Hard Tail (14 page)

“Had enough of slumming it down here, have you?”

“Don’t be a prat!” It came out a bit more forcefully than I meant it to, and Jay shot me an astonished look. “No—I’m, well, I’m kind of enjoying it, actually. So you don’t need to worry about hurrying back. Why not leave it until your leg’s healed properly? Take a break. Pun not intended.”

Jay was staring at me like I’d announced my intention to start dressing in rabbit skins and living wild in the forest.

“What?” I asked.

“This isn’t some kind of midlife crisis, is it?”

Not him as well. “I’m twenty-eight, Jay. I’m three years younger than you are!”

“Yeah, but you’ve been living life in the fast lane, haven’t you?”

“The fast lane? I’m an accountant from Mill Hill, for God’s sake!”

“Yeah, but you work in the City. Did work, anyway. And I know you; you never eat properly. Physiologically speaking, you’re probably nearer forty.”

My jaw dropped—and Olivia glided in just in time to see me standing there like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Mum followed in her wake, looking like she was seething over something and would erupt any minute like the apocalypse kicking off.

Olivia gave me a cool smile. “Hello, Tim. Have you given any thought to what I said?”

It was too much. No way was I staying there to be humiliated while Olivia shared the tale of my greying pubes. I squared my shoulders, gathered my dignity—and slunk out of there like a weasel who’d been caught pushing dodgy carrots to little baby bunnies.

By the time I got home, all enthusiasm for going up to Mill Hill that evening had fled. I could live without the rest of my stuff for a little while longer. Actually, to be honest, I could probably live without most of it indefinitely. My clothes were all wrong for down here, Jay had duplicates of most of the decent stuff in my CD collection and as I wasn’t planning to enter any tournaments down here, my sparring mitts and pads wouldn’t be required.

I wondered if Kate had any plans for the household stuff. Most of it had been wedding gifts from elderly relatives; the kitchen stuff in particular had hardly been used. Was it a bit late now to return the stuff to the original givers? Of course, some of the crumblier great-aunts and uncles had died since then… I thought guiltily of Auntie Pat and her matched set of copper-bottomed pans. Maybe I should have put in a bit more effort to learn how to use them?

Stung by Jay’s comments about my diet, I’d popped into Asda on the way back and bought some healthy stuff from their Good For You range, but it was still ready meals. I had a nasty suspicion they still wouldn’t be a patch on cooking stuff from scratch.

After all, millions of people cooked food every day—how hard could it be? Feeling inspired, I grabbed one of Jay’s cookbooks from the kitchen shelf and flicked through until I found a recipe for something I recognised. Lasagna. That was just pasta, and pasta was easy, right? Trying not to be put off by the list of ingredients longer than my small intestine, I scanned the instructions.
Chop onions
… I could do that.
Brown mince
…trickier but manageable. Probably.
Make a roux in the usual way
… I sighed, shut the book with a snap and went off to make dinner in
my
usual way: pierce film; bung in microwave; wait for bell.

Chapter Ten

Wednesday morning was, if possible, even quieter than a week ago. Odd to think I’d been here only a week; I already felt like my old life in London had just been an unusually long and, frankly, uninteresting dream.

I felt a twinge of guilt at dismissing all my years of marriage this way. But it was only a small twinge, and I seemed to recover from it rather quickly.

Matt seemed a bit distracted—or maybe he just hadn’t slept well. Thinking of what he might have been doing instead, I realised from the ache in my jaw I was grinding my teeth. Coffee. I needed coffee. If nothing else, it’d give me something to do with my mouth that wouldn’t involve an expensive trip to the dentist.

We—that is, Jay and Matt—kept a small kettle in the back room, together with a jar of Nescafé (Matt) and some dodgy-smelling teabags (Jay). “Fancy a brew?” I asked Matt, interrupting him as he wrote up a repairs invoice in his messy-yet-legible hand.

“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks. Coffee for me, please,” he added as usual. I wasn’t sure if it was natural diffidence making him doubt I’d remember his beverage of choice, or if he did occasionally come over all masochistic and have some of Jay’s herbal tisane. I wasn’t even sure tisane was a word; I certainly wasn’t going trust it as a drink.

