Blowing It (24 page)

She’d failed. It was payback time for making Ilex and Clover spend their earliest summers with a whirl of loved-up music festivals instead of playgroup nursery rhymes; chaotic time zones instead of fixed bedtimes and swirly psychedelic fabrics instead of Pooh Bear brushed cotton. They wore hand-knitted rainbow sweaters and fleece-lined frog wellingtons in winter and on hot summer days frequently nothing but a coating of mud and dust. She’d raised them haphazardly, confusing disorder with freedom, then shooed them out into the world and assumed they could cope, and now they’d come back, licking their wounds and searching out a comfort zone. Oh God, had she really got it so wrong?

‘Don’t worry so much. It’s not our fault,’ Mac reassured her. ‘They’ve been grown-up and capable for ages. They’re usually pretty well balanced. Stuff happens and these are
their
problems – nothing to do with us. I’m surprised about Sean though, I didn’t have him down as the affair type. The odd one-off, maybe, but he got that out of his system years ago and they seemed to survive the fall-out OK. I wonder if Clover’s got the right end of the stick there? You know what she’s like, always looks on the dark side.’

‘And what’s Ilex’s excuse? I still don’t get it. There must be more to it than the cat-thing if Manda’s chucked him out. Perhaps neither of them are the sticking types. Perhaps they’re the ones who should be going off travelling, not us.’

Mac laughed. ‘Manda’ll take him back. Give it a few days.’

‘God, I hope so. You should tell Ilex about the film music deal – he might cheer up if he thinks we’ve got some serious funds on the way. You could let him try and talk you into some worthy life insurance plan.’

‘Nah – not till it’s more definite. Once you start telling people, then it starts going wrong.’ He laughed. ‘Maybe if we hadn’t told the family about the trip till we’d got it all sorted, they might have been OK. We should have just sneaked off, called them from St Petersburg and told them we’d run away from home.’

‘We couldn’t do that to Sorrel,’ Lottie said. ‘I’m not sure any more we should be even doing
this
to Sorrel. She needs us to stop being so flippant about not having a place to live. I hate to say it, but maybe we shouldn’t rush into going anywhere.’

‘If we don’t rush we’ll never go.’ Mac abruptly stopped walking and turned to look at her, surprising her with his expression of total dismay. ‘I keep thinking … what if it’s all going to end soon? I have these thoughts where I wonder things like, is the next passport I get the last one I’m going to need? Or worse, suppose I’ve already got my last one and its expiry date is way ahead of mine?’

Lottie felt a chill shudder. What he was saying coincided so exactly with what she’d been thinking. Or maybe it was just the effect of the cool night air, she decided; she should have worn a jacket.

‘Come on, Mac, we’ve got years yet, cross fingers. We’ll go away, of course we will, but we must do something to make Sorrel feel a bit more secure. I don’t think Soho’s really a goer, do you? Noise and traffic and bad-tempered media types rushing everywhere swilling lattes on the street and gabbling into phones. We’d hate it after about five minutes.’

The lights were all out in the Major’s house. Lottie had seen the removal van outside that morning. By lunchtime it had trundled away, presumably taking the Major’s possessions to Eastbourne. She hoped he’d be happy there. She could picture him out for tea at the Grand Hotel, sitting by a well-stoked fire
and
being offered crustless cucumber sandwiches by an elegant dowager in classic navy and white while the two of them reminisced about long-dead friends and confided that for each of them the war hadn’t been altogether a bad time.

‘He hasn’t sold it yet.’ Mac noticed as they passed the gate. ‘I’d have thought a pretty Georgian place like that would be snapped up in days.’

‘It needs work. Susie told me. Lots and lots of work. And planning permission for just about every roof tile and pane of window.’

‘Too much to take on then. You’d need a lot of time, somewhere else to live, all that,’ Lottie mused.

‘Right. Far too much to take on,’ Mac agreed.

Clover felt as nervous as a first-date teenager but she wasn’t going to change her mind now. What’s sauce for the gander … she told herself as she drove defiantly out through the Holbrook House electronic gates. And it wasn’t as if she was going to do anything really extreme. She was only going for a quiet drink with Harry, not running away for a weekend of porn-passion in a Paris hotel. Whatever. The important thing was Sean would find out and be horribly, stupendously amazed that she could even contemplate going out with someone else. Tough, because it was what he deserved, the lying, cheating bastard. Now he’d know how it felt. She’d told Sorrel and Ilex what to say when he called, and he
would
call because he phoned the house every
couple
of hours, apologizing to whoever answered (because it sure wasn’t going to be her) that he had to keep trying, she was refusing to answer her mobile.

