Summer With My Sister (33 page)

It all meant long days of hard work, but Clare got a massive thrill from seeing her finished bottles building up, box by box. Her parents and friends pitched in whenever they could, and both Roxie and Luke asked her regularly for updates. God, she was lucky to have them all helping her, she thought frequently. Tracey hadn’t been joking when she’d called them Team Clare.

Still, she wasn’t there yet, not by a long chalk. With the end of term imminent, she had the usual working-mum juggling act to contend with for six weeks, which was always tricky. She’d signed Leila and Alex up for week-long drama and football clubs in Amberley, and her friends and parents had agreed to look after them at other times. She also wangled some shift-swapping with Roxie and put in for a fortnight’s annual leave in August, hoping fervently that she’d be able to spend some of this time doing fun things with the children. It was going to be a strange old summer, all right.

That weekend it was Steve’s turn to have the children. Usually Clare felt somewhat vulnerable about him coming to the house and taking the children away, but today she realized she felt different and wondered if it was because her new-found ally, Polly, was going to be in the house with her. Clare wasn’t daft; she’d seen the way Polly had flinched when the Langley’s phone call had come. She knew her sister envied this piece of success that had come her way, and she had wondered if Polly might descend into an almighty sulk over it, or perhaps try to belittle the business. But Clare had been wrong. Against all expectations, Polly had mucked in just as much as anyone else and had worked really hard. The initial tension that had simmered between them now seemed to be melting away, and Clare was surprised and happy that Polly seemed to be the newest recruit to her team. Who would have thought it?

Steve hadn’t exactly seemed delighted to see Polly again. They’d never hit it off in the past: she’d looked down her nose at him, and he thought she was up her own bum. ‘Fridge-knickers’ he’d always called her behind her back. Good one, Steve, Clare thought now, remembering this; if a woman makes you feel intimidated, put her down by implying frigidity. What had she ever seen in the bloke? It was becoming harder and harder to remember.

‘Morning,’ Polly had said coolly when he walked into the kitchen. She was making coffee, but didn’t offer to pour him a cup.

His nostrils quivered at the mingled aromas of coffee, ginger, vanilla and lime, and his eyes swerved around the kitchen with interest, taking in the boxes of bottles stacked in a corner and the supplies of Castile soap flakes and liquid glycerine. ‘What’s going on in here then?’ he asked.

Nosey sod. ‘Work,’ Clare said shortly. ‘And if you don’t mind, I need to get on.’

‘What do you mean, work? What
is
all this stuff anyway?’ His lip had curled; she’d always disliked the way he did that. So supercilious. Well, she wasn’t going to give him the chance to sneer at her business, she decided, so she ignored his questions.

‘Leila! Alex! Dad’s here, hurry up!’ she yelled. ‘See you on Sunday,’ she added pointedly to him, walking out of the room.

The door closed behind the three of them ten minutes later and Clare braced herself, ready for the usual feelings of desolation to overpower her. It had been awful, the first few times Steve had taken the children away for his weekend ‘contact’, as the custody agreement termed it, leaving her all on her own, rattling around the place. She’d felt as if her heart had been ripped out. Even now, over a year later, she still wasn’t used to the deep, empty silence that swallowed up the cottage whenever they were away overnight.

This weekend, at least, she was not on her own and had more than enough to keep her occupied. Count your blessings, Clare.

‘Are you okay?’ She felt Polly’s hand tentatively alight on her back.

‘Yeah. Let’s get stuck in,’ she said briskly.

‘Is he always like that when he comes to pick up the kids?’ Polly asked, donning an apron and opening the kitchen windows to let in a breeze. The hot, heady smell of honeysuckle drifted through. It was rampant all over the back wall at the moment, thick with fat bumblebees, its delicate pink-and-white flower heads open like mouths towards the summer sun.

‘What? A prick?’ Clare replied. ‘Yes, unfortunately. I look at him and can’t believe I ever fancied him now, let alone was madly in love with him.’ She shook her head. ‘Weird, isn’t it, how that happens. How can you think the world of someone and know them so intimately once . . . and then want nothing else to do with them, six months down the line.’

Polly looked blank. ‘Um . . . I suppose,’ she said, opening the freezer door and pulling out the trays of soap they’d made the night before. She prodded one delicately. ‘These look good.’

Clare eyed her curiously. Why was she being so obtuse? ‘You
suppose
?’ she echoed. ‘I know you’ve always kept your private life private, but there must be some vile ex-boyfriends lurking in your past, surely?’

‘Not really.’ Polly had her head down and was carefully pushing the little soaps from their moulds. Clare could smell their sweet vanilla fragrance as they slid onto the table.

‘Don’t give me that,’ she scoffed. It was like picking at a scab, pressing Polly in this way. A reluctant scab that didn’t want to be prised off by anybody’s fingernails, but Clare couldn’t help herself. ‘There must have been
someone
you loved. Someone you were really close to. Wasn’t there?’

Just for a second Clare thought she’d glimpsed a wistfulness clouding Polly’s eyes, a rarely seen uncertainty about her face. Then down came the shutters and she shook her head. ‘Nah,’ she said airily, as if she didn’t care. ‘I was always too busy for relationships.’

Too busy. What a cop-out. Since when did having a full-on job have to preclude any other kind of life? There must have been a degree of choice in the matter for Polly to have shunned all relationships completely. That was if she was telling the truth, of course. Clare didn’t believe a word of it.

