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Day 137: Sunday, 18^th March

At Periwinkle Cottage

Epic Achievement: Discovering a carrot patch in the vegetable rack.

I’m not sure if it’s the thought of guests or the excitement of an all-you-can-eat day, but as soon she’s delivered my new colouring book Aunty Thing rushes off and starts crashing around the kitchen. As she clatters the cups and plates onto a tray and gets out a gigantic teapot, she’s dancing around so fast her gold pumps are leaving light trails.

She waves at the next room, snaps out another order. ‘Get the cake, Edie, it’s in the vegetable rack.’

That’s not a place I’ve visited yet, but moments later I’m back in the kitchen sliding a square cake out of the box, eyes popping at the creamy topping and bright orange knobs of icing carrots sprouting green sugar leaves.

She’s tutting critically as she watches me unwrap it. ‘It’s an M&S carrot patch cake – the milkman picked it up for me from Penzance.’

‘It’s pretty fab.’ Even though I’m reeling from being bossed about, I have to hand it to her. In my other life with Marcus I might even have tucked the idea for that away in my mental recipe file and pulled it out later as a cute sweet to take round to his friends’ for a weekend barbie. My desserts were the sole trick I had to impress them with. Marcus’s mates in creative media – and he had a lot – took male bonding to a whole new level. The kind where, if they weren’t away on some kind of wacky adventure, they were incapable of making it through a weekend without meeting up on someone’s patio. Mostly they swilled back craft beers with odd names and incinerated choice lumps of cow from the craft burger shops while they tried to channel their younger selves. Even though they’d graduated from flats to houses, due to soaring Bristol property prices and the burst of the dot com bubble, no one had yet made it to the stage of owning a full-blown flower-filled garden. So we chewed on our chargrills in back yards, sitting on stacked-up railway sleepers listening to Wonderwall against backdrops of reclaimed brickwork.

At the time it felt like we’d be twenty-something all our life, and be doing that for ever. Then the inevitable happens, someone forgets to take their Pill, someone else thinks ‘Why not us?’ And, before you know it, baby bumps aren’t just trending, they’re exploding under every Nicole Farhi silk T-shirt. And whatever people say about not letting kids change their lives, they’re kidding themselves. I had an aunt’s-eye view when Tash had Tiddlywink and Wilf. It was like a hurricane upended their home and then came back through for seconds. Put it this way, once you shell out more on a Bugaboo Cameleon pushchair combo than a Vera Wang wedding dress – and there were plenty of both among Marcus’s friends – nothing’s ever the same again.

But, getting back to Aunty Jo’s carrot patch, even for a cake-face like me, it’s huge. I’m also impressed at how obliging the door-to-door people are around these parts. I’m counting the sprouting carrots in my head and I get all the way to eleven before I falter. It could be the sea air, or Aunty Jo making me count along with her when she does her before lunch Stay Young stretches. But that’s the most I’ve reached for a long time, so in my head I’m giving a silent cheer.

‘We could have tea in the conservatory? As we have company.’

‘Great plan,’ I say. It’s warm in the garden room, even on cloudy days, and this way we sidestep the visitors seeing we live in what looks like a rainforest theme park.

By the time the boy is kicking his way across the courtyard we’re settled onto basket chairs, marvelling at how the gunmetal paint on the window frames matches the shine of the distant sea. Aunty Jo pushes the door open, points at the mat and, after a frenzied foot wipe, the boy wanders over to where my pens are spread out on the low table next to me.

He’s giving my felt tips a hard stare. ‘Aren’t you too old for colouring in?’

I smile. ‘You think so?’

He shrugs. ‘I don’t like colouring. I go over the lines.’

I get that. ‘Same here.’

His hands are deep in his pockets. ‘Making up your own pictures is better for your imagination.’

Why didn’t I think about that? He could be right. ‘Anyway, I’m Edie Browne with an ‘e’, and this is Aunty—’

She’s straight in there, filling the gap. ‘Jo. Aunty Jo. Jo like ‘joker’, because I laugh a lot. Let’s see how that one works?’ From the look she gives me she knows I’m liable to forget.

I turn to the boy. ‘So do you have a name?’

‘Cam. Except at school I’m Cameron Michael Arnold, but that’s so long to write.’ He sounds despondent. ‘I’m really slow at writing.’

‘Me too.’ I’m not actually getting how Aunty Jo is any fun at all, but I can sympathise with the slow part. Even so, I bet if we had a race he’d win. If he’s here because he’s a sponge fan too we could have a lot in common. ‘But I’m fast at eating cake.’

His eyes pull back into focus. ‘Barney said to hurry, we’re going to see a customer.’

Aunty Joke’s tone hardens. ‘He will still have time for tea?’

‘Nope.’ Cam’s shaking his head.

‘That’s a shame.’ Not. I’m mentally punching the air with relief as I reach for the knife. ‘I’d better go fast then.’

His brow furrows. ‘What are those orange things?’

Do six-year-olds understand irony? ‘They’re icing carrots because it’s carrot cake. They’re meant to be funny.’

He wrinkles his nose. ‘I don’t like vegetables.’

