In a Country Garden Read online

  For female friends everywhere

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  An Italian Holiday

  One

  ‘Come on, Claudia, tell all. How was the honeymoon? Are the happy couple still speaking?’

  Claudia nervously patted her carefully coloured nut-brown hair (no grey for her, thanks, even the Helen Mirren platinum variety) as she considered the question about her daughter’s recent wedding.

  The fact was, her daughter had very nearly called the whole thing off. And the reason she’d given was the bad example her parents had set in their own marriage.

  It was exceptionally bad timing, Claudia had to admit, that Gaby had discovered her mother in the arms of the sexy choirmaster who ran her weekly singing group on the very same day she came across emails to her father from an old flame. Claudia blamed her moment of madness on giving up the teaching job she’d loved and reluctantly moving to the country to look after her ailing parents. She didn’t know what her husband Don’s excuse was.

  ‘They’re safely home and very happy, apart from the fact they want to build a house and haven’t any money. All the fault of our generation, of course, who’ve pushed up house prices.’

  ‘Of course it is,’ laughed Ella. ‘Everything from exploited Uber drivers to unaffordable one-bedroom flats is the fault of our generation. We’re the selfish baby-boomers.’ She glanced round The Grecian Grove, the scruffy basement wine bar with its badly painted murals of lecherous shepherds chasing bored-looking nymphs, where they met once a month. ‘Is it me or are those nymphs looking older?’

  They all laughed in recognition of the fact that after forty years of friendship they weren’t so young themselves.

  ‘Anyway,’ Claudia announced. ‘Don and I have resolved to start all over again. Embracing country life and each other.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’ Ella raised her glass. ‘So, isn’t anyone going to ask how I am? Actually, I’m feeling pretty good.’ Her two friends, Claudia and Laura, studied her. She did look good. Her elfin looks had aged well. In fact, apart from the stray grey hair, she had the same alert and energetic look she’d always had. ‘The sale went through on the house in double-quick time and I’ve already moved into my new riverside cottage!’

  ‘Bloody hell, Ella, that was quick!’ Claudia marvelled.

  ‘But wasn’t it really hard for you to leave?’ asked Laura, trying not to let herself down and cry. She was facing moving herself, though not from choice. She was in the middle of a bitter divorce and her horrible husband Simon was insisting they sell up now that their decree absolute loomed. She knew that Ella’s beautiful Georgian home had always been her pride and joy, far more to her than just bricks and mortar. Laura couldn’t understand how she could be so matter of fact about losing it. ‘How long did you live there?’

  ‘It doesn’t feel like that long ago, but it was,’ Ella replied. ‘It was right back when I got my first job as a lawyer and Laurence had just started in business. To think, as my daughters continually remind me, the entire house cost less than a studio flat in Dalston does now.’

  They all took a moment to dwell on the madness of the London property market, where millionaires lived in ordinary semis and only Russian oligarchs could afford anything detached.

  ‘It must have been so sad for you to have to leave your memories of Laurence.’ Laura reached out a hand to her friend, but knew that she was really talking about herself. Ella’s husband Laurence had been killed in a train crash five years ago, leaving Ella distraught and devastated.

  Ella shook her head. ‘That’s what I thought. I thought it would break my heart to leave it all behind and move to somewhere tiny. But it was strangely liberating. It feels like a new phase. A good one. The funny thing is, I could hear Laurence telling me that. Come on, old girl, he was saying, time to move on. I’m actually quite excited, and wait – hot news – my old neighbours are giving up their allotment and it looks like I’ll be able to jump the waiting list and get it.’

  Despite her precarious emotional state, Laura had to laugh. ‘Whatever happened to us, eh? Weren’t we going to change the world?’ The laughter lit up her still-pretty features, reminding the others suddenly of the Laura they’d met at eighteen in their first year at college.

  ‘I’m happy to change it through growing greens, thank you very much,’ laughed Ella.

  ‘Not even voting Green?’

  ‘Politics never interested me even then. Claudia was the radical one who threw paving stones in Paris.’

  ‘Only because a gorgeous French boy encouraged me,’ Claudia reminisced. ‘Anyway, it was a different world then. The young knew they could do anything they wanted and no one could stop them.’

