Blowing It (5 page)

And now, on Manda’s non-wedding day, they were to go to Ilex’s parents in the smoothest depths of Surrey for Sunday lunch and face his sister Clover and her so-perfect pair of peachy-skinned, fair-haired daughters. Manda would look at them and see how they’d grown from the last time and wonder if they’d soon be too old to play with any little cousins that she might produce for them. At this rate, Sophia would be old enough to babysit by the time she and Ilex started their own family. She
hated
seeing Clover. Nice woman and all that, but she’d got Manda’s life.

Manda climbed out of bed and looked in the mirror, running her fingers through her hair as she did every morning to see if any tiny hint of grey had crept in overnight. It might – she was very nearly thirty-four – and it was time to be vigilant about these things. She wrapped her shell-pink satin robe round her and thought about getting ready for the day and what she’d wear. The shower had been running for ages. Ilex would use up all the hot water. She’d seen him take a magazine in there with him, which was ridiculous – it would get all soggy and he knew how much she liked the Sunday colour supplements.

‘Ilex? Are you going to be all day in there?’ She wandered out into the corridor and shouted through the closed door. Did that sound like nagging? She could have phrased it better. That might be something else she should start being vigilant about.

‘Won’t be long!’ he called back after rather a long pause.

Manda went back into the bedroom and gave her hair a vigorous brushing. It was still long and glossy and silky and an even shade of milk-chocolate brown, like the ears on a Siamese cat. And her body beneath the satin wrap was smooth and unlined and slender, just the way Ilex liked it. Manda smiled at her reflection and made a decision: this
would
be the year of the wedding. No question. One way or another she’d be looking at the end of next 12 May as the new Mrs MacIntyre.

On the far side of the bathroom door, and mindful that Manda had super-charged hearing, Ilex stealthily shifted aside the heavy marble shelf that covered the workings of the loo cistern. Into the tiny gap behind the tank he stowed out of sight the latest edition of his favourite reading matter, a slim speciality magazine by the name of
Fuzz
, featuring strong, burly girls and boys in (though mostly half out of) the police uniforms of many countries. He was fully aware that as time wasting went, this was about as crassly adolescent as you could get, possibly a notch down from lying in bed in the dark,
freeze-framing
the crotch-flashes from Sugarbabes DVDs. Grown men, he was sure, had long left behind this kind of thing and moved on to pretending they bought men’s magazines with slick-skinned barely dressed totty on the cover purely for the articles on designer luggage and must-have sunglasses.

She was a bit special, the American Fed in the ‘On the Beat’ centre-spread: a big chunky girl, with a bull-dyke haircut and an unashamedly lived-in body that had never agonized over low-fat options on a menu. If those thunder-thighs pinned you to the bed, you’d stay pinned. Just the way Ilex liked it.

FOUR

THE CLEMATIS HAD
collapsed again. Lottie could see it flapping limply against the kitchen window as if it knew there was little hope of her racing out to rescue it. This was the fourth time this spring it had done it and given a stout ladder and better secateurs than the ones that lay rusting in the kitchen drawer, she would have ruthlessly chopped the whole lot down to ground level, pouring on a dose of something lethal and possibly illegal just to make sure. But as these wicked plant-murdering thoughts crossed her mind, she knew that even such desperate measures wouldn’t kill the bugger, for it was a strong and resolute thing and survived her worst efforts at obliteration with sly perseverance. It was also one of the few survivors from the garden’s original Gertrude Jekyll design and even Lottie could only admire the stealthy guile with which it managed to get the better of her horticultural incompetence and keep inching determinedly in the
direction
of its prey – the crumbling undersides of the fragile roof tiles.

When had this war started? she wondered. This series of skirmishes between her home’s fabric and its occupants? When did the house become bored with its simple role as safe and solid refuge and begin showing signs of troublesome rebellion? With only three of them now living in it (and Sorrel so often in that mysterious teenage place called ‘out’), the house was far too big. More than one person had commented that next year when Sorrel had gone to university, she and Mac would rattle around in it as if they were a couple of loose, forgotten balls on a wonky pinball machine.

