Dee stood under the shower spray, the needle-sharp streams massaging the knotted muscles of her upper spine, and began to catalogue all the ‘stuff’ she had to do today as she waited for the hollow ache that was always there after dreaming of Pammy to subside.
She had two dozen loaves to bake for Gillingham market and, once that was done, she had a celebratory meal to plan for everyone to enjoy once the first phase of the barn clear-out was completed.
The forecast was for a balmy evening, so she would get Josh and Toto to help her put the trestle tables out in the yard, adding fairy lights and lanterns for an air of celebration – to symbolise the launching of this exciting new venture to secure the co-op’s future. She smiled as she leaned into the mirror to apply moisturiser and suncream – thinking of all the high spirits and high fives yesterday evening at the news of the bank loan being approved – and ignored the new twinge in her back.
An array of salads would be perfect to start the feast – maybe the carrot and ginger, baked aubergine and mint yoghurt, plus some faro and roasted red pepper, she’d have to check her pantry. She’d pick up fresh salmon to bake with lime and organic lamb for kebabs in Gillingham while she was at the farmers’ market, maybe do a trade-off with Donald Allsop and Christy Jenkins who ran the relevant stalls – if not she knew they’d give her a good price. Perhaps she’d pull out the Yotam Ottolenghi cookbook Tess had given her for Christmas to spice up the menu with something new. She rarely stuck to the recipes verbatim, because where was the fun in that, but Yotam never failed to inspire her.
Her back twinged again. The only thing she needed to make sure of was that nothing on her menu required her to spend six hours standing at the stove stirring boiling fruit like she had yesterday while making gooseberry jam to stock the shop when it was ready.
She added a layer of concealer and rimmed her mouth with gloss. Maybe it was a vain indulgence, seeing as no one was going to see her who was likely to notice. She shrugged off the depressing thought as she dropped the lipstick back into her make-up bag. As she picked a shirt from the wardrobe, she spotted the one outfit of Pam’s that she’d kept. The outfit Pam had worn to their civil partnership a year before her terminal cancer diagnosis.
Dee stroked the emerald green lace.
They’d been so stupidly happy that day, not knowing what was in store for them. Tucking the body-con dress behind a set of overalls, she closed the closet door on the painful memories, and the aching sense of loss that would never completely go away.
Pammy was gone now. And she wasn’t ever coming back. But Ellie was here. And so was Josh. Life was so fickle and unpredictable, you needed to grab every ounce of happiness where you could.
Maybe today would be a good day to finally begin to breach the chasm that still existed between them, and ask Ellie about her life in America. She’d made a point of not pressing, not pushing Ellie for details, but it was becoming glaringly apparent that Ellie still hadn’t mentioned Josh’s father. Not once. Something was wrong, and Dee had begun to despair of Ellie ever coming to her.
She laced up her Converse pumps, tied her hair up and headed down the stairs. Would it really be so terrible to probe gently? Just to make sure everything was OK? If Ellie wasn’t receptive, or it seemed too intrusive, she could always just back off again.
Dee brewed coffee in the quiet kitchen, got flour and yeast out and began measuring out by eye the ingredients in her bread maker for the morning batch. She grabbed some buttermilk from the pantry.
Sourdough today, with sunflower and poppy seeds. And maybe a focaccia with the sun-dried tomatoes she’d left soaking in olive oil yesterday. She’d make an extra couple of loaves to add to tonight’s feast.
As she grabbed a couple of packets of yeast to add to the mix, the dull ache in her lower back returned. What she wouldn’t give right now to feel Pammy’s strong hands digging into the sore muscles, taking the pain away and replacing it with the delicious ache of sexual arousal. Dee blinked, the stinging in her tear duct surprising her.
She tipped the ingredients into a large earthenware bowl, and began dribbling in the water. She definitely needed the distraction of kneading by hand today.
She heard the tread of someone on the stairs.
Ellie wandered into the room, her eyes snapping shut as she covered her face with her forearm. ‘Crap.’
‘Everything all right?’ Dee asked, concerned by the grey pallor of Ellie’s skin as she reached over to tug the curtain closed. ‘Do you want to go back to bed?’ she asked. ‘I could bring you up some tea?’ It was barely six o’clock. And a Saturday. The back barn clear-out wasn’t scheduled to start until midday, so no one else needed to be up at this ungodly hour on a weekend except her and Rob, who’d be busy in the dairy barn organising the milking.