  ‘Not where I grew up they didn’t,’ Ella protested. ‘Do you know ninety-nine per cent of people believe the sexual revolution happened, and ninety-eight per cent think it happened to somebody else?’

  They all thought for a moment of the heady days of the Sixties, when they’d been young and carefree and were never, ever going to get old.

  ‘While we’re on the subject of sex, what happened to that nice man you brought to Gaby’s wedding? We liked him, didn’t we, Ella?’

  ‘We did indeed,’ seconded Ella. ‘Nice eyes.’

  ‘And arse,’ Claudia reminisced.

  ‘Calum,’ Laura replied crisply. ‘Really, Claudia. You’re beginning to sound quite repressed. He’s just a friend.’

  ‘The kind of friend who thumps your soon-to-be-ex-husband for not appreciating how wonderful you are,’ teased Claudia before turning back to Ella.

  ‘So you’re getting your own allotment at last? Hold the front page.’ She looked towards the door. ‘Speaking of front pages, where is Sal?’ Sal was the fourth member of their little group, a magazine editor. She was also a lover of leopard-skin onesies, ludicrously high-heeled stilettoes and studded biker jackets despite being over sixty like the rest of them.

  ‘Maybe she’s decided not to come. After all, it’s not long since her operation,’ Laura pointed out. Sal had shocked them all at the wedding by suddenly announcing that she had breast cancer and was about to have a mastectomy. None of them had had the slightest inkling she was even ill.

  ‘I’m so relieved it went okay,’ Claudia announced.

  The last time they’d seen her they’d been gathered round her hospital bed while she’d tried on a variety of outrageous headdresses and teased the doctors that she was going to make being bald fashionable.

  ‘Sal’s a coper,’ insisted Ella.

  ‘Has she forgiven you for being so rude to her at the wedding?’ Laura asked.

  The normally cool, calm and collected Ella had the grace to blush, recalling how she’d got gloriously drunk and accused Sal of being selfish for not telling them about her cancer sooner.

  ‘Oh God, don’t remind me!’ Ella hid her face in genuine remorse. ‘I can’t believe I was such a bitch!’

  Admitting to her illness hadn’t been the only surprise Sal had pulled from under her pink wig that day. She’d also produced a young woman called Lara whom she’d announced, to their startled amazement, as the long-lost daughter she’d given away as a
baby when she’d been an eighteen-year-old au pair in Oslo. ‘Speak of the devil in Prada, here she is!’

  They all stood up in sheer amazement. Sal had pulled many surprises during their long friendship, Lara included, but few to rival this. Sal looked like an entirely new person. Gone was the outrageous pink wig and the fur hat and sunglasses she had used to disguise her hair loss. So was any trace of leopard skin. Instead a tall, elegant woman with very short grey hair and large stylish earrings stood in front of them wearing a discreetly cut silk dress.

  ‘Sal!’ Laura marvelled before she could stop herself. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’

  ‘It’s called cancer chic,’ Sal announced, grinning broadly. ‘A grown-up look to go with my new hair growth. No one told me when it started growing back it would be curly with a touch of Annie Lennox.’ Ignoring the fascinated gaze of the other customers, she began to undo the buttons of her dress. Before any of them realized her intentions she had pulled down her bra and was proudly brandishing a dark and puckered scar which ran across her chest where previously her right breast had been.

  ‘Impressive, eh?’ Sal demanded. ‘Pity there’s no demand these days for ageing Amazon warriors.’

  ‘Sal! Sit down!’ Conventional Laura attempted to shield Sal from the fascinated or horrified gaze of the other customers.

  ‘As if I give a shit!’ insisted Sal. ‘Modesty is the last thing that bothers you when you’ve been poked around like I have. Look what they’ve given me.’ She produced an oval-shaped foam pad from out of her bra and waved it at them. ‘A falsie! Do you remember the old days? When you were terrified a boy would discover your falsie during heavy petting?’

  Her eyes fixed on Laura’s shapely bosoms. ‘No, well, you wouldn’t, Laura.’

  ‘Only Sal could think of heavy petting after a mastectomy,’ giggled Claudia. ‘Go on, do yourself up and tell us the gory details.’

