The Barn on Half Moon Hill (10 page)

Linda leaned over the coffee table and handed her friend a plastic fan. There were five women in the room and all of them had small whirring blades cooling their faces, even Iris, Linda's
eighty-two-year-old mother. And surprisingly Caro too, who was floating through the menopause as if she was aboard an enchanted craft with an anti-menopause cloaking device, had beads of
perspiration pushing out of the pores on her forehead. She dabbed at her temples with her fingertips.
She even makes sweating look elegant
, thought Gaynor.

‘Thought you didn't get hot flushes,' she said, tapping her fan on the table, hoping that would somehow rev up the dying battery.

‘I don't usually. My thermometer might be getting more and more on the blink, but I haven't had that experience you seem to get where you say you feel it rising up from your
feet,' replied Caro.

‘I used to sweat so much in bed, Dennis used to have to sleep in a wetsuit,' sniffed Iris, putting down her fan in order to sip delicately from her special china cup covered in
irises which she lifted from a matching saucer.

‘Slight exaggeration there, Mother,' said Linda. Her hair was plastered to her face with perspiration. ‘Dear God, this can't be normal.'

‘I didn't get sweats until I was over a year into the full-throttle menop— oh bugger, my battery's knackered as well,' said Stel, banging her fan on the side of the
sofa in an attempt to revive it.

‘Here, Stel.' From a drawer in the dresser behind her, Linda retrieved another fan from the job-lot stored there and tossed it to her. Linda's husband Dino was a market dealer
(Aladdino's Cave) trading in allsorts and novelties which he imported from the Far East.

This quintet of friends always jokingly referred to themselves as ‘The Old Spice Girls'. They'd known each other for ages; but two years ago they'd decided to make their
meetings a regular Sunday event from 5.30 until 7 p.m., to galvanise them for the week ahead with pots of tea and finger food.

If they had been actual Spice Girls, it wouldn't have been too hard to choose their names. The preened and perfect Caro would have been Posh Spice. With her rounded vowels and cultured
ways, she made Victoria Beckham look like Pat Butcher. Iris would have been Blunt Spice, since the brake on her mouth had long since failed, much to the frequent embarrassment of her daughter.
Linda would have been Bountiful Spice because everything about Linda was big: her hair, her bum, her appetite and her heart. Gaynor would have been Bitter Spice. She was twisted up in knots about
her husband running off almost a year ago with a cheap young tramp, and fed off his frustration that she wouldn't give him a divorce. And Stel Blackbird would, at the moment, be Sad Spice.
Her much-loved only daughter Viv had left home that day in order to work in a godforsaken place up on the moors. She'd said she only intended to work there through the summer, but Stel had
said the same to her parents and then had never moved back to the family nest.

‘Linda, you do know the central heating's on, don't you?' said Gaynor, feeling the radiator. ‘No wonder we're all wilting.'

‘It's what? But it can't be . . .' Linda broke off her sentence as the penny dropped and she turned slowly to Iris, her eyes narrowing to slits. ‘It's you
again, isn't it, Mum?'

‘I must have forgotten to turn it off,' said Iris. ‘I thought I'd warm the room up a bit for everyone.'

Linda bobbed next door to turn off the heating, chuntering profanities in her mother's direction.

‘It's always cold when you first come in. I was only trying to help.' Iris lifted up her shoulders and dropped them as if hurt.

‘It's seventy degrees in the shade today,' Linda batted back. ‘You can fry eggs on the pavement.'

The Old Spice Girls met in Linda's ‘party room'. Dino had converted half their enormous garage into an extra reception room so that he and the lads could go and have a game of
darts, or watch the football on the sixty-inch screen mounted on the wall whilst partaking of a few beers, and Linda could fill it with her friends on Sunday nights.

‘I thought I was having a hot flush to end all hot flushes. Four years I've been having them now and I'm bloody sick of them,' said Gaynor, wishing there was a turbo
facility on her fan. ‘I must be coming to the end of them by now, surely?' Sometimes Gaynor felt as if nature was against her as well as everything else. ‘Can I open a window,
Linda?'

‘Open the bloody lot of them,' said Linda. ‘It's like a slow-cooker in here.' She gave her mother a warning look. ‘And don't you dare moan that
it's draughty.'

