Читать книгу Dancing Over the Hill: The new feel good comedy from the author of The Kicking the Bucket List - Cathy Hopkins, Cathy Hopkins - Страница 16

As I drove home, I thought about what awaited me. Matt and a house full of worries or … maybe I’d try the phone sex. OK, so … stuff to get him excited? Now let me think. Last year on the writing course, a great older lady called Lily suggested we try writing erotic fiction for a few weeks and, as part of the course, we studied what men wanted to read in contrast to women. It was interesting. We’d read a book called Unleashing the Hound to give us an idea of what people wrote. It appeared that men liked strong words, lots of hard thrusting, action, whereas most women liked the anticipation, the romance and build-up.

No time like the present, I thought as I stopped the car in a quiet street and got out my mobile. Now, get in the mood, Cait. Remember how it was when we were younger. I called home. I heard Matt’s voice a few moments later.

‘Matt?’

‘Ah, Cait,’ I heard him say.

‘Don’t say anything,’ I started and went in to what I hoped was a Russian accent, ‘I ’ave been thinking of you and vot I’d like to do.’

‘Cait—’

‘No, don’t interrupt, just go vith eet. I am imagining you naked.’

He sounded surprised. ‘You are?’

‘I vont you to unleash the hound. I vont you to slide your hand down in between—’

‘Cait,’ Matt said urgently.

‘I vill do the same. I’m sliding my hand across my breasts, my thrusting breasts—’

‘No, Cait stop—’

‘I cannot stop, I vont to feel—’

‘No, NO.’ My words were drowned out by the sound of Matt calling my name, louder and louder. ‘CAIT. CAAAAIT.’ I hadn’t heard him this excited in years.

‘I want to feel your body, hard—’

‘CAIT—’

‘You are liking vot you’re hearing? Yes? No?’

‘Well, yes but it’s not Matt. It’s Duncan.’

‘Duncan?’

‘Yeah.’

Noooooooo. Matt’s chauvinist stoner of a brother. Same voice as Matt.

‘I … thought you were Matt.’

‘I know. You saucy minx. Who’d have thought? Though I’m not sure about the Welsh accent.’ I heard him laugh. ‘Matt’s just popped out to get us a couple of beers. Hold on, I’m just writing down what you said so I can pass on the message. Breasts. Legs. Hound. Hard. Right, think I got most of that.’

‘Fuck off, Duncan.’

I heard him laugh again then the phone clicked off.

No way was I going home if Duncan was still there. I turned around and headed to Lorna’s.

‘What have you been up to?’ I asked when I arrived.

‘Oh, the usual, just doing my Saturday jobs – feeding the dogs, watering the garden, cutting some herbs for supper. Come outside, I just have to finish the borders then I’ll fix us a drink.’

I followed her through the house and sat on the wrought-iron veranda looking out on the garden. It had come alive since I was last here, the pergola to the right was covered with pink Clematis montana, and in the beds there were foxgloves popping up, lavender, white tulips about to fade.

It wasn’t meant to be like this, I thought as I watched Lorna stride out onto the lawn with the hose, turn it on and begin watering. I recalled sitting in the same spot watching Alistair do the same thing only a year ago. It didn’t seem right: Lorna, alone in her big old rambling house with no one but her golden retrievers, Otto and Angus, for company. ‘No decisions for a year,’ Matt had said to her after Alistair died; wise words echoed by all her children apart from her daughter, Jess, who invited Lorna to go and live with her in New Zealand. ‘Get away, new scenery, new experiences,’ she’d said. But Lorna had told us that she didn’t want new experiences; she wanted to be home where Alistair’s presence was still evident, inside and out.

After putting the hose away, Lorna made two large gin and tonics and came to join me on the rattan sofa.

‘So what have you been doing?’ she asked.

I told her about Debs’s way of clearing Fabio out of her life, but omitted the phone-sex episode. I’d had enough humiliation for one day.

‘I suppose Debs’s method of doing it is one way. I’ve told myself every month that I’d clear Alistair’s study, go through his wardrobes, give his clothes to charity, but as each month has gone by since he died, I’ve found I can’t do it. If I cleared everything out, he’d be gone, leaving empty spaces and even emptier rooms, and I’m not ready, not yet, if ever. But the house is way too big, I know that.’

I glanced up at the back. A lovely seventeenth-century manor house with five bedrooms, Alistair’s study, two reception rooms, an enormous kitchen-diner that opened out to the garden where there were three stone outbuildings. Their girls had slept and played there when they were growing up. It had been a home full of the sound of laughter, chatter, friends coming and going, always something happening and now, even with two of us here, amicably chatting, it felt silent.

‘I know,’ said Lorna, picking up on my thoughts. ‘It’s quiet here, isn’t it? So quiet. For the first time in years, I’m aware of the ticking of the clock and the humming of the fridge-freezer.’

I felt for her. Her children had all been and stayed before and after the funeral, but they couldn’t stay forever. Lorna knew that. Jess, her husband and two boys were first to go back, home to New Zealand. Alice and Rachel were next to leave, Alice to her job with Médecins Sans Frontières, her latest posting in Uganda. Lorna was so proud of her but I knew she worried how safe she was, not that she let Alice know that. Rachel went back to her marketing job at an advertising agency in New York, where she shared a flat with her boyfriend, Mark. Like me with Sam, and Debs with Ollie, Lorna caught up with her cyberspace family at weekends on Skype, but we often said to each other that it wasn’t the same as having them here, filling the kitchen, making endless meals and cups of tea, draped on sofas with books, mobiles or laptops, the place full of life.

