I hesitate as he hands me the brown paper bag of books. ‘Actually, there might be something. I don’t suppose you know any gardeners around here?’
‘To tackle Osprey House’s gardens, you mean?’
‘Yes. At least, as much as can be done in a short time...’
‘Like one of those revamp-your-home-in-a-day type shows? But for the outside?’
‘Exactly,’ I say, laughing. ‘A spruce-up, I suppose. First impressions and all that.’
‘Let me have a think and I’ll call you. You have my number, right? Could you send me yours?’
‘I will,’ I say, ‘and thank you.’ As I leave the shop, setting the bells above the door tinkling, I realise I’m feeling a little more like my old self. I’ll fix the gardening problem somehow. Everything will be okay, I can feel it.
And much later, as sleep folds over me in the pale lemon room, I remind myself that I arrived here less than a week ago. Right now, that hardly seems possible. But already, I’m beginning to remember who I am.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Vince
Deborah’s dinner party is galloping towards Vince like a racehorse at the Grand National. One of the loose ones without a jockey that seem completely out of control and look like they might run amok and trample everyone.
Vince fears horses. He always has. From the wooden kind in the school gym to the flesh-and-blood type with wild eyes and flaring nostrils, they’re all terrifying to him. Right now, Vince wishes he could find a small cupboard to climb into, where he’d hide until the book festival planning committee dinner was over.
Yet he can’t do that. For one thing, he has a gig this week, in a decent London venue, which he’s actually grateful for as things have quietened down a little of late. It’ll be weird, being so close to Kate, yet being unable to see her. But he’s determined that he won’t pester her or beg to meet up. Normally he’d stay the night with Harry in Clapham. But now there’s the baby and Vince isn’t sure he can handle seeing Harry and his wife being besotted with each other and cooing over their daughter and everything being perfect.
Instead, he books a chain hotel in Holborn and heads straight to it after the gig. At onea.m. he’s still lying on top of the bedcovers with the lights on, gazing around at the cheap desk and bland art and thinking,This wouldn’t be depressing if Kate was here. It’d be fun.At least it would have, when she seemed happy with him. They’d have had a few drinks and come back and had a lovely session on crisp hotel sheets and laughed at the purpleness of the lighting and the industrialness of the shower gel. ‘In a wall-mounted pump dispenser so we can’t nick it,’ she’d have said.
Vince checks the time again. An air-con unit, or some kind of machinery, is growling ominously and there’s no way he’ll be able to sleep tonight. Another worry is Jarvis, who’s staying with Gail and Mehmet next door. They hadn’t seemed keen but it’s only one night and aren’t neighbours supposed to be, well...neighbourly?Wasn’t that one of the reasons he’d been so keen to move out to his parents’ house, where people were kind and considerate instead of flinging their filthy mattresses onto the road?
‘As long he settles at night,’ Gail said, pulling a face when she finally agreed to the arrangement. ‘I need my full eight hours’ sleep, Vince. Otherwise I can’t function.’
‘Of course he does,’ Vince reassured her. He’s a good dog, when he’s not savaging dressing gowns and peeing in his study. (Of course he didn’t mention that.) Why are some people so preoccupied with sleep and plant milk and why is everything so fucking difficult now?
‘Oh, Kate,’ Vince groans out loud. Hours and hours spin by in the bleak hotel room. Finally he crumbles and decides to send Kate just one carefully composed message.
It takes him forty-five minutes to get it right.
Hey honey. Hope you’re having a nice fun time wherever you are. At Tash’s presumably? Well that’s good because I had an idea and you can mention it to her. That spa thing. Thinking maybe you don’t want to go on your own? Not much fun that. I should’ve realised, sorry. I know I’m a fuckwit sometimes. So I looked into some places and how about you and Tash go together? For a whole weekend as a treat? There’s a place where you can get covered in paraffin—
His phone pings with an incoming message and in shock he sends the text. Shit, that didn’t sound right. It sounds like he wants to douse her in fuel and that’s not what he meant.
He checks the new message.Could you send me that tagine recipe? Want to order quality lamb at Lawson’s.
What’s Deborah doing, bothering him about recipes at this hour? Lawson’s is the best butcher’s in Shugbury. Vince’s mum would never go anywhere else. But it’s Wednesday night – actually Thursday morning; he can hear what sounds like bin lorries out – and he’s lying alone on a hotel bed that feels approximately the size of Belgium and he’s not exactly in the mood for sharing recipes.
The planning committee meeting isn’t until Saturday night. A ‘casual supper’, Deborah said it would be. How much preparation is needed? He thinks of Kate, flinging together an immense pile of food for their party guests with no warning whatsoever.
There was no phoning in an order to Lawson’s then. No wittering about ‘quality lamb’. She tore into the task, albeit with a whiff of resentment – and, okay, she’d left him immediately afterwards.Andthe food was weird. (Were the two connected, he’s wondered? Should her ‘couscous surprise’ have warned him of impending marital collapse?)
All the same, Kate had always just got on with it. She gets on with everything that’s thrown at her, he reflects now: being a stepmum to Edie, and rising up the ranks at the museum and moving out to Buckinghamshire and being his back end and working at the spa hotel, with those idiots who can’t be bothered to take a pumice to their own stupid pampered feet.
His heart seems to twang as he tries to brush off the awful suspicion that whatever he’s done – and he still can’t fathom it out – might have screwed things up forever.
So no, tagine recipes aren’t top of Vince’s concerns right now. Exhaling forcefully, he files Deborah’s request under the ‘irksome things I’d rather not deal with’ part of his brain, where an awful lot of stuff seems to go these days. Like rehanging the bathroom door. He’d rather not deal with that either, even though he’s growing tired of having Jarvis sitting there, staring at him, whenever he’s on the loo.
Their relationship seems to have intensified. Well, of course it has. Vince is now the dog’s primary carer: a role he never signed up for, no matter how much he loves his daughter and wants to make her happy. Now, whenever Jarvis’s unwavering gaze is fixed upon him, Vince imagines a message being transmitted:
So you think it’s okay to switch from my special raw meat to cheap kibble, hmm?
