Goodness, Grace and Me Read online

  ‘Mum, who’s Patricia?’ Diana asked gently, taking her other hand.

  For a moment Mum seemed confused, unable to work out the question, let alone the answer. Then she gave a crafty cackle. ‘Ah, you don’t think you’re going to catch me out again, do you? That’s for me to know and you to find out,’ and she tapped the side of her nose with one finger.

  ‘Was Granny Morgan here this morning?’ I asked, feeling rather foolish. ‘Dad seemed to think you were talking to her.’

  Mum gave me such a look of incredulity, I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. ‘Your Granny Morgan, Harriet, has been dead these last four years. Did no one tell you?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘How silly of me. Did you see Patricia when you were on holiday last week?’

  Mum leaned towards me, away from Dad, and said in a confidential whisper, ‘I looked, Harriet, I really did. But she’d gone again. Where do you think they took her?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where do you think?’ I whispered back.

  Looking incredibly sad, Mum shook her head, but said nothing.

  ‘Are you going to come to India’s birthday party tomorrow, Mum?’ I now asked once it was clear that she wasn’t going to expand further on the mysterious Patricia.

  ‘Is that mother-in-law of yours going to be there?’ she asked.

  ‘Sylvia lives with us now, Mum. You know that.’

  ‘Don’t ever let her tell you what to do,’ Mum said sharply. ‘You tell her it’s none of her business.’

  ‘Ok,’ I laughed, surprised. ‘I’ll bear that in mind. So are you coming? You’ve not seen India for a few weeks.’

  ‘We’ll be there, Kenneth, won’t we?’ Mum said, looking at Dad. ‘But, don’t you go telling your Granny Morgan about it. I’m not speaking to her.’

  Once we’d rung the local surgery and made an appointment for Dad and Diana to have a chat with Mum’s doctor the following week, we cleared up the tea things and made our way down the garden path to our respective cars.

  ‘So do you think you’ll have John on to you about the way you spoke to Christine? You were a bit over the top, you know,’ I said as Diana made to unlock her car door.

  ‘Doubt it. I think he probably agrees with me that his wife is a particularly silly woman,’ Diana grinned. ‘He’s far too idle to get off his backside or the golf course with the sole purpose of driving over to me in order to defend his wife’s honour.’

  ‘Well actually, Di, he did just that last week.’ John had sworn me to secrecy over his on-off thing with Amanda, but there was no way I was keeping this from Diana.

  Diana turned, key in hand, and laughed out loud. ‘What? John came over to defend Christine’s honour? From whom?’

  ‘Shh!’ I didn’t want the whole neighbourhood knowing John’s business, and there was already a woman in the next-door garden who seemed more intent on eavesdropping than deadheading her autumn roses. ‘No, nothing to do with Christine. John’s found out about Nick and David Henderson and basically came round to warn Nick off him. With Nick away in Italy, I got the brunt of it.’

  ‘What does John know about David Henderson, apart from his being married to Amanda Goodners?’ Diana asked, puzzled.

  ‘Absolutely nothing, I should think. He was actually trying to make sure Nick had nothing to do with Amanda.’

  Diana frowned in disbelief. ‘What, you mean John had had such a bad time with her he was coming round to warn Nick what a terrible person she is?’

  ‘Well, not quite as altruistic as that. Basically, Di, John is still in love with her and can’t bear the thought she might make a play for Nick.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake. It’s about time John grew up. He hasn’t seen her for years,’ Di snorted in derision.

  I hesitated. ‘That’s where you’re wrong, Di, and that’s why I can believe Amanda would have no qualms about getting Nick, if that’s what she wants. Being married to David hasn’t stopped her from keeping John on a string all these years.’

  ‘Well more fool him,’ Diana retorted angrily, once I’d told her of John’s confession only a week earlier. ‘And don’t you go thinking Nick is of the same ilk as John. Nick is straight as a die – John has had living with Christine all these years to warp him.’

  For once I sprang to my sister-in-law’s defence. ‘Don’t go blaming Christine for this,’ I snapped. ‘Have you forgotten that awful summer when John first met Amanda?’

