‘Euh.’ His rheumy old eyes looked downcast. Then brightened. ‘Oh yes, once we’ve done all that malarkey, but there’ll still be lots of time for fun too.’ He lowered his voice. ‘When I was in the army we played this terrific game at an all-ranks dance where you had to guess the bare backside. Blindfold, you know? Really broke the ice.’

‘I’m not convinced much ice needs breaking,’ I said uneasily, remembering Simon and Jennie chatting very quietly in a corner, heads bent so close together they almost touched.

‘Nevertheless I think I’ll bring one along.’

‘What?’

‘A blindfold. Scarf, or something. Got some marvellous Glenmorangie too that my brother-in-law gave me last Christmas; pretty sure Simon will like that. I’ll bring that too. Toodle-pip!’ And off he scurried, thrilled to bits, an entire screenplay playing out in his head, his Border terrier on a tartan lead trotting along beside him.

Later that morning, as I left the house to collect Clemmie from school, old Frank Warner, who’d been sitting outside the Rose and Crown across the road having a pint with Odd Bob, put his glass down on the bench and shuffled towards me.

‘Hello, Poppy.’

‘Hello, Frank.’

‘Um, Poppy, I gather there’s a bit of a book-club thingy occurring at Peggy’s place these days. Wondered if I could join?’ Frank was late sixties, an ex-squadron leader, widowed, vast moustache, excessive dandruff. He spent a lot of time outside the Rose and Crown sinking pint after pint with Odd Bob, who never said much but nodded sagely as Frank held forth about Harrier Jets. Bob, slower in every respect, had now joined us, it having taken him that much longer to circumnavigate the pond.

‘Bob would like to join too,’ Frank assured me firmly, as Bob nodded mutely. Bob was the closest thing we had to a village idiot. He was a tenant farmer who lived in the filthiest farmhouse imaginable on the road out of the village. If, perchance, as a favour to Angie, one ever popped the parish magazine through his door, such a cacophony of dog barking and howling would start you’d hear it all the way home, and then the geese would start honking and the whole village would turn and look accusingly at you when you returned.

‘Um, right. Well, I’m not quite sure, to be honest.’ I scratched my leg nervously. ‘Can I get back to you? Only – I’m not really organizing it. I’ll have to ask the others.’

Frank smoothed his luxuriant moustache in an alarmingly Terry Thomas manner. ‘If you would, my dear. And put in a good word for us, hm?’

‘Of course.’

He gave me a huge wink. ‘Ding dong,’ he murmured.

I hastened off up the hill with my buggy.

I told Jennie about it when I got back. She was weeding her front garden and leaned on her fork to listen.

‘Oh God, that’s nothing,’ she told me. ‘When I was in the shop just now, Dickie Frowbisher sidled up to me and said he’d read a lot of John Grisham and did that count?’

‘Oh dear God. What have we started?’

‘A book club,’ she said firmly. ‘With an exclusive, restricted membership. No new members unless they’ve been thoroughly vetted and agreed on by all existing members; and, as of next week, we get down to the serious business of talking books. Angus should drop them off today and then we can get reading.’

‘Exactly.’ I agreed. My eyes roved down. ‘What’s wrong with Leila?’ The usually irrepressible Irish terrier was lying at Jennie’s feet looking morose, a huge plastic collar, about a foot wide, like a halo around her neck. ‘Why has she got that on?’

Jennie regarded her hound speciously. ‘She self-harms,’ she told me gloomily.

‘No!’

‘Well, no, OK, she scratches herself. So she has to wear that stupid collar. D’you think I should blame myself? For her mental-health issues?’

‘Oh, shut up, Jennie. How long has she got to wear it for?’

‘Till she stops scratching, I suppose.’ She sighed. ‘Anyway, she’s in therapy now.’

‘Leila?’

‘Well, not me – yet. There’s a girl in the next village offering free dog-therapy sessions because she’s just starting.’ She made a face. ‘After Leila, she might be just stopping.’

I giggled.

‘Anyway,’ she grinned, ‘on, on.’ She stuck her fork in the ground and started digging. Humming too, quite merrily for her. And she hated gardening. As I went up my path, the window above her porch flew open. Dan appeared half dressed, hair askew.

‘Can’t find any ruddy socks!’ he roared.

Jennie put down her fork. ‘Coming, darling,’ she said, in an unusually mild voice. I watched her walk inside, in astonishment. Such a statement would normally be met with a sharp rebuke to bloody well find them himself and even Dan blinked down at me in surprise, ocean wave flopping. He grinned.

‘Hi, Poppy. Enjoy your evening last night?’

‘Yes, thanks, Dan, it was fun.’

‘Good. Well, I must say I’m all for it. It’s done wonders for Jennie’s humour; can’t think what’s come over her. She really ought to get out more. Well done you for organizing it.’

‘Oh, er, it wasn’t really me. It was Peggy,’ I said uneasily, shifting the blame.

‘Well, good for Peggy. You girls need some stimulation in your lives. Can’t be running round after your bloody husbands and children all the time, can you? And think of all the books you’ll read. Great stuff!’

And with that he popped his head back in to greet his brand-new wife, who, perhaps not enjoying entirely the stimulation Dan had in mind, and with a different sort of fantasy fiction evolving in her head, was at least less susceptible to the irritations he provided.

