Puppies Are For Life (12 page)

Harvey nudged the exam notes under the sofa with his foot. ‘How long do you think you’ll be?’

‘I won’t be back until dinner-time, I suppose.’ She turned and began to mince out of the room, her brief skirt a tight band round her upper thighs. ‘Oh, and that bathroom, Harvey … it’s beginning to get on my nerves.’

‘Yes. Yes, I know.’ Harvey couldn’t help but agree with her. It tended to bug him too. Being at the top of the stairs it was forever in full view. Even with the door closed it was hard to ignore what lay behind it. The men had been remarkably quick in installing the new furniture but the walls had been scraped bare of the old tiles and left as ugly plaster.

‘I don’t know why you had to send my nice tiles back,’ Julia grumbled. ‘And as you’ve nothing better to do today you’d better go and choose some more. Or – what was it you said about a mural?’

Harvey’s thoughts raced: perhaps fate, through Julia, was giving him the go-ahead. He was meant to see Susannah Harding again.

‘But it’s not as if we use that bathroom much,’ he
countered by way of testing his theory. ‘We can take as long as we like over it. Even if it is a bit irritating.’

‘No we can’t,’ was her parting shot. ‘Christmas’ll be here before you know it, and so will my mum and dad.’

‘So they will,’ Harvey muttered when she’d gone. That seemed to settle it.

Accustomed to finding the cottage as tidy as when she left it, Susannah’s shock at discovering an unqualified mess was compounded by the fact that Harvey Webb had already arrived. He couldn’t have been there long, she conjectured; he was standing in the middle of the kitchen with Katy gawping up at him. But he couldn’t help but notice …

The floor was littered with toys, an accumulation of dirty dishes and baby bottles huddled round the sink, and a block of cheese that should have been wrapped up and returned to the fridge hours ago was going stale on the draining board next to the defrosting meat. A day’s living had taken place on the pine table, and the arrangement of dried flowers that normally occupied the centre was lost amid the clutter.

Justin – barely noticeable among his surroundings – was heedless of both the stranger’s arrival and the effect he was having on his young aunt. He was sitting under the clothes airer, absorbed in pulling off row upon row of socks, with Gazza crouched close by, watching him.

When he saw Susannah, he let out a squeal and tried to hide his face with his hands. But he couldn’t conceal the stains down the front of the vest he was wearing.

Susannah gazed about her in dumb disbelief – until Harvey coughed politely.

Lifting a quizzical eyebrow at her across the room he looked larger, more real, and more disturbingly attractive than she remembered. Heat surged to her cheeks.

‘Oh,’ she began to blurt out, a hand fluttering to her throat, ‘I thought you wouldn’t be here.’

‘Is that what you were hoping?’ He smiled ruefully down at her. ‘That I wouldn’t bother waiting and would be gone before you got back?’ He helped her slip off her coat.

‘No, no, of course not.’ She took another furtive glance round the room as she took her coat from him and draped it across a chair; was the place really as bad as she’d thought on first opening the door? But it was, it really was.

‘I’m so sorry I wasn’t here first,’ she rushed on, making a helpless gesture to indicate her sorrow for the muddle, but Harvey merely smiled and put a hand on her shoulder. Presumably he had meant to soothe her but it had quite the opposite effect.

‘It’s my fault for being too early,’ he said. ‘One thing I have plenty of these days is time. Of course, if it’s inconvenient …’

‘No, no of course not … it’s not inconvenient at all.’ Lord, what an outrageous lie!

Her vision of this meeting had been so different. To begin with she would have smartened up a little beforehand and would have let him in through the front door, which was hardly ever used. Harvey Webb wasn’t the kind of person to be let in through the side entrance and entertained in the kitchen. Whatever had Katy been thinking of?

Well, then they would have sat over tea and shortbread fingers for a while – all served on the best bone china from the sideboard, of course. And they would have made intelligent conversation – about art, maybe, or music. She was sure they would have similar tastes in music. After that they would have drifted into her studio to study her work and he would have expressed delight at the quality of –

‘Tea!’ she said suddenly aloud. ‘Good heavens, Katy – you’ve met my daughter Katy, I presume? – couldn’t you have offered our guest a cup of tea? Or – or coffee, perhaps, if he prefers?’

Katy closed her mouth for the first time since setting eyes on the visitor and dragged her attention to her mother.

‘There isn’t any milk left,’ she muttered through the side of her mouth. ‘You didn’t order enough.’

