Summer Season Read online

  Kezzie stretched and slowly got out of her aunt’s big, cosy bed. Jo had modelled it on a Bedouin tent and built a frame above it to hang curtains from. Kezzie felt like she was emerging from a cocoon; it was the perfect bed to hide herself away in. She threw on a dressing gown and padded downstairs to the bathroom, which led off from the kitchen. Even on a warm day like today it felt chilly and slightly uninviting, with its flagstone floor and wooden door, which didn’t quite reach the floor. That was going to be draughty in winter. The bathroom was the one room Jo hadn’t got round to modernizing, and the shower was erratic to say the least, spewing out boiling water one second and icy cold the next. Kezzie spent the shortest time possible in there, got dressed quickly and left the cottage. On the way down the little lane she passed a middle-aged woman walking a Border Collie.

  ‘Would you mind telling me where I could buy some teabags?’ Kezzie asked.

  ‘Turn right out of the Lane, go down the hill, and there’s a little shop on the corner of Madans Avenue and the High Street. It’s less than five minutes. Or if you have time, walk right to the end of the High Street, and you’ll find a small local supermarket, Macey’s, which has most things you need.’

  ‘Thanks very much,’ said Kezzie.

  ‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ said the woman. ‘Eileen Jones. I live across the road.’

  ‘Oh, hi. Kezzie Andrews,’ said Kezzie. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  She set off down to the shop, taking in the wide sweep of the road lined with broad oaks and beeches as it wound its way down to the picturesque little village at the bottom of the hill. It was indeed as Eileen said, only five minutes away. Ali’s Emporium declared the sign above the door, though in truth it was more of a minimart than an emporium. Still, it sold tea and milk, though not the herbal variety.

  ‘You must be Jo’s niece,’ smiled the man behind the counter, who was presumably Ali. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  ‘Yes, I am,’ said Kezzie. ‘Er, nice to meet you.’

  She made her way home, shaking her head with amusement. She’d been here less than twenty-four hours and already said hello to more people than she did on her street in London.

  After a reviving cup of tea, Kezzie decided to go for a walk up to the Downs. She’d only been here a few times before, and remembered going for a lovely walk with Jo ages ago. She fancied a quick blow away of the cobwebs, before she got down to doing stuff she needed to, like getting on with unpacking, and sorting out her entire life. It was all very well living on her redundancy, but Kezzie knew she’d go mad with boredom if she didn’t find something constructive to do soon. Much as she hated it, at least she still had enough contacts to get her some freelance web design work, if the gardening didn’t take off straight away.

  She turned right out of the house and made her way up the Lane, till she came to a fork in the road. Ahead of her was a farm, and to the left was a path which presumably led back down to the village. She struck off up to the right, figuring that would keep her walking in the right direction. She’d been walking for about five minutes up a tree-lined path, the trees laden with orange and yellow leaves, through which the sun shimmered and shone, when she came across an attractive, high, redbrick wall. Kezzie wondered idly what lay on the other side, and coming to where the wall turned a corner at the main road, she saw there was an old oak tree, with roots that were breaking up the bottom of the wall. It had a bough low enough to tempt her to swing up to see what was hidden behind the wall.

  ‘Wow.’ Kezzie was stunned. She had assumed it was going to be someone’s back garden, but was taken aback by what she saw. It was a sunken garden, with steps and a metal gate at one end, a square in the middle, surrounded by gravel paths and a rusty old bench near to where she was. At one time it had clearly been well maintained; the ivy, rosemary and box that now straggled over the paths, still resembled some kind of pattern, but they were now so choked with weeds it was hard to make out what it was. She swung herself slowly down. What an amazing place. A proper secret garden. She walked a little further up the hill and followed the wall round a corner, to where she saw a large, derelict-looking redbrick house. Its high windows looked soulless and empty, the paint peeling off them, and the curtains faded and old. The front door was painted a dark green, and had a charming stained-glass pattern at the top, but several of the glass panes were cracked, and the privet bushes and wisteria planted in front of the two bay windows were crowding over the cracked garden path and obscuring the doorway. The house looked unlived in and neglected, much like the garden.

  ‘What a shame,’ said Kezzie out loud. ‘Someone should do something about it.’ Someone? Kezzie thought back to her early guerrilla gardening days, when she, Flick and Flick’s boyfriend, Gavin had called themselves the Three Musketeers and taken it upon themselves to restore gardens that were uncared for. She’d been looking for something to do. She might just have found it.

  Monday morning, and Joel was running late. It had been over a week since the painful graveside meeting with Claire’s parents. As usual, their kindness to him made him feel more fraudulent then ever, and he’d felt too guilty to take Marion up on her kind offer of babysitting at the weekend. Instead, he’d asked Eileen Jones to do it, and then felt guilty that he was depriving Marion of seeing her grandson. His evening out at the local pub, the Labourer’s Legs, had gone a bit awry. In a moment of madness he’d agreed to go out for a drink with Suzanne Cawston, a cashier at Macey’s, who clearly fancied him, as well as feeling sorry for him. Why he’d said yes he didn’t know, but he found himself sitting in the pub with her, under Lauren’s scornful eyes, as she poured him a pint. Though she had never said anything, Lauren seemed to him to be the only person who disapproved of him dating other women – or was it that looking at her reminded him of Claire?