Ellie slumped into one of the chairs.
‘No tea,’ she groaned. ‘Just lots more water. This is all self-inflicted so I don’t deserve your sympathy.’
Dee wiped her hands on her apron. Of course, Ellie had gone over to Annie’s last night with Maddy and Tess.
‘You got into this state getting a manicure?’ she said, shocked. Maddy was young and occasionally reckless, but both Annie and Tess had young children and she wouldn’t have expected them to drink to excess.
Ellie lifted bloodshot eyes. Dee winced, she could see the headache in them and it did not look pretty.
‘No, your sloe gin did actually, once I got back here,’ Ellie countered. ‘And please keep your voice down or my head may shatter into a billion pieces.’
Dee filled a glass with home-made lemonade from the pitcher she kept in the fridge and hunted out a couple of extra-strength painkillers.
Ellie groaned her appreciation, then chased the painkillers with a long gulp of the lemonade.
Anxiety leapt in Dee’s chest. She’d been trying to respect Ellie’s boundaries, not to probe into her daughter’s personal life until she was willing and eager to talk about it. But if something was wrong, she wanted Ellie to know she was here for her. The truth was, she hadn’t been a mother to Ellie for nineteen years. Cooking and cleaning and redecorating wasn’t enough. Ever since Ellie had made the choice to leave with her father, Dee had not been present in her daughter’s life – the postcards and emails and home-made gifts she’d sent over the last four years could never replace all the things they’d lost that day. And that had always been Dee’s fault for making decisions that had ultimately pushed her daughter away. It was way past time to remedy that.
Sitting down beside Ellie, she took her daughter’s hand. ‘Sweetheart, why were you drinking on your own? Is something the matter?’
‘I wasn’t drinking on my own precisely,’ Ellie said, the pallor replaced by a burning in her cheeks. ‘I had Art for company.’
‘Art?’ Dee said, trying for nonchalant and missing by several miles. ‘That’s…’ Astonishing? Intriguing? ‘Surprising,’ she settled on.
Ellie didn’t elaborate.
‘I thought you and Art were avoiding each other?’ she said.
‘Not any more,’ Ellie said, not sounding at all pleased about the new development.
Dee knew Art still had issues about the project, he’d been noticeably absent from the back barn roster – the only one of the co-op’s members not to commit to devoting some time to the clear-out today. And, as part of her don’t-get-in-Ellie’s-face initiative, Dee had deliberately avoided making a comment about the obvious tension between the two of them.
But she’d ignored the animosity between Ellie and Art once before. During her first summer at the farm. At that time all she’d seen in Art was a boy whose desperate need for affection had made him do foolish things – and because of her pity for that boy, she had never taken Ellie’s complaints about him seriously. Especially as they had died down after a while. She’d even become convinced Ellie had a little crush on him. But perhaps if she’d done more then, to support Ellie, her daughter wouldn’t have felt so isolated.
The two of them were adults now and she needed to respect that. And intervening would feel a bit like trying to mediate between her two children, because Art had become like a son to her over the years. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t probe. Gently.
‘Did something happen between you two last night?’ Dee asked and watched the pink flags light up Ellie’s cheeks.
OK, something definitely happened, the question is what?
*
‘Nothing significant,’ Ellie said, her cheeks burning like flamethrowers. ‘We started drinking, and somehow managed to polish off a whole bottle of your sloe gin.’
And if my head didn’t feel as if it was being crushed in an enormous vice, I might be able to lie about that with some conviction.
Had she seriously got tipsy with Art and snogged him last night? In the kitchen? And how on earth, when she was currently sporting a hangover that might well kill her, could she still remember every single minute detail of that kiss?
In way too much minute detail.
After nineteen years, she’d finally discovered what it felt like to have Art’s mouth on hers and it had been so good. And so not good.
It was perfectly acceptable to entertain a few prurient thoughts about a guy over elderflower champagne and killer nail polish, it was quite another to go the full lip monty with him the first time you caught him alone.
