Chapter 16
16
‘This can’t be right,’ Lena mutters out loud. They mustn’t have been listening properly when Michael was dispensing instructions. No wonder, with the workings of a five-oven Aga being explained in under a minute and then him rushing off, anxious to catch that flight.
Lena exhales forcefully and, for the third time, she rummages through the entire contents of Michael’s freezer in the utility room. There are vegetables and raspberries and fish fingers and oven chips and a small supermarket-brand broccoli quiche. In the bottom drawer she unearths individually wrapped choc ices and a few loose sweetcorn niblets. But none of the promised home-cooked dishes for them to defrost in time for dinner tonight.
‘Are you sure they’re not there?’ Pearl crouches beside her.
‘Yes, unless I’m going completely mad.’ Lena looks at her in panic as they both straighten up and assess the situation. ‘So much for Michael’s systems. What are we going to do for dinner tonight?’
Pearl grimaces and now Shelley joins them in the utility room. ‘There are no labelled meals?’
‘No!’ Lena announces.
‘Oh, God.’ Pearl’s gaze flicks to the wall-mounted chalkboard on which Michael has written the guests’ meal choices.
SAT 1 mush 1 chick 2 lamb. All crum.
SUN 1 chick 2 sal 1 mouss. 2 A pie 2 stick.
‘What does it all mean?’ Lena stares at it.
‘Well, there’s chicken and lamb…’ Pearl suggests as if they are at the initial stage of a crime investigation.
‘Yes, I get that,’ Lena says impatiently. ‘But what kind of chicken and lamb? And what’s “mush”?’
‘And “crum”, “stick” and “mouss”?’ Shelley frowns at the board.
‘Mousse?’ Pearl offers.
‘Maybe,’ Lena says, ‘but what kind, and where the heck is it?’
‘There must be some other place.’ Shelley looks around the room in panic. Fridge, freezer, cupboard and a rack of hooks piled with jackets; that’s about it. There’s another fridge in the kitchen but they have already checked it out. She glances briefly at the pile of wellies in a giant wicker basket, and then opens the rickety cupboard. Here are the promised waterproof trousers – several pairs all neatly folded – plus a selection of woolly hats, scarves and gloves. But of course there’s no pie in there, nor a mousse.
‘Shit,’ she murmurs. ‘But look, we’ve got time. The family’s not arriving until two-ish so we have hours to figure something out.’
Lena checks her phone. ‘Well, two hours, Shell. It’s nearly twelve already?—’
‘Yes, but dinner’s not until evening, is it? So there’s no need to panic.’ In her seventeen years of virtually single-handed parenting, Shelley grew accustomed to her kids’ friends bowling up unexpectedly, and could stretch out meals to almost biblical degrees. Great cauldrons of chilli and rice were her speciality. Those gargantuan dinners are a thing of the past now, as apparently Martha and Fin would find it mortifying to have their friends sit and eat at their family table. In fact, Shelley is no longer allowed to interact with their friends at all. But she is still programmed to serve the needs of famished children, and is unfazed by the prospect of catering on an industrial scale. ‘We can go through what there is,’ she continues, ‘and figure out what we can cook. We’ll just say there’s been a change of menu?—’
‘We can’t do that!’ Pearl exclaims.
‘Why not?’ Shelley asks.
‘Because they’ve chosen their meals.’
‘Well, they can un-choose them! Not the end of the world, is it? How many times d’you eat out and they say sorry, the thing you wanted is off?—’
‘But not everything,’ Pearl protests. ‘I’ve never gone out to dinner and everything’s been off?—’
‘Well, it is now,’ Shelley says firmly. ‘Everything’s off due to unforeseen circumstances. They’ll just have to deal with that.’
Pearl’s green eyes widen. ‘But what’ll we say?’
‘That there’s been a problem with our suppliers?’ Lena suggests, also looking somewhat stressed.
‘Yes, a logistical thing,’ Shelley decides. ‘There’s been a rock fall, a landslide. Surely that happens around here.’
