Chapter 11 #2
“We’re pushing the boat out,” David tells the waitress, as she arrives and takes an order pad out of her apron pocket. “So haddock and chips and mushy peas and bread and butter and tea, please.”
“Same,” I agree.
“Two fish teas,” she says. Then she gives me a look. “Do you want a tea towel to tuck into your neck, hen? You don’t want grease falling on a silk dress.”
“Bet they wouldn’t have brought me a tea towel for the grease at Snail Mousse Acres,” I say when she’s gone. At last he relaxes and starts smiling.
“So how’s it all going?” he asks me. “Your friend—Chloe, you said?—seemed very businesslike for a Saturday get-together.”
“You’ve no idea,” I tell him. “She’s helping me house-hunt, see.”
He waits for me to go on. Meanwhile the waitress brings a fat teapot and warns us that the handle’s hot.
“She showed me this one place,” I tell him. “And I liked it a lot. But it’s my whole budget. And I don’t have any idea how much it costs to do the purchase of a house in this country, so maybe I overestimated what my budget is. But now I’ve seen it, it’s soured me for anything else.”
“You sure?” He checks the teapot handle, winces and wraps it with a paper napkin to lift it and pour. “My God,” he says, looking at the opaque, teak-coloured stream of liquid. “This’ll put hair on our chests.”
“Sure . . . ?”
“Sure you like it. You look troubled.”
I flash again on the words scratched into the paintwork under the windowsill, then will myself back to the explanation I’ve concocted for myself.
Homesick maid, kids playing. “It’s not that,” I say.
“The house is perfect. I knew the old lady who lived there last. Well, I met her. I went there for tea.”
“Shit!” he hisses, as the cup overflows. “I was looking into your eyes.”
That’s not true. He was staring at the teapot, but he doesn’t want me to know he’s clumsy.
“She loved the place and it shows,” I say, watching him pour the saucerful of tea back into the pot, burning his fingers again.
“Does it bother you that she died there?”
“She didn’t!” I say. “And it wouldn’t anyway.
I don’t think. I was planning to find out which nursing home her family moved her into so I could invite her back to visit.
” I hesitate, trying to read his face. Maybe he’s only trying not to suck his fingertips and swear.
“Unless . . . Does that seem like a crass idea? Hurtful? My judgement might be off at the moment. My family think I’m . . .”
“Not at all,” he says. “It’s very kind.” But something’s bothering him, I can tell. “Won’t the family tell you where she is? Now you’re moving in.”
“I won’t be moving in,” I tell him. “The asking price doesn’t leave me so much as a tenner to pay a lawyer’s bill.
And I shouldn’t anyway, because it’s so cheap there must be something wrong with it.
Or maybe I should ignore my brother and sister-in-law and my best friend and not make any decisions at all.
Like everyone tells you. Although my brother’s not exactly been consistent. ”
“Not buying your dream house is a decision too,” he says.
“But buying a house is stressful and I haven’t been coping well with what’s on my plate already.”
He’s looking at me so calmly, and so kindly, that I actually consider telling him all about my “not coping.” On a first date. Thankfully, right then the waitress bangs down an oval plate of food, still sizzling, in front of me.
“Err you go. Gerrit ett,” she says. I love this place, I decide.
“I love this place,” says David Minto. “They’d never have said Gerrit ett at La Bruyère d’étaine.”
“It would have been bon appétit if we were lucky,” I say. “But it might have been”—I put my head on one side and breathe the word out slowly—“Enjoy.”
David shudders. “Enjoy what?”
“Exactly.”
“The only thing worse than”—he puts his head on one side too—“Enjoy! is Believe!”
“Believe what?” we both say in chorus.
“Not that I’m a stickler,” I add. “I just love language.”
“Exactly,” says David. “Now, gerrit ett.”
We would come here for every anniversary, if this was a fairy tale instead of real life, I’m thinking, at the exact moment David Minto says something that certainly sounds like a fairy tale to me. “I could take a look at the home report for you. That would answer one of your questions.”
