Blowing It (8 page)

‘But you can’t do that!’ Clover blurted out. ‘You couldn’t sell this house! It’s … it’s
home
! It’s the whole family … centre!’

Lottie and Mac smiled at each other; the surrounding expressions of horror were wonderful to behold, the tease was irresistible. ‘Sure we could! It’s our new, great idea.’ Mac shrugged. ‘Why not?’

SIX

IT WAS, FOR
a weekday, a pretty good way to be woken up. Ilex watched the top of Manda’s glossy brown head snaking its way back up the bed and smiled happily.

‘Mmm. It doesn’t get much better than this,’ he told her, feeling a delicious post-coital languor creeping on.

Manda, who rather thought it did, gave his shoulder a swift kiss and climbed out of bed to go and run the shower. She wasn’t due at work till midday, which gave her plenty of time to go to the gym, have a swim and a workout and maybe join in with the advanced yoga class. All that lot would give her energy, get the
chi
flowing and help her to feel positive, something that she badly needed. Where now, if not at Holbrook House, were she and Ilex going to have their wedding party? What were his parents thinking of, so casually coming up with the idea of selling the place? It was their family’s home,
for
heaven’s sake, not some superfluous gadget you could offload on eBay. And Clover, who sometimes seemed so babyish as to be barely out of her pram, must be spitting blood at the very idea of Mummy and Daddy getting rid of the house. She probably still kept her soft toy collection there, all cutely lined up on her little pink bed.

Manda knew perfectly well that there were any number of grand venues to choose from for a wedding these days. Kew Gardens was a good one – she’d been to a lovely one there. And there were various hotels and historic houses. Compared with a simple village church and Holbrook House, though, everything else would seem too impersonal. Plus it was hard enough to drag Ilex to an unfamiliar restaurant, let alone expect him to spend the happiest day of his (and her) life at some starchy, swags-and-chintz place he didn’t know inside out. Her friends, when they were being kind, called him ‘traditional’. But when they got a bit pissed and kindness went out of the window, the word ‘anal’ occasionally surfaced.

‘Ilex, darling? Wake up.’ Manda, back from the shower, shook him gently to wake him from the doze he’d fallen into. He looked shiny, she thought; in need of a wipe-down like a bar-top late at night. She turned her attention to her underwear drawer, selected a pink and black Elle Macpherson bra and matching knickers with side-tying bows. She paced around a bit and took her time putting these on, her
body
prettily posed for her audience as she dressed. Ilex, infuriatingly, wasn’t watching. He stretched and yawned and gazed up at the ceiling. She was wasting her time and should have done this half an hour ago: now he was sated he was focused on the day ahead.

‘Ilex – this thing about Mac and Lottie selling up. Do you think they really will?’ She stood in front of the long mirror and tweaked at her bra cup. Ilex sat up, blinking sleep from his eyes.

‘They’d be mad to right now – prices in that bracket aren’t doing too well. Which means that yes, they’ll probably have it on the market by the end of the week.’ He laughed. ‘I mean, they’re my folks, aren’t they? Never knowingly gone for the smart money option!’ He considered for a moment. ‘But … if they could hold on for another year, we could be talking another half million at least. I despair of them. I mean, what are they going to do for a pension when they’ve blown it all? By the time they’ve got the travel thing out of their systems and bought a place when they get back, there’ll be sod-all left for them to live on.’ He sighed. ‘And by music business standards, they’re pretty much clean living. They could go on to well over a hundred. Imagine financing that at whatever-you-need a year by then. Who’s going to fork out for the care home?’

‘Yes, but it’s not
just
about the money, is it?’ Manda ventured gently, knowing perfectly well that in Ilex’s case, it certainly was. Worth a try though, so
she
persevered. Her sister Caro had said, ‘Nothing will happen unless you make it happen.’ She just needed a bit more practice. ‘It’s so much more than a heap of cash to you all, surely, a house like that; it’s somewhere you’ve always called home. You’re all so lucky. Caro and I didn’t have a proper kind of a home after Mum died. Nowhere we could go back to for Christmas and family celebrations.’ She emphasized her point with a deep sigh.

