Old Dogs, New Tricks

‘But I’ve been doing most of the work for months!’ Oh, how exasperating he could be at times! He stifled her with his over-protectiveness. It was like being a child not allowed to grow up. A prisoner driven mad for escape. ‘Phil, I really don’t need molly-coddling like this. That was fifteen years ago. Just because I cracked up a little then, doesn’t mean I can’t handle a bit of stress. A certain amount of stress is essential in life. It keeps you on your toes and functioning. I know I can manage those shops.’

‘Well, I’m afraid you won’t get the chance to prove what you can do, one way or the other.’ He drew the curtains across the window. ‘And I won’t be doing it either.’

‘Phil!’ She growled his name through clenched teeth. Her dream was slipping from her grasp. The shops had been her escape route – in fact, her only means of escape. Because what could possibly replace them? No one else on this earth would put her in charge of three shops. No one else would put her in charge of anything. She had no formal qualifications. No CV. She would never get past the first post.

Clutching at straws, she found herself willing to compromise where only hours before the idea had been abhorrent.

‘Look,’ she said putting one finger and a thumb to her temples where a muzziness signalled the start of a headache, ‘O?, so you haven’t been made redundant, but couldn’t you resign from Spittal’s instead of going down to Bristol? Then you’d be free to take over the shops and we could both run them together.’

‘Oh really?’ he scoffed. ‘And live on what, may I ask? They don’t bring in that much profit, you know – and there’d be four of us to support. Anyway, even if it were possible I could never take over from Dad. He simply wouldn’t let me, and you know it.’

‘But of course he –’

‘He wouldn’t. Not in reality. Oh, he’d willingly hand over the reins, I know that, but he’d still be there, breathing down my neck, telling me what to do. He would, you know he would.’ Arms gesticulating he paced the room. ‘You’ve no doubt experienced it for yourself. He can’t keep out of it, can be? Can’t trust anyone but himself. As soon as he’s set you to carry out a task, he starts forcing himself in on the act.’

Marjorie’s silence, her compressed lips, told him he was right. Working for Eric could be frustrating.

‘You see, I do know what goes on in Dad’s little empire; he made me work there in my holidays, remember? Even as a young lad I could see that staff turned over at an astonishing rate, and that managers came and went. I don’t suppose anything’s changed. Many’s a time when you would have had to bite your tongue in front of him, Marjie, and try to smooth people out behind his back. Tell me if I’m wrong.’

But Marjorie couldn’t do that. ‘What you say is true,’ she agreed, ‘but I’m sure he’d stay out of the way now. He isn’t a young man any more and he’ll need to take things easy.’

Phil came back to the bed and fished under his side of the duvet for pyjamas. Finding none there he went to a drawer for a clean pair and began to undress.

It isn’t fair, Marjorie thought morosely as his lean legs were stripped bare. Phil could eat what he liked – and he liked all the ‘wrong’ things – and still not put on any weight. He had much the same slim figure that he’d had the day they married, which was more than could be said about her. She slipped down on the pillows pulling the duvet up to her chin.

‘No,’ Phil went on, ferreting in the wardrobe for a trouser-hanger, ‘what Dad should do is sell up and get out. Think about it intelligently: the shops are all too small and they’re in the wrong places. “Little shops round the corner” are a thing of the past. People would rather drive out to a superstore any day. Get more choice and pay less.’

Marjorie sank further down the bed. What he was saying had a ring of truth. Each year was proving more of a struggle than the last, but only because Eric refused to get up to date. She felt sure there was room for a lot of improvement. But all Phil seemed to want to do was to go on banging nails into the coffin containing her dreams.

‘And when he’s sold them off – though who would want them now heaven only knows – he should invest whatever they bring in. If he’s careful he should have enough money to buy professional care for the two of them for the rest of their lives.’

‘So that you can wash your hands of them?’ Marjorie was open-mouthed. To think that Phil could be so mean. Was it right that his parents should have to pay for care? Shouldn’t it be provided freely by their children? But of course, the world wasn’t like that any more, although she had thought Phil, being of the old school, would have seen things differently. Increasingly she had the feeling she no longer knew the man she had married.

