Folly (2 page)

My calm tone was entirely at odds with the sick, churning fear I felt as I looked out of the kitchen window at the pair of thoroughbreds, who were not, for once, steadily munching their way through obscene quantities of expensive fodder. Ace, the older of the two, was dozing in the sunshine in the bottom left-hand corner of the fenced-off field that was their home. Admiral was standing by the gate, ears pricked, observing one of my cats on the prowl.

I turned back to the open-plan living area. There wasn't much furniture left in it. A dark wooden sideboard, now empty. One rather scuffed brown couch and an ancient armchair. Wooden bookshelves lined the south wall which, six months ago, had had a lot more books in them. The top shelf had been reserved for the ornaments that my husband Mark had given me over the years, which were mostly of cats, and which had come to be something of a tradition for birthday presents.

The Lladro pieces and the Wachtmeisters were all gone now. Only a few of the cheaper ones remained, staring down at me, their expressions simultaneously managing to convey disapproval at these reduced circumstances, and offence that they had not been considered valuable enough to sell.

I caught myself muttering under my breath. Muttering and counting on my fingers, just like a crazy cat lady might do.

‘Ten bales of lucerne, ten of hay. I wonder if I can persuade the supplier to let me pay at the end of the month.' A ridiculously optimistic idea, I knew. ‘Plus Goodness's salary, groceries, food, soap, petrol, candles.'

I was ticking the items that I had a hope of paying for – those that would allow me to live from day to day. Trying desperately not to think about the other massive, frightening sums.

The outstanding bond payments, first and foremost. The rates and taxes. The water. The electricity bill – as a result of late payment, the power had been cut off for more than a week last month, and the month before – hence the need for the candles.

A hoot from outside the gate jerked me away from my unhappy calculations. It seemed that 14 Bottlebrush Avenue was quite the destination for uninvited visitors these days. Wondering which financial institution the new arrival would represent, I dragged myself tiredly to the window and looked out.

Parked at the gate was the gleaming grey Mercedes that belonged to Randy Da Silva, my lawyer.

Well, not exactly my lawyer. My brother's long-standing lawyer friend, who he'd hired on my behalf when he'd flown up to Johannesburg this time last year, after Mark's accident, to do what he called in his own words, ‘sort me out'.

I trudged over to the front door, took the remote control for the gate off the hook and pressed the button to open it. At the same time, I glanced into the hall mirror. The woman who stared back had a frightened face and tired, sallow skin. She looked ten years too old and ten kilos too heavy.

On the small table in the hallway stood a framed photo of myself and Mark, taken outside the Moulin Rouge in Paris, on our honeymoon several years ago. We stood arm in arm. Clad in a pair of figure-hugging black pants and a scoop-necked top, I looked curvaceous and beautiful. I was aglow with happiness, expensive cosmetics, and the after-effects of two glasses of Chardonnay. My hazel eyes were sparkling and my dark, shiny hair was ever so slightly mussed, possibly from the passionate quickie we'd had in our shoebox-sized hotel room just an hour earlier.

I'd instigated it while we were getting dressed to go out. Playfully, I'd grabbed Mark's shoulders and pushed him down onto his back on the squeaky double bed with his pants not yet buttoned and surprise in his eyes.

Then, after we'd hastily fumbled off my own underwear, I'd straddled him. I had taken hold of his wrists and pushed his arms down onto the pillow behind his head. I'd wrapped my fingers around them, pinning him in place, letting him know that, this time, it was going to be my sex, my way.

Both of us were giggling and breathing hard, whispering at each other to be quiet thanks to the hotel's paper-thin walls through which we'd realised sound penetrated all too easily. We had already heard the monsieur in the room next door clearing his throat on several occasions and, once, letting out a trumpeting noise which Mark had identified as ‘un grand fart'.

Now, the photo mocked me and so did the memories of that happy time before the money problems and the fights had started. Angrily, I turned the frame to face the wall and stepped out into the bright and sunny morning.

Da Silva slammed his car door, lifted his briefcase out of the boot, and walked across the bare soil of the front-garden-to-be, pausing to wipe his feet rather ostentatiously before entering the house.

