Читать книгу Old Dogs, New Tricks - Linda Phillips - Страница 9

Marjorie wound down the passenger window for a closer look. ‘Yes, that’s definitely a brick wall out there. No doubt about it.’

Philip ground his teeth. He had had about enough of Marjorie’s sarcasm lately, her hurtful little jibes. And she had obviously made up her mind not to like the house, no matter what its merits might be. Resting his elbow on the sill of his own open window he rubbed a hand over his mouth. He mustn’t let himself be drawn into an argument when on unsafe ground, he told himself. Marjorie had every right to find fault with things; she had never wanted this move. It was all down to him. He just wished she would keep quiet about every little setback, although even her silences somehow managed to convey disapproval.

‘Well, there wasn’t a wall here before,’ he snapped, unable to keep tetchiness from his tone. He loosened a button on his shirt. Although not yet mid-morning the car was already uncomfortably warm. The thermometer on the dashboard showed that the outside air temperature was unusually high for late spring and he wondered, as he surveyed the garish red brickwork silhouetted against the powdery blue of the sky, whether they were in for a scorching summer.

‘I suppose,’ he said, having turned the car in the lane, ‘the woman from the site office brought me to see the house this way as a short cut.’ Canny bitch, he added silently. She’d certainly seen him coming! A lot of building had been done since that visit, none of which he had been aware of at that time. And now that he could see the way the development was going he realised that nobody in their right mind would want to spend the price being asked, to live on such a cluttered site. It would have been far better to have gone for something more exclusive. Aloud he said, ‘That wall must belong to our garden. Look, you can see our roof on the other side.’

Marjorie craned her head for the first glimpse of their new home as the car bumped back down the lane. The roof – their roof – with its rows of raw brown tiles, looked solid enough even for Philip’s peace of mind; the black plastic drainpipes equally so. She must try to like it for his sake. It wasn’t fair of her to keep longing for their old place when it had been such a worry to him.

She would try not to spoil his pleasure, really she would, and it could only be half an hour, after all, since she’d made vows to herself about being positive. How quickly her intentions had slipped! But it wasn’t easy. Her trepidation was increasing with each passing minute

Having rediscovered the site office, Philip took his bearings and set off down what they soon realised must be the main and only thoroughfare into the estate, and as he drove, the silence that accumulated in the car with the passing of each block of houses, pressed down on them.

Marjorie found a song running through her head. What were the words? Something about little boxes made of ticky-tacky. She recalled it from years ago but its message, sadly, had not reached the ears of the architects. She glanced across at Philip, who had his hands fixed doggedly on the steering wheel, and wondered whether he was finding it difficult not to turn the car round again and head back the way they had come.

‘Didn’t see any of this lot,’ he managed to murmur, ‘when the woman showed me the house. Think some hedges must have been ripped out too.’

‘Oh?’ Marjorie lifted her eyebrows as she looked from side to side. It was hard to imagine how all these houses could have escaped Phil’s notice, hedges or not. There were hundreds of them. Simply hundreds. Spreading in every direction. And yet the plans they had been given had shown only fifteen in all. A select little development, they’d supposed The Paddock to be.

‘I thought …’ she began to put her question to Phil but he anticipated her.

‘Obviously there are other builders here. Ones I knew nothing about. Of course, they don’t show you those on your plans.’

‘No, but –’ Her tone implied that he should have made more enquiries. Heavens, couldn’t he have seen what was going on? ‘Somehow –’ she scrutinised the plots more closely ‘– they don’t exactly look as though different builders put them up. I suppose they are different in little ways, but overall they tend to look much of a muchness. Even ours isn’t all that different from what I remember seeing in the brochure. Where is it now, by the way?’

They were speeding away from the completed properties now, bumping over rutted mud left behind by countless works vehicles. The unmetalled road continued its relentless march across a pot-holed field and Philip followed it, his eyes fastened on the horizon. And now Marjorie realised that the solitary house looming ahead of them was their new home – the only one of that particular phase to have been built.

‘What’s happened to the rest of The Paddock?’ she demanded, bewilderment setting in.

