Summer at Shell Cottage Page 12

  Harriet was a nice woman, it had to be said. Easy to get along with. Back when she and Robert had got married a few summers ago, Freya had been quite startled by just how many female friends Harriet had – a great swarm of women, thronging protectively around the bride with wide lipsticked smiles, laughing about hen night shenanigans. The ‘gal pals’, as Harriet referred to them in her speech, which had been greeted by raucous cheers. Freya could see why Harriet was so popular, though. She had a friendliness about her that invited confidence, an untroubled air of a woman who saw the good in everyone.

  In contrast, Freya seemed to have lost the knack of making and keeping ‘gal pals’, her busy schedule meaning that her social circle had shrunk like expensive knickers in a hot wash. Her closest friend from university, Mel, now lived in Liverpool with a long-standing partner, Janie, and their friendship had dwindled to occasional emails and Facebook exchanges – ‘It’s been ages! We must meet up soon!’ ‘We really must! Definitely!’ But somehow they never did.

  You’d have thought that having children would be the ultimate door-opener when it came to making new acquaintances, but the school playground had always seemed a hostile environment to Freya, filled with small, tight clusters of women who all knew each other and each other’s children and spent great chunks of the week at each other’s houses, by the sound of things. Working full-time meant that Freya was rarely there anyway, but on the odd occasion she came to pick up the younger two, she found herself on the edge, ignored each time. Sure, she had done her best to ingratiate herself, always smiling hopefully when anyone glanced in her direction, but she had discovered too late that offering unsolicited medical advice to a parent having noticed their child’s ringworm or impetigo was not the most successful way to strike up a new friendship.

  Freya loaded the trolley with fruit and vegetables, fresh pizzas and garlic bread, and a couple of chickens for Sunday. Sausages. Pasta sauce. Arborio rice for a risotto with any roast chicken leftovers. Squash for the children, cereal, more tea and coffee. Cheese and yogurts and bacon. Steaks for a barbecue. Toilet roll.

  She caught up with Harriet and Teddy, who were having a very earnest discussion in front of the ice cream freezer. ‘Thank you,’ she mouthed to Harriet, as Teddy pointed out his chosen products with the satisfied air of a boy who’d done his bit for family enjoyment and confidently predicted many well-scraped pudding bowls ahead.

  ‘Any time,’ Harriet said, ruffling Teddy’s hair. ‘He’s gorgeous. Aren’t you, Tedster?’

  The gorgeous boy squirmed away and went to inspect an end-of-aisle display of summer toys: footballs, water pistols, inflatable lilos and the like. ‘Gorgeous, and hoping for a water pistol, alas,’ Freya said dryly, shaking her head no at him as he held one up.

  Harriet smiled, then looked back at Freya. There was a delicate moment of silence, then she asked, ‘Listen … is everything all right? Tell me to butt out if you don’t want to talk, but …’

  Freya felt her face stiffen. Was everything all right? Well, now, Harriet, she imagined saying, I might have inadvertently caused a baby to die at work. I’m scared of Victor finding out what a screw-up I really am. I miss my dad desperately and am worried about Mum … Yeah, sure, everything’s brilliant!

  She forced a rigid smile instead. ‘I’m fine,’ she said brightly. ‘Everything’s fine!’

  Just then Teddy emerged from the far aisle, where he must have slipped away unnoticed. He was carrying a huge bottle of Bombay Sapphire and looking very pleased with himself. ‘I got your favourite one, Mummy!’ he yelled at top volume, lifting a hand to wave and accidentally letting go of the bottle, which smashed to the floor.

  Oh Christ. Kill me now, thought Freya, hurrying towards him, scarlet-faced. Just kill me now.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Olivia was slumped in a deckchair on the lawn outside Shell Cottage, even though the sky was overcast and the sun defeated by thick muffling clouds. Everyone else was out, and she had found herself thinking nostalgically about summers gone by, when Freya and Robert were tiny and she and Alec had spent so much time with them down on the beach. Long golden days, laughing and playing, all enjoying their perfect family holidays together. She couldn’t help looking back through a filter of melancholy, wondering if she’d ever laugh like that again.