Ilex looked blank. ‘Isn’t this home?’ He looked round their bedroom, puzzled. ‘When I’m out and I say “I’m going home”, this is where I think of.’

This was good, Manda conceded, but in this particular case, today, it was good
and
bad.

‘But think of Sorrel. She’s got only Holbrook House, the home she’s always had. Where’s she supposed to live?
And
I don’t think Clover feels the same as you either,’ she ventured. ‘I think when Clover thinks of “home” she thinks of where her mum and dad live.’

‘Oh, well, Clover; she was always the little girl. It’s high time she grew up.’

Ilex climbed out of bed and strode into the bathroom. He didn’t shut the door and Manda could hear him peeing loudly. Why did men do that? It was so unattractive. He’d be completely repulsed if she did it. ‘A man likes a bit of mystery’ had been a favourite adage of her mother when trying (too late) to persuade her adolescent daughters that virginity wasn’t something to offload lightly. Manda felt tears
welling
up. What would her mum think of her daughter now, reduced to sliding down a bed at 7 a.m. to give a man a blow-job in the hope he’d be brain-addled enough to ask her to marry him? There wasn’t a lot of mystery there.

Ilex emerged from the bathroom. ‘I was thinking,’ he said, scratching his head as if helping the process along, ‘maybe I should have a word with Clover about this house-sale thing. And Sorrel too. Maybe between us we could persuade them to hold off for a bit, think it through. Just till the market perks up again. And till they’ve made firmer plans. I mean, they haven’t a clue yet where they’re heading, have they? No point going to the expense of advertising the place if they’re going to change their minds.’

Manda felt enormously cheered. She put her arms round him and kissed him softly. ‘Now that’s a brilliant idea!’ she murmured into his ear as she snuggled against his bare chest. ‘I do love you, Ilex!’

There, Mum. She sent the thought up to her mother among the angels. See? Job done.

Clover had tried telling herself several times that she was a Big Girl Now who had long since left the cosy world of Mummy and Daddy and she would normally be the first to admit that it was pretty pathetic for a woman in her early thirties to feel so upset about her parents making plans to change their lives. But these weren’t normal times (Was
Sean
about to be made redundant? Or was he whooping it up at vast expense with some easily impressed slapper? Should she give up her subscription to
Sunshine Property
and forget the Dordogne and blissful sunny peace?) and they certainly weren’t normal parents. When other people’s mums and dads got to a certain age they took up golf or they bought into nice chintzy time-share apartments in safe places like Malta or Torquay. They went on cruises where they were lectured to about Cretan myths or Roman relics and they went to see ancient relatives in New Zealand before it was too late. You weren’t going to get a pair of old rockers like Lottie and Mac to join in with any of that (and to be honest, it crossed her mind she was probably thinking of people a good twenty years older than they were). Clover liked life to be settled; she relished the comfort of the familiar, and having her parents continuing at Holbrook House represented safety and solidity to her. If she really wanted to analyse it (and she didn’t much like to, for fear of what she’d find) she’d have to admit that the place still represented somewhere to run back to, a refuge when she needed it. And boy, had she needed it, a mere six weeks after Elsa was born. There’d been Sean, working away from home at a rugby awards event up north, celebrating second-time fatherhood by shafting a waitress across a table-full of trophies. His assistant had walked in on them and immediately phoned Clover as she ‘thought she ought to be
told
’. Clover, engrossed at the time in breast-feeding and Sophia’s emerging sibling rivalry, wasn’t so sure. Some things you can really do without knowing at a time like that – she had quite enough on her plate, thank you. Once you were told, you had to deal with it.