She watched him screw up his underwear and toss it on to the heap in the bottom of the only built-in cupboard that the room possessed. In spite of his words she thought she could see him struggling with his conscience.

‘I have no intention of washing my hands of anyone,’ he said. ‘I’ll help them to find someone reliable to manage the shops so that Dad can retire if he really wants to, though I don’t believe for a minute that he will, and we’ll get someone to help Mum as well. OK? I shall always be around for them when there’s a crisis.’ He paused before shutting the cupboard door. ‘Bristol isn’t so very far away, you know.’

5

With the entire contents of their home somewhere between London and Bristol, Philip and Marjorie checked into a hotel for the night. Falling into what purported to be a four-poster bed – well, it did have four rough posts meagrely swathed in cheap curtaining – they groaned with exhaustion.

‘Soon be there,’ Philip said in the awful hearty tone he’d adopted ever since Marjorie’s last bastions of defence had crumbled.

She had resisted this disruption in their lives with all her strength. Childishly she had at first adopted the attitude that if she ignored Phil’s plans they would go away, but of course they hadn’t. He’d continued to be as determined to move as she’d been to stay put. The arguments they’d had over the weeks! None of which had done any good.

She had had to leave everything in the end, because what alternative did she have? Break up the marriage and leave Phil – or bow to his judgement as per usual? But of course leaving him was unthinkable. She had loved him since the day she’d set eyes on him and still did.

She thought she’d lost him once, years ago when he’d gone off to university. Surely that was the end of their close, but entirely innocent and platonic friendship, she’d thought. Never would he return to her, still unattached, and see her in a romantic light. And yet the unlikely had happened. He’d sown his oats and come back to her.

What had been the attraction of ‘the girl next door’? she had asked herself at times in later years. But she hadn’t enquired too closely: she’d merely been grateful for the fact.

No, she could never leave her husband. But he did deserve to suffer a little for dragging her away from all that she knew and loved, so at the moment he was firmly consigned to the dog-house.

‘Just think,’ he went on remorselessly, ‘tomorrow night we’ll be sleeping in our brand new home.’

‘In our dreadfully saggy old bed,’ she grunted. Shame had seized them when the removal men, in full view of the neighbours, had carried out the cumbersome double divan. Neither of them had realised quite how decrepit it had become.

Perhaps Phil saw his wife in much the same way, Marjorie thought, adjusting her pillows for the night; she had been around so long he simply didn’t notice her any more. Because if he looked at her with just one ounce of interest wouldn’t he realise how unhappy he’d made her?

She’d tried to tell him, tried to explain her feelings and her needs, but when she’d come out with words like ‘escape’ and ‘challenge’ it had sounded to him as though a move to new pastures was exactly what she needed. He’d even admitted somewhat sheepishly that he’d been feeling a need for change himself. He’d not been able to see – or hadn’t wanted to see – that her ideas were not at all the same as his.

New pastures! Tears collected under her eyelids as she thought about her lovely old garden and Phil’s apparent indifference to it. Maybe it had been stupid of her, but she had mown and clipped and tidied, right up to the last moment. Philip, seemingly so easily able to shed all his old attachments, had been irritated to find her dead-heading the last of the tulips while the men were carting the dustbin away.

‘There won’t be anyone here to appreciate your efforts,’ he told her, gazing around for the last time at the immaculate scene. He might have been surveying crop-damage, judging by the look on his face. ‘Anyway, the relocation company will be taking care of all this. It’s their responsibility now.’ He glanced up at the guttering as though, in accordance with sod’s law, it might come clattering down at this crucial stage of the transaction and he would yet have to see to its repair. He really couldn’t wait to turn his back on it all, it seemed.

Running a hand for the last time over the perfect globe of her favourite Chamaecyparis obtusa ‘Nana’, Marjorie had doubted that anyone would lavish as much loving care on her prized specimens as she had. Over the years she had painstakingly cultivated every inch of the hundred-foot plot to create a miniature paradise. It was her proudest achievement – after the girls, of course.

