The Great Allotment Proposal (4 page)

‘You want some dinner?’ he said in the end.

‘OK.’

Chapter Six

The kitchen was tiny. The table even smaller. Emily sat with a glass of wine watching Jack cook. Throwing together the finest, simplest ingredients – tearing leaves from beautiful lush pots of fresh herbs on the window sill, slicing big juicy Spanish tomatoes, crushing plump smoked garlic and ripping up soft white mozzarella. She wondered where he’d learnt all these skills. He hadn’t been able to cook when she’d known him. Nor, for that matter, could he have built a boat. Not one as stunning as this one. The interior was all chestnut-coloured glossy wood, a worn bench ran along one side of cabin opposite a scuffed black furnace, plain white curtains rippled in the slight breeze and at the end of the room a soft tartan rug had been thrown over a big, high bed. Next to them in the kitchen there was an old worn Peruvian rug on the floor, a bunch of cushions scattered against the wall and a large window that opened up to look out on the river.

‘I really like your boat,’ she said.

Jack laughed as if her saying it was ridiculous.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘What are you doing here, Emily?’

‘Being my usual amazing self.’

Jack raised a brow.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I liked the idea of seeing you, I suppose.’

He narrowed his eyes at her as if assessing her motives.

She bit her lip and half-smiled, ‘Why don’t you believe me?’

‘Because my life is really simple now,’ he said, looking down to stir the saucepan full of rich tomatoey spaghetti. There was a tiny half-smile on his face, but she got the impression that he wanted to close his eyes and make her disappear.

‘I won’t make it complicated.’ Emily nudged his calf with her toe. ‘I promise.’

‘You make everything complicated,’ he said with a laugh and then waved a hand as if they should say no more. ‘OK, well here, have some pasta. You need more wine?’

She nodded and he topped up her glass with a smoky bordeaux that reminded her of sitting by the wood fire in her mum’s house in France. Then she picked up her fork and twirled up some spaghetti. The moment it hit her tastebuds, all the fancy canapés she’d eaten that night paled into insignificance. ‘How come you can cook like this?’

Jack sat back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other ankle to knee; he had the bowl of pasta in one hand and was twisting spaghetti with the other. ‘I learnt while I was in Spain.’

Emily made a face. ‘At that commune? I thought you were building stuff not cooking.’

He shook his head. ‘We had to do everything, it was totally self-sufficient. And it wasn’t a commune, it was a research centre.’

‘Yeah, but it was all hippy-dippy eco, wasn’t it?’

He winced. ‘No, Em, it was a research centre. We worked on creating sustainable engineering projects. It just happens to be self-sufficient and off-grid. So yes, you learn how to cook.’ He held up his bowl as if to show that that was how he had learnt to make such good pasta.

‘You did pretty well considering you were only there for a year. It sounds like my worst nightmare.’ Emily shuddered before putting a big forkful of pasta into her mouth.

Jack paused. ‘I wasn’t there for a year, Em,’ he said. ‘I was there for seven years.’

Emily frowned. She had too much pasta in her mouth to say anything so instead she just watched him as he carried on eating, not looking at her.

The summer of the Cherry Pie Island Festival was the hottest anyone had known. It had been too hot to do anything other than lie in the shade as the bees bumped lazily from flower to flower and dogs moaned. Occasionally they would roll themselves from the shade into the pool with a splash. It was the type of heat that you couldn’t fight so it was easier to give in. She and Jack would sprawl in a tangle of golden limbs, dreaming of a future as easy and uncomplicated as their humid, sticky days.

They both knew the future was ticking closer, but that only meant Jack at uni in London, home some weekends, and Emily, whose TV drama had been commissioned for another eight episodes, would carry on back and forth to Three Mills studios. It was perfect. There was nothing to keep them apart. They lay in bliss, eating fat, juicy cherries content in the future they had mapped to perfection.

The weather got hotter. The hosepipes were banned and the grass turned yellow and the flowers withered. The dog cried at night as the thick heat swamped them in their beds. The fans droned. There was no escape.

