Blowing It (3 page)

Lottie indicated the little heap of ripped paper on the table. ‘You should have filled that form in and sent it off, Mac – it’s the ecological way to go. The local green mafia will be very disappointed in you.’

Am I nagging? she wondered. She heard old
women
like that all the time. They were in the supermarket and the older they got, the bossier, telling their defeated, wizened old husbands that no, they wouldn’t like Coco Pops and to get a move on or they’d miss
Countdown
. She didn’t want to catch herself turning into that type.

‘Bugger the green mafia, I can’t start queuing up for buses,’ Mac said. ‘Suppose someone recognized me? Suppose someone said, “Ooh look, it’s that old geezer who used to front Charisma and now look, he’s on a free bus pass, just like every other poor and needy oldie.” You can just see them, all ha ha ha, and who’d-a-thought-it.’

‘Hey, you’re not bloody Rod Stewart, you know! No one’s recognized you in ages. Perhaps they’d think you’d lost your licence and had to put your Ferrari collection into storage.’ Lottie started to clear away the remnants of their very late breakfast.

‘And I bet Rod filled in
his
bus pass form,’ she told Mac. ‘He’s your age and looking well up to snuff – he wouldn’t let a little thing like a council age-reminder get him down.’

‘Ah yes, but he’s a Scot. He’s not going to miss out on a freebie. So tell me then, where would a bus go that I’d want to get to?’

Lottie thought for a minute. ‘India? Didn’t you used to be able to go to India from Amsterdam on the Magic Bus? I have a vague memory of ads in
Oz
and the
International Times
for hippie-trail transport.’

Mac laughed. ‘I remember that – one of our sound techies got on a bus in Paris after a bender and ended up in Afghanistan. He thought he was on a coach trip to Versailles. I’m not sure how it would go down here though, getting on the local 170 and asking if they’re stopping in Katmandu.’

Mac picked up the rest of the mail and headed for the kitchen door. ‘I’ll go and let the hens out on the way to having a look at the coriander. The bloke from The Candle at Both Ends said he needs some later today – he’s got a Thai special on this week. The organic-box people are coming to pick up a load of the flat-leaf parsley so I’ll sort that as well. And then I’m going to put a few hours in down at the studio. I’ve got a song on the go in here.’ He tapped the side of his head and grinned at her. ‘It might do for Robbie.’

If only. Then they’d be talking pensions with a capital ‘P’ and even Ilex might shut up. Over the years since Charisma had gone their separate ways, several of Mac’s songs had been covered by other artists. ‘It might do for Robbie’, as in Williams, had become a running joke between them whenever Mac felt inspired to take himself off to his studio with a half-formed song in his head.

Lottie loaded the dishwasher and noticed a new line of rust on the side of its door. The machine was probably well overdue for replacement and had done long and loyal service. A bit like me, Lottie thought, then re-considered. No, it’s not, she thought. I’m still OK. There was, if she thought
about
it, a good long list of Still-Haves and Still-Dos. She put an encouraging list together in her head as she wiped down the work-top.

I still have: a full set of healthy teeth/a definite waist/an excellent sex life.

I still don’t: leak when I cough/get puffed going upstairs/wish the world would slow down.

I still: buy clothes from Jigsaw, Gap and Joseph/fancy Bob Geldof/wonder what I’ll be when I grow up.

That last might not be a good thing, she decided. Surely, once the time with Charisma was over she’d already
been
what she was going to be when she was a grown-up, albeit an occupation that for her had only lasted about five years before family life and Holbrook House took over. You could take toddlers out on the road with you, especially to the summer festivals, but once school-age set in, she and Mac had decided it was time to give Ilex and Clover some home-time. And then there were the things she’d been since: restaurant owner, wolfhound breeder, racehorse supporter, painter, gallery-owner, and now herb-and-salad-crops grower. All of these were things they’d sort of fallen into by accident. Only the children and the house were the constants and with Sorrel about to leave school, what exactly was the point of holding on to a house of this size and this demanding? She felt a small twinge of guilt at the thought of abandoning it, now that it had become needy and she had to
remind
herself that it wasn’t a human, or even a pet. Someone else, someone better equipped, with time and money and energy, would be able to take it on, give it the love and attention it deserved. She wondered if Mac was feeling the same way. Something told her he was.

