‘I think,’ Ted said to Becky, ‘that you want to leave that cigarette until you’re on the train. You’re going back to Hereford tonight, aren’t you?’
Becky nodded.
‘Mum meeting you?’
‘If her old banger makes it. It’s a complete wreck. It’s all Dad’ll give her.’
‘Now, now.’
‘It’s got a hole in the floor in the back. You can see the road.’
‘Your mother,’ Ted said, eyeing Becky’s piebald fingernails, ‘she got a job?’
‘No.’
‘If she had a job, she could buy a better car.’
‘Why should she?’
‘We’ve all got to try,’ Ted said. ‘We’ve all got to do our bit.’
Becky pulled a strand of hair out in front of her face to inspect it.
‘Not when it’s all unfair.’
‘Unfair?’
Becky said, not looking at Josie, ‘She’s got a new house, hasn’t she? And their car is pretty nearly new.’
‘And who’s that unfair to?’
‘Mum.’
‘Becky,’ Ted said, suddenly not caring, ‘your mother wouldn’t know something fair if she met it in her porridge.’
She dropped her strand of hair and glared at him.
‘Pig,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘If it makes you feel better.’
She took a breath.
‘Nothing does!’ she shrieked. ‘Nothing does! And nothing ever will!’ And then she burst into tears and banged her head down into her cold and untouched pizza.
‘Ted said sorry,’ Matthew said.
Josie, lying back with her eyes closed against the headrest of the passenger seat of the car, said why did he feel he had to.
‘For upsetting Becky.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He wouldn’t tell me, but it was something to do with Nadine. Some home truth, no doubt. He couldn’t stand Nadine.’
Josie felt a small glow of affection for Ted Holmes. It warmed her, creeping across the chill that had settled on her, despite all her earlier happy excitement, at the moment of saying goodbye to Rufus. He was going to stay with Elaine, her mother, for three days. He held up his face for a kiss, and his face was quite empty of expression as if he were being kissed by someone he hardly knew because he’d been told to allow it.
‘Bye, darling.’
‘Bye,’ he said.
‘Have a lovely time,’ Elaine said. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t think about him.’
Josie looked at her gratefully. None of this was what Elaine would have chosen, but she was trying, she was really trying to accept it, to make something of it.
‘Mum was good,’ she said to Matthew now.
He reached out for her nearest hand.
‘She was,’ he said. ‘And Dad was fine and Karen was fine and my mother was a disaster.’
Josie rolled her head so that she could see his profile and the jawline she so much admired, that was such a surprising turn-on when she was never conscious of even noticing men’s jawlines before.
‘And the children—’
‘Josie,’ Matthew said. He took his hand away from hers and put it on the steering wheel again. ‘Josie, we’ve got three nights together and two days and, during those three nights and two days, we are not even going to mention the children.’ He paused, and then he said in a voice that was far less positive, ‘We’ve got the rest of our lives for that.’
Chapter Two
Elizabeth Brown stood at the first-floor windows of the house she had just bought and looked down at the garden. Down was the operative word. The garden fell away so steeply to the little street below that some previous owner had terraced it, in giant steps, and put in a gradual zigzag path so that you could at least get to the front door without mountaineering. If Elizabeth left this bedroom, and went into the little one behind it that she intended to turn into a bathroom, she would see that the land, as if it were taking absolutely no notice of this terrace of houses that had been imposed upon it, rose just as sharply behind as it fell away in front, culminating in a second street at the top, and a back gate and a garage. The whole thing, her father had said when he came to see it, was like living halfway up a staircase.
‘I know,’ she said. She loved her father and relied upon his opinion. ‘Am I mad?’
‘Not if you want it.’
She did. It was unsettling to want it because it was so entirely not what she had intended to buy. She had meant to buy a cottage, a cottage that would be a complete contrast to the efficient but featureless London mansion-block flat in which she spent her working week. When Elizabeth’s mother died, and her father decided to sell his antiquarian book business in Bath and move to a flat there big enough to accommodate the books and whisky bottles and cans of soup which were all he required for sustenance, he gave Elizabeth some money. Serious money, enough – if she chose to – to change the shape of her hard-working, comfortable but uneventful professional life. Enough to buy a cottage. A cottage in the hills around Bath, with a garden.
‘You ought to garden,’ her father said. ‘Seems to suit women. Something to do with nurturing and producing. Look for a garden.’
She’d seen dozens of gardens, dozens, and the cottages that went with them. She’d even made an offer on a couple and found herself oddly undisappointed when someone else made a higher bid, and won. She looked at cottages and gardens for a whole summer, travelling down on Friday nights to Bath, staying with her father in considerable discomfort among the book piles, viewing all Saturday and sometimes on Sunday mornings, and then returning to London on Sunday after noons to order herself for the week ahead.
‘There isn’t an idyll,’ her father said. ‘You have to make those.’ He’d looked at her. ‘You’re getting set in your ways, Eliza. You’ve got to take a leap. Take a punt.’
‘You never have—’
‘No. But that doesn’t mean I think I’m right. Buy a tower. Buy a windmill. Just buy something.’
So she did. On a warm Sunday morning in September, she cancelled the viewing of a cottage in Freshford, and went for a walk instead, up the steep streets and lanes above her father’s flat. It was all very curious and charming and the hilly terraces were full of gentle Sunday-morning life: families, and couples with the radio on, audible through open windows, and desultory gardening and dogs and a pram or two, and washing. Here and there were ‘For Sale’ notices thrust haphazardly into front hedges, but Elizabeth didn’t want a town house, so she didn’t look at them except to think, with the wistfulness that was now so much part of her daily thinking that she hardly noticed it, how nice it must be to need to buy a house in a town near schools, to put a family in. How nice to have to do something, instead of wondering, with a slight sense of lostness that her friends loudly, enviously, called freedom, what to choose to do.
She stopped by a gate. It was a low iron gate and on it was a badly hand-painted notice which read ‘Beware of the agapanthus’. Beside it, a ‘For Sale’ notice leaned tiredly against a young lime tree, as if it had been there for some time. She looked up. The garden, tousled and tangled, but with the air of having once been planned by someone with some care, rose up sharply to the façade of a small, two-storey, flat-fronted stone house in a terrace of ten. It had a black iron Regency porch and a brick chimney and in an adjoining garden, a small girl dressed only in pink knickers and a witch’s hat was singing to something in a shoebox. Elizabeth opened the gate and went up the zigzag path.
Now, three months later, it was hers. There were no leaves on the lime tree, and the garden had subsided into tawny nothingness, but the lime tree was hers and so were these strange semi-cultivated terraces which were, Tom Carver said, full of possibility. Tom Carver was an architect. Her father knew him because architecture had been one of the speciality subjects of her father’s bookshop and had suggested to Elizabeth that she get him in to help her.