Blowing It (21 page)

Then there was Manda’s tidiness. OK, that was hardly top of the list when you were seeking out a life-long soulmate but total sloppiness on home premises would be a definite no. If a woman was a dedicated clothes-scatterer and bathroom slob when there were just the two of them in a minimally furnished flat, imagine what she’d be like when there were a couple of children, and all their toy-junk to be dealt with? He’d be forever scooping up Playmobile bits and crunching tiny cars underfoot. Ah but children. That was the big one. She wanted them, he could tell. There was a Mini Boden catalogue in the flat – she claimed her sister Caro had left it there but had she?

Did he want children? He’d probably get used to the idea, eventually, once they turned seven or so. Given the option, it now occurred to Ilex that at the moment he’d really rather have a cat. He liked them but had never owned one – Mac and Lottie had always kept wolfhounds, possibly as many as four or five of them in sequence during his growing up, and each one called Bonzo. Mac had said it was
simply
what he called his dog and that was that, no choice, no protests allowed. A grey cat would be nice. Simon at work had a cousin who bred British Blue ones – big solid dense-furred creatures with Cheshire-cat grins and fat, cartoon faces. The big question remained to be asked though: what did Manda think? So, he thought, here goes.

‘Manda? I just want to ask you something.’

‘What is it, Lexy?’ Manda purred. Great eyes, he thought. They managed a rare trick of looking soulful and saucy at the same time.

‘I just wondered …’ he asked, hesitating.
Lexy?
God, not her as well. Had she been talking to Wendy?

‘Come on … you can ask me anything, darling. You know that.’ Manda slid her hand across the breadcrumbs he’d nervously scattered on the table.

‘It’s just … Manda, I was wondering, if you’d consider …’

‘Yes?’ She leaned forward and smiled, giving his hand a gentle, encouraging squeeze.

‘Would you like to …? Maybe it’s time we …’

‘Mmm … go on!’ Her eyes were all glittery and excited now. It looked like he was on for a yes.

‘I was wondering,’ he stroked her fingers, and she curled them round his, caressing, ‘do you think,’ he continued, ‘would you consider the possibility of us maybe … getting a cat?’

* * *

Only moments later, out on the pavement, Ilex watched in dismay as Manda’s taxi sped away. He went back inside to pay the bill for the food they’d ordered but not eaten, but first asked for a restorative brandy and climbed on to the end bar stool, avoiding the eyes of nearby diners who for once weren’t being too cool to stare.

‘The young lady’s had to leave then?’ the barman commented sympathetically as he handed Ilex the drink.

‘Yeah.’ Ilex sighed, wishing he was, at this moment, a smoker. That was one hell of a speedy flurry she’d left in – up from the table, jacket grabbed and out through the revolving door in one fluid movement, leaving it spinning fast and furious, along with the echo of just one heartfelt violently spat-out word: ‘Bastard.’

‘It seems I said something,’ Ilex confided to the barman. ‘All I did was ask her one simple question. She didn’t even answer.’

‘Oh, I think she did, sir,’ the barman told him. ‘I’d say she definitely did.’

THIRTEEN

SHIFTY. THAT WAS
the word. Clover, driving to collect Elsa from her
Bébé France
class, was quite certain this was precisely the word for the way Sean was behaving at the moment. He had suddenly taken to using his mobile phone for all outgoing calls, and if it rang he’d answer quickly and move swiftly out of the room to talk. He’d developed a peculiar way of speaking into it – as if only half his mouth worked – together with an awkward lopsided stoop when walking, protecting the thing from sight as well as hearing. She no longer dared to check his calls or go through his pockets, not now he really was behaving so strangely. After all, it was one thing to go through life on a level of mild suspicion – that was just sensible self-preservation, wasn’t it? Surely safer for the soul than blind trust? But it was quite another to feel thoroughly agonized that you really might have something substantial to be suspicious about. After all, who could blame Sean if he’d found
someone
more spontaneous and exciting to have sex with? Someone who would be all too willing to cancel everything at a second’s notice to go and have sex in a swish hotel? What an idiot she was. If he’d only ask her again, she’d settle for an hour in a Travel Lodge at the back of the nearest Little Chef. She decided, as she drove dangerously subconsciously through the afternoon school-run traffic, that she’d be the one to do the suggesting. What they needed was a couple of nights away somewhere, just the two of them, for some passionate re-bonding. Might as well do these things while they still could, while Mac and Lottie were there at Holbrook House with time and space for their only grandchildren, before they sold up and ran out on them all. Stop it now, Clover told herself, feeling that tension was pushing tears into her eyes again. Stop being such a self-centred baby. Cars behind started beeping and she realized she was sitting staring into space while the traffic lights had turned green. A glossy-looking young woman in a Discovery, presumably also on the school run, put two fingers up at her and shot past her. So rude.

