Out on a Limb (17 page)

I shake my head. ‘I thought I did,’ I answer truthfully, my anger now abating. ‘I thought I might. But I was wrong. I was just a bit swept off my feet by him, that’s all.’

And saying so no longer feels like a pep talk. I can say it and mean it. Because I realise it’s true. They’re now very much back on the ground.

Chapter 17

W
HEN
I
WAKE THE
next morning, it’s to the almost molten sensation of the sun seeping into my bedclothes, and I realise I’ve just awakened from the longest period of uninterrupted slumber I’ve had in months. My glass of water sits untouched on the bedside table and the last LCD time that burned on my retina read 22.29, not 02.30, or 04.10. It now reads 08.11. Almost ten hours asleep.

I push the duvet from my chest and draw my legs up to stamp it down to the end of the bed. I can hear street sounds, a dust cart, crows calling, traffic. The murmur of the television wafting up from downstairs. And something else. My mother’s voice. She’s obviously talking to someone on the phone.

I pull on my dressing gown and head down the stairs. I’m still not fully used to the business of being in my house on a weekday, any more than I’m used to finding someone else in it every single time I turn around. She’s in the hall, replacing the receiver.

‘Ah, you’re up.’

‘Who was that?’

‘It was your friend Dee,’ she says. ‘About booking badminton for Tuesday?’

I nod. ‘Okay.’ She’ll also want to know about Charlie. Still, no rush. No panic. I inspect my synapses as I think this. No pings. No jolts. I really am free.

‘Anyway,’ continues my mother. ‘ I told her you’d call her back. So,’ she says then, inspecting me properly. ‘Feeling better for your lie-in?’

I also forget that to my mother 8.11
is
a lie-in. Still, she’s right. It does feel like I’ve had one. I nod. ‘And hungry. I didn’t eat last night. You had breakfast?’ Silly question. 8.11. She’ll already be thinking about what to have for lunch.

Spike’s bouncing at my heels, so I pick him up and take him into the kitchen with me. Mum follows.

‘Shall I make you something? A boiled egg? Some porridge?’

I almost say an automatic ‘no, I can do it,’ but then I realise that in her cack-handed, unapologetic way, she is actually trying to make amends of some sort. At the very least, to make some sort of connection back to last night. And it makes me feel awkward around her all over again. I don’t actually much want to re-visit last night. I don’t want to talk to her about Charlie, for one thing, and for another, and more importantly (for I think I can see where we’re headed) about her and me. About her being
here
. In short, I don’t want to confront it. I’m more comfortable dancing the dance, observing the usual rules…i.e. strenuously
not
being honest and upfront. Where would that get us, after all?

I put Spike down. ‘I’ll just have some toast, thanks,’ I say instead.

She crosses the kitchen – she’s managing indoors sometimes without her stick now, I notice – and gets the bread out of the bread bin. ‘So,’ she says. ‘Do you have plans for today?’

I pull out a chair and let her attend to my toast. Spike puts his front paws on my knees and I scoop him up again into my lap for a cuddle, burying my nose into the fur on his neck.

I sometimes wonder quite what I’d do without Spike. Perhaps take to hugging cushions. Or trees. One of the starkest of stark realities about being on your own is the terrible dearth of physical contact. If you’re a huggy kissy touchy sort of person, like I am, that sort of thing really matters. And though my sons will hug me, and frequently do, there’s a subtle shift once the testosterone kicks in. There are times when they can but many more when they can’t. And all too soon, giving their mother a cuddle will be something they do just on greetings and partings and birthdays.

I look at my mother and remember my father. He did. She didn’t. It just wasn’t her style. We air-kiss on parting and we air-kiss on greeting. And that’s it. And it’s sobering, to me, if not her. It’s not as it should be, but where do you start?

And where will we end? Two grumpy old women co-existing without contact and shuffling around together with our force fields intact?

She puts a plate and knife and the butter in front of me and refrains from commenting about dogs at tables, which is a first. I put spike down again anyway, because much as I love him, his breath smells of dog food. Which means she’s fed him as well.

‘Erm…’ Plans. I consider. My brain’s been so hijacked, I can barely recall that it’s Friday. Plans. Plans for Friday. Did I have any plans? I try to think what plans I might have had. To cut the grass. Yes. But then I always have a plan to cut the grass. Cutting the grass never seems to be far from my mind between April and October. It’s one of those things I constantly plan to do and then don’t. Because it’s raining. Because it’s windy. Because something else comes up. Because all sorts. Latterly Because Mother. Because trailing round estate agents. Because never seeming to find a single moment for myself.

