Twelve

That summer

‘I’ve found you a summer job, Rachel. I know you don’t need the money but you know how I feel about teenagers learning to stand on their own two feet. When I was your age I was labouring on building sites from dawn to dusk. It’ll give you something to do before you go to university. And anyway,’ her father’s voice faltered, ‘it’ll be better than staying in the house, moping and thinking about your mother.’

In the three months since Rachel’s mother had died, her father, Frank, had never uttered the words ‘mum’, ‘mother’ or ‘wife’. Rachel hadn’t either. She didn’t want to upset her father by reminding him about his wife’s death. She knew he didn’t want to remind her that her mother was dead either. They were like two conspirators covering up a crime called grief. Instead of the sound of tears in their rambling country house, there was only silence. The silence of the grave.

Rachel pasted on her best make-believe smile. ‘Great.’

‘I met an old friend of mine yesterday at my club,’ her father informed her as they sat at their special spot at the kitchen table. ‘I don’t think you’ve met my friend, Danny. He’s got a big house on an estate about five miles from here. He owns a business in my line of work too, building, construction. Anyway, I had a word with him and he thought he could find you something to do around his house, filing or collating or something. You can travel there on your bike. I said you’d go over tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock. Don’t be late, start as you mean to go on.’

That was all her father said before silence descended on their home again.

There was no sign of Danny the following morning when Rachel wheeled her bike up the drive of a property that certainly put the ‘country’ into ‘house’. She rang the doorbell and hammered on the brass knocker but no-one came. The house was silent. But in the luxuriant gardens that surrounded the property, there was a sound. Someone singing along to a guitar, accompanied by the yap-yap barking of a small dog. She left the front door and followed the music. Behind a gazebo, she found a young man who her girlfriends would call ‘a looker’ sitting back against the structure singing Alice Cooper’s Eighteen. A puppy gleefully scampered around, joining in with a howling harmony.

The man looked up with a warm smile. ‘Hi there. Come to burgle the place? The safe’s behind a landscape painting in the master bedroom.’

Cheeky guy! Though she did like the twinkle in his eyes.

‘I’m Rachel. I’m supposed to be starting work today with Danny but I don’t know where he is.’

The young man nodded. ‘He’s probably out and about putting up overpriced jerry-built flats that don’t need to wait for Jericho for the walls to come tumbling down. That’s where he usually is. I’m Philip, by the way. Why don’t you park your backside and join me for a ciggy while you wait for the old crook to turn up?’

‘I don’t smoke, it’s bad for you.’

Philip was laughing at her. ‘Right. I suppose that means you don’t want to shoot up any of the heroin I’ve got in my bag?’

Rachel looked outraged. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s a joke. You know what one of them is, don’t you? If you’re going to be working around here, best to have a sense of humour.’

‘Right.’ More in embarrassment than anything, Rachel sat down next to Philip and enjoyed the puppy making a fuss of her. ‘Hello, what’s your name?’

Philip explained. ‘He hasn’t got a name yet. I found him in a river on the way to work a few weeks back; I think someone was trying to drown him.’ He tapped a finger to the side of his nose. ‘By the way, don’t tell Danny I’m looking after our little friend here. He doesn’t like dogs. He told me to get rid of him.’

At the sound of footsteps approaching, Rachel leapt to her feet and stood awkwardly to attention, Philip meanwhile lounged further back. A large thickset man with a stony face came round the corner, eyed Rachel, then Philip, then Rachel again.

He spoke to her first. ‘Hello, you must be Frank’s girl. Come into the house and I’ll find you something to do.’ He turned to Philip. ‘And as for you, what do you think you’re doing?’

The cheeky young man shrugged. ‘I’m on a tea break. I’m entitled, it’s the law.’

‘And what’s that mutt still doing here? I thought I told you to make it disappear. I’m paying you to be a gardener and handyman – not a dog warden. Why don’t you go and prune the roses or something?’

Slowly, with the insolence of youth, Philip climbed to his feet, guitar in hand. ‘Yeah, I’ll do that. They could do with a bit of nip and tuck. I’ll see you around, Rach.’

As Danny and his new employee walked towards the front door of the house, Philip called out across the garden. ‘Hey, Rach. I’ve got a name for the dog. I’m going to call him Ray – then you’ll be Ray and Rachel – you can go on the stage together as a double act!’

For the first time since her mum died, Rachel’s face lifted into a real smile.

Rachel was an only child. In the weeks that followed, Philip became the brother she’d never had. They were both eighteen. When Danny wasn’t around, and sometimes when he was, her new friend seemed to be on a perpetual tea break. During those extended breaks, he taught her how to juggle apples from Danny’s orchard, how to play the chords to Alice Cooper’s Eighteen on his guitar and how to do wheelies on her bike across the gravel drive. He taught her all the names of the plants and trees and the birds that sat in them. He asked her questions that she’d never been asked before. When she said she was going to a really good university in the autumn, he looked puzzled. ‘Why?’

No-one asked that question at her school or among her friends because it was the natural order of things that everyone went to university. ‘To get a good job.’

He scoffed, appearing highly unconvinced. ‘Right. Good plan.’

When she mentioned she’d lost her mother in the spring and the doctors couldn’t explain why, he didn’t react like most people. He didn’t say:

‘At least she’s at peace now.’

‘Time’s a great healer.’

‘At least you’ve still got your dad.’

Philip said nothing, just offered her his hand. When she took it, he held it softly for as long as she wanted it held. He always said and did the right thing. He always made her laugh. He always looked out for her.

Only once in those first few summer weeks did Philip turn serious. When he asked her what Danny was actually making her do, she told him she was cleaning his classic car collection in their specially built annex.

Philip’s initial reaction was to sneer, ‘Oh yes, his cars; they’re the only things he really cares about. That and his multiple ex-wives of course.’

But when she told him, ‘From tomorrow though, he’s asked me to go down in his wine cellar and catalogue the vino in a notebook for him,’ the muscle in Philip’s cheek twitched.

‘His wine cellar?’

‘Yes – that’s all right, isn’t it?’

It was a long time before Philip answered. ‘I suppose.’

‘Why wouldn’t it be?’

It was an even longer time before he whispered, ‘No reason.’