When she and Phil had first moved in, the garden had contained only a rectangle of grass, one cherry tree, a grave-like island bed and a straight concrete path. It seemed inconceivable that a 1930s semi could have remained so unaltered throughout its previous ownership, but there it was. And it stayed that way for the first two years of their marriage. Philip had mown the lawn, when pressed, and Marjorie had weeded the bed.

Her passion for gardening had not begun until Becky’s first summer. Having rocked the baby to silence in her pram, she would stretch herself out under the cherry tree beside her and try to grab a little sleep. But while her body craved rest from the hard work that one small child seemed to generate, her mind could not ignore her surroundings. She found herself longing to conceal the bare wood fence, to grow something against the house, to erect a trellis against a too-keen-to-gossip neighbour.

Soon she found herself doing more than pulling weeds. She scattered seeds, cadged cuttings, scraped money from the housekeeping for minuscule shrubs. And Philip was nagged into doing a bit more than just the mowing; he put up trellises, screened the dustbin, and relaid the path with stepping-stones. In time the garden took shape. Now largely Marjorie’s preserve since Phil had been far too busy in recent years, it was the envy of all who saw it … or had been.

A tear trickled towards her ear, threatening to dampen the hotel’s lumpy pillow, and as she reached up to wipe it away Phil went on in his bright, bracing tone: ‘It’s going to be fun, you know.’

Lying snugly within the confines of the four-poster he set out his plans for their future life. There would be new places to investigate, new friends to be made, new neighbours to meet. A number of the neighbours would be Spittal’s employees. ‘Brightwells is so handy for them, you see.’

None of them was known to Marjorie though. The only Spittal’s people she knew were the redundant ones being left behind in London. And new friends? How would they make new friends? It was something they hadn’t had to do for a long time, and those they’d had up until now had been acquired with no conscious effort that she could recall. They’d just happened.

But she must stop this destructive line of thought; it wouldn’t get her anywhere. Looking backwards was pointless. She must start addressing the future. Be positive. Take life by the scruff of the neck and make it work for her. Yes, that’s what she would do: find herself a new role and build a whole new life. Somehow she must be able to claw her way back to the state of happiness and hope that had been hers until so recently. Couldn’t she? Surely it wasn’t that impossible?

And certainly her problems appeared less daunting the following morning as she spread sweet jelly-like marmalade on cold triangles of brittle toast. The sun was shining in a cloudless haze of blue, and she could almost feel in holiday mood as she gazed through the hotel window.

Phil drummed his fingers on his place mat, impatient to take her to the new house. ‘First you complain they’ve brought the toast before you’re ready for it,’ he grumbled, ‘then you wolf six slices.’

‘Moving’s given me an appetite,’ she said, and went on crunching slowly.

‘Aren’t you keen to see the new house?’ His eyes danced as though he had a huge, mysterious Christmas present waiting for her.

So far she had not set eyes on their new home. Philip had acquired it entirely on his own, having seen it briefly on a visit to his new place of work. Such had been Marjorie’s resentment that she had steadfastly refused to go down to Bristol with him on that occasion, nor had she been anywhere near it since. She’d been curious about it, naturally, and now the thought of it gave her a fluttery sensation inside – what woman wouldn’t feel stirrings of interest at the prospect of a brand new house? – but she wasn’t going to let on to Philip.

She’d merely sniffed when he’d first shown her the artist’s impression of Plot 19, The Paddock, Brightwells. He had thrust the estate agent’s brochure at her the minute he’d arrived home from his trip, crossing his heart and swearing to die that the house he’d found for them looked just like the picture on the front. It was ready for immediate occupancy, too, he told her, the couple who’d originally intended buying it having dropped out, and the builders had set an incentive to exchange contracts within a month – an incentive that Phil told her he was keen to take advantage of.

‘Why have the couple dropped out?’ Marjorie asked, drying her hands on the kitchen towel and studying the picture. It was a classy-looking place, admittedly, and she quite liked looking at houses even though she had no intention of moving out of the one she was in, so she took the details into the through-room and spread them about her on the settee.

Phil followed her like an eager puppy. ‘I don’t know why they dropped out, exactly. The agent didn’t say. People do change their minds, you know.’

‘Not usually at so late a stage,’ Marjorie argued. She smelt a rat already. There must be something wrong with it, although it certainly looked fine on paper.