‘Ah, Emma. Glad to find you at home,' he said with his trademark faux warmth, and I saw him give a swift sideways glance into the hallway mirror as if to reassure himself that his silvery-grey hair and his well-pressed suit and his shiny gold tie were all still just so. ‘I've been unsuccessful in getting hold of you on the phone so I thought I'd pop by.'

‘I'm sorry.' I closed the front door behind him, my mind racing as I tried to come up with a plausible excuse for being incommunicado. ‘My phone's been working on and off over the past few days. Faulty cellphone tower in our area, apparently.'

I feared what I had just said to Da Silva would be the first of a regiment of lies.

‘Please, sit down,' I added. ‘Something to drink?'

While I made instant coffee, Da Silva settled himself at the dining-room table and took out a folder crammed with paperwork.

‘Right. I'll get the bad news out of the way first,' he said, as I approached the table. My nerves were wound up so tight that, on hearing these words, I slopped a considerable amount of the mug's contents onto the floor.

I placed the mug down well away from all the pristine paperwork and hurried to mop up with the last of the paper towels on the kitchen roll before taking a seat opposite him.

‘Unfortunately, we've made no further progress with Federal Surety,' he said. ‘It looks like this is going to end up as a stalemate. If I were you, I'd accept their goodwill settlement offer, which I think in the circumstances is fair, and leave it at that.'

‘Right,' I said. ‘That's the best you can do, then?'

Da Silva gave a small nod, the gesture managing to convey both sympathy and smugness.

When Mark had a head-on collision with a truck at the beginning of last year, he'd had both accident insurance and medical aid. Unfortunately, the premiums were debited from his current account, which had been overdrawn for just a couple of critical months, causing them both to be rejected.

So simple and yet so cataclysmic. Mark would never have let an insurance premium lapse intentionally – he was a stickler for doing things the right way. I think, though, that in the stress of starting up another business venture that already looked like it was going to flop, he simply hadn't realised that the debit orders had been returned. And before he could do anything about it, an eighteen-wheeler had ploughed into him.

‘I'd take it, if I were you,' Da Silva advised in his patriarchal tone. ‘You're not going to get any more out of them. That money will cover my bills and it should give Mark another two or three months in Rest Haven.'

Rest Haven. The expensive private care home where my seriously brain-damaged and physically disabled husband now resided.

‘What's the good news?' I asked.

Da Silva looked startled, as if I'd caught him out by asking for it. His immaculately manicured fingers drummed out a little tune.

‘Ah. That. I've submitted the Road Accident Fund claim,' he said. ‘You may have to wait another year or two for the payout, but it should come eventually. At least that's one thing we can look forward to, eh? Now, have you put this house on the market yet?'

His words were like a direct blow to my solar plexus.

‘The house … no. No. Not yet. I'm still considering my options. I may … well, I may move into the cottage and rent the house out.'

‘Rent it out?' Da Silva echoed.

‘Yes. It's a nice big place. I'm sure—'

‘But Emma, it's not rentable. Not really liveable at all, is it? It's barely half-completed. None of the downstairs finishings are done – I don't know about upstairs. You haven't even got ceiling lights. None of the south-side windows are installed – have you forgotten why those boards are nailed to the wall? You don't even have a kitchen sink.'

Well, that wasn't my fault. We'd run out of money to pay contractors and I'd given up asking Mark to install a sink himself – not that he'd ever been a great one for diy in any case.

‘Just stop nagging me,' Mark had barked at me eventually, exasperated by yet another of my pleas as I hauled the dishes outside to wash them in the large concrete sink in the back yard. ‘When I say I'll do something, I'll get it done, ok? You don't have to keep reminding me about it every six months!'

Now Da Silva was peering at the other, smaller gap in the kitchen counter. ‘And what happened to your stove?'

‘I sold it,' I admitted, and saw his lips purse.

‘The cottage – what did Mark used to call it – the folly? That's finished, isn't it?'

‘There's a tenant renting it at the moment.' Who, I had just realised, was more than two weeks late with her monthly payment.