‘I –?’ Susannah was gaping now. ‘But you must have heard the milkman come. Or Simon must have done if you didn’t. Surely one of you could –’ She stopped; her voice was beginning to rise, and Harvey Webb hadn’t come to listen to family squabbles. He must already be wishing he hadn’t
come at all. ‘Where is Simon, by the way?’ she asked. ‘And your grandad and – and Ganjan?’

Ganjan was the name Jan had been given since Katy and Simon’s babyhood – it was a compromise of Susannah’s, since Jan wasn’t their grandmother by blood. It had seemed a good idea at the time; right now it sounded plain silly.

‘Simon’s out.’ Katy shrugged. ‘I don’t know where. Ganjan and Grandad have gone out too. They’ve been out all day. They said they had things to do.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Susannah turned to Harvey again. ‘There appears to be no milk …’

‘Black coffee would be fine. Instant,’ he added before further complications could arise, ‘and I don’t take any sugar.’

‘Oh. Good. Well, Katy, would you mind putting the kettle on while I see Mr Webb through to the sitting room? Oh, but you can’t, can you? I forgot …’

‘Sorry,’ Katy mumbled. She lifted her useless hands. ‘And Mum, I’ve made myself an appointment – you know – for these, like we said.’

‘Oh, yes?’ Susannah brightened a little; at least
something
had been accomplished that day. But her face soon fell when she realised what Katy was trying to tell her: she had promised she would go with her to the doctor’s and the appointment was right now.

‘Yes, I was lucky,’ Katy said. ‘It’s the last appointment of the day, five fifty-five this evening.
And you did say you’d come, you know.’

Susannah’s eyes flew to the clock on the wall. She hadn’t dreamed the appointment would be so soon; usually you had to have a premonition of when you would be ill and book up well in advance.

Harvey glanced at the watch on his wrist, and Katy looked at her mother. It was ten past five already.

‘I –’ Susannah began, but Harvey put up both hands to her, his smile as yet undiminished.

‘No problem,’ he said, ‘don’t worry. I can always come another time.’

But Susannah was determined that something would go her way for once. ‘No, I won’t hear of it. We have just about enough time; the surgery isn’t far away. Please, Mr Webb, won’t you come through to the sitting room?’

She started to push open the sitting-room door but stopped and banged it shut again. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, closing her eyes. ‘I’m afraid I can’t take you in there after all.’

One brief glance had informed her that whatever calamity had befallen the kitchen had not been confined to that room; it had spread like leaking water – probably throughout the whole cottage. Simon’s bedclothes were precisely where he’d crawled out of them. The chairs and sofa hadn’t been reassembled, and the curtains looked as though they hadn’t been opened all day.

As if that weren’t enough, Paul hadn’t been able
to get into the room, with Simon sleeping there, in order to perform his usual task of cleaning away ashes and re-laying logs, and it hadn’t occurred to anyone else to do it. In short, the room was a dark, unwelcoming tip, giving out a stale and musty smell.

‘We – we’ll have our coffee in the studio,’ Susannah decided. ‘– That’s – her eyes flickered doubtfully to her ever-patient guest – ‘if you don’t mind having it there?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, still smiling, and he stood back so she could show him the way.

‘I’ve managed to put something together for you,’ she said, clicking on the strip light and indicating the table on which her work was laid. And he would never know how difficult it had been, she thought, watching his face for his initial reaction. She had had precisely thirty-seven and a half minutes to herself the previous day – she had measured it by the kitchen timer. In that time she had drawn a rough cartoon of a design and laid out some samples of tesserae. She had been thrilled with the result, even with those early beginnings, but Harvey was looking puzzled. What was wrong?

Drawing her eyes away from their contemplation of his handsome profile, Susannah followed his gaze. And there, where once her work had been, lay quite another kettle of fish. Some of the tesserae had been rearranged into a matchstick man lying down, while the rest formed a ragged word: B-O-R-I-N-G.

Susannah’s knees turned to water.

‘Oh, no!’ she managed to gasp. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m so very, very –’

‘Sorry?’

Something relaxed inside her; she managed a rueful grin. Thank goodness he was being understanding about it.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Now promise me you’ll stop apologising.’

‘But what on earth can you be thinking? The place looks like the aftermath of a jumble sale and I can’t even offer you milk. And I hope you don’t think that I –’

‘Did that?’ His eyes twinkled at the matchstick man. ‘Of course not. And I can see you’ve got your hands full at the moment. You must be rushed off your feet.’

