Lots of Love (49 page)

Spurs didn’t react, still talking to Pheely, his head bowed in concentration.

Rubbing her forehead with her fingers, Ellen glanced worriedly back across the table. To her surprise, Godspell caught her eye and winked heavy black lashes.

‘Is that a fact?’ Rory was slurring.

‘Yeah – I bet it’s
really
good fun.’

‘Oh, it is.’

‘You know that from personal experience?’ Dilly tilted her head coquettishly.

‘Yeah.’

‘Have you slept with lots of girls?’

‘A few.’

‘I wish I was one of them.’ Dilly reached coolly for her glass, missed it several times then tipped most of its contents down her front as she aimed randomly for her mouth. Unperturbed, she smiled at Rory. ‘I bet you’re really good in bed.’

Ellen winced. When Rory stood up, she half expected him to suggest that Dilly and he pop back to his hay barn for a quickie, but instead he burped loudly and lurched off to the loo. Ellen slid across into his chair and tried to calm Dilly down a bit. ‘You look lovely. That dress really suits you.’

‘Sssh,’ Dilly hissed. ‘I don’t want anyone knowing it’s yours. But thanks.’ She wrinkled her nose in appreciation, young and drunk enough to know that she looked a hell of a lot better in it than Ellen ever had. Then her eyes crossed and uncrossed as she gave Ellen a beady look and whispered, ‘What on earth were you thinking bringing Mum here? It’s the last thing I need.’

‘It was a misunderstanding,’ Ellen hedged.

‘You
followed
us. And look at the old cow now – all over Spurs. I thought she hated him.’

Spurs and Pheely were nose-to-nose at the opposite end of the table, but the conversation hardly looked flirtatious or friendly. They looked closer to having a punch-up. Ellen turned back to Dilly. ‘Maybe,’ she told Dilly gently, ‘they’ve decided that it’s time to forgive and forget.’

‘Hmmph.’ Dilly glared at Godspell. ‘Forgiving people is totally wet.’

But her erstwhile friend didn’t react. Godspell was too busy taking in the action at the end of the table, her dark-painted eyes hooded as she watched Pheely and Spurs exchange bitter whispers, her narrow purple lips pursed.

‘I never forgive,’ Dilly told Ellen, still glowering at Godspell. ‘I just forget. I find forgetting people really easy. What’s your name again? Helen? Eleanor?’

Ellen looked away in despair, caught Godspell’s eye again and was graced with another wink. The little Goth was drinking pints of bitter – which secretly Ellen found quite impressive – and didn’t seem at all bothered by her own silence, despite her exclusion from everything going on around her. Her passive, watchful presence was disquieting.

‘So, you two used to go riding together?’ Ellen asked her brightly, hoping to recapture the fleeting affinity they had shared in her lair, but blowing it by sounding false.

Godspell nodded silently.

Beneath the table, Dilly gave Ellen’s ankle a sharp kick. ‘Godspell gave up,’ she sneered. ‘She lost her nerve.’

Godspell didn’t react. Close to, she looked older and less malevolent, with giveaway laughter lines around the coffee-bean eyes, but she had yet to try out a facial expression. Her only animated feature was one selective winking eyelid, which stayed determinedly unbatted when Ellen tried for a conversation. ‘I heard your band playing the first night I was here – Roadkill, isn’t it?’

Another nod.

‘Sounded great. Have you been together long?’

‘’Bout a year.’

Victory! She was talking at last.

‘And do you write your own material?’ She remembered the note pad, in Godspell’s playpen.

‘Some.’

‘I’d love to be able to write lyrics.’ Ellen lied shammily, then tried eagerly to drag Dilly in. ‘Wouldn’t you, Dilly? I bet you’d be wonderful at it.’

But, apparently furious that she was no longer the centre of attention, Dilly had already started looking around for a distraction. Rory was still in the loo and her mother and Spurs were hissing away like two snakes in a basket. When she overheard Pheely say, ‘You have some nerve thinking you can breeze back in and charm my daughter into thinking—’ she had her cue.

‘Stop dredging up ancient history, Mum. I don’t care what Spurs did. He’s been really cool.’ She widened her eyes at him and let a few curls drop over her face. The lurching sway of her shoulders gave away how sloshed she was.

‘Shut up, Dilly,’ Pheely snapped.

‘Don’t talk to me like that! You weren’t invited here. Spurs asked
me
out.’

Spurs reached for a cigarette, glancing anxiously at Ellen as though to remind himself that she was there, before he addressed himself to Dilly. ‘I asked your mother to join us,’ he reminded her.