That’s another thing we have in common. I prise off a carrot top and pass it to him. ‘Try one, they’re delish.’ Not that I could taste them myself, but if they’re M&S they have to be. As I watch him chew, his frown melts. ‘Good?’

‘Yep.’

Aunty Joke isn’t giving up on her teapot. ‘Well, you can always have tea another time. Next weekend, maybe?’

I slice through the buttercream. ‘One for now and one for later?’ I pass Cam the first chunk in kitchen roll, then wrap up the second.

Aunty Jo prompts me, ‘Don’t forget – do some for Barney too, he’s here now. I just hope he doesn’t look at how dirty our windows are.’

Damn. People like him don’t deserve cake. And I’m giving up on the window cleaner thing.

When Barney finally slides his shoulder up against the frame, he fills the doorway. Then my worst nightmare happens and his eyes lock with mine. I clutch at my stomach as it lurches into some kind of cartwheel, spectacularly fail to stop it as it slips into freefall and somehow lose my grip on the cake knife, which arcs through the air and clatters onto the tiles next to Barney’s feet.

He stoops to pick up the knife and as he stands up his lips twitch. ‘Hey there, butterfingers.’

I roll my eyes. ‘You again? So soon.’

Then, as his eyes slide down to the cake, they widen. ‘Nice carrots. Is that homemade?’

Why the hell would I even care he’s noticed? As for the pang of disappointment that I can’t claim the cake as mine, that’s bonkers too because he’s the last person I’d want to impress. That little pool of wide-eyed awe of his isn’t one I’d want to bask in. Honestly.

I feel my nose wrinkle. ‘I guess someone with a home made it.’ I have no ideas where that bollocks came from, but I have to come clean. ‘It wasn’t me.’

He looks half amused. ‘In that case I won’t say great cooking. Or make any mention of baking and entering.’

I’m groaning inwardly at that, but I don’t flinch. ‘And I won’t say thanks a lot for the compliments, although I might risk an “enjoy”.’ But that’s only for Cam’s sake, obviously. Okay, someone please tell my mouth it’s time to stop. ‘And in case you’re thinking of sending the special constables round to interrogate us, it isn’t stolen – the person who brings that white stuff in bottles brought it.’

His nostrils flare slightly. ‘Any cake is good cake as far as we’re concerned. Not that we’re desperate or anything.’

‘I’ll take your word on that.’ I swear that’s my last word too.

‘Ready, Cam?’ He cocks his head at the boy, then turns to Aunty Jo. ‘I hope it’s okay he gate-crashed your afternoon tea?’ He’s raising an eyebrow at Cam. ‘C’mon then, big man, fast as you can, we’re already late. What do you say?’

‘Thanks.’ Cam’s clutching his stack of cake parcels, dropping crumbs as he hurries out onto the stone-flagged path.

‘You will come again?’ There’s no time for Aunty Jo to say more because they’ve almost reached the lane.

So there’s ‘in a hurry’. And there’s ‘bad mannered’. And I know where my money is.

As she pulls the door closed behind them her voice has lightened. ‘He was nice.’

‘He was, I don’t see many kids that age.’

Her eyes narrow. ‘Not the child, I was talking about Barney.’

It takes me a while to pick myself up off the floor. ‘Nice, in what way?’ All that stubble and on-trend scuffed Timberlands still don’t make up for rushing off. Or accusing me of robbery. Even worse, now he’s gone my heart is pounding and my pulse is racing. I blame my faulty adrenalin circuits. The slightest excuse, they flood my body so I’m ready to run away. Which is great for survival and outsmarting the Neighbourhood Watch brigade, but leaves me feeling way more jumpy than I’d like.

‘Put it this way, if he’d asked me to dance thirty years ago I wouldn’t have said no.’ Her wicker chair creaks as she settles back into it.

I can’t believe what I’m hearing. ‘But you’re grieving.’ And she’s also my aunt who’s into ballet and wheat grass juice and rubs on Estée Lauder Youth Dew body lotion morning, noon and many times later on. Every day. How can a guy whose idea of a meet-the-client outfit is a ripped T-shirt and is hunky enough to have jumped off the pages of GQ magazine even register on her radar? He’s totally nothing like, you know … the one who looks like he wants to snog Margot’s face off every time he snatches her out of the air. Or smooth old Uncle Harry, come to that.

‘Don’t be so frumpy, Edie, I’ve lost my husband, not my eyes.’ It’s another one of those times when her snap is so sharp, arguing is pointless.

I fix my gaze on the ferns in the room beyond the door. ‘We really need to do something about this wallpaper.’ This is me, and I’m taking back control. A few minutes’ break from the riot of black and purple has been bliss. At home Dad repainted my bedroom and the pale grey walls and soft light filtering through the muslin nets worked wonders for clearing my head. We’ve got to make a start somewhere and Edie Browne, site manager, knows the cottage is the place.

‘You could be right. If we’re having regular visitors we don’t want to come across all dark and gloomy, do we?’

If Mr Awful-Neighbour got an upgrade to visitor status, even if it’s only in her head, we need to get this quest up and running. The sooner we do, the sooner I’ll be back to civilisation. And normality. And after today I could really do with some of that.