Chapter 1
1
When I was a child, birthdays always seemed to take forever to come round. But as the years passed, time appeared to gain pace. Then one year, about five minutes after my last birthday, another one was hovering into view and this time it was a really big one. Sixty-five.
I knew people usually talked about the big 5-0 or 6-0 as being significant, but at my age every milestone had begun to count. Being sixty-four had enjoyed some slightly comical connotations thanks to The Beatles. Will you still need me? Well, at sixty-five it felt like no one actually did. And it didn’t really feel funny at all.
I hadn’t really minded the previous significant birthdays. Forty just proved I really was an adult. At fifty I was still working, fit and active, had grown-up children forging their futures and their relationships but still coming home for Mum’s cooking, and I still had Greg. As I looked into the face of turning sixty-five, a lot of things were different.
Everything that was important in my life had changed and none of it had really been in my plan, such as it was. It made me realise that a lot of the things I had done in my life hadn’t really been my idea either, and that really annoyed me.
I’d had to have a knee replacement (fell off a pavement), I’d been made to retire (cutbacks in the budget and the ever-present improvements that never seemed to improve anything), our daughters, Jessie and Katherine, and our son Alexander had all married and left home for jobs in London, Birmingham and Reading. The girls had produced children of their own (two granddaughters, Violet and Maudie), and Greg had flown the nest too (new wife in Dublin – Thin Blonde Trollop, or TBT as I preferred to call her).
Which left me on my own in a quite nice house in a small town, with a garden that, if I was honest, was a bit too big for me to manage, and a granny flat over the garage where ten days ago my son Alex had moved back for a ‘short time while everything is sorted out’ following the inevitable breakdown of his marriage. And to be fair, he hadn’t been any trouble so far, so I really couldn’t complain.
I had a reasonable pension from my years as a teacher too. So I couldn’t exactly say I was suffering. But my goodness, even knowing Alex was in the self-contained flat nearby, I was lonely. And sort of rudderless. This wasn’t what I had expected.
But what had I been anticipating for my – what were they called – golden years? I supposed a home together where Jessie, Kat and Alex came to visit us with their families. Where Greg and I would be the focal point of family events and celebrations. A couple of older, wiser, cuddly people that the younger generations respected as they sat around us, faces glowing from the firelight as we dispensed good advice after yet another of my marvellous Sunday lunches.
Greg and I would live out our days with each other, getting used to being older, overlooking each other’s irritating habits and perhaps coping with life together.
Nope.
That wasn’t how it went.
Greg left the day after my fifty-eighth birthday with the TBT (initially dismissed by him as being rather young, too thin, obsessed with horses and a bit neurotic) who had been mentioned in passing over the last two years. A great PA but, as Greg said, a bit ditzy. What did that even mean?
I looked it up on Google once. She was either scatterbrained or was covered in a pattern of small, random motifs, typically flowers. Maybe she was both?
Apparently the last time Jess had seen him, Greg had been complaining about the cost of keeping TBT’s small but high-maintenance horse in a livery stables, not to mention the price of snaffles and leg bandages and whatever else it was that horse needed. Kat had once shown me a picture on Facebook, where Greg was hanging on to the horse’s bridle while TBT held up a red rosette in triumph. He looked slightly terrified, and she looked about twenty-one. Heaven knows what she saw in him. Jess said every time she saw him he was grumpy and dissatisfied and complaining about food allergies. She tried to be kind and wondered if he had IBS, and Alex asked her if she meant Irritable, Boring and Selfish. No comment.
After I retired, I’d filled my days with routine. Cleaning, social media, laundry, although there wasn’t much of it those days, occasional lunches with friends, letter writing, gardening. But I began to realise that being out in the garden sometimes made me sad. Every little blossom, resurrected plant and border were things only I saw. No one but me exclaimed in delight when the lilac bloomed or the tree at the end of the garden finally produced apples after sulking for two years.
I didn’t want to live like this, on the edge of everything. I hated the thought that maybe the most exciting part of my life was behind me. ‘The best years of your life’, that was a phrase I sometimes thought about. Was the best really behind me? How incredibly depressing. And I’d hardly done any of the things I’d meant to do. I’d just done what had been expected of me, what was right. I’d wanted to make other people proud of me, but was I proud of myself? I wasn’t sure.
In fact, I wondered if I had got to the stage in my life when I was just taking up space rather than contributing to anything.
I’d had a good career working as a teacher, ending up as a headmistress of a small village school, so that was worthwhile. I had a decent pension, which Greg’s lawyers had not gone after as Alex had threatened that if he did, he personally would never speak to him again. There are occasions when one’s children can be surprisingly supportive.