‘Only because she followed us,’ Dilly huffed, waving her arms around and knocking her glass over. ‘And because you want to get into Ellen’s knickers.’

‘Dilly!’ Pheely’s green eyes bulged in warning.

‘You were the one who told me he and Ellen had the hots for each other!’ Dilly taunted. ‘Anyway, Ellen says it’s rubbish. She told me that Spurs wasn’t her soulmate, didn’t you?’ She turned to Ellen, who was close to mortified combustion. ‘So you’re wasting your time.’ She smiled naughtily at Spurs. ‘Ellen says
we’d
be perfect for one another. You and I.’

‘I didn’t say that,’ Ellen bleated.

‘How
dare
you set up such a perverted match?’ Pheely stormed at her.

‘Spurs is
not
a pervert,’ Dilly yelped. ‘He’s bloody lovely.’

Lifting her pint of bitter to her purple lips, Godspell let out a strange, disembodied wolf-howl of laughter.

‘And you can shut up!’ Dilly wailed, in the grip of her alcohol and sugar high. ‘You only came along so that you could gloat at me because you think you’re so grown-up and superior. You might be too bloody cool to talk nowadays, but you’re a freak.’

When Rory lurched back from the loo, Dilly was in full swing, laying into her mother again, now chemically hyperbolic to the point of meltdown. ‘You’re just jealous because Spurs and Rory fancy me, and I get to choose between them and you only get wrinkly old has-beens with beer bellies – and I’ll probably be fabulous at sex and you’re hopeless. I know because I read your diary and you wrote that you faked your organis – organ – origam—

‘You fake your
ORIGAMIS
!’ she announced victoriously as Pheely turned purple. ‘And you!’ Dilly wagged her finger at Rory. ‘You probably don’t even remember yours because they’re wasted on fat Sharrie. She’s such a minger, I don’t know how you could bear to do it. I mean, loads of girls must fancy you, even though you’re not that bright . . . Rory . . . Rory?’

Raising his eyebrows in drunken alarm, Rory sauntered straight past the table and out of the door, pitching into the coat hooks before he fell into the re-emerging evening sunshine, muttering to no one in particular that he had to do the evening yard check.

‘Where d’you think you’re
going
?’ Dilly yelled, at his departing back.

‘Getting away from you, I should think,’ Pheely told her, with surprising dignity, given the recent revelations. ‘Few men like to witness children’s temper tantrums.’

‘Piss off, you old cow!’ With a sob, Dilly fled to the loo.

‘Oh dear, I suppose I’d better go after her.’ Pheely grabbed her champagne glass for a swig. ‘She’s been very emotional – exam stress, you know.’ She spoke loudly to appease the pub at large, her voice drenched with maternal patience and understanding. But her hand shook, belying her humiliation and reluctance to face the monstrous, hormonal, drunken, jealous, immature mess that awaited her.

But before she could stand up, Godspell unfolded herself like a waking bat and fluttered silently after Dilly, shooting one of her killer winks over her pointed shoulder.

Pheely sat down gratefully and reached for the bottle. ‘I’ll let her deal with it. Maybe they’ll make friends again.’

‘Like us.’ Spurs steadied her glass, which was rattling under the bottle neck.

‘We were never friends.’ Pheely waited for the froth to subside as she poured, her eyes brimming with tears.

‘I thought we were.’ He was trying to get her mind away from what had just happened, his own petition for peace immaterial. ‘You were like a goddess to me. You bought me my first pint in a pub, taught me to roll a joint, introduced me to Hendrix when I still thought Duran Duran were real musicians. And you helped me finish graffiti-ing Nazi Nigel’s garage wall.’

‘Ssh.’ Pheely shot Ellen a guilty look, aware that she had been caught out. Then, despite herself, she let out a little gurgle of laughter at the memory.

‘I’d like to be friends again,’ Spurs entreated.

The laughter died in Pheely’s throat. ‘I don’t think that’s possible.’

‘Please forgive me.’

‘You should have asked that a long time ago.’

‘I was too fucking scared,’ he said quietly.

‘You aren’t afraid of anything.’ She laughed hollowly.

‘I am now.’ He gazed at Ellen, eyes haunted.

Pheely cleared her throat. ‘What do you think, Ellen?’ She stretched across to top up Ellen’s glass, spilling champagne everywhere.

‘It doesn’t matter what I think.’ Ellen resurfaced from trying to merge with the furnishings.

