After Ever After (20 page)

‘I said, is there a shirt ironed?’

I ball my hands into fists and resist the urge to scream.

‘No. But it’s dress-down Friday, isn’t it?’ I listen to a pause from the other side of the duvet, and Fergus’s body weight thuds on to the bed and he pulls the covers away, noticing my frown with mild amusement.

‘It’s just that we don’t seem to spend any time together, you and me any more. I see you for half an hour in the morning and then by the time I get home we’re both knackered.’ He looks uncomfortably past my face and at the headboard. ‘I
need
you, Kitty.’ I look at the ceiling, and notice the shadow of dust that highlights the plaster ceiling rose.

‘I need you too,’ I respond cautiously, trying to temper my instant fury. ‘But I need you to see me and hear and notice me at times other than when you want to … to have sex,’ I finish lamely.

‘I love you, you know that.’ Fergus lies beside me in only his smart-casual shirt and his boxers. ‘I do notice you, if you only knew. I think about you, about being like this all the time. I need it, I need our … physical relationship. I need … that.’

I roll on my side and look into his eyes, taking his hand in mine.

‘I know, I need you too, like that I mean.’ I’m aware that no matter how much I try and sound as if I mean it I sound empty and hollow. ‘Really I do, it’s just that since the baby … It’s just, I don’t know, it takes a bit more to get me in the mood these days, that’s all.’

I put my arms around his neck and he holds me quietly for a long time, both of us feeling the small spaces between our bodies as if they were acres of loneliness.

‘I’m sorry, but I’m sure it will come back, and I love you and don’t have an affair,’ I say into his chest, feeling guilty since pretty much all of my fantasies and dreams over the past few weeks have been about doing exactly that.

‘Don’t be stupid,’ he says, breaking the embrace with a platonic kiss on the side of my nose. ‘I’d better get ready so I can make sure I can leave on time tonight. Don’t want you missing out on your stage debut.’

I watch him dress and wonder how much he understands and how much he pretends to understand, hiding his real worries away under his laid-back façade. Wondering how much, really, either one of us knows about the other.

‘All set for later then?’ Mr Crawley leans on the kitchen counter and drinks his coffee. It’s just him today; Tim’s gone somewhere to price some materials. Today is his last day.

‘Well, I’m sort of all set. I mean, I’m not really.’ I am stupidly excited about the whole audition thing – I think it’s a hangover from TV talent hunts. Maybe someone in the audience will discover that there’s a niche for a gravelly voiced thirty-something singer who wears loose tops and can’t act.

‘But what shall I sing? Do you think “Windy City” or “The Dead Wood Stage”?’ I ask him.

Mr Crawley smiles at me.

‘How well can you sing?’ he says.

‘Well, I can carry a tune if it’s not
too
demanding, nothing higher than “la” or lower than “do” if we’re going to be Julie Andrews about it. Strictly chorus material, I’d say.’ I shrug off my fantasy of running about in yellow gingham holding a bunch of daffodils just like Doris.

‘Well, that is a slightly limited range,’ he says kindly, and hums a few bars of each tune to himself.

‘“Windy City”,’ he says after a moment’s deliberation. ‘Gives you more scope to act the song instead of sing it. Sort of like a lady Rex Harrison.’

I nod and tap my fingers on the worktop as I hum it through. ‘Oh yes, that’ll be fine. Of course, I can’t act either, but what the hey …’

Mr Crawley watches me intently as I wipe down a work surface.

‘Mrs Kelly. There was something I wanted to ask you?’

I snap up my head and look at him with my recently acquired certainty that all news is bad news.

‘Have we gone over budget? How much? Is it more than £500?’

Mr Crawley shakes his head.

‘No, no. In fact we’ve come in just a bit under …’ He runs a hand over his thinning hair. ‘It’s, um, well, my children don’t live locally now. My son Christian and his lovely wife Naomi live in Holland, and Lucia and her husband are down in Dorset, run a hotel, charming place. I could move to be with them but the business is here, and I’ve made a good deal of friends over the years … What I’m trying to say is that I have come to enjoy your company a great deal over the weeks that I’ve been working here, and that I hope that our friendship will extend past the termination of my contract.’ As he speaks he turns his back on me and examines the garden. ‘He
has
got a good eye that lad, I’ll say that for him. A bit fly-by-night maybe, but a good eye all the same.’

I hold back the urge to hug him from behind.