The problem was that Holbrook House was becoming as cravenly high maintenance as an ageing movie star. According to the estate agent when they’d bought it thirty years before, this was ‘Classic Lutyens in the Surrey Vernacular’. Mac and Lottie hadn’t had a clue what he was talking about, seeing only the family-raising potential in the solid H-shaped building, the large, light rooms along with acres of beautiful flower garden, leading down to an orchard, meadow and woodland. But it didn’t come cheap, keeping in good repair sharp-angled, low-hipped gables, tall, fancy-patterned brick chimneys and over-sized multi-paned windows that were heavily chequered with lead. If a downpipe fractured you couldn’t just run down to B&Q for a bit of plastic replacement. You had to look things up
in
the heritage book, plead with the miserable sod who guarded the local architectural salvage yard as if every inch of ironwork was solid gold and then pay well over the odds for a very slow craftsman who would remind you that his was a dying trade and charge by the millisecond.

And then there was the garden … It was all very well for Ms Jekyll to lay it out as a charming series of delightful rooms, amusingly linked by pergolas, mellow brick walls and with a gently trickling rill running from parterre to orchard – back in 1901
she
would have employed an entire team of skilled gardeners to keep it all perfect. At first, mindful of the responsibility of taking on one of Gertrude’s precious gardens, Lottie had employed a full-time man for the job. The rot had started, quite literally, the minute he’d retired and Al, a former Charisma roadie, had decided he could take care of it, no problem, two or three days a week. He was still there, doggedly putting in the hours in return for fairly minimal cash-in-hand pay and free eggs from Lottie’s chickens. Looking back, she and Mac had simply been far too young to take on premises as demanding as this. A childhood spent making mud-pies, growing mustard and cress and squeezing snapdragons in the vicarage garden of Lottie’s early years hadn’t been anywhere near enough practice for dealing with flower-planting on this scale. Slugs and snails ate the delphiniums. Swathes of lupins vanished thanks to greedy fat bugs. Black, green or
possibly
purple fly chewed holes in the hostas and Lottie was amazed to discover that roses as well as cars could be afflicted with rust. Al was terrific for loyalty and no alarmingly obsessed Charisma fan would get to the front door past his smoking-lair between the gates and the house, but he had limits, horticulture-wise. He wasn’t keen on subtleties of colour, preferring plants that gave you your money’s-worth in eye-watering brightness rather than Gertrude’s choice from nature’s more gentle palette. He’d sneaked in displays of lobster-pink begonias and scarlet geraniums. He favoured lollipop marigolds and hanging baskets of vibrant fuchsias and he loved sitting for hours smoking rollups on Mac’s fancy mower. Gradually the rill stopped trickling and silted up with blanket weed. Between the magnificent York stones of the sunken terrace grew a stubborn crop of dandelions and moss. The yew hedges, which Al longed to obliterate entirely in the interests of extending the lawn (and time spent mowing), became as overgrown, shaggy and untameable as Mac’s hair
circa
1973. But the paddock now housed three polytunnels full of herbs that supplied several restaurants across the county, the orchard flourished somehow and was home to an ever-growing collection of mongrel hens and the long herbaceous border in front of the warm mellow wall was now (just about) successfully stocked with Lottie and Mac’s latest venture – organic
home-grown
vegetables, proof, according to a sceptical Sorrel, of the seductive powers of Friday-night TV gardening programmes. What those programmes failed to put across was the mind-numbing dullness of daily contact with … vegetables. If you planted them, then could simply come back a month or so later and marvel at how they’d grown – the way you did with a rarely seen small child – then that would be fine. But obviously you couldn’t do that. You had to watch them creep to maturity, a day at a time, as you tended and watered them. It was almost literally like watching paint dry. They should, Lottie sometimes thought, have gone in for huge competition blooms. Agapanthus would have been a good choice – huge bluey-mauve heads of flowers, like the ones that grew wild all over the sandy dunes of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly.

Lottie, geeing herself up for preparing a full-scale family Sunday lunch, glared at the flapping clematis and dared it to fall down in a heap. While it clung stubbornly to life it at least served one useful function: it obscured the crumbling brickwork. The cost of repointing that lot using a hundred-year-old mortar-recipe didn’t even bear thinking about.

