Chapter 15
‘What are you up to?’
The voice came from behind and Jack looked over his shoulder to see an elderly guy standing right behind him.
‘I’m putting a fence up for the owner,’ he said, then he noticed the dog, a small white and tan terrier, and he wondered whether this guy could be Bill.
‘Glad to see she’s brought someone in. She’s been trying to do it all herself. I would offer, but my arthritis is too bad. Can’t risk buggering myself up for weeks.’ The old gent glanced up and down the path. ‘Where’s your van? Do you work for a company or for yourself?’
Jack was taken aback by the directness of the man’s questions. ‘I… um… actually live here.’
‘You do not. A young lady called Molly lives here – you don’t. Who are you?’
‘I’m Jack,’ Jack said, ‘and I do live here. I moved in yesterday.’
‘I didn’t know she had a fella. She never said.’ The old man looked quite put out, then he stuck out his hand. ‘I’m Bill and this is Patch.’
Jack took the hand and shook it. ‘Jack, and I’m not her fella; I’m her lodger.’
Bill squinted at him, the crinkles deepening. ‘There’s not many lodgers who would put up a fence for their landladies.’
‘I doubt there are,’ Jack replied mildly. He wasn’t prepared to discuss his rental arrangement with Bill, or anyone else for that matter. If Molly wanted to confide in the old guy, that was up to her.
‘You’re not doing too bad a job,’ Bill said, examining the length of picket fence attached to the post. He walked around the other side to view it from the back. ‘Nope, not too bad at all.’
‘Glad you think so,’ Jack said.
‘You’ve got a fair few to do.’
‘Tell me about it. I don’t think I’ll get it all done today. A couple more posts need to go in first. But I can get this section done.’ By ‘this section’, Jack was referring to the area leading up to a giant slab of cracked concrete that served as a driveway. Molly had bought a pair of wide wooden gates and a smaller one to go next to them, but Jack guessed it would take two people to hang the gates properly. So he would do what he could, and then see if she wanted to give him a hand when she came home.
‘How come you moved in with Molly?’ Bill asked. His dog must have assumed he was here for the duration, because he was lying down with his nose on his paws and appeared to be asleep.
Jack shrugged. ‘She had a room free, and I needed somewhere to stay.’
‘Good. I didn’t like the thought of her being on her own in this place at night.’
‘It’s not that bad, surely?’
‘You moved in yesterday, you say? You’ll see. One night isn’t long enough.’
Jack thought back to the screeching he had heard in the middle of the night. ‘It was a bit noisy,’ he conceded. ‘Foxes, apparently.’
‘Aye, and the rest. When I took Patch out for a walk at about nine o’clock last night, there was a gang of youths hanging around the bandstand. Making one hell of a racket, they were. There was cans and fag ends everywhere. Molly, bless her, has taken it upon herself to clear up their mess in the mornings.’
‘I know.’
‘It’s a disgrace, that’s what it is,’ Bill grumbled. ‘The bloody council should do something about it.’
Jack thought it best to keep his mouth shut. ‘Hmm,’ was all he said. The last thing he needed was some old bloke getting on his case, as well as Molly.
‘I remember when this was a lovely place to be,’ Bill continued. ‘There was music on in the bandstand – the Sally Army used to play there a lot – and that little tea room was open and you could get a cup of tea and a scone, or an ice cream for the kiddies. Talking about kiddies, have you seen the state of that play area? It’s downright dangerous. Somebody should do something about it. A slip of a girl can’t do it all herself.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Molly hasn’t said anything,’ Bill said, ‘but I know the type. She’s not going to stop at picking up litter. She’s going to want to sort this place out. She told me she’s already been to see some chap at the council, but he was as much use as a chocolate fireguard. Waste of space, she said he was. A real jobsworth.’
‘I see.’ So that’s what she’d thought of him. He hoped her opinion had mellowed since their fateful meeting at the council offices.
‘You look like a good sort,’ Bill added. ‘You can help out a bit.’