‘A spacious lounge,’ she muttered to herself, skipping through the blurb, ‘ample dining room and a Victorian-style conservatory?’ Not only that but a study, too, where Phil could keep his astronomy books. And the kitchen was an absolute knockout. Enjoying cooking as much as she did, it was hard not to feel a thrill.

She studied her husband for a moment. ‘You say those people had even chosen the bathroom tiles, and all the fittings and carpets?’

‘Yes, yes, they had. But nothing we wouldn’t have chosen ourselves. That’s the beauty of it all: we could move in straight away.’ His eyes glazed over. ‘Just imagine! No more worries about this jerry-built heap. No more patching up the roof, or the dodgy bit of guttering round the back …’

‘Bit on the pricey side for the provinces, isn’t it?’

Phil waggled his hand judiciously. ‘So-so.’

Marjorie frowned; events felt as though they were racing along at a rate of knots beneath her reluctant feet. Phil had told her the other day that they wouldn’t even have to sell their own house before buying the new one: the relocation company would take it on. All they had to do once the legal side had been completed was to move out with their furniture.

He’d been drip-feeding her such tit-bits of information for days by then, no doubt hoping to wean her towards full acceptance of his plans. Aware of his tactics, she had armoured herself well against them.

‘You can manage to afford this –’ she flapped the brochure ‘– but you can’t afford to go in with your father? I don’t quite see your logic.’

‘I’ve told you a hundred times –’

‘Three bathrooms? Three?’ She pounced on a black and white room plan. ‘What would we need three bathrooms for?’ In her mind’s eye she saw a lorry load of Harpic trundling up to the front door, a trailer of toilet rolls dragging behind. ‘And five bedrooms!’ she gasped. It would be like running a boarding house. She looked up at her husband as though he had taken leave of his senses.

‘You were worried about leaving our friends,’ he reminded her. ‘Well, that’s why we’ll need extra rooms – for when they come down to visit us. And for the girls, of course.’

‘Our friends?’ Marjorie snorted. ‘If Beth and Tom are anything to go by we’ll never see any of them again.’

The house details forgotten for a moment, Marjorie stared into space. ‘I simply don’t understand it. Beth and Tom were so … well, uppity, I thought, when we saw them the other day.’

They had met up by accident at a mutual friend’s house the day after Spittal’s closure was announced, and the minute Tom and Beth had put in an appearance the atmosphere had noticeably chilled. Naturally Spittal’s plans had been first on the list for discussion, but Tom and Beth had stood to one side looking awkward, even frosty, and had hardly attempted to join in.

Marjorie had come away puzzled and not a little hurt. Philip had gone quiet too, so she presumed he was feeling the same. ‘It’s almost as if they were jealous of us,’ she remarked on their way home in the car, ‘jealous because you’ve been given the opportunity to move with the firm and Tom hasn’t. Funny, I never would have thought they could be like that. Would you?’ But Philip, offering no comment, simply stared at the road ahead.

Marjorie had smiled grimly; she would have liked to reassure Beth that she’d be delighted to change places with her any day, and would have said as much if it had just been the two of them having a cosy chat, without Phil there, ready to glare his disapproval. As it was, she had pretended a resigned acceptance of her fate and said little.

Turning back to the brochure she wondered what Beth would do if confronted with a huge new Tudor-style house at Brightwells. She peered more closely at the artist’s impression and feigned an innocent expression

‘What sort of trees are these?’ She knew that as far as new gardens went, two rolls of turf and some chicken wire were all you were likely to be given.

Phil fixed her with his most quelling expression. ‘You have to plant those yourself.’

‘This one’s bigger than the garage.’ She jabbed her finger at a large, impossibly green willow tree, arching over a perfect lawn. There were none of those messy bits of twig and leaf lying about underneath it either. ‘Take all day to dig a hole for a tree like that,’ she scoffed, ‘and then you’d need ten men.’