It wasn’t far. Just a few miles back towards the M25, through pine woods and down a narrow lane to the sort of not-quite-country pub that people used to drive out of town to for some real ale and a stroll in the resinous air. How lovely this must look when it was covered in snow. That’s what pines needed, in her opinion. They somehow weren’t at their best in summer; too angular and gawky like a certain type of upright, elderly Englishman she’d see each year holidaying in Cornwall, the sort that walked the cliff-paths in ancient shorts together with long woolly socks and sturdy sandals, trekking dutifully behind determined map-toting wives. God, Cornwall. She hadn’t booked anything for the holidays yet. There’d be nothing decent left – and now she’d have to go there without Sean (limited help though he tended to be) and be stuck with the girls in some damp, miserable hovel miles from the sea. The way her luck was going, it would be sure to rain daily. Perhaps she could persuade Sorrel to come, pay her to help take care of her nieces. It would add to her funds for her Australia trip. Or perhaps she would forget about Cornwall, book a last-minute gite in France. But the last-minute ones, weren’t they the ones that everyone had tried and no one wanted to go back to, ever
again
? Where the loo was a hole in the ground at the back of a barn and the owners wouldn’t let you run a tap between 9 a.m. and late afternoon?

Clover felt her stomach tighten as she drove into the pub’s car park. Harry’s car was already there and she parked alongside it. She could actually have done with a longer drive to calm herself; or to have arrived first. Instead, she sat still for a few moments till she could breathe evenly, checking her make-up in the mirror and re-applying some gloss to nerve-dried lips.

She was as ready as she was going to be. It was only a friendly drink after all; nothing to make a song and dance about. All the same, as she climbed out of the car, her instant thought was, Here goes a really, really stupid idea.

‘Bloody nerve. They can’t change quiz night! It’s written in stone!’

‘Travesty!’

Mac and Al were taking their outrage out on the bar staff, who carried on obliviously pulling pints and slopping beer across the many customers who jostled at the crowded bar.

‘Packed out,’ Mac muttered. ‘Might as well forget it and go home. Charity bloody Karaoke night! What are they thinking of?’

‘Well it says they’re thinking of the Shooting Star Hospice, so I’ll put some cash in the tin,’ Lottie told him. ‘Shame about the quiz though – I was looking
forward
to getting into it, take my mind off the fractured family for a few hours.’

‘Hey, you know we might as well stay for a bit and have a laugh,’ Al said. ‘Pick out the ones we’d go for if we were on the look-out for talent. Music talent I mean,’ he said, grinning at Lottie. He looked across to where the sound system was being given a last-minute tweak. Lottie saw a brief wistful look cross his face, as if he’d like to be involved as in his old Charisma roadie days, plugging up the leads and checking the microphones.

‘Not what we were expecting though,’ Mac said. ‘But that’s another sign of old age, isn’t it, getting set in your ways. You’ll stop me if I buy a pewter tankard to keep over the bar, won’t you, Al?

‘Just one drink then home?’ he asked Lottie. ‘Unless you want to stay and watch a bunch of golf-club accountants poncing about thinking they’re Jagger?’

‘No, it’s fine by me. Let’s just have a look at the song list though.’

‘Oh God, tell me you’re not joining in?’ Mac groaned. ‘Sorrel would never live it down.’

‘What do you mean? Sorrel’s not here to see what we get up to. After all this time are you saying my singing’s rubbish?’

‘Course I’m not. But you know what she’s like. She’d hear about it and she’d say we were making an exhibition of ourselves. Teenagers can’t think of anything worse. Look what she was like when the
band
was on
Top of the Pops 2
last year. She had to run out of the room shrieking and with her hands over her eyes.’

‘Yeah, well, maybe she should remember that the stuff that makes her shriek and hide is what pays her way through life.’

Lottie scanned through the catalogue of songs. ‘Look, there’s three of Charisma’s in here. Maybe we should give it a go. “Target Practice” is in: why don’t you do it, Mac? It might bring us luck, with the film and that.’

