Restoring Grace (6 page)

‘
I have a dishwasher.’

Grace shrugged. How could
you explain washing up
to a man with a dishwasher?

‘
But if you
have to do them by hand, I could help you,' he offered. 'I could dry, anyway.
It would be quicker with
two.’

Grace shook her head. 'No hot water,' she
explained
with a smile, glad to have a proper
reason for refusing
his offer, when really the reason she didn't want
him to
help was that she found his presence
in her kitchen, where
she was used to
being alone, oddly unsettling. 'I forgot
to put the immersion on. I'll do it in the morning, and if
I
rinse in really hot water, I won't need to dry them.'

‘
Surely a
house this size needs a better way of heating
hot water than an immersion heater. It must be so expen
sive, for
one thing.'

‘
Not really. There's only me.’

He frowned.
'That's strange, too.’

She bristled, waiting for the lecture about it
being ridiculous her living in such a great big house etc.
Although a second later she realised that was
unfair. This
man whose name she had
forgotten was unlikely to
lecture her like her sister did. 'What's
strange? The fact that I live in this house all on my own?'

‘
No. The fact that you're single. You are
single?’

Grace hovered between telling him it was none
of his
business and just answering the
question. She decided a
simple 'yes' would be quicker. Besides, she
found being confrontational difficult. She nodded. 'Yes. But I like it that way’

He nodded, as if in
understanding, but then said, 'I
was wondering if you might like to
come out to dinner sometime.’

Grace, her head still a kaleidoscope of names,
wines and the state of the hot water, stopped. 'Why would I want to do that?'
she asked. Surely she'd just explained that she liked being on her own?
--For the first time the spy smiled, and Grace
wished she
could remember his name. She'd be all right when she could
refer to her list, but at the moment she was at a
complete loss. Not knowing it added to the sense of confu
sion
his presence gave her.

‘
Because you might get hungry, perhaps?’

Grace shook her head, on
certain ground at last. Since
her divorce,
she hardly ever got hungry. And the thought
of going out to dinner with a man whose name she
couldn't
remember was not appealing.

‘
I don't
think so.' Then, aware she might have sounded abrupt, she added, 'But thank you
very much for the invi
tation.’

The spy regarded her speculatively. He was
about to say something else when Margaret appeared.

‘
Shall we
go, darling? I've finished my fag. Lovely
house,' she said to Grace.

Grace smiled. Margaret probably got hungry a lot. She
could go out to dinner with the
mysterious Irishman.

Chapter
Three

 
Ellie got home at half past
midnight. She was supposed
to work until
three, but she'd asked to go early. She hadn't
had to say why she was so exhausted; she'd just said she
felt
sick. Which she did.

Rick was out, probably still at the pub, which
was famous for its lock-ins. His dirty dishes filled the sink,
accompanied by cold, greasy water. The water was
Rick's
idea of help, and it did help
in that the food wasn't welded
quite so solidly on to the plate, but
Ellie found putting her hand through the layer of orange grease to the plug
almost unbearable. She did it, because in the morning she'd feel even sicker.
Then, having started the process,
and
because she'd put the immersion heater on earlier for
a bath she'd never
quite made time for, she washed up.

She would have to leave. She suddenly realised
this
had ceased to be a thought too dreadful
even to form into
words in her head and become an acknowledged truth
without her processing the notion at all.

As Ellie rubbed in hand-cream, remembering too
late that it would all wash off again when she got ready for bed, she wondered
why she knew for certain now she must leave Rick when before she hadn't.

What had changed between
them, apart from the pregnancy, which surely must be far too small yet to impinge
on their relationship? In some ways, nothing; he
was still
the student she had fallen
in love with. He got up late,
he left beer
cans, fag-ends and roaches all over the house.
He
wouldn't ever bother to wash up while there were
still pl
ates
to eat off and he still wanted sex every night
and every morning. That was evidently the same as ever.

But he used to be loving. He used to buy her
little
presents: chocolates, flowers, a
little heart-shaped cheese.
He'd decorate her pillow with flowers, and
once, when
she'd gone to bed much earlier
than he had, he'd written
'I Love You' in sweeties on the table.

Without all that, clearing
up after him was just a chore,
not a home-making, nurturing thing
to do. And even before he'd first been shown the thin blue line on Ellie's
pregnancy test, he'd become less affectionate and more
slob-like. If it had been a deliberate, thought-out attempt
on his behalf to prove to her how hopeless he
would be
as a father, it would have
worked. But Ellie absolved him
of this — he wouldn't bother to change
just to make her do what he wanted her to. Why should he? He'd always
done exactly as he wanted, and now he was losing
interest
in Ellie as a person and just wanted her as an aid to his
comfort and well-being. Well, he'd find another loving young art student soon
enough. She refused to think of the time and energy she had invested in their
relation
ship; she was too tired to cope
with the emotions it would
raise. She just decided: she was getting out.

