Summer Season (3 page)

Taking a deep breath, and trying to ignore the telltale wobble in her voice, she said, ‘Hi, Richard. This is Kezzie. I’m leaving town. You won’t hear from me again.’

She put the phone down, trembling, tears spilling over her cheeks. But it was done. Kezzie surveyed the mess of the room she was in, and slowly started to rationalize the boxes. There wasn’t any other option. The summer was over, and autumn had begun.

Different sounds. That was the most unusual thing about living in the country, Kezzie decided. It wasn’t dead silent, as she’d always imagined. The previous evening, the birds had been making a right racket in the hedgerow at dusk, and she’d heard bats squeaking in the dark. This morning she’d been woken by a very early morning dawn chorus. It was still relatively light in the mornings, though approaching mid September, and having left London’s gloomy weather, it had cheered her up no end to get up and watch a very pink sunrise give way to a bright and sunny September morning.

It had taken her all day to pack up her stuff in the van she’d hired, drive down to Jo’s house in the pretty village of Heartsease on the Surrey/Sussex border which she’d fallen in love with on previous visits, and unpack it all. Kezzie knew she could have asked Flick and the others to help but she was too proud. She’d told Flick about the split, of course she had, but she still felt sore and embarrassed about the reasons for it. She couldn’t face actually telling anyone, let alone her best friend, what had really happened. And part of her need for escape was a need to re-evaluate every aspect of her life: her drinking and drug taking, and slight feeling of always living on the edge. Until she had met Richard that had been all she’d wanted, and she’d
revelled in shocking him, and teasing him about being so straight-laced. But since their break-up, she’d become uncertain about her lifestyle and wondered whether she was right to always be so frenetic and spontaneous. It used to feel fun. Now she wasn’t sure. And sadly, Flick and her friends were part of all that. Maybe if she was away she could unpick what and who she was, and work out where her life went from here. Maybe.

First things first though. Kezzie realized last night, before she fell into bed, that she’d forgotten to buy milk and teabags. Jo, a caring and thoughtful individual in many ways, hadn’t thought to leave any groceries in the fridge. Mind you, as Jo appeared to have taken off on her voyage of self-discovery with one very small backpack, a few necessities, and had yet to email, perhaps that wasn’t all that surprising.

Kezzie stretched and slowly got out of her aunt’s big, cosy bed. Jo had modelled it on a Bedouin tent and built a frame above it to hang curtains from. Kezzie felt like she was emerging from a cocoon; it was the perfect bed to hide herself away in. She threw on a dressing gown and padded downstairs to the bathroom, which led off from the kitchen. Even on a warm day like today it felt chilly and slightly uninviting, with its flagstone floor and wooden door, which didn’t quite reach the floor. That was going to be draughty in winter. The bathroom was the one room Jo hadn’t got round to modernizing, and the shower was erratic to say the least, spewing out boiling water one second and icy cold the next. Kezzie spent the shortest time possible in there, got dressed quickly and left the cottage. On the way down the little lane she passed a middle-aged woman walking a Border Collie.

‘Would you mind telling me where I could buy some teabags?’ Kezzie asked.

‘Turn right out of the Lane, go down the hill, and there’s a little shop on the corner of Madans Avenue and the High Street. It’s less than five minutes. Or if you have time, walk right to the end of the High Street, and you’ll find a small local supermarket, Macey’s, which has most things you need.’

‘Thanks very much,’ said Kezzie.

‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ said the woman. ‘Eileen Jones. I live across the road.’

‘Oh, hi. Kezzie Andrews,’ said Kezzie. ‘Nice to meet you.’

She set off down to the shop, taking in the wide sweep of the road lined with broad oaks and beeches as it wound its way down to the picturesque little village at the bottom of the hill. It was indeed as Eileen said, only five minutes away. Ali’s Emporium declared the sign above the door, though in truth it was more of a minimart than an emporium. Still, it sold tea and milk, though not the herbal variety.

‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ smiled the man behind the counter, who was presumably Ali. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Yes, I am,’ said Kezzie. ‘Er, nice to meet you.’

She made her way home, shaking her head with amusement. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours and already said hello to more people than she did on her street in London.