Thank God Art had called a halt, or they may have ended up doing something even more dangerous. But what if he hadn’t?
After a week of proving herself with the project, securing her role as an admin superstar and distancing herself from the one person who had the ability to totally screw up her whole summer, she’d plunged right off a cliff in the space of one kiss.
What was wrong with her? She was here to escape from the stupid decisions of her youth, not dig up more of them for a do-over.
She should not have kissed Art, but, even more worrying, why had he kissed her? The tiny part of her brain still capable of operating without pain had been trying to puzzle that one out for an hour and she hadn’t come up with an obvious answer. She couldn’t remember much of what had been said – metrosexual, bi-curious and arsehole were floating around in there somewhere, but that wasn’t a lot of help. The only possible mitigating factor was that she had a vague recollection of Art being drunk too. So maybe that kiss wasn’t part of some sneaky scheme to expose her frailties. That small consolation hadn’t stopped the euphoria and confidence of the night before from plunging into the toilet this morning.
And now she had her mum, looking all fierce and protective on her behalf.
‘A whole bottle?’ Dee said, looking suitably shocked. ‘Why did you do that?’
I know, right. ‘I don’t know, but if this hangover is anything to go by, it was a mistake that will not be repeated.’ And it wasn’t the only one.
‘Is he still sulking about the shop?’ Dee asked.
Ellie felt stupidly touched. So her mum thought Art was still being a dick about the shop too? Why did it feel so important to know that? She was not in competition with Art. Far from it, unfortunately.
‘Yes, I think so,’ she said. Although, to be honest it was hard to know how Art still felt about the shop, seeing as that was one thing they had not discussed, as far as she could remember.
‘Well, I suppose it’s a good thing that you’re not avoiding each other any more?’
Not really. Actually, not at all.
Kissing men who disliked you and getting off on it was right up there in the annals of stupid decisions with marrying men that couldn’t stay faithful and never getting off at all.
Dee got up and walked back around the kitchen table to punch the dough she’d been working on when Ellie had walked in.
The soft puff of air escaping sounded like a jet engine landing inside Ellie’s head.
‘Can I ask you a question, Ellie?’
‘I suppose.’ Please don’t let it be about Art.
‘What’s going on with Josh’s father?’
Please don’t let it be about that either.
‘Why do you ask?’ Ellie said, in a pathetic attempt to stall for time. She was so not ready to have this conversation while her head was exploding – and damage limitation on her latest catastrophe was still one life-threatening hangover away.
‘You never speak with him when he Skypes Josh,’ her mother said. ‘And I wondered why he didn’t come with you?’ Dee sprinkled flour over the kitchen table and plopped the dough on top. ‘Three months is a long time for Josh and you to be away from him, and for you to be away from your business.’ Dee plunged her knuckles into the dough, and began to stretch and tear it. ‘I just wanted to make sure everything was all right?’
Emotion Ellie hadn’t even realised was there burned her larynx, as she suddenly envisioned herself as Dee’s ball of dough being contorted into all sorts of impossible positions.
‘It’s complicated,’ she finally managed to mumble.
‘I’m sure it is, marriages always are,’ her mother said, the understanding in her voice somehow unbearably poignant.
No wonder she didn’t want to tell her mum about Dan and the divorce. Because it would force her to admit how stupid she had been – about her determination to keep her marriage going no matter what. A part of her had always condemned her mum for giving up too easily, for not trying harder to resist Pam, to make things work with her dad, but what if her mum had just been a great deal braver and more honest than she was?
At least her mum had loved Pam, while Ellie wasn’t entirely convinced she had ever really loved Dan.
What she’d been was dazzled by his golden boy good looks, and his confidence and charm. When they’d first met, she’d been doing grunt work on a J-1 visa at the Marshall Creek Summer Camp in Sarasota and Dan had been the camp’s sailing instructor. Impossibly cute and so effortlessly sexy, he could make every person at the camp with ovaries, and quite a few without, hyperventilate.
At the time, she’d convinced herself she was special. The only one who could make him hyperventilate back, during all those sweaty, furtive encounters in the boathouse after lights out, which had eventually produced Josh.
If only she’d known then what she knew now, that Dan had never been hyperventilating just for her.