  A breeze rushed around the garden, shaking the branches of the plum tree, bustling through the long grasses as if in a tearing hurry. The lawn needed mowing, really, and the beds were becoming crowded by all the weeds that had seized upon Olivia’s apathy as a chance to gatecrash the nicest borders. They had ‘a man’ in the village who came and maintained the garden year-round whenever the Tarrants weren’t in the house, but while she was staying Olivia liked to get back on top of things herself and sink her fingers into the rich, crumbly Devon soil again.

  This time she didn’t feel like touching any of it, though. The sweet peas had gone berserk, a bright wigwam of colour and perfume in her sunniest border, and normally she’d be cutting bunches every day, filling vases and jugs and jam jars with the pretty papery flowers. But this year, she –

  ‘Cooeee!’

  A loud female voice jolted her out of her thoughts. Turning – rather awkwardly, thanks to the deckchair – Olivia saw that a dented silver Mini had been parked at an angle in the driveway, and then a woman came striding around the side of the house, flip-flops slapping on the ground.

  ‘Cooeee! Anyone th—? Oh! Hello.’

  The woman was in her fifties, at a guess, with a scarlet sleeveless top and a denim skirt. There was a jiggle of bingo wings going on but her legs were tanned and shapely, her glossy toenails the same shade as her top. She was chewing a wad of gum and shifted it to the side of her mouth as she flipped up Jackie O sunglasses and smiled at Olivia. ‘Gloria. Hello,’ she said. ‘Your new cleaner.’

  ‘My new – ? Oh. Are you? Since when?’

  Olivia hadn’t meant her words to come out sounding quite so unfriendly, but Gloria just laughed – a low, husky laugh that bore testament to an allegiance lasting several decades with Benson and Hedges at a guess. ‘Since someone put up a note in the post office?’ She waved a postcard between finger and thumb. ‘Right here. Cleaner wanted for light household duties …’

  ‘Oh,’ Olivia said again, feeling as if she’d been caught off guard. Freya must have placed the advert, she presumed, although this woman was certainly very quick off the mark. ‘I see. Well … do you have any references? A CV?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘By the way, did you actually take the postcard out of the post office window? Only I think the idea is that you leave it there for other people to see as well.’

  Gloria looked amused at the questions. She had coral-coloured lipstick, which clashed rather horribly with her henna-red hair, and about twenty coats of black mascara framing soft brown eyes. ‘A CV? For a cleaning job?’ she asked, a laugh bubbling beneath her words. ‘You don’t need O levels or – whatchamacallem – GCSEs to push a hoover round, darling. Not round here, you don’t anyway.’ She tapped the card impatiently against her fingers and Olivia caught a waft of cheap floral perfume mingled with Eau de Fags. ‘So … ?’

  Olivia thought about their cleaner back in London – Maria, who was meek and obedient, who tiptoed around the house like a polite shadow. She had come to them through an agency who promised rigorous checks on all their staff: visas, criminal records, previous employment history, the works. None of this turning up and brazenly asking for a job in a person’s garden.

  All of a sudden, she felt very old and very tired. She wasn’t sure she even wanted a cleaner right now, anyway, when she was still so wounded and vulnerable. ‘This is not really the way I like to do business,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you could telephone to make an appointment, rather than …’ She waved a hand. ‘Rather than this approach.’

  Gloria’s arms fell by her sides, the card dangling from her fingers. ‘Ahh. Okay,’ she said. Then she rummaged in a grubby white fringed handbag and pulled out a small pink phone
. ‘Right, then, let’s see.’ She peered at the postcard. ‘I can’t make out the number,’ she said apologetically. ‘Where are my reading specs, then?’

  Olivia glared. This woman was the limit.

  Failing to locate the reading glasses, Gloria held the card at arm’s length and squinted. ‘Tiny handwriting,’ she grumbled. ‘Don’t suppose you could just tell me the number, like, could you? Do me a favour?’

  Olivia gave her a withering look, which went unnoticed. ‘Are you seriously asking me to tell you the number of my phone so that you can then ring it, and have me go up into the house to answer it?’

  Gloria shrugged. ‘Well, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, but I didn’t mean now, I meant—’

  ‘Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?’ Another shrug. ‘We could pretend we were on the phone, if you want? If that makes any difference. I dunno, I just thought this might be the quickest way around it, like, but if you want me to sit in my car for ten minutes and then phone, I suppose I could …’ She left the sentence hanging as if to say, I’m not the crazy one here, love.

