Nearest Thing to Crazy (6 page)

I didn’t hear anything from Ellie after our trip. It was weird. Really weird. I kept going over what I’d said, trying to work out if I’d offended her in some way. I kept wondering if I had imagined the change in her; perhaps I had been over-sensitive, or just plain unsophisticated and unable to enter into her idea of fun. Maybe I was losing my sense of humour. I told myself that I needed to chill out about it, that I was becoming too set in my country ways, that I couldn’t appreciate her metropolitan edginess. I was genuinely happy at the prospect of having a glamorous new friend. I was confused, because we
had
bonded, hadn’t we, otherwise why would she have chosen to confide in me? And I’d been pretty open with her on the bus about Dan and me. The more I thought about it, the more I thought perhaps I had sounded prissy and priggish and why would she want to spend a day with a bunch of geriatrics? No, I should never have asked her. It had been a stupid thing to do. She’d be more a champagne and oysters in Selfridges kind of girl. She’d been a proverbial fish out of water, an exotic hothouse orchid placed in the centre of a staid old herbaceous border. And then I finally remembered what she’d said about her mother preferring plants to her. Maybe that was it. I cursed myself for being so stupid and insensitive. Of course she would have hated the whole garden tour thing, and the oldies. It must have brought it all painfully back to her.

With all of that on top of the boyfriend problem I felt really worried about her, and so I called her mobile and left a message saying I was sorry about dragging her on the trip, and that I hoped she was all right. But I didn’t hear anything back. So the next day I called her landline and left another message saying, ‘Pop in for coffee if you feel bored . . .’ but again I got no response. A couple of days after that I picked her a bunch of sweet peas and took them round to her house, and although her car was there and the dog barked, she didn’t come to the door. Perhaps she was working and didn’t want to be disturbed. I scribbled a note on a scrap of paper saying:

Hope you,re okay. Call and see me when you feel like it. C.x

I didn’t want to become a pest, and I reasoned she’d come and see me when she was ready, and besides I had things to do, such as getting my stuff ready for the farmers’ market in the local village hall.

I was always up at six on the Saturday market mornings, and I loved the mixture of peace and promise of the unwritten day. I loved the taint of ozone as the veil of mist dissolved, exposing the new morning; the dew-soaked grass washing my rose-printed rubber over-shoes as I paced around the garden clutching my mug of tea. The hens were always waiting for me, clucking their annoyance, impatient to be released. This was my world.
Dan, however, liked to lie in at the weekends. Monday to Friday, he was showered, dressed and out of the door by 6.45, ready to catch the 7.30 train to his office in Birmingham, and so at weekends it seemed only fair that he should rebel. He liked to slob around, not shave, drink his coffee at his leisure and catch up with the newspapers.

This morning, by the time he appeared in the kitchen I’d loaded up the car with most of the produce I intended to sell and was just putting the finishing touches of gingham hats on my raspberry jam.

‘Hi,’ I said.

He grunted, which I knew meant, ‘Good morning, darling.’ He was wearing a pair of worn jeans and an ancient, white linen collar-less shirt which made his head seem small, like a tortoise poking out of its shell. I got chilling mode and scruff-order while the office got the cool Dan. This Dan was the Dan I liked best, my cosy Dan. He shuffled over to the kitchen table and pulled out the chair which scraped painfully across the uneven flagstones, and then dropped heavily into it. It was the large Windsor chair with arms, and if it had a label it would say ‘most important person in house chair’.

‘I can’t find the newspaper.’

‘It’s in the sitting room.’

‘Well I couldn’t see it.’

‘On the coffee table?’

‘It’s not . . .’

‘Do you want me to go and look?’

‘No . . . no . . . but . . . well . . . if you know where it is . . .’

I was back in the kitchen a few seconds later holding the newspaper. ‘It was underneath the table, on the floor.’ I laughed. Dan could never find anything unless it was exactly where he expected it to be.

‘Thanks. No wonder I couldn’t see it.’

‘It wasn’t difficult. Coffee?’ I plonked the cafetière down in front of him, together with the giant breakfast cup he preferred. He spread the
Guardian
out in front of him and rested his chin in his left palm while he rubbed, distractedly, at the back of his neck with his right hand, and fiddled with his hair. It was thick and black, with the merest threads of silver, and he liked to wear it long so that it curled over his collar. He looked young for fifty-three. People were usually surprised to learn he’d passed the five-O point. I’m two years younger, but people generally never voiced surprise that I’d passed mine. Maybe I’d look younger if I had a wife like me.

‘Toast?’ I put a couple of slices in the toaster without waiting for a reply. Then I took out a jar of my home-made marmalade from the cupboard, picked up the butter dish and set them down beside him. With his unbrushed hair and stubbly chin, he looked rather worn and comfortable and eminently loveable. I planted a kiss on the top of his head and ruffled his curls affectionately, and then the microwave pinged, so I fetched the small jug of hot milk and placed it on the table.
‘Thanks, sweetheart,’ he said.

‘Sleep well?’ I asked, as I picked up the toast and passed it to him. But I could guess the answer. He hadn’t slept properly in weeks
.
The last few months had been really tough on Dan, with the agency haemorrhaging accounts, staff redundancies, and executives having to take salary cutbacks; there’d even been talk lately of closing the office completely and shifting what business remained to London. If that happened Dan wasn’t even sure he’d be invited to go too. The strain he was under was enormous. Sometimes I felt like we were walking on eggshells around each other, like I had to tiptoe, being careful not to say the wrong thing, not put my foot in it and make things more stressful for him. I was trying to cut back on the household budget, and I hoped that the tiny income from my gardening business was a help. It was definitely better than nothing.

‘Not bad. You?’

‘Fine. I hope I didn’t wake you when I got up.’

