‘Funky, or elegant? What do you reckon?’
I held up an Ikat print tunic in one hand and a grey linen dress in the other. Jude reclined further on the bed, the better to appraise both outfits from a suitable distance.
‘I’d go with that,’ she said, leaning forward and swatting the dress, ‘the other one looks a bit “eccentric potter”.’
‘Oh, cheers, Jude…’
‘No it’s nice, and everything, it’s just… I’m not being funny, Kaz, you’ve got to be careful living in a place like this.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Well, we had a little nose round the town on our way here – it’s very cute, but…’
I jutted my chin, defensively.
‘… Also, let’s face it, a bit Middle Earth.’
‘It isn’t actually,’ I said hotly. ‘That’s just the touristy bit. There’s quite a decent commercial gallery that you wouldn’t have seen because it’s tucked away. And there’s a craft beer place and an art trail twice a…’
‘Don’t take it so personally,’ interrupted Jude, laughing, ‘it’s just where you live. It doesn’t define you.’
I looked at Jude in her Agnès b. shirt and her expensive haircut and felt a faint twinge of… what? Not dislike, surely? One could not dislike one’s best friend, who has stuck by one through thick and thin, particularly thin. Irritation, then. Yes, Jude could be irritating. Dave too. They had made fun of the Aga, as I knew they would. Dave had started humming the theme tune to The Archers and talking about milk quotas in a funny accent. But then the four of us had gone on to enjoy an evening of drunken camaraderie. Dave had brought coke ‘for old time’s sake’ and everyone had done a line except me. I was tactfully discouraged. There was a lot of repartee about what Dave insisted on calling ‘the Auld Neighbourhood’, even though he’s not Irish and it was in Hackney. Mutual friends were shot down in flames for their hypocrisies and pretensions. I found myself wondering what kind of jokes Dave and Jude made about us behind our backs, although to be fair, we had not really been joke material of late. Not unless you had a very sick sense of humour, anyway. It was a fun evening all the same and for a couple of hours, in the glow of the fire and the embrace of the wine, and to the strains of a mellow soundtrack provided by Nick’s music app that told you if you liked that, you might also like this, I started to see how I might become a person again, a friend, a wife even.
But that had been last night and this was tonight and the grey linen dress looked try-hard with the wedge heels that Jude had suggested, yet frumpy when dressed down with Converse, so I had abandoned it in favour of a drapey sweater and jeans. It had been a warm day and the sky was still blue, but a bank of pinky-grey clouds was scudding up the valley on a brisk evening breeze. The fairy lights that Nick had rigged in the trees around my new studio were swinging alarmingly, and smoke was swirling from the barbecue like a malevolent genie released from its lamp.
Jude and I stood on the grass, arms hugging our bodies and sipping our wine, while further down the garden Nick was greeting some early arrivals, his tone jovial and not a little strained.
‘This reminds me of my sixth birthday party,’ I muttered in Jude’s ear. ‘My mum invited the whole class and I hid in my bedroom and refused to come down.’
‘Let’s not talk to them,’ Jude said. ‘Let’s just get wasted and dance on the patio.’
I gave her an anxious glance.
‘Relax,’ Jude patted me on the shoulder, ‘I’m kidding.’
Already, Nick was shepherding an elderly couple up the garden path towards us: the man, white-haired and slightly stooped, in a houndstooth jacket and slacks; the woman ruddy-faced and beady in a polyester two-piece.
‘Darling,’ Nick said (he never called me darling), ‘these are our next-door-but-one neighbours, Jean and Gordon from Prospect Cottage. Jean, Gordon; meet my wife Karen and our very good friend Jude.’
I shook Jean’s papery hand, then Gordon’s surprisingly soft one.
‘Jew, was it?’ bellowed Gordon, his face contorted with what I hoped was curiosity, but feared might be something worse.
‘Jude,’ said Jude, with a beaming smile, ‘short for Judith.’
‘Ah…’ said Gordon, with a hint of relief.
‘But I am Jewish, as it happens,’ said Jude, ‘on my mother’s side anyway, which is how it works. All that wandering in the desert. I suppose they couldn’t be sure who the father was, so they made it matrilineal.’
