Chapter Eight Moving on Up
Charlie and I turned out to be pretty useless when it came to reviewing the prospectus separately, so agreed to work on it together and have met up every evening this week to develop the proposal. The requirements of the bid are that the new investment partner brings in new ideas, more tourism to the island, and with that more employment. The wedding idea seems to fit the bill perfectly. We’ve already worked out the cost of buying the yurts and safari tents, of investing in a makeover and of marketing our new service. It’s a significant investment but the business plan is definitely achievable. We’ve also researched the weddings market and we’re both completely gobsmacked by the amount people are spending these days. Traditional nuptials in this country make a quick jaunt to our island look like an absolute bargain, and reduces the need to invite those relatives not liked. We decide we’re best mentioning that little nugget in our conversations with the happy couples rather than in our brochures.
So far, it’s all looking extremely promising and we’re sure any bank or investor will be chomping at the bit to get on board. We’re having no problem with the first draft of our proposal ― the ideas are flowing. We’ve asked Peter to double-check everything, to challenge our thoughts and put together a number of cash-flow spreadsheets for us. We want to know the worst-case scenario and the best case. By the end of the week we’re convinced that this is not only a good idea ― it’s one we’re truly excited about. It fits Mercury perfectly. Now we just have to convince the bank manager that it does, and we have an appointment to see him next week.
So after all that, come Sunday morning, I feel quite flat. This house suddenly feels big and empty. Patty is coming round later with the estate agent to value it but after that, it’ll be very quiet. I wonder if Michael is free today? I text him.
R u working today?
Till 6 — could meet you later
Fab — will make dinner
Looking forward to it x
I exchange contracts on my new apartment next week and they’ve said I should be completing very soon, so Patty needs to start selling this place ready for her new life with Jack. She arrives minutes before the estate agent and then we dutifully follow him around the house answering pretty obvious questions.
‘Centrally heated, is it?’
We nod, resisting the urge to say, ‘No — those radiators on the wall are makeshift xylophones in case we get the urge to play a little tune actually.’ We all trail upstairs as he measures each bedroom and checks the wardrobes. Fortunately, I’ve had enough time to give a quick hoover round and dust the surfaces with an old sock. I look like the ideal house guest.
‘Is there loft space?’ he asks. ‘People like to know that there’s potential to add value to a property.’
I blame TV despite the fact that I’m as addicted to these programmes as the next person. Once upon a time we lived in houses but now we own ‘properties’ and they never stop blethering on about ‘potential’ in these shows. And you know full well that most people won’t get any further than putting up fancy wallpaper to create their feature walls, never mind knocking a great big hole in the dining room.
‘Yes, let me show you the ladder,’ says Patty, unaware of my internal ranting.
The estate agent goes up into the loft while we stand on the landing.
‘Wow,’ he yells down, ‘this is enormous. So much scope up here. Did you never think of having it converted?’
Patty ignores him and I remember back to when she and Nigel were going to do just that. He was always starting new hobbies and one year, having watched far too much Sky at Night, he decided to get into star-gazing. He even bought himself a very expensive telescope but then had nowhere to use it. Outside in the garden was always too cold and peering out from the bedroom made him feel like a peeping Tom, so they decided to convert the loft and turn it into his observatory.
‘Anything to keep him quiet,’ Patty had said.
The plans were drawn up, Nigel bought huge posters of the constellations and planets but then the cancer struck. Hopeful that they’d beat it, they went ahead, getting planning permission and even hiring a project manager. Then one day Patty came home from hospital and rang me. I asked how Nigel was and will never forget her words: ‘I’ve cancelled the loft conversion.’ That’s all she said.
So no, that room doesn’t say potential to us and if I’m recalling that moment, Patty certainly must be.
The estate agent looks positively buoyant as he leaves the house and promises to get back to Patty with a valuation. She gazes absently around the living room as if taking stock for the final time. I remember how I felt when my family home was sold after the divorce. It was one of the saddest days of the entire break-up.
‘Are you OK?’ I ask her and she nods.
‘More than OK. I never thought I’d see the day I was ready to move on. I never thought anyone could make me laugh as much as Nigel did.’
She picks up her wedding picture from the mantelpiece. I remember that day so clearly: when the vicar announced he could kiss the bride, Nigel grabbed Patty and threw her back in a Richard Gere Pretty-Woman-style hold and yelled, ‘Kiss me, you fool’. Patty is obviously remembering the same moment. ‘He got his movies a bit mixed up.’
‘It was a great day,’ I tell her gently, holding her arm.
‘It was and he was a great husband,’ says Patty. ‘I think he’d get on with Jack.’
‘I think you’re right.’ I let the room fall silent for a moment.
‘I had some brilliant times in this house. But...’ Patty perks up after a few moments and stands tall. ‘I’m ready for my new life and I’m going to start by clearing out that loft.’
She takes the stairs two at a time and then the ladder. I’m out of breath when I stand next to her in a loft that hasn’t been touched for at least five years.
‘Jeez,’ I say looking at all the boxes. ‘You two were hoarders.’