“Okay. Do you mind if I…?” I waved the coffee jar in Matt’s direction. “Sorry—I keep forgetting to bring in a jar of my own.”

“Nah, don’t be daft. You’re welcome to mine,” Matt insisted. He still seemed a little subdued, and I noticed, when I handed him his coffee, that he drank it carefully out of the less swollen side of his mouth.

“Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah!” Matt stared into his mug. “’M fine.”

“I mean, if you wanted to nip down to the chemist’s and get something to put on that, or some painkillers, that’d be fine.”

“It’s okay,” Matt insisted, giving me half a smile.

I hesitated—and then the doorbell jangled and I had to get back out front.

It was probably just as well. It clearly wasn’t a good moment to sound Matt out about where one might go to experiment with being gay—and anything else I might have felt the urge to say to him right now was probably best left unsaid.

Grown men definitely didn’t offer to kiss each other better.

“Right,” I said briskly, striding into the back room on the dot of one before Matt could disappear. “Where are we going for lunch?”

Matt turned to look at me sharply, a sort of “you what?” expression on his face. “Lunch?”

“Yes—you promised me New Forest pub lunches, last Wednesday—don’t tell me you’ve forgotten?” I mentally crossed my fingers and prayed for some selective amnesia about my general git-ishness that day.

“Oh! No—no, right. Um. Well, there’s the Oak out past Lyndhurst—fancy that?”

“Sounds great,” I said heartily. “The Oak it is, then.”

Matt looked a bit wary at the prospect, as well he might, based on my behaviour in the café last week. “Er, are we both going to drive?”

I nodded. “Probably best. We’ll be going in opposite directions afterwards.” Plus, he didn’t want to be worrying about getting stranded if I stormed out in a snit again. “Have you got the postcode of the place for the SatNav?”

“Sorry—don’t use one.”

“Okay—directions?”

Matt looked worried. “Um, well, we start by going to Lyndhurst, but I’m not very good at giving directions—always seem to miss bits out. How about you follow me?”

That was a recipe for disaster if ever I heard one. “Fine,” I said and made a mental note to Google the place on my phone as soon as I got to my car.

Of course, when I got to where I’d parked and tried it, I got the little red triangle telling me there was no service around here. Damn it. I’d just have to hope Matt remembered I was tailing him and didn’t go shooting off at junctions, like a certain brother of mine I could name tended to do.

A horn tooted, and I looked around to see Matt waving at me from the window of his Ford Focus. I waved back, and we set off in our miniature convoy.

We took the A35 out towards Lyndhurst, where we drove down the one-way system past any number of perfectly nice-looking pubs and restaurants (my stomach grumbling loudly in protest) and then out the other side. It soon felt like we were in the forest proper, the roads bordered by woodland. I was so busy admiring the countryside and trying to remember what little I’d ever learned about identifying trees that I nearly missed it when Matt turned off onto an unmarked side road. There were a few houses here, mostly of the large, expensive variety, with big, well-kept gardens. I wondered if Steve’s house was this imposing.

And then we were there. The lane opened out into a Y-shaped junction, and right in the middle was the Oak Inn. It was a solid, squarish place, painted white with black window frames, and looked at least a couple of centuries old. To the left, I could see a farm; to the right, a green where a couple of nut-brown ponies were grazing. It was all very idyllic, peaceful and quintessentially English. There was even an old-fashioned red telephone box outside the pub, although whether it was still functional or just there for decoration I couldn’t have said. Did anyone ever use phone boxes these days in any case?

I parked the BMW next to Matt’s battered old Ford Focus. Matt grinned as I got out. “All we need is a Rolls Royce on your other side and it’ll be just like that Frost Report ‘class’ sketch, only with cars.”

I laughed, half surprised he knew the sketch. Neither of us had been born when it had first been broadcast. It was a classic, though—they don’t make ’em like that anymore. “Does that mean you look up to me?” I asked.