‘That’s what I’m doing.’ Jack jerked his head towards the fence.
‘I mean, you can look out for her. Give her a bit of support.’
Bemused Jack said, ‘I’ll do what I can.’ He meant it, too.
‘I’d best get on. Remember what I said – keep an eye out for her. She doesn’t realise what she’s let herself in for.’
‘I will,’ Jack promised. He didn’t think things were that bad, though. The only noises he’d heard last night had come from the wildlife. If there had been any youngsters hanging about, the TV had drowned them out, and they must have gone home by the time Jack had gone to bed.
Jack watched the old gent trundle away, and wondered if he was the phantom phone caller. He might very well be. Most people would have filled in the online complaints form, or would have emailed the department, but Bill struck him as the type to prefer to use a phone. In his experience, older people tended to call. But why hadn’t the old chap left his name and number? It would have made life so much easier.
Jack waited until Bill was out of sight before returning to his task. He would only be able to do so much without help, because he needed someone to hold the gate into position while he put the screws in, so he did what he could, and then let Jet out. He would have liked to have had the dog outside with him this morning while he worked, but he was worried that if he was concentrating, he wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on him and Jet might wander off. If that happened, he had a feeling Molly would never forgive him. Although she had told him she hadn’t had the dog for long, she seemed to have developed a very strong bond with the animal. Jet slept in her bedroom, and Jack suspected the hound also slept on her bed. He wasn’t sure he would like to share his bed with a dog, but what Molly did was up to her.
Jack hadn’t had much of a chance to explore the area to the back of the cottage. He’d noticed from the kitchen window that it was overgrown, even more so than the front. It was like a jungle out there, and he wasn’t looking forward to knocking it into shape. He had never been much of a gardener and neither had Della: one of the things that had attracted them to their house was that the garden wasn’t too big, and it mainly consisted of lawn. He didn’t find mowing too onerous, but he wasn’t keen on pruning or weeding. He tended to hack at plants, and pull up bulbs instead of weeds.
He eyed the garden warily, whilst Jet scurried about in the undergrowth. There seemed to be an awful lot of sniffing and tail wagging going on, and now and again the dog disappeared behind a bush or a tree.
Whilst he waited for Jet to finish checking over his property, Jack decided to explore. Because the garden was so overgrown it wasn’t easy to tell how big it was, so he began to fight his way through the low-hanging branches and bushes that wanted to snag his T-shirt and hold him back.
He came to a halt when he discovered what seemed to be a concrete bunker, but on closer inspection turned out to be a shed and an outside loo. He didn’t mind the shed so much – it didn’t have a lot in it except for a few shelves and some dusty and rusted tins of paint, but the outside toilet was a different ball game. He took one look inside and hastily slammed the door shut.
Shuddering, he risked another peep and cracked open the door a couple of centimetres
Yep, it was as he thought – that spider was huge.
Jack was no shrinking violet, and he didn’t usually mind spiders, but he didn’t think he’d ever seen one this big before outside of a zoo, and he wondered whether it had escaped. It was one of those arachnids with a fat round body and thick, hairy legs. He could have sworn it was glaring at him with venomous dislike.
Jack shut the door, a little more softly this time because he didn’t want to antagonise the beast, and wondered whether Molly knew what was living in her outside toilet. He thought about telling her, but he didn’t want to run the risk of her asking him to catch it, because he had an awful feeling that he would end up being the hunted and not the hunter.
Leaving the ginormous spider to lurk in peace, Jack called the dog to him and went inside the house. It was lunchtime, so he made a quick sandwich, the dog eating half of it, then got back to work.
This afternoon he was going to sand and prep all the woodwork in the lounge, ready for painting. The skirting boards were easy enough to do because Molly had already done the hard work by removing the old paint, so all that was needed was a light sanding and a quick rinse to get rid of the dust. However, the windows were an altogether different proposition. He wondered when they’d last been replaced, because they looked very old, although they didn’t seem to be in a bad condition despite having at least six coats of paint on them. It was going to be quite a task to strip it all back, but he set to with enthusiasm, listening to an upbeat playlist on his phone as he worked.
