Your Roots Are Showing (14 page)

Working at a regular job was a last resort. Lizzie didn’t have a lot of intractable opinions, but she’d always known she wanted to be around for her children, especially when they were little. Besides, she was fairly sure she wouldn’t be able to find a highly paid PR job in Sevenoaks, and commuting to London would be too risky as a single parent. Even on a fast train, it would take her at least forty minutes to get back if there were an emergency with the twins.

She didn’t have the luxury of looking for a mediocre sort of job in Sevenoaks. With the cost of child care to consider, that simply wouldn’t make sense.

No, her only option was to write a best-selling volume of nonsense verses for children.

For some reason, this had always been her burning ambition — well, ever since she’d given up the idea of being the Poet Laureate.

She had her late grandmother to thank for her writing aspirations. When Lizzie was eight or nine, she’d sent a humorous poem to Gran in lieu of a proper sixty-fifth birthday present. Gran had been deeply impressed with the genius of her fourth grandchild. She copied out the little rhyme and sent it off to her favorite radio station. For good measure, she also posted it to the “children’s corner” of her local paper.

In a massive stroke of good fortune, both the radio station and the newspaper liked the silly verse. It was read on air one Sunday morning and published in the paper the following Wednesday. The paper later sent a check for ten pounds because Lizzie had won a little creative writing competition they’d been running.

As her grandmother proudly handed over the check at a family gathering, she pronounced, “Mark my words, this child will go far. Keep every little thing she writes down. She’ll be famous one day.”

Lizzie had known, growing up, that in the fullness of time she would effortlessly pen the single most important body of verse of the early twenty-first century. But as time wore on, she found that whenever she actually picked up a pen and sat down to begin her life’s work, nothing but nonsense rhymes ever came out of the nib. So she went through a period of readjustment and instead set her sights on writing the greatest nonsense verse since “The Owl and the Pussycat” and “Green Eggs and Ham.”

You wouldn’t think it would be difficult to buckle down and write enough nonsense verses to make up a book. But it was. It was terribly difficult. The most difficult part of all was ever finishing a verse she’d started. She’d started plenty. Possibly as many as sixty or seventy. But most of them — no, all of them — resisted closure in the most obdurate way imaginable.

But that had all been before she’d had a really important reason to finish the bally things off. Now she had the most important reason of all — survival.

Well, maybe she was being overly dramatic. She would certainly survive if she didn’t make a single penny out of her nonsense verses. She knew she’d always be able to count on James to pay his share, no matter how things turned out; he simply wasn’t the deadbeat-dad type. She knew, too, that if push came to shove, she could move into a smaller place, maybe a semi or a row house, in some less exalted satellite of London. In the worst-case scenario, she could go somewhere really cheap, like Wales or the far reaches of Scotland. She could live in a croft, for example. That would be very economical, and the children would get used to shearing sheep and burning dung, or whatever it was crofters did.

But Lizzie hated moving. She hated it in general, and she would hate it in particular in this instance — because if she weren’t so deeply miserable all the time, she’d be very happy here in Sevenoaks.

She liked the mad Hatters. She liked having Tessa nearby. She liked the garden and the fields, the green lane and the hedgerows. She even liked the rabbits that kept playing havoc with the lawn. If she had to be out of Mill House for the summer, then she wanted to be here, in Back Lane Cottage, when the brambles on the fences eventually burst out with masses of purple-black berries.

So she wouldn’t start looking for a job, not yet. For one thing, she was still hanging onto the hope that all this was just a blip in her married life. But just in case it wasn’t, she’d have faith in herself and bury herself in her writing. Maybe nonsense verse would be the next big thing, maybe she’d strike it lucky and become, overnight, the second richest woman in England, pipped to the post only by J. K. Rowling.

She’d get busy just as soon as she’d put up the toilet paper holder. It was a simple job. She just had to drill two holes and screw in two screws.

The only thing was, the drill bit didn’t seem to want to go into the wall.

