolences aren’t just for the bereaved. Maybe I’m being too harsh, but I noticed it every time someone at the funeral insisted on telling me about how upset they were over someone they’d lost. Like I cared at the time. I wanted to shout This isn’t about you! in their faces.