So on the surface I had nothing to complain about. But apart from feeling in control of things, I wanted to feel needed. Included. Proud of myself. And sometimes I didn’t feel any of those things.
I had people to talk to though, neighbours and ladies who worked in the little local shops, occasionally visits from past pupils and colleagues, and of course news from my two friends from university days. Ellen and Susie. I had Juliette too, who was my nearest neighbour. She lived in what would have been called the big house when I was a child. A rambling old rectory which backed on to my garden. The fence dividing our plots had blown down the winter after I had moved in, and rather than either of us mending it, Juliette had taken to just wandering in unannounced, usually with a cake so she was always sure of a warm welcome.
Then suddenly I reached the time in life when illness and deaths and funerals were things that happened to people I knew, contemporaries with whom I had worked, not just to other people’s parents or older relatives.
Ellen – talented, bright and beautiful – who sadly after months of an unnamed ailment, which she had dismissed as nothing particular, died five years ago, and by then I hadn’t seen her for a long time thanks to the travel restrictions, except on Zoom calls, not since she’d gone to live in Italy.
And now Susie wanted to celebrate my birthday. Was being sixty-five something to celebrate? Well, I supposed it beat the alternative.
She had been most insistent. She had been going through problems with her partner Simon for some time, but even at sixty-three she could still think of reasons to have fun and excuses to behave in a way people would not expect of women our age, which I was beginning to see was an excellent mindset. Despite the lessons we should have learned from the scrapes we had got into when we were younger.
Dressing downs at university when we had been caught doing something wrong – as we always were. Later on, parking fines when her assurances that ‘no one ever comes to check this street after six o’clock’ proved to be repeatedly inaccurate. Dreadful hangovers from homemade wine. Photographic evidence that although Madonna might have been able to pull off ripped jeans, lace mittens and bits of ribbon tied everywhere, we hadn’t. Perhaps Ellen had, because she was an art student and naturally stylish. Susie back then was little and blonde and had the ability to look both innocent and dangerous at the same time. I had just looked like a crazy bag lady.
Since then, the three of us had gone our separate ways but with Ellen away in her home on Capri, Susie and I tried to meet up every few weeks, leaving our significant others and my children at home while the two of us went to a wine bar to eat overpriced salad and catch up with each other’s news.
Over the years, the topics had changed from the excitement of getting married, having babies – or in Susie’s case not getting married or having babies – the terrible twos, house moves, Ofsted inspections, annual work appraisals, relationship problems, travel adventures and exam results, and then the topics sliding away into empty nesting, random health scares, grandchildren and cholesterol levels. Far more things to worry about it seemed, and looking back, it was much more fun being young. Adulting is a heavy load.
‘It doesn’t have to be,’ Susie said when I voiced that opinion one Friday evening as we finished a chilled bottle of Chablis. ‘We can still have fun at our age, just more carefully so we don’t hurt ourselves.’
I looked across the table at her. Sometimes, she didn’t seem to have changed at all since the day she had swung on the door of my student room, asking if I had a cigarette lighter. Yes, her hair was grey and her face more lined, but I’d read that wrinkles are where the smiles have been, and Susie did have a very smiley face. And sparkling blue eyes. Two things which had got her out of trouble or into an exclusive club on more than one occasion.
‘And we can afford to do things, some things anyway. I’m not up for a world cruise. Jo, you are going to be sixty-five next month. I think that calls for a celebration, don’t you? I think we should have a mini break. Somewhere lovely, without Simon, where we can get a massage or something. And we don’t have to cook anything or clear up. I’ll sort it out,’ Susie said, as she had many times over the years. When she was younger she had always been up for a party, a festival or a concert.
‘As long as you don’t get a lot of grief from Simon when you get back. I know what he can be like.’
‘Oh, him,’ Susie said, pulling a face. ‘I’m beginning to realise we might not go the distance after all. I know we’ve been together for a while but recently I’ve realised I have more fun without him. Is that very disloyal of me?’
‘No,’ I said, secretly relieved that perhaps Susie was seeing what everyone else had thought for years. ‘But is being sixty-five really something to celebrate? And what about Alex now he’s moved back in with me? Do you think I should leave him on his own?’
‘Yes,’ she said firmly, ‘he is after all a grown-up with a job and solicitors fees to pay, and he’s not exactly mooning around the place being miserable, is he? And never mind him, remember poor Ellen. She died at sixty-one. Far too young. I sometimes forget, and think about emailing her, and then I remember all over again. But we are still here, like Elton says, still standing.’
‘I can now I’ve had my knee replacement,’ I said. ‘Modern medicine is marvellous.’
Susie held out her phone to show us a picture.
‘Anyway, back to our mini break. This place. It’s only twenty minutes away from my flat, holiday breaks for over 55s.’ I went over there to take a quick look.
