Chapter Nine
Rich, dawn-pink fabric. Anything too pale would’ve been a mistake with Tamzin’s bloodless complexion. Glass buttons, black embroidery silk, chrome rings in two tiny sizes, thread. The new-fabric smell enveloped her along with the steam as Diane ironed out the folds ready to mark out the garment on the laminate floor. She didn’t have a table. Cutting on the floor saved space and money, both of which were at a premium in this house, although it did also mean fluff bunnies that collected in corners and rolled out to attach themselves to her fabric at the least draught.
A hard blue cushion was stuck with pins, red tailor’s chalk lay beside the one-metre wooden rule and, pinned to a cork tile on the wall, the measurements that demarcated Tamzin’s waif-like figure were written onto a female outline.
Diane looked at the materials around her. She felt scratchy eyed and light headed; not remotely like starting on Tamzin’s mammoth order. But the garments wouldn’t make themselves. Tamzin, although Diane hadn’t seen her for over a week, had seemed to be looking forward to the new clothes and it was apparently a miracle for her to look forward to anything. Diane had an itch to help her if she could.
But she’d lain awake for too many anxious night hours recently asking herself what she’d done and feeling her stomach turning over at the answer. Twenty-five years she’d been faithful to Gareth, through thick and thin (or thin and thinner), good and, latterly, bad. After the row about Diane’s inheritance — or lack of it — sex between them had faded until abstinence was habitual. Until then Gareth had never let anger interfere with his desire for her.
But there was something of which she was in no doubt: even if he no longer wanted her, he wouldn’t want another man to want her.
She could just imagine his cold rage if he ever discovered her back-of-the-car sex.
How sordid it sounded! But it hadn’t seemed it. James, both caring and urgent, had wanted her. And wanted her. She’d run with her instinct and satisfied a craving for human contact of the kind she hadn’t even realised she’d been missing so badly. Waves of desire had washed her onto a dangerous beach.
But that had been then.
Before the cold light of several days had illuminated the fact that she knew almost nothing about James and only had his word for it that he and Valerie hadn’t, um, met in the middle for years. And he hadn’t said anything about meeting anybody else’s middle. Casual sex could be his norm. It had seemed to come easily enough, complete with suggestions about hotels. She had come easily enough, too: one cheesy chat-up line and she’d hopped into his backseat like a curious teenager.
Carefully, she checked that her lengthways fold ran accurately along the warp of the fabric, then pinned and pressed it, a bad hang to a garment grating on her like a screeched note would on a musician.
She sat back on her heels and surveyed her sketch and the pattern she’d cut for a double-breasted shirt with collar and slightly gathered sleeves. Tamzin needed to avoid anything too fitted until she regained some weight. Either side of the centre panel Diane would embroider whorls of tiny stem stitch and French knots, working in and around the little chrome rings as she went. Subtle and unusual, Diane’s offbeat ornamentation would suit Tamzin better than ribbon or ruffles.
She examined the cutting edge of her scissors. They’d soon need sharpening, and Gareth normally did them.
Downstairs, the phone rang.
Motionless, she listened. If she got to it before it stopped ringing, it wouldn’t be James. He hadn’t phoned on Tuesday. Or Wednesday or Thursday. The man didn’t phone a woman after a one-night stand, she’d come to realise. That’s what made it a one-night stand. Dur! So what did he do? Probably, he smiled with vague friendliness when he next happened to encounter her and maybe asked how she was. If he didn’t mention the sex unless the woman was misguided enough to oblige him to, then it had been nothing special. He whistled in the shower as he swilled away Scent of A One Night Stand Woman and he forgot the whole thing.
The man certainly didn’t swear and panic and attempt a belated douche job as an optimistic form of contraception, trying grimly to calculate when his period was due before hurrying off to Dr Cooke for advice.
The phone continued to ring.
Diane lunged inelegantly to her feet, a leg buckling because she spent too much time on her knees on that hard floor. She raced for the stairs, wishing she had telephone handsets all over the house so that she didn’t have to drop what she was doing and fly to where the phone was fixed to the wall.
She jumped into the narrow hall. The phone still rang. She snatched up the receiver with a breathless, ‘Hello?’
‘Can we swap hospital visiting slots with you, today?’ It was Ivan, blunt to the point of rudeness, typical of him that he didn’t even bother with ‘Hi, how are you?’ Of course it wasn’t James.
‘OK.’ She matched his economy with her own.
‘You can go in the evening.’
‘I can, can’t I?’
‘Only we want to go to the footie tonight and we’ve got half a day off.’ Ivan and Melvyn worked at the same mammoth packaging plant.
‘Have fun.’
‘And you can stay over at ours.’
‘I’ll be fine.’
‘But our Gary wants—’
‘It’s very thoughtful of you all to worry but I’ll drive home.’
‘It’ll be dark.’
‘I’ll put the headlights on.’