There’d been several sessions of counselling after that, for Clover had been feeling very shaky and unsure of herself. Sean unhelpfully diagnosed post-natal depression, presumably to deflect from the more obvious post-being-cheated-on sort. One day she’d taken Elsa out in the car to buy some nappies at Sainsbury’s and instead of coming back just that one mile home, had driven in a complete daze down to Holbrook House, silently gone up to her old room and climbed into her childhood bed, snuggling up to her baby as if she was a comforting teddy. Mad, Sean had called her, completely certifiable. He’d been furious (which might have had something to do with having had to cancel his golf to stay at home with Sophia) and had told her to grow up, get herself sorted. It had only, he’d said, been a stupid, one-off shag – it wasn’t going to happen again and there was no need for all this palaver. Apparently it was a well-known man thing, so he claimed (so that was all right then – perfectly normal). Nature, in her skewed wisdom, gave men an irresistible desire to go out and spread the seed around immediately after a birth, while the females of the species could see the living proof of the males’
fertility
. It was something to do with the survival of the species giving them a primitive urge to impregnate as many women as possible. All this made Clover wonder if she was supposed to be grateful it was only one waitress he’d had, not the entire team, all lined up in their black skirts and little white aprons. If it
was
only one. He was away over night so often, she couldn’t possibly know what he did. She didn’t want to let herself board that particular train of thought. It was too hard to stop.

The counsellor she had seen hadn’t been much use and had also assumed Clover was suffering crazed delusions brought on by post-natal depression and he had only really taken notice when she’d talked about her early childhood. Nodding and occasionally grunting, the blank-faced therapist had almost chewed the end off his pencil as Clover conjured up her earliest memories: the time she and Ilex were taken round the capitals of Europe in the Charisma tour bus with a selection of beardy old musicians, their sandalled, mantra-chanting women, and the gloriously untamed children of the other band members. Sean had said the therapist was probably stashing all the info away as a case-study for a future self-help bestseller and wasn’t at all interested in Clover’s part in her own childhood but it had left Clover wondering if she’d had her fragile baby-roots shaken by random childcare and the nightly stage-side view of her parents entertaining crowds of thousands instead of
tucking
her into her cot with nursery rhymes and a Fisher-Price mobile. It had surely left her childishly needy. When she’d worked at Home Comforts, assembling sample boards of paint colours and furnishing fabrics for customers, she’d too often tried to insist that a classic Victorian sitting room really needed candy pink. Now, here she was outside the gates of St Hilary’s, blurting out to her best school-gate friend Mary-Jane that her parents were thinking of selling up and planning a year-long world-trip, and wondering who to blame for her failure to turn into a properly formed grown-up. Hastily, she tried a bit of back-pedalling, looking to make herself feel better.

‘Of course I’m sure they didn’t mean any of it. It was probably just my crazy parents’ idea of a windup. It would be typical of them to come out with it for effect. They’ve probably forgotten all about it by now.’

She smiled and shrugged and opened the door of her VW Touareg in an attempt to put off an approaching traffic warden. Did they have to hover so close to the school at dropping-off time? It wasn’t as if anyone was going to be more than a minute or two and it was only a single yellow line, nothing serious. She sighed and chewed at a nail – and why not? After Sunday they were all thoroughly ruined. Late last night she’d had to take off all the shattered varnish and file away the chewed edges. She’d have popped into Hand Job on the high street for repairs
but
Sean had now made her feel wary about spending casual cash, in case the redundancy thing really was true. She wasn’t sure whether she hoped it was, and had to face a downgrade in outgoings (and she could handle that) or that it wasn’t, and she had to go through all the angst of being convinced he was stashing money offshore as a lead-up to a cheap divorce or spending money on a mistress.

Alongside Clover, watching the girls going into school, Mary-Jane’s face was only mildly sympathetic. She waved distractedly across the playground in the direction of her daughter Polly, who, trailed by Clover’s adoring Sophia, was plodding with dramatic misery at a snail’s pace towards her classroom but was absolutely
not
to be allowed to get away with yet another day off for a sore throat.

‘So … it was just a spur-of-the-moment idea, maybe.’ Mary-Jane looked thoughtful and then said, ‘But are you sure they haven’t been planning a trip for ages? I mean, selling a house they’ve lived in for over thirty years to fund a serious amount of world travel is a pretty crazy idea to come up with, just on a whim. Imagine how much stuff they’ll have to clear out – how brave is that!’

Unaware she was making things worse and that this wasn’t the role Clover had planned for her, Mary-Jane continued, ‘Perhaps that was the whole idea behind the big lunch – to get you all together to tell you they were cashing in the family chips. Good
on
them – my parents never went further than the Lake District. They moved into a bungalow the year I went to university in preparation for old age and the time when they couldn’t climb stairs. They weren’t even out of their forties!’