  How could we forget?

  My brother John had married Caring Christine on the rebound.

  From Amanda Goodners.

  He’d gone into town as usual with his mates one warm, June evening and there, in all her blonde glory, was Little Miss Goodness celebrating, with the same posse of prefects who followed her everywhere, finishing her A levels. John is still a good-looking man, but at the age of fourteen even I could see that my big twenty-year-old brother, with his almost Italian good looks, was quite devastatingly attractive. My mother despaired at the number of heartbroken girls – Christine included – that hung around our doorstep in need of mopping up after being abandoned by John in what can only be described as a totally cavalier manner.

  One idle glance across the heaving, smoke-filled bar and John was a lost cause. With the same beguiling smile that she’d deigned to bestow on my eleven-year-old self, Amanda cast a net at her intended victim and John swam in. For almost four months, until she went off to Oxford, John was her willing slave. They were out almost every night, and I know John spent an absolute fortune taking her out to restaurants in Manchester and Leeds and paying for weekends away in the Dales and the Lake District. His Mini was traded in for a little blue Spitfire and he would roar off, hood down, obsessed with this new woman in his life. At the time, we knew nothing of the identity of the girl – John was far too embarrassed to bring Midhope’s wealthiest mill owner’s only daughter home to our council house – only that by turns he was, depending on Amanda’s treatment of him, either ecstatic or despairing.

  Apparently, and I only learned of this many years later, Amanda openly spoke of my brother as her ‘bit of rough.’ Perhaps she’d been reading ‘Room at the Top’ and got carried away by the sheer novelty of it all, but John was out of his depth, heading for a fall.

  And fall he did.

  Big time.

  Amanda played with him, sucked him dry, and threw him right back where she’d found him, refusing to answer any of his phone calls or letters once she left for university. It didn’t surprise me a bit once I learned who was the cause of John’s despair, but it was Mum’s reaction to the affair that we didn’t understand. Instead of berating John, telling him he’d at last got his come-uppance for all the hearts he’d broken in the past, she spent weeks just listening to him as he raved about Amanda, sat in his room as he paced the floor, and physically held him back every time he threatened to go round to the Goodners’ house or drive down to Oxford. Our whole household was in a state, all of us caught up in the sheer drama and misery of John’s broken heart.

  Christine, waiting patiently in the wings while the whole sorry Amanda drama was played out, bided her time, made her well calculated entrance and emerged triumphant. By Christmas of that year she was pregnant, and by Easter she and John were married.

  ‘You know, I do sometimes forget that Christine can’t have it that easy living with John,’ Diana now said as she finally opened her car door and got in. ‘He really is a sod, isn’t he? I bet he really makes her feel second best. Do you reckon she knows he’s still in love with Amanda?’

  I sighed, still wanting to talk, not really wanting to go home. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me. She’ll put up with it. She knew the score when she married him.’

  ‘Well with any luck she’ll keep a low profile for a while, particularly where poor old Mum is concerned. I mean, can you imagine Mum dressed in rhinestones and a cowboy hat, line dancing with the rest of the inmates?’

  ‘Hardly,’ I grimaced. ‘So why do you think she’s got such a bee in her bonnet
about this Patricia? Dad’s certainly never heard of her.’

  ‘Dunno. Maybe it’s someone she was at school with – I seem to remember her talking about a friend called Pat. Maybe it’s her.’ Diana shrugged her shoulders. ‘Right. I’m off into town to buy birthday presents for your two. Any ideas?’

  ‘Something pink for India? And a packet of condoms for Kit? That should do nicely, thank you very much.’

  ‘Fine. Take it as sorted.’

  ‘I was joking, you know,’ I said nervously.

  ‘Oh, you mean she’s no longer into pink? Something in a different colour then?’

  ‘You know exactly what I mean. I wouldn’t put it past you to buy Kit just that.’

  ‘You can’t be too careful,’ Diana shook her head sagely. ‘Look what John brought into the family at the age of twenty-one by not being prepared. You don’t want to end up with some daughter-in-law who’ll persuade Kit to put you into a home where the highlight of your week will be doing the “Birdie Song” with all the other residents of a Saturday evening, do you?’

