Chances. Freya North

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СКАЧАТЬ Life’s way too short to fall out over a stupid dishwasher.

      He’d called her a fucking control freak once. She’d gone stony cold and had said, I’m doing it for us – it’s the way I keep our home and if you want to make a mockery of that you can fuck off yourself. He’d said, Stop being so bloody melodramatic. Jonty, who had been about eight or nine, had said, What’s melon-traumatic? And she’d said, Mel-o-dramatic, darling, it’s nothing, just a silly word for a silly thing. So gently, so sweetly, so patiently that this had wound up Oliver even more. He’d stropped off to the pub. And later, when guilt had made him leave before closing time and he’d returned and unloaded the dishwasher, he’d had to concede how well she’d restacked it. One beer too many had made him annoyed that she could be right over something so trivial, exasperated that her natural fastidiousness, the high standards she placed on family and home and perfection, necessitated this crazy rigidity to maintain them.

      That night long ago – when was it? – if Jonty had been nine-ish, it must have been a good five years ago. The dishwasher before this one. That night, back then, Oliver had slept in the spare room. And DeeDee had crept in during the small hours. And they’d shuffled closer and closer together, cuddling and kissing and pressing and offering silent apologies. Jonty had gone into their empty bedroom in the morning and wondered whether aliens had abducted his parents.

      DeeDee would die if she saw the state of the house now. Or, rather, she’d die again.

      Today, Oliver can still feel the muddle of conflicting emotions – like washing up with water so hot it feels cold. He likes to justify that, these days, it’s environmentally irresponsible to use a dishwasher. Especially since there’s only him and Jonty. And mostly they eat takeaways direct from the tubs. And the food they cook at other times rarely requires many utensils. Just plates, really, for pizza or cold cuts or beans on toast. They often don’t bother with knives. They use their forks – to spear, to scoop, to sever. They go through an industrial quantity of teaspoons each day.

      ‘Remember how Mum used to always lay the table? Including a spoon for pudding even though she invariably said, Help yourselves to fresh fruit?’

      ‘Yeah,’ says Jonty.

      But his father can’t tell what his son’s eyes are saying behind that lank curtain of dye-dark hair. It is one of those moments 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 СКАЧАТЬ