The following morning at
about eleven, before Rick was
up, and before
she had a chance to change her mind, Ellie
took a deep breath and telephoned her mother at the shop,
hoping
she'd be there and not with a client.

Her mother was a highly successful interior
designer
who had kept her career going more
or less uninterrupted
by
Ellie's
arrival. Her father worked in insurance and felt
his contribution to child-rearing was not to interfere with
the nanny, in any sense, and to take Ellie to McDonald's once every
holiday. They both loved Ellie very dearly, she
knew
that, but they seemed to love their careers and foreign travel slightly more.

Ellie was
their only child and she had always felt that
both
her initial arrival in the world and her subsequent
existence were baffling to them. Her mother was artistic,
but
Ellie was 'arty'. Her mother loved good clothes, but Ellie loved weird,
tie-dyed garments, things she bought from jumble sales and then adapted. To
their enormous credit, something that Ellie was truly grateful for, her
parents had allowed her to follow her dreams of
studying
art, hadn't visited her at university and made her alter
her surroundings, and didn't comment on her
friends as
long as she kept them out of the sitting room.

‘Hello, darling!' Her mother's voice greeted
Ellie with that mixture of surprise and pleasure Ellie had become
used to. It was always as if her mother had either
forgotten
her existence, or somehow never expected to hear from her again.

‘
Hi, Mum.
How are you? Did you get that suit you
were
talking about?' This was partly to remind her mother that they had in fact
spoken quite recently; Ellie had rung
up to tell her parents she was
pregnant, but bottled out.

‘Yes. Frightfully expensive, but so lovely.'
She paused.
'So, what news? Everything all
right? Not short of money,
or anything?’

Ellie sometimes had the impression that her
parents protected themselves against her with money. But Ellie was very
independent, and since she had left university,
had refused all offers of money unless they represented
a birthday
or Christmas present.

‘I thought I might come and stay for a bit.'
After she'd
said it, she realised that at
one time she would have said:
'come
home for a bit'. Now it seemed more like paying
a visit as a guest than
going home as a daughter. Her
bedroom had
been redecorated and redesigned as a study
for her father long since.

‘That would be nice.' Her mother sounded
flustered. 'Would you be staying for long? Only we're going away next weekend.’

Ellie sighed. Why did she
expect her mother to cling,
to beg her to stay for ever? She had
never done so, and for most of her life, Ellie had been grateful — she knew
some of her friends thought the distance in their rela
tionship was odd, but it had always been like that. Not
all mothers, after all, were that maternal. It was
just that
now she wanted her to be different.

‘
I thought I might stay a
few days, if that's all right.
I'm thinking of looking for somewhere else to
live.’

‘
Oh.' A pause.
'Are you and Rick all right?'

‘
We're both fine. We just may not stay together, that's
all.'

‘
Oh,
darling!' Ellie heard genuine sympathy and
warmed to it. Perhaps it
would be OK telling her mother about the baby. Perhaps her mother might
discover all those mothering instincts which had been a bit lacking when Ellie
was a baby herself.

She left a note for Rick. He would read it when
he got up, and probably be relieved that she wouldn't be there
nagging him any more. He'd be annoyed about having
to pay the rent on his own, but Ellie felt fairly sure he'd soon find
someone else to look after him. He was a very good-looking boy and,
consequently, rather spoilt. Although she would have been happy to have gone on
looking after
^-
him herself, if
he'd only been positive about
the baby, and kinder to her.

Having stuffed the few
possessions she felt attached to
into a series of carrier bags and
bin-liners and put them into her car, she took a deep breath and shut the front
door on her home for the past eighteen months. 'Don't think about it, Ellie,'
she said firmly. 'Just let go.' Then she set off out of the town into rural
Gloucestershire, to the little market town where her parents lived.

Her parents' house was
beautiful. They always
described it as 'architect
designed', the logic of which
escaped
Ellie, who thought that all houses must have had
some sort of architect
involved. It was modern, energy-efficient and elegant.

It would, however, never be cosy, Ellie
realised a few
hours later, after a
pointless day of driving around waiting
for her mother to get home from work. As she parked
her 2CV in the driveway next to her mother's
little MGTF,
she thought of the
cottage in Bath she had left, for which
the word 'cosy' was almost too expansive. But it made
the pages of
the style magazines quite often.

Her mother's eye for design
was evident everywhere.
It had once appeared in a magazine
in an article about
the use of white paint,
illustrating just how many shades
of white there were.

Now, a scarlet amaryllis in a steel pot was the
only
colour evident, apart from her mother's
suit, also scarlet.
Even while they hugged, Ellie remembered how
difficult it had been growing up in such a sterile space when she had been a
teenager, and mostly in control of her limbs and possessions. It would be an
impossible house for a
baby. Fortunately
the thought that she might bring up her
baby in her parents' house had not dwelt for long in Ellie's
imagination.