Laying the Ghost (14 page)

‘Haven’t,’ Mimi admitted. ‘We just talked and stuff.’

‘Hold hands?’

‘No. Not even that.’

‘Ah. Right. And like, here you are, having this conversation with me about whether you’re going to have sex with him or not?’

‘At this rate I’ll be twenty-one before we get that far,’ Mimi said, gloomily.

‘No you won’t, don’t be mad.’

‘Suppose he doesn’t even fancy me? Suppose when he does kiss me, he doesn’t like me because I do it all wrong? I haven’t had enough practice.’

Tess looked at her. ‘I’ll tell you if you do it right, if you like.’

‘What?’ Tess was lying back on the pillow, her long dark hair spread out and shiny. It reminded Mimi of Marmite, though Tess’s hair was more likely to smell sweet – Bed Head serum.

‘It’s OK, I won’t tell anyone. We’ll just kiss and I’ll tell you if you’re OK. It’s no big deal.’

‘Um … well, I think it might be, actually. I’m not a lezzer.’

‘I’m not a lezzer either. I don’t think so, anyway. Aren’t we a bit young to tell? Come on, give it a go.’

Mimi wriggled a bit closer. ‘Tess … you haven’t set up a secret webcam thing in here, have you? I don’t want this to be the next thing Lucy has on special offer round the school.’

‘Come here – just kiss me.’ Tess reached up and pulled Mimi towards her. Mimi closed her eyes and connected softly with Tess’s mouth. And then it didn’t feel like Tess – this could be anyone’s mouth, anyone’s tongue … Whoever, it was a sheer, utter delight; she didn’t want it to stop. But hey no, she thought suddenly, and pulled away.

‘Wow. You’re more than OK,’ Tess said, looking startled. ‘What do you think?’

Mimi was finding it hard to breathe. ‘Um … yeah. You as well. It’s just …’

‘What?’ Tess sat up abruptly. ‘Tell me!’

‘I really don’t want to do that again with you, OK? No offence!’ She tried to laugh but it didn’t sound right. It wasn’t convincing. What she’d said wasn’t true.

‘Nah – me neither! It was an interesting go, but I don’t fancy girls. You don’t feel hard like a bloke,’ Tess spluttered. ‘I don’t mean hard like that! I mean hard like your whole body. Girls don’t do it for me. They’re too … squashy.’

‘Exactly,’ Mimi said, getting out of bed to look out of the window, check that the car pulling up in the driveway was her mum and not, say, Johnny Depp come to whisk her away.

‘Squashy,’ she murmured, staring into the darkness as her mother climbed out of her car.

* * *

It was that simple, that fast: Steve must have gone straight home and got on with the mission. His email was short and to the point:

‘
Got him! He’s very ex-directory – address is Hanbury Mews, Water Lane, Chadstock, Near Wallingford. Best of luck and stay safe. Steve x
’

All Nell had to do now was decide how to use the information. There was no question about any ‘if’.

8

Wishing Well

(Free)

‘SHE’S OFF EARLY
. It’s only just after eight.’ Charles turned away from the window, picked up the newspaper from the doormat and went into the kitchen. ‘Where’s she going, do you think?’

Ed, who was loading the bird-feeder with peanuts, looked at his brother, wondering if he was really expecting a response.

‘First, can we establish who “she” is?’ he said. ‘And second, do you really think I’m likely to know?’

It sounded a bit harsh, but Charles was used to logic and clear thinking. Or at least he used to be: he’d taught maths for thirty years. Perhaps, now he was retired, he’d deleted all rational thought from his head on the grounds that it, too, was redundant.

‘By “she” I meant Nell from next door,’ Charles said as he pushed two slices of bread into the toaster. It was nasty bland stuff: no seeds, no husks, no flecks. His digestion could no longer cope with such challenges – another tiny notch on life’s worry-stick. ‘And no, I probably don’t imagine you’d be able to tell me, though you talk to the neighbours far more than I do. I suppose it crossed my mind she might have said something to you.’

Ed hung the bird-feeder on the hook outside the back door. It was high enough to be well beyond the reach of Nell’s cat Pablo, but even so, he sometimes wondered if it was a good idea to attract birds so close to feline premises. Seeds and nuts fell to the ground. Birds would peck on the terrace rather than fight each other for space on the wire feeder, and so were vulnerable. But they were nesting now; they needed extra food, extra energy. He’d risk it.

