Gifted and Talented (17 page)

He cleared his throat. ‘Yes, roses, great, that’s fine. My . . .’

No. He would not bring Amy into it. He looked at the ground, collecting himself. Resisting. He took a deep breath and looked at her. ‘And I believe you had some plans for wild flowers too . . .’

The warmth of her gaze was something he could almost feel; a strange, new, sensation of heat was spreading through his insides. ‘Can we walk round again?’ she asked him, eagerly. ‘Just to go through it again? Just to make sure?’

She had caught his arm – unconsciously, it seemed – and yet he was very conscious of it himself. Her fingers, light as they were, seemed to weigh on the outside of his fleece. ‘Don’t you think?’ she was saying, her face turned inquiringly up to him like a flower towards the sun.

He hadn’t heard a word but nodded eagerly, keen to seem all attention. Now he made himself listen, as well as look.

She was reiterating her plans. As he agreed and confirmed, Richard found himself admiring her certitude. She had a great ability to visualise. He could see, as she described it, how a sun-warmed wall to the side of the unlovely boiler room would look with honeysuckle and orange blossom tangled against it.

Diana was confused by such absolute attention. She had never known a man who followed what she said so carefully. The change, given how he had behaved before, was bewildering. He listened intently, eyes narrowed in concentration, nodding gravely, and then occasionally, and sometimes unexpectedly, smiling. There was something about his smile, Diana thought. It was slow, sensual, rather mesmerising. She could almost see what Sally had been talking about. Even if she had never particularly warmed to Mr Darcy.

‘Over here I thought, by the pond,’ she added hurriedly, ‘we could have primulas . . . Lots of colours, quite vibrant, because reflected in the water they’ll be gorgeous . . .’

Gorgeous. Yes, he thought, staring at her.

‘Thank you . . .’ she was saying now. Her eyes were brilliant, wide and warm.

He swallowed. ‘I feel I ought to make it up to you in some way,’ he said, quickly, helplessly. ‘I was so rude before.’

‘Oh, that.’ She flashed him a smile. ‘Let’s forget it.’

‘No, I was very rude. Completely unjustifiably.’ He paused. ‘Perhaps,’ Richard found himself suddenly adding, ‘I could take you out to dinner?’

Driving home later, with Rosie, Diana wondered if she had imagined the whole of the exchange. Had Richard Black really asked her out? She relived the conversation over and over again, Rosie’s chatter going over her head. It was not until she reached home that she realised Rosie’s tone had become more urgent and exclamatory.

‘Oh, Mummy!’ she was gasping. ‘Just look!’

Mitch and Debs’ house had come alive. When Debs had mentioned, casually, a day or two earlier, that they were putting up Christmas lights, Diana had envisioned a line of bulbs along the roof or around the window or doorway. The kaleidoscopic-kinetic outer carapace their home had now acquired was something she had never imagined. It was completely covered in a flashing, multicoloured framework of exuberant illumination. Outside Oxford Street or Piccadilly Circus, Diana had never seen anything quite like it. Not an undecorated inch remained. The lights were all colours, not only edging doors and windows, but arranging themselves into tableaux, spelling out messages, continually restless, flashing, rippling, strobing and pulsing. It made Diana tired to look at them.

Stars throbbed. The roofline dripped with running blue flashes. Various red-dot, rolling messages of seasonal goodwill scrolled, headline-like, endlessly along an invisible frame. A three-dimensional plastic Father Christmas, complete with sack and illuminated with an inward bulb, had been attached to the edge of the roof, apparently en route to the chimney. In the space between the sitting room and bedroom windows was a framework of lights on which a wildly flashing sleigh, complete with reindeer and crammed with presents, switched to three different succeeding positions before returning to the start of the sequence. On the wall by the front door, a pulsing Christmas tree flashed down through several diminishing, multicoloured versions of itself before beginning again.

‘But,’ Diana breathed, ‘it’s only the beginning of November.’

‘Can we go round?’ Rosie was pleading. ‘Shanna-Mae’s going to paint my nails for me.’

Diana drew in her breath, then let it out again. In the old days she would have refused without a second thought. Nine-year-old girls had no business with painted nails. But Shanna-Mae, as determined a character as her mother, intended to open her own beauty salon one day and practised on anyone who would let her. What Diana had seen of her handiwork – and face-i-work and hair-i-work, come to that – was impressive and it now it flashed through Diana’s mind that she could use some of Shanna-Mae’s skill with cosmetics for the forthcoming date, not to mention the cosmetics themselves. She hadn’t worn make-up since the divorce.

