By the time Juno and Tilda arrived back home after calling at the fabulous artisan bakery and deli in the village for one of their wonderful – but ridiculously expensive – sourdough cobs, it was well after one and both of them were starving and already pulling off chunks and sharing the bread as they walked.
‘You’ve twenty minutes before we need to go,’ Juno warned as Tilda led Harry Trotter through the gate at the bottom of the paddock. ‘You’ll stink of horse so, once you’ve done what you have to do with him, jump in the shower and get your party dress on.’
‘Party dress?’ Tilda scoffed over her shoulder. ‘I’m nearly eleven, not five.’
Juno quickly cut the remaining hunk of bread into pieces, found pate and cheese as well as marmite for Tilda and, sat with a huge mug of tea at the kitchen table, contemplated what she might do with the free Saturday afternoon ahead of her. She certainly had some medical notes to write up, there was still the ironing to attack and, really, she should go up and check on Helen and maybe take her to Sainsbury’s.
Helen didn’t drive much anymore; a fear of crowds, and medication that had interfered with her ability to concentrate while in the car meant that, although her old Fiat still sat on the drive, she very rarely had the confidence or felt the need to wander far from home. Pandora had taken it upon herself to be in charge of their mother and, while both Juno and Ariadne considered Pandora bossy in the extreme, they were most grateful that the responsibility for Helen had been taken on by their sister. At the end of the day, Pandora wasn’t in paid employment like Ariadne and Juno and, in the same way that Pandora had assumed total responsibility for the sixteen-year-old Lexia, taking her to live with them when Patrick, their father abandoned them for Anichka, and Helen finally gave herself up to mental illness and was sectioned, she’d taken on the mantle of care for their mother.
‘What are you up to this afternoon?’ Tilda, wearing the eleven-year-old’s party uniform of black tights, faded denim shorts, her new DM boots and hoody, spread butter and marmite thickly on a huge chunk of bread.
‘I’m just considering,’ Juno said, cutting a wedge of cheese to go with the remaining heel of the cob. ‘I might actually just lie here and read all afternoon.’
‘I thought you were wanting a new bathroom?’
Juno looked suspiciously at Tilda. ‘Are you wearing makeup?’
‘Of course,’ Tilda retorted. ‘There’s no way I’m going to Lulu’s party without it.’
‘But your skin is so beautiful and unmarked at your age. I was fourteen before I wore so much as a dash of lipstick.’
‘Ah, the good old days.’ Tilda reached for the biscuit tin. ‘This is nothing compared with what Emily, Martha and Poppy will have on their faces. So, your bathroom?’
‘What about it?’ Juno eyed the M&S flapjacks, reached out a hand and then thought better of it.
‘Don’t you have to start pulling all the old stuff out? You know, ready for the new?’
‘Me? No, the workmen will do that.’
‘Save yourself a fortune if you did it yourself. Good exercise too.’
*
And so it was, once she’d dropped Tilda off at her party, Juno drove back through Westenbury calling in at the village hardware store for a wallpaper scraper, sandpaper and the bottle of yellow sugar soap the assistant advised would be needed to prepare surfaces prior to painting. While she had no intention of pulling out showers and demolishing tiles, and she accepted it was downright daft to even think about the paintwork when the old stuff hadn’t been pulled out or she’d even sat down with the catalogues and chosen the new bathroom, she had a sudden urge to be a bit proactive. The old, peeling wallpaper definitely needed to come off. That’s where she’d make a start.
Juno remembered helping Patrick to rub down paintwork when she was just a little girl. She must have been seven or eight and Helen hugely pregnant with Lexia. Patrick, adoring Helen’s fecund, fruitful body full of promise, was happy to be at his wife’s side and with his three daughters rather than straying, as was his wont with his twenty-year-old students once the reality of giving birth and crying babies replaced the tableau he created for himself as father and husband while Helen was pregnant. Juno recalled Patrick reaching out a hand to his wife’s rounded belly and Helen clasping it to herself before covering it with kisses.
Ariadne, almost seventeen and already deeply suspicious of her father as well as totally embarrassed that there was yet another baby on its way, kept herself out of the way in her bedroom poring over her Classics, English and French A level studies and counting the days until she could leave for university and distance herself from what she perceived to be her father’s hypocrisy and her mother’s ridiculously blatant need and desire for Patrick.
All Juno could remember was how much she’d enjoyed the rubbing down of the old pink cot brought down from storage in the loft and loving being with Patrick and helping prepare the nursery for the new baby. Despite her medical training, Juno was not of the nature to wonder why, recalling her seven-year-old self, she might feel the need to rediscover that lovely feeling she’d had, working together with Patrick, having her daddy to herself for once, her father at home and so in love with her mother.