‘When they were young, I thought we’d always be together,’ said Lorna, picking up on my thoughts once more. ‘I’d imagined there would be family weekends in summer, swimming by the river, walks along the canal followed by long Sunday lunches out in the garden. I’d be busy making jam or baking, preparing picnics to take to nearby fields, my grandchildren cartwheeling on the lawns, bashing balls around, playing cricket, croquet, badminton but … it hasn’t worked out that way, and all the garden games lie in boxes in one of the outhouses, gathering cobwebs.’

Her girls were a bright bunch. They had gone off to university, met partners and carved out their careers, which is exactly what she and Alistair wanted them to do. ‘No one can predict where or for how long jobs are going to present themselves,’ I said, ‘and there was nothing doing round here for them in the fields they’d chosen. It’s great that you never held them back and encouraged each of them to follow their own path, as did Alistair.’

Lorna nodded. ‘He did, but I know that he too had his dreams of an idyllic chapter as we grew older, and that they would be within driving distance. Neither of us ever imagined they’d all be so far away. They come back when they can, but travel is expensive and each visit feels too short. Then there are the inevitable goodbyes, waving them off at the gate, never showing that I’m crumbling inside.’

It wasn’t meant to be like this, I thought again as I sipped on my drink and wondered what I could say to make her feel better. My two friends, both alone, though in different circumstances, both dealing with being by themselves in such opposite ways. I was glad that I’d come to see Lorna, and glad that she’d opened up to me about how she was feeling. It was a rare event, and I didn’t want to spoil it by bringing up Matt, Tom or my concerns in the face of her obvious loneliness and the brave front she put on most days. Despite that courage, there was no changing the fact that she was here on her own most nights, on the veranda at the back of the house where she’d spent every evening with Alistair, the dogs at their feet, before he died.

‘We’d talk for hours out here,’ said Lorna, ‘and while Alistair was alive, it was bearable that our family had flown to distant parts of the world. We had each other, always something to say and, you know, although he was ten years older than me, I thought he’d last at least another twenty years.’

I nodded. ‘Me too. He was such a big character, the life and soul, with a hundred interests and opinions on everything, informed and stimulating ones at that.’

‘And now there’s just me here, an empty chair opposite where Alistair used to be, silence where there was conversation and company. Even inside, everything is as he’d left it in his study, a scribbled note on his desk reminding him to get tickets for an author event at Toppings bookshop in town, the history book he was reading on the side table by his armchair, his old cardigan hanging on the back of his desk chair. If I hold it to my face, I can still just about catch the scent of him, woody from the garden where, as you know, he spent most of his time.’

I reached out and put my hand over hers. ‘Oh, Lorna. I know it must be so hard. You know you’re welcome at ours any time you feel like company.’

‘I know, and thanks, but the reality is, he’s gone, and I’d still have to come back and wake up here, have my evenings without him. I’ve been house-hunting in the last week, if only to keep my girls happy, as Jess and Rachel have been on at me again to move. I saw three houses, all perfectly nice, adequate, charming even, but I couldn’t see myself in any of them. What feels right is home, my home, so it’s only confirmed that I don’t want to move. I told the estate agent that I’d be in touch but I won’t.’

‘I can’t blame you for not wanting to go. It’s beautiful here. So peaceful.’ I knew that the house had been in Alistair’s family for three generations, making it doubly hard to let go of.

‘Even though it’s quiet without him, I feel his presence. When I look out on the garden, I’m reminded of the endless trips to nurseries when we began to redesign the layout. It had been so neglected in his parents’ old age. The bare root roses, wild geraniums, alliums, lavender, clematis, jasmine that we bought that will tumble over walls, trellises in June and July, tiny plants we nurtured that now fill the borders, they’re all reminders of him. I couldn’t leave them for someone else to neglect.’

‘Then don’t,’ I said. ‘It’s perfect, and if it gives you comfort being here with all the reminders, then stay.’ She and Alistair had done their homework in the early days and driven all over England looking at National Trust gardens, Sissinghurst, Gertrude Jekyll landscapes. There were years when I remembered they’d pored over gardening books, attended workshops at weekends until they knew exactly what they were doing, before creating the wonderful garden that was in front of us now.

I smiled and took my hand away from Lorna’s. ‘I can still see Alistair out there in his baggy old gardening clothes, on his knees planting or in the greenhouses watering his pride-and-joy tomatoes.’

‘And inside, every room has paintings and artefacts left by his parents, and others we chose together on various holidays. Every one tells a story, to me at least. So no, I don’t want to move yet. Some day. Not yet.’

Suddenly she stood up and shook herself. ‘Enough of being maudlin, Lorna. I’ll think of something,’ she said as she went down the garden to wind a stray stem of clematis around a pergola pole. ‘If Alistair going has taught me anything, it’s that we must seize the day and live our lives fearlessly, Cait: life is short. Sorry. Enough of me and doom and gloom. How are things with you? How’s your lovely dad? And heard any more from that Tom bloke?’

‘Dad’s OK though lonely I think. And no, I haven’t heard from Tom.’

‘Did you delete his friend request?’

‘It’s on my list of things to do when I get back.’ I didn’t need to tell her that I’d accepted Tom’s request if only to satisfy my curiosity. If I unfriended him, she’d never know.

‘You make sure you do it, Cait. How’s Matt?’

‘Same ole.’

‘Same ole good or same ole bad?’

‘Same ole somewhere in the middle. He keeps bringing me tea in bed. His way of making an effort.’

‘I’m sure you’ll get through this.’

‘I know. I’ll give him time.’

‘And yourself, Cait. It’s an adjustment for you too.’