‘Not a chance.’ Mac was vehement. ‘Not a bloody chance.’

And so it was a good four drinks later that Mac, appalled by an insultingly miserable rendition of his own ‘Welcome to the Circus’ by the searingly out-of-tune owner of the village Past It (Antiques and Ephemera) shop, found himself on a stage once more, wondering, this time, why he didn’t have as much breath as he used to in the days when he’d sung to much vaster audiences. Bloody age, he thought again rather dispiritedly, as he acknowledged polite, but hardly rapturous, applause.

‘Well, that went down very averagely,’ Mac commented to Al.

‘Mmm. Not bad. But a bloke behind me said you were supposed to give your own name, not the name of the original artist.’

Lottie burst out laughing. ‘They didn’t believe it was you!’ she said.

Mac was feeling all wrong. What Lottie had said hadn’t really gone in. He also felt as if not enough air had gone in either – he needed to get outside to breathe. And the room wasn’t as focused as it should be. He hadn’t had that much, enough but not enough to feel this unbalanced. He felt slightly queasy and didn’t want the last drops of beer. ‘Ready to go, Lottie? I think we’ve done our bit here. Shall we?’

‘Oh come on then, you miserable old git. You’re only pissed off because you’re not going to win.’

The winner was going to be the man who thought he was Elvis. Al’s opinion was that any Karaoke was always going to be won by a person who thought they were Elvis, even when, in this case, they were short, tubby, bald and could make ‘Crying in the Chapel’ something to laugh long and loud at. Lottie said goodbye to Al and started to make her way to the door. Mac went to follow but his feet didn’t seem to want to move. Either he was lurching strangely or the room was tilting. The last thing he heard before his eyes closed against the greasy floral carpet was the voice of Mr Antiques and Ephemera close by his ear saying, ‘Not just pissed, is he? What’s his name, for the ambulance?’

Then Al: ‘Bernie MacIntyre.’

‘Yeah, right. I don’t think so, mate. Nothing like him. He was rubbish, singing, just now.’

Then nothing.

* * *

She’d been right. It was a very, very stupid idea and it had got ludicrously out of hand. Clover now shifted slightly on the bed and wondered where her knickers were. This had been like too-fast teenage sex, though completely lacking the urgent, edgy thrill that she recalled from her own teen years. She was a tangle of clothes and limbs and embarrassment and feeling a deep, deep wish that she was pretty much anywhere else than here in this single man’s über-pad, on his low-lit, low-level suede-edged bed. Paddling among sharks would be preferable, or sky-diving into a thick fog. Anything, anywhere. So this was what it was like; this was a no-frills, one-off fling with no emotion and no commitment. Well, you could keep it. Give her Sean’s generous sexual warmth and cheerful cowboy whooping any day.

‘Oh bay-
beee
,’ Harry groaned beside her, a voice that came straight from a cheap porn movie. God. Clover gritted her teeth and hoped he wasn’t going to close in for post-coital snuggling. If she could bring herself to speak, she’d love to tell him he could by-pass that pseudo-lovey aftermath bit and go straight to the scene where he went to make her a cup of coffee so she could grab her bag and vanish out of the front door, never to see him again. Whatever she’d hoped to prove, whichever stupid ‘what you can do, I can do’ trip she was hoping to compete on with Sean, it hadn’t worked. This was as dire as it got. Why she hadn’t stopped at the point
where
Harry (while doing the ‘how about a tour of the apartment?’ bit – to be expected, she supposed, from an estate agent) had first slid her onto the bed and started nuzzling at her neck like a foal after sugarlumps, she’d never know. Sometimes, good manners were such a curse. She would have to make sure her daughters learned there were limits to the concept of being polite.

Clover moved slightly and rubbed the back of her neck. The clasp on her necklace had been digging in painfully, for Harry’s idea of a perfect grip was to shove his hands under the pillow and scoop it up around her ears so her head felt squashed to the point of near-suffocation. He’d probably put her wrigglings of protest down to writhings of passion. What had that been about? she wondered, speculating on how close she might have come to being totally smothered. Possibly it was lucky she hadn’t been far roused from inert passivity. Maybe distaste had saved her life. Harry, who had blithely floundered on, oblivious to her non-participation, quite possibly wouldn’t have noticed if he’d actually killed her; he had surely been absent from the school sex lesson where they did the bit about girls liking to join in too.