Lottie scooped up the fragments of Mac’s bus pass application from the table and threw them into the bin. Her mother had been keen on bus trips late in her life. The highlight of each fortnight had been her Friday outings to historic houses, gardens, craft fairs, anywhere that could accommodate a mini-bus packed with old ladies in need of a loo, a sit-down, tea and a scone. When she’d died, Lottie had been moved to tears by the collection of small souvenirs her mother had collected on these trips. All the pottery thimbles, scenic coasters, printed tea towels and commemorative mugs tucked away unused in a cupboard were testament to a woman who liked to get out and about a lot and was far too well mannered to visit anywhere without making a grateful contribution to the economy of the venue.

‘Your rooster has raced up from the henhouse to crap on your car roof again.’ Mac reappeared in the kitchen doorway and indicated the sight of the fat Light Sussex cockerel strutting his stuff on top of Lottie’s Audi. ‘So do you fancy going there then?’ he added, looking oddly shy as if he was still a young boy asking her for a date. He’d looked a lot like that the first time she’d met him, when at sixteen she’d been
refused
entry (on grounds of looking under eighteen) to The Roundhouse to see Spooky Tooth and he’d managed to get her in, by way of the guest list.

‘Do I fancy going where?’ Lottie asked, wondering why you couldn’t reason with poultry.

‘India. On a bus. Or a plane, whatever. Like we were just talking about. It wasn’t
just
talk, was it?’

Telepathy like that was what you got, Lottie thought, when you’d lived with someone so long. She held her breath, waiting to see if he really was on the same thought rails as her.

‘It’s only …’ he continued, ‘I don’t want to be harvesting boring bloody leaves for the rest of my days. Perhaps we need to flog this massive great place and go, while we can still get around without needing new hips and knees.
And
I’ve been reading this great book about world events not to be missed. There’s a camel fair, at Pushkar, up in Rajasthan, sometime in November. It’s a sort of mixture of Glastonbury and the Appleton horse fair but with camels. Very colourful, very noisy. Smelly too, probably.’

Lottie pushed the door of the dishwasher shut with her foot and heard something fall off inside the machine. It was a loud clunk and sounded terminal. When,
if
, the time came for clearing out to be done, and she felt a choking rush of both terror and excitement at the thought, this gadget would be first into the skip.

‘Sounds great! And in theory, I’m right with you. But there’d be a huge amount to think about,
wouldn’t
there? I don’t want to put any kind of a downer on things, but what about Sorrel? This has always been her home. We’ll have to sit her down and talk to her about it properly, give her some idea where we might be thinking of living when we get back. Wherever it is, unless we stay in the village she’ll be leaving all her friends.’

‘But she’ll be leaving them anyway – and they’ll be leaving her when they all go off to university. She’s only got a few more weeks in school, and she’ll keep the friends who really matter. They do far more getting together on the internet than they do in real life. She’ll be OK, one darkened room with a computer in it is much the same as another. For one thing she can always go and stay with Clover. She’s got plenty of room over in Richmond.’

Lottie looked at Mac warily. He seemed more determined with every sentence. He was persuading her now, fielding each and every possible problem with growing enthusiasm. She’d seen him like this before, many a time. The first had been when he’d come home one night from Kempton Park races, half-cut and half-owner (with best friend George, late – in every sense, sadly – guitarist from Charisma) of a two-year-old thoroughbred called Lacy Lil. Lil had been hailed, by Mac and George, as the great post-Charisma way forward.

‘She’ll keep us occupied, off the streets, out of trouble.’ George had draped his drunk, stoned self lovingly round his furious wife Kate and tried to
persuade
her and Lottie that horseflesh really was a cracking investment.

‘She’ll run at Ascot. We’ll get a box and you girls can do the fancy hat thing,’ Mac had joined in, carried away by Tequila slammers and wild ambition. ‘
Owners
’ box,’ he’d said, fist up in a victory punch. ‘One up from all that Royal Enclosure bollocks. And you two can lead her in when she wins. I can see it now.’ Kate and Lottie had accepted defeat and hoped for the best.

Possibly as sweet equine revenge for being a drunk’s five-minute novelty, Lacy Lil had not even remotely fulfilled her new owners’ eager expectations. In spite of being placed with a first-class trainer she simply didn’t understand this concept of the ‘way forward’ in a race at all, not unless she had another horse to follow and preferably several. George and Mac bought themselves all the kit – the Barbours, the sheepskin jackets, the top-of-the-range binoculars, shooting sticks and hip flasks – and followed their protégée from race to race but eventually the trainer gave up on her, complaining she was taking up valuable yard space and making him a laughing stock. Kate had insisted they did their best for her and Lil had been retired at some expense to a sanctuary in Gloucestershire. You couldn’t put teenagers like Sorrel out to grass though, Lottie thought as she filled a bucket of soapy water to clean the rooster’s mess off the car roof. You couldn’t re-home them like cats.

