Muddy Waters (30 page)

‘Oh, that sort of space,' he sighed, relieved. ‘More room space, more land,' he muttered, repeating for reassurance.

‘Well?' She was waiting, still patient. ‘We could afford it, I've been doing some calculating.'

‘I'm not sure. I quite like coming down the garden to here. It's like actually going out to work, closing the door on home life like the rest of the real grown-up world does. What about you, though, would
you
like to move away somewhere?' There was an element of wondering what was the right reply, he thought. Was he ticking the correct boxes? Stella wasn't looking at him, so it was hard to see what she was thinking. Her gaze was way across the river, miles away past the woods on the opposite bank.

‘I'm not sure,' she said eventually, ‘it's just when I stayed at Abigail's and there was so much room, and everything so fantastically well organized. I mean, if
her
daughter was doing this exhibition, there's no way Abigail would be scrubbing out
her
summerhouse. She's got staff for that sort of thing. It must be bliss. If we were that well organized I could be indoors at my computer right now starting on another book. So could you. This isn't the best allocation of time or talent.'

‘That's nothing to do with how many bedrooms or acres we've got,' Adrian pointed out, perching himself on the edge of the desk where he could keep a close eye on Stella's expressions. ‘It's more to do with not having the nerve to ask Mrs Morris to abandon washing the kitchen floor and come out and do this instead, in case she takes it as an insult and leaves. It's all about staff relations.'

Stella hauled herself out of the chair and picked up the duster again. ‘I suppose so,' she agreed, wiping half an inch of dust from the top of Adrian's filing cabinet. ‘But it's also to do with Abigail. People want to do things for her, she assumes they do, and they all collude. I do it too. I wish I'd said she couldn't come this weekend. I could easily have got Toby to drive down to Sussex with the cat.' She grinned at Adrian suddenly, ‘He could have taken Giuliana. Did you know about those two, by the way?'

‘I think so . . . Yes, of course I did, now I think about it. It's just one of those things that seemed to happen, without anyone telling anyone anything.'

‘He seems to like his women a bit older,' Stella said with a grin as she opened the summerhouse door and stepped out with relief into the dust-free sunlight. She looked back at Adrian who wasn't smiling at all but just standing looking vague and startled as if he couldn't decide whether he'd just been told good news or bad. ‘
Toby
! Your son! Heavens, where is your brain today?' She reminded him softly, ‘I mean, he seemed pretty much attracted to Abigail when she was here and now he's going out with Giuliana . . .'

‘That's completely different,' Adrian suddenly cut in, rather crossly, defensively really, Stella thought. ‘Giuliana isn't twice his age, hardly more than five years older, I'd say. I don't think Toby is the older woman type. No, he's not. No, I'm
sure
he's not.'

‘OK, OK! Don't over-react!' Stella said laughing. ‘Is this some male terror thing that I don't know about?'

Adrian stamped out of the summerhouse and slammed the door shut. He stalked past her and headed back towards the house, calling back over his shoulder. ‘No, it's bloody
not
.' He stopped next to the agapanthus and turned round to face her properly, saying, ‘Look, just because you're a sodding agony aunt, it doesn't mean that this household is full of mad fixations and hidden bits of devious behaviour. This is just ordinary
real life.
Nothing special.' He turned and strode off in through the kitchen door and Stella stood looking at it, wondering if that too would be slammed furiously. God, what have I said now, she thought.

Abigail muttered out loud as she packed. ‘Not too much stuff,' she reminded herself, removing a lemon-coloured silk bra from the bag and flinging it in roughly the direction of the enormous chest of drawers that took up the whole end wall of her dressing-room. ‘Mustn't frighten Stella.' She zipped up the bag, looked at it for a moment as if expecting it to open all by itself, unzipped it again and then walked back to her wardrobe, opened a door and took out another couple of slim, summery Ghost dresses. She folded each of them down to the size of a handkerchief and stuffed them into a corner of the bag, just next to her cream shoes. ‘Can get loads of new clothes,' she murmured, smiling prettily at the mirrored wardrobe door for self-reassurance, ‘when everything's settled.'