‘No, she didn’t say anything to me. She could be going anywhere: doing an early shop at Sainsbury’s, off to a meeting with her agent, a day out in Harvey Nichols. Or possibly off for a shift servicing clients in a massage parlour? Who knows? It’s none of our business.’

Charles needed to get out more, Ed reckoned. He shouldn’t be doing all this curtain-peeping and watching other people’s lives from a distance. It was turning into a hobby. They
both
needed to do more. Over the past weekend down in Dorset, Ed had been out for supper at Tamsin’s scruffy, hippyish cottage, tended his garden and
had
otherwise done nothing more sociable than say a casual hello to neighbours he’d run across in the village shop. He was getting lazy. If he didn’t watch out, soon he would be on a level with Charles in old-man-behaviour terms – content to lie around in the evenings reading old favourite novels and watching football on Sky Sport. This week, up here in Putney, he hadn’t made any plans to do more in the evenings than read through his students’ A-level coursework. That wasn’t enough. Could do better, as he’d never written on any idle student’s report. He rummaged in the recycling box till he found the local paper and turned to the entertainments page. There was still half an hour before he needed to leave for college today – plenty of time to find something worth going out for, at least a couple of nights this week.

As soon as she arrived at Kate’s, Nell realized it would have been far more sensible to make this trip to Oxfordshire by herself. Alvin’s equipment alone was going to take half an hour to load. When did babies suddenly need so much stuff that they required the equivalent of a team of roadies in attendance? As she drank tepid tea in Kate’s kitchen and watched her persuading the child into his shoes, Nell tried telling herself that after twenty and more years since the last time she’d been anywhere near Patrick, what could another hour or two matter? But the adrenalin was churning inside her and she
was
trembling with eagerness to get to where she needed to be. She took the Multimap printout from her bag again and had a fiftieth look at it, as if there was something new it could tell her. The little arrow marked a spot close to the Thames.

She tried to imagine the house and came up with a Cotswold stone cottage hung with wisteria and clematis. In her picture, these were flowering profusely, a romantic, hectic tumble of purple and palest pink, but of course the reality would be that even if they existed, it was too early in the season for them to bloom. The walls would instead be twiggy and tatty. She had small, multi-paned windows in her vision. Was Patrick a curtain man these days? He certainly wouldn’t have net ones, though possibly black lace might feature. He hadn’t had any window covering at the Oxford flat. He dismissed them all as suburban, which was fine except in high summer when they’d been woken so horribly early by the sun streaming in. The bed seemed to have been positioned so that by mid-June the day’s first light shone directly on their eyes. She’d told him it was like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, arrested on midsummer morning at Stonehenge with the sun blazing on to her at daybreak through the stones. He’d been grumpy and said she was showing off because she’d read more than he had.

‘Where’s your romantic soul?’ she’d teased.

‘What is romance?’ he’d said, looking weary, then added, ‘And what is a soul?’

‘Obviously he’ll need his buggy …’ Kate was muttering as she ambled around her kitchen, vaguely opening and closing cupboard doors as if the buggy would be found stowed inside. ‘And something to eat. I’d take a banana but he can make an awful mess with them. The state of your car seats last time …’

‘Don’t worry about the seats,’ Nell reassured her. ‘They’re not exactly in what they’d call “as new” condition. An army of slugs have left trails all over the back, from when I took the garden stuff to the tip last week.’ In truth, much of the reason for the filthy state of the Golf’s back seats really was down to little Alvin’s delight, from a very early stage, in smearing chewed biscuit on any reachable piece of upholstery. She’d had to take a filleting knife to the wicker chairs at home, the day he’d discovered the joys of pushing half-eaten apple into the weave. The boy was surely either destined to be a plasterer or sculptor, or a rustic soul constructing cob bricks by hand. Nell imagined him at thirty or so, mixing mud and straw out in a Devon field and wondering why he was having flashbacks to blue and grey diamond-check fabric and the scent of organic rice cakes.

‘… and some spare nappies, though he’s been doing well lately without, and he is nearly three. Still, you can’t stop on the M4 just because he starts shouting. And if you don’t stop
right then
…’ Kate was talking to herself as she assembled the Alvin kit. Into the bag went cartons of
Ribena,
two bananas, the inevitable rice cakes, baby wipes, tissues, his coat, his bunny, a fleecy blanket, three board books, a bottle of Calpol and a pink plastic toy phone with a frightening array of ringtones.