If, as Lottie suspected, Sorrel had still got Gaz holed up in her room with her from the night before, and if, as teenagers always did, they’d troop downstairs claiming near starvation as soon as the scent of cooked food wafted up the stairs to tempt them
out
, that would make a total of ten for lunch and they all came with their various catering requirements. When did they get so picky? Lottie was sure she hadn’t raised her children to turn up their noses at potatoes (Clover), all kinds of bean (Sorrel) or anything that looked as if it might have an aubergine hidden in it (Ilex). You’d think that now they were adults (even Sorrel) they’d have left that sort of faddiness behind long ago. And that was only hers. Clover’s husband Sean could only eat fish if it had no trace of skin, bone, eye, fin or tail and absolutely no sauce or other covering in case that was hiding the other five. Possibly only Captain Birds Eye prepared seafood the way he liked it. Ilex’s long-term girlfriend Manda shuddered at the very idea of anything connected with chickens – especially eggs.

‘It’s where they come
out
from,’ she’d once whispered to Lottie, as if she had, at past thirty, only recently discovered the shells weren’t, after all, individually hand-crafted from super-fine organic pastry in a stylish – though pleasingly rustic – Conran-esque kitchen. Gaz, bless him, would eat a knitted tea-cosy if you poured enough gravy on it, and thank you for it.

Lottie was tempted to lie on the squashy pink kitchen sofa browsing idly through the Sunday papers until they had all arrived and then simply hand them the sheaf of pizza emporia flyers off the dresser and let them phone for a delivery. Instead, here she was taking out her clematis-wrath by
stabbing
a sharp blade into two legs of lamb and inserting slivers of garlic and rosemary into the cuts. This, she thought as the knife pierced the flesh, must be close to what it physically feels like to murder a human. There would presumably be that same initial light resistance, then the ‘give’ into soft yielding tissue till the knife stopped short against solid bone. Horrible. She hurriedly washed the knife under the tap as if scrubbing the evidence. Where did such awful thoughts come from? They happened frighteningly often, these days. Only a week or so ago, bored while waiting for the delayed tube at Oxford Circus with Sorrel, she’d looked along the platform to pick out the person she’d be most likely to select to push under a train, for no other reason than that it passed the time. Surely a sane person would have read the cinema posters or peeked over someone’s shoulder at the
Evening Standard
headlines?

She stuck the cleaned knife back on the rack, covered the prepared legs of lamb with a tea towel and moved them further along the worktop in case she was overcome with an urge to go crazy, savaging them till they were shredded and inedible. Never mind the delicate tastes of her children and their various partners, she wasn’t sure if even she could eat them now. Calming herself, she decided she would roast a huge dish of potatoes – sweet ones that brought to mind sweaty Caribbean markets, as well as sensible English King Edwards, freshly dug
up
early that morning. Clover could surely compensate with other vegetables. Plus there were to be Delia’s cauliflower and leeks with cheese sauce (so calm, Delia, you couldn’t imagine her considering the casual slaughter of innocent strangers, or even a clematis), and, as the courgette plants in the greenhouse were well ahead, she’d pan-fry some of those with tomatoes, garlic and lemon juice. Not an aubergine, bean, egg, chicken or fish in sight. Unless … an elfin streak of temptation flittered across her mind. Manda surely wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t even think to question, how the pastry on the rhubarb and apple pie came to look so glossy, would she? How much would a little bit of egg-yolk glaze hurt? It wasn’t as if the girl was actually allergic to the things, just strangely squeamish about them. Lottie took the uncooked pie out of the fridge and put it on the worktop, then took an egg from the box by the window and checked the felt-tip date she’d written on it. What would it matter, a lovely bit of free-range, organic home-laid bantam egg? But fearful of karma – for one day this egg-phobic Manda could well wield power as the mother of Ilex’s children – she put the egg back. There was nothing wrong with a matt finish on a pie. In the interests of being kind it could go without a glossy burnish: she wasn’t bloody Nigella Lawson.

They really didn’t care. Sorrel couldn’t believe her parents sometimes. Didn’t they want her to get
brilliant
A levels and make it into her first-choice uni? How was she supposed to get the grades for Exeter, burdened with parents who kept such slack, undisciplined habits? Did they even care she’d got Gaz in for an overnight? Suppose there was a fire and she was rescued unconscious and they didn’t know he was in there to send the fire fighters in?