SIX

IT WAS, FOR a weekday, a pretty good way to be woken up. Ilex watched the top of Manda’s glossy brown head snaking its way back up the bed and smiled happily.

‘Mmm. It doesn’t get much better than this,’ he told her, feeling a delicious post-coital languor creeping on.

Manda, who rather thought it did, gave his shoulder a swift kiss and climbed out of bed to go and run the shower. She wasn’t due at work till midday, which gave her plenty of time to go to the gym, have a swim and a workout and maybe join in with the advanced yoga class. All that lot would give her energy, get the chi flowing and help her to feel positive, something that she badly needed. Where now, if not at Holbrook House, were she and Ilex going to have their wedding party? What were his parents thinking of, so casually coming up with the idea of selling the place? It was their family’s home, for heaven’s sake, not some superfluous gadget you could offload on eBay. And Clover, who sometimes seemed so babyish as to be barely out of her pram, must be spitting blood at the very idea of Mummy and Daddy getting rid of the house. She probably still kept her soft toy collection there, all cutely lined up on her little pink bed.

Manda knew perfectly well that there were any number of grand venues to choose from for a wedding these days. Kew Gardens was a good one – she’d been to a lovely one there. And there were various hotels and historic houses. Compared with a simple village church and Holbrook House, though, everything else would seem too impersonal. Plus it was hard enough to drag Ilex to an unfamiliar restaurant, let alone expect him to spend the happiest day of his (and her) life at some starchy, swags-and-chintz place he didn’t know inside out. Her friends, when they were being kind, called him ‘traditional’. But when they got a bit pissed and kindness went out of the window, the word ‘anal’ occasionally surfaced.

‘Ilex, darling? Wake up.’ Manda, back from the shower, shook him gently to wake him from the doze he’d fallen into. He looked shiny, she thought; in need of a wipe-down like a bar-top late at night. She turned her attention to her underwear drawer, selected a pink and black Elle Macpherson bra and matching knickers with side-tying bows. She paced around a bit and took her time putting these on, her body prettily posed for her audience as she dressed. Ilex, infuriatingly, wasn’t watching. He stretched and yawned and gazed up at the ceiling. She was wasting her time and should have done this half an hour ago: now he was sated he was focused on the day ahead.

‘Ilex – this thing about Mac and Lottie selling up. Do you think they really will?’ She stood in front of the long mirror and tweaked at her bra cup. Ilex sat up, blinking sleep from his eyes.

‘They’d be mad to right now – prices in that bracket aren’t doing too well. Which means that yes, they’ll probably have it on the market by the end of the week.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, they’re my folks, aren’t they? Never knowingly gone for the smart money option!’ He considered for a moment. ‘But … if they could hold on for another year, we could be talking another half million at least. I despair of them. I mean, what are they going to do for a pension when they’ve blown it all? By the time they’ve got the travel thing out of their systems and bought a place when they get back, there’ll be sod-all left for them to live on.’ He sighed. ‘And by music business standards, they’re pretty much clean living. They could go on to well over a hundred. Imagine financing that at whatever-you-need a year by then. Who’s going to fork out for the care home?’

‘Yes, but it’s not just about the money, is it?’ Manda ventured gently, knowing perfectly well that in Ilex’s case, it certainly was. Worth a try though, so she persevered. Her sister Caro had said, ‘Nothing will happen unless you make it happen.’ She just needed a bit more practice. ‘It’s so much more than a heap of cash to you all, surely, a house like that; it’s somewhere you’ve always called home. You’re all so lucky. Caro and I didn’t have a proper kind of a home after Mum died. Nowhere we could go back to for Christmas and family celebrations.’ She emphasized her point with a deep sigh.

Ilex looked blank. ‘Isn’t this home?’ He looked round their bedroom, puzzled. ‘When I’m out and I say “I’m going home”, this is where I think of.’

This was good, Manda conceded, but in this particular case, today, it was good and bad.

‘But think of Sorrel. She’s got only Holbrook House, the home she’s always had. Where’s she supposed to live? And I don’t think Clover feels the same as you either,’ she ventured. ‘I think when Clover thinks of “home” she thinks of where her mum and dad live.’

‘Oh, well, Clover; she was always the little girl. It’s high time she grew up.’