Staring through the kitchen window after ending the call, she didn’t immediately return to Tamzin’s shirt. Clumsy and incompetent, Ivan was attempting to manipulate her. She would discover why — she’d had years of practice. It was just a question of being methodical. It would give her something to think about other than James.
OK, first — kitchen drawers.
No.
Sideboard. No. Gareth’s wardrobe. Nothing remarkable in, on, underneath nor behind. Under one of the mattresses? No. Chest of drawers, bedside locker, behind the bath panel, under the bed, no, no, no, no. Every other nook and cranny, no. Purposefully, she clattered the stepladder up the stairs, heaved her way through the overhead hatch and into the loft.
Three hours later she was in the shower ridding herself of the dust from rifling every box and suitcase and cobwebby pocket of roofing felt that looked as if it might be a hiding place.
But, no.
Thoughtfully, she returned to the shirt, wielding the shears carefully along the pattern pieces, pinning the darts, tacking for the gathers at either end of the sleeves. She switched on the sewing machine and threaded it to wind the bobbin.
A car stopped outside in the lane.
She paused. Then stretched up like a meerkat to peep over the sill. A little white hatchback had pulled up and a young man stepped out and made for one of the neighbouring houses. She turned back to her work, wanting to spit like a camel. What had she imagined would be out there? A black Mercedes?
She paused. Her eyes returned to the view from the window.
In a moment, she’d stamped her feet into her canvas shoes and was jogging downstairs and outside, snatching up the car keys en route.
Why hadn’t she thought of the damned car?
Glove compartment, door pockets, seat pockets, under the seats. Nothing. She threw open the boot, tipping out the contents of a plastic toolbox with a shrill scream of spanners. No. She halted, for the first time uncertain. No?
Then she saw a little loop, just below the boot catch. Pulling it up sharply, she found the floor of the boot came up and she was staring at the spare wheel.
And there, cradled by the hub, was a blue canvas pouch, neat and new.
She slid open the nylon zip. Inside laid a mobile phone, a set of keys and a blue building-society passbook.
Her fingertips went numb. She hadn’t had much experience with mobile phones but knew enough from Bryony and George to switch it on and locate the phone book. The only entries read:
Dad
Ivan
Melvyn
STM
This phone
Valerie
The keys looked like a front door key and a back.
The opening balance in the passbook had been ￡200,000.
About ￡120,000 of it remained.
* * *
Diane sat in the car for several minutes outside Harold’s lovely house, admiring the fish-eye dormers and the sweeping lawns. Gareth’s father’s house. It compared badly to Gareth’s mother’s house on the Brightside Estate — and that had been the best of a lifetime of bad lots. In the huddle of L-shaped terraces slotted like a jigsaw around car parks, greens and graffitied play areas, the Jenner house on the Brightside had been in a row with maroon front doors and a dustbin alcove alongside. The Brightside. The councillors must’ve been on something when they’d dreamed that one up.
When Gareth had first taken Diane home she’d been wiping sweaty palms on her jeans, she’d been so nervous.
‘It can’t be as bad as meeting your parents was for me,’ he joked.
They found Wendy, a large, tired-looking woman, in her sitting room, setting small stitches in a ripped shirt pocket. At Gareth’s laconic introduction, ‘This is Diane,’ she removed black-rimmed glasses to stare. Simultaneously, Melvyn and Ivan appeared, each as dark as Wendy, to have a peep at what Gareth had brought home.
The room was long and narrow with a dining table at one end. A brown suite surrounded a smoked-glass coffee table on a mottled brown carpet, and the walls were beige. With five people there, three of them strapping lads, the room seemed small.
‘Pleased to meet you,’ Diane offered, into the silence.
‘You’re easy pleased, then. Gareth says you’ve got your own car?’
Diane flushed at Wendy’s offhandedness. ‘A mini.’
‘You must have a good job. Well, sit down.’
Diane, unused to having her life picked over so rudely, sat slowly. ‘I work in a boutique. My parents bought me the car.’
Melvyn and Ivan exchanged grins.
Wendy stared harder. ‘Must be nice to have things like that fall in your lap.’ She set her mending aside. ‘I suppose I’d better put the kettle on, you’ll expect a cup of tea.’
Stiff with embarrassment at such ungraciousness, Diane refused. ‘No, thank you.’
Gareth said, ‘She takes one sugar, white.’
Wendy returned with a tin tray of mugs and continued her blunt interrogation. ‘So what kind of a house do your parents live in? I suppose your friends are lawyers and bank managers and they all have cars, nice new cars. It’s all right, isn’t it, when you’ve got a bit of brass in the family?’
Gareth took a green mug bearing a picture of an improbably yellow, doleful sausage dog. ‘We’re getting married,’ he said, quietly and without particular emphasis. He laced his fingers through Diane’s.