‘Oh, Mr Crawley, I’d
love
us to still be friends. In fact, I’ve been thinking about telling Fergus that I wanted this wall knocked down just so you would stay a bit longer!’

Mr Crawley turns back to face me, smiling.

‘Well then, Kitty, you must call me Ian and that’s that. I’ve sent the bill to your husband and I’ll pick you up tonight at seven for the auditions?’ He holds out his hand to me and I take it, finding myself on the edge of tears, because despite everything that he has just said it feels as if my guardian angel is leaving me.

‘Thank you for everything, I mean
everything
: the kitchen, the bathroom, the damp coursing in the dining room, the loft conversion, the child care, the parenting tips – everything. You’ve been so good to me.’

Mr Crawley squeezes my hand and, putting his other hand on my shoulder, kisses me lightly on the cheek.

‘I’ll see you later on,’ he says quietly, and then he is gone.

‘I reckon he fancies you, the dirty old bastard.’ I jump and find Gareth poised in the door frame, laughing. I am horrified as I feel the heat rise in my cheeks. That is not the way Mr Crawley and I feel about each other. I know that, but somehow Gareth’s uniquely levelling gaze makes me feel uncomfortable and guilty.

‘Don’t be mad,’ I say awkwardly, avoiding meeting his eye. ‘He’s not like that, he’s … he’s a very good friend.’ Suddenly I remember why it is that Gareth has been out all morning and my moment of disconcertion evaporates. ‘Oh, have you got it, have you got my turf?’ I jiggle up and down on my toes and Gareth laughs, scooping his length of chestnut hair back into a ponytail.

‘Yeah, I’ve got it. I tried to work out if I could bring it round without going through the house, but it’s too tricky and I don’t think your neighbours’d be too happy about me climbing their fence every few minutes with a couple of rolls of turf balanced on each hand. I’m gonna put some matting down in the hall and bring it through that way, okay?’ He grins at me. ‘Feel like getting off your lovely arse and helping me today?’

I hesitate, trying to ignore his reference to my arse, and dither.

‘All right then, I’ve got an hour or two.’ I pick up Ella, who has so far been absorbed in eating the cord of her pull-along frog on the grounds that she can’t pull it along yet anyway, and plonk her in her playpen. She sits and blinks for a moment, observing her confinement as if she is wondering what the words ‘play’ and ‘pen’ are doing being so closely associated with each other. She bursts into angry tears, complaining bitterly to me about it and probably threatening to phone ChildLine.

‘Oh,’ I say, turning to Gareth. ‘Maybe not then.’

He tuts and crosses his arms.

‘Don’t mind her, leave her for a few minutes.’ He leans into the pen and ruffles her hair, which does precisely nothing to improve her mood. ‘She’ll be all right, won’t you, you little minx. You’ve got to remind them who’s boss, you know, otherwise she’ll have you at her beck and call all of your life.’

I look at baby Ella, who has clamped her teeth over the nose of her frog and is biting down hard as if she knows that it will make her sensitive gums even more sore, and her cries even harder to ignore.

‘Darling.’ I lean over her and she grabs the neck of my shirt, pulling it dangerously low.’ I hastily detach her fingers. ‘Don’t do it if it hurts!’ I say to her. I look at Gareth, who’s regarding me as if I have about as much backbone as a limp rag, and steel myself to be firm with her.

‘I’d better get her out,’ I say instead. He shrugs and trots down the hallway.

‘Fine, it’s up to you. But I warn you, it’ll take me twice as long and I might not get it all laid today and it’ll go all yellow!’

I look at Ella, whose face has reached the kind of purple-pink reserved for when she is especially unhappy, and for the first time in my life decide to take a leaf out of Scary Poppins’ book.

‘Now come on, baby, Mama won’t be long. Look at all your
lovely
toys, look!’ I hand her her pull-along frog but she bats it away and flings herself on the floor of the pen. I feel terrible, but for some reason I don’t want Gareth to see that I’ve given in to her. ‘Okay, well, I’ll be back in five minutes, all right?’

Outside, I hold the wheelbarrow for Gareth while he loads it up with rolls of green turf and listen to Ella’s cries turns to sobs and sniffs and then finally into her usual happy gobbledygook. Gareth hefts the last roll into my barrow and rests another on each shoulder.

‘See, I told you. Happy as Larry now. She’s got you under her thumb, that one.’ He grins, and I shrug, conceding that he is probably right, and attempt to wield the barrow with some difficulty.