Hmm. Memo to self. When next moment to self happens, is lawnmowing number one priority? Gadzooks – you must seize it, woman! Get life and soonest!

But right now I can’t seem to think of anything better to do. ‘I thought I might cut the grass,’ I respond.

She brings two slices of toast to my plate. Carefully props them in an upside down ‘V’. ‘Only Celeste and I thought we might go through our lines, and –’

‘No probs. I’ll take you over there. What time?’

She still looks apologetic. ‘Will about ten be okay?’

Order restored. And some moments to myself. ‘Sure.’ I pick up the knife. But there’s a thought.
Lines?
‘Lines?’ I ask. ‘What lines?’

‘Our lines for the play.’

‘
Your
lines? I thought you said you’d missed the auditions.’

She folds the tea towel in her hand and slides it carefully over the handle on the oven door. ‘Wilfred called me back last night,’ she says sheepishly. ‘He’d been pulling my leg, bless him. They’d already put me down for Medea.’

God
. And after all that bloody
fuss.

Still, I think. What’s new? But then I think some more. And I blink at her. ‘Medea?
You
? Playing
Medea
? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t Medea, well,
young
?’

And a bit of a babe, by all accounts. I’m not as clued up on Euripides as I might be, but as far as I can remember she was a vampy young Greek sorceress who duped someone into cutting up their father and boiling up his bones, before knocking off both her kids after a hissy fit with Jason. Hmm. Bar the age, I
can
see it.

My mother tuts. She has no concept of the world ‘old’. None at all. ‘Not
this
Medea. This is Wilfred’s contemporary re-working of the play. It’s a sort of allegory, set in an old people’s home.’

The mind boggles. That sure will take some re-working. And I was wrong. She does seem to have the word ‘old’ in her vocabulary. Just doesn’t tend to apply it to herself. ‘That sounds bizarre,’ I say, buttering my toast. ‘What’s your contemporary Medea about, then? Is she the new kid on the block, come to stir up the residents and woo a retired colonel called Gerald?’

‘Hmm,’ she says sniffily. ‘I can see you
are
feeling better, then. And yes, as it happens, something like that. And the killing’s an accident. We don’t want too much gore. It’s for a Cyncoed audience, after all.’

‘Any bones boiled?’

‘I believe there’s a scene with a symbolic leg of lamb.’

‘You mean mutton.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘You mean leg of mutton, don’t you?’

‘Now you’re just being silly.’

And feeling all the better for it. Order most definitely restored.

And so it came to pass that I took Medea to Celeste’s house, took Spike for a long walk and took a parcel to the post office for Jake. Seb’s X-Box, as it turned out, which he’d agreed to Jake selling on eBay, to put towards a double bass pedal for his birthday next month. Which made me feel all warm and woolly and proud. And then I came home to cut the grass.

For all the time I spend thinking about cutting the grass and then forgetting I thought it, deciding I will cut the grass but then not getting around to cutting the grass, definitely scheduling grass cutting on the calendar, and then double booking other stuff instead, it would be easy to suppose that I don’t actually like cutting the grass very much.

This, however, is not true.

One of the more enduring legacies of my marriage is an aged red petrol-powered lawn mower. Though one might assume such a thing to be more usually something that ends up in the ‘his’ pile, Sebastian and Jake’s dad was going to live abroad, and so many things normally testosterone-related ended up with me by default.

I wasn’t, it has to be said, the grass-cutting half of the marital partnership at that time, any more than he was the clothes-washing one. I did, however, learn, as a woman on her own must. I even once stripped it down and cleaned the filter.

But o n this particular morning, its filter is academic, as (as is always the way with these things) it’s almost entirely out of petrol. And the few drops I had left in my red plastic petrol can have clearly, in the absence of applying themselves to lawn mowing, decided to become vapour instead.

So I have to pop down to the petrol station in order to get some more. Which turns out to be no sort of pop, but a marathon chore. As I wait at the back of one of eight separate queues of four cars each, all of whom seem to be off on some holiday, or away day or theme park or beach, I wistfully wonder quite why it is that I’m not doing something similarly edifying. And then, having wondered, I reach the sort of conclusions that I decide I really mustn’t wonder any more. I must Get Out More, that’s what I must do. Go and re-engage with the world.

The sad truth, of course, is that I have been in self-imposed purdah. Such it is with mistresses. Thank God I’m not one of those any more.

