‘How about if I just give you the garage key, so that you can cut the grass?’ she interrupted.
‘That would be great.’ He leaped to his feet like a waggy dog. ‘It’s boring just waiting.’ He followed Clarissa as she opened the garage door and showed him the mower, the electrical outlet, thedoor out of the end of the garage to give him access to the back yard and a green bin on wheels for the grass cuttings.
He wheeled the mower to the lawn, pressed the button and tweaked the handle, and it roared into life. While Clarissa watched, he cut two swathes of grass then raked up and dropped the long stalks into the green bin. ‘This is not grass cutting, it’s haymaking.’
Such a feeble joke seemed to reassure Clarissa that there was no harm in him and she said her goodbyes. As soon as she’d backed the little car out and whirred away up the road, Stef let the mower fall silent and whisked through the garage and up more steps to the back yard, where the long grass was falling over with neglect. He glanced around, checking out the degree to which the garden was overlooked, which turned out to be not much. Just another bungalow, really, its back to Honor’s place and just about every blind still rolled down in Sunday morning laziness.
Grateful for late sleepers, Stef began to feel around the opening edge of each window. The top one, in the way of many wooden frames, had some play in it. He began a rapid tattoo with the flat of his hand, just where the long window catch hooked on, pausing periodically to ease the opening section to and fro. The catch began to jiggle. All he needed was patience and a little time.
* * *
Honor, to avoid Stef, had risen early and taken the bus into Brighton. It wasn’t one with Martyn projecting sex appeal from the side, but a sparkling woman and a cute child peeking through fashionable spectacle frames.
From the bus stop on the Old Steine, Honor walked down on to the shingle of Brighton beach, past the fairground rides to where a series of arches under the promenade parallel withthe sea were filled with gift shops, beach cafés, and watercolour artists’ studios. She browsed through postcards and prints, pulling up her jacket collar against the breeze.
Families had staked their claims on the beach and, as it was low tide, there was even a ribbon of damp sand for the children to play on. Only the final few of the pier’s stilts were in the water.
Behind the breakwater a noisy group, probably students, sat around a young guy who cradled a guitar. He grinned up at Honor as she crunched past, goatee beard and blond curls making him look like the result of an imp catching an angel at a weak moment, and kicked a jacket over an impressive beer stash. From theArgus, Honor knew that Brighton police had the power to confiscate alcohol being consumed in public places. Returning the smile, she hoped that kids only eight or ten years her junior didn’t think she looked as if she could be the Beer Police. She hesitated. What if she stood and listened to the imp angel’s music? Maybe they’d widen their circle to admit her and offer her a beer.
A new song began and she hovered but the circle remained closed. OK. On past the little shops, the sculpture that looked like a curved segment of a monster Easter egg, the row of little boats that constituted the Brighton yacht club, a skate park and playground, the great rusty frame that once was the West Pier and a bandstand straight out of Dickens. Finally, she walked up from the beach to find that the esplanade had widened to encompass gardens and statues and she’d crossed the boundary into Hove. Angling away from the ocean, she strolled through gardens surrounded by buttery yellow Regency houses and found herself in a crowded and busy shopping area for a late lunch and to browse the afternoon away around the shops.
At the end of the long solitary day, she caught a bus towards home, content to watch the city go by as the bus crawled through the busy traffic in Hove and Brighton, seeming never to progressmore than a few yards without stopping for traffic signals, junctions or bus stops, until it began uphill to Woodingdean. There, the view was more suburban and she was almost asleep when it finally swooped down to Rottingdean.
She clambered down opposite the White Horse Hotel, where the bus would loop around and turn back, crossed the intersection and started down the slope to the Undercliff Walk — it being a lot flatter than Marine Drive — glad that today she didn’t have to go through Martyn’s up-the-stairs-down-the-slope routine. The sea was well on its way in, now, sucking and gobbling at the pebbles and then falling back for a breather.
Rounding a fold in the cliff, she came across Frog and the Tadpoles, toeing a soccer ball around one of the widened areas of the Undercliff Walk. She grinned. Her last encounter with Frog had gone well — once the ice down the shorts incident was behind them — ending in eating cake together.
Although he didn’t grin back, he half-lifted a hand in greeting. ‘Hey, Yankee Doodle.’ His hair was so short that it didn’t move in the breeze but the loose material of his top flapped against his body.
‘Hey, Toby.’
She paused to allow the ball to cross in front of her. As she went forward, she tensed,juuuuustin case the ball flew back via some part of her body.
But Frog just tapped the ball behind her then fell into step alongside. ‘Know what? There’s a Mr Yankee Doodle hanging round. Says he’s your old man.’
Honor sighed. ‘Yeah.’
The ball dribbled past them and Frog trapped it with his foot. ‘He asks a lot of questions.’
‘About me?’
Frog tried, and failed, to flick the ball up and on to his knee, then tried again, scowling. ‘About Martyn Mayfair.’
‘Oh.’ Disquiet trickled through her stomach. Martyn would hate it if Stef’s questions got him talked about. Particularly in connection with Stef’s wife. ‘Did you tell him anything?’
Frog managed to flick the ball up, on to his knee and back to his foot. ‘Yeah.’ He grinned. ‘I told him to piss off.’
‘That really works for me.’ Honor was filled with relief. ‘Thanks for the heads up. I owe you one.’
Frog began to fall behind, lining the ball up for a mighty kick. ‘Make sure it’s not an icy one.’
With the last of her energy, she pulled herself up the cliffside stairway by the handrail and crossed the road on aching legs.
In her driveway, she halted. Wow — somebody had cut the grass. A wriggle of guilt. Bet Clarissa had got sick of asking her to organise it and had sent someone herself. Honor had better call her up and arrange to pay her back. She yawned and let herself into the bungalow, which was quiet and still and felt like home. And smelled like coffee.
Coffee? She hadn’t been here to make coffee.
‘Hiiiii honeeeee. Had a good day?’ The voice was full of laughter and jubilation. And was all too familiar. And all too damned close.