The bag wasn't too heavy when she lifted it from the peach-flowered sofa and carried it to the top of the stairs. She put it down and looked back towards the bedroom, automatically expecting Martin to come and offer to carry it down for her. ‘Silly thing,' she admonished herself, ‘no Martin, remember?'

Downstairs in the hallway, the children sat silently on the uncomfortable Regency sofa by the front door and waited patiently with their bags of haphazardly chosen and packed clothes and favourite toys. James swung his feet idly, kicking at one of the sofa legs in the unusual certainty that this time he wouldn't be told off for it. His mother no longer seemed to care about that sort of thing. His gerbil had escaped in the kitchen the day before and instead of going ape, as he'd assumed, terrified, that she would, she'd simply said that it was a good thing it had gone off to fend for itself, one less thing to worry about. Venetia picked at the skin on her forearm and timed how long it would take to make it bleed. ‘I bet she won't even offer me a plaster,' she said to James as a satisfying jewel of blood welled up.

‘No, I don't ‘spect she will,' he agreed, and they both grinned happily at each other, pleased at the new and carelessly anarchic regime in the house.

‘Ready?' Abigail said as she clattered down the stairs with her big squashy bag, stuffed with what she'd selected as life's essentials. ‘Got everything you want? I hope there's not too much.' She looked hard and long at Venetia, biting her lip with uncertainty as if trying to remember if she was actually
hers
. Venetia ignored her, licking at her bleeding arm and savouring the taste of blood.

‘It's all right, Mum,' James told her, doing some expression-interpreting, ‘I helped Ven with her stuff. She's got enough knickers and things.'

‘Oh. Oh, that's good.' Abigail replied vaguely as if she'd already forgotten what they were talking about. She turned to the table and pressed a number of Ansaphone buttons. ‘Don't suppose anyone will call, but who knows, and really who cares . . .' she said, changing her mind and pulling the plug from the wall.

‘She's mumbling away again, she keeps doing that. I can't hear anything she's saying anymore, not really,' Venetia whispered to James, ‘Can you?'

‘No, but don't worry, it's all right. People quite often do talk to themselves,' he reassured her. Mad people do anyway, he remembered his house mother telling him, and bravely he didn't share this information with his sister.

‘Oh and passports . . .' Abigail muttered, opening a drawer in the table and searching through papers. ‘They should be here . . . oh yes. Good, just in case. And lots of credit cards . . .' she stuffed them in her handbag, picked up her Mercedes keys and looked at the children. ‘Right. Shall we go?' she said brightly, ‘Say “good-bye, house”.'

Venetia and James exchanged nervous glances, ‘Good-bye, house,' they chanted obediently. Crossing his fingers for luck, James added in a whisper, ‘See you soon, I hope.'

The island was almost ready for its influx of visitors. Ancient, faded and tattered bunting, long ago handed down from the town's carnival committee, did its brave best to look festive, swathed rather haphazardly from tree to tree along the path all the way from the ferry to the boathouse. Willow returned home briefly to tend to her yowling cats and to hang up a gaily painted sign re-directing old and new clients to her new premises in the boathouse gallery. The sign showed two silhouetted figures, based on the dancing ones on the front of her house, holding hands and decked with garlands of flowers as if they'd been met at a Hawaiian airport by an over-eager welcoming party. She had several moments of doubt and regret as she looked at her gloriously vivid garden, all the nasturtiums and calendulas rioting together with the unchecked dandelions and buttercups and the cornflowers and nigella wantonly self-seeded everywhere in between. She missed all this rampant fecundity, down at the other end of the island. Bernard didn't really go in for gardens; he seemed oblivious to the scruffy patch of parched bare scrubland surrounding the boathouse. It looked as if it was still expecting to have boats hauled out of the water and jacked up for repair. ‘It's in keeping,' he'd simply insisted firmly, when she'd tentatively wondered if the area might be jollied up, ‘refoliaged' as she'd laughingly suggested, mocking council-speak in an attempt to disguise nesting. Wisely, after his reply, she'd abandoned the subject, but only till later, however much later it had to be. Her own garden, at least, was still there to be visited and savoured. And she had, after all, got exactly what she'd always wanted.

