Laying the Ghost (10 page)

‘Is that how you think of it? Is this a broken home?’ How dreadful that sounded: as if domestic comfort, security, could be smashed like a precious vase. Nell didn’t have the sort that was financially valuable in mind; more the type of appealing, clumsy pottery that had deep sentimental attachment, something lovingly squidged together in a school art class perhaps (and which you kept forgetting leaked, until you put a bunch of daffodils in it), or a holiday souvenir invested with the kind of memories that made you smile. You grieved when things like that got broken. With
valuable
items, you just phoned the insurance company and welcomed the cash as an excuse for glitzy shoes.

‘Well … no, not really. Not specially.’ Mimi fidgeted with the strap of her schoolbag. ‘But years down the line, I don’t know, I’ll have to blame something and someone if life goes all wrong, won’t I?’

Nell hugged her, risking being pushed away with the usual resounding, ‘God, Mum, gerroff’. ‘Mimi, there’s no reason why it should all go wrong. Don’t even think about that!’

Mimi allowed herself to be held close for another moment before breaking away, ‘Yeah, well, I bet you didn’t think it would all go wrong either, when you and Dad got together. You must have been a hundred per cent sure it would all be all right for ever and ever or you wouldn’t have married him, would you?’

Nell laughed, to put off having to come up with a good reply. ‘Hey, life’s not a fairy tale,’ she said. ‘Happy ever after happens, but there’s a lot in the middle between the meeting and the long-term living. Give it a chance, don’t get bitter because of us.’

‘Can we have a takeout?’ Mimi’s attention was back on hunger.

‘Yes, good idea. What do you fancy? Indian?’

‘Ooh yeah. Sick.’

‘Huh? Do I take that as a no or a yes?’ Youth-speak – it could mean anything.

‘No – it’s a yes. A top yes. Keep up, Ma. Can it be soon? I only had a tuna melt for lunch, nothing since. I’m
dying
here.’ Mimi collapsed dramatically into a chair, holding her stomach and making agonized expressions. Nell suspected this was more to do with her being the one of the two of them who didn’t intend to go out in the dark, up to the high street to the Delhi Durbar to pick up the food. She needn’t have bothered – Nell didn’t particularly want her to be wandering up the road on her own in the dark, not with legs that long, hair that blonde, with a skirt that short, with her youth, her beauty and a world full of lions prowling out there.

‘OK. Korma? Naan? The cucumber thing?’

‘And the big crisps?’

‘Yes, I’ll get them. I’ll phone the order and go now. Warm some plates, find chutney, all the usual.’

‘Mmm, sure,’ Mimi murmured vaguely, flipping the kitchen television down from its under-shelf position and aiming the remote control at it. She settled back in her chair, tucking her feet under her, looking certain to be still in the same position when Nell came home again. Nell called the restaurant and ordered the food, then grabbed her keys, her phone and her credit card and headed out of the door. The order wouldn’t be ready by the time she got there, but she quite fancied a bottle of Cobra and a quick read through showbiz gossip in a trashy newspaper.

She was halfway through a fascinating piece on best
choices
for a fantasy royal edition of
Celebrity Big Brother
when Ed walked into the restaurant.

‘Hey, we’ve had the same idea. I did a full-scale Waitrose stock-up tonight and then couldn’t face cooking anything,’ he said, after putting in his order and coming to join her at the table kept for takeaway customers. ‘Fancy another beer?’

‘No thanks, I’m fine,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t be bothered to cook either. There’s a lot to be said for the eighteenth-century days when you didn’t even possess a kitchen but just wandered up to the local bakehouse for pigeon and oyster pie and a gossip with Mrs Miggins. I suppose this is the twenty-first century equivalent.’

‘Could be. One day fish and chips, then pizza, Chinese on Fridays and so on. It could be done, just.’

‘But only if you live somewhere conveniently urban. I bet you couldn’t live like that down at your place in Dorset, could you?’

Ed laughed. ‘No – not unless you were keen on cold food and a long, winding drive. They only deliver up to five miles so that’s not an option either.’

‘Other things make up for it though, I suppose?’

‘Oh yes – the nudist beach over on the Isle of Purbeck has an ice-cream stall that can’t be beaten. You should come down one weekend, see for yourself.’

