Blowing It (2 page)

Mac’s turn at the counter came at last and he handed over an untidy handful of cheques to an adolescent boy who looked as if he was wearing his much-bulkier black-sheep brother’s going-to-court suit. Obviously fresh from the sixth form, Mac reckoned. He’d put money on it that the lad was temping for gap-year cash and would be off from
Gatwick
with a rucksack and a Lonely Planet guidebook before Mac’s next final demand arrived. How come the young grabbed themselves months of carefree travel whereas he now had to think twice about a cheap weekend in Valencia? How unfair – as Sorrel would phrase it – was that? Gap year, he thought; if bloody only.

The boy yawned as he shuffled Mac’s bills for gas, electricity, American Express, Visa and half a year’s council tax.

‘Have you considered our on-line banking service, sir?’ he asked.

‘I have,’ Mac assured him solemnly, ‘and I decided against it on the grounds of severe risk of identity theft.’

There was a millisecond’s hesitation before the youth handed back the stamped counterfoils. The hesitation said only one thing: You sad, broke, balding, badly dressed old git. What kind of tragic, useless loser would want to steal
your
identity?

He had, Mac conceded, got him there.

TWO

THERE WAS A
low droning noise from behind the newspaper across the table. Slowly it dawned on Lottie (who was engrossed in the fashion pages and the minimal chances of her ever needing a strapless dress in yellow ruched satin) that Mac was reading something to her and that she was supposed to listen and take a suitable wifely interest. It was really annoying when he did this without first saying something to get her attention. She’d only tune in to the fact that he was talking to her at all when he was halfway through the piece and then he’d sigh in that exasperated way when she asked him to start telling her again.

Lottie, finding it impossible to get her head round how simple rope-and-canvas sandals could carry a price tag of £400, chucked her bit of the newspaper expertly at the recycling box across the kitchen, leaned across the table between the rows of jars (honey, two marmalades, blackberry jam) and
rattled
the photo of Wayne Rooney on Mac’s back page.

‘Sorry, Mac, I was concentrating on something. Tell me again.’

He lowered the paper a few inches and grinned across at her. ‘It’s that column where they do a funny bit each week about words that look the same but aren’t at all, “homonyms”, are they? I dunno. Anyway, it
says
…’ And in the short space while he took a breath she sensed those long-ago
Listen With Mother
comfort-words ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’

‘“Pension,”’ he read. ‘“A pathetically inadequate amount of money, grudgingly handed over by either state or private fund, on which to live out one’s declining years in the kind of penny-pinching manner to which no one would wish to become accustomed.”’

Lottie pulled a face at this unwelcome reminder as to what the future might not hold in terms of funds. Had her parents’ generation thought like that? Everywhere you looked now, there was a piece of finger-wagging government bossiness about savings and investments and Proper Provision. Soon, they would all be told it was their duty as good citizens to die at sixty or be evicted to a north-facing hillside to face chill starvation.

‘Or,’ Mac continued, ‘“
Pension
– a simple yet charming guesthouse in sunny rural France, offering substantial rustic fare and a selection of fine – if
robust
– local wines.”’ He chuckled and turned the page. ‘Makes you think, doesn’t it?’ he said, before moving on instantly to become engrossed in Chelsea’s new striker.

‘No, no it doesn’t,’ Lottie said, shuddering slightly. ‘I really don’t want to think about the “P” word, especially not over breakfast.’ More precisely, it was the lack of pension she didn’t want to think about. The very thought made her feel mildly faint in exactly the way she used to feel years ago on the train to school when she hadn’t bought a ticket, only to see the guard making his way towards her with a look on his face that told her she was about to make his day.

‘It’s like that parable,’ she now found herself murmuring to herself, ‘the one about the foolish virgins.’

‘Virgins?’ Mac looked up. ‘What virgins? Where?’

‘Pensions,’ Lottie continued vaguely. ‘Those women in the Bible who didn’t keep their lamps trimmed or squandered their talents or something. The squanderers got told off for not being good savers, like we’re going to be when we’re old.’

‘I wouldn’t say we squandered our talents,’ Mac said. ‘We’ve done OK. We still live on it all. Just.’