After a reviving cup of tea, Kezzie decided to go for a walk up to the Downs. She’d only been here a few times before, and remembered going for a lovely walk with Jo ages ago. She fancied a quick blow away of the cobwebs, before she got down to doing stuff she needed to, like getting on with unpacking, and sorting out her entire life. It was all very well living on her redundancy, but Kezzie knew she’d go mad with boredom if she didn’t find something constructive to do soon. Much as she hated it, at least she still had enough
contacts to get her some freelance web design work, if the gardening didn’t take off straight away.

She turned right out of the house and made her way up the Lane, till she came to a fork in the road. Ahead of her was a farm, and to the left was a path which presumably led back down to the village. She struck off up to the right, figuring that would keep her walking in the right direction. She’d been walking for about five minutes up a tree-lined path, the trees laden with orange and yellow leaves, through which the sun shimmered and shone, when she came across an attractive, high, redbrick wall. Kezzie wondered idly what lay on the other side, and coming to where the wall turned a corner at the main road, she saw there was an old oak tree, with roots that were breaking up the bottom of the wall. It had a bough low enough to tempt her to swing up to see what was hidden behind the wall.

‘Wow.’ Kezzie was stunned. She had assumed it was going to be someone’s back garden, but was taken aback by what she saw. It was a sunken garden, with steps and a metal gate at one end, a square in the middle, surrounded by gravel paths and a rusty old bench near to where she was. At one time it had clearly been well maintained; the ivy, rosemary and box that now straggled over the paths, still resembled some kind of pattern, but they were now so choked with weeds it was hard to make out what it was. She swung herself slowly down. What an amazing place. A proper secret garden. She walked a little further up the hill and followed the wall round a corner, to where she saw a large, derelict-looking redbrick house. Its high windows looked soulless and empty, the paint peeling off them, and the curtains faded and old. The front door was painted a dark green, and had a charming stained-glass pattern at the top, but several of the glass panes were cracked, and the privet bushes and wisteria planted in front of the two bay windows were crowding over the
cracked garden path and obscuring the doorway. The house looked unlived in and neglected, much like the garden.

‘What a shame,’ said Kezzie out loud. ‘Someone should do something about it.’ Someone? Kezzie thought back to her early guerrilla gardening days, when she, Flick and Flick’s boyfriend, Gavin had called themselves the Three Musketeers and taken it upon themselves to restore gardens that were uncared for. She’d been looking for something to do. She might just have found it.

Monday morning, and Joel was running late. It had been over a week since the painful graveside meeting with Claire’s parents. As usual, their kindness to him made him feel more fraudulent then ever, and he’d felt too guilty to take Marion up on her kind offer of babysitting at the weekend. Instead, he’d asked Eileen Jones to do it, and then felt guilty that he was depriving Marion of seeing her grandson. His evening out at the local pub, the Labourer’s Legs, had gone a bit awry. In a moment of madness he’d agreed to go out for a drink with Suzanne Cawston, a cashier at Macey’s, who clearly fancied him, as well as feeling sorry for him. Why he’d said yes he didn’t know, but he found himself sitting in the pub with her, under Lauren’s scornful eyes, as she poured him a pint. Though she had never said anything, Lauren seemed to him to be the only person who disapproved of him dating other women – or was it that looking at her reminded him of Claire?

Joel quickly established he and Suzanne had nothing in common – at twenty-two she was far too young for him – and not wanting to be rude, had drunk far more than was good for him. After that he ended up having an embarrassing fumble in the dark, outside the pub – Suzanne’s comment ‘We can’t go home, my mum and dad are in,’ reminding him how little he should be doing this – before
he made his excuses and fled back home. He ignored her plaintive cry of, ‘We will see each other again won’t we?’ as he made his way up the hill.

Sunday had been spent visiting his mum. He never mentioned these women to Mum. He suspected she guessed something of his private life but she never asked him, unless he brought it up first. He’d taken her and Sam out for lunch in a cosy restaurant in nearby Chiverton, where she lived in a warden-assisted flat, and as usual, she’d cooed over her grandson. It was only towards the end of the meal, she’d tentatively asked, ‘Joel, are you OK? Only you’re very quiet. I know last week must have been so hard for you.’

‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘More than fine. It’s been hard, but we’re getting through it, aren’t we, Sammy?’ And he tickled Sam’s chin, and ignored the hand Mum held out in front of him. He didn’t refer to it again, till he dropped his mum home, gave her a kiss, and told her she worried too much.

