The Great Allotment Proposal (12 page)

After a moment, the sun shimmering an evening haze above them and the birds swooping across the clouds, Jack leant forward, his arms draped over his knees and said, ‘So tell me about Giles.’

Catching her completely off guard, she almost choked on her damson stone. ‘What about him?’ she said when she’d recovered her breath.

He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. What happened? What went wrong?’

She drew her legs up underneath her and said, ‘You sound like an interviewer.’

‘But I’m not an interviewer. I’m your friend.’

Emily retied her hair with the bit of old string and licked her lips.

‘Was it good?’ he asked. ‘Did you have fun?’

‘Yeah.’ She nodded. ‘Yeah I did. It was fun for a while. At the beginning, it was amazing. That feeling of waking up one morning and you’re the most famous person on the planet practically, that was crazy.’

‘And he looked after you? Through all that?’ Jack plucked at the bits of grass between the cracked paving slabs, looking up at where she was sitting, nervously fiddling with her hair.

‘I think so. Or at least someone did. Assistants, PR people. It was – I can’t really remember it. In my head it’s more like a colour, like a feeling, you know? It’s a big blur of what I’m pretty sure was happiness.’

‘And then?’

Emily sucked in her bottom lip and glanced over to where Annie’s mum was clipping her tomatoes and Jonathan was re-draping his net curtain protector. ‘And then I think you could probably say it got slightly less happy.’ She laughed but Jack watched her without smiling. ‘I probably wasn’t the best person to be famous. It was like being let loose on this wild adventure that I didn’t have the emotional tools for and, well you know me, I’ve always loved attention.’ She picked at the mud under her fingernails. ‘To Giles I was a kid and he treated me like a kid and so I acted like a kid. He had all his grown-up pals who’d sit around in dark rooms getting high talking about shit and I’d flit in like his teenage daughter trying to get his attention.’ She leant back in the chair and glanced over at Jack. ‘The whole relationship was me trying to get his attention. And when he asked me to marry him it was like I’d hit the jackpot. I don’t think I even thought about whether I liked him or not or whether he loved me. He wanted to marry me.’

Jack sat back against the fallen shed wall, his legs outstretched in front of him, and asked, ‘Why do you think he asked you to marry him?’

Emily scrunched up her face. ‘I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot and part of me thinks it was for the publicity. We generated a lot of income as a couple and I made him more valuable. Our wedding would have been insane. Or maybe it’s that you think marriage will turn your relationship into something else. We had fun together sometimes, he was really protective of me. We’d been together for like eight years so we obviously thought there was something there worth keeping. Or…’ She shrugged. ‘Or it was just habit. Take your pick,’ she added with a smile.

Jack gave her a half-smile in return.

Emily lay back in her chair and looked up at the sky, squinted at the falling sun and followed a pair of magpies with her finger as they flew from the damson tree over to the other side of the allotment. ‘But then Adeline came on the scene. I knew something was wrong but I thought it was just the same worries I had. And for Giles, I mean her coming along was a good thing. That’s what’s so annoying. If we hadn’t been about to get married, then I think we could have just sloped apart. We could have uncoupled, as they say.’ She laughed again. ‘But he didn’t bloody tell me. That’s what I can’t forgive him for. That’s what makes me so mad. He let me go right up to the day.’

Emily looked over at Jack to see him still watching her, his head tilted slightly to one side. His fingers stripping a blade of grass.

‘Do you regret it?’ he asked.

‘No.’ Emily shook her head. ‘No,’ she said again. ‘Yes,’ she added suddenly. ‘Yes I massively regret it. You’re not meant to have regrets…’ Her voice started to wobble and Jack shifted upright. ‘But I really, really regret it,’ she said, and then she started to cry.

‘Oh shit, Em.’ Jack jumped up and came over to kneel beside her, his hand resting on her shoulder. ‘I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

‘You didn’t.’ She swiped the tears away. ‘I made me cry.’ Then she smiled at him. ‘It’s good to cry, clears the emotion.’

‘If you say so.’

She reached over and ran her hand down the slight stubble on his jaw. ‘You shaved your beard off.’

‘You said you didn’t like it.’

‘Is that why you shaved it off.’

He shrugged. ‘Might have had something to do with it.’

