Artistic Licence (3 page)

Thea gave Derek a mental ‘thank you’ for understanding that his niece was not all joy. ‘But Molly, it would be far cheaper to pay the single room supplement.’

‘Oh, I know. It’s the company I want you for, really. You never know who you’ll get on those trips. I like to
go with someone I know. Someone I can talk to.’

Personally, Thea liked to go on holiday with somebody she liked and although she did like Molly, even the very best of friendships could founder in such conditions. And she wasn’t sure that Molly qualified as ‘very best’.

Thea decided to risk losing Molly’s good opinion of her by producing her hidden wine. As Petal probably had the only decent corkscrew in her room, she had to prise the cork out with one that hurt her fingers. ‘It’s terribly generous of you, Molly, but I can’t possibly accept. Have some of this. It’s only a “bogoff” but really quite OK if you warm it up a bit first.’

‘Bogoff?’ Molly looked at her glass as if it contained very nasty medicine.

‘You know, buy one, get one free.’

Molly was a member of a wine club and this notion appalled her, but she didn’t comment. ‘
Of course
you can come to France,’ she said decisively. She picked up her glass, thought better of it and put it down again. ‘Really, Derek can afford it and he’s right, you deserve a break for looking after Petal.’ She looked up at the ceiling. The sound of banging and crashing indicated that Petal’s artwork was nearing the front door. ‘Can you get away at such short notice?’

Suddenly the thought of exchanging her lodgers and her boring part-time job for Provence in the spring was terribly attractive. And even if Molly was bossy and overbearing, she was fun.

Thea took a large sip of her wine and decided that Molly was right: it wasn’t very nice. The wine in Provence was bound to be better. Then she pulled up a chair and threw her cloth into the sink. ‘We’re not
particularly busy at the moment and I don’t get holiday pay or anything. I don’t think it would be a problem.’

‘Super! You’ll need comfortable shoes, an umbrella and a sunhat.’

Just then, Petal opened the kitchen door and shouted through it, ‘Ben said thank you for the tea and sorry he can’t say goodbye, but he’s loading the car. And Aunt Molly, he’ll give you a ring as he hasn’t time to call in now. ‘Bye!’ The kitchen door closed and then opened again. ‘By the way, Thea, there are some clothes of mine in the tumble-dryer. If you could be an angel and hang them up for me?’ Assuming that Thea would be an angel, Petal removed herself.

Thea regarded Molly. ‘A sunhat?’ The cold spring rain was lashing against the window and the tumble-dryer was full of Petal’s clothes. ‘I’d love to come, Molly.’

Thea’s part-time job at a high street photographer’s was not one which was ever going to bring her much in the way of job satisfaction. Sending off other people’s holiday snaps and handing them back twenty-four hours later was not intrinsically interesting. She had realised that going for that particular job was a mistake the moment she had first made coffee for everyone. But because in a previous life she had been a photographer it had seemed natural, although she now knew that selling cheap imported clothes to bo-hos and second-time-around hippies would have been much more fun.

But while she often inspected cards put up in other shop windows and turned to the jobs page in the local
paper, she couldn’t quite summon up the energy to find anything more challenging. It was to do with the lassitude that had begun to affect her lately; she wasn’t happy with her life, but hadn’t the initiative to do anything much to change it. Perhaps an art appreciation tour in France would give her the necessary prod.

It would have been an overstatement to say that Thea’s ‘life’ and the ‘love of it’ had both deserted her at the same time, but she had hoped the man in question would turn into a partner – or even a husband.

She had been a photojournalist, just making her name, and what had happened was hurtful and humiliating, but the worst part was that her female photographer friends all told her it was her fault.

They had bullied the story out of her three days after her arrival at the door of one of them, late one evening, asking if she could stay the night. After three days of seeing Thea in her pyjamas watching Channel 5, the friend, who wanted her sofa back, called in reinforcements. Ordered to get dressed, she was frogmarched to a local pub where they could straighten her out in peace, accompanied by tequila slammers.