‘Dan and I are getting a divorce. He got Josh’s middle school teacher pregnant. I thought it would be good for Josh and I to be away from Orchard Harbor for the summer when everyone finds out.’
‘Oh Ellie, I…’
‘Wait, that’s not all,’ she said, to halt the outpouring of support she wasn’t sure she deserved. ‘I don’t have to worry about taking a break from my business, because…’ She hesitated. Why was this the hardest part? She thought of Art’s accusations last Friday. That would be why.
‘It’s a total disaster. In fact, I don’t really have a business any more.’ She stared down at her hands, feeling sick with humiliation and guilt. ‘Once I kicked Dan out of the house, all my clients deserted me, because I no longer had the kudos of being Senator Granger’s daughter-in-law. And why would anyone else want to hire Events by Eloise when it was owned by a woman who had been cheated on all over town and had pretended not to notice.’
Surely that was the worse part, that ever since she’d first caught Dan cheating, she’d secretly known he’d never stopped, but she’d kept the façade of her perfect marriage to Senator Granger’s son going for the sake of appearances and little else. She’d kidded herself she’d been keeping it going for Josh, but how could that be true, when Dan had given their son almost as little attention as he gave her?
She gulped down the last of her lemonade, the tart sweet taste doing nothing to ease the dryness in her throat.
‘Maybe Art’s right to be sceptical about my abilities to pull this off,’ she said. ‘I went to see him after the meeting when we agreed the project and he made it clear he thinks this is just a vanity project for me, that I’m just using it to pass the time until I go home.’
‘Art had absolutely no right to say that.’ The total and utter faith in her mother’s voice made tears well up Ellie’s throat.
‘I swear that’s genuinely not true,’ Ellie said, the need to prove herself to her mother suddenly paramount. ‘I really want the shop to work. But maybe he’s right to be wary. I’ve failed at my marriage and my business. What if I’m just using this project as a chance to shore up my confidence after all those other screw ups. And what happens if I screw this up, too?’
Her mother swooped down, pressing flour-covered palms to her clammy cheeks. ‘You’re not going to screw it up.’ Dee gripped her head, to get the message across. ‘And you’re not a failure. Frankly, it sounds like your husband failed in the marriage, not you.’
‘The shop might not be a success though.’ Did her mother understand that? That she might lose everything Pam had left her? ‘It’s a risk.’
‘And it’s a risk we’re all willing to take because real failure would be not taking that chance and letting the co-op die by slow degrees through our own inaction.’ Dee folded Ellie into a hug.
‘Art doesn’t think so,’ Ellie said against her mother’s bosom. The pointless tears started to make her sinuses ache almost as much as her head.
‘That’s because Art finds it next to impossible to trust anyone, after what happened with Laura and then with Alicia.’
Alicia? Who’s Alicia?
Ellie shut the question down. Because thinking about Art just made her head hurt more.
‘Does Josh know? About the divorce?’ her mother said.
Ellie shook her head. ‘I don’t know how to tell him.’
How had her mother handled it?
‘I don’t want to ruin his summer,’ she added. ‘He’s having such a good time. He’s even enjoying going to school with Toto.’
The novelty of his accent and his encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon and the Marvel Universe had transformed him from the weird kid to the cool kid and he was loving it.
‘Then don’t tell him yet,’ her mother said, making it sound so simple.
How would she handle it if Josh responded the same way she had to the news? With tantrums and diva strops and endless complaints? Not that Josh was likely to do that, because it wasn’t in his nature to have a diva strop, but even so…
Ellie began to shake, the enormity of everything she’d been avoiding closing in on her. Her mother clasped her harder, the smell of fresh herbs and yeast surrounded her.
‘But every time I think about it…’ Or every time she avoided thinking about it. ‘Every time I hear him talking to Dan.’ And every time she avoided talking to Dan too, in case he brought it up and asked why she hadn’t told Josh yet. ‘I feel so dishonest.’
‘It’s not dishonest, there’s no rush,’ Dee said. ‘I piled so much onto you when I brought you here,’ she murmured against her hair. ‘Much more than you were capable of handling and, as a result, I lost you. That you’re being cautious is not a sign of failure or dishonesty. It’s a sign of your selflessness and your love.’