‘Maybe if we sold the house we could set Sorrel up with a flat in the village if she really didn’t want to leave the area,’ she suggested. ‘There’s a lovely little place going in the high street, just along from Susie’s gallery. I saw someone from Digby, James and Humphreys putting a For Sale sign up.’

Mac laughed. ‘OK, maybe when we’ve made some sort of decisions we’ll put that to her – if she’s not interested then we’ll know how much she really wants to stay where her friends are. But I know what she’ll say. It’ll be a big, fat “no”. If she gets the idea there’s a flat on offer, Sorrel will hold out for Chelsea Harbour.’

Lottie went out to scrub the Audi’s roof. The rooster eyed her from the arch in the yew hedge. The Pushkar Camel Fair, she thought. She’d read up on it. It surely had to be more fun than Ladies’ Day in a heavy drizzle. Apart from the smell: camels were horribly pungent things. And didn’t they spit? She hadn’t seen a lot of spitting at a smart race meeting – at least, not among the horses.

THREE

CLOVER, BLONDE, THIRTY-THREE
and as scrummy as a mummy could get, was having an attack of the doubts, her biggest enemy. This Sunday had started badly from the moment she’d skimmed through the Property Abroad pages of the Home section from
The Sunday Times
. Clover longed for and planned for a dream holiday home in the sun. Somewhere she and Sean and their fast-growing daughters could spend long, sultry summers together before their pair of lovely, sunny-natured little girls vanished into the dreadful whirlpool of hostile teen-dom, begging and scheming to be anywhere that their parents weren’t. It would also be somewhere for friends and family (even Sorrel, so long as she didn’t spend all day having noisy sex with that hormone-charged boyfriend Gaz) to visit. She could see them all now, eating artichokes from a rustic market with
pissaladière
and village-baked bread, beneath a shady jasmine-scented pergola while the
children
shrieked and splashed happily in the pool. Sean would have to take weeks at a time away from work and relax properly rather than collapsing in an exhausted heap on the draughty terrace of their annual rented house in Rock. It was such a depressing feature of that Cornwall fortnight – the sight of so many tense holiday fathers, pacing the road outside the Mariners Bar, talking urgent share prices and legal waffle into their mobile phones while trying to marshal small children across the road carrying wetsuits and centreboards and dodging the 4x4s whizzing along to the car park. Awful. Exactly like the school run, only in Boden-wear and Birkenstocks rather than Joseph and L.K. Bennett.

Clover had long ago set her heart on France and had it all mapped out in her head, right down to the lush taupe rough-plastered bathroom walls combined with sleek Starck 3 fittings. Sale time at Fired Earth had her hanging about in the Fulham Road shop, tempted to invest in a few dozen square metres of bargain terracotta for future flooring. And yet … recently the property pages had been featuring more and more adorable places in Italy, Portugal and Greece until she’d felt her dreams slip and alter. Today they were featuring Spain. It seemed you could still pick up an absolutely darling
finca
for practically next to nothing.

It was now just possible Clover had selected the wrong language for Elsa to learn. She’d started her at the
Bébé France
classes the previous autumn
because
Mary-Jane at Toddle-Tots had gushed on and on about how wonderful it was, how fast they picked it up and how cute her Jakey had been the summer before, happily approaching the
patron
in the Provençal
boulangerie
and asking, with complete confidence and no hesitation at all (according to Mary-Jane), for a
pain au chocolat
. Well he would, wouldn’t he? Clover had bitten back the thought before it escaped out loud, the child spent every blissful summer holiday moment at Mary-Jane’s to-die-for pink-shuttered villa near Avignon. You’d think he’d be bloody well fluent. But with France not now necessarily her sure-fire choice, Clover was having second thoughts. Also Elsa would be learning French when she joined Sophia at St Hilary’s next year. She could, now, be sorting the basics of Spanish or Italian or possibly even Greek instead. Was it too late to change? Would Elsa become hopelessly confused or could four year olds absorb any number of vaguely similar European languages? It was a bit late to do much about Sophia. At seven she was now well grounded in schoolgirl French. If necessary they could find her an after-school tutor for whatever else she needed. Now, sitting in the kitchen of her Richmond Edwardian four-storey semi and sighing over photos of a happy ex-pat family lolling on hammocks in a shady Mallorcan courtyard tendrilled with vines, she wondered if becoming trilingual might yet be a realistic goal for Elsa, obviously bright as she was.