“I wondered if you were around tomorrow, midday?” Tomorrow was Saturday.
She hesitated for a second or two. Oh God. She had plans. She probably had some other bloke. Who was listening, right now, to the dickhead who’d had his chance and blown it big-time.
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“I mean, if you’re not, then some other time . . .”
Mark felt like a gawky teenager. Which he hadn’t even been.
“No . . . no . . . tomorrow is fine. Midday, you say?”
“Yeah. Around twelve.”
“I’ll be here.” At least she hadn’t said she’d leave it on the front porch.
“I wondered . . . if you weren’t doing anything . . . if you wanted to, I mean . . .” Spit it out, for God’s sake, you moron. Ask her. “If you would like to have lunch. It’s supposed to be nice. We could go for a drive. Find a country pub, with a garden. Something like that. If you wanted to.”
Again, Jane hesitated.
“I don’t know, Mark. I’m not sure it’s such a good idea, you know?”
So she had no plans, but no plans and a ham sandwich in the kitchen alone was better than lunch with him.
He felt his cheeks burn. “No problem. Thought it was worth asking. . . .”
The silence was practically solid. Mark had no idea how to end this conversation.
“Lunch, you say?”
“Yes, just lunch. I just thought it might be nice. . . .”
“Okay.” She sounded more decisive than he did. “Lunch. Thank you.”
“Thank you, Jane.”
By the time he hung up Mark had actual beads of sweat in his hair-line. Cool, he told himself, very cool.
The next day, at 12:05 p.m., she opened the door ready to leave, almost as soon as he knocked, with a handbag over her arm, and his abandoned T-shirt in her hand. She seemed much more nervous than she had on their first date, and she pulled the door closed quickly behind her.
He bent to kiss her on the cheek. The kiss missed its mark and landed awkwardly near her ear.
“It’s nice to see you.”
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“Nice to see you, too.”
He’d really done a number on her, hadn’t he? Mark felt guiltier than ever and wondered if it had been such a good idea, calling her again. It wasn’t like he had a plan of action. Maybe it wasn’t fair.
He opened her door for her, and Jane climbed into the car. She looked pretty again. She was one of those women who could dress young without looking daft. She was wearing a white dress with a high waist-line, trimmed with broderie anglaise, and a short, pale yellow cardigan.
They talked about the weather for a couple of minutes. About the girls and their exams. Jane kept her handbag in her lap, gripping it more tightly than was necessary. Mark concentrated on the road, although there was little traffic. Then they stopped talking, and Mark wondered whether he should put the radio on.
“Why did you call me again?”
“I’m sorry?”
“I was just wondering. Why you called me again. After all this time.
I mean, it seemed to be such a disaster last time, I just wondered why you would want to see me again.”
“A disaster?”
“Well, not for me, no. It was the way you left. The way you sounded when I called you about the shirt. I just thought you wished . . .”
“That it hadn’t happened?”
“Yes—that it hadn’t happened. And then, at school, I just had the feeling you were avoiding me. And so I didn’t expect to hear from you again.”
They’d pulled into the pub’s graveled car park now. Mark parked in one of the empty bays and turned the ignition off. Then he shifted around in his seat to look at Jane. Her chest was red and blotchy with the effort of speaking about it.
“I’m sorry. What a prat.”
“You’re not a prat, Mark. You just went too fast, I think. . . . We went too fast.”
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“I think so, too. I felt like crap afterward. Like I’d taken advantage of you.”
“Hardly.”
“That’s how I felt. It’s like that evening was in two parts. The dinner part—that, I was ready for. I enjoyed being with you, talking to you. I felt better than I had in ages.”
“Me, too.”
“But what happened back at the house? I wasn’t ready for that. It wasn’t fair.”
“I know.”
“So I skulked off. I’m so sorry if you thought it was something to do with you. It truly wasn’t. It was me. I know that sounds like the biggest line in the book, but it really was.”
She smiled faintly.
“You were lovely. You were beautiful and sexy and great. Honestly.
You were. I just wasn’t ready . . . to be with someone in that way. I felt like I used you.”