‘I see,’ said Gordon, with a faint look of distaste.
‘Anyway,’ Jude said breezily, ‘I’m about to get a top-up. Can I bring you something to drink…?’
‘A light ale for me and Jean’ll have a tomato juice,’ Gordon said.
Perhaps Jean would like a Mai Tai, I felt like saying; perhaps she’s in the mood for a Sex on the Beach. I caught Jude’s eye as she headed off towards the makeshift patio bar.
‘Grab me another beer will you, Jude?’ Nick called after her. ‘On second thoughts, you won’t have enough hands, I’ll come with you.’
‘Nick…’ I protested, but they had gone and I was marooned, clutching my glass, as tongue-tied and awkward as if the new guests were some glamour couple from Islington, not our septuagenarian neighbours from two doors up.
I turned back to them with my best hostess’s smile. ‘Have you… lived here long?’
Jean turned deferentially to Gordon.
‘How long is it, dear?’
Gordon raised his eyes heavenwards.
‘Nineteen sixty-seven we moved in,’ he muttered as if this were a topic of conversation he was tired of rehashing.
‘Nineteen sixty-seven, that’s right,’ Jean nodded fondly, ‘because we got a television and that lady won the song contest in her bare feet.’
Gordon muttered to himself and drifted off to weigh up the vegetable patch.
‘Goodness, that’s a long time!’ I said, with a forced smile.
Fifty years in this one spot. Fifty years married to Gordon. I felt a gloom descending and I wasn’t sure if it was on Jean’s behalf or my own. Would I find myself reminiscing at some future date on my own half century spent in this obscure little corner? The hedges growing higher every season, the trees growing taller, the wonky signpost finally falling off so that not even Jude would be able to find me?
‘We moved in with Gordon’s mother, after his father passed away.’
‘Right,’ I said.
‘And by the time she passed on I was in the family way, so it made sense to stay in the house.’
‘How lovely!’ I said, thinking the opposite. ‘It must be so nice to have that sense of continuity. Do your children still live nearby?’
‘Oh no, dear, Peter’s in Dubai and…’ she lowered her voice, ‘… Gordon doesn’t see eye to eye with our daughter, so we don’t see her any more…’ her tone was wistful ‘… or the grandchildren.’
‘Oh, what a shame,’ I said with a sympathetic pout, ‘it’s such a lovely spot for little ones too.’
Who was I kidding? Prospect Cottage was every estate agent’s nightmare – a blight on an otherwise desirable hamlet in which the average property prices had doubled in a decade. Its mellow stone frontage had been pebble-dashed over and the portion of its front garden not turned into hard-standing for the couple’s Honda Civic, was dominated by a vast Leylandii, whose one benefit was that it obscured a fuller view of the ugly uPVC porch which Jean and Gordon had filled with gloomy, Triffid-like houseplants. Neglect, the consequence of its owners’ advancing years, had been the property’s only saving grace, allowing its hedges to grow tall and shaggy, ivy to rampage up to its sagging eaves and moss to spawn on wall and outbuilding alike, softening its ugly profile into an irregular dark green carbuncle.
‘… They know who their granny is though,’ Jean continued now, the chirpy optimism in her tone more heartbreaking by far than despair, ‘I never forget their birthdays. Send ’em a postal order every year, on the dot.’
A postal order, I mused, was that still a thing?
‘That’s nice,’ I said doubtfully.
Jean gave me a wistful smile but as we both glanced across to where Gordon was still glowering at the kale, it died on her lips, and I looked away embarrassed. Over her shoulder I could see a young couple making their way down the lane, he carrying a bottle of champagne, she a Kilner jar trimmed with gingham. Behind them trailed two little girls in flouncy dresses and Alice bands, each clutching a small bunch of garden flowers. I squeezed Jean’s arm by way of ‘excuse me’ and her eyes met mine in mute appeal, as if there was more she had wanted to say to me.
‘Douglas Gaines,’ said the newcomer, pumping my hand warmly and handing me the bottle. ‘And this is my wife Imogen.’
She was a woman for whom the term pretty might have been coined: snub-nosed, blue-eyed, smooth-haired, with a mouth neither too big nor too small. She wore a fitted cotton dress and an angora cardigan over her freckled shoulders.
