‘Delivery. Boulders,’ roared a voice back at her. ‘And sand.’
Lillian closed her eyes and let her hand rest against her forehead briefly. Boulders, of course. She was making a rock garden because it was an easy way of maintaining that stretch of grass to the right of the studio.
Lou was normally here every second Tuesday morning because it was her day off and she helped Lillian with the chores. That was why Lillian had organised the delivery for today. Bloody Lou. What was she playing at? She couldn’t still be upset about Friday night?
Damn it. Lillian had moved on. She knew her know-it-all sister-in-law would fill her in chapter and verse if she asked, but Lillian hated asking Gloria anything. She would not ask.
‘What do you want me to do with the delivery?’ roared the delivery guy again.
Lillian felt her head ache some more. Ageing was not for sissies, as Bette Davies had said. Nor was drinking, for that matter.
‘Wherever,’ she yelled in bored tones and shut the window, on a mission to find some high-quality painkillers to dull the ache in her skull.
The room reeked of wine now, which was horrible. She thought she might throw up, which was worse.
The man at the door looked around Lillian Cooper’s property. Wherever, she’d said. Easiest spot to dump the sand was just inside the rusty, once-white gate. The boulders were trickier. The grabber on the second truck could put them just to the right of the old dear’s car. She probably didn’t go out much in it. And she was rude.
The sand started off in a nice hill but by the time the truck with the boulders had manoeuvred in and placed them, the sand had shifted a bit so that it was spilling slowly and inexorably down behind the old dear’s car.Karma’s a bitch, he thought, and waved his mate off before getting into his own truck.
Chapter Fourteen
Lou slept on the plane and woke as it banked gently over the Mediterranean like a giant hand was gently waking up a sleeping baby. They were coming down out of the sky, moving through the soft clouds so that Lou could see, past Trinity who had the window seat, clouds shaped like a giant duvet stretching in front of them so they could float deliciously down to earth.
‘Are we here?’ she said, stretching and dislodging Toni’s winter white cashmere throw she’d wrapped around herself in the early coolness of the flight.
‘Nearly. We’ve about fifteen minutes to go,’ said Toni, who was folding up her own throw, a similarly expensive cashmere version in old gold which was always very useful on holiday in case the nights were cold.
‘Thank you for this,’ said Lou happily, pulling the throw around her and luxuriating in its expensive glory.
She closed her eyes again happily, not even wondering why she wasn’t feeling her usual panicky self as the plane descended. This was generally the time when Lou’s Barking Dog went into overdrive. She had never seen Plane Crash Investigation on TV but she didn’t have to see it to imagine it: all crunching metal, screaming people and body bags. Take-off and landing were the most dangerous times of plane travel. Normally, she’d be sitting bolt upright and white-faced as they headed towards the airport. But not today.
Instead, she was snuggling into cashmere which was scented with some sexy perfume of Toni’s, an exotic haze of oud, amber and tobacco mingling with something like attar of roses, perhaps? Lou liked her perfumes floral but in this new bizarrely laid-back incarnation – and she had no idea where this had come from, but she’d woken up feeling this way – she found herself wondering if this sexy perfume would suit her. It was probably called Femme Fatale. Erotica. Molten Honey. She grinned happily to herself and snuggled deeper.
At least half the clothes she’d brought were Toni’s, far more expensive than her own wardrobe, and she’d borrowed things with stretch because Toni was a far leaner creature than Lou.
‘Mum, I couldn’t find most of your summer stuff,’ Emily had written on a ripped piece of paper attached to the couriered bag. ‘Did you put it all away? I found flip-flops, a sarong, two summer dresses – but I think you wore them in the garden ... ? I added in your necklaces, though, and some stuff from your bedside drawer. Plus some books.’
Lou, who normally loathed packing because her anxiety came to a head when faced with the notion of all the catastrophes that might take place, and how unprepared she was for each, had astonished herself by laughing at the diverse bits and bobs her daughter had sent.
‘Look at these!’ she said, grinning and holding up two cotton sleeveless dresses with scoop necks, one navy and one silvery grey, which had been washed so often that they were fit only for gardening or being turned into dusters.
In the holdall was a pair of ancient off-white Converse with filthy laces, an actually decent pair of Havaianas, a white linen shirt, a multi-coloured sarong and khaki shorts that no longer buttoned at the waist. Emily had added her mother’s jewellery pouch, which contained all her little hands of Fatima and ankh bracelets and necklaces, along with the rose gold pendant for self-love, and the silver necklace made with tiny aquamarine and amethyst beads for anxiety, one of the things Mim had given her.
Plus there was more of her antidepressant medication, her valerian drops, her Rescue Remedy, her Peruvian worry dolls, the books from beside her bed and her big notebook with its purple pen where Lou wrote her gratitude lists.
‘I’ve got ribbons for those Converses,’ said Trinity, picking the shoes out of the pile and carefully beginning to unlace them. ‘They’re an aquamarine colour. They’re for my hair but they’ll look totally adorable in these shoes.’
Lou had been about to say: ‘I couldn’t take your hair ribbons,’ when she stopped herself.
Trinity was delighted to be able to offer something.
Having the younger woman around was proving to be a joy. She had no idea what Trinity was running from, or indeed, if she was running from anything, but she was young and even though she was quirkily independent, Lou felt she needed someone to, well, mother her a bit.
Not like an actual mother, Lou thought, being firm with herself. She could not fill the gap of Emily’s absence with Trinity. That would be wrong. But she could be ... an auntie. Yes, that was it. A surrogate auntie helping Trinity navigate whatever was going on in her life. Lou was going to get to the bottom of it, but for the moment she was asking no questions.
‘What’s going on with her?’ Toni wanted to know.
Toni, for all that she knew everything, simply had no idea how to handle the young, Lou thought. It was very confidence-boosting to think that there was something she was better at than her younger, sharper sister.