She nodded understanding.
“And afterward, I realized that you were vulnerable, too. That you were probably a bit damaged, too, and then I felt like a shit, and then I just made it worse . . . I know . . . by being weird. Ostrich behavior, I’m afraid. I really am sorry.”
“Apology accepted.”
“Thank you. I’m not sure I deserve it, but thank you.”
“So . . . why did you call me again?”
“I wanted to apologize. To make it up to you.” Mark ran his hand around the leather of the steering wheel. “And . . .
“And . . . I wondered if you might give me another chance. Let me backpedal and start again. Have lunch with me. Have dinner with me.
Take it slowly. Give us a chance to see if there’s something there?”
Jane didn’t answer straightaway.
“If, however, you want to take your apology and your Stilton Plough-T h i n g s I W a n t M y D a u g h t e r s t o K n o w 343
man’s and give the fucked-up widower a very wide berth from now on, I’ll understand completely.”
She laughed.
“You’re a very lovely woman, Jane. You deserve to be happy.”
“We all deserve that.”
“Mmm.” Was that an answer?
“So, you’re suggesting we date? No sex. Friends. See where that goes?”
“How does that sound? Of remote interest?”
“Can I think about it?”
Jennifer
Jennifer sat back on her heels and wiped the sheen of sweat from her brow. It was hot out here today. She surveyed her work critically and nodded with approval. She’d almost finished this bed. She’d started with this one because it was the biggest, and it faced the terrace most directly.
Here, her efforts would have the greatest result. Glancing at her watch, she saw that she’d been at it for almost an hour, listening to Wimbledon on a small Roberts radio she’d borrowed from the kitchen.
Gardening was one of those things you really had to grow into. Like eating olives, listening to opera, and voting Conservative—it was not the natural preserve of the young. She had a clear recollection of Mum falling for gardening. They’d moved a couple of times, after Mum and Dad split up—first to a rented house, in which the small garden had been entirely paved for the convenience of tenants. She and Lisa had cycled for hours in tight circles around a single terra-cotta pot, containing a rose of indeterminate color and very dubious strength. The tiles had been murder on Amanda’s hands and knees, when she’d started crawling. Before their baby sister was a year old, they’d moved to Carlton Close. It was a 1970s box, on a cul-de-sac full of 1970s boxes, a fact that had been of less interest, of course, than the size of their bedrooms—
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had had a lawn, with a low brick wall at the front, and a tarmac drive to the side. Mum had never done much with that. The front was where Jennifer and Lisa and their friends had congregated. But the back—that became something really rather lovely. It seemed like they’d gone down the path one day, after money for the ice cream lorry, or begging for an extension on bedtime, and found it transformed from a wilderness to a paradise. Mum gardened at the weekends, all through the spring and summer, in a bikini, a sunhat, and a giant pair of Jackie O sunglasses, while Amanda rode her trike and held tea parties for her dollies on the small patio.
In the autumn she built bonfires. Jennifer remembered their smell and their noise. They invited the kids from the street, and their parents, and Mum cooked baked potatoes with sausages and beans. Everyone loved Mum. She had this energy—it was hard to describe. She made everyone feel interesting and like she had time for them. People liked to be around her.
Lisa used to say that she should get married again. Jennifer couldn’t imagine it then.
When Mark was building the house, and he and Mum were living in the caravan, Jennifer had only visited once or twice. She found it so uncomfortable—this new, younger man. Her mum living . . . like that. And most of all, being pregnant with Hannah. But the first time she’d gone, they’d shown her the plans, excited about their new home.
Mark had unrolled the blueprints of the floorplan—technical and detailed and slightly unfathomable to the untrained eye. But Mum had filled an A4 blank notebook with garden plans—drawn in pencil and colored in meticulously—each item labeled in the margin in her loopy round handwriting. She had talked about this new garden with her eyes sparkling. A grassy area for the new baby to play in, a fruit and vegetable patch, with asparagus and raspberries, a place to sit that caught the last rays of the day . . . she’d been so happy. Why hadn’t Jennifer seen it
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then for what it was? Why had she worried so much about how it looked, about how it affected her? It was, for Mum, the perfect thing.