And then the arguments started between Jack and his dad. A workaholic driven by mountains of success, Alan Neil wanted Jack behind him in the business. Wanted it to pass down within the family. He’d niggled and pushed but now as the time came for Jack to go and the heat tapped incessantly, spiralling normal conversations into ferocious bickering, he started to question why he was going. His maths wasn’t good enough for engineering, they all knew it; he wouldn’t last the uni course. Alan was humouring him by letting him go; he’d struggle and he wasn’t the type to really knuckle down. If he didn’t get through the maths, then the whole thing was pointless. A waste of money. A waste of Alan’s money. Better to stay.

But Jack didn’t want to stay. He didn’t want to be his dad. In fact it was his dad who had driven him into the desire to leave, to do something else, to not be hovering on his phone at midnight, flying off to the States at moment’s notice, leaving the kids with the nanny or in front of the TV while he calmed some needy rock and roll star.

Emily started to get nervous.

Jack told her it would be fine. But Emily had lived her whole life being shipped from pillar to post, she had seen what happened when tempers frayed, when people were held in the palms of others, their choices stifled. She had seen her mother backed into a corner enough times, her power cut in an instant by her reliance on the money of the men she married. How in a fit of frustrated fury she would pack them all up and they would be gone. Or just as easily, and as often, someone else would pack their bags and throw them out.

Jack couldn’t bear being at the mercy of his father. You could see it in the wild dart of his eyes as they tried to lie outside in the heat, pretending it was as it was before. But sweat that had seemed slick was now sticky, irritating, too hot, too close.

And then it all happened at once. A chain of motion. Like a pinball machine in little French cafes.

Jack’s dad pulled the plug on his finances. But instead of making him stay, it pushed Jack to find other means of studying. Which he found in the deepest, hottest part of the Spanish desert. Where they grew tomatoes in polytunnels and filmed Wild West movies. An eco research centre where he would learn sustainable engineering.

It would be OK. It was only for a year. There was no internet and limited phone contact, but it would be OK.

Alan raged.

The weather changed. The sky grew clouds that turned grey overnight and it rained as incessantly as the sun had beaten down. The grass went green.

And Jack left.

‘Of course I want you to wait for me. But I understand that for both of us it’s a big ask. So let’s take it a day at a time. Let what will be, be.’
They were not the parting words that Emily wanted to hear.

But she didn’t have to dwell on them for long, because three days after Jack left, Bernard died.

Back on the boat, Jack clicked his fingers and said, ‘Emily, what are you thinking about?’

She shook her head, surprised to find that she’d just been sitting reminiscing in a trance. ‘Nothing. I wasn’t thinking about anything.’

‘Yeah, right,’ he scoffed. ‘It didn’t look like nothing.’

She rested her fork on the side of her bowl and leant forward, her elbows resting on the table, her palm supporting her chin and said, ‘I was thinking about how hot it was. That summer. How just unbelievably hot it was.’

Jack swallowed and put his fork down as well, crossed his arms over his chest and tipped his chair back against the cupboard. ‘Yeah. It was hot.’

‘You think the heat made a difference? Like we’ve never talked about it, have we? This is probably the first time we’ve seen each other.’ She narrowed her eyes, thinking, then said, ‘It
is
the first time we’ve seen each other, isn’t it? God that’s weird.’

Jack got up and started to make coffee in a little silver percolator that sat on the hob. ‘I saw you nearly every time I went to buy a paper. Staring down from a magazine. Your life, Em, it’s hectic. Chaos.’

She frowned. ‘It’s not chaos. It isn’t.’ She shook her head when he raised a brow in disbelief. ‘It has been, like I certainly did some stupid things that I’m not necessarily proud of but it’s bloody hard to suddenly be thrust into the limelight and have no idea how to handle it. Seriously, don’t look at me like that. I’d like to see how you would have handled it. You can’t throw them all in the river, you know.’ She smiled and took the little cup of coffee that he had poured while she was talking. ‘Thanks, by the way, for today. Possibly could have walked him out the gate, but thanks anyway.’

Jack just tipped his head in acceptance, didn’t say anything.

