Blowing It (16 page)

‘Yes. Um, exactly,’ Harry agreed, shifting slightly and looking across the room to the six-foot-square painting of a naked Lottie dancing in a field of buttercups, beneath an orange and purple sunset. Her body may have been entirely exposed in it, but the patch on the wall where the plaster had fallen off was successfully covered.

Lottie grinned and followed his gaze. ‘One of my better efforts, that one. Do you think I should leave it as a moving-in gift for the next people?’

‘Oh, you painted it yourself?’ Harry’s eyes opened wide and his face went a shade more pink. ‘Goodness! It’s … er … really—’

‘It’s really terrible,’ Clover snapped. ‘You’ll have to take it with you, Mum. No one else in their right mind would want to live with it.’

‘Don’t get in a stress, Clover, I was only joking.’ Never mind sending her to sit on the stairs, Lottie’s fingers now itched to give her daughter a slap.

‘Well, I can’t tell, these days. After all, Ilex and I thought you were joking about selling the house.’

Harry stowed his Blackberry in his briefcase and turned to Lottie. ‘And have you decided on a property to move to? Perhaps DJH could help you there? What sort of place were you looking for? Something smaller, a whole lot easier to manage, I assume?’

Lottie minded the assumption, but then to be fair she’d mind whatever he said, now she’d taken against him on behalf of her mother. Why smaller? Did he have her and Mac in mind for a snug warden flatlet in a retirement development? Or something with a ready-fitted stairlift and one of those strange, walk-in baths, all prepared for an infirm old age? It would be (please God) a long, long time before they were ready for all that kind of kit. She was tempted to invent an impulsive move to a palatial French chateau complete with fully functioning champagne vineyard, or to a swish New York apartment in the Dakota Building, alongside Yoko Ono and a
selection
of movie stars who were generally thought to be already dead, but decided the truth would do just as well.

‘No. We’re not looking for anywhere else to live, not for a while anyway. Mac and I intend to travel a bit. Well, a
lot
actually. We’ll simply put everything we want to keep into storage and take a long, long trip around the world’s wonders. At any given moment, you’ll find that somewhere in the world it’s party time!’

Harry looked confused, and Lottie could see he was clearly picturing sedate middle-aged drinks gatherings, like golf-club ladies’ night functions, events that differed only as to whether the host nation was hot, cold or temperate. She decided to enlighten him a little.

‘You see, there’s always so much going on, all the time, all over the world. It’s just a matter of getting on a plane and going along to join in the fun! You can start in the Philippines in January with the Kalibo Ati-Atihan, party on round the world for the rest of the year then get to Thailand for the Koh Pangan full moon party in December. See? A fabulous year of festivals, carnivals and celebration.’ She could see Clover raising her eyes ceiling-ward, but ignored her.

‘And then, you see, forget the Olympic Games – too dull and worthy,’ she said, leaning forward to hold his attention. ‘Have you ever heard of Naadam?’

‘I can’t say I have. What is it?’ Harry looked professionally interested, if slightly worried. Clover simply looked, which was, this difficult afternoon, an improvement.

‘Well, it’s three days of Mongolian traditional sports held in Ulaanbaatar in July: wrestling, archery, horse racing and so on. It’s a centuries-old event, and first properly organized by Genghis Khan, can you believe? It’s also a time of festival and fireworks, music and food and dancing. Absolutely
not
to be missed! You younger ones, you really should get out more.’

Harry smiled nervously, looking across to Clover for some kind of sign that Lottie wasn’t crazy.

‘Right, OK.’ Clover sighed, closed her notebook and stood up, ready to leave. ‘So far with your plans, Mum, that’s the Genghis Khan games, the thing where the whole town rolls about in squashed tomatoes in Spain, some Junk-what’sit in the Bahamas—’

‘Junkanoo,’ Lottie corrected her, then turned to Harry. ‘That’s another amazing festival, starting on Boxing Day. Fabulous costumes, apparently. And,’ she reminded Clover, ‘don’t forget the Pushkar camel fair in India.’

‘Oh how could I have forgotten that one?’ Clover groaned. ‘I’m sure you’ll come home with some lovely new pets.’

‘It all sounds … er … brilliant. Um … meanwhile …’ Harry brought them back to the matter in
hand
. ‘Meanwhile there’s the question of what I’m here for. Of, er, a potential value for this house. Obviously I need to write up a proper proposal for the sale, if you’re sure you’d like me to go ahead, but …’ He now looked at Lottie uncertainly, clearly, she could tell, wondering if he’d been entirely wasting his time on a mad, idle dreamer who could at any whimsical moment completely change her mind and instead turn the house into a refuge for abandoned cats. He was probably already mentally concocting an invoice for an afternoon frittered away.