Ilex climbed out of bed and strode into the bathroom. He didn’t shut the door and Manda could hear him peeing loudly. Why did men do that? It was so unattractive. He’d be completely repulsed if she did it. ‘A man likes a bit of mystery’ had been a favourite adage of her mother when trying (too late) to persuade her adolescent daughters that virginity wasn’t something to offload lightly. Manda felt tears welling up. What would her mum think of her daughter now, reduced to sliding down a bed at 7 a.m. to give a man a blow-job in the hope he’d be brain-addled enough to ask her to marry him? There wasn’t a lot of mystery there.

Ilex emerged from the bathroom. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, scratching his head as if helping the process along, ‘maybe I should have a word with Clover about this house-sale thing. And Sorrel too. Maybe between us we could persuade them to hold off for a bit, think it through. Just till the market perks up again. And till they’ve made firmer plans. I mean, they haven’t a clue yet where they’re heading, have they? No point going to the expense of advertising the place if they’re going to change their minds.’

Manda felt enormously cheered. She put her arms round him and kissed him softly. ‘Now that’s a brilliant idea!’ she murmured into his ear as she snuggled against his bare chest. ‘I do love you, Ilex!’

There, Mum. She sent the thought up to her mother among the angels. See? Job done.

Clover had tried telling herself several times that she was a Big Girl Now who had long since left the cosy world of Mummy and Daddy and she would normally be the first to admit that it was pretty pathetic for a woman in her early thirties to feel so upset about her parents making plans to change their lives. But these weren’t normal times (Was Sean about to be made redundant? Or was he whooping it up at vast expense with some easily impressed slapper? Should she give up her subscription to Sunshine Property and forget the Dordogne and blissful sunny peace?) and they certainly weren’t normal parents. When other people’s mums and dads got to a certain age they took up golf or they bought into nice chintzy time-share apartments in safe places like Malta or Torquay. They went on cruises where they were lectured to about Cretan myths or Roman relics and they went to see ancient relatives in New Zealand before it was too late. You weren’t going to get a pair of old rockers like Lottie and Mac to join in with any of that (and to be honest, it crossed her mind she was probably thinking of people a good twenty years older than they were). Clover liked life to be settled; she relished the comfort of the familiar, and having her parents continuing at Holbrook House represented safety and solidity to her. If she really wanted to analyse it (and she didn’t much like to, for fear of what she’d find) she’d have to admit that the place still represented somewhere to run back to, a refuge when she needed it. And boy, had she needed it, a mere six weeks after Elsa was born. There’d been Sean, working away from home at a rugby awards event up north, celebrating second-time fatherhood by shafting a waitress across a table-full of trophies. His assistant had walked in on them and immediately phoned Clover as she ‘thought she ought to be told’. Clover, engrossed at the time in breast-feeding and Sophia’s emerging sibling rivalry, wasn’t so sure. Some things you can really do without knowing at a time like that – she had quite enough on her plate, thank you. Once you were told, you had to deal with it.

There’d been several sessions of counselling after that, for Clover had been feeling very shaky and unsure of herself. Sean unhelpfully diagnosed post-natal depression, presumably to deflect from the more obvious post-being-cheated-on sort. One day she’d taken Elsa out in the car to buy some nappies at Sainsbury’s and instead of coming back just that one mile home, had driven in a complete daze down to Holbrook House, silently gone up to her old room and climbed into her childhood bed, snuggling up to her baby as if she was a comforting teddy. Mad, Sean had called her, completely certifiable. He’d been furious (which might have had something to do with having had to cancel his golf to stay at home with Sophia) and had told her to grow up, get herself sorted. It had only, he’d said, been a stupid, one-off shag – it wasn’t going to happen again and there was no need for all this palaver. Apparently it was a well-known man thing, so he claimed (so that was all right then – perfectly normal). Nature, in her skewed wisdom, gave men an irresistible desire to go out and spread the seed around immediately after a birth, while the females of the species could see the living proof of the males’ fertility. It was something to do with the survival of the species giving them a primitive urge to impregnate as many women as possible. All this made Clover wonder if she was supposed to be grateful it was only one waitress he’d had, not the entire team, all lined up in their black skirts and little white aprons. If it was only one. He was away over night so often, she couldn’t possibly know what he did. She didn’t want to let herself board that particular train of thought. It was too hard to stop.

