Blowing It (7 page)

‘Sorry, princess!’ Sean called after his daughter. ‘Think of it as leaving you more room for pudding! So, Mac, how’s the mighty herb project coming along? Cornered the market in minority mints yet?’

Mac groaned. ‘Don’t bloody ask. You won’t believe how fast a polytunnel full of parsley can drop dead if you water it in a heatwave.’

‘So why did you?’

‘Good question,’ Lottie said. ‘The hose was on a timer and something must have tripped. Just about every leaf was sun-scorched and useless. Restaurants can’t use anything less than perfect so we were stuck with a glut, only good for compost.’

‘Tastes the same though.’ Mac shrugged. ‘I made the most amazing green mayonnaise with it.’

‘Brown, you mean,’ Ilex interrupted. ‘Wouldn’t it be, with scorched leaves?’ His parents’ in competence at matters of simple business practice never ceased to stagger him. How many failed ventures had they ploughed their enthusiasm and loads of cash into during his lifetime? He hardly dared add them up. There was probably a club for people like them – hundreds of ex-musicians with a string of doomed hobby-careers. They could all get together and chat about their trout farms and nightclubs and pheasant shoots and where did it all go wrong? If Mac and Lottie had only re-trained as something sensible when the music faded away instead of relying on short-lived enthusiasms and the comfort of twice-yearly royalties, they could be winding themselves down towards a nice quiet retirement, all nest-eggs hatching nicely. Instead, it looked like all funds had flown the coop long ago. And was this really the first time he’d noticed how run-down the house
was
looking?
Tired
was the word that came to mind, bordering on the exhausted and clapped-out. The curtains in this rarely used room – once glorious rich gold devoré velvet – were saggy and dulled. The Moroccan kelims would have proved a sound investment if they’d been preserved safely hanging on the walls rather than on the floors where they’d become scuffed and threadbare from a lifetime’s worth of sharp-clawed (and often incontinent) cats and dogs. It needed a sharp injection of serious funds, and fast, before real rot set in and the whole thing fell down.

‘The green mayo was all right,’ Mac protested. ‘I chucked in a couple of drops of food colouring from a bottle at the back of the larder. Could have packaged the stuff up, given it a fancy label and flogged it, no trouble. In fact, it gave me an idea.’

Ilex looked hard at his father, trying to work out whether he was joking or not. You could never tell with Mac. When he and Lottie had attempted to run a restaurant they’d had quite a lot of trouble understanding the concept of Health and Safety. Mac had had a huge row with the visiting inspectors over the wolfhound-of-the-time dozing in its basket in the corner of the restaurant kitchen, pointing out to the outraged clipboard-toting official that it was either that or being on the wrong side of yet another set of authorities for leaving the poor creature slowly stewing to a certain death outside in the hot car.

‘What kind of idea, Dad?’ There was a certain amount of dread in Clover’s voice. ‘Please don’t say it’s another restaurant?’

‘God no! I’d never do that again. You have to be nice to people
all the time
!’ He laughed. ‘Though I suppose I could sit back, keep out of the way and not try to be hands-on …’

‘What, and just, like, count the money? Sounds cool.’ Sorrel nodded.

‘Nah – there wouldn’t be any money. Never is, not in food. The more rules and regulations, the less cash. And chefs are such prima donnas. I’ve had enough of those to last two lifetimes.’ Mac reached across for the wine and poured some into Clover’s glass and then his own. ‘No, I just thought, what about doing a range of herbal sorbets? You could package them up all arty-tarty and flog them off in upmarket delis. Got to be a winner because they’d be frozen – they’d keep. That way I wouldn’t get stuck with a glut and be at the mercy of those bloody up-their-own-egos chefs.’

‘You know, Mac, that’s not such a bad one.’ Lottie also refilled her glass and offered the wine to Sean who, mindful he’d be driving his car-full of family, looked at it longingly before passing it on to Sorrel. ‘We could have a competition for the package design – get some of the students down at the art college to do it – much cheaper than hiring some rip-off company.’

‘Mum, slow down! That’s just so typical!’ Clover
interrupted
, laughing. ‘There you go, straight to the fun bit before you’ve even given a thought to marketing and demand and a business plan! Can’t you and Dad
ever
think things through first?’

Lottie looked with amazement at her agitated daughter. ‘Think
what
through? Hey, lighten up, will you, Clover! It’s just an idea. We’re only at the playing-with-it stage!’