It also crossed Clover’s mind, as she pulled into the road by the school, that Sean’s new interest might not be a real person at all. He was also, these days, spending hours on the internet in his study upstairs, flicking swiftly to a screen saver whenever Clover tried to slide softly into the room to catch a glimpse at what he was looking at. Oh God, please
don’t
let him develop a porno chat-room habit, she thought as she parked the Touareg behind Mary-Jane’s Street Ka. Or even worse, please don’t let him have hit on a special new on-line lust-interest. She hoped he hadn’t fallen for that old scam – didn’t they always turn out to have as much substance as a child’s imaginary friend? He could be deluding himself he’d pulled a twenty-two-year-old Russian lovely. She’d read about mid-life men who did that. Men who, driven by a testosterone level that was pumped to a giddy height of over-excitement, would race off to meet their slinky beloved for a session of rampant sex in one of those sleaze-dives that charge for rooms by the hour, only to find instead a couple of burly muggers lying in wait to relieve him of all credit cards, empty his bank account and possibly even subject their gullible victim to a dose of blackmail.

She wished she hadn’t been so flippant with that word now, using it the other day on Ilex. There was absolutely nothing funny or pretty about it. And that one had backfired, hadn’t it? Something must have gone horribly wrong there, or Ilex wouldn’t now be back in his old bedroom at Holbrook House with no possessions other than what Manda had crammed into a suitcase and hurled down the stairwell of their apartment block. Manda wasn’t telling anyone what had happened. Clover and Lottie had both tried but she was keeping both the apartment phone and her mobile switched to voice-mail. And
of
course it was no good asking Ilex. Lottie said he’d muttered something completely unintelligible about blue cats, then refused point blank to elaborate further. Why didn’t men
talk
? Clover was completely convinced that so much that was wrong in the world could be sorted out perfectly easily if men, and, well, everyone really, would just open up to each other a bit more, the way women did. You could get so much straight in your head with a girlfriend, tea and a gooey piece of home-baked chocolate cake.

‘Hi, Clover! Everything all right?’ Mary-Jane, jaunty and sleek as ever in a new pair of skinny jeans, was already out of the building, firmly stuffing the plump little back end of Jakey through her car door.

Clover looked up, startled out of her dismal thoughts. ‘Everything all right?’ was that the question?

‘Oh … hi! Er, yes! Yes everything’s fine! Really great!’

Well, there it was. When it came to it, what else could you say?

‘So you were growing herbs and salad crops as a commercial enterprise? Won’t you miss it?’ Mrs Cresswell’s delicate high gold sandals were not best suited to the uneven terrain in the orchard. Lottie hoped the poor woman wouldn’t turn her ankle. She looked the clued-up, smart sort who might sue.
Chickens
wandered around, pecking speculatively at her feet in the hope that her painted toenails would turn into sweet berries. Mr Cresswell hung back by the gate, rightly wary of Charlie the cockerel, who was fast approaching and doing his best aggressive sideways strut while trailing one wing stylishly like a bullfighter with his cloak, closing in for the strike.

Commercially? Well, Lottie had to think for a moment before answering that one. ‘Commercially’ implied there was profit in it, as opposed to loss. Frankly, she and Mac couldn’t honestly claim that any of their enterprises had been what a generous-natured person would call ‘commercial’, not if you wanted to append the word ‘success’ with any accuracy.

‘It was more of an interest that sort of grew,’ she explained instead, choosing her words carefully. ‘A couple of years ago there was some space that needed filling in the east long border so we decided to mix in some ruby chard and purslane among the flowers, just for family use and it, well … sort of took off from there.’