  ‘He’s fourteen,’ I said laughing.

  ‘Yes, and we all know what is constantly on fourteen-year-old boys’ minds. And it certainly isn’t Lego!’

  When I arrived home, I couldn’t, for a moment, quite work out what was different about the garden. Still feeling slightly hungover after the excesses of the previous evening, my sole aim was a large mug of Earl Grey and ten minutes on the sofa with the latest edition of 25 Beautiful Homes. I knew, though, I’d only be setting myself up for an afternoon of discontent as I faced the fact that our lovely house was badly in need, not only of decoration, but of major structural repairs. Only this morning Liberty had pointed out a huge damp patch in her bedroom that, like an unchecked tumour, appeared to be growing at an alarming rate. The knowledge that fifty thousand pounds of our money – alright, Sylvia’s money, but money that could have been used for some essential decoration – was now lining David Henderson’s pockets didn’t bear thinking about.

  I stepped back and took a proper look through the window at what had fleetingly caught my eye as I’d reached, automatically, for the kettle.

  This wasn’t just any old potting shed. This was the crème de la crème of potting sheds. It stood where the original, burned out version had once stood, majestically surveying its kingdom, haughty in the knowledge, like a top supermodel, that it had nothing to fear from any inferior being.

  Forgetting my still fragile state, I whooped down the garden to where Nick and Kit were helping a couple of well-tattooed lackeys to place windows and doors.

  ‘Big enough for you?’ Nick grinned, hammering a couple of nails into the shed’s side.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ I breathed. ‘It’s what I’ve always wanted. But how can we afford it?’

  ‘Insurance. I told you they’d agreed to pay up in full. I have to say I’m amazed they’ve been so quick about it. We thought we’d surprise you. They sent the cheque last week, Mum supervised the laying of the flags for its foundations yesterday while you were at work, and Jez and Daz here have been working on it all morning.’

  When I was a little girl, the one thing I’d coveted above all else was the Wendy house belonging to Sharon Gillespie who’d lived three doors down from us. She’d been given it on her seventh birthday and had actually hosted her birthday party in it. I had thought it the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen. It had a little flight of stairs with a carved wooden handrail that led to a minute bedroom above the main downstairs room. Sharon’s mother had sewn curtains in a poppy-decorated fabric and they’d hung jauntily at the diamond-leaded windows on either side of the bright green door. I had longed for my own wooden house just like this one but money was short and, despite writing a myriad of letters to Santa, it soon became obvious that he never received them.

  Standing now, more than thirty years later, in front of my new potting shed, I felt a rush of love for Nick. He’d heard the sad tale of my longing for a little house just like Sharon Gillespie’s Wendy house many times over the years, and had obviously gone out of his way to track down a potting shed that he knew might compensate for my deprived childhood.

  I stepped inside, intoxicated by the smell of new wood and creosote. I was already planning bookshelves and a rug. A couple of easy chairs that had seen better days and were now languishing in the loft would be perfect after I’d tarted them up with some new throws and cushions.

  ‘Don’t forget all the garden stuff has got to fit in,’ Nick warned, reading my mind. ‘I know exactly what you’re thinking, but at the end of the day it is a garden shed.’

  ‘Couldn’t we maybe just partition off part of it in order to create a little den for me?’ I asked hopefully.

  ‘I don’t see why not. I’ve asked Bill, the electrician from Wells Trading, to pop over next week. He’s going to see if he can run a cable from the house so that we can have electricity down here.’

  ‘So I can have a kettle?’

  ‘Yes and a little fridge for your Sauvignon Blanc,’ Nick grinned, my enthusiasm clearly infectious.

  ‘I can invite you down for a drink and then seduce you amongst the plant cuttings,’ I said, desperately hoping for a reaction from Nick that would convince me he was still mine. I had an awful feeling that if Kit, Jez and Daz hadn’t been there I might have whipped off his trousers and had him up against the still wet creosote.

  ‘Yes, well, you’re going to have to get a bit further on with your garden if you’re thinking of taking cuttings. You’ve only spent a couple of afternoons down here so far.’