‘OK,’ she said, ‘but you have to do your homework before any manicures.’ Especially Shanna-Mae manicures. She went the full nine yards, with crackle polish, stuck-on gemstones and the lot.

‘I will,’ Rosie said. ‘Mrs Biggs won’t let Shanna-Mae do anything before she’s done hers, anyway. You know how strict she is.’

Diana grinned as she nosed the car into a parking space. Debs
was
strict, certainly. Her belief in the importance of education made her every bit as much a tiger mother as the ambitious West London women Diana had left behind.

She and Rosie went up the path to Debs’ house. After the first shock, the lights were rather growing on her. That they looked cheerful there was no denying. And the successful juggling of colours and balancing of design represented, in its way, a considerable artistic triumph. It had inspired others, Diana could see. A few houses up the street, someone had created a vintage motorcar in coloured lights, its spoked wheels rolling. Someone else had a big plastic nativity scene in the front garden, glowing from within and complete with flashing halos for the Holy Family.

People had clearly been busy. But no one had reached the heights and ambition of Mitch and Debs.

‘Like it?’ Debs grinned, opening the door to Diana’s somewhat muffled knock. It had been difficult to find a space to put her fist amid all the plastic holly.

‘It’s amazing,’ Diana said truthfully, stepping inside, which, illuminated as it was by the one bare bulb, seemed infinitely less luxurious than the outside.

Debs explained that they budgeted all year in order to afford the electricity bill, that the vintage car two doors up had been there last year but that the nativity scene was new.

‘Like to put on a good show, we do,’ Debs said proudly. ‘Cheers everyone up, it does. People can get low, this time of year. I like to think of it as our present to the street.’

Diana smiled, but felt inwardly slightly ashamed. The class prejudices with which she had arrived in the street had not been borne out. Life on a council estate was not in the least what she had expected. It was not as it looked in the tabloids, or on the TV news.

What she had not expected was the old-fashioned sense of community. The estate’s children played outside constantly, in all weathers, watched from a distance by an informal and revolving rota of benign adults. Relations between the adults, meanwhile, were supportive. People exchanged information, ran errands for each other, helped each other out.

All this seemed amazing to Diana. Her previous experience of neighbours had been the Oopvards in London: Sara Oopvard, with her aquarium cleaner, Christmas-tree themer and Olympic-level social ambitions. She had wanted not so much to keep up with the Joneses as to annihilate them. But on the Campion Estate, the Joneses actually got helped.

Debs had offered, from the start, not only friendship and company, but help of the most generous and practical kind. If Diana was delayed at work, or in traffic, Debs would happily take Rosie home from school with Shanna-Mae. While the good words that Debs put in for her with other mothers on the Campion Estate smoothed Diana’s path from the start in the school playground. She had never stood there as an awkward new mother, just as Rosie had never felt like an awkward new girl.

Diana was deeply grateful. It seemed to her that, to far greater positive effect, Debs was a social force to rival her ghastly former London neighbour, Sara Oopvard.

She did what she could in return. Mostly this was – with Rosie’s help – work in Debs’ garden. But, even as she dug, she was aware that there was something else Debs wanted.

While obviously curious about Diana’s past, Debs’ innate good manners prevented her from prying. Diana had told her little more than the fact of being divorced but, just as Debs obviously secretly longed to know all the details, Diana secretly longed to give her them, to unburden herself more fully, preferably over a glass of wine or three. Perhaps she even ought to. Only after admitting what had happened, and to someone she trusted, could she really come to terms with it and move on.

Once or twice she had been on the brink of disclosure. But then her natural caution stepped in and warned that the financial details of her divorce were too sensational not to weigh down the fragile foundations of such a short friendship.

‘Wine?’ Debs asked, pressing a plump finger on the tap of the wine box in the kitchen. Diana nodded gratefully. In the sitting room, Rosie and Shanna-Mae frowned over their exercise books.

‘How’s the love life going?’ Debs wanted to know. ‘Not got yourself a nice new man yet?’