There was a silence while they considered their diminishing income and the demanding vastness of the house that income had to support. It had been a massive piece of luck that some of Mac’s songs had become such worldwide standards that they’d kept
them
going this long. But the day would surely come when opening a royalty statement would reveal ‘Total: £3.50’ at the bottom of the page. Lottie wondered what they’d do then: possibly the choices would be to gamble it on a horse or to buy Lottery tickets. Growing and selling fancy salad vegetables to the hotel and restaurant trade, as they currently did, but in so half-hearted and desultory a way that it was only half a step up from hobby-farming in what was once a glorious Gertrude Jekyll-designed garden, was never going to earn them more than beer money. In fact, it probably came to less than beer money, really, once Al, the part-time gardener, had been paid.

‘I didn’t mean that kind of talent,’ Lottie told him. ‘I meant the money sort. The Old Testament was big on securing the future. Unlike us. All our money’s in this house.’

And what a house, a vast Surrey Lutyens gem, far too big for what was now only three of them, and soon to be only two once Sorrel had gone first on her travels and then to university.

‘Yeah but …’ Mac started folding the whole of the sports section into a fat, unwieldy paper aeroplane. For a second she wondered about asking him to save the racing pages, to start checking out form for that £3.50 bet. ‘… what would you rather do now? Stash everything away for a rainy day that we might not live long enough to see? Or should we think about doing something else? In the bank yesterday, I was
thinking
about kids having gap years and why it was only them. It’s our lot would appreciate it more, surely.’

‘Mm. I was thinking that way too,’ Lottie agreed vaguely, ‘but in Top Shop.’

France was perfect in May, she thought, that rustic
pension
would be just the thing. If they simply packed and left Holbrook House right now, they could go on from there, overland towards Italy, down through Greece, Turkey, all points east. It couldn’t be a first-class trip though, more a budget break at the moment. Oh you beautiful but falling-down house, she thought as she looked at the peeling paint on the kitchen walls, and the splashy self-portrait of her own naked body that covered up a crack so deep and serious that no one wanted to have to look at it and consider the expense of repairs: why, house, are you such a costly dependant? When Sorrel left for university, would it be so terribly disloyal to this thirty-year home to consider, just maybe, giving someone else a chance to do the right thing by it?

Ilex was always going on about pensions. Lottie sometimes thought he must have been swapped at birth, for how else could she and Mac have raised a son so cautious and sensible? She imagined the hell it must have been for his real parents who’d have been constantly bewildered to find themselves bringing up some kind of junior Ozzie Osbourne. What would these unknown people, a Building
Society
executive perhaps, paired with a studious librarian, make of their cuckoo? How had they dealt, in his younger years, with his appalling language, his moody clothes and his crash-and-burn music on their quiet Madeira holidays?

A few months before, Ilex had brought to the house with him a collection of brochures about ‘Third Age Options’, full of deeply unthrilling information about how to maximize investments. Lottie had tried to disillusion him gently, pointing out that she and Mac had long ago learned that in their hands investments tended to settle for minimizing themselves; they wouldn’t be making the day of any fancy city brokers unless they had a stonking win during a Las Vegas bargain weekend break. She remembered how he’d smiled so blankly when she’d said all this, as if she’d told him a joke that he didn’t want to admit he didn’t get. When he and Manda came to lunch this Sunday, Lottie rather hoped he’d bring tulips instead – they would be far more welcome.

There was a rattle and a clunk from the hallway and Lottie went to collect the post from the mat.

‘Len gets later every day,’ Lottie muttered as she carried the small heap of envelopes back to the kitchen. ‘I don’t feel as if the day can start properly till he’s been and now look, it’s nearly eleven already and I haven’t been down to check the coriander or feed the hens.’

‘No rush – nothing’s going anywhere. Though I’m
really
beginning to think we should.’ He chuckled. ‘Why should kids be the only ones who get to have all the travel adventures? I know we’ve seen the world, you and me, but that was work.’

It was mostly Holiday Inns, airports, smoke-filled buses and backstage bars too. If they’d played Rome, say, they’d immediately be on the way to Florence and the next gig rather than touring the ancient sites. Even Australia had been an in-and-out job, four days, four cities and on to Tokyo. Lottie looked at him. What was he saying? That he too seriously wondered for the first time about selling up and moving on?

