Out of Step (15 page)

‘What, even in February?’

‘Well, maybe not the spring half term, but definitely the other two.’

‘I see. And is everything OK?’

‘Fine, in fact better than usual.’ Elly broke into a triumphant smile, which it was just as well Nell couldn’t see. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘Oh, no reason. I just wondered …’

‘Well, better be off,’ Elly said briskly. ‘Things to see, people to do.’

‘In a manner of speaking!’

Freudian slip, Elly thought, laughing. ‘Bye then!’

‘Bye, El,’ Nell said.

Elly turned to the mirror above the telephone to check for slippage, but her make-up was still intact, and her face glowed back at her with recently renewed self-assurance. She lifted her hair with both hands and watched with satisfaction as it took on a plumped-up, carefully tousled shape. She looked good. She opened her handbag and directed a squirt of scent behind each ear, and on to the gently pulsating area of each wrist. Then she looked in the mirror again and pursed her lips in an ironic kiss, before leaving in her car.

She thought, as she drove, how very kind it was of the fates that Paul should have such a passion for sailing, and that his mother should be such a dutiful grandma. With Hat, one couldn’t be sure whether she was keen to have the boys to stay simply because she loved them, or if perhaps she hoped to save them from their father’s influence, of which she quite clearly disapproved. Either way, Elly thought, who cares? And she broke into song, smiling at the other motorists, who drew up beside her at traffic lights, with such
joie de vivre
that they too grinned; a positive triumph in surly London.

Who’d have thought it? Elly asked herself. A couple of months ago I was in a deep black hole, but now I’m flying!

She found a parking space in the elegant square at once, as though by right, and walked demurely up the steps to
the ornate front door, conscious that he might be watching out for her.

‘My darling girl! he exclaimed, as he let her in. ‘You look
wonderful!’
He kissed her lightly and led her by the hand up the stairs to his drawing room. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, ‘and I want to give it to you now, before we exhaust ourselves. A good idea,
n’est-ce pas?’

Elly stroked his face gently, smiling in agreement. His eyes looked very soft, and the crinkles around them very sweet. She loved the contrast between his large black eyebrows and his silver-grey hair. She noticed suddenly that his nostrils were perfectly symmetrical, and laughed delightedly to have discovered something new about him.

‘What?’ he asked, beaming at her.

‘I’ll tell you in bed,’ she promised.

‘First things first,’ he said, sitting on a couch and drawing her down beside him. He gave her a thin oblong parcel wrapped in blue tissue paper, the colour of his eyes, which she tore off quickly and dropped in ragged pieces on the floor. Inside the box, Elly found a necklace of smooth stones, all of the same mineral, but of different swirling patterns and shades from palest eau-de-Nil to almost black, as if deep green water with all its whirlpools and confluences had been captured and fossilised for all time.

‘It’s
beautiful,’
Elly whispered. ‘Oh, darling …’ He put it round her neck and fastened it, all cold and heavy, and she put up her hands to feel it there.

‘Malachite,’ he said, ‘my all-time favourite, and particularly appropriate too, I think you’ll agree.’

Elly gazed at him with love. ‘Thank you,’ she said. She kissed him on both cheeks and put her arms around his neck. ‘You’re so good to me. Thank you, darling Malachy.’

The swifts came back from Africa on 6th May and Nell recorded their arrival in her diary, and admired them as they quartered the skies above with effortless agility. By the 14th the ash trees were at last coming into leaf, weeks behind the oak.

If the oak’s before the ash, then you’ll only get a splash; if the ash precedes the oak, then you may expect a soak
.

Nell had her own theory on this, which was retrospective rather than predictive; we’ve only had a splash of rain this spring, so that explains why they’re so late, she decided. In fact ash was always late in coming out, and one of the first to drop its leaves in autumn, like a cautious old maid – exposing her precious foliage to the elements only when she could be absolutely sure that the weather would be clement.

Everywhere else was in full verdure, the lanes pungent with hawthorn blossom and crowded with cow parsley. At night, odd maybugs bumped against Nell’s lighted windowpanes. By day the two buzzards, who until recently had been circling and mewing possessively high over her valley, were now nesting somewhere quiet and secret.