The counsellor she had seen hadn’t been much use and had also assumed Clover was suffering crazed delusions brought on by post-natal depression and he had only really taken notice when she’d talked about her early childhood. Nodding and occasionally grunting, the blank-faced therapist had almost chewed the end off his pencil as Clover conjured up her earliest memories: the time she and Ilex were taken round the capitals of Europe in the Charisma tour bus with a selection of beardy old musicians, their sandalled, mantra-chanting women, and the gloriously untamed children of the other band members. Sean had said the therapist was probably stashing all the info away as a case-study for a future self-help bestseller and wasn’t at all interested in Clover’s part in her own childhood but it had left Clover wondering if she’d had her fragile baby-roots shaken by random childcare and the nightly stage-side view of her parents entertaining crowds of thousands instead of tucking her into her cot with nursery rhymes and a Fisher-Price mobile. It had surely left her childishly needy. When she’d worked at Home Comforts, assembling sample boards of paint colours and furnishing fabrics for customers, she’d too often tried to insist that a classic Victorian sitting room really needed candy pink. Now, here she was outside the gates of St Hilary’s, blurting out to her best school-gate friend Mary-Jane that her parents were thinking of selling up and planning a year-long world-trip, and wondering who to blame for her failure to turn into a properly formed grown-up. Hastily, she tried a bit of back-pedalling, looking to make herself feel better.

‘Of course I’m sure they didn’t mean any of it. It was probably just my crazy parents’ idea of a windup. It would be typical of them to come out with it for effect. They’ve probably forgotten all about it by now.’

She smiled and shrugged and opened the door of her VW Touareg in an attempt to put off an approaching traffic warden. Did they have to hover so close to the school at dropping-off time? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be more than a minute or two and it was only a single yellow line, nothing serious. She sighed and chewed at a nail – and why not? After Sunday they were all thoroughly ruined. Late last night she’d had to take off all the shattered varnish and file away the chewed edges. She’d have popped into Hand Job on the high street for repairs but Sean had now made her feel wary about spending casual cash, in case the redundancy thing really was true. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped it was, and had to face a downgrade in outgoings (and she could handle that) or that it wasn’t, and she had to go through all the angst of being convinced he was stashing money offshore as a lead-up to a cheap divorce or spending money on a mistress.

Alongside Clover, watching the girls going into school, Mary-Jane’s face was only mildly sympathetic. She waved distractedly across the playground in the direction of her daughter Polly, who, trailed by Clover’s adoring Sophia, was plodding with dramatic misery at a snail’s pace towards her classroom but was absolutely not to be allowed to get away with yet another day off for a sore throat.

‘So … it was just a spur-of-the-moment idea, maybe.’ Mary-Jane looked thoughtful and then said, ‘But are you sure they haven’t been planning a trip for ages? I mean, selling a house they’ve lived in for over thirty years to fund a serious amount of world travel is a pretty crazy idea to come up with, just on a whim. Imagine how much stuff they’ll have to clear out – how brave is that!’

Unaware she was making things worse and that this wasn’t the role Clover had planned for her, Mary-Jane continued, ‘Perhaps that was the whole idea behind the big lunch – to get you all together to tell you they were cashing in the family chips. Good on them – my parents never went further than the Lake District. They moved into a bungalow the year I went to university in preparation for old age and the time when they couldn’t climb stairs. They weren’t even out of their forties!’

The Lake District. Wouldn’t that suit Mac and Lottie? Why weren’t they the sort who took up gentle hill-walking if they wanted a challenge? This wasn’t even remotely reassuring. Clover had only told Mary-Jane because she thought she could count on her saying the right thing, something along the lines of, ‘Oh how sad, your parents selling up the family home. End of an era.’ A hug would have been nice. Except that obviously it wasn’t sad – well, not the kind of sad you could expect anyone who wasn’t a family member (and who already had her own to-die-for dream-home in France) to understand.

‘No, really I don’t think so. It came out a bit too spontaneously for that, as a sort of follow-up to something else. And besides, planning isn’t my parents’ strong point,’ Clover told her. This was true: the existence of Sorrel was surely proof of that. Sorrel was a brilliant little sister – at a safe distance – but what on earth had they been thinking of, producing another baby when their first two were practically finished with school?