After they’d heard that she and Conrad had broken up (which they’d guessed), they moved on to the reason why. And, to a professional, hard-boiled woman, they condemned her as a naïve amateur.

‘I know,’ she admitted, finishing her slammer. ‘I’ve got so much egg on my face I can hardly see out.’

‘I could do with egg like that,’ said Zelda, a model who had moved round to the other side of the camera. ‘How much did you get as a thank you present?’

Thea repeated the amount, although they all knew perfectly well by now. ‘I feel bad about accepting it, but Anna insisted. She told me that I’d given her much more than money could ever buy and that being generous involved receiving as well as giving. I thought it was rather sweet.’

The women’s collective expression told Thea they found it rather nauseous, actually, but they didn’t comment.

‘So now what? You can upgrade your shoebox to a boot box. When you’ve got the bastard out, that is,’ suggested one.

‘What you should do is get some really fancy equipment, something that will earn you proper money.’

Elizabeth was career-minded and made Thea feel tired at the best of times. ‘What I really want to do,’ she said, preparing to duck from what was about to be thrown at her, ‘is to buy a large house in Cheltenham and fill it with students.’

Chapter Two

They were all too shocked to throw things.

‘Why Cheltenham?’ asked Elizabeth, in case there was something Thea knew about it that she didn’t.

‘Because I don’t know anyone in Cheltenham. I can have a completely new start in life. Do something entirely different. Earn my living without having to hustle for work and lug half a ton of equipment around the place to do it. I’ve done a lot of thinking during the last few days and I’ve made up my mind.’

‘But it’s so stimulating! Not knowing where you’re going to be working each day,’ said Magenta. ‘And the equipment’s getting lighter all the time.’

‘But not fast enough for my back, alas.’

‘And you could always do studio work.’

‘I could,’ Thea agreed, ‘and perhaps I might set up a studio, after a while, but just for now I want to hide away and lick my wounds.’

‘You must have been hurt badly if you want to retire to the provinces.’ Zelda said with a shudder. ‘Have you ever been there?’

Thea nodded. ‘I did some work at the Literature Festival once. There’s a lovely parade of shops, with caryatids. I really fancy it. And yes, I was badly hurt. I don’t think Conrad ever loved me.’

‘What did you say? Did you have a huge row?’

‘No, not really. I just couldn’t make him understand what he’d done wrong. There was no point in rowing. I don’t think you do quarrel with people you don’t care about. He never cared about me and I suddenly stopped caring about him. Put me right off men, though.’

‘Don’t they have men in Cheltenham?’ asked Elizabeth.

‘No, I don’t think so. It’s partly why I chose it.’

Everyone laughed, but they didn’t manage to change her mind throughout the course of the evening and they did agree that she was way too naïve for photojournalism.

‘Well,’ said Magenta, ‘you can always come and stay if you want to come back and rejoin the world.’

‘And you can come and stay with me, if you want to get away from it.’

‘Thank you, darling. It sounds heaven,’ Magenta replied, completely unconvinced.

For a while she enjoyed her change of lifestyle. She worked extremely hard doing up her house, making friends and making it clear to the world that she didn’t want a man, thank you, ever. Now, nearly two years on, her house was decorated and full of lodgers, and the lodgers were driving her mad.

Mostly, she enjoyed the kids. She was easygoing, didn’t really mind hanging people’s washing out, or taking it in if it was raining. And only a real cow could object to ironing something when someone was ‘really, really late’ and desperate for a white blouse, especially if it was ‘for work’.

But she was only thirty-five and was surrogate
mother to people far too old to be her children. Those people, often away from home for the first time, were only too glad to find such a kindly, helpful person to listen to their problems and sew on their buttons in an emergency. If she occasionally nagged them about not leaving their dirty crockery all over the house, they mostly ignored her. At least she didn’t grill them about who they were going out with.