‘But I can, I think, assure you that you’re going to be looking at a figure well into the top end of the close to three million mark.’ He twinkled again, anticipating a joyous reaction.

‘Really?’ Lottie said, as matter-of-factly as she could. She actually felt almost breathless at the amount but refused to let Harry have the satisfaction of seeing her behave like one of the hopefuls on
The Antiques Roadshow
who has just been told that the battered tin toy they’ve brought for a valuation will auction for more than enough to put little Hermione through boarding-school.

‘Well, that’s quite good,’ she conceded, starting to gather up the used teacups. ‘We should be able to take in the Sossusvlei National Park as well, then.’

Clover and Harry looked blank. ‘It’s in Namibia,’ Lottie explained. ‘A beautiful, desolate place with
absolutely
nothing in it. Nothing but sand and colour and camelthorn trees. Magnificent!’

Somewhere easier to manage
, Lottie thought, as she slammed the crockery into the rusty dishwasher, she’d give him bloody easier to sodding manage.

Clover had found the grace, at last, to attempt to be pleasant. It had, given the way she’d behaved, been really kind of Harry to offer her a lift back to London and
really
kind to insist on going out of his way, via Richmond, so she would get home in good time to collect the girls from Mary-Jane.

Slowing down to negotiate some roadworks on the A3, Harry asked tentatively, ‘Tell me if I’m out of order but do I get the impression you’re not terribly keen on the house being sold?’

She smiled, accepting that given her open hostility, it was a pretty brave question.

‘Sorry – was it that obvious? I’ve been a total bitch all afternoon, haven’t I? Now I’m out of the house I feel really bad about that.’

Harry’s hands gestured on the steering wheel. ‘Well, obviously your family politics are nothing to do with me, but to be honest, I don’t think it’s me you need to apologize to. Still, I expect you had your reasons,’ he ventured, shooting her a small and rather sexy grin.

‘Clever answer,’ she conceded, smiling back. ‘You must know that makes a person want to talk about it!’

‘Really?’ He laughed. ‘I had no idea, honestly! And please don’t tell me if you’d rather not.’

‘Now you’re making it worse! OK – all I’ll say is that my parents have a bit of a track record in spur-of-the-moment decisions on fairly major issues.’ She hesitated. After all, Digby, James and Humphreys knew perfectly well who their client – potential client – was. She also knew that although estate agents claimed they were going to treat you with the utmost discretion, there could always be someone bored with typing up house details in the back office who might want to make a bid for a bit of holiday money from calling up the showbiz gossip pages of the tabloids. She could just see a small derisory piece about her dad, something smirky along the – untrue – lines of him having to sell up to make ends meet. They revelled in that sort of story, anything that smacked of formerly rolling-rich rock stars biting the humble dust of insolvency. It would be graced by an ancient onstage photo of Mac from his bearded and beaded days, probably with Lottie alongside, all pre-Raphaelite hair and skinny in a gold kaftan.

‘So …’ Harry ventured as he approached the Kingston roundabout. ‘Does that mean that you think they haven’t really thought things through? Are they not really serious about selling?’

‘No, no – they’re serious all right. They’re always serious – till the next project.’ Until it all goes horribly wrong, she thought. She wasn’t going to say
that
– her conscience told her that, tabloids or not, it came under ‘disloyal’.

‘I worry that they might … regret it.’ Clover fished in her bag for a tissue. She suddenly felt in danger of tears. ‘It’s been home for so many years – all their grown-up lives, really.’

‘And yours too?’ Harry said softly.

Why couldn’t Sean be all sympathy and understanding like this? Clover thought, feeling fat tears overflowing onto her cheeks. Why did he have to be all insensitive and ‘good on ’em’ about it? All he saw was the likelihood that Mac and Lottie would spend a few weeks on a beach somewhere then come home and settle again, much as before, but with money in the bank instead of in high-maintenance bricks. He should know them better than that by now. Didn’t he realize the two of them could actually blow the entire lot, no qualms, no problems? Where, as Ilex worried, would their pension be then? Where (and she hated herself for it, but there it was) would her idea for family gatherings in a pink-walled French farmhouse be? Selfish, selfish, she told herself.

‘Holbrook House hasn’t been my home for quite a few years now. So really, it absolutely isn’t anything to do with me.’