But later when he got home, and put Sam to bed, he’d had a whole evening to brood. As he sat alone sipping a whisky, idly flicking through the TV channels in the lounge he’d started decorating just before Claire died, and had still not finished, he knew that his mum was right to worry about him.

The house weighed heavily on him – what had once seemed an exciting lifetime’s project now felt like a burden. Without Claire to share the work with him, without her to give him something to aim for, restoring this old, falling down wreck of a house seemed a pointless exercise. His enthusiasm for restoring it had died with Claire. And as for the secret garden, which had excited him so much when he and Claire had first got here, he hadn’t been in it for months. Even his great great grandfather’s old writing desk (left to him with the house), which he’d started to strip
down and lovingly planned to restore, sat abandoned and unfinished. He felt in limbo. Unable to go back, unable to move on. He was very very far from all right.

Matters didn’t get any better the following morning. Sam wasn’t being cooperative and he’d got porridge all down the top that Joel had just put him in. Joel had ended up shouting, and of course Sam burst into tears, which made him feel terrible. What kind of monstrous dad shouted at their seventeen-month-old? As ever the thought – what would Claire do? – floated in his head. He sighed, got Sam changed, and then himself when he realized that he was smeared with baby porridge. Seeing the time he raced to the car, strapped Sam in, and drove like the clappers down the hill to Lauren’s house.

He got on well with Lauren, and she’d been a fantastic source of strength to him after Claire died. She had been one of the few people he could face being around in those early weeks. She didn’t ask anything of him, or besiege him with questions about how he was doing, but was quietly supportive, and they had grieved for Claire together.

Their childcare arrangement (fortunately already in place before Claire died) was a good one, but he often felt wrongfooted when he was with Lauren. It was one thing to constantly be home late for an uncomplaining wife, quite another to face Lauren’s wrath for the hundredth time, when he’d got stuck working late. He did his best, and for the most part the small charity where he worked accommodated him, but his life was now full of tense compromises between work and home. He was always joking that he was like the wife of the office, always the one rushing home early for the children. And only now was he beginning to realize quite how tough things had been for Claire when she first went back to work.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, as he thrust Sam into Lauren’s
waiting arms. The twins peeped mischievously from behind her, already in their school uniforms. How did she do that? Joel wondered. She had two of them, it wasn’t yet 8 a.m., and they were both spick and span and ready. Even after a year he still felt inadequate when it came to the domestic side of his life.

‘No worries,’ said Lauren lightly, but he knew her well enough to tell she was irritated. Though she generally showed him nothing but sympathy and kindness, Lauren wasn’t above putting him in his place from time to time. She had pointed out on more than one occasion that she wasn’t his slave, and he really needed to take more responsibility for things. She’d never quite said, ‘Just because Claire put up with you, there’s no reason why I should,’ but Joel sometimes felt sure it must be on the tip of her tongue, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should make more effort for Lauren. She was great with Sam, and filled the gap Claire left behind as well as she could. Joel never meant to take her for granted, but life was so overwhelming sometimes he leant on her a bit too heavily. Lauren loved Sam almost as much as he did. He was immensely lucky to have her.

Lauren sighed as she shut the door behind Joel. He could be so frustrating at times, it nearly drove her demented. He appeared to have no concept of time at all, or appreciate that her life didn’t just revolve around him and Sam. For the most part, Lauren felt really sorry for him – it was hard for him having to bring up a child alone, and she was sympathetic. But lately, she had also begun to feel resentful. She’d been left literally holding the babies and had had no choice but to get on with it. Everyone in Heartsease thought that Joel was an amazing dad and he was, but Lauren also knew from things Claire had let slip that he had been quite
unhelpful when Sam was born. So while she was sympathetic to his situation, somehow she couldn’t quite shift her feelings of irritation.

‘It must be difficult for him, I guess,’ Claire would say, to Lauren’s annoyance. Much as Lauren had loved Claire, it drove her mad the way she constantly forgave Joel, when Lauren felt he was being so unsupportive.
Claire
. Lauren felt the loss of her friend keenly. The grief could still come suddenly like a deep punch to the stomach. Claire had put up with Joel’s vagaries because she loved him, Lauren should probably try and do the same.