Cuckoo (35 page)
‘It’s going to be a beautiful day, according to the weather forecast. Even hotter than yesterday. One of those freakish April days. Oh, hi Anna. Porridge?’
Without waiting for an answer, Polly took herself over to the pantry to reach down the oats. Anna came and sat next to Rose, burying her face in her shoulder.
If only it were just us, Rose thought.
Thirty-Two
Later that morning, they held a solemn little service for Manky. Anna wept and threw handfuls of narcissi in the grave that Gareth had dug at the far corner of the orchard. Polly played the guitar and sang a plaintive version of ‘Cool for Cats’ with customised, Manky-themed verses.
Rose could have done without that. It seemed a little too ironic for what was after all, for her, a small personal tragedy. But it seemed to cheer Anna, who sang, seriously, along to the chorus:
Cool for Cats.
Cool for Cats.
Gareth stood and leaned on his shovel, respectfully grim-faced, like a professional gravedigger. Even the boys were subdued. The sun was high, and as Polly had predicted, it was unseasonably hot. Rose felt a pool of sweat gather in the small of her back. This was crazy weather for April.
Gareth wasn’t going to come to the picnic. He wanted to stay behind, he said, to fill in the grave and make the headstone structure. Rose had tried to change his mind, but he was adamant. She hadn’t seen him for what felt like years, not properly. She wanted to spend the afternoon with him, even if it was in Polly’s company. But clearly he felt differently.
‘Can’t we leave the river trip for another day?’ she said to Polly as they filed back up to the house from the orchard where they had buried the cat.
‘What, and miss this beautiful weather?’ Polly said, turning her face to the sun. Her pallor almost glowed.
‘Well, I—’
‘Oh, Mum,’ Anna said, slipping her hand into Rose’s and looking up to her with damaged eyes. ‘Please can we go?’
‘How can you say no to that?’ Polly said, tossing her hair back. ‘See you in about half an hour. Boys, get yourselves together, and be sure to help Rose.’ Swinging her guitar over her shoulders, she broke away from the rest of them and headed up to the Annexe.
Gareth organised the boys and gathered up the rest of the swimming things while Rose attempted to piece a picnic together with what she could find in the kitchen.
‘Are you OK, love?’ he asked as he put the packed swimming bag on the kitchen table.
‘I’ve been better.’
‘It does seem kind of quiet here without him, doesn’t it?’
Rose looked in all the biscuit tins. Apart from visiting the farmers’ market, which, as far as getting supplies in was more ornamental than practical, she hadn’t been shopping for ages, and everything was empty. She was losing her touch.
‘It’s no good,’ she said to Gareth. ‘I’ve got to go to the village shop.’
She went off with her basket tucked under her arm, taking Anna with her to help choose some treats, while Gareth got Flossie ready. On their way back, they were accosted by Polly, who stuck her head out of the Annexe window.
‘Aren’t you changed yet? Best sundresses, Rose! You and Anna! We’re doing this thing in style.’
Rose looked up at her and squinted. ‘I don’t think—’
‘Ten minutes to get them on, starting from now.’ Polly slammed the window shut, allowing no argument.
‘Come on, Mum, it’ll be fun.’ Anna dragged Rose towards The Lodge. They put the basket down on the kitchen table and went upstairs.
It was completely ridiculous, of course. Rose sat on her bed and looked at herself in her dressing-table mirror while Anna sped off to her room. In an impossibly short time to have wreaked such a change, Anna reappeared in her favourite – or rather, only – sundress. White and full-skirted, it was covered in a giant cherry print.
‘Come on, Mum, you’ve got to make an effort here,’ she said, rummaging in Rose’s wardrobe.
She pulled out Rose’s old sundress. It was a vintage thing she had picked up at a car-boot sale a couple of years back, before she had had Flossie. It was covered with shouty large rose blooms. She tried to remember what it was like, being the woman who had picked this extravagant thing out thinking that it was ‘her’.
‘I don’t think I’ll fit into that any more.’
‘Course you will. Just try it on.’
To Rose’s amazement she filled the dress as if it had been made after a series of long and painstaking fittings. Anna led her down the stairs to a small round of applause from Gareth. Flossie, who was in his arms, registered nothing.
‘You look a million dollars,’ Gareth said to Rose and Anna.
‘Can you get Flossie in the car seat, Gareth?’ Rose said, packing their new purchases into the picnic bag.
‘Come on, you boys!’ Gareth called.
Laden with picnic and swimming things, they trooped up to the car, just in time to see Polly come down the Annexe stairs holding up two chilled bottles of champagne.
‘Oh, my,’ Gareth said under his breath.
‘Snap!’ Polly said.
Polly was wearing a sundress very similar in style to Rose’s. The big difference was, Rose noticed, that it was a size six, whereas her own was a generous fourteen. Like hers, Polly’s was tight around the bodice and full-skirted. It, too, was covered in roses, but in amongst the blooms were – and this was a typically edgy move on Polly’s part – tiny white skulls, with the thorny rose stems curling in and around their eye-sockets.
Polly did a twirl for them all, holding the champagne aloft, and Rose saw, and remembered, the tattoos on her shoulders. On the left she had a rose, on the right, a skull, perfectly matching her sundress. Rose had been there when she had them done in a shady parlour in Streatham, one coke-fuelled evening in their early twenties. The idea was that Rose was going to have the same designs on her own shoulders, that same night. But she had decided against it when she saw what the process entailed. She had very forcibly shown her change of heart, she remembered, by first passing out, then throwing up, right there on the tattoo-parlour floor.