As she grew older, she eventually began to understand, and ultimately had to accept, that the wonderful father who had shown her how to rub down paintwork was actually not so admirable after all. That snapshot, of preparing for her new baby brother or sister – Juno secretly longed for a brother – was probably the most favoured she carried in her subconscious, bringing it out for a good airing in order to persuade her younger self that, really, Patrick had been a good and loving, as well as present, father. The reality that he was often absent from their lives or, when he was at home, selfishly into his own world, distant, even irritable with his offspring, Juno had never been prepared to admit even to herself and certainly not to others.
By moving to Scotland to study medicine, rather than choosing an English, more readily accessible university, she knew she was guilty of deliberately distancing herself not only from her parents’ fracturing marriage but also the fallout the three older girls dreaded if Patrick ever finally made his temporary absences permanent. Juno knew she would carry the guilt that she’d abandoned her mother for the rest of her days.
Wanting to in some way assuage that guilt, Juno also knew she didn’t want her own children to be at odds with their father. While she was beginning to realise she probably no longer loved Fraser as she should, she didn’t want Gabriel and Tilda to suffer because of it.
Putting all thoughts of her mother’s marriage, as well as the state of her own, from her mind – she was actually getting quite good at doing just this – Juno knew she was in the mood for action, to set the ball rolling towards a new bathroom. If she didn’t start stripping off the old Eighties’ wallpaper – did anyone have wallpaper in bathrooms anymore? – she might go off the whole idea of a new bathroom and nothing would have changed by the time Fraser was home.
After Googling how to go about stripping wallpaper, Juno searched out her oldest jeans and sweatshirt, assembled a bucket of water and her long-handled broom, a spray bottle with hot water and vinegar and, tuning her old ghetto-blaster radio to Radio 4 and the afternoon play, set to. She soaked the walls above the banana-coloured tiles thoroughly and was amazed when the decades-old rose-strewn yellow wallpaper scraped off easily. There was something incredibly gratifying about the long strips of paper that lifted, curled and fell to the bathroom floor in one piece, rather like peeling the skin from an apple in one continuous strand.
If she’d known it was going to be this easy, Juno assured her red-faced reflection in the bathroom mirror, she’d have done it immediately they’d moved in. Within an hour there was a satisfying mound of wet, yellow paper on the cork-tiled floor and Juno opened the heavy sash window slightly to let out the smell of damp paper and vinegar and went downstairs to the kitchen to put the kettle on and find the roll of black bin-bags. She glanced out of the kitchen window and watched Harry Trotter grazing peacefully at the bottom end of the paddock. Although she knew he could be an absolute ruffian, getting his kicks from terrorising walkers who took their lives into their own hands walking down the public footpath through his paddock, he appeared, this afternoon, such a well-behaved pony. She continued to stand, gazing out at the garden where, at the edges of the lawn, the daffodil bulbs had pushed out the first green shoots with their promise of the spring to come. Although cold, the afternoon was still fine and sunny, but there was quite a wind getting up and Juno watched as the cedar trees swayed and bent to the left as the breeze caught the naked boughs. Where would be the best spot for the hen coop? She’d never let on to Tilda, but she was actually beginning to feel rather excited about Myrtle and her mates being part of their family.
Juno frowned and tried to picture Fraser. It’d not been six weeks since he’d left and already it seemed like he’d been gone for ever. Did she miss him? Hand on heart, she didn’t think she did. Both of them had known their marriage was just plodding along, but then, weren’t all marriages like that? Juno sighed. She’d married too young, that was it. She really should have made more of an effort, suggested weekends away perhaps; date nights – wasn’t that what they were called? A surprise bottle of champagne on a Friday night after work instead of a cup of tea and a catch up of Coronation Street. She wasn’t yet forty for heaven’s sake. Would she fancy Fraser if she met him, as he was now, today? She had a horrid feeling she wouldn’t, and the thought of the next forty years spent with someone she merely rubbed along with, rather than adored, suddenly filled her with panic. She breathed deeply, took a good slurp of strong coffee and reached for those damned flapjacks in order to calm herself and make herself feel better. She really mustn’t think like this; she had a lovely husband, fabulous kids and a great home – well, it would be once she’d done some of the renovations. And, really exciting, Lexia was back. She’d get to know her all over again. She made the decision to clear up the mess upstairs, have a long hot shower and then ring Fraser and tell him she loved him and was missing him. Juno made sure they spoke at least once a week without fail, but she didn’t like to admit, even to herself, that she didn’t look forward to the chats. She needed to make more of an effort. One did need to work at marriage after all. And tomorrow she’d find Lexia and go and visit her. Maybe take Helen.