  ‘That’s because I’m so busy working and bringing up your children single-handed.’ I replied, stung into petulance once more. I really was going to have to stop this sulky attitude. It wasn’t at all becoming.

  I hadn’t realised just how much I’d missed my little haven that was now Sylvia’s flat. Although technically the kids’ playroom, it had been where I’d ended up most days once the children had gone off to school and nursery in the days before I’d had to go back to work. With the French windows flung open onto the garden, I’d spend my time at the computer writing; or I’d take my coffee down there and catch up with the Sunday supplements, or spend a good hour with whatever novel I’d been reading and been unable to put down. I’d spent the winter before Nick’s business collapsed rereading the novels of Thomas Hardy, the occasional, insomniac squirrel chasing across the frosty lawn my only distraction.

  Sometimes, before India was born, I’d get the older children off to school and just sit, basking in the view down the garden and across the fields beyond, watching the blackbirds and robins making tracks in the snow in winter, unable to believe that all this was mine. I’d never spent any length of time alone: I’d shared a bedroom with Diana until she left home just before I went to university. Then there were flatmates and Nick, and then the children. With the kids at school, and a cleaner to crack off the majority of the housework, I relished each day of solitude. Looking back, it was an idyllic time but, like many love affairs, short-lived.

  The new potting shed promised a place that I could call my own, away from the mundane realities of school and housework. The door from the shed opened out onto exactly the same view as the playroom but, from here, you felt to be firmly ensconced in the view rather than looking down upon it. Perfection.

  ‘Thanks, my darling,’ I said, hugging him so tightly that the nails hanging from his mouth nearly shot down his throat. ‘Thank you so much.’

  Chapter 13

  When Nick’s company first began to crash three years or so ago, I would wake in the night and find that he was no longer in bed. Where his body had lain would be quite cold and I’d know, with a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he’d been up for hours, unable to sleep, wandering from room to room and sometimes even out into the garden, desperately worried about what was going to become of us – the mortgage, the school fees, the bills that seemed to be coming in at an alarming rate.

&nb
sp; Once Nick had accepted the inevitable and creditors had been paid, we found that we just managed with my return to teaching and Nick’s new job, and his nocturnal wanderings had eventually ceased as we began to pick up the pieces and get on with our new life.

  Waking at three in the morning, I knew instantly, without having to feel, that Nick’s side of the bed was empty. I sat up immediately, praying that he’d just popped to the loo, but knowing in my heart that he’d been gone for a while.

  ‘Oh dear God, not again,’ I muttered, searching on the floor for my abandoned dressing gown.

  I found him at the kitchen table, hunched over the laptop that had been vital to this new venture. A glass of milk lay abandoned and he was frowning at the screen as his hand raked constantly through his thick blonde hair.

  ‘Nick, do you know what time it is?’ I asked gently, stroking his hair and arresting the fingers that he’d entwined there.

  ‘There’s just something I need to figure out,’ he said. ‘It’s all so new and I need to know that I’m on the right lines with all this.’

  ‘Nick, I know you through and through. You wouldn’t be down here worrying if you thought everything was going ok. Talk to me. Tell me what’s wrong.’

  ‘No, honestly, Hat. It’ll be fine. Things have moved on so much since Pennine Clothing was up and running. Everything is more cut-throat. Everyone is wanting a bite of the cherry and I can’t afford to miss a trick.’ He sighed, rubbing his hand across his face where a hint of black stubble was just beginning to show.

  He looked desperately tired but still managed to exude the allure that had drawn me to him in the first place. It’s not many men that can carry designer stubble – most manage to end up looking like something from ‘Care in the Community’ – but my husband, along with George Michael of course, wears his five o’clock shadow like a true sex god.

  ‘Are you beginning to regret throwing your lot in with David Henderson?’ I asked, holding my breath in fear of an answer I didn’t want to hear. I needed Nick to be confident about what he’d started. He seemed to me to be on the first step of a roller-coaster ride and I didn’t want to hear him saying that he’d made a mistake; that he was suddenly afraid of heights and needed to get off. This was one journey he was going to have to sit tight and get on with.