‘I mean, on the one hand why shouldn’t they go travelling while they’ve still got their health and strength? Fine, go for it. Take a holiday. But just getting rid of the family home, our home, our base, well, that’s a shock to the system, really kind of final and drastic. They could have run the idea past us a bit more gently. They didn’t give us any consideration at all, as if the place was just, like nothing, like any old anonymous semi. Holbrook House is so incredibly special, full of all our memories and still quite a lot of our stuff. I felt as if they thought it didn’t count for anything, that they could casually chuck it all away.’ She felt ridiculously close to tears. ‘And …’ she added, summoning up a bit of fury, ‘Sorrel still lives there! When she goes off travelling, where’s she going to come back to?’

The terrifying word ‘You?’ hovered unsaid between the two women. Imagine, Clover thought, Sean’s reaction to the news that they were to give house-room to a moody teenager and all her chaotic possessions. She daren’t so much as put that possibility into words, not even to Mary-Jane.

A dawn chorus trilled out from Mary-Jane’s soft, buttery and so envy-provoking Mulberry bag and she delved in to find her phone. She checked the caller ID and switched off, slinging the phone impatiently back in her bag. ‘It’s Polly, no surprise,’ she said. ‘Bugger. I wish Lance had never given her that stupid little phone. What does a seven year old need one for?’

Clover rather thought it was for what Polly was almost certainly doing now – calling to insist that, in spite of what every harassed early-morning mother promised, she didn’t feel at all better just because she’d gone into school. But yes, why had she got a phone with her in school at her age? Her little brain would fry and, worse, every child in her class would be demanding one, starting with Sophia.

‘Quick, let’s get out of here before Mrs Thing comes out of the class and sees I’m still within catching distance. I can really do without Poll around me today – I’ve got loads to do.’ And Mary-Jane was round the front of Clover’s car and in through the Touareg’s passenger door before Clover had a chance to go through the polite motions of offering her a lift. Clover looked back across the playground as she started the engine in case Polly was actually there, standing on the main-door steps, in pain and weeping. How awful it would be for the poor child to see her own mother being driven away at bank-robber speed rather than rushing back in to scoop her up and take her back home for a day’s sympathetic cherishing.

‘You don’t mind dropping me off back at mine, do you, sweetie?’ Mary-Jane settled back in her seat. ‘We’ve got a new nanny coming for an interview. I’ve got a little job starting in a few weeks – chauffeuring Wimbledon tennis players around. It’s for three and a bit weeks, including training. So, cross fingers, this new girl absolutely needs to be The One.’

‘You said that last time!’ Clover laughed. Mary-Jane’s nanny-disasters were well known: the cheery one from Newcastle had been arrested for shoplifting (how useful Jakey’s fancy three-wheel stroller had turned out to be, equipped like a Barbour jacket with enough pockets to hide half the John Lewis cosmetics counters), the posh Cotswold one had had sex with the Fed-Ex delivery man in Mary-Jane’s bed and at least two idle souls had quit after a mere week, finding that the care of two small children in a terminally untidy household was simply too much hassle.

‘I don’t know why you don’t have a nanny too, Clover. It would free up so much of your time.’

What did Mary-Jane do with all this time? Clover wondered. It certainly wasn’t housework and she didn’t have a regular job to go to or even a dog to walk. She was quite scruffy too, albeit in an attractive, jeans-and-quirky-tops sort of way. It was one of the things Clover liked about her. A lot of the other mummies seemed so positively hell-bent on achieving personal yumminess that you’d think their skin would be exfoliated to bone level. Clover slicked ruinously costly Crème de la Mer across her face and indulged a passion for having her nails done but didn’t spend hours having hot-stone massages or hay-wraps or Restylane treatments. She kept her blonde hair at convenient shoulder-length so it could be tied back or piled up or scuzzed about for maximum sexiness if Sean needed reminding that she was the one he was supposed to fancy but it didn’t take much hairdressing effort beyond the usual four-weekly trim. Mary-Jane’s hair was spiky, as if she had had a bad fright. Clover had heard she cut it herself. So it certainly wasn’t pampering that took up all her time. Perhaps Mary-Jane climbed back into bed and read trashy novels till it was time to collect Jakey from pre-school. How lovely to do that, Clover thought, imagining the guilty bliss of a daytime duvet. How wonderful to have so little conscience. Clover was amazed Mary-Jane had found herself a job at all – even for just a few weeks. She didn’t seem to need the money. No one with children at St Hilary’s seemed to need money. This job’s appeal couldn’t have anything to do with sharing closed-in car-space with staggeringly fit champion sportsmen, could it? Surely not. Or was school-hours sex the time-consuming little hobby of Mary-Jane’s that Clover didn’t know about?