Was that such a bad thing, I wondered as I went inside, lifting Archie from his buggy and refusing Clemmie’s demand for a biscuit before lunch. I took their cottage pie from the oven and let it cool a moment on the side. If living in one’s own head made one more amenable to others, more accepting of the real world and the people one lived with, so what? Surely that was OK? Up to a point, I decided, as I scooped out a bit of pie for Archie and broke it up with a fork to let the steam pour out. The problem came when one lived more in one’s head than in the real world. It had always been a safe place for me to go, both as a child when Mum had died and later on as my marriage failed. But if we all moved around in our private worlds, we ended up living with strangers.

I sat a moment, gazing out of the window, remembering Dad and me in the early days after Mum’s death; being so careful, so polite to each other.

‘I thought we’d give her clothes away to one of those charity shops,’ he’d said one day, coming in from the fields. ‘You know, Save the Children or something. Too many memories.’

‘Sure. Whatever you think, Daddy.’ And he’d gone off back to the yard. Meanwhile my head had screamed: ‘You mean, someone else gets to smell my mother on the collar of her suede jacket? The one I sneak out of her wardrobe and inhale daily?’

And then later with Phil:

‘Cycling in Majorca in August,’ he’d say, closing the guide book decisively. ‘We’ll leave the children with your father.’

‘No. No. Cornwall. Rock pools, with the children,’ my head had raged, too tired to fight. All fought out. I’d heard Phil’s arguments before, every year.

‘When they’re older, Poppy, of course we will,’ he’d say patiently. ‘But sand and nappies don’t really mix, do they? Be reasonable.’

We had gone to Cornwall once and he’d hated it. ‘I don’t get it, Poppy. I’m sorry, I just don’t. A ham roll on a freezing rock with a flapping Telegraph?’

I’d seen only my baby in the sand, little Clemmie, gazing in rapture as a minute sand crab shifted sideways down the beach at speed. Later, building a small castle; building poignant memories too. Mind you, I also remember my husband’s skinny white legs protruding from a towel and his clenched expression. It was the look of a man controlling himself in impossible circumstances. So off we’d gone to Majorca the following year, and Phil had been happy and I’d once more retired to my head. So much so that once, in a restaurant in Palma, when Phil asked me what I wanted, I said I’d have a pasty.

I’d have to keep my eye on Jennie.




12

The next day, I went to see Dad. There wasn’t any real need to ring, he was always there, doing what he always did, and was always pleased to see me, but I gave him a call anyway before I pitched up. He was there. And he was pleased too.

I found him lunging a yearling in the field behind his cottage: a nervous young filly trotting round him in circles on the end of a long piece of rope. My father’s face was a picture of rapt concentration, the only time it looked like that, aside from when he was pricking out seedlings in what passed for his greenhouse. Yes, young things: fillies, seedlings, children. I’d been lucky. And only my gran had known that when Mum died. Most people had looked at one another in horror: Peter Mortimer, with a child of eleven! A little girl! But Gran had known about his nurturing heart and had no truck with people who’d told her she should step in and take over. She lived reasonably close by and had popped in regularly – Mum’s mum, this is – and if she’d ever been appalled at the chaos, the confusion, the endless saddles and bridles slung over chairs, the hastily opened tins of beans for tea, she never said. Might have quietly cleaned up, but, looking out of the window as she washed up, would have seen me perched in front of Dad in the saddle of some huge hunter, or with him in the barn filling hay nets or water buckets, which could easily descend into a water fight in the yard, both of us running in drenched. I was always pretty grubby and oddly dressed, but I was always with him: beside him in the rattling old horse lorry off to the sales – never a seat belt and probably never a tax disc either. Dad wasn’t dishonest, but if he was up against it money-wise, which he always was, he sailed fairly close to the wind. And Gran would have left us to it. Stayed for tea – more beans – and gone away knowing I’d probably be awake until Dad went to bed. Knowing too that I didn’t always make it to school if we’d been up all night with a mare foaling, that I drove around the farm alone in a horse box with hardly any brakes, but also that I appeared to be thriving. That I was getting a different sort of nourishment.

Calling it a farm was pitching it high, I thought with a small smile as I stood at the edge of the flat, windy field, watching the filly, who, nostrils flaring, all her instincts telling her this was not right and she shouldn’t be on the end of this rope, was nonetheless falling for the patience and kindness of the man on the other end. The field was one of six, all patchy and overgrazed, which together totalled thirty acres. A smallholding, really, with a cottage, a few tumbledown outhouses and a barn, which Dad had personally divided into stalls. All the stalls were crib-bitten and crisis-managed, held together with bits of plywood and binder twine, but they were scrupulously clean and the occupants looked happy enough. Glossy, healthy and relaxed, rather as, years ago, the young occupant of the cottage had been: thriving on benign neglect.

‘What d’you think?’ Dad called softly. He’d slackened the rope and was walking towards her, stealthily winding the rope in loops around his elbow as he went until he was beside her.

‘Lovely,’ I said quietly, walking across. I reached out a cautious hand, making sure she’d seen it first, to stroke a silky chestnut neck. ‘Is that the first time you’ve lunged her?’

‘Second. Might put a blanket on her tomorrow.’

I smiled. Received horsey wisdom suggested one might not do this until the age of three, but Dad had his own method of breaking horses, which involved treating them like adults from an early age. He’d adopted the same policy with me. He’d never turned a hair at teenage indulgences, never joined the clucking mothers who endlessly dissected their children’s love – or rather sex – lives; indeed he had no problem with my sexuality at all. What he did mind very much, though, was whose car I got into.