Iris managed to arrange her features into a perfect balance of innocence and disgruntlement.

Caro turned off her fan and put her cup of coffee down on a small glass-topped table with a shelf underneath, She could see a child's book parked there, entitled
Jolly Jellyfish
.
She gave a gasp of joy at the sight.

‘Oh, Linda, has Freddie been round to see you?'

Linda raised her hand and waved it in a gesture of ‘don't talk about it'.

‘Has he heck,' said Iris. ‘I put that there because Rebecca said she'd bring him round yesterday for half an hour and guess what, she didn't turn up.
Again.'

Caro didn't have grandchildren herself, but she could still imagine what it would be like to not be allowed to see them because your daughter-in-law was a controlling cow. She snatched at
the nearest passing subject to divert Linda's thoughts.

‘We should get some tickets and go to the theatre, make an evening of it. We haven't been for ages, have we?'

‘Well, I'm not going this week,' said Linda. ‘They're putting on
Rebecca
. No wonder Laurence Olivier drowned her.'

The Old Spice Girls had gravitated to one another to form a friendship group over the years, as women do. Linda was a nurse and had met Stel at St Theresa's Hospice, where the latter still
worked as head receptionist. Iris lived with Linda, and they and Gaynor lived on the same sprawling estate in Dodley. Stel and Caro first met when their children had been in hospital at the same
time ten years ago and they'd bonded in the hospital coffee shop as they waited for good news.

‘Did Viv get off all right, then?' asked Iris.

Stel didn't answer, because her throat felt suddenly blocked with a ball of solidified tears.

‘She'll be all right, love,' said Linda. ‘She's a sensible lass, is Viv.'

‘She went off to university for three years, Stel. Surely that acclimatised you for her leaving home?' said Gaynor.

‘That was different, Gaynor. She was home nearly every weekend and in the holidays. I always felt as if she were on a piece of elastic, but now . . .' Her voice dissolved into a
croak.

‘She's only gone to the moors, not emigrated to bloody New Zealand,' said Gaynor impatiently as she got up from the sofa. ‘Think about me. I haven't seen my Leanne
for nearly six months.'

Lucky you
, thought most of the room. Leanne Pollock had been one of those horrible, spoiled kids who had grown up into an even more horrible, spoiled young woman. She took the art of
self-serving to new levels. She had done Gaynor a favour by moving down to London to pursue a modelling career; not that any of them would say that to her, with the possible exception of Iris if
the opportunity presented itself.

Gaynor snapped her fingers. ‘I knew there was something I had to tell you all. Leanne had an audition for that top modelling agency a couple of weeks ago. You know, the one that Kate Moss
used to work for. And they would have taken her, they said, but for one thing, one tiny thing . . .' She pincered her thumb and finger together. ‘And do you know what it was?'

‘Her face?' suggested Iris.

‘No, her height.' Gaynor glared at the chippy octogenarian. ‘She was one inch too short. Would you have thought an inch made that much difference?'

Caro snorted down her nose and Gaynor threw her a dirty look.

‘An inch can make a hell of a difference, Gaynor love,' Linda winked at her.

‘Oh, I'm going to the loo if you're going to talk smut,' said Gaynor. The air seemed to lighten by several degrees when she left the room, shutting the door hard behind
her. Once upon a time, thought Caro, Gaynor would have been the first to chuckle at the innuendo.

‘Your father and I were always very active in the bedroom,' put in Iris, causing Linda to cover her ears.

‘Mum, please.'

Iris huffed in exasperation. ‘That's the trouble, every generation thinks it invented sex. I used to be a young woman with a figure that your father had difficulty keeping his hands
off. We once managed—'

‘La la la la.' Linda couldn't hear what her mother and father had managed to do because she was singing and her hands were over her ears. But her friends did – if their
widened eyeballs were anything to go by.

‘I reckon Gaynor needs a good bonk,' whispered Stel. ‘Hasn't Eamonn got any nice friends, Caro?'

‘They wouldn't get up there for the barbed wire,' sniffed Iris.

Linda immediately rounded on her. ‘Mum, that is mean. Gaynor's struggling and anger is her way of dealing with it. Even if it wouldn't be yours or my way of doing
things.'