Mum wanted to grow and nurture and make the world prettier. Jennifer had always seen it before as something different. A perfect garden for her perfect life. That had changed, too.
Doing Barbara’s garden now made her feel closer to her mother.
It was a beautiful day. June was her favorite month. It seemed that the whole garden was in bloom. Foxgloves and mallows; fat, creamy English roses and sweet william—their blooms proliferated everywhere.
Mum’s lavender bed, planted the summer after Hannah was born, was a riot of purple fragrance. The whole thing was so fecund it was verging on the wild. April and May had been wet, but it was dry now, and warm.
She’d found Barbara’s old gardening gloves in the shed and a pad to kneel on. Earlier, she’d felt her neck beginning to burn in the sun, so she’d returned to the shed and come out with a straw hat. Not at all glamorous, but very effective. There was a lot to do.
Hannah came out with a plastic jug of iced water. All the physical evidence of her accident had gone, except for one small scar, about an inch long, low on her left cheek. She seemed almost back to her old self.
“Blimey—you look just like Mum.”
“Got all her gear on, that’s why. Hope you don’t mind.”
“Why would I mind?” Hannah shrugged happily. “Listen, if you weren’t out here doing this weeding and whatever . . . Dad would have roped me in at some point, so you won’t hear any complaints from me. I hate gardening.”
“You know, that’s so weird. You spent all your time out here when you were a baby. Mum used to park your pram”—she turned and pointed to a tree near the side of the house—“there, and you’d lie there contentedly all day, with your fat little legs pumping away into midair, while she gardened.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t like
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know a euphorbia from an aruncula, me.” She winked. “I’m a teenager. I don’t, by definition, like anything that involves physical or mental work.
I expect I’ll grow into it.”
Jennifer laughed. “When you’re my age, you mean?”
“Listen, if the cap fits . . . !” She was laughing. “You’re making me hot, for God’s sake, and I’m not doing anything . . . come and have a glass of water, will you?”
Jennifer stood up and rubbed the small of her back with a begloved hand. “Okay. You win. Bring any biscuits?”
Hannah was wearing a vest with narrow spaghetti straps. She pushed them down her shoulders and leaned back in the garden chair, pulling her long denim skirt up to her thighs and sticking her long legs out in front of her to catch the sun.
Jennifer peered at her sister’s exposed skin. “Have you got cream on?”
“Shut up, Mum.” Hannah scowled at her. “Just ten minutes. Did you know, none of us get enough sun, these days. People plaster themselves in SPF 500 before they step outside their door, and they’re just not getting enough vitamin D.”
“Is that right, doctor?”
“That is right. I read it. In the newspaper.” Hannah poked her tongue out at her sister, who poked back.
“I’m going the Nicole Kidman route myself.” Jennifer spread out her milky arms. “I give up with the tanning. Stripes and sunburns and flaky skin—who needs it?”
“You haven’t got a prom coming up in a couple of weeks, then, I guess.”
“What’s going on? What the hell’s a prom? Are we in an American movie or something?”
“Get with the program, Gran. We have one every year now.”
Jennifer shook her head.
“I know, I know.” Hannah smirked. “It wasn’t like that in your day.”
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Jennifer flicked her with a glove. “No, it bloody wasn’t. Not so much of the ‘your day,’ thanks. I didn’t go to school in the last century. We had discos, not proms, that’s all. What do you wear to one of these proms?”
“A prom dress. Mine’s strapless and black and Dad says it terrifies him, so I know I must look foxy. Guys wear black tie.”
“See, completely different. I remember Lisa once got in terrible trouble with Mum. She wasn’t around—I can’t remember why—and Lisa needed something to wear to the disco, and she got this kilt, which some relative had sent, and which turned out to be a proper one, and dead expensive, and cut, like, fifteen inches off the hem—so it was a mini, really, really mini—all sort of jagged, on purpose, stuck it up with Wundaweb, and wore that. Mum went nuts.”