  ‘I was too woozy last time, wasn’t I?’ Sal adjusted her clothing and sat down. ‘First they draw on your chest with a felt-tip pen as if you were a marketing man’s flipchart, then, bingo, off comes your boob. Mine were so flat I thought I’d hardly notice but actually it was agony. Lovely Lara helped me with the exercises. That girl really was sent from heaven.’ She poured herself a large glass of wine.

  Ella and Claudia exchanged glances but neither had the nerve to ask if the doctor had told her it was okay to drink.

  ‘The best thing is no hoovering or ironing, doctor’s orders. Lara’s doing all that for me. The poor girl does get cross with me, though, for not taking it all seriously. Just because I asked the oncologist, “Will I be able to drive, doctor?” and when he said yes I quipped, “That’s amazing. I couldn’t drive before!” I can’t convince her I only laugh because it’s serious.’ She sipped her wine with relish. ‘Lara’s so sweet. She makes me read all the cancer blogs because she thinks they’ll be good for me, make me look on the bright side. And she’s right. They’re brilliant. An absolute hoot. You’d think getting cancer was the best thing that could happen to you!’ She raised her glass. ‘Anyway, who needs breasts? Get them off, I say!’

  The subject of blogs made her turn to Ella. ‘And I hope you haven’t forgotten, O betrayer of confidences, that you agreed to start writing for my magazine?’

  Ella looked as if she’d hoped Sal had forgotten. ‘Do you really think anyone would care what I have to say?’ She glanced round apologetically at her friends. A few months ago she’d started a funny blog drawing on her friends’ experiences of ageing, divorce and adultery that had almost cost her their friendship. Ella, not the techiest of types, had thought she could say whatever she wanted in a blog because no one would ever read it.

  ‘Of course they’d care what you have to say, Ella,’ Sal insisted, ‘because you’re actually very funny.’

  ‘As long as you’re not funny about us any more!’ Laura insisted, still smarting from her sense of betrayal that Ella had revealed the details of her painful divorce.

  ‘So, Laura . . .’ Ella was looking so sheepish that Claudia thought it politic to change the subject. ‘Where are you going to move to?’

  Too late she realized this wasn’t such a good idea. Laura looked stricken.

  ‘I really don’t know. I won’t be able to afford much.’ She tried not to show how devastated she was to leave the home where she’d brought up her children, but it was too much for her. ‘It’s so bloody unfair! I’m the innocent victim and I’m still losing my home, thanks to sodding no-fault divorce!’

  The truth was, after years of marriage and children, Laura was terrified of growing old alone. ‘It’s a pity we couldn’t all live together again,’ she smiled, ‘like we used to at uni.’

  ‘That’d be so much fun.’ Claudia couldn’t help thinking of her parents and how dependent they were becoming. It would be terrific to have her friends around to give her support.

  ‘What, you mean live together like in some kind of dotty commune for oldies?’ Ella demanded. ‘A retirement village like they have in America, with bingo in the afternoon and pool aerobics and golf buggies so you never have to walk?’

  ‘More anti-retirement,’ Claudia mused, getting into the spirit of the idea. ‘A cross between a student flat and a kibbutz. Not just one age group. I couldn’t bear to live just with other old people – even you!’

  ‘But we’re not old!’ protested Laura. ‘We’re only in our sixties.’

  ‘We will be sooner than you think,’ Claudia laughed. ‘Think how quickly the last fifteen years went. In another we’ll be eighty!’

  They contemplated this awful fact in silent horror.

  ‘You’d have to have someone to clean it,’ Ella interrupted. ‘Do you remember how grotty that flat was?’

  ‘Grotty. There’s a word I haven’t heard in a while,’ Claudia grinned. ‘And we’d need kind young carers to wipe our bums and understand Netflix.’

  ‘And to do our hair. I may not stay grey forever. As a matter of fact, I rather fancy a hint of green. The ageing-mermaid look. And we’d definitely need a bar,’ nodded Sal as if this were a foregone conclusion.

  ‘Plus a spa,’ Laura mused dreamily. ‘Hairdressing and pedicures, of course. Maybe even Botox. And someone to remove our facial fur.’