‘Honestly, you’ve got to believe me when I say that it’s not the way my life is now. Not always, anyway. I was really young and at sea, then. Especially after Giles…’

They both sort of flinched when she said his name and so she carried on really quickly, trying to get to her point rather than dwell on her ex-fiancé. ‘I was suddenly free and rich and had too many people that I trusted as my friends. And, unfortunately, all that is captured on camera for the world to see, for ever.’ She gave a small laugh and then drained her espresso. ‘Let’s go outside and have a brandy or something. This is too deep. Have you got any brandy?’

Jack nodded. He drank a sip of coffee and chucked the rest in the sink, then took a bottle of brandy off the top shelf, hooked two small green glasses between his fingers and as he started to walk outside, beckoned for her to go ahead of him.

Chapter Seven

Bernard’s death wasn’t just devastating because he had been so important and so lovely. It was a disaster because he never got round to changing his will. So his death was quickly followed by the arrival of his sister, who hated Emily’s mother more than she could express in words, and kicked them out in seething silence, practically hissing that they were never to step foot in Mont Manor again.

Suddenly Emily and her mother were homeless again, their hastily packed bags at their feet as they sat in the Dandelion Cafe and pushed cold scrambled eggs around on their plates. Unlike other times like this, however, Emily’s mother had a back-up option. A tiny apartment in France that she’d bought with some money left over from a previous inheritance, a tiny bolt-hole for emergencies. So she had decided the best plan was to head to Europe to lick her wounds and regroup. Seventeen year old Emily was welcome to join her. But that meant passing up an acting opportunity that had been bubbling away for a while and had finally come to fruition. Her soap opera director, who by this point was more than a little in love with Emily, had been given his first big break on a low-budget movie filming at Pinewood and had wrangled a small part for his young protégé.

So in order to stay, Emily would have to find somewhere to live and her lifeline came in the unlikely form of Bernard’s friend, Enid. Enid ran the Dandelion Cafe on Cherry Pie Island and had been pouring the bereft pair free coffee refills while eavesdropping on their woes. Emily spent six months living with Enid. In a tiny box room at the back of her houseboat that was really a cupboard.

Much like how her and Jack were sitting now on the deck of his boat, the brandy on the floor between them, their legs up on the railing, the stars bright up ahead, Enid would sit up and wait for Emily, whatever time she came home. She didn’t think a seventeen year old should run around unaccounted for, whatever Emily’s mother thought. She would sit out on her deck drinking coffee and smoking cigars as she’d done so often at Mont Manor with Bernard.

The night Emily came home and said that she was auditioning for a role in a film that would shoot half in Bulgaria and then move to Hollywood, that she probably wouldn’t get it because she was up against proper people and she probably wasn’t quite thin enough and looked maybe a bit young for the part, but wouldn’t it be amazing? Wouldn’t it be the best thing ever? Giles Fox was in it? Imagine acting with Giles Fox! Enid had lounged back against the side of her boat, her bare feet dangling in the river, watching her quizzically as Emily practically lost her breath she was talking so fast and said,
‘It doesn’t all have to be such a hurry, Emily. There’s no rush.’

And Emily remembered getting really annoyed, throwing her arms up and huffing and saying how it was pointless even talking to her because she didn’t understand. And lying in her box room bed that night with the answer she wished she’d said going round and round in her head:
Of course there’s a rush. Because if you don’t grab it while it’s there, then the next minute it’s gone. Of course there’s a rush.

‘I really do like your boat, you know?’ Emily said as she sat with her legs outstretched, swirling her brandy in the little green glass and shivering slightly in the cool evening air.

Jack looked around as if to check what it might be like to see it for the first time. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ she smiled, almost mocking their politeness.

Jack chucked a stone from the deck into the river and they watched as the light from the boat caught the ripples on the water. ‘How’s your new house?’ he asked, still looking at the river.

‘Ruined by dreadful interior design.’

He laughed through his nose. And his shoulders slumped back against the wooden cabin, like he was finally starting to relax since she’d arrived on the boat. Emily tucked her legs underneath her and pulled her hair out of its ponytail. ‘Do you want to help me put it back to normal? Build me a staircase or something?’

Jack leant back and closed his eyes for a second, then shook his head. Like he’d thought this question might be coming. ‘No.’