Тилли Бэгшоу – One Summer’s Afternoon: A perfect summer treat! (страница 3)
He closed the window and went downstairs in search of a cold gin and tonic, feeling mildly cheered.
Perhaps his agent would turn out to have been right after all.
The Swell Valley was starting to look up.
TUESDAY
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’
Penelope Harwich stared down at the blackened chicken casserole, so badly burned it probably couldn’t even be identified from its dental records, and ran her hands through her hair in despair.
‘Why didn’t the bloody bipper go off?’
This last question was addressed to Sebastian, Penny’s fourteen-year-old son, who was hunched over the kitchen table at Woodside Hall, deep in his Nintendo 3DS.
‘It did,’ he said without looking up. ‘I turned it off.’
‘Why?’ wailed Penny.
‘Because it was annoying,’ said Seb, reasonably.
‘Yes, but why didn’t you come and get me? I set it so I’d remember to take the lunch out of the oven!’
‘Well I didn’t know that, did I?’ said Seb, reluctantly turning off his game and pushing open the kitchen door, to allow the smoke to escape. ‘You set that thing all the time – to remember to call granny, to remember to do the ironing, to remember some other thing you’re supposed to remember.’
Penny groaned. She wished this weren’t true. That she didn’t muddle through her life like a victim of early-onset Alzheimer’s, barely able to brush her own hair or make a cup of tea without some sort of outside assistance. But, ever since her divorce last year (since her husband, Paul, had left her on their twentieth wedding anniversary, for a man, admitting to a gay double life that Penny had had literally no suspicion of whatsoever), she’d lost so much confidence she barely trusted herself to remember her own name.
‘I think we’d better leave this in the garden for a bit. Till it stops, you know, smoking,’ said Seb.
Watching her lovely, kind, capable fourteen-year-old son slip on her oven gloves and carry the charred mess outside, Penny Harwich felt poleaxed with guilt. Paul’s abandonment and spectacular coming-out had been hard on all of them, a terrible shock. But, while she had unravelled like a dropped spool of yarn and Emma, Seb’s older sister, had taken refuge in anger and acting out, Seb had held things together with a maturity and stoicism far beyond his years.
‘If someone’s gay, they’re gay,’ her son had told her calmly while she sobbed on his shoulders. ‘It’s not Dad’s fault and it’s certainly not yours. You just have to, you know, get on with it.’
And Seb had ‘got on with it’, going back to boarding school with no apparent problems, even spending occasional weekends with his father and his new partner, Mike. When Penny had steeled herself to ask Seb what the boyfriend was like, he’d shrugged and said simply, ‘All right. He can fix toasters. And he likes cricket.’
For Seb Harwich, the world was divided not into gay and straight, old and young, rich and poor, but into those who did and did not like cricket. How Penny wished her own world-view could be so simple, so accepting.
As it was, she felt guilty about everything. Guilty for not reading the signs, for not knowing about Paul, for not changing him. Guilty for not being a better mother, a better wife, a better artist, a better person. And, while Penny was busy blaming herself, her daughter Emma vociferously seconded the motion, blaming her mother for everything from her father’s sexuality, to the dilapidated state of the house, to the weather.
The chicken casserole, Emma’s favourite, had been Penny’s latest doomed attempt at appeasement. Emma was home for a week, ostensibly to watch Sebby in the big cricket match, but actually to have her photograph taken, bask in male attention and make her poor mother’s life as hellish as humanly possible. It was hard to know what, exactly, had pushed Emma Harwich from being a normal, slightly moody teenager, to a full-on-entitled, spoiled bitch. Whether it was the bombshell dropped by her father or the explosion of her modelling career, which had happened at about the same time, Penny didn’t know. Either way, it was safe to say that money, fame and attention had not had a beneficial effect on Emma’s character.
This was really Seb’s big moment, and Penny knew that she should be focusing on her son this week and not her daughter. Not only was it the first time he’d made the team, but Seb would be the youngest player in Swell Valley cricketing history to bat for Fittlescombe against their age-old rivals. As ever, however, Emma was the squeaky wheel that ended up getting the grease.