‘Right,’ she said diplomatically after a weighty moment.

‘I mean, I have
dated
a lot, I have had
sex
with men,’ Polly added. ‘I’m not saying I’m a born-again virgin. But they were just dates. And just sex. I never really bothered getting to know any of them. I certainly never
cared
about them.’

‘Oh,’ Clare said, not sure how else to reply. What an awful, horrible thing to admit to. And Polly said it as if she couldn’t give two hoots about the situation, as if she wasn’t bothered either way that she’d never really loved anyone. Clare couldn’t imagine anything more depressing. Better to have loved and lost, in her experience, even if it had meant marrying Steve.

‘I guess I’ve never been the settling-down type,’ Polly said, popping out the last soap from the mould and taking the trays to the sink, where she set about washing them with a good deal of splashing.

And that, Clare thought, was all she was going to get out of her sister on
that
subject. She wasn’t sure whether to pity or admire Polly for it. It wasn’t a way of life she’d have wanted, though.

The two of them began work in earnest. Clare put some music on and started melting soap flakes, feeling herself slowly beginning to relax at the prospect of a child-free weekend. She would miss Leila and Alex, of course – she always missed them – but this was the first weekend ever that she hadn’t gone straight upstairs after they’d left to sit mournfully in the desolate silence of their empty bedrooms, wondering what they were doing without her, how many treats and goodies Steve and Denise were lavishing on them, if Alex would be sick on the way home or if Leila would return fired up with talk of pony-riding and go-karting and all the other things Steve had shelled out for her.

Once they came home again, Clare always struggled not to ask questions about the life Steve and Denise led in Basingstoke, even though part of her was desperate to know everything. ‘Denise wears make-up at breakfast time,’ Leila had once said (rather scornfully, to Clare’s relief), but this fact alone had been enough to keep Clare awake that night, miserably tossing and turning as she imagined the radiant Denise in her skimpy silk dressing gown and a full face of creams and powders to start the day.

Her phone buzzed just then and she saw that a text from Steve had appeared onscreen.
Back home and all OK. Will call
later. S

Paranoid as she was about her children’s well-being, she’d asked him all those months ago to let her know when they’d arrived safely on these contact weekends, just so that she wasn’t fretting. But why did he need to call her later? He never usually rang. Did he have some big piece of news that he wanted to break, which he’d bottled out of doing in person that morning?

A few months ago Alex had come home and mentioned that Denise had vomited twice while they’d been staying there. There had been a considerable amount of relish in his voice at the grossness of the situation. ‘It was
disgusting
. You could hear the puke coming out into the toilet, like this . . .’ And as he’d launched into a demonstration of gruesome fake-retching noises, Clare had been gripped with the fear that Denise was pregnant; and then of course her mind whirled immediately through all the possibilities: the new baby Berry, cosseted and cooed over, dressed in ridiculous Baby Dior outfits by image-mad Denise. Loved more than Leila and Alex . . .

Steve hadn’t announced any pregnancy news, though, and there had been no further word from the children about Denise having a bump, or showing scan pictures to them. Maybe it had just been a tummy bug, or maybe Denise had been too early in the pregnancy to want to announce anything yet. Steve had made no bones about the fact that the two of them were keen to start a family, though. He’d actually said those words:
Start a family
. As if he didn’t already have one of those.

One thing was for sure, she’d have to practise sounding delighted when Steve broke the news, if she was to stand a chance of avoiding the dread in her heart spilling into her voice.

As it turned out, there was no joyful announcement of baby news. Instead Steve was ringing about something entirely unexpected: her neglectful parenting.

‘I’ve been talking to the children and I’m shocked at what’s been going on there,’ he began without preamble. ‘It’s not on, Clare. It’s just not on.’

It was as if he was speaking in riddles; it took a few seconds for her brain to actually decode his words. Even then they made no sense. ‘What?’ she asked in bewilderment. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about you setting up a factory for your
business’ –
he seemed to spit the word down the line as if he couldn’t bear the taste of it – ‘in our
kitchen
. Exposing our
children
to dangerous
chemicals!
It’s bang out of order, Clare. It’s absolutely unacceptable.’

Her mouth dropped open in astonishment as, once again, she needed a moment to decipher this absurdity. ‘Wait a minute,’ she said, appalled that he could even suggest such a thing. ‘It’s not “your” kitchen, just as it’s not any of your business what I do in there.’ She shook with anger. How dare he criticize what she was doing? If anyone was out of order, it was him, one hundred per cent.

‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he said. ‘It
is
my business, when it affects my children.’

The sanctimonious tone of his voice filled her with fresh rage.
His
children now, were they? Oh, this was rich, coming from him, the man who needed reminding when
his
children’s sodding birthdays were. ‘They are not being affected in any way,’ she retaliated, struggling to keep her voice sounding even and calm. ‘There are no dangerous chemicals whatsoever. And they are not being neglected, thank you very much. What sort of person do you think I am?’

‘Has your sister put you up to this?’ he replied. ‘This business bullshit? Well, I’m not happy about it, Clare. Not happy at all.’

‘Not happy about what? Me making a half-decent crust for
our
children, for a change? I’d have thought you’d be grateful. You’re the one who’s always been so reluctant to contribute any maintenance money. You’re the one who’s left me skint and struggling for so bloody long.’