‘So how are we going to put it?’ Pearl asks. ‘“Dinner tonight will be an unusual pairing of melted choc ice and crumbled fish finger”—’
‘Pearl, it’ll be okay,’ Shelley says firmly.
‘We can garnish it with sweetcorn,’ Lena mutters, but Pearl frowns, in no mood for jokes.
‘There must be another freezer somewhere.’ She strides out of the utility room and into the kitchen. To think, just few hours ago she was working through the various steps of her morning skincare routine (she has brought all of her products decanted into mini containers). Then she’d applied light make-up and sent a quick message to Brandon:
Pearl
Hope all okay love. Happy for you and Abi to get a Deliveroo later if you like.
It’s Pearl’s account, and despite his girlfriend running roughshod over the flat, she knows he wouldn’t order anything without checking with her. She’s lucky, she thinks, to have such a decent young man for a son. He wouldn’t have guzzled all the best Celebrations. That was definitely Abi’s work. For eleven years she and Brandon have been a tight little band of two, and now they are three. When her patience twangs she reminds herself how blessed she is, to have had him all to herself for so long.
However, Pearl doesn’t feel blessed now. The beaded curtain jangles as she sweeps it to one side and steps into the pantry. Here the shelves are neatly stacked with tins, cereals, baking ingredients and Kilner jars of pastas and grains. A rush of anxiety quickens her heartbeat and she tries to quell it by breathing slowly and deeply, the way her therapist suggested. In the couple of years after Dean had died, she was prone to panic attacks. Once, when buying a new school uniform for Brandon, she literally couldn’t breathe. Things are better now but she is still prone to a certain jumpiness.
She glances at the well-stocked wine rack, seized by an urge to grab a bottle and start early. What was Michael thinking, leaving them to figure all of this out? But then, it was Pearl and her friends who’d persuaded him to go to London. Virtually forced him, really. He’d trusted them to manage things here, and Pearl is determined not to let him down.
‘There’s plenty of veg in here,’ she calls out, eyeing the laden vegetable rack. Lena and Shelley peer in through the sparkly beads.
‘Great,’ Lena says without enthusiasm.
‘And there’s bread in the bread bin.’ Pearl steps out of the pantry and looks hopefully at her friends.
‘Hallelujah!’ Shelley announces, and then the three women fall into a grave silence.
‘I think I should message Michael,’ Pearl murmurs as Stan nuzzles at her hand.
‘Yep, definitely,’ Lena says. ‘Just ask him where the stuff is…’
Pearl goes to fetch her phone from their room, and has just fired off a message – Sorry to bother you Michael but we don’t seem to be able to find the frozen meals – when tyres crunch on gravel. It’s raining heavily and through the downpour she sees that a scruffy buff-coloured Range Rover has come to a halt.
‘Someone’s here!’ Shelley calls from the kitchen. ‘Is it that single bloke? That Niall guy? If so he’s awfully early…’
‘Maybe it’s just a friend of Michael’s?’ Lena suggests as Pearl hurries through. They all peer out of the window and see a tall, slim man with cropped dark hair and spectacles climbing out of the vehicle. He pulls up the hood of his dark green jacket and looks around, as if taking in unfamiliar surroundings.
‘That must be Niall.’ Pearl quickly rearranges her expression to project what she hopes is calm professionalism. In her working life as a make-up artist Pearl has encountered all kinds of challenging situations. When her assistant was sick she made up seven models singlehandedly for a department store fashion show. She has made a tearful bride feel like the most beautiful woman on earth, and on the morning of Dean’s funeral she applied the immaculate make-up which would carry herself – and by extension, her distraught ten-year-old son – through the most harrowing of days.
They might have no meals prepared but there is nothing Pearl can’t handle, she reminds herself. So with Lena and Shelley in her wake, she grabs one of the outsized umbrellas stashed in the bucket at the front door. All crammed beneath it, the three women step out of Shore Cottage to greet their first guest.