In June unexpected delights appeared in her garden; pink and fragrant Albertine roses, white irises, blue delphiniums and orange day lilies which bloomed, and slewed sideways in the summer winds, requiring twine and stakes. By the turnaround where the ground had been disturbed, scarlet field poppies flowered, as brash and beautiful as only high-class weeds can be. Nell took
photographs and made plans, and on free hot days at weekends she sat and painted in the garden in the shade of the apple tree and received the envious glances of ramblers on the coast path, with a modest pride. I am where I want to be, she thought. I am
so
lucky.

Later that month she bought tons of cordwood when the weather was dry and the lane surface hard enough to bear a six-wheeler. Then, over several weeks of hard labour, and whilst it was still in four-foot lengths, she stacked it carefully to season in the summer’s heat.

‘Hubby goin’ to cut it up fur ‘ee, then?’ the lorry driver had enquired, as he’d dumped the load. ‘They say as firewood do warm a body three times over, what with the cutting and the carting ‘swell’s the burning.’ He gave her his delivery note to sign.

‘He’ll most probably hire a chap with a saw bench,’ Nell said, writing her name, and taking on an imaginary spouse with practised conviction. She was well accustomed to coping with potentially embarrassing offers of assistance from overconfident strange men.

‘Unless he do get thee at it wi’ a bowsaw,’ the driver chuckled, taking the piece of yellow paper back from her, and making explicit fore and aft gestures with it. ‘Good exercise, like.’

‘Oh, he wouldn’t dream of doing that,’ Nell said carefully. ‘He does all the heavy work himself.’

‘Big bloke, eh?’

‘Over six foot.’

‘Ar well, best be on me way.’ And he put his lorry into low gear and laboured it back up the hill and away.

Nell wondered then, and at regular intervals thereafter, whether she would ever have a genuine flesh-and-blood partner to take cover behind. Rob had been her best bet so far, but now he seemed to be fading out altogether. Months went by without a sighting of him. The drought increased and a hose-pipe ban came into operation. The
River Torrent dwindled, and at low tide took up only a third of its normal channel. Small cracks opened up in the walls of Bottom Cottage as the clay foundations beneath dried up and shrank, and the house subsided into a new summer stance. Nell would have liked to be able to ask Rob if this was its normal behaviour, but didn’t want to bother him at Mugglestone, Pudduck and Co., feeling sure that sooner or later he would be down the lane for a walk, and she could mention it then.

But as summer passed and autumn began, with still no sign of him, Nell began to believe that she must have misread him completely. Perhaps he was afraid of the Mad Cow and simply obeying orders; a total wimp. More likely he didn’t want to be reminded of a place he’d loved and lost. Nell was aware of feeling disappointed, but her general contentment with her lot stayed intact.

She also saw less of Elly than she had expected to. Paul and Elly did come down, but only for a week at a time in May and again during the summer holidays. Nell sometimes noticed Paul’s yacht, with the red parrot motif on its mainsail, sailing past her cottage downriver to the sea, and assumed he must be staying on the houseboat alone (since he had much longer holidays than his wife) but on those occasions he never called on her. Nell worried that he was seeing Anna and wondered what, if anything, she ought to do about it. However, increasingly unsure of her own judgment, she did the easy thing, and said nothing.

As time went on, and during her frequent phone calls to Elly, this self-doubt of Nell’s began to escalate. Her friend, who had formerly been determinedly bright but edgy, was now relaxed and funny. Nell, who felt she ought to be celebrating this new zest and sparkle, instead felt confused and uncomfortable. At the October half term, when the Tozer family came down to the houseboat again, Elly and her two boys (and sometimes Sibyl too)
came over to Nell’s cottage for hours at a time, playing hide and seek, going for walks by the river, and waving to Paul as he slipped past in his sleek white one-off yacht.

‘One of these days, when I’m rich, I shall repair my jetty and buy a little dinghy with an outboard motor,’ Nell said, as she and Elly sat in the dunes one sunny day, watching the boys searching with buckets and spades along the tideline.

‘Didn’t Rob have one when he lived there?’

‘He told me he had a rowing boat, but Cassie made him get rid of it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it would be “dangerous for the children”. He assured her he’d teach them to be safe, but she wouldn’t have it.’

‘Shame.’

‘Yes. How about Will and Sam? Don’t they want to sail with their dad? I should have thought it would be lovely, pottering down the estuary looking at everything.’