‘Mum, you’re
always
at the “playing-with-it” stage,’ Ilex said, leaning across the table and tenderly patting his mother’s wrist. He had to back up his sister here. If someone didn’t slow them down to a sensible pace right now, Mac and Lottie would soon be in full possession of a run-down food-processing plant and a warehouse full of unsold tarragon ice-cream rapidly heading for its Destroy-By date.

‘Ooh, you know sometimes I can’t believe you and Clover are really our children!’ Lottie got up and started collecting plates. ‘You’re so …
straight
! Where’s your imagination? Your vision? Where’s your sense of rebellion and your natural-born anarchy?’

‘Anarchy doesn’t get the bills paid, Mum,’ Ilex pointed out primly.

‘Or the children into a good school,’ Clover joined in.

‘Which is
your
rebellion – pathetic as it is,’ Sorrel pointed out to her sister. ‘Mum and Dad are old hippies who somehow got away with never having
proper
jobs so obviously your idea of rebelling was to go the other way.’ She looked carefully at her older brother and sister and added, ‘Of course you can rebel too far. I mean, Ilex, for Chrissake, you’re an
estate agent
. Like, how deadly is
that
?’

‘I am
not
an estate agent! I’m a property management consultant!’

‘Same difference,’ Sorrel snorted, pushing her chair away. She collected up the remaining plates and followed Lottie to the kitchen, calling as she went, ‘Whatever name you give it, Ilex, you’re still a no-life nine-to-five office slave who’s scared to leave home without a tie!’

‘And I suppose you think a few months backpacking is going to make you an authority on the romance of a wanderer’s life?’

Sorrel came back into the room and treated her brother to a pitying smile. ‘Well, at least I’m
going
somewhere. You and Manda never do any travelling.’

‘We go away. We went to Italy last September, and then to Bruges to the Christmas market. Or doesn’t that count?’

‘Yes, but it’s not
travelling
. It’s just a holiday. You knew exactly where you’d be from day one to when you came home and where you’d stay and everything.
Travelling
is when you really get the feel for how people live in the places you go to, not just hanging out in some tourist complex. It’s an adventure, the possibilities of the unknown!’

‘Sounds like being on tour with Charisma.’ Mac chuckled. Lottie came back in, carrying the rhubarb and apple pie. ‘Remember Cairo, Lotts?’

‘Oh I remember Cairo,’ she agreed, preparing to slice the pie. Was Clover on a diet this week? Probably. ‘Rats, dysentery, the wrong airport and two deported roadies. We should go there again. What do you think?’

‘Hmm. Put it on the list,’ Mac murmured to her.

‘Happy memories, then, if you’d go again.’ Sean laughed. ‘Sounds like my idea of hell.’

‘Yes but we …’

‘… were young.’ Ilex finished for his father. ‘And rich, by then. It’s not like you really had to worry.’

‘I wouldn’t worry now,’ Mac said, shrugging. ‘Rich or not. I mean, now I’m older I don’t much care what goes wrong on a trip. I know the worst that can happen is going to be the airline overbooking or a strike somewhere or crap food. If you sit tight with something to read, it usually works out. It’s you lot in the middle that get in a flap, expecting everything to run hitch-free all the time. You fall to bits and look for someone to sue if something goes a bit pear-shaped. You want to be “kept informed”. For God’s sake
why
? What’s the rush all the time?’

‘There could be bombs or the plane could crash,’ Gaz pointed out, helpfully.

‘Oh cheers, Gaz, thanks. Just when we’re planning a round-the-worlder.’ Sorrel prodded him hard in
the
ribs. ‘It’s all right for Dad, he’s not gonna be doing that, is he?’

‘I don’t see why not,’ Lottie said. ‘Actually, we were sort of vaguely thinking maybe we should have a gap year too. Why do teenagers think it’s something invented just for them? God knows, we deserve one after raising you lot. Thirty years of child care is about the same as the longest life sentence.’

‘Was it that bad?’ Clover looked hurt. ‘You must have liked it at the time, or after me and Ilex there wouldn’t be Sorrel.’

‘No, darling, of course it wasn’t. I was joking. It’s just been a long time since we didn’t have anyone to think about but ourselves. Obviously with Sorrel being so much younger it was like having two goes at it.’