‘If you were to sell, a buyer could live there while he completed the house.'

Was it my imagination or had Da Silva put unnecessary emphasis on the word ‘he'? Not that I was a shining example of the self-sufficiency of womankind right now, but still.

‘Even so, this place won't be easy to move, so I'd really advise putting it on the market as soon as possible and seeing what offers you get,' Da Silva continued.

The house had become home to me. I had forgotten its shortcomings. In any case, there wasn't only me to think about.

There was also Goodness, his wife and their three children. There were my two retired horses, and the four rescue cats, one of whom, Sparkle, was even now leaping onto the table and approaching Da Silva's folder with a purposeful look in his eye. Quickly, Da Silva shuffled the folder closed and replaced it in his briefcase.

‘I've got a few very promising job interviews lined up,' I said, weakly.

Then I waited. If a lightning bolt was going to fry me it would probably happen now.

‘That's good news. Finding employment needs to be a priority for you, whether or not you sell the house.'

I couldn't help but scowl. Did he honestly believe that the thought of getting work hadn't yet crossed my mind?

And then I realised that, thanks to the scurrilous details about my past that I suspected Roger had drip-fed him over the years, Da Silva probably did think exactly that.

‘You lost your job how long ago? Six months?'

I bristled. ‘I was retrenched when the company went insolvent, and that was four months ago now.'

‘That's a long time to be without work. You should look at renting a smaller place in a more built-up area. For a woman on her own, living on a large plot like this is both costly and unsafe.'

‘But I'm not …'

He steamrollered right over me. ‘As Roger has said, you need to try to view what has happened to you in a positive light, and use it as an opportunity to make changes for the better, and to start taking more responsibility.'

Oh, right. With that comment, I knew Da Silva had definitely heard all about my past. How could I have thought my brother would have kept it a secret? I had to force myself to bite back a vicious response.

Instead, to make myself feel better, I looked at Da Silva and I visualised him naked.

Not just unclothed, but stripped bare and face down on the plastic dining-room table, arms and legs splayed out, trussed by his wrists and ankles to the table legs with yards of kitchen string.

I imagined how he'd crane his neck and roll his eyes in alarm as I stalked towards him, all his smugness evaporated.

‘Well, well,' I would say to him. ‘What a lovely table decoration you make, Mr Da Silva. A truly spectacular centrepiece. There's only one problem. Every centrepiece should have a candle, shouldn't it? And now … let me think carefully … I have one here in my hands. Where do you think will be the best place to put it?'

‘Emma!' Da Silva's voice cut sharply into my fantasy. ‘Are you laughing at something?'

‘Better to laugh than cry,' I rejoined, which did nothing to wipe the frown from his face.

Da Silva snapped his briefcase shut and stood up, clearly ready to leave. I bid him goodbye in falsely cheerful tones as I showed him out, just in case he thought he was the only one of us who could do phony emotion.

Back in the living area, the trussed-up spectre of Da Silva had vanished from the dining-room table, and my imagination was powerless to summon it back. The thought of sitting down again and trying to calculate a nonexistent budget no longer appealed. I decided instead to go and extract the rental money from my tardy tenant.

Chapter 3

T
he cottage that Hayley, my tenant, rented was set in front of the main house and separately fenced, with its own entrance. It was the first dwelling that we'd built on my land – his folly, Mark had nicknamed it. Octagonal in shape, the hi gh-roofed cottage had two downstairs rooms – a small bathroom and a spacious lounge-kitchen – and a mezzanine bedroom above.

We'd lived happily in the folly for years until Mark had decided it wasn't good enough. That we needed a bigger place. And so construction for the main house – aka The Palace – got underway, with machines groaning as they levelled the ground, builders pounding away with hammers and mallets, scaffolding bristling upwards around the walls. Unforeseen cost after unforeseen cost. The massive increase in the price of cement. The local unavailability of the granite kitchen surfaces we'd wanted, which had finally arrived in the country and had been installed just before we'd run out of money. The Great Stove Debate, which had culminated in Mark's decision, financially disastrous in hindsight, to import a Nardi hob from Italy.