Patty heads over to a particularly dusty old suitcase.
‘It isn’t just our old stuff. I have some of Joy’s here from ages ago.’
Now I’m excited. Joy was Patty’s mother and a legend of her own making. I’ve heard so many tales about her, how she hated being called Mum as this made her sound too old. She was an actress and in all of the photos I’ve seen, was simply glamour personified. Even though I never met her, I was in awe of the very idea of her. She died young at the age of thirty-six, in a car crash, exactly as beautiful people are supposed to. Patty opens the suitcase and starts rummaging through some black-and-white photographs. I kneel down beside her and she passes them to me one by one.
The first one we come to is of a stunning teenager in her black capris and skin-tight sweater. She has the most amazing figure and looks just like the classic 1960s bad girl. Joy used to tell us that when she was seventeen, she saw The Beatles at the London Palladium. They’d just released ‘She Loves You’ and it was number one in the charts but you couldn’t actually hear them singing because of all the screaming girls at the concert. I remember being so envious that she was around to witness the beautiful young John Lennon and all that sexual energy exploding onto the music scene for the first time.
‘Is this Ritchie?’ I ask pointing to the Jimmy Dean lookalike posing alongside her and knowing the answer.
‘That’s him,’ sighs Patty. ‘Mr Julian Richard Egerton. The name didn’t suit his freestyling image. Nor did a daughter apparently.’
Patty’s mum fell pregnant after running away with Ritchie to try and get into the Top of the Pops audience. They succeeded and were pushed to the front of the stage because they looked so young and fashionable. Of course, I’ve heard this story many times over the years and I’ve been shown the back of their heads on several television reruns. Being conceived like this is part of Patty’s personal myth and apparently explains her destiny in music. Ritchie and Joy split up when Patty was just seven because Joy wanted to be free to embrace the sexual revolution of the era. Patty never really saw her father again.
‘He sent me some birthday cards for a while but Joy moved around so much he had no chance of keeping up with us, even if he’d wanted to. I never knew him but it didn’t stop me missing him.’
There are always two sides to every decade and while Joy was doing the Free Love thing in hippie camps, my mum was thinking that Stepford looked like a nice clean place to live. Being an unmarried mother would have been an unspeakable blot on our family. Patty hands me another photo where this time there’s an explosion of gaudy colour, miniskirts and mascara. Joy is smiling and Patty stands at her side like a sort of mini-me.
‘We were doing the festivals then,’ says Patty. ‘We slept in a van wrapped in Joy’s Afghan coat. It was freezing and the van leaked. We stunk of wet goat by the morning. It put me off cashmere for life.’
The next pictures are of the peace rallies that you sometimes see in history programmes. But Joy lived them.
‘This is where she met the crowd who persuaded her to try drama school,’ says Patty. ‘She was a natural apparently. After that I spent five years being dragged around the country to various repertory theatres, lodging with other luvved-up actors in the worst B&Bs you’ve ever seen.’
‘It’s hardly surprising you ended up touring the world as cabin crew, is it?’
‘Not really,’ replies Patty. ‘I was only eighteen when Mum died and throughout our lives, I hardly stayed in one place for any length of time. My schooling would have been non-existent if the theatre crowd she hung out with hadn’t been so well educated and bohemian. I knew every classic text and could order drinks in four languages by the time I was seventeen. So airlines seemed a natural fit after she went. I just kept roaming the world until I met Nigel. He was my home, my rock. I stopped feeling lonely when I found him.’
Patty drops the pictures back into the case and opens another box. We both squeal with laughter at the sight of our younger selves in our air-stewardess uniforms.
‘Oh my God, that must be 1985 when we first met and I joined your cabin crew,’ I say to Patty. ‘How on earth did I get that little stewardess hat on top of that enormous perm?’
‘Oh Lord,’ Patty continues, ‘do you remember this uniform?’
She hands me the picture. We’re both proudly modelling the latest update to our navy suit — a red pussy-bow scarf.
‘We thought we were the bees’ knees.’
‘Especially when we rocked it with red shoes and plastic earrings.’ I cringe.
‘And look at your eye-shadow — you’ve co-ordinated with the jacket and scarf!’
‘Well, you’ve matched the lipstick to the shoes,’ I reply.
‘God, we look like Boy George—’ Patty shakes her head — ‘with less style.’
As well as the photographs, there are naff souvenirs and postcards, piles and piles of postcards from our travels.
‘You forget these things even existed,’ I say, picking them up. ‘They’re a casualty of picture texts now.’
We used to send ourselves cards from every stopover even if we had to send it from the airport hotel. Sometimes we would even send them to each other. Reading the daft comments we wrote to one another takes us back in time. The one I find next is of St Basil’s in Moscow. It’s from me and I’ve scrawled ‘Patty arrested by KGB for draining country of vodka’ on the back.