‘We won’t be out that long, Kate.’ Nell was keen to get going. ‘It’s just there and back, a quick recce.’ She picked up the child’s car seat from beside the door and went out to put it in her car, to see if this would gee Kate up a bit. Alvin toddled after her and wailed from the doorway, more, she knew, because he thought she was stealing his car seat than because he thought she was abandoning him.

‘I expect he’ll sleep all the way there,’ Kate said as she carried him out and crammed his fat little body into the seat. Alvin instantly did the going-rigid thing that two-year-olds do as a protest against being fastened in. Expertly, Kate squished his middle so he bent and she could secure the strap.

‘Right. Now for
my
stuff.’ She closed the car door on her son.

‘Kate … are you really sure you want to do this?’ Nell’s anxiety level was reaching crescendo point. She wanted this trip over and done with. Obviously (and sensibly) there was still the option not to go at all, but then she’d be forever wondering. If they could just get there instantly, preferably by helicopter with a quick in-and-out descent, that would be ideal.

‘It’s all right! I’m joking! Look – here’s me: with handbag, doorkeys, phone! I’ve even had a last wee! I’m ready! Let’s go stalking!’

‘Aaagh! Kate, don’t call it that!’ Nell laughed as she backed the Golf out of Kate’s drive. ‘It’s
not
stalking! I only want to check out where Patrick lives so that … well … I don’t know what.’ There was another uncomfortable rush of adrenalin. She could feel it, sharply pooling into her veins. At this rate she’d have heart failure long before they got to Chadstock.

‘
I
know – it’s so that you can see if he’s got a seductive stately pile for which you could offer your body and soul and eternal love to him all over again. If it’s a bungalow with begonias and gnomes and a plastic wishing well, you can creep away and give it a miss and be glad you escaped.’

‘No … it’s … I know this sounds crazy but I want to make sure it’s, like, he lives in a kind of normal place. Not somewhere that’s a manky squat. Patrick was quite strange in some ways, inclined to depression, you know. He could have gone either way. He might be anything. He could have made it seriously big as an artist – though I guess he’d be using a different name or I’d have heard of him – or he could spend his days hanging around Oxford city centre busking in a doorway with a dog on a string.’

‘Nothing wrong with busking – it’s selling a service like any other. But why would he be doing that? Come to
think
of it, why would he change his name? Unless he didn’t want to be found … dare I say it in present company … by people from his past?’

‘Oh, he probably wouldn’t. I’m just surmising, in a ridiculous, nervy, jabbering-mindlessly-through-the-jitters sort of way,’ Nell conceded as they approached the Hogarth roundabout. ‘But he wasn’t the most stable sort and after twenty years, he could be … anything. I just want to be careful. Tactful. If all looks reasonably normal, I’ll send him a short hello note and he can take it from there.’

‘And that’s why I’m here. To knock on his door and ask if he’s seen my lost cat,’ Kate chuckled. ‘I love this. It’s going to be fun. And if he
does
have a wishing well, perhaps it’s in a spirit of artistic irony.’

Nell had even more doubts at this point. What
were
they going to do, exactly? Definitely
not
knock on his door, that was for sure. She didn’t want Kate going all giggly, ringing his bell and pretending to be the one Jehovah’s Witness with scarlet and auburn striped hair who wore industrial quantities of mascara, and a low-cut turquoise ripple-frilled top with black bra strap on display. But suppose, as they pulled into the lane where he lived, it happened to be at a moment when he came out of the house and saw them: an unexpected and immediate face-to-face? Suppose she looked at him and he looked at her and there was instant recognition on both sides? And
horror
? Well, on his side there would be, anyway – he’d be the one with the bigger shock. She knew she risked catching him painting the front door or something. She could just imagine it – the mutual what-to-say agony. And what
could
she say? ‘Wow! Amazing! Fancy seeing you here!’ wasn’t going to cut it. They couldn’t possibly claim to be ‘just passing’: according to the map the lane was a no through road and led to the river.

‘I bet there’s a lovely pub in the village – somewhere for lunch,’ Kate was saying, looking at the map. ‘Do you fancy that? A pretty riverside place that serves home-made steak pie and chips? I’d have to tie Alvin to a chair leg, though, or he’d be in with the ducks.’