It didn’t take long to shove the piles of old soggy wallpaper – as well as rather a lot of the actual plaster that had also come down – into two binbags and then sweep the bathroom floor. Because, after discussion with the man in the bathroom shop yesterday, the new bathroom was more than likely going to be almost completely tiled, so the only real paintwork that would need doing was the actual bathroom door. Juno stood and looked at it. She remembered Patrick telling her, as he set to with a screwdriver in the nursery, that to rub down, prepare and paint a door properly, one should always remove the door handle. Only sloppy decorators painted round it. Juno knew there was, for some reason, a screwdriver in her knicker drawer – she’d no idea why – and she went through to retrieve it and soon had the handles off and a pile of screws which she took back into the bedroom with the screwdriver for safekeeping. She then spent ten minutes washing down the paintwork with the sugar soap and another twenty with the sandpaper before realising she wasn’t really making much progress on that score and she’d either have to hire one of those sanding machine things or, even better, leave it to a professional decorator.
Juno sat back on her heels and surveyed her handiwork, feeling satisfied that she’d at least started the ball rolling and there was now no going back. Sweating and dirty, she cleared up as best she could and went into her bedroom and stripped off. She kicked her dirty clothes into a corner and went back to run the shower planning how she’d spend the evening. She had some episodes of Luther to catch up and watch but, she reminded herself, she’d been quite frightened when that mad murderer in the clown mask had crawled along the floor of the top deck of the bus to his victim in the episode she’d watched during the week. Feeling a bit spooked, her mind now wandering to the shower scene from Psycho, Juno hurriedly washed her hair as she tried to recall if she’d locked the back door. She had a horrid feeling she hadn’t. The wind was beginning to blow a bit of a gale, the old blind she should really have taken down before stripping the wallpaper, lifting and rattling in the draft through the open window. She stopped the shower and stepped out, reaching for the towel on the wooden towel rail. Bugger. She’d taken rail and towels into the bedroom before she’d started wallpaper stripping.
A particularly strong gust of wind set the blind dancing once more and, as Juno went to close the window, the bathroom door slammed behind her at the same time as the first notes of Vivaldi’s ‘Spring’ sounded from her mobile where she’d left it in the next room.
‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ she shouted, heading, dripping and naked, for the bedroom.
Except she wasn’t. Going anywhere, that is. The bathroom door, without its handles, had slammed shut imprisoning her, without a stitch on, in the now quite chilly bathroom.
Juno slid the tips of her fingers under the door and pulled. Nothing. Bugger. She rattled the metal steel cylinder through the exposed hole in the bathroom door but, without anything to grip and bite into, it simply rotated freely mocking her, it seemed, with its refusal to open the latch.
Whoever was phoning persevered once more and then there was silence. Nothing. Just the sound of Juno’s breathing and the increasing stream of profanities that met the quiet of a cold, locked bathroom.
She was a prisoner. A prisoner in her own damned bathroom without a stitch of clothing, dripping hair and, because she’d thrown everything, including the towels, into the bedroom, not even a flannel or loofah to cover herself. She glanced at her wrist and swore again at the futility of doing so; her watch was also in the bedroom and only the darkening sky, when she moved the blind to look down into the front garden, told her it must be around 5 p.m. ‘I can’t stay here all night.’ She spoke the words out loud for the reassurance of hearing her own voice and, as she felt in vain for heat from the bathroom’s one antiquated radiator, began to shiver from the cold. ‘Damn, damn, damn, the sodding central heating system’s playing up again. I’m bloody frozen. Perished.’ Juno heard the little tremor in her voice and, crossly admonished herself. ‘Get a grip, Juno. You’re a grown woman, a doctor.’
She turned and stamped – as much to get her circulation going, as to frighten the lock into submission – back to the door and tried once more, patiently at first, pleading, teasing, speaking softly as she gently turned the metal thingy through the door. And then, when it refused to play ball, rattling the door and kicking its half-rubbed down paintwork with fury until the cylinder slid smoothly out and onto the bedroom floor beyond. Great stuff. Now she’d lost the effing pole thing.
Juno was just considering filling the bath and immersing herself in hot water in order to prevent death from hypothermia (she couldn’t afford to die just yet; she and Fraser hadn’t ever been able to agree on where the kids should end up in the event of their own untimely demise and, as such, the wills lay, incomplete, in the kitchen drawer and would more than likely remain there until Fraser’s return) when there came the welcome sound of someone knocking on the kitchen door.
Oh, thank goodness. Someone was down there, in the garden. Juno reached her fingers, numb with cold, to the old Victorian sash window once more and heaved with all her might. An icy blast of wind swept over her naked body and wet hair but, fear that whoever was down in the garden would leave, abandoning her once more to her fate as Prisoner Cell Block Bathroom, lent volume to her lungs and, taking a deep breath she yelled, ‘Help, I’m up here.’