The car had come to a halt on a slab of bare concrete which would be their drive when the work was finished, only at the moment it fell two feet short of the garage and didn’t quite meet the road. Twin panelled doors faced them beneath a grand pointed roof; their cars – Phil had promised her a new one – would be sheltered in a detached property of their own, large enough to house several homeless families. But that, and the adjacent house, were the only buildings around them.

‘This is the first of The Paddock to go up,’ Phil said, patting his pockets to locate the keys to the front door. ‘The builders’ll start work on the rest of them as soon as people put down their names.’

‘You mean, we have no neighbours yet?’ Adopting the attitude of a stranded sailor Marjorie shielded her eyes and squinted at the ‘ticky-tacky’ estate shimmering through the heat haze in the distance. Civilisation lay miles away across a sea of reddish, dried-up mud. ‘How many people have put their names down?’

‘Really, Marjie, I can’t be expected to know everything, can I? Look, I’ve found the keys now. Let’s go inside. I’m sure you’re going to be thrilled when you see this.’

And she was. She had to admit it. She fell in love with the kitchen at first sight; couldn’t wait to unpack her utensils and start cooking something. But Phil, laughing his first real laugh for weeks, took her hand and wouldn’t let her put her head in another cupboard until she had seen everything else. By the time they returned to the kitchen her cheeks were flushed with excitement.

If only he’d thought about the boiler!

‘Oh, Phil …’

He turned from his investigation of the fuse box to find her pale and trembling behind him. Moisture gleamed on her lip. Her complexion resembled candle wax.

She pushed him into the utility room and showed him the white appliance on the wall. ‘It is a gas one, isn’t it?’ Their previous house had been ‘all electric’, which had suited Marjorie just fine. She had managed to overcome her fear of gas sufficiently to enter other buildings where it was installed, but she couldn’t bear the thought of it in her own. The lighting of it, the way it blipped into life, the roar of it under a grill – none of this could she bear to contend with.

‘Oh, Marjie, I meant to warn you.’ But clearly he hadn’t given it a thought. In his efforts to get her to make the move at all it hadn’t even entered his head.

‘How could you?’ she whispered. ‘How could you?’

‘I’m sorry, really I am … don’t look at me as though I’ve done this deliberately. But it’s all new and perfectly safe. Look, we can have special detectors fitted.’ He tried to take her in his arms. ‘What happened to your mother and father – it’ll never happen to us.’

But he knew that that wasn’t the point. Marjorie could do without gas appliances as a constant reminder. So could he as well if he were honest with himself. Marjorie wasn’t the only one still haunted by the event; nor was she the only one to have the occasional nightmare. The whole family still suffered. Naturally it had been worse for Marjorie as she had been the one to find them, but he’d been devastated too. He had known her parents for most of his life and a lovely couple they’d been. Then there had been the two girls, mere youngsters at the time, who couldn’t begin to understand. And his own parents who had lost good friends. And the milkman had been so cut up about it because he thought he should have noticed something, and – well – the list went on and on.

Phil looked up from his morbid musings to glimpse the removal van trundling towards the house across the landscape which, only a few minutes previously, they had been looking down upon from the landing window and jokingly nicknamed the Red Sea. There was nothing more he could say to Marjorie now, or do for her, except suffer a gross black mark for his gaff and get on with the work in hand.

‘Your money,’ Oliver said flatly that evening, watching Jade as she swept aside a Tiffany lamp that had been a ‘must have’ four months ago, but which was now apparently out of favour, and installed the vase in its place.

‘That’s right.’ She darted a chilly glance at him, noticing that he’d already changed for the country club. Leaning against the door frame in his track suit he looked full of pent-up vitality, but hard-faced and narrow-eyed as well.

‘Do you mean you bought this with your salary or with the savings from your modelling work?’ he went on in the tone she’d come to know so well: the tone that was ninety per cent geniality but ten per cent heavy sarcasm. ‘Because the first can’t possibly cover it and the second’s been spent ten times over.’

Jade’s pleasure in her purchase drained away. She flounced into the bedroom and began stripping off her navy suit. ‘Trust you to take the fun out of everything.’