Melvyn and Ivan gave vent to hoots of derision and old jokes about balls and chains but Wendy’s hostile probing ceased.
Gareth took Diane home often in the few months before the wedding. Despite Wendy’s resentment it was easier there than at Diane’s house. They could go to his room and play records while Wendy sat downstairs in her armchair mending clothes and knitting jumpers in front of the TV.
It was on his own turf that Diane began to discover the complex person that was Gareth Jenner.
It seemed there hadn’t been much money in the boys’ childhoods. Equal pay for women had been still a few years away, which had meant punishing hours for Wendy. Now that all three Jenner boys were earning and Wendy semi-retired Gareth wanted the family to move, but Wendy wasn’t interested. ‘I’m too old to bother. And the boys need the money for their own lives. You’ll always be OK, Gareth, you a miser all your life; you’ll move on when you’ve hoarded enough. But Melvyn and Ivan have the arse out of their pants by Wednesday every week. They’d never cope with a higher rent.’
So they remained on the Brightside Estate.
Most of the petty criminals in the area had been housed in the ugly new beige-brick terraces and, although loosely law abiding themselves, the Jenners mixed comfortably with the dealers, thieves and hookers that lived beside them, treating the police like vampires — if you never invited them in you were fairly safe.
Diane won acceptance in the Jenner household, after a fashion. She might not be their sort but if she belonged to Gareth then she belonged to them and they made sure she never had a moment’s trouble from the neighbourhood.
It was Diane’s parents who fought bitterly and futilely to keep her from taking the name of Jenner.
So many rows. So many brutal words. So often that Gareth, pale with rage, had to stick out insulting disregard for his honesty and prospects.
Low life.
Wrong ’un.
Regret it all your life.
Underclass.
Don’t come crying to us.
You’ve made your bed.
We expected better.
Diane shook her head clear of the echoes of her father’s voice, and climbed from the car into spitting rain.
Harold answered the door looking as if he might just have awakened from an afternoon nap. But his bleariness soon vanished. ‘Diane! Come in. You’re a nice surprise.’ Diane smiled at his pleasure, genuine she had no doubt, reflecting how little of this kindness she saw in his son.
How different would Gareth have been if he’d known Harold from the beginning?
Harold drew Diane through the house to a tiny sitting-room at the back with two cottage-style armchairs facing the French doors. This room was comfortably worn, the small table exhibiting a careless ring or two, the chairs bleached and shiny on the arms.
She surveyed the garden while he made tea, silently apologising to him for what she was about to do. ‘Lapsang Souchong, Earl Grey or PG Pyramids?’ he proffered through the kitchen hatch.
Her mouth watered suddenly at a smoky reminiscence. She hadn’t had Lapsang Souchong for years. ‘Lapsang, please. Any lemon?’
‘Oh, yes. Lemon.’
She was glad to see he let the tea brew well in the small, elegant teapot. ‘Have you visited Gareth recently?’
‘Yesterday,’ he confirmed, with a smile that displayed his fine dentures.
‘He’s worried, isn’t he?’ She sighed, shaking a regretful head.
Harold’s smile switched off. ‘Is he?’
‘He’s not used to being so isolated. He’s normally in control. You know, finances, car services, household maintenance. He can’t believe that I’m capable of writing a cheque for the gas bill. He’s even worrying about me driving in and out to see him in hospital.’
Harold put down his china cup and stroked his large nose with one clean forefinger. ‘Well. I hadn’t realised. Do you worry about driving?’
Conveniently disregarding her initial wobbles, she gave a pshaw! of disdain. ‘Of course not. But you know Gareth. And I can tell he’s worrying about the cottage, because nobody’s been near it since the crash.’
Face clearing, Harold rediscovered his smile. ‘But it’s only twenty-five minutes from here. I can keep an eye on it.’
She tried not to let the triumph welling in her chest reflect on her face. She smiled gratefully, instead. ‘Oh, you are lovely. I suggested it myself. But—’ She paused, fidgeting, as if casting about for the right words. She let her voice drop confidentially. ‘He won’t hear of that, either. He feels so guilty that you had an angina attack because of him and Valerie.’
‘But I’m quite over that.’
‘I know.’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘But if I let you trouble yourself he’ll go bananas. So I thought that you could give me directions and I could do it.’
‘If you think that’s best.’ Despite his doubtful expression, Harold obligingly reached for a pad and pen. And Diane smiled.
Directions safely in her pocket, she finished her tea. ‘Better get on, I have things to do before I visit Gareth.’ She felt breathless with jubilation as he followed her down the hall, even if she’d had to fib — all right, lie — to Harold. For that she was sorry but would forgive herself.
He opened the oak front door. ‘I hope he appreciates you; some people might feel he didn’t quite deserve your support, all things considered.’
She stepped out over the high threshold and turned to kiss Harold’s cheek. ‘Actually, I can’t wait to talk to him.’