She smiled and then bit her lip, her eyes dancing with their familiar mischief. ‘Would you flinch again if I tried to kiss you?’

‘You said you weren’t trying to kiss me.’

‘I wasn’t but would you?’

A grin spread across Jack’s face. ‘No.’

Emily nodded but stayed where she was. ‘That’s good to know.’

Jack narrowed his eyes. ‘Go on then.’

‘What?’

‘Try and kiss me.’

‘No. You try and kiss me.’

‘Why? You said it first.’

Emily laughed. ‘OK.’

She stared at him, at his dancing laughing eyes, at his cocky half-smile, at his dark, tanned skin.

‘Come on,’ he urged.

‘OK,’ she smiled. ‘OK.’ And she reached her hand up again and let it rest on his face, then snake round into his shorn hair and, leaning across the arm of the rickety chair, she let her lips touch his and she kissed him for the first time since she was seventeen.

Snap.

The sound of the camera shutter was like thunder against the still, quiet evening.

Emily jerked backwards.

The blond paparazzo appeared from behind the cherry tree. ‘Gotcha, Em. Gotcha good,’ he laughed and before either of them could do anything he’d jumped on his bike and was cycling off across the allotment to the gate, destroying potential prize-winning vegetables and flattening sky-high sunflowers as he went.

‘Oh my god!’ Emily jumped up in panic. ‘Shit, Jack, what are we going to do?’

He shook his head. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘Don’t be bloody ridiculous. He’s just got us. It’ll be everywhere.’

‘So?’ Jack shrugged.

‘He’ll destroy you. Everything about you will be everywhere.’ Emily shook her head, glaring at him.

Jack looked down at the floor for a second, seemed to think about what she’d said and then looked back up at her without saying anything more.

‘Shit.’ Emily dragged her hand through her hair and got her phone out to call her PR team.

‘Who are you calling?’

‘PR. We have to manage this.’

Jack narrowed his eyes as he watched her. ‘You have to live your life, Emily. Won’t it just go away if we leave it?’

Emily sighed. ‘Don’t be naive.’

Chapter Fifteen

The picture of her and Jack kissing went viral in a matter of minutes. The gossip magazine websites had exclusives from ‘her friends’ about her new relationship. One paper had them marrying at the weekend, having done some digging and discovered a marquee was on hire for Mont Manor.

Wednesday morning the paparazzi were outside Jack’s boat, sniffing around the Dandelion Cafe, milling around the gates of the manor house.

Emily watched them from the window while searching the internet for more stories. They’d found out who Jack was, they had pictures of him at the eco research centre, they had pictures from somewhere of her and Jack as teenagers. She zoomed in and realised it was one taken by the local paper the morning of the original festival.

She’d walked away from Jack the previous night, while on the phone to her PR, telling him to stay away from everyone asking any questions. She knew she’d been cold but it seemed like the kindest option.

She thought about when she’d first gone to his boat and he’d asked her why she was there. Asked her if she was going to make his life complicated and she had said no. Yet here she was barricaded inside her house while journalists hounded him on his boat. He didn’t want that in his life and she knew it.

The heat had climbed overnight. It was now an incessant pounding in the air, every space, every inch boiled up and unrelenting. Winston had battled through the sweating photographers shouting at them to leave Emily alone. She’d texted him to stay at home but he hadn’t listened and he had the door code so she couldn’t keep him out. He called her name when he arrived and she’d shouted hello but hadn’t gone down to see him.

Her phone kept flashing with Jack’s name but she didn’t answer. Annie had rung but she’d said she should just lie low for a bit.

At the back of it all she thought of her precious dahlia, getting scorched in the harsh sunlight. She texted Jane to ask her to water it. Jane had replied with a simple: Of course.

At midday Emily saw the mast of Jack’s boat disappear up the river. Watched the white flag as it flickered above the line of bushes. She leant on the windowsill and followed it till it was out of sight, then she lay on her bed and stared up through the skylight till her eyes blurred and she still didn’t know what to do.

The world turned around her for a day and a night. The internet bubbled with more and more rumours. As she’d feared, they’d found a picture of Josephine and Jack on their wedding day and then trawled through Josephine’s past and present to find Ed.