The house seemed to agree – only that morning Lottie had noticed that the fuzzy, greenish patch of mouldy damp on the floor of the downstairs cloakroom had definitely got bigger. It sort of glittered too, like a holy statue weeping mystical tears. It reminded her slightly of a dog holding up an injured paw, asking for it to be fixed, please – and, if you can’t do it, please find someone who can. This tiny seed of an idea about getting away could be like idly mentioning you might need an extension to the house – once the thought had been voiced, you realized you simply couldn’t contemplate living without the extra space. But oh lordy, the potential for upheaval. Could they really just pack and sneak out when no one was looking?

Mac poured himself another cup of coffee. ‘Anything profitable in the mail? A win on the
premium
bonds? Reader’s Digest come up with my name yet?’

Lottie laughed. ‘God knows, you deserve it. You must be the only person in the country who fills in every single one of those forms they send you to claim the big prize.’

‘That’s right. Me and Tom Champagne, we go back a long way.’

‘Crazy name.’ She shook her head. ‘Hope he’s a bubbly kind of guy.’

‘It would be such a waste if he’s a miserable git,’ Mac agreed. ‘Go on then. Hand over the bad news. Ugh – brown envelopes, bills, bills, more bills. This place, it’s like heating a castle. And what’s this?’ He ripped open a large envelope. ‘Some local government bullshit. I just paid the council tax, what more can they want?’

Mac stared in puzzlement at the envelope’s contents. He spread out on the table in front of him the various forms, brochures and information sheets.

‘Buses?’ Mac said. ‘What do I want with …? Bloody ’ell, Lottie, they want me to apply for a sodding
bus pass
! I’m not that old, am I?’

‘Ah! Well I suppose you nearly are. You’ll be able to join the Twirlies!’ she told him.

‘What the naffin’ ’ell is a “Twirly”?’ Mac looked perplexed. ‘Sounds like the Brownies or something. Is it a sect? Is it paramilitary?’ There was a glimmer of hope in his eye and Lottie fleetingly considered
the
awfulness of Mac being let loose with any kind of weapon. He’d once taken a powerful air rifle to a flock of pigeons that were devouring the bean plants, a flock so dense no one could possibly miss. And although not a single bird lost so much as a feather, a passing rambler on the far side of the fence had come to the front door showing a pellet hole in his rucksack and raging that if he hadn’t bent to look at a grass snake he could have lost an eye.

Lottie considered. ‘No and possibly yes. “Twirlies” are those pensioners who line up at 9.25 in the morning to get on a bus and when they try to use their passes, driver says, “Sorry, love, you’re too early.” Twirly. Get it?’

‘Got it,’ Mac groaned. ‘Nothing paramilitary, then?’

‘The uniform for men and women is beige coats, woolly hats. The men are armed with walking sticks and the women with tartan shopping trolleys. Both lethal.’

‘You’re being ageist. That could be us, one day.’ Mac slowly tore up his bus pass application into tiny pieces.

‘Never,’ Lottie said. ‘Our generation didn’t fail to die before it got old just so it could wear beige. At least not me and you. I shall totter to my dotage in Vivienne Westwood and a selection of mad hats, thank you.’

I’d better think about making a start on collecting all that lot now, she thought ruefully – when does dotage start? Or had it crept up already and taken
hold
without her noticing? There were a lot of things that did that. Her passport had needed renewing the previous year. As she’d filled in the forms she’d had a weird shiver of knowledge that maybe this, or the next, could be the last one she’d have. And then there were the succession of wolfhounds they’d had over the years, even to the extent of being serious breeders and Cruft’s entrants at one time. They hadn’t got one at the moment; the last one had died in the autumn and was buried, along with four of its ancestors, down in the orchard – but when they did, should they get a puppy and risk it ending up homeless on the grounds of outliving them? Not only was she having these bizarre musings, but she was also furious with herself for them: she was probably wasting carefree time here and should not have to give this so much as a passing thought for another twenty or even thirty years. In fact, if she was given the kind of luxurious TLC the late Queen Mother had had, she could still have another fifty-plus years to live. You just couldn’t tell. All she could say was that although she felt as strong and healthy as she had in her thirties, thoughts now shimmied across her mind that wouldn’t have got so much as a look-in back then.