If someone had asked him a month ago if he liked DIY, his response would have been “not really”. He had always regarded it as a necessary evil, but now he found he was enjoying it. There was something quite satisfying in removing old paint to reveal the natural wood underneath, and he hoped Molly wouldn’t paint over it.
He had also enjoyed erecting the fence, the bit of it he had managed to do. Once again, he realised there was a certain gratification to be found in working with his hands. He felt quite proud of what he’d achieved, and he prayed Molly would think he had done a good job.
As the afternoon ticked on, Jack’s thoughts turned to what to cook for tea. He didn’t know when she would be home, but perhaps if he made a casserole he could pop it in the oven where it could simmer gently until it was needed. And if he prepared some vegetables and new potatoes now, all he would need to do was to put them on to boil as soon as she arrived.
He was surprised to discover how much he was looking forward to seeing her. Although he’d kept himself busy, he had missed her. He’d tried telling himself it was because this was her house, but that wasn’t the reason at all.
He’d missed Molly, God damn it. And when she walked in through the door, dropping her bag at the foot of the stairs and shouting ‘Anyone home?’ Jack felt like greeting her as enthusiastically as her dog, but possibly without trying to lick her face or clamber onto her lap as she crouched on the floor. He would prefer to kiss her instead.
Oh, dear me, that would never do. She would be horrified if she knew what he was thinking, so Jack darted into the kitchen to check on the casserole and hoped that the heat from the oven would hide the colour he could feel creeping into his face.
***
‘The fence looks great,’ Molly said, following Jack out to the kitchen, Jet at her heels.
The dog had clearly missed her and couldn’t get close enough. It was a pity Jack wasn’t as pleased to see her. He had sort of grunted, leaving her to wonder what was wrong.
Jack was peering into the oven, gingerly lifting the lid of a casserole dish and stirring the contents with a wooden spoon.
Ah, she thought, he’s cooking. It was a well-known fact that men couldn’t concentrate on two things at once, so she would wait for him to finish stirring whatever it was – which smelled absolutely delicious, by the way – and then she’d try again to tell him how impressed she was with the fence. Now that a good third or more of the picket fence was in place, she could envisage what the rest of it would look like, and she grinned.
In a remarkably short space of time, the cottage was turning into the home of her dreams.
A friend of her mother’s was into embroidery, and Molly had once seen her working on a very intricate cross stitch pattern of Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford, and Molly had carried the image in her head as an ideal picture of what she wanted her own garden to look like. English country garden was what she was aiming for. She wanted roses climbing around the front door, she wanted purple and pink hydrangeas with their huge flowers, she wanted foxgloves and hollyhocks, and a lilac tree, and lavender growing along the edges of the path. She wanted a small pond, and a bird bath, a summer house and a hammock.
The picket fence was only the first step. Even if she couldn’t do anything with the rest of the park, she could do something with her garden. She knew it was going to be a big job and that she would be lucky to break the back of it this summer, but at least she could plant wildflowers, and her mum would show her how to take cuttings from the hydrangea and other suitable plants.
Jack finished stirring and straightened up, looking very flushed. Molly noticed he’d caught the sun, or was his pink face because he’d had his head stuck in the oven?
‘I was saying that the fence looks great,’ Molly repeated.
‘Do you think so?’
‘It’s exactly how I envisaged it.’
‘That’s good.’
Jack’s answers were short and he couldn’t seem to look her in the eye. There was a bit of an atmosphere too, and Molly couldn’t work out why. She wondered if something had happened while she had been out, and prayed to God her mother hadn’t dropped by.
‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes, why? Shouldn’t it be?’ He looked worried.
‘My mother hasn’t popped in, has she?’
‘No sorry, she hasn’t. Were you expecting her?’
‘Thank goodness for that!’ Molly sighed and flopped down into one of the kitchen chairs. ‘I did ask her not to, but my mum can be a law unto herself. By the way, I’m going to my parents’ house for lunch tomorrow and they’ve invited you. My mum does a mean Sunday roast.’