‘Oh, yes, it does.’ Pheely’s green eyes trapped hers, and her hypnotic voice growled. ‘You’re the reason we’re sitting here, my darling. You keep telling me that Spurs has changed – something you have obviously gleaned from your short horticultural acquaintance. And you’ve certainly been happy to let him set out to seduce my daughter under your garden guardianship.’

‘That’s not fair!’

‘It’s the truth,’ she pointed out bluntly. ‘As Dorothy Parker said, you can lead a horticulture, but you can’t make her think. Why are you digging up old graves like this?’

‘My garden angel,’ Spurs murmured, reaching for his glass. But his eyes remained haunted.

Ellen looked from him to Pheely, feeling cornered and exposed, knowing she was to blame for this if it all blew up.

‘I’m stirring because I can,’ she said truthfully. There was no point in procrastinating. ‘I don’t know about the past or the future because I’m only passing through. That’s why I can burn bridges and boats saying that you two should get on like a house on fire.’

‘Perhaps an unfortunate analogy, given Spurs’ arson record,’ Pheely murmured, but her eyes were brimming even more.

‘Everyone deserves a second chance.’ Ellen resorted to another cliché.

‘If not a second generation,’ Spurs said drily.

‘Quite.’ Pheely let a wary smile dawn over her champagne glass as she studied him. ‘You should leave Dilly alone. You’re not Wordsworthy.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘Okay, so I was never cut out to be a host of daffodils. That doesn’t mean you and I can’t be civil to one another.’

Pheely cast Ellen a thoughtful look, then started to giggle. ‘Maybe the Oddlode outlaw can come in from the cold at last,’ she conceded. ‘But that’s not a reason to set me up as this wretched renegade’s mother-in-law, Ellen. What
were
you thinking of?’

‘I didn’t set anything up,’ Ellen bleated, eyeing Spurs, who shrugged nonchalantly.

Suddenly she, too, found the situation ludicrously funny. ‘That’ll teach me to go gardening with a reformed rake.’

‘Digging up the past can be the best way to lay new paths,’ Spurs said smoothly, looking at Pheely. ‘Does this mean you forgive me?’

‘Only if you leave my daughter alone.’ Her eyes twinkled, the freshly wiped tears replaced with renewed spirit.

‘I’m only interested in riding her horse,’ he declared, tipping his chair back. ‘Not her.’

‘As long as you mean that.’ She glanced towards the door to the ladies’. ‘She needs you like a hole in the head.’

‘I couldn’t agree more.’ Spurs looked at Ellen, who registered the echo and swallowed uncomfortably.

‘Is Rory okay?’ she asked, anxious to move on.

‘Probably passed out in a ditch.’ He didn’t seem remotely concerned, but picked up her cue and played the subject-change game. ‘Sold the cottage yet?’

‘Almost.’

‘I’ve told Ellen she must at least stay for Ely’s party.’ Pheely was watching them contemplatively, still feeling her way back into talking to Spurs like a normal human being.

‘Oh, absolutely,’ he agreed, with a strange edge to his voice too. ‘I certainly wouldn’t miss it for the world.’

‘Surely you’re not going?’ Pheely was amazed.

‘On the contrary, I’m guest of honour,’ he replied, as Godspell came back with a very grey-looking Dilly. ‘Your father’s party is set to be quite remarkable, isn’t it, Witchy?’

Godspell flared her pale nostrils and settled back in her seat to fold up her black layers, indicating for Dilly to sit next to her.

‘Sorry Mum, Ellen – Spurs.’ Dilly spoke very carefully because she was frightened of slurring. She hung her head, unable to look at them. ‘I think I’ve had too many Archers.’

‘Maid Marion felt exactly the same way, darling.’ Pheely raised her glass, eager to bestow forgiveness while she was feeling conciliatory. ‘Let’s all forget about it.’

Dilly managed a wobbly, grateful smile. ‘Should I go and check if Rory’s okay? I think I upset him.’

‘I’ll go.’ Spurs sprang up and edged his way around the table.

Suddenly Ellen felt a warm hand clasp her fingers. ‘I need a word with you.’ Before she could protest, he was spiriting her towards the door. As she stumbled past Godspell, Ellen was almost certain that the little Goth shot her another killer wink.

‘Never double-date with a blonde,’ Pheely told the two girls cheerfully, and reached for the champagne bottle. ‘This always bloody happens. Bubbly? It’s the best thing for sobering you up, Dilly darling. If you’re not going to chat, can you just turn your head to the left a bit, Godspell? I’m still not intimate with your wretched chin.’