Clover tried laughing about it but only a strangled squawk emerged. It was eight years, two months and a couple of weeks ago to be exact that she’d moved out, though she wasn’t going to tell this
Harry-person
that. It sounded so juvenile. It was simply that she could date it from her wedding day. She’d never minded about not doing the girlie flat-share thing, having had plenty of territory of her own in the house, not to mention parents who were more likely to wonder if there was something wrong with you if you
didn’t
bring boys in to sleep with, rather than getting huffy if you did. And she’d so very much enjoyed
not
living with Sean before they got married. Dating, from home, in a rather nineteen-fifties American sort of way had been brilliant fun. Having quasi-illicit sex with him in his office, in hotel rooms, once on a freezing snowy night up on a sports pavilion roof outside Guildford (where the security lights had suddenly come on) somehow had turned out to be more thrillingly delicious than the real-life marital bed sort of stuff. It was probably her fault. Mary-Jane, when Clover had confessed this over sinful afternoon Chablis (and cake, of course – a walnut and coffee one that time) while the children were safely in school, had said she should fantasize more. ‘Buy yourself a big fat vibrator down at the Ann Summers shop,’ she’d suggested, quite straight-faced. ‘Or have a fling with someone else now and then – it sure gives your marriage an edge.’ So matter-of-fact, you’d have thought she was suggesting a logical remedy for too-tight shoes or something.

She should have gone to Manchester when Sean had asked her that time. It’d been a sexy,
back-to-the-old-days
impulse and she’d blown it. He’d been a bit cool with her since then, a bit too hands-off. Mary-Jane would have gone. She wouldn’t have let a little thing like what to do with the children get in the way. Now Clover came to think of it, perhaps that answered the question of what Mary-Jane did with all her free time. She’d have to ask her, had she had a thing with the Hugh-Grant-lookalike school dad? Had she whizzed him back to her place after the school drop-off, hurled the piles of paperbacks from her bed and had him before the nanny got back from Waitrose? How did you learn to be that guiltless?

‘Home is where the heart is, don’t they say?’ Harry, now in Roehampton, turned the car down Clarence Lane towards Richmond Park. ‘I know it’s a cliché but you can’t be expected to watch the house you grew up in, particularly a house as special as Holbrook, being sold off without feeling a bit upset. I do understand, you know. I see it a lot. I’ve had to deal with vendors who need to have their fingernails prised from the front door on moving day.’

‘No, no. I should be over it. It’s fine. Really, it’ll be fine!’ Clover blew her nose and tried a smile.

‘And,’ Harry ventured, ‘if you want to talk about it, maybe even meet up, you can always call me?’

Clover took the business card he’d pulled out of the car’s dashboard shelf and looked at it.

‘My mobile number’s on there,’ he told her. ‘Just call, anytime. And I’ll try really hard, I promise, to find your old home a caring new owner.’

‘You make it sound like an abandoned puppy.’ Clover laughed, stowing the card carefully at the back of her wallet. She felt strangely light and quivery and knew, though as yet for no discernible reason, that she wouldn’t be mentioning Harry, or this drive home, to Sean.

Mac crossed Piccadilly quickly, dodging stop-start traffic, and went into the courtyard of the Royal Academy. He just wanted somewhere quiet to sit by himself, to collect his thoughts before he set out for home. If he didn’t, he’d be mulling over the lunchtime conversation to the point where he’d probably walk absent-mindedly straight onto the track at Waterloo. He went and sat on the steps, to the side of the entrance, attracting some wary looks from a small group of ladies who’d come to visit the tea room and check out the dates for the Summer Exhibition. He didn’t blame them. With his scraggy, thinning hair and in his old jeans, sockless Docksiders and unlined linen jacket (several years old but a classy Victor and Victoria number in its day) they probably had him down as one of London’s homeless thousands and about to ask them for cash. The very idea made him smile. If they only knew the kind of money that had been discussed over the Wolseley’s finest; the synchronization fees over
the
oysters and the performing rights royalty predictions over the shepherd’s pie. He lit a cigarette and tried to calm his heart’s busy fluttering. He really mustn’t get carried away – he’d been (almost) here before. His old compositions had seen some action in adverts for ketchup, a major used-car dealer, dog food, a lawnmower and for tampons. Fortunately for Sorrel, as she had been only twelve at the time and sensitive to playground teasing, that particular one had been rejected after a regional trial run and no one outside Plymouth had known about it. His music had never yet, till now, come up as a contender for a major international film. He tried hard not to get over-excited, not to think of what happened with the revived ‘Love is All Around’ when it went into
Four Weddings
… Knowing his luck, this lunch with Doug and his music publisher would represent the beginning and end of the whole deal. Next thing he’d hear was bound to be that they’d decided to go with an old-but-good number written by a musician who’d been careless over losing his copyright. Or somebody long dead. So much cheaper that way and in spite of mega-million budgets, there was always some careful money-wallah in a production office watching the costs.