‘Yes, you could say that.’ She began to regroup the tesserae. ‘My family has run into difficulties. They’ve all come to stay for a while. Look –’ she pulled the stools from under the table – ‘these aren’t very comfortable to sit on, but please, feel free. I’ll soon have this sample looking something like it was intended to be.’ She glanced up at him, suddenly apprehensive. ‘Do you know anything about the techniques for this work? I mean, if you’re an expert in this kind of thing …’

‘Good lord, no. I haven’t an ounce of artistic knowledge in my entire body. I’ve spent all my life in the world of finance.’ He fixed her with his clear grey eyes and pulled a self-deprecating face.
‘Boring, as your daughter might say. I – er – presume she was responsible for this sabotage?’

‘Well, it does have her stamp on it, I must admit. I don’t think it could be my son’s work; that sort of thing would be a little beneath him now he’s a father. The baby’s his, by the way.’ Which gave away the fact that she was a grandmother, but never mind.

‘Mmm.’ Harvey made thoughtful sounds with his lips. ‘And how old is Katy now?’

‘Twenty-one … and a half.’

‘And she expects you to take her to the doctor’s?’ He was clearly incredulous.

‘Yes. Well. I am her mother, you know.’

‘I know.’ He considered the matter for a moment. ‘All the same, I should have thought there was a limit. I mean, when do you stop taking children to the doctor’s? When they’re thirty? Forty? Till you’re no longer around to do it?’

Susannah refrained from answering. It was all too easy for people to criticise when they had no children themselves.

‘You see,’ he went on, ‘what I mean is, if you don’t let them stand on their own two feet, won’t they always rely on you?’

‘Katy’s got problems at the moment,’ she said tersely, ‘problems with her hands. You don’t have any children, do you?’

‘No,’ he said, not looking away quickly enough. Pain had shown in his eyes and she wished she hadn’t asked. ‘We wanted to have some, and the
doctors said there was no reason why we shouldn’t. Somehow it just never happened.’

Mortified, Susannah arranged a section of the smallest tiles. They blended from the deepest of blues to the palest aquamarine. All that animal magnetism, she thought as she worked, and he couldn’t produce a child. Or maybe the problem was with his wife.

‘This is going to be the top of a coffee table,’ she said, changing the subject. ‘When the tesserae are all laid out here I shall apply a special glued tracing paper to the design, dealing with it section by section. If it’s divided up like that it will be easier to handle.’

‘I see.’ Harvey was watching intently.

‘It’s simply a means of lifting the design,’ she explained, sensing his mystification. Why men would never admit that something was beyond them she would never understand. ‘I’ll then carry each section across to my ready-glued table top – when I’ve finished making it – and lay them down in order. That’s why I use tracing paper, you see; I can keep an eye on the design.’

‘Ah-ha.’

Then a board is used to level them. And when it’s all hardened nicely, the paper can be peeled away. After that it’s grouted and finished off.’

‘Simple,’ he declared, ‘if rather finicky. And I can see you’re very good at it. Now what I want to know is whether you could apply this to a wall.’

‘A wall?’ Susannah mentally consulted her
How
to Make Mosaics
book. ‘Well, of course it could, yes, although the technique would be a little different. Depending on the materials used, mosaics can be put anywhere: patios, paths, outside walls; floors, ceilings, windows. There really is no limit.’

‘Good. Then how about my bathroom? I’m having it done up at the moment and something like this would look terrific over the bath.’

Her stomach lurched at his words; he surely wasn’t going to suggest she take on anything that ambitious? But he was. He really was! She was about to get her first order, and she couldn’t wait to see Paul’s face when she told him the news.

‘I wonder whether you could quote me for it?’ he went on, as though it were as simple as ordering carpet. ‘Something – oh, I don’t know – perhaps about four feet or so by three?’

She swallowed hard on her euphoria, trying to keep a level head. What should she charge for labour? And it would take many hours of work – at least … but her dream began to disintegrate while it was still taking shape. She clenched her hands with frustration.

‘Mr Webb,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I’m not sure I have the time for this sort of undertaking …’

In the next room she could hear Justin winding up towards his most irritable period of the day. If Simon didn’t come home soon the baby would have to accompany them to the doctor’s.

‘I work full-time,’ she went on, ‘at C & G
Electronics. I’m in the salaries section.’ Her mind dwelt for a second on the wretched BMDs – the bane of her life – and of the ‘punters’ who were always so swift to condemn on the odd occasion when their pay was wrong. Her thoughts must have shown in her face.