More knocking on the back door. ‘Help, I’m locked in,’ Juno yelled, part of her wanting to titter at the ridiculous vision of herself as Rapunzel, letting down her wet hair to whoever was in the back garden on this bitterly cold late January afternoon. ‘Help, help, bloody well help, somebody…’
*
‘Good job you’d left your back door unlocked,’ Scott Butler shouted cheerfully from the other side of the bathroom door. ‘Hang on, I’ll just stick this cylinder back through the door and then attach the handle this side… and it should… yep, there you go… you’re free. Oh, you poor little thing, you’re blue with cold.’ Scott turned his back, scanning Juno’s bedroom for something – anything – to cover her and then, finding Fraser’s old white bathrobe which she’d thrown out onto the bedroom floor together with the towels and towel rail in her eagerness to get on with stripping the wallpaper, helped ease her frozen body into its depths.
‘I can do it,’ Juno muttered, embarrassed.
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Scott frowned. ‘Trust me, I’m a doctor.’ He tied the belt of the bathrobe around her waist as Juno continued to shiver and then, reaching for a towel, sat her down on the bedroom armchair wrapping it deftly and expertly turban-like around her wet hair. ‘I’m surprised there aren’t any icicles on the ends of your hair. There’s a really raw wind out there.’ He disappeared into the bathroom to close the window. ‘Don’t you have any heating on in this place?’
‘The central heating usually clicks in up here at four.’ Juno glanced across at the clock at the side of her bed. ‘But for some reason it hasn’t come on. The whole system is on its last legs, but I think this wind has probably blown the pilot light out on the boiler.’ She looked up at Scott who was standing, arms folded across his warm navy Crombie coat and felt ridiculously underdressed as well as totally embarrassed at this rather gorgeous man finding her in such a state, and standing here now in her bedroom. ‘Was that you ringing earlier?’
‘Earlier?’
‘About fifteen minutes ago?’
Scott frowned. ‘No, I’d only just arrived, knocked a couple of times and was about to leave when I heard your shouts for help.’ He grinned. ‘You will see the funny side of this eventually, you know. So, no, I didn’t know your phone number, so couldn’t let you know… but thought you might be wondering where it was…’
‘Where what was?’ Juno stared.
‘You left your briefcase in the boot of my car when I gave you the lift home after work yesterday. I only saw it myself this afternoon when I’d been to the gym and threw my bag in there.’ He smiled. ‘You obviously hadn’t got round to thinking about work yet.’
Obviously, Juno thought. Too sodding busy trying to escape from Alcatraz. ‘Oh,’ she said airily, ‘Monday is my day for catching up with work. That’s the beauty of being part-time.’
Scott gave an involuntary shiver and looked at the bedroom door. ‘Look, it really is cold up here; I’m still not used to your British weather. You’re going to get ill if you don’t warm up a bit. Why don’t you run yourself a hot bath?’
‘I’m not going back in there. No way.’
Scott began to laugh. ‘You do realise you’ll have a total phobia about locking the door on a bathroom now? You’ll have to pee with the door open wherever you are.’
Juno began to giggle and then found she couldn’t stop.
‘Look,’ Scott said, moving towards the bathroom, ‘I’ll run you a really hot bath, pour you a whiskey – do you have some somewhere? – and then see if I can fix the boiler and get the central heating going again.’
‘Really, there’s no need,’ Juno half-protested. ‘I’m sure you have other plans’
‘Nope, not at the moment.’
‘Damn.’
‘What? What now?’ Scott reappeared at Juno’s side as she scanned the messages on her phone and the comforting sound of water filling the bath reached her ears.
‘My daughter, Tilda, is out on another sleepover. She’s left several messages reminding me to make sure Harry is tucked up for the night.’
‘Harry?’
‘Tilda’s pony. I need to get him in his stable.’
‘Where is he? In that paddock at the back of your garden?’
Juno nodded.
‘OK, have you a torch?’
‘There’s one by the back door. New batteries in it. Are you sure?’
‘Don’t mind a bit. I like horses. Right, I’ll sort him first and then come back to sort the central heating and then you can direct me towards alcohol. I think I’ll need a stiff drink myself after all this drama.’
‘This is really good of you.’ Juno met Scott’s eyes for the first time since he’d arrived. He smiled down at her and stroked her arm through her bathrobe. Fraser’s bathrobe, she reminded herself as her heart began to quicken for some reason at his touch.
‘Won’t be long,’ he said, before turning and leaving her bedroom.
‘Be still my beating heart,’ Juno muttered to herself as she braved the cold of the bathroom once more, poured half a bottle of Christmas-present-bath-stuff into the steaming contents of the old Seventies avocado bath and, shrugging off the bathrobe, slid beneath the depths and closed her eyes.