Summer at Shell Cottage (15 page)

Olivia was slumped in a deckchair on the lawn outside Shell Cottage, even though the sky was overcast and the sun defeated by thick muffling clouds.
Everyone else was out, and
she had found herself thinking nostalgically about summers gone by, when Freya and Robert were tiny and she and Alec had spent so much time with them down on the beach.
Long golden days, laughing
and playing, all enjoying their perfect family holidays together.
She couldn’t help looking back through a filter of melancholy, wondering if she’d ever laugh like that again.

A breeze rushed around the garden, shaking the branches of the plum tree, bustling through the long grasses as if in a tearing hurry.
The lawn needed mowing, really, and the beds were becoming
crowded by all the weeds that had seized upon Olivia’s apathy as a chance to gatecrash the nicest borders.
They had ‘a man’ in the village who came and maintained the garden
year-round whenever the Tarrants weren’t in the house, but while she was staying Olivia liked to get back on top of things herself and sink her fingers into the rich, crumbly Devon soil
again.

This time she didn’t feel like touching any of it, though.
The sweet peas had gone berserk, a bright wigwam of colour and perfume in her sunniest border, and normally she’d be
cutting bunches every day, filling vases and jugs and jam jars with the pretty papery flowers.
But this year, she –

‘Cooeee!’

A loud female voice jolted her out of her thoughts.
Turning – rather awkwardly, thanks to the deckchair – Olivia saw that a dented silver Mini had been parked at an angle in the
driveway, and then a woman came striding around the side of the house, flip-flops slapping on the ground.

‘Cooeee!
Anyone th—?
Oh!
Hello.’

The woman was in her fifties, at a guess, with a scarlet sleeveless top and a denim skirt.
There was a jiggle of bingo wings going on but her legs were tanned and shapely, her glossy toenails
the same shade as her top.
She was chewing a wad of gum and shifted it to the side of her mouth as she flipped up Jackie O sunglasses and smiled at Olivia.
‘Gloria.
Hello,’ she said.
‘Your new cleaner.’

‘My new – ?
Oh.
Are you?
Since when?’

Olivia hadn’t meant her words to come out sounding quite so unfriendly, but Gloria just laughed – a low, husky laugh that bore testament to an allegiance lasting several decades with
Benson and Hedges at a guess.
‘Since someone put up a note in the post office?’
She waved a postcard between finger and thumb.
‘Right here.
Cleaner wanted for light household
duties .
.
.’

‘Oh,’ Olivia said again, feeling as if she’d been caught off guard.
Freya must have placed the advert, she presumed, although this woman was certainly very quick off the mark.
‘I see.
Well .
.
.
do you have any references?
A CV?’
Her eyes narrowed.
‘By the way, did you actually take the postcard out of the post office window?
Only I think the idea is
that you leave it there for other people to see as well.’

Gloria looked amused at the questions.
She had coral-coloured lipstick, which clashed rather horribly with her henna-red hair, and about twenty coats of black mascara framing soft brown eyes.
‘A CV?
For a cleaning job?’
she asked, a laugh bubbling beneath her words.
‘You don’t need O levels or – whatchamacallem – GCSEs to push a hoover round, darling.
Not round here, you don’t anyway.’
She tapped the card impatiently against her fingers and Olivia caught a waft of cheap floral perfume mingled with Eau de Fags.
‘So .
.
.
?’

Olivia thought about their cleaner back in London – Maria, who was meek and obedient, who tiptoed around the house like a polite shadow.
She had come to them through an agency who promised
rigorous checks on all their staff: visas, criminal records, previous employment history, the works.
None of this turning up and brazenly asking for a job in a person’s garden.

All of a sudden, she felt very old and very tired.
She wasn’t sure she even wanted a cleaner right now, anyway, when she was still so wounded and vulnerable.
‘This is not really the
way I like to do business,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you could telephone to make an appointment, rather than .
.
.’
She waved a hand.
‘Rather than
this
approach.’

Gloria’s arms fell by her sides, the card dangling from her fingers.
‘Ahh.
Okay,’ she said.
Then she rummaged in a grubby white fringed handbag and pulled out a small pink
phone.
‘Right, then, let’s see.’
She peered at the postcard.
‘I can’t make out the number,’ she said apologetically.
‘Where are my reading specs,
then?’

Olivia glared.
This woman was the limit.

Failing to locate the reading glasses, Gloria held the card at arm’s length and squinted.
‘Tiny handwriting,’ she grumbled.
‘Don’t suppose you could just tell me
the number, like, could you?
Do me a favour?’

Olivia gave her a withering look, which went unnoticed.
‘Are you seriously asking me to tell you the number of my phone so that you can then ring it, and have me go up into the house to
answer it?’

Gloria shrugged.
‘Well, that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but I didn’t mean
now
, I meant—’

‘Well, I’m here now, aren’t I?’
Another shrug.
‘We could
pretend
we were on the phone, if you want?
If that makes any difference.
I dunno, I just thought
this might be the quickest way around it, like, but if you want me to sit in my car for ten minutes and
then
phone, I suppose I could .
.
.’
She left the sentence hanging as if to
say,
I’m not the crazy one here, love.

Goodness, but she was exasperating.
Olivia wished that Freya or Robert would materialize to deal with this Gloria, because she, for one, did not have the stamina today.
She was just about to
plead a headache and ask her to come back and talk to Freya later on, when Gloria spoke again.