All of them wished for her sake that Gaynor could move on, and they knew she wouldn't do that until she stopped denying her Mick the divorce he wanted. She was being as awkward as she knew
how, not responding to his solicitor's letters and making her presence felt in any way she could as punishment for leaving her for a girl over thirty years younger than she was.
And a
Bellfield at that
. There were some rough renowned families in the town: the O'Gowans, the Clamps, the Crookes; but the Bellfields were considered the worst. Young Danira Bellfield (or de
Niro as Gaynor so scathingly called her) was as different from Gaynor as she could be, which wasn't very flattering to Gaynor, and gave a gigantic clue to why Mick had left his wife two weeks
after their Pearl Wedding Anniversary. Danira was plump and loud, peroxide-blonde and wanton. But Gaynor, for all her Hyacinth Bouquet pretensions, was a good woman who'd worked hard to make
a comfortable home for her family, only to be rewarded with a duplicitous husband and a self-obsessed daughter.

There was the sound of a flush in the background, so Linda quickly switched the subject to the neighbours.

‘Annie and Joe next door are renewing their marriage vows in Jamaica next month.'

‘I bet he was doing the dirty on her,' sniffed Gaynor as she walked back in and immediately joined in the conversation. ‘Couples who renew their vows usually have that story to
tell.'

‘Actually, you're wrong because—' began Linda, but Gaynor cut her off.

‘You mark my words, they won't just be doing it because they're still so much in
lurrrve
.' Gaynor loaded the word with all the sarcasm it could carry.
‘It'll come out eventually. He'll have been dipping his wick where he shouldn't have been. He was always too good-looking for her,' she huffed derisively.

That couldn't be said of her own marriage. Mick Pollock was a smart, handsome man but Gaynor more than matched him for looks. She had the same dark colouring, wide mouth and big brown eyes
as Sophia Loren. In fact that was the first line Mick had ever said to her:
Excuse me, could I have your autograph, Miss Loren?
Corny, but it worked on her. She had always taken care over
her appearance, maybe too much so. Maybe she had been too polished for Mick's tastes, if the slobby Danira was anything to go by. The past year was telling on Gaynor though. Her mouth was set
in a downward arc and she radiated waves of resentment. If she had been born a cobra, her hood would have been permanently expanded.

‘A fucking Bellfield!' exclaimed Gaynor, sliding into dark, slimy waters in her head. ‘Lowest of the low. And what does she see in him? He's thirty years older than her
for a start. When we got married, she wasn't even born.' She shuddered as if that somehow made him a paedophile. ‘It won't be anything to do with his bank balance, will it?
Anyway, he can whistle for his divorce. I burned the last set of papers in our firepit and I'll do the same with the next lot. Bastard. I'll make it as hard as possible for him to get
me out of his life.'

The room crackled with Gaynor's electric bitterness. The only sound was Iris's cup hitting the saucer. Then Caro's soft, smoky voice broke through the silence.

‘Do you think maybe, for your own sake, you should let him go, Gaynor love?'

Gaynor's lips narrowed until they were almost invisible.

‘You are joking?'

Caro prepared to back up her words with more of the same. ‘No, I'm not. Look around you, Gaynor. You're in a room full of people who care for you. You're young enough to
start a new life, find a new man. All this fighting is damaging you more than it is him.'

‘It needed saying,' added Iris, who was never one to miss the opportunity to throw petrol on a fire. ‘It's what everyone here is thinking.'

‘Is it now?' Gaynor's eyes took them all in.

‘Because we're your friends and we love you, Gaynor,' Caro said. She was all too aware that Gaynor thought that she had the Midas touch, and so what would she really know about
what Gaynor was going through. Caro had a gorgeous faithful husband, loving children, a big house, a successful business and his-and-hers Mercedes and a Motorhome parked in the treble garage. Caro
shopped in Waitrose, wore expensive clothes, and had a diamond the size of Poland on her third finger. She and Gaynor had been close friends until Mick had buggered off. His leaving had triggered
an irrational envy of Caro which Gaynor knew was both wrong and puerile, but she just couldn't help it. Right now, getting a life lecture from Caro was like pouring acid in Gaynor's
wounds.