‘There are no kids dive bombing the pool, no toddler tantrums at the next table, and the chicken nuggets are called goujons. There’s a spa where we can have treatments, and most importantly they don’t use paper robes that tear down the back when you sit down. I phoned them up to check. Remember last time we got a weekend away? My fiftieth when I flashed the whole spa.’
‘It was probably the best thing some of them had seen for years,’ I murmured, and she laughed.
She pushed her wild, curly hair back behind her ears. I’d never known anyone with as much hair as she had. When she was younger it was sort of strawberry blonde; now at sixty-four, it was a silvery grey. She looked like a tiny Viking.
‘I don’t seem to have a bottom any more,’ I said. ‘It’s more like one of the cushion pads for garden chairs I bought off Amazon. Flat. Perhaps I should get implants.’
Susie looked worried. ‘I’ve often wondered what happens if you sit down too hard on them. Wouldn’t they burst?’
‘Or they might make you spring up again unexpectedly, like sitting on a space hopper,’ I suggested.
We thought about this for a moment and then we both laughed.
‘I’m not going to, so don’t worry,’ I said.
We both peered at her phone, and I squinted a little.
‘What does that say? I haven’t got my reading glasses. Alma Cogan? Wasn’t she a singer?’
Susie giggled. ‘It’s Alma Court. You take a look at the website and then I’ll make the reservations and sort out two adjacent rooms. It will be like being back in halls of residence again.’
‘Except no smoking, pot plants on the windowsill or throwing up in the sink,’ I said.
‘As if we would,’ she said. ‘We’re grown-ups now.’
‘What a bore,’ I replied, shaking my head, ‘I’ve been thinking about it and I’m beginning to wonder if all my best years are behind me.’
‘Rubbish,’ Susie said firmly. ‘The best is yet to come.’
* * *
‘Oh, of course you must go,’ Juliette said a couple of days later when I mentioned the proposed trip. ‘There’s nothing better than a little mini break. I was talking to Matthew only the other day about us having a couple of days somewhere. I said Ibiza and he said Scotland. I said my piece about blackflies and the rain, which are all I remember about our trip to the Trossachs, and he went on about Maurice not liking it in kennels. I swear that dog holds more sway than I do sometimes. So in the end we didn’t book anything. I’ll have to work on him.’
She was sitting in her usual place at my kitchen table that afternoon, sparkling in a bright fuchsia top and blue trousers. I was in a rather dull but comfortable dress which I had taken to wearing rather too often. Both of us were enjoying some of her experimental ginger, rhubarb and cranberry traybake. I munched away for a moment, my teeth stuck together and then washed it down with a second mug of tea. When Juliette said she was ‘just popping in’, it was never five minutes. But then she was such good company that I didn’t mind. It certainly beat doing the ironing.
‘But sixty-five,’ I said in a mournful tone.
Juliette flapped a hand at me. ‘Is nothing, don’t come crying to me. I’m nearly seventy and I’ve never been happier. I used to think life had passed me by and then I realised it hadn’t and I’d better get stuck in. Take every chance you get, that’s my motto. This cake is very odd, isn’t it? Perhaps less ginger next time. And less rhubarb. And come to think of it, fewer cranberries. Still, it was a good try. Matthew will eat it regardless. He seems to think everything I make is wonderful. How is Alex getting on?’
‘He’s okay,’ I said, ‘although he does seem to think my fridge is his. I’m never quite sure what I will find in there these days when he has one of his raids.’
‘Don’t let him settle,’ Juliette said wisely. ‘I have a friend who has been trying to get both her kids permanently out for over three years. The boomerang generation, I think they call it. No sooner does one find a new person to flat share with than the other one breaks up with someone and scurries back to Kim.’
Yes, she was probably right. Even after such a short time in residence, Alex had snaffled up my best towels, made requests for certain grocery items to be added to my supermarket shop and claimed his washing machine wasn’t working properly, so could he use mine.
‘You go,’ Juliette said, ‘and report back. I might even persuade Matthew to come away with me for a few days, if we can find someone to look after Maurice.’
‘I don’t know anything about dogs,’ I said, ‘but I would if you can’t find someone else. He’s only little. He can’t be much trouble, can he?’
Juliette gave me a look. ‘You would think. I never owned a pair of wellingtons before I met Matthew. That dog has gnawed through three pairs of mine since we got married. And don’t talk to me about chew toys. There isn’t one made he can’t demolish. And heaven knows how many dog beds we have bought him. He just steals a tea towel from the Aga rail every evening, brings it upstairs and sleeps on that at the end of our bed. For such a small dog he takes up a lot of room. And he’s very hot. Now then, I must be off. Matthew has been at a parish council meeting, so he will be in a bad mood. I will have to sweeten him up, but I don’t think it will be with this cake.’