‘Don’t ever go out with Paul, then,’ Elly warned. ‘He turns into a speed freak the moment his feet touch the deck. All he wants to do is to get there as fast and as efficiently as possible.’

‘Where?’

‘Anywhere but where the boys and I want to go, and to hell with scenery or wildlife or anything interesting. We call him Damon Hilltler!’

‘So he’s put them off sailing? That’s a shame.’

‘Will just hates being shouted at. I can’t say I blame him!’

‘And little Sam?’

‘Oh, Sam refuses to be tied down. He reckons that a safety harness is for babies years younger than whatever age he happens to be, and he’s become expert at unclipping his, which makes me too damned scared to let him go, unless I’m there to keep an eye on him.’

‘But Paul would look after him, surely.’

‘You’re joking! Paul gets so involved with trying to catch every tiny windfart, he’d probably only notice a person had fallen overboard if the bit of rope next to where they’d just been sitting needed pulling round the … what d’you call it…? The ratline-gimbal-bilge thing.’

‘Wow! I can tell you’ve got the old nautical jargon well sussed.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Elly said. ‘I feel it’s the least I can do,’ and she laughed, putting her head back with her eyes closed, to feel the sun on her face.

To Nell’s surprise, she now seemed entirely philosophical about her husband’s shortcomings. What had changed? As far as Nell could see, Paul was still as chauvinist as ever. Perhaps she’d been quite wrong all along about his affair with Anna, and he and Elly had simply been through a sticky patch. Perhaps Elly had decided to make the best of a bad job at last. Maybe Sibyl had finally convinced her of the benefits of positive thinking. Nell still found it hard to believe.

‘What’s got into you?’ she asked.

‘What d’you mean?’ Elly still had her eyes closed, but her mouth widened into a broad grin.

‘Well … you seem different lately … lighter … younger even. Like you used to be years ago, when we left university.’

‘If you must know, I’ve got these wonderful new pills,’ Elly said, sitting up and handing her a tube of the boys’ Smarties. ‘The secret is in the blue ones!’

‘No, seriously.’

‘Second childhood perhaps.’ Elly opened both hands briefly. ‘I dunno, I’m still the same me.’ She looked down at her sons, who were now throwing bladderwrack at each other with cries of glee. ‘Uh oh, I thought the sealoom hunt wouldn’t last for long. It’s probably time we made a move.’

‘Sealoom?’

‘The marine treasure equivalent of heirloom. It’s a family joke.’

‘I see… No I don’t!’

‘Oh, it’s a long boring story,’ Elly said, ‘but I’ll give you the jist of it: valuable jewellery discovered in Uncle Tozer’s attic in an
airline
bag, and said to be heirlooms. Therefore anything exciting found in the
sea
must be a … and so on.’ She got to her feet and began dusting the sand off her clothes.

Nell did the same, looking around her. ‘Isn’t that Paul’s boat coming back now? She pointed at a yacht re-entering the mouth of the estuary.

‘So it is.’

‘What’s the significance of the red parrot?’

‘Paul thinks it’s part of the boat’s name.’

‘Which is what?’

Elly made a face.
‘Polypeptide.’

Mic saw the social worker from the landing window upstairs, and thought, Oh, here we go. I might have known! Cassie’s parting words to her the week before had been, ‘Don’t tell Rob or the social services either. Promise?’ and then she’d left Mic in charge and (not before time) gone off to get her head sorted at the funny farm. The busybodies there must have interfered. Typical!

Mic was more than happy to be on her own in the house with the three children. She could see an improvement in Josh and Rosie’s behaviour already, and she didn’t need any ‘help’ from anyone. The front doorbell rang, and then rang again. She went downstairs feeling defensive, and let the woman in.

‘Right, so you’re Mrs Hayhoe’s nanny?’ the social worker asked, fixing her with a penetrating but caring gaze. She had an air of brisk obsequiousness which Mic distrusted instantly.

So what’s in a name? Mic thought, shrugging. ‘Yeah.’

‘And you’re employed on a permanent basis?’

‘Sort of, yeah.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Yeah, I am.’

‘So, she pays you a salary?’

‘Well, not exactly …’

‘You’re not paid
anything?’

‘No, well, we have this, like, arrangement.’

‘Are you a relation of hers, is that it?’