  Goodness, but she was exasperating. Olivia wished that Freya or Robert would materialize to deal with this Gloria, because she, for one, did not have the stamina today. She was just about to plead a headache and ask her to come back and talk to Freya later on, when Gloria spoke again.

  ‘Hey, I was sorry to hear about your fella, by the way.’ To give her credit, she had stopped smirking now and did look sincere at least. ‘I liked his books. Me and my husband took it in turns to buy his new ones at Christmas; proper good, every time.’

  The unexpected kindness took the wind right out of Olivia’s sails. ‘Thank you,’ she managed to say tightly after a small pause.

  ‘My husband died this year too, back in February. Came off his motorbike and cracked his head open, the dozy bugger.’ Gloria’s face twisted in a helpless spasm. ‘So I do understand what you’re going through. I’m right there in the same mess myself.’

  ‘Th-thank you,’ Olivia said again. There was another pause and then, because she was a good-mannered woman, even under extreme duress, she added, ‘Sorry to hear about your husband.’

  ‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’ Gloria burst out. ‘Proper shit. I don’t know how I’ve got through the last few months, I really don’t. But now, look at the pair of us. You need your house cleaning and I need some cash. So you could say we make a good couple. Destined for each other, like.’

  Olivia snorted. Those weren’t the exact phrases she’d had on the tip of her tongue. ‘The thing is—’

  Gloria was already talking over her. ‘It’s just … well, you could be waiting a while, that’s all. If you’re going to be interviewing and wanting references and all that sh – kind of stuff. And I’m not being rude but I had a peep through the front windows and …’ She shrugged. ‘Well. Not to put too fine a point on it, darl, but the place looks a bit of a tip to me. No offence, like. I’m not being rude. But—’

  It was like trying to argue with a politician – a politician with only one objective in mind: win the conversation. Get what I want. Have it my way. ‘Oh, all right,’ said Olivia in defeat, putting up a hand to stem this torrent of words. Seeing as Gloria had pinched the postcard out of the post office window, they wouldn’t get anyone else coming along until they’d sorted out a replacement advert anyway, and she wasn’t sure she had the motivation to do such a thing herself. Besides, the woman was right, the house was a mess. What harm could it do to let her blast around the downstairs rooms with a hoover and J-cloth at least, and scrub some of the stickiness out of the kitchen? Freya had given it a half-hearted once-over the other day, but the whole house could do with a proper clean, after Olivia’s negligence. She took a deep breath, hoping she wasn’t on the verge of making a terrible mistake. ‘Maybe I could give you a trial run. When are you free?’

  Gloria beamed. She had a wide, Julia Roberts-esque mouth and good teeth; it was a nice smile despite the awful lipstick. ‘Now?’

  A moment passed where a series of horror-story images flashed through Olivia’s mind. Gloria ransacking the place while holding Olivia hostage. Gloria casing the joint and returning after darkness with a gang of men and snarling dogs. Gloria with a hand around Olivia’s throat, puffing smoke into her face …

  Hmm. Olivia glanced at Gloria’s yellowed fingers and realized that there was the clincher. She could murder a cigarette right now. ‘Why not?’ she said, getting to her feet. Her bones felt leaden as she stood up, and the air seemed to press down on her, thick and humid like a heavy shawl. ‘I’ll show you what needs doing. But first …’ She hesitated. ‘I don’t suppose you could crash me a ciggy, while you’re here, could you?’

  Gloria beamed again. ‘Of course, darling! No problemo. I’ll join you.’

  Over cigarettes on the patio – ‘I daren’t smoke inside, I suspect my daughter’s already on the verge of checking me into rehab as it is,’ Olivia confessed with a grimace – the two women chatted about this and that, and Olivia took the opportunity to find out a bit more about her potential new employee.

  Gloria was fifty-eight, like Olivia, and she and her husband Bill had run the local pet shop for twenty-seven years, she said. But in the space of six months, a huge pet-shop chain had opened in an out-of-town mall, and then the big garden centre out on the ring road began selling fish tanks and hamster cages, and business had completely divebombed. When Bill died, soon afterwards, Gloria was faced with mounting debts and a business in its death throes and she had bailed out while she could. Since then, she’d taken on cleaning jobs where possible, shifts of bar work in The Dray and Horses, and she’d even done a bit of modelling at the local amateur art club.