* * *
Alma Court was absolutely magnificent as we drove up the tree-lined drive four weeks later. It was an old Palladian mansion, golden stone glowing in the spring sunshine.
I’d read up a little about its history before we arrived. It had been built in the nineteenth century for some bewhiskered industrial magnate who didn’t appear to have had a conscience about his ill treatment of his workers and wanted to showcase his wealth to the world. And then, when wars and death duties ran a coach and horses through that, it was eventually bought by a faded sixties pop star who mistakenly thought it would cement his next incarnation as a respectable country squire, although hedonistic parties, raids by the vice squad and cars being driven into the carp lake didn’t exactly help.
Eventually, after many years of neglect, it was brought back to life by a hotel chain, which had installed proper plumbing, fitted carpets and new lighting, and restored the lofty, plasterwork ceilings to their former glory. It must have cost a fortune.
We trundled our suitcases up to the reception desk, which had been installed in the massive entrance hall, and waited while a white-haired couple in front of us checked in. Then, having been reassured that a young lad called Jordan would bring their luggage up to their room, they went off, pushing matching Zimmer frames in front of them to find the lifts.
The receptionist turned to us with a bright smile.
‘Welcome to Alma Court. I’m Tracy. How can I help?’
‘Joanna Dawson,’ I said, ‘two rooms, two nights.’
Tracy did some busy typing on her keyboard and frowned.
We exchanged a look and Susie cleared her throat, tapping on the desk with her fingernails.
‘Ah yes, of course, there you are. Joanna Dawson and Susanna Fellowes. I was looking in the wrong place. I thought you’d be in the new wing, the bit that isn’t still cordoned off, but you’re in the main building. Because of the incident . And you did request two rooms together. And we managed to do it. At this time of year, we’re not booked solid. A lot of our clients don’t want to deal with the stairs, which is why the ground floor rooms are always taken first.’
‘Hang on. What incident?’ I said.
Tracy wriggled uncomfortably in her seat.
‘Nothing to worry about. Just a bit of drama.’
What could that be then? A fire? A murder? Blood splattered up the walls?
Susie plonked her handbag down on the desk and leaned forward.
‘Do go on,’ she murmured.
Tracy’s eyes glittered with excitement, and we waited.
‘Well, I shouldn’t really, but there was a bit of a thing with three couples who were here with a coach party from the Midlands, part of a ballroom society, and some medication. Unprescribed medication. The sort you get from non-residents, if you catch my drift. A chap who, shall we say, is known to us. And the police. He shouldn’t have even been on the premises but…’
‘Drugs?’ Susie breathed, absolutely delighted.
I think at this point her hair gave a little shiver of its own and I stifled a snort of laughter.
Tracy gave a tiny nod and chewed her lower lip, obviously reluctant to say more, but her willingness to gossip got the better of her.
‘Police everywhere,’ she hissed, ‘a fire engine and an ambulance parked outside just in case. And sniffer dogs. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was only yesterday they took down the blue and white tape. It was terrible trying to keep the other residents away. And Mrs Wilkins was trying to give the police sniffer dogs ham sandwiches because she thought they were looking for food. My word, she got shouted at and no mistake. People wanting to take photographs and see the room. I’d have thought people of that age would know better but of course everyone has mobile phones these days.’
‘Was someone hurt?’ I asked, not daring to look at Susie in case she made me laugh.
Tracy shook her head. ‘Oh no, nothing like that. But as my boyfriend says, if you’re not used to it, you shouldn’t take it. And a place like this, people don’t want to have fire alarms pulled when they’re waiting for their starters, and it was prawn cocktails too that night, which are always popular. And they definitely don’t want to see naked people in the dining room doing the conga when they’re waiting for their Cumberland sausage surprise?—’
Susie let out a snort of laughter at this point and I pretended to be fiddling with my handbag.
‘Anyway, here are your room cards. Top of the stairs and turn left, or you can wait for the lifts down there by the bust of Margaret Thatcher.’
She gave us a brilliant smile and we left her to the next couple who had just ambled in, dragging cases and a picnic hamper on wheels behind them that clinked suspiciously as though it was filled with bottles.
‘Mr and Mrs Bulstrode! How nice to see you again…’
Susie and I exchanged a look and both of us started giggling.
‘Oh my stars this is going to be an absolute hoot,’ she said.
‘When she mentioned the Cumberland sausage surprise…’
‘How surprising can a sausage be?’
‘I do hope we find out,’ I said, wiping my eyes.
There was no doubt about it – we were going to have fun.