Chances. Freya North
when Oliver considers how a teenager’s hair can hide a child’s eyes. And he is not sure what he’s meant to do about it.
‘You can dry.’
‘There’s only about two plates and a hundred forks, Dad. Let it all drain.’
His son is on his way out of the kitchen, to flick on the TV in front of which he’ll sit with his dad, quietly watching whatever crap might be on until they’re finally tired enough for bed.
Oliver looks at the draining board.
Only two plates. And just forks. It breaks his heart all over again.
‘Cup of tea, Jont?’
Bugger. No clean mugs again. He rinses out a couple with scalding water, using his thumbs to rub away the ring marks from previous brews.
I missed you today, DeeDee.
Is it OK to tell you that there are days now, almost three years on, when I don’t know if I’ve thought about you so I remind myself to? That one day recently I merely mentioned you in passing and didn’t pause after doing so? You were in and out of the conversation in a click. I was chatting to Adrian. Your name simply slid in and out of the conversation like a bird flying past.
Now I’m going to sit beside our son and watch TV till we’re knackered. We don’t put biscuits on a plate any more, DeeDee. We just eat them from the packet. And when Mrs Blackthorne comes – because she still comes – she has a week’s worth of crumbs to deal with. Today, though – today I miss you, darling.
The Tree Houses
Where Vita lived, officially called Mill Lane, was always referred to as the Tree Houses. Not that these were eco-savvy dwellings in lofty boughs, however, but a terrace of small, plain, Victorian two-up, two-downs in red brick. Cherry Tree Cottage, Plum Tree Cottage, Walnut Tree Cottage, Damson, Apple, Hazel, Quince and Pear Tree Cottage. Apple Tree Cottage had a small, old, wizened tree in the front garden that each spring blossomed in a half-hearted manner but rarely followed through with fruit of any quality. The only blossom at Cherry Tree Cottage was garishly painted onto an elaborate name plaque. There were no eponymous trees at Walnut, Quince or Hazel. Damson Cottage had its windows and door painted the colour of the fruit but the garden itself was laid mainly to gravel. Plum Tree Cottage was by far the prettiest with roses around the front door, a lavender-bordered path and a profusion of gay bedding plants through the summer, but no plums. Pear Tree Cottage, Vita’s house, was right at the end.
When she’d been house hunting, she’d felt sorry for the cottage as one might a mangy old dog at a rescue centre.
The exterior was drab and unkempt. Inside, it was dank and forlorn. The place smelt musty, in need of air, but many of the window frames had been painted over so often they no longer opened. Though the whole house needed decorating, it was actually the old wallpaper upstairs which had sold it to Vita. It was faded, but when she looked carefully she noted how it had been pretty once. Sprigs of flowers – mauve in one room, yellow in the other. She’d been told the late owner had been a bachelor who had lived there alone for over fifty years. But she’d stood in the back bedroom quietly considering that the lonely old bachelor must have had a lady friend who had advised on the wallpaper all those years ago. That, for a while, this shabby, stale house had been a home where the rooms had been tended to not just with floral paper. At some stage, love had been in this house.
Her mother, who was insisting on giving Vita her small inheritance early, had said, Darling, isn’t that nice all-mod-cons, ten-year-guarantee new-build apartment overlooking the canal a better investment? But Vita said no. She wasn’t looking for an investment; she was looking for a home.
What had once been Tim’s house, Vita had made into their home over the four years they lived together; softening the hard edges of his statement furniture and proliferation of gadgets with a little bit of Cath Kidston here and there; making something domestic and homely of the space. But it wasn’t hers to start with. When they’d split, Tim had given her an amount of money. Initially, she was resistant to his offer – not from any sense of pride or independence but because it was so brute. It felt as though Tim was quantifying the relationship, paying her off, throwing money at a problem to make her go away.
Vita’s friends – who constituted a tight ring rather than a wide circle – let her stay in their spare rooms and marched her up and down local streets with estate agents’ particulars in her hands. That’s how she came to find herself at the Tree Houses and the down-trodden cottage right at the end of the row. The smallest of the cottages, in that no extensions had been added over the years, nor had the loft been converted, but of all the Tree Houses, Pear Tree Cottage had the biggest tree, and it was indeed a pear, dominating the back garden.
‘I don’t like that tree,’ her mother had said. ‘It looks a bit leering – like some guardian troll of the garden.’
But Vita made light of it.
‘You can make me pear upside-down cake, Mum,’ she had breezed deliberately. Her offer had been accepted, the surveyor had been round, the mortgage granted, and she desperately needed this to work. ‘Or pear and chocolate brownies. Like you used to when I was little.’
Why doesn’t she go for the canal-side flats with the gym in the basement? her friends worried behind her back.
That blimmin’ great tree, the neighbours at the Tree Houses often remarked to each other over the garden fences.
* * *
Vita thinks she really likes the house and now that it is spring, and the blossom is stunning, she thinks she’ll really like the garden too. But she keeps any ambivalence from her friends. She tells herself she doesn’t want them to worry. Nor does she want to catch them giving each other ‘that look’ – which she reads as their frustration that she’s still not quite cock-a-hoop about her new life. Their strategy is to enthuse, to encourage her and tell her that if she can work the wonders on the exterior that she has on the interior, then Pear Tree Cottage will reap dividends for her emotionally in the short term and financially in the long term too.
Her possessions are around her; it’s her linen on the bed, her books on the shelf, her Cath Kidston oilcloth on the kitchen table. Those are her brush and roller marks on the white walls, that’s her careful satinwooding on the skirting and doors that she spent weeks rubbing down. Apart from one wall of the faded wallpaper in the front bedroom upstairs, there’s no longer any hint of the previous occupant. She bought a new seat for the loo, her mother gave her some ready-made curtains and the guy who fitted out the shop put in the Ikea kitchen units as a favour.
Despite all this, despite the black-and-white fact that it’s Vita’s name on the title deeds – the first time she’s owned property – sometimes, it still feels as though she’s squatting, as though she’s in transit, that this can’t be her destination. She’s made the house very nice – but occasionally, she still feels her real home must be elsewhere. Not Tim’s place, not now. Sometimes it simply feels that Pear Tree Cottage can’t really be the place she’s meant to live. She may well have signed the transfer papers, the mortgage, and a million other forms – but when did she sign up to living alone in her mid-thirties?
In the days just before she completed on the property, in the New Year, and just after she moved in, Vita desperately regretted the purchase. It was legal and binding and it meant that nothing could remain up in the air with Tim. He’d paid her off. She’d taken his money and invested it in the foundations of a house that in turn was apparently going to provide the foundation stone on which she’d be building her new life, or so her friends kept saying.
During those early weeks, when she was exhausted and dusty and unnerved, guilt seeped in – on paper, she had her very own place, her friends had bedecked it with hope and good wishes and lovely moving-in gifts, her mother had poured money into it. How could she feel so ambivalent when she had such good fortune? She didn’t want to record an answering machine message in the first person singular. She didn’t want to cook for friends and then clear up on her own once they’d gone. She didn’t want to stay in and watch