‘No, no, lovely,’ Gareth says mildly. ‘You don’t push the barrow, I’ll push the barrow. If you can help me get it over the front step and bring these couple of rolls that’d be great. That is, if you don’t mind getting a bit dirty with me.’ He laughs the kind of laugh I’d expect to hear after sex and just before a fag. Thoroughly disconcerted for the third time since he appeared from nowhere this morning, I pull myself together and follow him into the hallway and through the kitchen, stopping briefly to find Ella earnestly but more or less cheerfully chewing her frog, and then out into the garden. Gareth’s jeans slip down a little over his hips as he unloads the wheelbarrow, and I remember my mission.

‘So, um, what did you think of Clare then, the other day?’ I say casually.

‘Clare?’ Gareth straightens, looking genuinely mystified.

‘Clare who you met here? My friend Clare? Blonde with lovely eyes?’

Gareth thinks for a moment.

‘Oh, you mean “Crazy Clare”, the hefty girl with a kid. Yeah, she seemed all right.’ He smiles pleasantly at me and turns the unloaded wheelbarrow around. ‘Right, at least four or five more trips, I reckon. Great for your abs and your upper-body strength.’

I trot after him.

‘I haven’t got any abs any more, and if I develop any more upper-arm strength I’ll qualify for Miss Universe.’

Gareth chuckles to himself.

‘I wouldn’t say Clare was hefty,’ I follow up. ‘I mean, she’s not long ago had a baby. All of us are a bit “hefty” after childbirth. Well, except for Posh Spice and those bastards with a personal trainer and a husband who does liposuction. Oh, and all those people who didn’t eat for two during pregnancy.’

Gareth has started humming to himself but I persist. ‘I mean, she’s very attractive really. Didn’t you notice her eyes?’

Gareth stops dead in front of me and I walk into his back. He turns abruptly and looks into my eyes.

‘
You
aren’t hefty.’ His eyes travel over my face. ‘You’re all curvy and soft. When I say hefty I mean sort of solid and square.’ He regards my face for a moment longer and then begins to reload the barrow. ‘And I’m sure she has lovely eyes, but she is a
bit
hefty.’

I stand where I am and breathe in and then breathe out. Curvy and soft, that’s what he said, but he said it as if it was a sexy thing to be, not as if I were a well-upholstered sofa. I smile to myself, feeling momentarily girlish and coy, and forget that I’m supposed to be helping only and not flirting or succumbing to any of his tricks. I’m sure that given the chance Gareth might really like Clare, but maybe what happens in the end doesn’t really matter. I mean, there’s no reason really to tell her that he thought she was ‘hefty’. In fact, I think it would do Clare the world of good just to have someone or something to dream about for a while, boost her confidence, give her hope. And maybe when Gareth does get to know her he’ll see what a fantastic girl she is and fall for her anyway, and if he doesn’t … well, we’ll think about that when we get to it.

We repeat our journey four or five times in a pleasant silence broken only by Gareth’s sporadic whistling, and on our final leg I stop and whirl Ella out of the pen and on to my hip. Half an hour later we’re finished, and it occurs to me that Gareth’s claim that it would take all day to do it on his own was slightly exaggerated. But no matter how much I tell myself his opinion shouldn’t matter to me, I don’t mind because I’m soft and curvy and after all that lifting a slight tug around my midriff suggests there might still be some abdominal muscle there after all.

‘Right now.’ Gareth wipes the heel of his hand across his forehead, having unloaded the last roll of turf on to a sort of pyramid on Mr Crawley’s patio. ‘Time for our next lesson. See, what I’ve done here is rake over the ground until it’s level, taken out any big bits of stone and roots, shit like that. Then I’ve fertilised it, trodden it down and raked it over again, while you were lounging around all lady-of-leisure-style.’ He lays a warm palm on my shoulder, his fingers squeezing me slightly. ‘Preparation is everything, Kitty; you can never spend too much time on preparation. You’ve got to look after your lawn and your lawn will look after you. Neglect it and it will run to weed, go bald and die.’ He picks up a roll and, sinking on to his haunches, unfurls it and then, with a disarming lack of embarrassment, rests his cheek gently against the grass. ‘Soft as velvet, just right for you and the little one.’

Ella and I look happily at each other, imagining twelve months of summer and endless fun and outdoor games. Well, at least I am. I think Ella is quite possibly hoping she’ll be able to eat the lawn rather than frolic on it.

‘Oooh, it’s like a carpet,’ I say happily. ‘A thick green carpet!’