‘What, the nudists? Not sure it’s my thing! Is it compulsory?’

‘No, definitely not!’ he laughed. ‘And the cottage is further west, only just into Dorset. It’s on the edge of a village; what an estate agent would call secluded but not totally isolated. The perfect bolthole. I’m going down on Friday night for the weekend, to catch up with Tamsin for a bit of father-daughter bonding.’

‘How’s she doing? Is she still writing crime fiction?’

‘Oh yes. Still profiting from crime, still living with the same dipstick who can’t be arsed to get up before noon on the grounds that he is “creative” – if you can call it that, welding iron railings together in random form and calling the result something pretentiously poncy like “a rare peaceful outcome from one tender deed in time of war”.’

‘Do you think of the cottage or the house here as your main home?’

‘Oh the cottage – definitely. I’m a voter there, I take better care of the garden there. It’s all done the way I want it, unlike here. This house was our mother’s – it feels like an old person’s domain and frankly, since she’s been dead, Charles has definitely started turning into the resident old person in her place. Now it’s six months since she went, I’m thinking of looking for another job so I can live down there full-time. I’ll still come up to see him, check he’s OK, obviously, but … well, this has always been just somewhere I work.’

‘But you’ve got friends here. A social life.’ Ed knew everyone in the road, Nell thought. He went to everyone’s
parties,
and would surely be – if you had to have a ballot on it – the neighbour who’d most be missed.

‘I’ve got all that there too. This is only the half of me. Like I said, you should come and visit. Bring Mimi. Tell her we do have electricity and running water and some rudimentary television reception.’

‘Maybe …’ Nell wondered about this. Ed had never invited her and Alex to his cottage when they’d been a couple. What was this? Just a neighbourly gesture? Yes. That would be it. And besides, he probably simply hadn’t liked Alex. Which must mean he
did
like her. Well, that was always good to know. Very cheering.

Her order was ready. Nell picked up the bag of food and said goodbye to Ed. She walked home on the better-lit side of the road, her key between her fingers ready to cause serious (but justifiable, according to Steve) injury to anyone who had thoughts of attacking her. No way would she give up a chicken Madras without a fight.

6

Sunday Girl

(Blondie)

IT HADN’T BEEN
worth checking, as it turned out, but then you never knew your luck. Nell thought this each time she logged on to Friends Reunited. The afternoon before, when she should have been working on the cabbage, she had whizzed quickly through the long-familiar lists of Patrick’s old schoolmates and had a look at the Oxford Brookes site, but he hadn’t registered either there or with his old school in Hampshire. She wasn’t surprised: if he hadn’t before, he wasn’t likely to now. He’d never been much of a joiner and would almost certainly dismiss those who enrolled as a bunch of sentimental saddos, but even the remote possibility that he might have turned up (or that someone would cheerily report ‘Hey, just saw Patrick Sanders!’) made her heart beat faster.

She had looked at Friends Reunited to check for Patrick a couple of times each year since it was first set up, just in case. Over this time she had met up with old classmates of her own and had had several of those exuberant, ‘Oh God, you haven’t changed
at all
!’ lunches where before the first glass of Pinot G. kicked in they had found that the most they had in common was a hatred of navy blue games knickers and memories of the terrors of trigonometry, too many years ago to matter. After the initial up-and-down inspection to check which looked the older/fatter/more well-worn/frankly gone to seed or unforgiveably gorgeous, there wasn’t really a lot to say, and it fast became clear enough why there’d been no contact since they’d walked out of the school or college clutching their locker contents.

One or two had really surprised her, though. There was the feisty queen bee Mo who had been so much at the centre of every naughtiness, every shoplifting escapade, each secret night-time boys-and-booze session, and yet who was now a community-pillar magistrate and golf-playing matriarch. Drab, dull, netball captain Amanda had miraculously glammed up to the max to look as shiny and immaculate as a very classy hooker, and worked as a croupier on a Caribbean cruise ship. How had that come about? As far as Nell recalled, she hadn’t so much as played snap at school, let alone learnt all the poker moves and how to do fancy shuffling. Nell’s own profile on the
site
wasn’t, as so many were, embellished with girly exclamation marks or shrieky show-off statements. She’d stuck to the boringly factual, simply stating that she lived in south-west London, was married, had two children and worked as a freelance illustrator. She hadn’t said she wouldn’t mind being ten pounds lighter; still had a weakness for hot-and-dirty rock guitarists; that she couldn’t tell if being blonde had bestowed her life with measurably more fun; that the best sex she had always seemed to be outdoors; or that she tended to cook too many potatoes because she was fond of cold, leftover ones (which, she now thought, might have something to do with the extra ten pounds).