“Are you . . . ?” I don’t want to say qualified.
“Qualified? Oh, I think I’ll manage. What’s the address?”
I tell him and watch him tapping away at his phone. “That’s something else they wouldn’t let you do in the tea towel desert,” I say. But he’s not really listening. So I make a chip sandwich with my share of the buttered bread and let him get on with it.
“Nice,” he says after a while. “Good solid house at first glance.”
“Can I have a look?” I ask, sitting forward. “I can’t get enough of it.”
But he lifts his phone to face his chest. “We’re not both sitting looking at a phone!” he says. “That’s dating death.”
I sit back so sharply my chair legs scrape. I hope he doesn’t notice my face as the restaurant starts to tilt and slide, like a disc with a picture on it. If John and Shelley could tell something’s been happening to me, David Minto might twig too.
“It doesn’t strike me as a particular bargain,” he says after a while, looking up at me.
“Never been done up, not as many bathrooms as people look for these days. Old-fashioned layout. If it gets flipped by someone with an eye for design, it’ll be worth a packet next time but, if you like it as is, I’d say go for it. ”
The thought of Saint Helen’s being “flipped” by someone who would blow out the kitchen wall and put in those basins in the bathroom that always make me think of sick bowls on a table is enough to clear up this latest episode of the symptom that scares me most. The one I couldn’t tell Chloe about.
The one even John and Shelley didn’t actually mention.
The one I know is just a leftover from childhood and shouldn’t bother me at all.
“Penny for them?” he says.
“Oh. Yeah. I was just— How much does it cost to do the . . . it’s called closing in America, what do we call it here again?”
“Conveyancing,” he says. Then he grins at me. “Depends. Do you happen to know any good lawyers who’re trying to impress you?”
My mouth drops open. “Don’t toy with me. I love that house.”
“I’m not,” he says. “I wouldn’t. I love . . . the idea of being able to help. I like you, Lindsay Lord, and you deserve a break after everything.”
I take a breath to tell him it’s Lindsay Hale, but I manage to stop myself. All things considered, it probably better not be.
“Good call on the chip butty, by the way,” he says, taking the other two slices of bread and laying them on his side plate. So, no matter how much he was focused on the home report, he was still watching me.
“Good night?” Shelley says as I let myself in. She’s in the living room, clearly waiting up for me.
“Wonderful night,” I say. “The ballet was brilliant.” Shelley snorts. “Is John crashed already?”
“I’m here,” says John, appearing in the dining room doorway. “What about the rest of it, that wasn’t ballet?”
“Nice dinner,” I say. Shelley groans and lets her head fall back. “And David’s . . . Well, what did you think of him?”
“Clean, good teeth, seemed normal,” says Shelley.
“Bit of a posho,” says John.
I see Shelley’s jaw stiffen. But I’ve got more on my mind than whatever’s wrong with this pair now.
“I like him,” I say. “What the hell am I going to do? I like him. He was supposed to be a toe-in-the-water, first-attempt guy, not an actual prospect. It’s too soon.
It’s a waste of him, meeting him already. ”
“Oh no!” Shelley says. “You had a happy marriage to a nice man and then you met another nice man but the timing isn’t perfect. Poor thing.”
I want to argue but then I think a bit harder and realise that she’s got a point.
“I’m away back to work,” says John.
“Night-night,” I say, and go to bed grinning, with my transformed Sleeping Murder, now covered in some brown paper I unearthed from my mum’s old bureau on the landing.
It came back to me as if it was yesterday that I last folded and cut and taped and ended up with a neat smooth block to write my name on.
Peggy would be proud of how well I’m treating her book.
Will be proud, when I find her and show her.
I can hear snores from one of the boys and I put my head round the door of their room.
Zak, the snorer, is splayed out like a starfish on the bottom bunk with his quilt twisted round his middle.
Nicholas is curled up on his side on the top bunk with his quilt held tight round his face like a shawl. I close the door softly.
I’m thirty-six and I need to be honest with myself.
