Chapter 45
Everything looks normal, Amanda decides as the cab pulls up outside her flat. Well, of course it does. Even a klutz like Jasper was unlikely to burn the place down, and he’d hardly cause a kitchen fire surviving on crackers and triangle cheese.
She thanks the driver and drags her enormous suitcase along the short, tiled pathway to the front door.
July the fourth, she muses as she steps into the beautiful Victorian building.
Independence Day. She decided, on the train down, that she’d step back into her life with an open mind and see how things pan out.
Be more Celia , she told herself as she sipped a gin and tonic at her table seat in the quiet coach.
Be more Celia. She turns the phrase over in her mind as she starts to lug the suitcase upstairs.
Celia who, just before Amanda left this morning, announced that she had a plan.
That is, a plan that might just help her mum.
Celia will overhaul her garden, she explained.
Enzo has offered to help, and Mathilde wants to be a part of it too.
‘It’s worth a try,’ Celia had told Amanda, ‘even if it just shows Mum that she’s cared about and that anything is possible.
’ Amanda knows the garden is overrun with weeds and marvels at Celia’s appetite for that kind of manual work.
She also knows that Celia is hoping her mother might even get involved, and that somehow, they can work together to help her change the way she lives – the way she is .
‘It has to come from Mum, though,’ Celia said.
Amanda hugged her. She’s learnt from Celia that working with plants is a wonderful healer, but will it help her mum? ‘If nothing else,’ Celia added, ‘she’ll have a beautiful garden to look out on again.’
‘Like it used to be,’ Amanda said, her eyes filling with sudden tears, ‘when it was yours.’ She’d quickly blinked them away because Celia did not need her getting all emotional about her own mum.
Now Amanda stops on the half landing and rotates her stiff shoulder. She will do that funeral plan ad, she’s decided. The money is great, and Ollie hinted that it’ll only be shown on daytime TV, in the ad breaks on quiz shows. So what’s the harm? It’s not as if anyone she knows will see it.
She is about to haul her case up the remaining stairs when she becomes aware of a hubbub coming from above.
Not just above in a vague way, but directly above where she is standing now – in her flat.
Voices and laughter and the clinking of glasses.
A loud guffaw and someone announcing, ‘It’s looking fantastic, Jasper. Well done!’
Amanda blinks slowly and rubs at her tired eyes. Then from out of nowhere comes a surge of energy as she lifts her case and storms up to her front door – which is wide open – and bursts in.
Her flat is full of people. Artsy people and actorly people – everywhere she looks there are chunky spectacles and little beards and scarves worn like cravats.
Several of the women present are wearing brightly coloured snug-fitting tops and dark-wash jeans the size of sails.
Her fashion-eye also picks out graphic prints from the Uniqlo x Marimekko collab, and a Stella McCartney pinafore.
Amanda stops in her tasteful hallway with the warm grey walls and tiny spotlights. When she’d left for Scotland, her favourite picture had hung here. A beautiful, stylised image of her head in profile, turned into a chic graphic, created for her fortieth birthday by an old friend on a TV job.
The picture has gone. Now the walls are displaying what look like Jasper’s fucking potato prints, framed simply under glass. She stands there, looking through to her living room, taking it all in like a stranger who has walked into a party alone and doesn’t know who to talk to.
‘Hi.’ A man with ginger hair and a tiny moustache has appeared at her side and smiles at her. ‘Red or white?’
Amanda stares at him. ‘Sorry?’
‘Red or white wine, or a soft?’
‘Er… nothing, thank you.’ I do not need to be offered a drink in my own home!
He sips from his own glass and gazes around at the artwork in the hallway. ‘Exhibition looks great, doesn’t it?’
She nods, tight-lipped, momentarily feeling as if she might cry.
With some effort she manages to calm herself with a huge, deep breath, and then somehow, miraculously – like a floppy cactus springing back to erectness – anger rises up in her.
‘It’s quite powerful, yes.’ As powerful as the punch I feel like giving him .
‘It’s very bold,’ the man remarks. ‘So how d’you know Jasper?’
She senses her nostrils flaring as she looks at him. ‘Excuse me.’ Leaving her suitcase in the hall and the man hovering beside it, she marches through to her crowded living room. Amanda has thrown wildly successful parties that were less populated than this.
‘Ooh, sorry!’ A woman in baggy black dungarees has clonked into her shoulder but Amanda barely notices. Instead, she is looking around at yet more prints, and paintings too – all Jasper’s art entirely filling the walls.
‘Honey, you’re here!’ Having spotted her across the room he wends his way between a woman in a denim boiler suit and a cluster of tall, interchangeable braying men, and he stops in front of her.
There’s a tight hug which causes Amanda to compress her arms to her sides, and when he pulls away he looks quizzical. ‘I thought you’d be here earlier!’
‘Train was delayed,’ she says.
‘Oh, really? Well, never mind because you’re here now?—’
‘Jasper, what are all these paintings doing on my walls?’
He frowns now as if she’s a child who’s just sworn in front of his mother. ‘Your walls? I thought I lived here too!’ He emits a barking laugh and glances fretfully around the room, and then looks back at her as if to say, Don’t be difficult, darling. Not tonight with all these people here.
‘But you said you had an exhibition?’ she says carefully. Keep calm , she tells herself. Look what Celia’s dealt with. Don’t lose your shit now.
‘I do,’ Jasper says.
‘A London gallery, you said?’
‘Yeah, this is it! It’s the thing now, didn’t you know? Showing work in a home environment? Much more relaxed, seeing the work like this, showing how the work can work in a normal living room…’ If he says ‘work’ again she will slap him across the head. ‘In a space where people live,’ he concludes.
‘Yes, where I live!’ It comes out louder than she’d intended and she catches the boiler suit woman shooting her a surprised glance.
Jasper forces a tight smile. ‘Shall we talk about this later, sweetie?’
‘What about gallery representation?’ Amanda asks. ‘You said?—’
‘Yes, I’m representing myself,’ he announces. ‘Who needs a middleman taking a cut? Please, darling. Settle down and get yourself a drink. Mingle a bit – there are some fun people here. You’ve had a long, tiring journey. I’d better mingle myself, people want to talk to me…’
‘Don’t let me keep you,’ she says, in as bright a voice as she can muster.
As she leaves the room for the sanctuary of her cool, chalky white bedroom, she tells herself again: don’t lose it.
Be more Celia. She sits heavily on the edge of the unmade bed – he hadn’t even bothered to make it – telling herself that it’s fine, this is her place, and her bed, and pretty soon it will really feel like hers again.
Back to the way she had it, when she loved her home, and being alone, just doing her own thing. In the days when her vegetables remained, unmolested, in her vegetable rack.
I can have all that again, she decides, and this realisation brings about a new sense of calm in her – that it will be okay, that she can take control of her life again.
Just like Celia does, Amanda reflects as she pulls her phone from her jacket pocket and calls her oldest friend.