‘Oh, I, er…’ Jack was floundering.
‘Please don’t feel obliged to come if you don’t want to. I won’t be offended.’
‘It’s not that I don’t want to…,’ he began, then ground to a halt.
‘It’s OK, you don’t have to explain. I don’t expect us to live in each other’s pockets. It’s just that she wanted to meet you and I’m going for lunch anyway, so I thought it would save you cooking. But if you’ve got other plans, that’s fine.’
‘I’ve not got any other plans, but are you sure you want me tagging along?’
‘It’s not a question of you tagging along, it’s a question of my mother insisting on meeting you.’ Molly wondered how much she should tell him and decided she should give him a watered-down version of the truth. ‘She wants to meet the guy I’m shacked up with.’
Jack’s horrified expression made her giggle
‘You should see your face,’ she teased. ‘I’m having you on. My mother doesn’t think we’re shacked up at all, not in that sense.’ Molly could feel a blush creeping into her cheeks, and she hastily added, ‘She would want to meet anyone who I was living with, regardless of gender or age. She’s being nosey.’
‘She’s probably looking out for you,’ Jack said. There was a smile playing about his mouth, and Molly hoped he hadn’t guessed her mum was distrustful of him.
‘I suppose she is,’ she agreed.
‘If that’s OK with you, I’d love to come. I haven’t had a proper roast dinner in ages. Gravy making isn’t one of my strengths.’
‘What are you cooking this evening?’ she asked, hungrily. Her mouth was already watering at the delicious aroma coming from the oven.
‘It’s very basic, I’m afraid. It’s just a chicken casserole with a white wine and tomato sauce. I threw in a couple of mushrooms as well, because they looked as though they needed to be used up.’
‘Whatever it is, it smells yummy.’ At that moment her tummy rumbled loudly and she bit her lip, hoping he hadn’t heard.
He had and he smiled. ‘I take it you’re hungry.’
‘Starving.’
‘It’ll be about thirty minutes, if you want to have a shower, or get changed.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ she said, and she was about to go upstairs when she noticed he had also been busy in the living room.
‘The window looks fabulous,’ she gushed, seriously impressed. ‘I can’t believe you’ve done so much!’ She felt a little guilty. She didn’t expect him to spend his every spare moment doing her house up. ‘You shouldn’t have. You’ve already done enough today with the fence.’
‘I don’t mind,’ he said. ‘Honestly. I didn’t have anything else to do. Do you think you’ll paint it?’
‘Oh definitely. I was thinking of pale blue.’
‘Really?’
‘Or do you think green would be better? A forest green, so it won’t stand out?’
‘Whatever you think.’ Jack had a pained look on his face.
‘What colour would you suggest?’ He clearly didn’t fancy either of the colours she’d mentioned.
‘If you want my honest opinion, I think you’ll spoil it if you paint it.’
‘I can’t leave it bare. It needs some form of protection. I’m scared it will rot, out there in all weathers. I know the wood is treated but—’
‘Hang on, I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing. I thought you meant the window,’ Jack said.
Molly giggled. ‘And I thought you meant the fence! Start again. Window first – I don’t think I will paint it. Maybe some varnish or wood stain to bring out the grain of the wood. What do you think?’
‘Perfect! And as for the fence, blue is pretty, if you want people to notice it. If you don’t, paint it green and it will blend in with the shrubs and the bushes.’
‘Now that’s sorted, I’m going to have a shower. See you in a bit.’
Molly trotted up the stairs, Jet hot on her heels, and she caught herself asking the dog whether he’d been a good boy for Jack. She had missed this daft pooch today and she gave him a hug as he leapt onto her bed. She had missed Jack too, but that was probably because she was envious that he was at home (the lucky thing!), and she’d had to go to work.
But even as she tried to convince herself that was the reason, she knew she was lying. She had been looking forward to coming home to see Jack just as much as she’d been looking forward to seeing her dog.