  Olivia raised a shocked eyebrow. ‘You mean … nude modelling?’ It was the last thing – the very last thing – she could imagine her other cleaner, shy, timid Maria, doing. It was the last thing she could imagine herself doing either, for that matter.

  Gloria winked and puffed out a smoke ring that quivered between them for a few moments before it dispersed. ‘Hell, yeah. Pays brilliantly,’ she said. ‘And it’s actually kind of liberating to get your kit off in front of a room full of strangers.’ She took a last drag from her cigarette then dropped it on the paving slab and ground it out with her foot. ‘You should come along sometime if you’re at a loose end. Tuesday mornings. It’ll make you feel like a goddess.’

  Olivia stubbed out her cigarette in the small tin ashtray that Freya had pointedly left on the patio table. She didn’t like the way the conversation was going all of a sudden; the balance seemed to have shifted. Was Gloria laughing at her? ‘I don’t think so,’ she said briskly. Time to set down a few boundaries. Rule number one: cleaners should not go around inviting their bosses to strip off and model in the nude with them, however friendly a conversation they might previously have had. They just shouldn’t. ‘Right. Let’s get on with it, then. If you could make a start on the kitchen – floor, worktops, cooker, everything – then I’ll put the coffee machine on. How do you like yours?’

  ‘Ooh, how I like my men: strong and black,’ Gloria said with that husky laugh again. Then she picked up her cigarette butt and dropped it in the ashtray, wiping her hands on her denim skirt. ‘Only joking.’ She turned her face up to the sky. ‘Sorry, Bill!’ she called. ‘Only messing. Go back to your fishing and take no notice.’

  Olivia couldn’t help feeling a moment’s solidarity with the beleaguered Bill. Gloria was a force to be reckoned with, like nobody she’d ever met before. She glanced at her watch and hoped Freya would be home soon, just in case she needed rescuing. Then she gave another polite smile and opened the back door of the house. ‘If you’d like to follow me?’

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sometime later, once the gin had been mopped up from the supermarket floor and Freya had apologized to approximately seventeen different members of staff, and Teddy had finally stopped crying, they finished the shopping and were at the c
heckout, packing carrier bags full of groceries. Freya could see through the glass walls at the front of the shop that Molly was perched on a wall outside, waiting for them, having tired early of the Ivybridge shopping facilities. With her phone tucked under her chin, the girl looked a picture of youth and beauty in denim short shorts and a turquoise scoop-necked T-shirt which read TOO GOOD FOR YOU.

  Beep, beep, beep went the cashier’s scanner. Molly twirled a lock of tawny hair around her free hand as she talked, her expression alternately coy and on the verge of bursting out laughing. A boy, Freya thought, plucking hopelessly at a new plastic bag in a vain attempt to open it up. It had to be a boy. No girl or woman ever looked that way about a mere friend.

  Beep, beep, beep. Molly had her head on one side coquettishly, a little smile playing on her lips, one of her flip-flops dangling from her toes as she murmured into the phone. The whole scene was as flirtatious and come-hither as if the boy had been right there in front of her.

  Freya nudged Harriet. ‘Let me guess. Important conversation with boyfriend taking place out there,’ she said.

  Harriet glanced over and laughed. ‘No!’ she said. ‘Molly’s not interested in boys yet. It’ll be Chloe, I bet, her best mate. They’re practically joined at the hip back in London.’

  Before she could reply, Freya was distracted by Teddy, who was rummaging through one of the carrier bags, trying to find the multi-pack of Hula Hoops and tipping out the apples in the process. ‘Oi! Fingers out,’ she told him sternly. Next time she’d send Ted out on a surfing lesson with the others, too young or not, she decided. It was like trying to go shopping with a monkey, having him here.

  Once they’d packed everything and paid up, Freya manoeuvred the laden trolley outside, where Molly was still on the phone.

  ‘Don’t say that! As if.’ Giggle, giggle, eyes bright. ‘No, that was you … Oh, you think so, do you?’ She became aware of the others coming towards them just then and hopped down from the wall, turning slightly to shield herself. ‘Listen, I’d better go. Yeah, I know you are. Course you are.’ She laughed. ‘Oh, all right. I miss you too. Happy now? Speak to you later.’