If I want to have the full shebang, including the kids—and I’m halfway to admitting that I do—then skipping a year of mourning and a year of dating duds is ideal, possibly essential.
As my spirits lift, I tell myself that probably the atmosphere between John and Shelley is nothing to do with me.
There must be something up with the business, for John to go back to his office at this time of night.
But I’m too full of leftover cheer from the date to let thoughts like that stay in my head. I slip my dress off, smiling at the thought of the waitress with the tea towel and the tip David left her.
Generous guy all round, David Minto, offering to be my lawyer and not even mentioning money.
Which, I think as I’m brushing my teeth, is too good to be true.
I try to unthink that, but there’s no stopping my brain now it’s started.
What if I buy the house and David Minto isn’t a lawyer after all and so it’s not a legal sale and I lose it again?
What if that woman in the garden centre toilets on Saturday simply didn’t want to admit she had no clue what those letters stood for?
Once I’ve cleaned off all my make-up and rubbed in my night cream, I wipe my hands, grab my phone, then google “David Minto, LLM CC,” hating myself for being so paranoid, so cynical, so different from the girl who met Kai and moved to Hawaii with two suitcases and not a care in the world.
John and Shelley’s woeful Wi-Fi gives me plenty of time to reconsider, but I steel myself. It’s only when I see 89,300 results with all the search terms, there at the top of the still-loading page, that I click Cancel and stand up to draw the curtains.
Which is when I see that the office is in darkness and John and his phone are out in the yard again.
There’s no way that’s business and my heart hurts for him.
I can’t keep kidding myself, looking down at those lights, that he’s over it all.
I wish he would talk to me, just once, before I move out.
I wish I could be sure he’ll be all right if I move on again.
Because why did he ask me to come back? I don’t blame him, but why hasn’t he let me help?
I watch his phone light for a minute or two, then jam my feet into sandals and put a jumper on over my nightie.
I trot down the stairs and out into the yard, mapping in my head where the light was, slipping past the sheds and in between towers of nameless black objects, scuttling along dark corridors of stacked wood and metal, no idea what any of this is in the pitch dark, or where I am actually, which way the house is, which way the Barrens lie.
“John?” I shout. “Are you still out here?”
I hear the sudden scrape of startled feet on rough, gravelled ground but he doesn’t answer me.
“John?”
He’s moving—I can hear him—but still he says nothing and, as I stand holding my breath and straining my ears to work out which way he’s going, a crawling cold slinks up the back of my neck and sets my heart hammering. That’s not John. It can’t be.
I blunder away but now the footsteps are following and everywhere I turn there’s something sharp that scrapes at my skin, something hooked that catches my hair.
I can’t see anything. I don’t know where I’m going and when I walk into a wall, smacking it with both my palms, I can’t stop moving in time to keep my head from hitting it too.
I curl my fingers and the squeal of my nails against the painted plastic is so familiar and so horrific that I’m five again, tear stained and pee soaked, with my sweaty hair plastered to my head, huddled in the dark and shrieking.
“Lindsay?” John’s voice, less than a foot away.
“You kept it?” I say. “You kept it? I can’t believe you kept it!”
John clicks his torch app on. “It’s not the same one,” he says.
Through my tears and terror I can see the truth of it. This caravan is white and square with a beige stripe. The caravan was so small it was almost round and it was a duck-egg blue colour.
“Of course I didn’t keep it,” John says. He comes up beside me and together we sit, shoulder to shoulder on the metal step that leads to its door. We’re together again. It’s taken all this time, but at last, once again, it’s John and me.
“How can you live here?” I whisper.
“I made my peace with it,” John says. “You did it your way, Lindsay, and I did it mine.”
I nod, hoping he can feel the movement, although it’s too dark for him to see it now his phone’s off again.
“And I was older than you,” he said. “No two kids in the same family ever have the same childhood.”
“We shared some of it,” I say. Now he nods. I feel it.
“We know,” he says.
“But we can’t,” I add.
“So we don’t.”
“Though we do.”
“I thought you’d forgotten,” I say.
“I have,” says John. “You should forget too.”