Ellie clung on to her mother. And hugged her tight, really tight, for the first time since she was a little girl. She could feel the rise and fall of her mother’s breathing, that solid strength that had always been there, and that had been gone when she returned to London with her father.
‘I did so many things wrong that summer.’ Her mother’s breast rose and fell as she gave a heavy sigh. ‘Pam and I should have waited longer to come here, but she was…’ Her mother’s voice faltered and Ellie shifted back to look into her mother’s face.
Unlined and pale, Dee’s face appeared younger than her years, but today Ellie could see the grief, that hollow sadness that would never lift.
‘You and Pam were together?’ she asked. ‘Before that summer?’
‘Yes, we’d been seeing each other for two years. Your father and I hadn’t had a physical relationship for a long time.’
Ellie sniffed. ‘Two years? But you never said anything?’ How had her mother kept that a secret for so long?
She thought of Pammy, the woman she’d tried so hard to hate that summer, but who had never shown her anything but consideration.
‘Why hadn’t you and Dad had a physical relationship for years?’ Had her mother always been a lesbian then?
Dee sat down heavily beside her, studied her hands, twisting the ring she always kept on her finger, the ring Pam had given her.
‘He cheated on me the first time, less than a year after we married. He couldn’t be faithful, and I tried to ignore it at first, but eventually there wasn’t really any need to, because we lived separate lives in the same house. He had a mistress and I didn’t mind.’ Her mother sent her a weak smile that spoke of how much she’d endured.
Ellie felt the twist of humiliation in her own chest, recalling all those times she had gone to an event in Orchard County with Dan, and known her husband wasn’t being faithful. And every time she’d made a conscious decision to ignore the evidence.
‘When I met Pammy,’ Dee said, ‘I discovered what it was actually like to be in love. Passionately in love. And I realised I had never felt that way about your father. So no wonder he wasn’t faithful to me.’
Ellie took her mother’s hands, and rubbed her thumbs across the knuckles, slightly swollen from all the hours she put in kneading dough or stirring something. The map of tiny cuts, the red mark across the base of the thumb where she must have burned herself.
She met her mum’s gaze, the pale blue eyes misty with tears. ‘If he couldn’t remain faithful, that’s his fault not yours. He didn’t deserve you.’
Just like Dan hadn’t deserved her.
‘And anyway it was Pam you loved.’
Her mother’s lips curled on one side, the smile weak, but there. ‘I know. But I always loved you more than anything. You were my child. And because I chose to stay here, you stopped believing that.’
‘You couldn’t have stayed with him, and I made the choice to go back to London, so what choice did you have?’ Why had it taken her so long to see this?
Her mother touched her cheek. ‘Don’t let me off so lightly, Ellie. You were a child and I was your mother. I’ve been over the events of that summer again and again over the years, once we’d grown so far apart, and I tried to figure out what I could have done differently. And I came to the conclusion, it was a mistake to bring you here. A selfish decision I made without taking your feelings into account.’ She glanced around the cosy country kitchen, and for the first time Ellie saw it through her mother’s eyes. How much she’d done to the place. ‘It wasn’t ready. You weren’t ready.’
Ellie squeezed her mum’s hand. ‘I’m ready now, and so is this place. You’ve made it into something really beautiful, Mum. Josh loves it here.’
Her mother turned her hand palm up, and squeezed back. ‘I’m glad.’
As she helped her mother with the bread making, the painkillers finally kicked in. She felt lighter, more in control, less fragile, the gut-wrenching feeling of anxiety – that had haunted her ever since the day she’d been eviscerated by Caroline Myerson over a crust-less crab salad sandwich when the woman had sacked her over afternoon tea in the Myerson Memorial Golf Club – was gone for the first time in a month.
She didn’t feel so alone any more. Her father’s infidelity had given her a connection with her mum she had not expected, and she had her new friends – Tess, Annie and Maddy – to do silly girly things with. And she had a ton of challenging exciting work to keep herself busy…
Which ought to prevent her from doing any more silly girly things with Art.
And thankfully Art was still refusing to get involved with the project, so once they got stuck into the construction, she’d be unlikely to see him much. Plus, she was embarking on a lifetime sloe gin ban.
All good.
And she was totally not interested in finding out about Alicia.
Not. At. All.