‘Hey, I was sorry to hear about your fella, by the way.’
To give her credit, she had stopped smirking now and did look sincere at least.
‘I liked his books.
Me and my husband
took it in turns to buy his new ones at Christmas; proper good, every time.’

The unexpected kindness took the wind right out of Olivia’s sails.
‘Thank you,’ she managed to say tightly after a small pause.

‘My husband died this year too, back in February.
Came off his motorbike and cracked his head open, the dozy bugger.’
Gloria’s face twisted in a helpless spasm.
‘So I do
understand what you’re going through.
I’m right there in the same mess myself.’

‘Th-thank you,’ Olivia said again.
There was another pause and then, because she was a good-mannered woman, even under extreme duress, she added, ‘Sorry to hear about your
husband.’

‘It’s shit, isn’t it?’
Gloria burst out.
‘Proper shit.
I don’t know how I’ve got through the last few months, I really don’t.
But now, look at the
pair of us.
You need your house cleaning and I need some cash.
So you could say we make a good couple.
Destined for each other, like.’

Olivia snorted.
Those weren’t the exact phrases she’d had on the tip of her tongue.
‘The thing is—’

Gloria was already talking over her.
‘It’s just .
.
.
well, you could be waiting a while, that’s all.
If you’re going to be interviewing and wanting references and all
that sh – kind of stuff.
And I’m not being rude but I had a peep through the front windows and .
.
.’
She shrugged.
‘Well.
Not to put too fine a point on it, darl, but the
place looks a bit of a tip to me.
No offence, like.
I’m not being rude.
But—’

It was like trying to argue with a politician – a politician with only one objective in mind: win the conversation.
Get what I want.
Have it my way.
‘Oh, all
right
,’
said Olivia in defeat, putting up a hand to stem this torrent of words.
Seeing as Gloria had pinched the postcard out of the post office window, they wouldn’t get anyone else coming along
until they’d sorted out a replacement advert anyway, and she wasn’t sure she had the motivation to do such a thing herself.
Besides, the woman was right, the house was a mess.
What harm
could it do to let her blast around the downstairs rooms with a hoover and J-cloth at least, and scrub some of the stickiness out of the kitchen?
Freya had given it a half-hearted once-over the
other day, but the whole house could do with a proper clean, after Olivia’s negligence.
She took a deep breath, hoping she wasn’t on the verge of making a terrible mistake.
‘Maybe
I could give you a trial run.
When are you free?’

Gloria beamed.
She had a wide, Julia Roberts-esque mouth and good teeth; it was a nice smile despite the awful lipstick.
‘Now?’

A moment passed where a series of horror-story images flashed through Olivia’s mind.
Gloria ransacking the place while holding Olivia hostage.
Gloria casing the joint and returning after
darkness with a gang of men and snarling dogs.
Gloria with a hand around Olivia’s throat, puffing smoke into her face .
.
.

Hmm.
Olivia glanced at Gloria’s yellowed fingers and realized that there was the clincher.
She could murder a cigarette right now.
‘Why not?’
she said, getting to her feet.
Her
bones felt leaden as she stood up, and the air seemed to press down on her, thick and humid like a heavy shawl.
‘I’ll show you what needs doing.
But first .
.
.’
She hesitated.
‘I don’t suppose you could crash me a ciggy, while you’re here, could you?’

Gloria beamed again.
‘Of course, darling!
No problemo.
I’ll join you.’

Over cigarettes on the patio – ‘I daren’t smoke inside, I suspect my daughter’s already on the verge of checking me into rehab as it is,’ Olivia
confessed with a grimace – the two women chatted about this and that, and Olivia took the opportunity to find out a bit more about her potential new employee.

Gloria was fifty-eight, like Olivia, and she and her husband Bill had run the local pet shop for twenty-seven years, she said.
But in the space of six months, a huge pet-shop chain had opened in
an out-of-town mall, and then the big garden centre out on the ring road began selling fish tanks and hamster cages, and business had completely divebombed.
When Bill died, soon afterwards, Gloria
was faced with mounting debts and a business in its death throes and she had bailed out while she could.
Since then, she’d taken on cleaning jobs where possible, shifts of bar work in The
Dray and Horses, and she’d even done a bit of modelling at the local amateur art club.

Olivia raised a shocked eyebrow.
‘You mean .
.
.
nude
modelling?’
It was the last thing – the very last thing – she could imagine her other cleaner, shy, timid
Maria, doing.
It was the last thing she could imagine herself doing either, for that matter.

Gloria winked and puffed out a smoke ring that quivered between them for a few moments before it dispersed.
‘Hell, yeah.
Pays brilliantly,’ she said.
‘And it’s actually
kind of liberating to get your kit off in front of a room full of strangers.’
She took a last drag from her cigarette then dropped it on the paving slab and ground it out with her foot.
‘You should come along sometime if you’re at a loose end.
Tuesday mornings.
It’ll make you feel like a goddess.’

Olivia stubbed out her cigarette in the small tin ashtray that Freya had pointedly left on the patio table.
She didn’t like the way the conversation was going all of a sudden; the balance
seemed to have shifted.
Was Gloria laughing at her?
‘I don’t think so,’ she said briskly.
Time to set down a few boundaries.
Rule number one: cleaners should not go around
inviting their bosses to strip off and model in the nude with them, however friendly a conversation they might previously have had.
They just shouldn’t.
‘Right.
Let’s get on with
it, then.
If you could make a start on the kitchen – floor, worktops, cooker, everything – then I’ll put the coffee machine on.
How do you like yours?’