‘Love in the Mist,' she murmured, wandering through the grass, tenderly stroking the feathery nigella fronds and hoping ahead towards dank autumn evenings, snuggled into the boathouse flat with Bernard. Perhaps she could also do some subliminal persuading about colour, she thought, admiring her cobalt blue walls and candyfloss-pink framed windows, perhaps he'd understand, eventually, that there was more to life, where wall paint was concerned, than white.

Giuliana painted a long sky blue and cream silk scarf with her name and telephone number on it and, after she'd photographed it to make publicity postcards down at the local Print-Out, hung it across the gateway to show customers what she did and where she was. She, like Willow, also stood at the edge of her garden having doubts and regrets. The pretty, delicate banner fluttered nervously over an untidy brutal heap of abandoned car engines, twisted pieces of car wheel and fourteen dented aluminium dustbins that Enzo had begged from the council tip and then decided not to use. He reminded Giuliana of their Italian grandmother who had hoarded scraps of fabric, kept every' cast-off piece of worn-out clothing, every dour black peasant-widow's dress she'd ever owned, just in case there was ever another war like the one where she and her family had gone ragged and cold through terrified mountain winters. But fabric was foldable, storable, just about possible to keep under some sort of domestic control. Enzo's precious unprecious metal simply piled its ugly self up and rusted and got in the way and made Giuliana depressed. She even hated the way he worked, the constant high-pitched squeal of power-tools, whining like an amplified dentist drill. She didn't want to live like this anymore, she decided as she picked her way across what could have been a bed of roses, or even cabbages and beans. It no longer suited her soul. She thought suddenly of fields of pungent lavender, of long, overripe plum tomatoes, zucchini, peppers, southern groves of olives and felt peculiarly homesick.

Stella rowed slowly round the island early on Friday morning and tried to look at it with a stranger's eye. Charlotte's prayer flags hung festively from the cherry tree in her tiny garden beside the cut and looked, from even quite close up, just like knickers drying in the sun. People will assume her washing line's broken, Stella thought, wishing she had a more appropriately artistic view of things. To her, the various flags and lines of bunting made the island look like a crumpled parcel wrapped by a team of mischievous five-year-olds. Ellen and Fergus MacIver had sneakily, she noticed, set up half a dozen white plastic tables and chairs in their back garden, suspiciously close to their freshly spruced-up barbecue. No one else would have seen that, the garden only being visible from the main-stream side of the river. They're not having a party, Stella thought to herself as she rowed past, or at least not one they've invited anyone on the island to, so they must be planning a secret batch of catering to capture and keep potential buyers. Their French doors stood wide open and Stella could just see, beyond the gently flapping floral curtains, the eau-de-nil walls hung all over with their year's work, scenes of the river from all possible angles, ducks and geese of every type, nesting, roosting, diving, mooching about – everything but flying. Fergus had once declared he didn't like painting a whole wingspan – it left too much space on the blockboard to be filled in with irrelevant reeds and trees. Draped along their front path, rose-arch to door, both sides, guard of honour style was a complete set of carefully ironed nautical flags. The place lacked only a double line of naval cadets, oars crossed. ‘Dressed over-all!' Fergus had declared proudly the evening before as he stood outside his gate, waiting for his display to be admired.

Stella was depressed. Adrian was in a strange and remote mood, jumpy if the phone rang, vague in conversation and perversely touchy. She had tried asking him what was wrong and he'd told her, very brusquely, to save her concern for her job. He, apparently, didn't need it.

‘Is she staying long?' he'd demanded for the third time that morning before Stella went out to row and to think.

‘Abigail?' she'd asked, thinking surely he remembers I only answered this question an hour ago.

‘Yes, of
course
bloody Abigail! Unless you've got more friends in sodding need, coming to leech your everlasting sympathy.'

‘She can stay for as long as she likes,' Stella had hissed back at him, infuriated by his unpredictable temper – it seemed so childish. ‘What exactly
is
all this sulking and stropping about?' she demanded. ‘Surely it's not just because I went away and had a self-indulgent good time without you? You've been acting odd ever since I got back. I can't believe you've turned into that kind of man, not
you
.'