We’d had to take a tour bus around the city but leapt off to have our photos taken at the Kremlin wearing our big furry Cossack hats. We’d watched as the citizens solemnly paraded past Lenin’s tomb, some still wearing the peasant-style clothes we’d associate with Doctor Zhivago. Patty starts humming ‘Lara’s Theme’, so I know she’s thinking the same thing.
‘I really liked Moscow,’ she says. ‘It felt so daring just being there.’
I nod, remembering the moment when, as a young twenty-year-old I told Mum I was going to Russia. It was the era of Reagan and Gorbachev and she was horrified. She lectured me about being brainwashed into communism or kidnapped and tortured as a Western spy.
‘Don’t go smuggling any arms,’ I remember her saying.
‘Most mothers tell their daughters to be careful on the underground,’ I’d replied. ‘I’m hardly likely to get a Kalashnikov in my vanity case.’
‘I don’t know what one of them is but you just be careful on the underground too,’ came her final warning.
If she’d seen the underground in Moscow she wouldn’t have worried. They were truly magnificent halls built to honour the ordinary people and display their craftsmanship. Patty is holding up a postcard of Stockholm.
‘But this was my favourite city.’
I remember. As a tall blonde party animal she felt right at home and we went there several times, including 1992. Sweden had just won the Eurovision Song Contest and although it was being hosted in Malm?, its capital city was definitely up for a party.
‘What are you going to do with all of this?’ I ask putting a pile of cards down.
‘I don’t know. It seems wrong to throw it all out but then I shouldn’t keep living in the past.’
‘Why don’t you have the photos digitized?’ I suggest. ‘And maybe just keep a couple of postcards.’
She nods but packs everything up just as it was.
‘We had some really great times, didn’t we?’ She smiles.
‘We’ll still have them.’
‘But it’ll be different from now on won’t it? As much as I love Jack, girls always have a little more fun on their own. Maybe we should have one last fling,’ Patty suggests.
‘I know just the thing,’ I say as I wave her goodbye.
* * *
A quick call to Charlie and it’s all sorted. Patty and I will be escorting Mercury Travel customers on their next trip to Amsterdam. This Sunday has been much livelier than I’d thought it would be and I still have Michael... oops — I’d forgotten about that. I still have Michael coming round expecting dinner. The doorbell rings, signalling his arrival. I let him in and he walks in sniffing the air.
‘I know I promised dinner and I could pretend that I’d planned a cold platter,’ I say, ‘but Patty’s been round and I lost track of time.’
I head into the kitchen and bring out a bottle of red.
‘So I can offer you this as the starter. And for the main course, I have lovingly prepared le fromage et les oatcakes?’
‘Just perfect,’ he says and I join him taking a glug and devouring a chunk of wonderful smoked Cheddar.
‘To us,’ he toasts.
I snuggle into Michael with my feet tucked under me. Our glasses seem to have miraculously emptied themselves, so Michael tops them up. As he leans over me, his lovely outdoorsy smell sets my heart racing. I kiss him on the shoulder. He leans back and kisses me on the lips.
‘I could stay if you’d like me to.’
I return the kiss and the loins start stirring. I hear Patty’s voice echoing in my head, ‘You are beautiful as you are, don’t wait for perfection, relax and just go with the flow.’ This could be it.
Houston, I think we are ready for lift-off.
I put my glass down and run my hands down his chest. My heart is pounding and my mouth is dry, this could really be it.
But then a horrible image starts to appear in my mind. I try to block it out but it’s like that thing when you’re not supposed to think about pink elephants and all of a sudden that’s all you can think about.
Houston, we have a problem. Stand by for details.
No, not now. Please not now.
But it’s too late, she’s there. My pink elephant.
Or rather a huge pink Stetson sitting on top of Patty’s head. The most vivid image of her ever is playing through my mind, drowning out any romantic thoughts. And she’s doing that song, drawled in her best country and western singalong voice. The one she uses for ‘Jolene’.
‘Heee’s a rrrh-i-ne-st-oone caw-buoy . . .’
She’s winking at me in a howdy-doody way. It’s no good ― Michael and I can’t possibly compete with that.
Houston, abort mission. I repeat, abort mission.
I try to pull myself away from that kiss as demurely as I can without completely destroying the moment. It’s no good. I have to escape Patty, her Stetson, Michael and the kiss. I leap up from the sofa and send my glass flying. I’m covered in red wine and I think we can safely say the moment has passed.
‘I’m really sorry,’ I blurt clumsily, ‘but it’s been a tough day and I’m probably more tired than I realized. I should just go and tidy myself up then get a good night’s sleep.’
‘I’m sorry... I didn’t mean to...’ Michael stutters as he gets up. He tries to help me blot up the wine with a napkin but I just grab it from him and push him away.
‘I’ll let you get some sleep,’ he says before leaving. At the door he leans in to give me a peck on the cheek and then decides against it.
I slump back down. What on earth have I done? How must he be feeling? I can probably guess the answer to that. Exactly the way I felt when I tried to show my feelings for someone — rejected and humiliated. I have to do something about this. I know Patty was joking about the vajazzling and stuff but there might be things I need to know. I don’t want to lose this man.