Most people would have given up after about the fourth or fifth assault on the plasterwork. But Lizzie was on a mission, and she wasn’t easily deterred. She even tried drilling holes three quarters of the way up the wall, where most people would be very surprised, if not downright dismayed, to see a toilet paper holder. By the time she finally stood back, half blinded by cement dust, she realized with a little flip of her stomach that the wall now had the pockmarked look of a room in which a fierce gun battle had taken place.

Lizzie knew she was beaten. She put down the blazing-hot drill and found a notepad. On a page headed “Shopping List — House,” she wrote, “white wall-filler stuff” and “ industrial-strength drill bit.”

It was difficult to move seamlessly from the scene of destruction in the bathroom to a session of inspired endeavor at her desk, but she was determined not to deviate from her plan.

Pausing only to make herself a cup of tea and grab a plate of shortbread biscuits, she was soon seated with pen in hand, scrawled-upon notebook in front of her, and a perplexed frown on her face.

She was trying to decipher some doggerel she’d begun ages ago, about a little girl who would wear nothing but pink no matter how much her poor mother coaxed, begged, and cajoled.

Millie, who was two, one day hopped out of bed and said

“I don’t think I’ll wear blue today, I don’t think I’ll wear red.

I don’t think I’ll wear orange, I don’t think I’ll wear yellow.

“I don’t think I’ll wear anything” — her voice rose to a bellow —

“I don’t think I’ll wear anything that isn’t pink, pink, pink.

’Cos that’s just what I think, Mum, pink, pink, pink, pink, PINK.”

That was fair enough, as far as it went, although the first line had a choppy rhythm. And there was more in the same vein. It seemed the little girl wouldn’t eat or drink anything that wasn’t pink either. But then Lizzie got to a bit that seemed to read:

At break of day Mum drove away to the shops at Dumbleton Bluff

And into a shopping basket threw a strange hodgepodge of stuff:

Strawberry chowder and pink sea bream

Pink margaritas and pink sour cream

Raspberry gumballs and pink caviar

Strawberry tofu and pink cigars.

Margaritas? Cigars? Caviar? Bream? That couldn’t be right. The only thing that struck the appropriate note was the raspberry gumballs. Even gum wasn’t politically correct in some parenting circles, and cream was a prime cause of heart disease.

Maybe it was just that she couldn’t read her own handwriting.

With a heavy sigh, she took up a pen and began to cross out the verse. Then she started racking her brain for replacement rhymes, but her brain was not cooperating. Her brain kept running on a track of its own: “I wonder if he decided to take them out for the day, or if they’re running riot in the manor? I wonder if the weather’s the same in the Cotswolds? Maybe the sun’s shining there and they’re playing hide-and-seek in the formal garden, annoying the paying guests.”

Maybe, on a day like this, James would have decided to take them strawberry picking at Longborough. But were the strawberries ripe in May?

It was no good. She threw down her pen and got up to put the kettle on. Come to think of it, she hadn’t eaten much today. What she needed was a good lunch.

Fifteen minutes later, she was slumped in front of the TV with a pile of golden-brown toasted cheese sandwiches. She’d sort of forgotten the twins weren’t there and made enough for everybody. She probably wouldn’t eat quite all of them, although boarding school had conditioned her to clean her plate. Each well-buttered triangle gleamed with grease, and the cheese inside was melted to oozy orange perfection. She alternated mouthfuls of warm sandwich with mouthfuls of strong, sweet coffee. Bliss.

To round it all off, she ate the chocolate orange she’d been hoarding for well over a week. She couldn’t believe she’d had the willpower to keep it that long. It just went to show that she wasn’t nearly as out of control as Tessa seemed to think she was.

Tessa.

Now, why did her stomach do an unpleasant clench, like a sea anemone being prodded, at the thought of Tessa?

Of course, she was still deeply annoyed with Tessa for that unforgivable lecture about her supposed weight problem. But, as far as she could remember, the two of them had more or less patched up their differences once Lizzie had made her own unforgivable remarks about Tessa’s infertility issues.

Yes, they’d patched things up and Lizzie had promised to . . . Oh my God. It was Saturday. It was ten to four. And Lizzie had promised to
go running
with Tessa at four o’clock this very afternoon.