Was Mrs Cresswell really interested? Might she be harbouring thoughts of carrying on the business herself, trusting it could be a convenient, part-time little number that would keep her amused between doing the school run and having lunch with her book club circle? She was probably already certain that she’d make a better go of it than Mac and Lottie,
go
in for some smart marketing, fancy labels with lots of cute descriptive detail, a pretty little water-colour of the house, all that. Maybe even a couple of goes at a Saturday farmers’ market. Perhaps Lottie should warn this so-elegant Mrs Cresswell in her DKNY denims and cream loose-knit Joseph cardi that there was more to supplying your family and a selection of the county’s finest restaurants with wholesome home-grown veg than swanning about on sunny mornings in baby-pink Hunter wellies, clutching a hand-crafted Suffolk trug. Really, at the very mention of the garden’s earning potential, Lottie should do the woman a huge favour and go, ‘Nooooo do not grow herbs! Weed out every floppy snail-magnet lettuce!’

So to the second question it was no, Lottie would have no regrets about giving up this particular enterprise. Whatever had made them start it? They must have been crazy. Lottie was inclined to blame Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for making self-sufficiency look such an idyllic option on TV. Did
he
lie awake wondering if the weather forecast would mean drought or drowning for his flourishing veg patch? No, of course not. He had it all much better organized than that. Thinking back, she could date the beginning of this urge to nurture crops from the night she’d watched him (on TV, fortunately, not for close-up real) bedding down naked in his polytunnel to sleep among his seedlings. She must have been feeling a pre-menopausal tweak of
earth-mother
broodiness at the time, imagining she’d care deeply about whether her radishes were nourished to a plump juicy size and that she’d be lavishing this hand-raised bounty on an eager, benevolent band of grateful consumers. Hugh F-W hadn’t said a lot about slugs and snails, other than being shown looking very enthusiastic while he made his nightly torchlight collection of them seem like the second-best fun you could have in the dark. Nor did he seem to suffer the theft of entire beds of crops by rabbits. Maybe after he’d done the slug-round he sat in wait for the bunnies for the rest of the night, leaning against a wall, beneath a perfectly espaliered peach tree with a shotgun, a flask of his own nettle-leaf tea and a substantial slice of home-cooked rook pie.

Annoying as the garden pests were, the customers were possibly the worst of the lot. It would be no loss if she never again had to explain patiently that Good King Henry was a salad ingredient not a forgotten monarch, or that experimental stripy yellow tomatoes deserved better than to be sneered at by people who considered themselves gourmets, and there’d be no more dismay at seeing plump yellow courgettes being poked at suspiciously by idiots who thought they were green ones that had gone off. There would also be no more realizing too late that sorrel and rocket should have been planted in the cooler of the long borders – the one that faced east – rather than in the warmer one where they
wilted
in the blazing afternoon sun and bolted to seed the moment you took your eyes off them. And, best of all, no more round trips of twenty miles to deliver two boxes of applemint that had been left out of the order for the Pimm’s promotion at the sodding Fothering Manor Hotel, only to find that ‘someone’ had, in the meantime, remembered that the hotel had a rampant patch of the stuff growing wild on the far side of their rose garden. If that was actually true; it could be that ‘someone’ didn’t want to admit they’d actually nipped out to Waitrose and bought up their entire pre-packed supply rather than wait for her to whiz all the way back with the forgotten delivery.

‘We still have the plans for the original planting in the long borders,’ Lottie told the Cresswells. ‘No vegetables there, obviously.’ She laughed, slightly nervously. Why were these people making it such hard work? There was an unmistakable air of slightly amazed disapproval about the two of them: a sort of ‘goodness, why on earth did you do
that
?’ It had started in the house, where the sight of the black-painted sitting room had brought a spluttered ‘Well, that’s, um … different!’ from Mrs C. Perhaps in future she’d simply go out for a few hours when viewers (if any more turned up) were due and leave the selling-side to the agent. Let Harry – or the next one, she hadn’t got round to sounding out another company yet – do his bit to earn his percentage. She’d already had to apologize for the sight of the
miserable
Ilex, sprawled flat out at midday on a bed wearing a motheaten old tartan dressing gown that he must have dug out from one of the blanket boxes on the middle landing. Not an attractive sight when you were trying to highlight the house’s better points.