So. Patrick. What was it with men? Why were so many of them short of the communication gene? Simply Googling his name produced several versions of Patrick Sanders, none of them him. There was a vicar in Shropshire (a blurry photograph showed a jolly-looking, short tubby man holding a frilly baby, possibly post-christening). There was a fierce-looking motor-trade magnate based in south Manchester and a trumpet player from (appropriately) Tooting, who was available for session work at union rates. As far as Nell knew, Patrick couldn’t play more than a bit of Mark Knopfler wannabe guitar chords and had never shown any interest in brass instruments, so that ruled him out as well. And as for Friends Reunited: so few men seemed to be curious about
way-back
companions, compared to women. Maybe they had other ways of keeping in touch, old-boy networks and rugby clubs and so on. Patrick wasn’t at all that type. He’d despised all team sports, saying that they just encouraged the viler aspects of tribalism and how could any thinking person care who kicked a bit of inflated leather into netting or over some big sticks.

Nell had had a look at the profiles of some of her male college contemporaries and these fell into only two categories: first there were the look-how-well-I’ve-dones. These detailed endless lists of work promotions and sporting triumphs, even sometimes a mention of what cars they drove – Porsches and Aston Martins came up here and there but not Ford Fiestas, which made it all suspiciously like a form of willy-waving. Then there were the ones who seemed a bit down, as if life hadn’t come up to expectations. There were those who were divorced and slightly lost, others who hadn’t become the next Mick Jagger and minded bitterly, or were between jobs and dropping hopeful hints about ‘networking’, fondly remembering school and college days as if they really were the best times and that nothing had worked out so well since. Nell updated her own profile to include a light and cheery sentence about being newly single, carefully worded so it definitely didn’t look as if she was in search of a new partner, and left it at that. She was findable if anyone was looking for her – she couldn’t do much more.

‘So how far have you got with it?’ Kate asked the following day when she and Nell met on the Thames riverbank close to Ham House to walk Kate’s dachshund and little Alvin, snug in his all-terrain Land-Rover buggy. ‘Have you got in touch with that missing ex yet?’

‘No! He’s impossible to find. I’ve no idea where he is or what he’s doing. Last time I heard, he was painting murals for vast amounts of money for the sort of people who stencil underwater scenes all over their bathrooms and want the ball scene from Cinderella in their children’s bedrooms.’

‘Was that his kind of thing?’ Kate asked. ‘Is that what you do an art degree for?’

‘God no! He’d have hated it. But we’ve all got to do something for money, haven’t we? I didn’t think I’d end up painting ill vegetables and being glad of the work. Patrick would have liked to be more of a Lucian Freud. He used to paint me; I had to lie for hours on his unmade bed with no clothes on, getting frozen while he mixed up the colours he fancied. I only did it because I knew there’d come a point when he’d give this big despairing sigh, say it wasn’t going well and we’d have lovely compensatory sex instead.’

‘Well it would warm you up, that.’

‘Certainly did.’

As she and Kate ambled along the towpath with the dog and Alvin, Nell thought about Patrick’s paintings. They’d been huge, oily things that took months to dry and had
given
his flat a permanent eye-watering stench of linseed oil and turps. He’d been a habitual and shameless art-shop thief, stealing brushes and tubes of paint by the dozen until he had far more of everything than he needed, and each theft was more brazen than the time before. Nell had been shocked, accusing him of arrogantly assuming he was entitled to help himself freely to the means to create works of genius. He’d simply dismissed her concern, telling her she was bourgeoise. He’d been caught more than once but had bluffed it out, never denying, never pretending he’d ‘accidentally’ pocketed the goods but instead pleading dire poverty and arrogantly expecting a sympathy decision on prosecution. With female shop assistants, all he had to do was give them the devastating Patrick smile and return a token half the goods from his pocket back to the shelves. His pretty face and blond too-long fringe never failed to charm.