  ‘And great music. The Eagles and the Grateful Dead permanently on loudspeaker,’ Sal laughed. ‘Someone sent me a card with an old bloke in a wheelchair and the carer’s saying, “Come on, Dave. Time for your Van Morrison.”’

  ‘What about men?’ Claudia enquired.

  ‘We can probably order them from a website,’ Sal decided.

  ‘No,’ Claudia giggled. ‘I mean husbands. Don, for example. He’d absolutely loathe it. He always quotes Sartre: Hell is other people.’

  ‘Don’ll be dead by then. Otherwise he can have his own wing.’

  ‘They actually do it in Scandinavia, you know,’ Sal announced impressively. ‘Lara was telling me about it. Eight per cent of Danes live in what they call “intentional communities”.’

  ‘We could have an unintentional community,’ suggested Claudia, ‘full of extremely old hippies who can’t remember their own names. And us, of course.’

  ‘Quite frankly,’ Laura shuddered, ‘and don’t take offence anyone, but I can’t think of anything worse.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Claudia could definitely see the appeal. ‘I think it’s rather a wonderful idea. The best of both worlds. You have your best friends around you to have fun with and to look after each other. I mean, why should we grow old the way people do at the moment? Dribbling in front of the telly in care homes or living alone and never seeing anyone? Why isn’t it more fun? I mean, we’re the baby-boomers, the Me Generation, we were going to do everything differently. Why not growing old?’ She grinned round at her friends, suddenly full of enthusiasm. ‘We could call it the Old Broads’ Retirement Home for Fun and Frolics!’

  ‘And incontinence,’ prompted Sal. ‘And don’t forget our old friend dementia!�
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  Her three friends looked at Sal in varying degrees of horror and amusement.

  ‘Well.’ Sal put down her glass and reached for her bag. ‘That’s one idea that isn’t going to happen. ‘You might as well shoot me first. It’s an absolutely ghastly thought.’

  ‘Apart from the golf buggies,’ Laura amended, as they all got up to depart for their various destinations. ‘I’d adore to have my own golf buggy.’

  ‘Personally,’ Sal replied, ‘I’m waiting for a self-driving car. Then I can prove my mother wrong when she told me I should have taken my test back in 1969.’

  ‘You wait,’ threatened Claudia, waving her glass of wine at them. ‘You’ll all come round to the idea in the end!’

  Two

  Ella opened her curtains with a huge smile already on her face. It was a beautiful morning, with the mist still hanging like grey gauze over the river. In her old house she’d been woken by the rosy-fingered dawn, but here her bedroom faced a different direction and she got the dramatic red magic of sunsets instead. How appropriate!

  She had already been downstairs and made herself a cup of tea, the habit of a lifetime, but lately she’d added a chocolate digestive. Screw all that stuff you were told about one biscuit a day making you put on a stone over a year. At her age you were entitled to do what you wanted. Who wanted to live another thirty years if it meant you couldn’t have whatever took your fancy? No wonder they lived till a hundred and ten in the high plateaus of Tibet, drinking yak’s milk and eating pickled sheep testicles. No thanks! Though she had to admit she hadn’t been feeling quite herself lately, but robust no-nonsense Ella refused to think about that. Laurence used to tease her that she saw all illness – especially the male sort – as a sign of weakness.

  Claudia’s mad proposal came back to her and she had to laugh. She adored her friends but there was no way she wanted to spend the rest of her life with them.

  She turned and surveyed her new bedroom. The old house had been painted with pale colours, mellowed by the patina of time. It had suited the place. The house itself had provided the drama just by virtue of its age and the wood panelling that warmed and surrounded you. Besides, she and Laurence hadn’t agreed about colour. He liked things unobtrusive. The subtle shades had certainly been a perfect backdrop to the beautiful things they had collected over the years, from gilded chandeliers, lovely china, a painted screen and the most fabulous marble table with feet which had graced their hall, always bearing a bunch of flowers, whatever the season, to greet you as you opened the front door. She had put some of it in storage and offered anything to the girls. Her elder daughter Julia had instantly declared almost everything to be out of fashion but Cory, the younger one, had put in a bid for several lovely pictures even though she lived in a tiny studio flat.