‘No.’

I poured myself a mug of coffee and leaned against the Aga rail.

‘I’m off to the market.’

‘Hmm . . .’

‘I’ve got loads of veg to sell and a couple of dozen eggs.’ I
calculated I might make thirty quid at most, if I was lucky.

‘Hmm . . .’ he repeated. His attention was fixed on the newspaper.

‘I could get some local lamb, if you’d like, for lunch tomorrow.’

He lowered the paper slightly and frowned at me over the top of his glasses. ‘We haven’t got anyone coming, have we?’

‘No, no, it’s just us.’

‘I’d be happy with a pack of sausages, if it’s just for me.’

‘It’s not just for you, so let’s have a nice lunch, and a decent bottle of wine . . . I’ll make you a rhubarb crumble.’ He always said it was his favourite, the way his mum made it, as long as it had hot yellow custard made from Bird’s Custard powder. I loved the way, for all his metropolitan sophistication, he still appreciated the ordinariness of such homely things. You could take the boy out of Manchester, but you couldn’t take Manchester out of the boy. I’m not sure that Dan fully appreciated why I needed to keep performing my homely role. When Laura was back I had a reason for providing a proper Sunday lunch, a reason for feeding and nurturing my family, one of the things I felt good at. But since she’d settled into university life, got a flat of her own and collected a myriad friends around her, she came home less and less. Sometimes I could hear the disappointment in my voice when I’d ask ‘And this weekend, darling . . .?’ and she’d say, ‘No way, Mum . . . too much going on,’ and I’d say ‘Oh, well, never mind, then . . .’

‘The plums are going to be spectacular this year.’ I brought myself back to the present, and to my major solace.

But Dan was distracted once more, focused on the front page of yesterday’s newspaper. ‘Hmm? Whatever, darling. Whatever you’d like, sounds great . . .’

As I returned to the sink to rinse out the coffee grounds from the cafetière, I could see, from the window, the sweet peas that were splashing their vivid purple and red frills along the fence like burlesque showgirls. I loved the view from this window, which was lucky as I seemed to spend a fair bit of time here. I could see the tumbledown picket fence that separated the so-called lawn area from the orchard. Most of the wooden posts were rotted and crumbling, another job on our ever-lengthening ‘to do’ list. But they had a rustic charm, embossed as they were with a silvery tapestry of fungal spores and gossamer, and pitted with crazy labyrinths that provided homes for the ants and the woodlice. The steel wire which once held the posts in place was loose and twisted, but the unruly couch grass filled the gaps and provided a verdant secondary barrier. Part of me longed for it all to be neat and tidy and classically ordered, like Amelia’s, but then there was also a part of me that loved the romantic chaos. I had made mood rooms in the garden to pander to my horticultural schizophrenia. I suppose my need to nurture manifested itself in an obsessive relationship with the garden.

I sometimes wondered if Dan found my passion mildly dull, no doubt bourgeois and middle-aged. Perhaps it wasn’t an ideal image to sit comfortably with that of an uber-cool advertising guru. I was in the cottagey-home-making phase of my life, while he was still going through minimalist monochrome which, luckily for me, he restricted to his professional life. He wouldn’t be seen dead in a Cath Kidston shop, for instance. And I still remember the scene he made when I buried the teapot under a rose-print tea cosy. I used to tease him, tell him that he loved it really; that in another life he’d have been down on his allotment chewing the cud with his digging mates, just like his father would have done. ‘You’re a country bumpkin now, and you can’t get away from it. A three-hundred-year-old cottage, a couple of acres and a compost heap, you can’t pretend you don’t secretly yearn to get some good old dirt under those pristine fingernails . . .’ But I’m not sure that Dan really liked being reminded of his dad’s allotment. I suspected he viewed it as a mark of his success that he could pay someone else to get his dirt under their fingers. Only now that we couldn’t afford to pay anyone to help maybe it was a mark of failure. But I loved the fact that it was all down to me. It gave me a role and a way of feeling useful. Growing things made me feel more anchored; weighted down by the clods of mud caked on my wellington boots, weaving my own roots into the fertile earth. It somehow kept me grounded and safe.

‘Are you okay?’ His voice made me jump.

‘Yes. Why?’

‘You were slurping your coffee, you know, making that slurp and aah sound that you do when you’re thinking. I don’t think you know you’re doing it.’

‘Sorry.’ I emptied the dregs of my coffee down the sink, placed my mug – the one that’s got ‘There’s nothing like a cup of tea in the garden’ written on it – in the dishwasher, and picked up my purse and the car keys.

‘Market,’ I said and grinned, trying to seem cheerful.

He nodded and smiled, lifting his cup as if he was toasting me, and then returned to the paper. He was caught up in distant, more interesting worlds.
I climbed into the car, shut the door, and stuffed the key into the ignition. And then I sighed, loudly and deeply, and said out loud to the car and to myself, for no reason at all, ‘Fuck!’

It was a short drive, relatively; just over two miles to the neighbouring village. The valley spread out before me, bordered in the distance by the looming ridges of the Malvern Hills. The landscape had a majestic, biblical beauty, and I told myself we were so lucky. We
almost
had everything, didn’t we? If only Dan wasn’t so worried about his job all the time, and the lack of money. The holiday had been really good for us, giving us space to recover ourselves, to remind each of us of who we were. Time apart from life, together. I think Dan had enjoyed it as much as I had. I
hoped
he had enjoyed it as much as I had. He’d slept better, laughed more, talked more. By the third day we’d even taken a walk holding hands. Of course it would have been good if it could have been for longer. Five days on Dartmoor wasn’t ideal, but then he had needed to be back in the office, fire-fighting as usual. Short and sweet, as Dan said.