‘Courgette chutney,’ she said, thrusting the Kilner jar at me. ‘Last year’s, I’m afraid, but it keeps for ever.’
I juggled the champagne, the Kilner jar and my half-empty glass before finding a precarious equilibrium.
‘Thank you so much.’
Douglas ushered the two girls forward.
‘And these two monkeys are Honour and Grace. Say “hello”, girls.’
‘Hello,’ they chimed, thrusting their bunches of wilting flowers at me.
‘Oh! Sweet.’
I made an awkward grab for one of the posies and the jar of chutney slipped from under my arm and smashed on the path.
The faint babble of conversation stopped and there was a brief silence, before someone – it must have been Dave – filled it with ironic applause.
Slowly, I took in the tableau of horror – the green gloop on the path, studded with shards of inch-thick glass; the spatter of chutney up the legs, and yes, on the dresses of Honour and Grace; the expressions of polite dismay on the faces of their parents.
‘God! Oh God. I am so sorry. I’m such a…’
Grace (or was it Honour?) started to cry while her braver sister cast a silent malevolent spell on me. Whatever she was summoning – pustules, incontinence, lameness, it couldn’t have been worse than the agony of standing there for what felt like decades, apologizing on a loop, while the Gaineses’ smiles grew ever more strained.
‘You’ve met the wife, then?’ Nick appeared from nowhere, clapping a matey hand on each of their shoulders, and looking from Douglas to Imogen and back again with an expression of such pop-eyed satirical enthusiasm that they had no choice but to laugh. Even I managed to crack a smile – my roguish husband, whose insults were taken for compliments, whose sins masqueraded as misdemeanours – always on hand with a ready quip.
‘She made it herself,’ I murmured, woefully, in Nick’s ear. He bent down to appraise the spilled chutney before sticking his finger in an uncontaminated bit and licking it ostentatiously.
He grimaced.
‘Lucky escape if you ask me!’
There was a moment of silence while the assembled guests digested the audacity of his remark, then Imogen turned on him an expression of scandalized delight and batted his sleeve and Douglas emitted a complicit snort. Jude handed me a dustpan and brush and ushered the little girls towards the kitchen. I heard her promising them Coke, crisps and stain removal, in that order. Day officially saved.
More people came. A friendly couple called Ray and Min who ran the B&B and overhauled vintage motorbikes in their spare time, followed by a plump Scottish woman, Cath, mannish of dress, unfussy of demeanour. She explained which house she lived in and I must have looked surprised. It was the picture-perfect cottage with roses round the door, which I had imagined might belong to some apple-cheeked matron and Nick had insisted was more likely a lucrative holiday let. Cath was a garden designer, she told me, and whilst her own garden reflected her old-fashioned preference for lupin and hollyhock, she had paid for it by designing minimalist gardens for city types who didn’t give a shit about plants but cared very much that she’d won two silver gilts at Chelsea. I smiled at that.
Things were getting almost buzzy now. The local farmer dropped in, accepted a glass of wine, offered us a discount on his organic beef and asked us to like his Facebook page before heading off to move the yearlings to their summer pasture. Then came an interesting pair, young and arty-looking with foreign accents and I got quite excited until Min took me to one side and explained, in embarrassed tones, that they were guests at the B&B, who hadn’t quite grasped the protocol, and thought it was open house. I didn’t mind. They bulked out the numbers and brought down the average age of the guests by a good couple of years. I even had a slightly stilted discussion with the woman about the merits of the Swedish education system, only to be told later by Jude that they were Dutch.
As twilight fell, a couple of rackety youths looked in, who seemed to know everyone, but only hung around long enough to eat a burger apiece and down a couple of beers, before heading up the lane towards the local pub. Nick muttered ‘freeloaders’ under his breath, but I didn’t mind – I liked their swagger and their air of entitlement and the way they came and went, like the weather. I could almost fool myself they were mates of Ethan’s – that we were a family again.
It was only when the four of us were clearing up at the end, trekking back and forth from garden to kitchen with glasses dangling between our fingertips, making cheery remarks as we passed each other on the path, that it occurred to me that Jean and Gordon must have left without saying goodbye.