‘I don’t really need a nanny,’ Clover said. ‘Not since Elsa’s been at Toddle-Tots. What would the poor girl do all morning? What does yours do?’

‘Children’s laundry, their lunch, shopping, you’d think of something. And then in the afternoon she takes Jakey to his various activities, cooks their supper. I can usually get them to do my ironing as well, when they’ve got a moment. I find it terribly hard to manage without one,’ Mary-Jane said, yawning. ‘I really hope today’s candidate is worth missing my Pilates session for.’

Clover had actually considered employing someone so that she could find herself a part-time job. Perhaps Home Comforts would take her on for a few mornings a week. It would be so lovely to get back to handling and choosing fabrics again, not to mention the staff discount on anything she might need for when that little house in the sun became reality. But Sean had been adamant – not to mention crudely basic – about not having someone living in. ‘We’d never get any shagging time,’ he’d complained. ‘We’d be sure to get one with ears like a bat. I don’t want some dolly grinning at me in a knowing way over breakfast.’

Clover could have suggested getting one who lived out, but in fact she wouldn’t have minded someone within listening distance. It might force Sean to be a bit less vocal in bed. She sometimes wondered if he’d been a cowboy in an earlier life, the way he whooped and hollered during sex. It could be so off-putting. Never mind a nanny, in a year or so it would be Sophia giving him the knowing looks and Clover a permanent blush of shame. Her own qualms about employing a nanny were that there’d be someone around all the time seeing what she did all day, which was actually, perhaps like Mary-Jane, far too little. Daniella came in and did the cleaning twice a week, and did it so thoroughly, silently and competently that Clover’s domestic input was whittled down to being merely concerned with chauffeuring the girls to gym club, ballet, Penguin swimmers, violin, extra maths, Monkey Music and Bébé France. She obviously dealt with food (and even that was mostly ordered on-line and delivered, thanks to Ocado) and there were the ever-growing heaps of clothes the girls seemed to need. It wasn’t so much a nanny they needed as a wardrobe mistress. Not that they could probably afford one now anyway, not since Sean had thrown in that terrifying spanner about work taking a downturn. She prayed they’d at least be all right for the school fees: how mortifying it would be to have to give a term’s notice and then slap on a brave face every day at the school gate. Whatever protests you made about a sudden political commitment to state education, all the mummy-radar would home in on exactly what your financial score was.

Clover dropped Mary-Jane off at her house and watched her de-code the lock on the high wrought-iron security gate, then pick her way along her untidy, lavender-strewn garden path, side-stepping three cats, a jumble of small bicycles and several overflowing bags of hedge-clippings. The casual domestic chaos reminded Clover of home – not of the bright, ordered house where she lived with Sean and their daughters but of Holbrook House and her muddy, happy childhood. It hurt, this sad, bitter feeling that her whole life’s comfort-base could be about to vanish for ever. She’d trusted it would always be there – not for anything specific but … just in case. It wasn’t a grown-up feeling; it wasn’t worthy and it wasn’t generous but it hurt. She bit her lip and carefully executed a tidy three-point turn. What was it that life coach (last year’s must-do-better attempt, Sean’s idea) had told her? Always concentrate on the results you wanted, think only of that successful solution to any problem. She needed to snap herself out of this mood. Carefully she visualized herself a few minutes from now, pulling up in her own driveway, opening the shiny pink front door and stepping onto the seagrass carpet in the hallway. Out loud she told herself, ‘Now I’m going home. I’m going to my own home.’ It almost worked: she focused on the new Brora cashmere catalogue she’d left on the console table in the hall and on the silver-framed photos of her daughters that would smile up at her, remind her who loved her most in the world. That’s better, these were her people, the ones she’d made. Her family. Her home.

She would make a cake. This calm, pale, silent house would fill with the snug scent of baking and chocolate to comfort and steady her. And later she’d choose something lovely from the Brora catalogue as she ate a soft, sticky slice. Cashmere and cake, was there ever such a perfectly soothing combination?