How frighteningly easy it was to shake Clover’s security, Lottie thought. Where had that fragility come from? She hoped it wasn’t Clover’s babyhood, when she and Ilex had spent several months being ferried round the USA and Europe in tour buses. Which was worse? It was that or leaving them at home in the care of a nanny. You didn’t do that, back then. You let them dance in rock-festival fields and wear daisies in their hair and have their faces painted like fairies. They paddled in warm oceans, thrived on a multi-national diet and slept under soft, antique patchwork as the bus rolled on to the next city. Possibly, in these over-careful days, all that would qualify for a care order.

‘Now Sorrel’s about to leave school and go travelling,’ Lottie continued, ‘what’s to stop Mac and me packing up and travelling too? Apart from holidays, it’s a long time since we’ve seen the world. Maybe we’d like to have another look before it’s too late. See what’s changed.’

The pie was now all sliced. Big bits, little bits, they could choose, help themselves. It didn’t look particularly thrilling, very matt, very wholemeal, very worthy. She should have gone with the egg – let the thing sparkle. She could have decorated it, been artistic with pastry leaves and swirls of icing sugar. She pushed the pie-plate towards Clover, who took a tiny sliver but waved the cream on past in the direction of Manda.

Sorrel laughed. ‘Yeah, but you can’t have a gap year, Mum, I mean, not you and Dad.’

‘Actually, why can’t we?’ Mac asked her. ‘Wouldn’t you rather we went off travelling than stayed here trying to market frozen coriander? Nice pie, Lottie. You on a diet again, Clover?’

‘You wouldn’t want to do that,’ Ilex said. ‘You’d hate it, hanging out in cheap hostels with scuzzy adolescents. Mum would worry they weren’t phoning home enough and Dad would keep asking if they’d downloaded any illegal Charisma on to their i-pods.’

Manda wasn’t eating any of the pie, Lottie noted. She could have dolloped a dozen egg yolks on it if she’d wanted to. Maybe the poor girl was worried –
surely
what Sorrel had said hadn’t upset her? Teenagers were always like that, deliberately chucking in something to shock. It was their function in a family. She could see Manda darting little looks at Ilex as if there was something on her mind that she wanted him to read. He wouldn’t, of course. He’d always been the type of boy (man, now, she reminded herself, and for a long time too) who needed everything spelled out for him. When his first girlfriend had tried in a kind way to dump him by suggesting they take a bit of time apart for seeing other people, he’d been phoning her after a month, utterly confident of getting straight back to full-scale romance thinking she’d be ready for him again now, having used the free time innocently going to movies with friends and catching up with homework.

‘Ah yes, but you see, Ilex,’ Mac was now explaining, ‘we wouldn’t
be
staying in cheap dives with “scuzzy adolescents” as you put it. We’d do it the five-star way, me and Lottie. Flash-packers, not back-packers, that’ll be us.’

‘Mmm, sounds good when you put it like that!’ Lottie agreed.

‘Cost you, that,’ Sean warned. ‘Doesn’t come cheap.’

Mac frowned. ‘Who said anything about cheap? When do I do cheap?’

‘But how …’ Ilex held his breath; perhaps he wasn’t going to have to worry about the old folks
after
all. A pension maturing, that must be it. Well, thank goodness – they’d been more prudent than he’d imagined. Not going to be the big old-age burden after all.

Mac grinned. ‘What’s the point of sitting on a load of cash if you don’t use it?’

Clover and Sean exchanged glances. ‘None at all, Dad,’ she smiled, ‘if you’ve got it, spend it.’ How reassuring that would be. Perhaps the little place in France (Spain? Portugal?) was a possibility after all.

‘Yeah, well, we’ve got it,’ Mac said, looking around the room. ‘Right here – this place must be worth truckloads. Should take us round the world at the front of the plane, wouldn’t you say, Lottie?’

‘Well, I hadn’t actually thought how much it would come to, exactly … but …’ She too looked around at the sagging curtains, the ornate plaster on the cobwebby ceilings that could do with an expert painter and the floors that in places creaked so ominously. Tatty but tasty, that was their home. ‘Yes, it should take us round the world several times over, I’d say!’

They were all looking at her as if she’d lost her last remaining senses. But if there were any pennies to drop in the collective junior branch MacIntyre brains, they were taking their time getting under way. It was – and who’d have thought it? – Gaz who finally got the words out.

‘What, you’d, like, flog your house,
this house
? And, like, blow all the cash? Wow, awesome!’ he
said
, reaching across Clover to spear the last big slice of pie.