Thea felt she had gone from potentially successful photojournalist to mother of teenagers too quickly. She should have had a life in between. But hindsight is a perfect science and when she had arrived down from London, exhausted and emotionally bruised, ‘a life’ was the last thing she wanted. She had wanted retirement, order and to wake up every morning without having to wonder which town her hotel room was in. She no longer wished to spend evenings fighting off advances from photographers who had drunk their mini-bars dry and wanted to take advantage of the double bed.

She hadn’t intended to give up on men completely – at least, not for ever. She knew perfectly well that while Conrad was a shit, a lot of men were honourable and trustworthy. She had even gone out with a few of them since she’d moved out of London. It was a shame that these cardinal virtues seemed to go hand in hand with dullness and a love of obscure classical music.

Much to Petal’s dismay, she had ended her relationship with one such just recently. Petal had been horrified: ‘But Thea, I know he’s not very exciting, but he’s
someone
and you shouldn’t finish with one boy – I mean, man – before you’ve got another one. Otherwise you’re on your own, manless and dateless! I mean, derr!
How sad are you?’

Thea bit back a smile at Petal’s indignation. ‘I thought I’d play the field, like the women on
Sex and the City
.’ This particular American entertainment was one of Petal’s favourites.

‘Thea! You’re not like those women! You couldn’t screw around like they do!’

Thea was relieved to hear this. While she knew perfectly well that she couldn’t ‘screw around’, the fact that Petal was equally shocked at the idea meant that perhaps Petal couldn’t either. Thea knew that Molly thought she should keep an eye on Petal’s morals, a task Thea felt completely unequal to. ‘Well anyway,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t stand another evening of early music in a freezing cold church.’

‘Tell him you don’t want to go! You don’t have to finish with a bloke because you don’t share the same taste in music. Just bring him round to what you like!’

While Thea was certain that Petal could convert the most dedicated classical music scholar to ‘techno’, or ‘drum’n’bass’, she didn’t feel she shared Petal’s skills in manipulation. Molly, on the other hand, might even be able to teach Petal a thing or two about getting her own way.

Molly’s husband Derek, well-trained and with the prospect of a week without Molly organising his life, had agreed to drive the two women to Gatwick. Molly took an elegant suitcase on wheels and a fitted vanity case as hand luggage. Thea took a battered holdall, borrowed from Jerry, one of her lodgers, and a large, flowery cotton handbag into which she could fit a huge amount. Molly would have made a list, and packed an
outfit for every day and every evening, and numerous pairs of shoes. Thea had stuffed her bag with everything she owned that was navy-blue, so there was a hope of it blending in, if not exactly matching, and a pair of slightly less tatty shoes for evening than the trainers she was now wearing.

Derek and Molly arrived at Thea’s house at eight o’clock in the morning. Molly was in full make-up and looked marvellous. She regarded Thea with her lips pursed. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Trainers.’

‘You said I’d need comfortable shoes,’ Thea reminded her.

‘I know, but I meant – oh, well, never mind. Have you got a light mac and an umbrella?’

‘I’ve got a cagoule but no umbrella,’ said Thea firmly. ‘I don’t get on with them.’ She hadn’t got an El11 either, or personal travel insurance, but she knew if she told Molly this she’d have a fit.

‘Well, it’s up to you. So, where’s your case?’

‘This is my case.’

Molly looked horrified. ‘I wouldn’t be able to go away for a night with only a bag that size.’

Thea shrugged, hoping she hadn’t forgotten anything really vital, like her one pair of tidy trousers.

‘Oh, well. You do know we eat out at restaurants every night?’

‘I’ll be fine.’ Thea closed the front door behind her, wondering if agreeing to go on holiday with Molly hadn’t been a dreadful mistake. Molly was already making her feel harrassed.

‘We won’t put our badges on until we’re in the departure lounge,’ said Molly after Thea had insisted
that Derek be allowed just to drop them off at the entrance, and not park his car and assist two able-bodied women through the check-in process. ‘We don’t want people identifying us too soon. You did get an identifying badge, didn’t you? They promised they’d send one?’