She was well aware that her savings had long since gone. Did Oliver have to keep reminding her? He’d even begun to hint that perhaps she should take up modelling again, do a bit in her spare time to help cover her expensive lifestyle. What spare time? she asked herself, pulling a leisure suit over her bra and pants.

She picked up a brush and ran it down the long shafts of her hair, then clipped back the two front sections of hair with blue combs. Suddenly she looked ten years younger than her twenty-six. Yes, she thought without conceit, checking her reflection in the glass, she could certainly still do some sort of modelling work if she wanted to. But she didn’t want to. She’d had more than enough of all that.

She had begun a career in modelling at eighteen when she left school. It had been entirely her mother’s idea. Her mother had practically pushed her into it because she had always wanted to be a model herself, instead of which she had become pregnant before she left school and had to marry Jade’s father.

Jade had gone along with the idea at first, being attracted by the possibility of making a little money to set her on her feet. Pointless to expect her no-good father to give her a start in life; he’d never had a bean himself. Well, not for long anyway. And perhaps she owed her mother something for the struggle she’d had bringing up Selina and herself; with their father flitting in and out of their lives she’d had a rotten time of it. Dad had drifted in when he needed money to fritter on horses and out again when he’d cadged all he could.

On leaving school Jade hadn’t decided what she wanted to do with her life. It wasn’t modelling, she knew that as soon as her mother suggested it. Modelling, she was inclined to believe, was not all it was cracked up to be. But it would be something to be going on with – just supposing she could actually find someone prepared to take her on …

To her surprise, the first agency to which her mother accompanied her accepted her without hesitation. The agent could hardly believe her luck as she eyed Jade up and down. It wasn’t every day that a girl of this calibre walked in off the street. She promised Jade great things and apparently knew what she was talking about. By the end of Jade’s first year, work was flooding in at such a rate that she could pick and choose what she did.

Someone suggested she ought to apply to a bigger agency in London, and soon after taking that advice Jade found herself smiling from the covers of increasingly glossy magazines. There was talk of the big fashion shows – London, Paris and New York.

She knew she wasn’t happy with what she was doing but she threw herself into the work, telling herself all the time how lucky she was. Her mother kept telling her, too. Millions of girls would give anything to be in her shoes, she was constantly reminded, and just think of the money she was making! Jade, though feeling trapped, could only agree. She found it impossible to call a halt. With so little time to stop and take stock of herself she couldn’t plan what she wanted to do next.

Time ticked on and Jade did nothing to alter the course of events, but after three years of hectic schedules and living out of suitcases she began, to her mother’s chagrin, to make real noises of discontent. Jade questioned what they were doing, fell into gloomy silences and continually dragged her heels.

During one particular scramble behind the scenes she found herself in a space that would have confounded a pixie, having to wriggle out of one complicated and – in her opinion – ghastly outfit, into another equally hideous creation, and emerge looking beautifully immaculate. Inside she was screaming with frustration. This, she decided, was ridiculous; this was not the way she wanted to spend one more minute of her life.

‘It’s degrading, superficial and monotonous,’ she told her mother later. ‘A nonsensical way to live. In fact it isn’t life at all. And what will I do when my looks fade? What shall I have to fall back on?’

Besides, she didn’t like the way ‘normal’ people regarded her – like some kind of mindless freak. Especially men. To them she was so much meat and didn’t have a brain, whereas in reality she knew she was bright and intelligent.

‘I’ve decided to jack it all in,’ she’d announced, wiping off her make-up for the last time. ‘I’m going to do something in law.’

Oliver had been standing in the tall bay window overlooking the street, his thoughts presumably still on money. ‘Perhaps, we should come back here to eat after we’ve been to the club,’ he suggested. ‘Is there anything left in the fridge?’

Jade made a face in the mirror. ‘Even if there is I don’t feel like cooking it. I’ll feel even less like it after advanced aerobics.’

‘But –’ Oliver got no further. Down in the street a dark green van had been cruising backwards and forwards along the crescent. Now, having abandoned hope of finding a parking space the driver stopped in the middle of the road, jumped out and began to unload large flat packs of frozen food. Oliver read the words Gardiner’s Gourmet Foods