She looked out the window on Thursday morning and Jack’s boat was still gone. She looked at her phone, he hadn’t tried to ring again.

Trawling through her emails, she found one from Jonathan asking whether he needed to set plans in motion for an alternative venue for the Cherry Pie Show. If he didn’t hear back from her, on return, he would action a new plan immediately.

Emily closed her eyes and breathed in and out through her nose.

She checked her most hated website again and saw a picture of a frightened-looking Josephine carrying little Monty to the car, shielding him from the camera flashes with her coat.

‘Shit,’ she said to herself, covering her eyes with her hands.

Her phone beeped with a text from Jane.

Emily, I’m really sorry…

Then a photograph.

Her dahlia.

Its big, fat, beautiful head snapped and hanging by one thin thread of stem.

She reached her fingers up to her lips.

For the first time since the photograph had been taken, since she’d leant over and kissed Jack full-square on the mouth, she cried. Really cried. Not just the few tears that she’d had after talking about Giles, but great sobs that seemed to hollow out her insides. She covered her face with her hands and cried and cried until she could barely breathe.

And gradually, as the sobs died down, and her breath came back, she wiped her face on Jack’s Nirvana T-shirt and she felt herself calm. She found her thoughts aligning.

She could see her mum kow-towing to whichever demand or temper of whichever man, as long as he kept them in the manner she was accustomed. She saw herself neatly boxed up by Giles, kept for public occasions where he would drape his arm around her and nuzzle into her neck. She saw the photographers she posed for drunkenly as she stumbled out of parties, giving them the brand Emily that they wanted. She saw the journalists digging and picking for their soundbite.

It was a lifestyle.

It was choice.

She had made the decision to live her life in front of a camera.

And surely if she’d made the decision to do it, she could equally make it to undo it?

What had Jack said as she’d been frantically dialling her PR.
Won’t it just go away if we leave it?

She had called him naive.

But perhaps it was her that was naive. Naive to believe she could have both. Or more to the point, that she wanted both. She’d had some of the best moments of her life living that lifestyle with those people, but she had chosen to up sticks and come back to Cherry Pie. She had chosen to work on the allotment. The vision of her sabotaged dahlia made her breath catch for a moment. She had chosen to change.

There was a knock on her door.

‘Er, Miss Emily?’ She heard Winston’s voice. ‘Miss Emily, I’ve brought you some tea and Annie’s made you a bacon sandwich. We thought you might be hungry.’

She got up off her bed and opened the door. Winston was standing in his overalls sheepishly carrying a cup of tea and a paper bag with the sandwich. ‘They’re still outside,’ he said. ‘Few less of them, though. Think it’s too hot for them,’ he added with a little laugh.

Emily took the cup of tea and the bag. ‘Thanks for this, Winston.’

‘No trouble at all. Don’t want you hiding away up here starving to death,’ he said then added, ‘Anyway, I’ve got painting to do.’ He started to turn and walk back down the stairs, but before he did he said, ‘You shouldn’t be hiding you know, you’ve done nothing wrong.’

‘Thanks, Winston,’ she said, watching him as he walked down the stairs, closing the door behind him.

She went back to sit on the bed, sipping her tea and getting the sandwich out. She hadn’t realised how hungry she was. As she ate, she remembered the article Faye Starkey had written:
We want to tell her that growing up doesn’t have to mean boring, sad and lonely. Bring back our Em with her crazy brand of cool.

She was doing exactly as Faye had predicted. She was hiding away in her great big house letting the world live around her. Emily knew she couldn’t change the past. She couldn’t buy back the past. The only thing she could change was her future.

And so she did exactly as Faye had suggested.

For the first time in five years, she called Giles.

Chapter Sixteen

Emily walked out of the house in her worst allotment shorts, her oldest, baggiest T-shirt, her wellingtons and her hair naturally kinked and damp from the shower. She wore full EHB make-up, but all the Barely There range so it wasn’t too obvious. She walked down the path and out the front gate, the flash bulbs as bright as the sun.

‘All right, Em, got lover boy in there?’

‘Em, Em, what’s the sex like?’

‘Em! Over here, Em. Is he better than Giles?’

‘Oi, Hunter-Brown, when are you getting married?’