In all the excitement of buying her new sports gear, Lizzie had somehow lost track of what the running shoes and tracksuit were actually
for
. Her mind simply hadn’t ventured beyond the nine o’clock visit from James, at which time she’d been scheduled to knock his socks off with her hitherto unsuspected athleticism.

Currently, the splendid new running things were lying in a heap at the back of Lizzie’s closet, price tags still attached, shoes still in box.

Obviously there was no way she could go running this afternoon, even granted that she could ever go running at all. The day had simply been too ghastly already. Besides, she felt slightly queasy after all that cheese and chocolate. And it was beginning to cloud over. It would probably rain. Even Tessa would have to see reason and let her off the hook.

Her stomach did the recoiling anemone thing again. Tessa had never been the type who saw reason — and the doorbell was ringing.

Tessa, dressed in Lycra from top to toe, bounced on the garden path as if she had springs in her shoes.

“Hey, you’re not ready,” she observed without so much as a “hello.” “Am I early?”

“Well, yes, just a tad. Come in. How about a coffee?”

“No, no, I’ll just look at a magazine or something while you change.”

“Oh. Erm . . . I’m not actually planning to change.”

“What? You’re never going running in those old jeans. Crikey, they don’t look as if they could stand the strain.”

“Thank you very much. I’m not going to put them to the test. The thing is . . . well, I don’t think today is a good day to start this running business.”

Before her very eyes, Tessa began to swell up like a bullfrog. She pulled her tummy in and inflated her chest and seemed to stand several inches taller than usual. “You don’t think . . .
what
?”

“Look, at least come and sit down while I explain. You see, it’s been an absolute shocker of a day. You won’t believe how awful! First, I overslept and the kids had to wake me up with James already knocking down the door, and the house in total shambles.”

“Really? But what happened? You were going to have everything shipshape.”

“I know, I know, but I couldn’t sleep last night. I finally conked out at around four in the morning. So, anyway, I had to answer the door in my gray sweats without a stitch of makeup.”

Tessa groaned. “Aargh! Not the gray sweats!”

Miserably, Lizzie nodded. “And then I had to run around packing and dressing the children. Then just before James left, he . . . he said something about a lawyer. A divorce lawyer.”

“Oh.”

“So you see, I couldn’t possibly go running after all that. And to make matters worse, I’ve gone and mucked up the walls in the bathroom. Come and see.”

Moments later, Tessa stood and gaped at Lizzie’s handiwork.

“ What — what were you doing?” she asked at last.

“Trying to put up this.” Lizzie held out the small, innocuous-looking toilet paper holder. “But the walls are steel reinforced or something. So now I’ve got to think about fixing this all up.”

Tessa simply nodded, eyes bulging.

“Then I decided to get down to some writing. But when I started working on one of the poems, I found I just couldn’t do anything with it at all. It’s absolute crap. They’re
all
crap. The one thing I thought I could do, and it turns out I’m really rubbish at it.”

Tessa shook her head decisively. “But Lizzie, that’s just not true. I’ve read some of your stuff. It’s not crap. It’s funny. You know what I think? I think you’re just really down on yourself today. You need cheering up.”

Thank goodness, Tessa
was
going to see reason after all. Lizzie’s spirits lifted. “How about a gin and tonic, then? I’ve even got a lime, and we could put on a movie.
Bridget Jones
? Or if you’re not in the mood for fantasy, maybe
Harry Potter
?”

Chapter Seven

R
emember to breathe,” Tessa shouted into the wind. “Like this.” She began to run backwards, sucking air loudly into her nose and panting it out through her open mouth.

“Stop . . . showing . . . off,” Lizzie panted back. “I know . . . how . . . to breathe.”

“No, no, don’t stop! Keep running! Remember, we
run
three hundred paces then
walk
a hundred. One-fifty-
two
, one-fifty-
three
,
keep running!
”

But Lizzie couldn’t. She couldn’t even keep walking. She stopped and bent over, cramming one hand into her side. “You . . . go . . . on . . .” she panted. “Got . . . stitch.”

“A stitch
already
? You didn’t drink or eat just before we came out, did you?”

Lizzie glanced up and pulled a face. “Think I ate lunch . . . bit late,” she puffed.