‘See how the dress matches the body,’ Gareth said, appraising her with what looked like an artist’s eye.
‘I’ll get a coolbag for the bottles,’ Rose said. ‘Gareth, will you strap Flossie in, please?’
After a final check that everyone had their seatbelts on, Rose started up the car. The children waved goodbye to Gareth, until they turned the corner in the lane and he could no longer be seen.
The river bathing-place was a field with a few huts, on the riverbank, about four miles downstream from The Lodge, beyond the next village. It was a private club and, like most of their neighbours, Rose and Gareth were members. For such a landlocked area, it provided welcome hot-weather relief. Although it was usually closed at this time of year the club had sent notes home with the schoolchildren a couple of days earlier saying that, due to the unseasonably hot weather, they would open for the weekend. Rose had been pleased when she saw the note. She loved swimming in wild water. The sea was the only thing she missed from her childhood in Brighton. She had swum in it almost daily, whatever the weather.
She parked the car in a gravelled patch at the entrance to the field. Anna and the boys flung open the car doors and started off towards the river.
‘Oy, you lot, come back here!’ Polly yelled. ‘Help Rose with the stuff.’
The three of them groaned, but came back and stood impatiently at the rear of the car, getting in Rose’s way.
She opened the hatchback and handed out the picnic basket, coolbag, rug, swimming bags and rubber rings. She hooked Flossie’s car seat into the crook of her arm, balancing it against her hip, and passed what she called the beach bag to Polly. Fully laden now, they clambered over a wooden stile and padded across the grass towards the river. The swimming spot was perfect here. There was a shallow paddling place for younger children, edged by a weir that was more or less impossible to go over by accident. The weir was a great water slide for the older children and it plunged mossily into a cool, deep pool that provided more challenging swimming for the seriousminded. The river was quite wide on that side – about thirty metres – ideal for catching up on widths.
The ground was still a little soft underfoot from the night’s rain. It gave slightly under their feet like not-quite-set fudge. But the sun was now so hot that the field was drying rapidly, filling the air with a steamy, earth smell that, had Rose grown up in the countryside, would have had a tinge of nostalgia to it.
‘Ugh,’ Polly said, as they stood looking for a space on the grass. ‘People.’
The field was packed, it couldn’t be denied. Little family groups covered it almost entirely, stretching their pale English legs out in the sun on brightly coloured Mexican blankets, tucking into their picnics. The sound of middle-class chatter filled the air, men talking about how it was like Tuscany today, mothers calling to their children.
‘Leo!’
‘Anastasia! Come here, darling!’
‘Let’s go over there.’ The children groaned as Polly led them all to a place far away from the crowd, at the top of the sloping field, at least fifty metres from the river. Rose would never have chosen that spot. It was impractical, a choice made by someone who obviously didn’t care if her children swam or drowned.
Rose was feeling the heat; her body was damp with it. She was sure her dress was showing her sweat. Her belly was hurting, too, that unmistakable, hot pain of a period about to start. She had once heard it described as a worm slowly eating its way out of you. That’s exactly how it felt to her.
Polly put the blanket down, and the children started tugging on their swimming costumes. Yannis threw off his clothes completely to get changed, but Nico and Anna were a little more circumspect, hiding their bodies by twisting and turning with towels and, in Anna’s case, shrouding her secrets with a long towelling robe that belonged to Rose.
‘Can we go now, Mum?’ Anna asked, hauling a rubber ring onto her shoulder.
‘Yes, but don’t go over the weir,’ Rose said. ‘And that applies to you two as well,’ she said to Nico and Yannis.
‘Do you think so?’ Polly turned to her. ‘They’re strong swimmers.’
‘There’s a current,’ Rose said, looking over at the strong flow of the river, which was still a little swollen by the recent rain. She didn’t really care what the boys did, but she didn’t want Anna to follow them.
‘Ohhh . . .’ Nico wailed, trying to attract Polly’s attention. But she was too busy now, changing into her own little bathing suit, to pay him any notice.
‘How about you play in the pool section until after lunch, then when Flossie’s asleep, I’ll take you over the other side,’ Rose offered.
Nico, realising that he didn’t have any alternative, shrugged his assent then turned and led the other two down the slope to the river.
‘Aren’t you going to get changed?’ Polly said, sitting down in her perfect fifties bikini. Rose was quite shocked at how her body looked unclothed. She was covered with a light down of dark hair, and her bones and sinews were quite clearly visible, as if she were some sort of three-dimensional anatomical diagram. Apart from the tattoos, another history was etched on her skin: a network of thin scars that criss-crossed her thighs and arms. Rose noticed that while some were older and keloid, others, which must have been made more recently, were still scabbed. And there were what looked like small bruises, too. On her inner thigh, and above her breast. Finger dots.
What a mess, Rose thought. And a small part of the hard thing that seemed to have set into her over the past couple of days melted, when she thought of all that Polly had put herself through. And of course, she needed to show kindness, and so did Gareth. And that, surely, was all he was up to: trying to show Polly some kindness.
‘I’m going to leave it a bit. I’ve got to feed Floss now,’ Rose said, unbuckling her from the little car seat.
Polly rubbed sun cream into her papery legs, then stood up and stretched. Despite the skin and the bones and the scars, people looked over at her. Or perhaps it was because of them. But Rose knew that it was also her glamour that drew people’s eyes. They wondered if she was some kind of star. And of course, she was – or had been – so they stared even more.
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