‘Marjorie. Please. Don’t be tiresome. I know you’re going to miss the garden here, but just think what you could do with this plot. You’d have a whole new canvas to make your mark on.’ He rustled through the leaflets in search of a plan of the entire ‘paddock’. ‘Look, the garden’s going to be a bit smaller than we’re used to, I know, but you’ve been saying lately that this one will soon be too much for you to keep up with, and I’m sure you could make the new one just as nice …’

‘Oh yes, I’m sure I could. Given twenty-odd years and a fortune. We’d have to go back there on day trips from our nursing home to see how it was all coming along.’

Phil flung down the specifications.

‘I can see there’s no pleasing you,’ he snapped. ‘I don’t know why I bother to try.’

She jumped up from the settee. ‘You know how you can please me,’ she wailed back at him. ‘You can tell me we’re staying put. You know how I hate the thought of moving. At our time of life it’s ridiculous. And you know how much I’ll miss my lovely garden. I’ll miss all our friends as well!’

She stood up, letting the brochure and its contents scatter. ‘You don’t seem to give a damn about me any more. You don’t give a damn about anyone. All you think of is yourself.’

Tears had not been far away. She’d stormed back into the kitchen where she had been scrubbing the grids from the cooker and started clanging them about.

It must have sounded as though the bells of hell had been let loose, Marjorie thought as she popped the last piece of toast into her mouth. She put down her knife, wiped her fingers on her napkin and sat up straight. The moment could be delayed no longer. Her new life was about to begin.

Sunshine warmed the back of Jade’s neck as she paused in front of the antique shop. She hadn’t meant to come down this street today. She need not have done so. The firm of Bath solicitors for whom she worked could be reached just as easily by any number of back street routes. And yet here she was, balanced on the balls of her feet as a gesture towards making her stop a brief one, but knowing full well that she would not. She had passed this window before and knew that in the middle of the tasteful display sat a wonderful Moorcroft vase. A vase that she fiercely coveted.

Her eyes gleamed; her lips parted. A hunger gnawed at her stomach. Oh, but it would look so good in their little hallway! The yellow ochre of the walls and the tones of the rug that she had chanced upon last month at the antiques market, would complement it perfectly. She had to have it!

Her ankles relaxed; her heels touched the pavement. The decision had been made. Fending off a fleeting vision of Oliver’s dark displeasure she swivelled one fashionable navy blue loafer towards the entrance to the shop, and the other quickly followed.

OK, she told herself as she pushed on the heavy glass, so it costs a lot of money. A hell of a lot. Far more than I ought to lash out. But it’s my own money, isn’t it? What’s it to do with Oliver?

It was almost as though she were echoing her sister’s words of the previous day. Jade had complained to Selina that recently Olly seemed to be growing twitchy with regard to her spending too much money and that he hadn’t been like that when she’d first met him.

‘What’s it to do with him?’ Selina had said, adding rather nastily, Jade thought, ‘Don’t tell me your blinkers are wearing out. I always wondered what on earth you saw in him.’

Jade had glared back at the shorter, dumpier version of herself and not answered. But she had sometimes wondered the same thing herself. What had she seen in him? Especially after that crazy speech of his, when he had suggested they move in together. The conditions he’d set down!

Right at the beginning she had had no doubt as to his attractions: intelligence, energy, ambition. He was a mature man with knowledge of the wider world, and she couldn’t abide silly, inexperienced boys just starting out in life. He might be a bit on the short side, admittedly, but she’d never liked wearing high heels anyway. And he did have rather nice dark sweeping eyelashes.

But that speech! Eyelashes notwithstanding, she had nearly ditched him there and then. Strangely it was his honesty that had stopped her; his frankness and his ‘openness’. How refreshingly, wonderfully different he was!

In those early days he’d been generous with presents too – remarkably so, since he had an almost-ex wife and two children lurking in the wings. They must be making demands on his salary, she guessed, even though he was earning quite well. But he still managed to make her feel cherished.

She didn’t like to dwell too much on Oliver’s past. He rarely mentioned it himself. And while it was a little disconcerting to think that he’d ditched his whole family, she had the impression that it was not something he had done lightly or without good reason. His ex must have been pretty awful to him, mustn’t she, to have merited being dumped like that? It wasn’t as though Oliver had had someone else lined up either; it was only months after the event that he’d met Jade.