“Yeah, don’t worry—I know my place.”

“And apparently it’s watching old black-and-white comedy sketches on YouTube,” I teased. “Right, are we going to go in and eat before I faint with hunger? You’ve got me too used to proper food at lunchtimes.”

“Yeah? You do realise I’ve been giving you the veggie options, don’t you? Steve reckons that’s what proper food
eats
.”

To be honest, I hadn’t even noticed the lack of meat. “Oh, well—I’ll make up for it by having something carnivorous today. Unless that’s a problem for you?” The last thing I wanted was to put Matt off his food.

“Nah, don’t be daft—like I said, Steve eats meat all the time.”

Okay, that was two mentions of Steve in two sentences. I hoped it wasn’t going to be like that all through the meal or I could see myself rapidly losing my appetite or, in a worst case scenario, my lunch.

The Oak’s interior was in keeping with the outside: bare wooden floors, low beams and wooden furniture. It had a cosy, relaxed feel, but I guessed it really came into its own in winter, when the old wood-burning stove could be lit. We walked up to the hop-festooned bar and ordered our lunch: local sausages with mustard mash and garden peas for me, while Matt just went for a ploughman’s. I supposed he’d be cooking tonight in any case.

Once we’d paid for our food, we took our drinks out into the beer garden. The place was pretty busy, even on a Wednesday lunchtime outside school holidays, but we managed to find a table in the shade of, appropriately enough, an oak tree. Well, I was 90 percent certain it was an oak, anyhow. If I came back in the autumn and found it dropped conkers instead of acorns, I’d have to revise my opinion.

I cast a regretful eye at the couple sitting at the table next to us. They were laughing away, each with a glass of white wine beaded with condensation in the warm air. “Seems like there’s something missing, having a pub lunch and just drinking Diet Coke.”

“You mean like the alcohol?” Matt said, swinging his leg over the wooden bench.

“Not just that. It just seems more relaxed, somehow, having a glass of wine or beer or whatever floats your boat. Like sticking two fingers up at the world and saying
sod it, I have no intention of even trying to achieve anything useful this afternoon, and I’m just fine with that
.”

Matt took a swig of his Coke, and I watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed. “So are you?” he asked.

I blinked. “Am I what?”

“Going to achieve anything constructive this afternoon?”

“Oh—very doubtful, I’d say. I suppose I could go up to London and fetch some more of my stuff—we’re putting the house on the market; it’ll have to be cleared—but I’m out tonight, so it makes the time a bit tight.” I shied away, as I had done several times before, from telling him I did karate. It wasn’t that I thought Matt would think it was weird or just really not me or anything—but ever since I’d got my black belt, it’d felt like bragging to bring up the subject. Like I was showing off about it. I didn’t want him thinking I was that immature. “It’d be a right pain to be stuck in traffic on the M25 and not get back soon enough,” I continued, then swatted away an unusually calorie-conscious wasp that had started taking an interest in my Diet Coke. “Thought it was a bit early for these.”

“Ah, but you’re down south now. We get summer earlier here.”

“Bollocks! North London is hardly the Arctic Circle. And the Solent is
definitely
not the Mediterranean.”

“Yeah, shame, that.” Matt ducked his head over his drink for a moment, then looked up again. “Why’d you move to London—if you don’t mind me asking? I mean, you’re from around here originally, aren’t you?”

I shrugged. “Well, Winchester, so just up the road. London just seemed the place to be—careers-wise, I mean. And it was where Kate wanted to live.” Actually, I couldn’t remember her ever saying that out loud—she’d just more or less assumed we’d go to London when we graduated, and I’d been happy enough to go along with that.

“Do you miss it? I mean, is it all really slow and boring down here?”

I looked around for a moment at the sunny beer garden, bordered with well-established trees and full of happy people, none of whom were dressed in designer suits or tapping away on their Blackberries. The air was rich with cut grass, beer, hot food and a sort of earthy smell I supposed must be the forest itself. A sparrow darted down not three feet from me to pounce on a crumb left by a previous diner. “God, no. This is brilliant.”