Seb came back in to find his mother pulling leftovers out of the fridge with the frenzied energy of a bag lady trawling for food in a dustbin. ‘What on earth am I going to give her now?’ she wailed. ‘She only eats chicken and fish.’
‘Mum, it’s Emma, not the bloody Queen,’ said Seb, calmly putting the food back. ‘You’ve got cheese. Let’s have pasta and cheese sauce.’
‘She’ll never eat that. Far too many calories,’ fretted Penny.
‘Well she’ll have to go hungry, then, won’t she?’ said Seb. ‘We’ll do a salad on the side. She can stick to that if she’s fussy. But you’ve got to have the pasta, Mum. You’re too thin.’
This was also true. At thirty-nine, Penelope Harwich was still extremely pretty in a wild-haired, hippyish, Pre-Raphaelite-beauty sort of a way. But the stress of divorce had stripped the pounds off her already small frame, to the point where the jut of her hip bones and ribs was clearly visible through the long cotton sundress she was wearing.
Twenty minutes later, with the cheese sauce bubbling on the Aga, the pasta almost done and a hearty-looking salad sitting in a big bowl on the table, Penny had started to relax. Seb pulled a bottle of Chablis out of the fridge and had just opened it, ignoring his mother’s protests, when the front door opened and a familiar man’s voice rang out through the hall.
‘Yoo-hoo! Only me.’
‘What does
‘Be nice,’ hissed Penny, just as Piers walked in. Considered good looking for a politician, at forty Piers Renton-Chambers was probably at the height of his charms. He was reasonably tall and regular-featured, and he still had a full head of hair, although the beginnings of a widow’s peak were starting to form, a fact that bothered him quite inordinately. His other attributes were a deep, resonant, orator’s voice – no matter what he said, he always sounded slightly as if he were making a speech – and his immaculate grooming. Unlike Penny, who rarely got through a day without wearing at least one stained item of clothing, often forgot to brush her hair and was no stranger to odd socks, Piers never looked anything less than dapper, clean-shaven and altogether beautifully turned out. But, if he was a little vain and pompous, he was also incredibly kind. For all Sebby’s misgivings, Penny didn’t know how she would have got through the last year without Piers’s support. And, despite his obvious affection and attraction for her, he had never made a move or overstepped the line – or at least, not yet.
‘Oh, you brought flowers. How lovely,’ she beamed, relieving him of a hand-tied bunch of pale-pink peonies. ‘And peonies, too, my absolute favourite.’
‘Are they?’ said Piers.
‘You know they are, you twat,’ Seb murmured under his breath. Happily, neither of the adults heard him.
‘Something smells good.’
‘It’s cheese,’ said Seb in a distinctly churlish tone, earning himself a reproachful look from his mother.
‘We’re having pasta and cheese sauce,’ said Penny, pouring Piers a glass of wine. ‘You’re very welcome to join us.’
‘I’d love to,’ he enthused.
Seb rolled his eyes and returned to his Nintendo.
‘It’s a bit of a scratch lunch, I’m afraid,’ said Penny. ‘I made a casserole for Emma this morning but I totally forgot it and we had to throw it out.’
Just then, as if summoned by the mention of her name, Emma walked in. Dropping her Balenciaga shoulder bag on the floor like a sack of potatoes, and kicking off her Jimmy Choo gladiator sandals, she strode across the room like a ship in full sail, ignoring both Piers and her mother, grabbed a packet of cigarettes from the kitchen drawer, lit one and proceeded to exhale smoke directly over the saucepan.
‘Jesus, what the fuck’s that?’ she said rudely, wrinkling her nose at the pungent smell of the cheese sauce. ‘It smells like boiled socks.’
‘It’s cheese sauce,’ said Seb.
‘You know, you really shouldn’t speak to your mother like that,’ Piers said bravely. ‘You’re lucky to have a mother who cooks for you, at your age.’
Emma looked at him like something she was having trouble scraping off the bottom of her shoe. ‘Fuck off,’ she said coolly. ‘I’m not eating it.’