I’m just coming back into the house, all petrolled up, when I become aware of some warbling from the depths of my handbag.

A mobile phone warbling, and once I get it out and check it, I see it’s a text message from my good friends at Vodafone, who are telling me I have two missed calls. I also notice, belatedly, that the answerphone light’s winking in the hall, so I poke the play button on that while I scroll through to see.

‘Gabriel Ash,’ the deep voice says without any preamble. ‘I’ll try your mobile instead. Bye-ee.’

I like the ‘bye-ee’. It’s so sunny day jolly. I bring the call register screen up. He has.

When I connect I think I’ve dialled the wrong number at first, because it’s not Gabriel Ash who answers. But then I realise I can’t have, because I didn’t dial the number, but pressed the return call button. So it has to be right.

‘Hiyah!’ says Lucy Whittall’s pretty, sing-song voice. ‘How are
you
?’

She talks as if I’m her long-lost sister in Halkidiki, but I find I don’t mind in the least. ‘Oh!’ I say. ‘Hi. Um, fine thanks. You?’

‘Fabulous!
Fab
ulous!’

‘Good. Er…I think Gabriel was trying to get hold of me?’

‘Yep,’ she says. ‘Indeed he was. He’s driving at the moment, but it was about some stuff you have for him? He wanted to stop by and pick it up?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That’s right. I’m sorry – I was out. When did he want to call in?’

‘Hang on. When d’you want to do it, Gabe?’ I only half hear his reply. ‘You still there?’ she says.

‘Yup.’

‘We were wondering if we could stop by sometime today if that’s okay with you?’

‘Sure. What sort of time?’

‘Hang on.’ A second exchange follows. ‘Are you home now?’

‘I am.’

‘Then, let me see. An hour or so? An hour or so, you think, Gabe? An hour or so suit you okay?’

Only the silliest and most insecure of persons could possibly do what I decide to do next. But in my defence I am intermittently both of those things, particularly at this juncture in my life, and it’s not every day you have local – nay,
national
– celebrities turning up at your house at short notice, and one must be prepared. Yes, I think, as I motor around the lawn with teeth rattling velocity. I must achieve two things above any other. I must cut the grass and then I must put on my wafty skirt and flip flops and some mascara and lip gloss. I must, above all, above
everything
in fact, not look like a fright when I answer the door.

‘Oh, oh, oh!!!’ exclaims Lucy Whittall, thrusting her face alarmingly at my bosom an hour and a half later. ‘Aren’t you just the sweetest, sweetest,
sweetest
little dog?’

Spike, who’s in my arms, speaks several languages, of course, but none quite so fluently as Adoring Female Person With Long Fingernails. His tail’s going so fast it could power a faerie wind farm. I hope he doesn’t crack up and wee all down my front.

‘He’s called Spike,’ I tell her.

‘Spike!’ she cries. ‘Oh, you little
cutie,
you! You absolute
cutie
! Oh, Gabe, we just must
so
get a dog!’ She fans at her face with her teeny tiny clutch bag. ‘God, but isn’t it just
boiling
today?’

Lucy Whittall, who belies this incontrovertible fact by looking as though she is cocooned inside her own invisible air-conditioning system, is wearing a wispy gauzy scrap of something in peach. The sort of dress that you could twizzle up and stuff into a very small matchbox, but which probably cost many hundreds of pounds.

And worth every last penny of anyone’s money. Except perhaps mine, because I’m not Lucy Whittall. And it just wouldn’t look like that on me. She, of course, looks every bit as fabulous as she feels. And I feel even stupider for having changed for the occasion. Who did I think I was kidding, getting all tarted up for a five minute encounter on a doorstep?

‘Yes, it is,’ I agree. As does Spike, who’s dripping spittle down me now. ‘I’ll, er, just go and fetch the bag for you. Won’t be a tick.’

‘Actually,’ she confides, ‘I know it’s very cheeky, but d’you mind if I skip in and use your loo? We’ve just driven back all the way from Monmouth, and I’m absolutely busting for a wee.’

‘Oh, of course!’ I pull the door wider. ‘Come in, then. Come in. I point. ‘That door there. Help yourself.’

I hope she’s not going to have to help herself to fifteen sheets of loo paper to mop wee from the toilet seat as well. With the amount of young males coming and, well,
going
in my house, I could really do with having one of those hourly check procedures that they have in motorway service stations by operatives called Janet. When did I last check it? Oh, fret fret fret fret.