Diana had not been intending to tell Debs about Richard. It was not long, after all, since she had sat in this very kitchen and excoriated him. But now she felt herself blush. And she could not, after all, keep everything secret.

Debs stared at her for a moment, then punched the air with her powerful arm. ‘You’ve got a date? You go, girl! Who’s the bloke?’

‘He’s called Richard,’ Diana said carefully.

Debs peered at her again. ‘Not him from the college!’ she cackled. ‘The one you said you hated?’

Diana dipped her head and stared at the floor. It did all sound rather unlikely. Ridiculous, even. Perhaps there was no point. She had nothing to talk to him about; she knew nothing about neuroscience.

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Debs said comfortably. ‘He might know all about brains but you know all about gardening. Ask you a question about plants and you can go on for hours.’

‘Are you saying I’m boring?’

She noticed that Debs sidestepped the question. ‘Just because he’s a top scientist doesn’t mean he’s got common sense,’ her neighbour sagely added. ‘Knowing your arse from your elbow, that’s what matters in the end.’

‘He’s only asking me out because he feels guilty,’ Diana fretted.

‘Well, what if he is?’ Debs chuckled. ‘Dinner out in a fancy restaurant’s my sort of guilt.’

‘He didn’t say it would be a fancy restaurant,’ Diana pointed out.

‘Bound to be,’ Debs returned cheerfully. ‘Master of the college. Hardly going to take you to McDonald’s, is he? Probably take you somewhere new and posh.’

‘Lecturer,’ Diana said, having read an advertorial about it in a freesheet only that morning. It was the latest luxury boutique hotel.

Debs looked amazed. ‘You didn’t tell me that.’

‘Tell you what?’

‘That he was a lecherer. He sounded like a nice bloke.’

Later, when Rosie was in bed – newly decorated nails spread carefully out over the top of her duvet – Diana was jerked from dozing over her gardening magazine by her mobile ringing. Who could possibly be calling at this hour?

‘Hello? Diana?’ The voice was a woman’s. Crisp, entitled and obviously used to getting its way. Diana struggled to place it.

‘Sara Upward, darling.’ There was an impatient note in the voice now.

Upward? Oh, Oopvard. Of course. Pronounced Upward, not inaptly. Diana narrowed her eyes. Why was she calling? Sara had cast Diana into the outer darkness, had she not?

‘Hello Sara,’ she said evenly, unable to resist adding, ‘Long time no hear.’

‘Sweet one, I’ve been longing to get in touch but I lost your number,’ Sara cooed, not particularly convincingly. ‘But let me get to the point— Oh, that’s the doorbell . . . Give me two secs, will you, darling, while I find someone to open it . . .’

Diana imagined her former neighbour clacking about her gracious home in her high heels, checking her extensively remodelled face in any one of many large mirrors as she sought one of her numerous domestic helpers.

Sara’s voice – high-pitched and breathy but with unmistakeable steel beneath – came back to the phone.

‘So, Diana, darling. Congratulate me. I’m a free woman.’

Diana considered this. It was not entirely clear what was meant. Free, certainly, is not how Henrik would describe his very expensive wife. Then, a shaft of insight. Surely not, though? ‘You’re leaving Henrik?’

The golden goose? Henrik looked like a goose, now Diana came to think of it – pale, and with a long neck. For Sara to leave him was unexpected, even so.

‘No, Henrik’s leaving me, which is much better.’ The voice on the other end was loudly exultant.

‘But why?’

Sara sniffed. ‘Turned out he was putting rather more than messages into the inbox of a certain female colleague. But who cares? It’s all worked out wonderfully. My lawyer’s squeezed poor old Henny till the pips squeak. I’ve got the house and everything. Oh, and Milo,’ she added, the joy draining suddenly from her tone.

‘How is Milo?’ It seemed unlikely that time and circumstance had improved him.

‘He’s nine now,’ Sara said briskly, ‘and I want him to focus on where he’s going in life.’

Does anyone, at the age of nine, know where they’re going in life?
Diana was about to say. The idea seemed preposterous. But then she stopped herself and asked, instead, ‘How do you mean?’

‘Well, obviously, after Smart’s he’ll be going to St Paul’s. Or Westminster,’ Sara announced confidently. ‘And one of our ancient universities after that. So I just wanted to show him one, you know. Focus him a bit. So that’s why I thought we might come and see you. Stay for a few days. Have a look round.’