  Joel quickly established he and Suzanne had nothing in common – at twenty-two she was far too young for him – and not wanting to be rude, had drunk far more than was good for him. After that he ended up having an embarrassing fumble in the dark, outside the pub – Suzanne’s comment ‘We can’t go home, my mum and dad are in,’ reminding him how little he should be doing this – before he made his excuses and fled back home. He ignored her plaintive cry of, ‘We will see each other again won’t we?’ as he made his way up the hill.

  Sunday had been spent visiting his mum. He never mentioned these women to Mum. He suspected she guessed something of his private life but she never asked him, unless he brought it up first. He’d taken her and Sam out for lunch in a cosy restaurant in nearby Chiverton, where she lived in a warden-assisted flat, and as usual, she’d cooed over her grandson. It was only towards the end of the meal, she’d tentatively asked, ‘Joel, are you OK? Only you’re very quiet. I know last week must have been so hard for you.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ he assured her. ‘More than fine. It’s been hard, but we’re getting through it, aren’t we, Sammy?’ And he tickled Sam’s chin, and ignored the hand Mum held out in front of him. He didn’t refer to it again, till he dropped his mum home, gave her a kiss, and told her she worried too much.

  But later when he got home, and put Sam to bed, he’d had a whole evening to brood. As he sat alone sipping a whisky, idly flicking through the TV channels in the lounge he’d started decorating just before Claire died, and had still not finished, he knew that his mum was right to worry about him.

  The house weighed heavily on him – what had once seemed an exciting lifetime’s project now felt like a burden. Without Claire to share the work with him, without her to give him something to aim for, restoring this old, falling down wreck of a house seemed a pointless exercise. His enthusiasm for restoring it had died with Claire. And as for the secret garden, which had excited him so much when he and Claire had first got here, he hadn’t been in it for months. Even his great great grandfather’s old writing desk (left to him with the house), which he’d started to strip down and lovingly planned to restore, sat abandoned and unfinished. He felt in limbo. Unable to go b
ack, unable to move on. He was very very far from all right.

  Matters didn’t get any better the following morning. Sam wasn’t being cooperative and he’d got porridge all down the top that Joel had just put him in. Joel had ended up shouting, and of course Sam burst into tears, which made him feel terrible. What kind of monstrous dad shouted at their seventeen-month-old? As ever the thought – what would Claire do? – floated in his head. He sighed, got Sam changed, and then himself when he realized that he was smeared with baby porridge. Seeing the time he raced to the car, strapped Sam in, and drove like the clappers down the hill to Lauren’s house.

  He got on well with Lauren, and she’d been a fantastic source of strength to him after Claire died. She had been one of the few people he could face being around in those early weeks. She didn’t ask anything of him, or besiege him with questions about how he was doing, but was quietly supportive, and they had grieved for Claire together.

  Their childcare arrangement (fortunately already in place before Claire died) was a good one, but he often felt wrongfooted when he was with Lauren. It was one thing to constantly be home late for an uncomplaining wife, quite another to face Lauren’s wrath for the hundredth time, when he’d got stuck working late. He did his best, and for the most part the small charity where he worked accommodated him, but his life was now full of tense compromises between work and home. He was always joking that he was like the wife of the office, always the one rushing home early for the children. And only now was he beginning to realize quite how tough things had been for Claire when she first went back to work.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ he said, as he thrust Sam into Lauren’s waiting arms. The twins peeped mischievously from behind her, already in their school uniforms. How did she do that? Joel wondered. She had two of them, it wasn’t yet 8 a.m., and they were both spick and span and ready. Even after a year he still felt inadequate when it came to the domestic side of his life.

  ‘No worries,’ said Lauren lightly, but he knew her well enough to tell she was irritated. Though she generally showed him nothing but sympathy and kindness, Lauren wasn’t above putting him in his place from time to time. She had pointed out on more than one occasion that she wasn’t his slave, and he really needed to take more responsibility for things. She’d never quite said, ‘Just because Claire put up with you, there’s no reason why I should,’ but Joel sometimes felt sure it must be on the tip of her tongue, and he knew he deserved it. He knew he should make more effort for Lauren. She was great with Sam, and filled the gap Claire left behind as well as she could. Joel never meant to take her for granted, but life was so overwhelming sometimes he leant on her a bit too heavily. Lauren loved Sam almost as much as he did. He was immensely lucky to have her.

  Lauren sighed as she shut the door behind Joel. He could be so frustrating at times, it nearly drove her demented. He appeared to have no concept of time at all, or appreciate that her life didn’t just revolve around him and Sam. For the most part, Lauren felt really sorry for him – it was hard for him having to bring up a child alone, and she was sympathetic. But lately, she had also begun to feel resentful. She’d been left literally holding the babies and had had no choice but to get on with it. Everyone in Heartsease thought that Joel was an amazing dad and he was, but Lauren also knew from things Claire had let slip that he had been quite unhelpful when Sam was born. So while she was sympathetic to his situation, somehow she couldn’t quite shift her feelings of irritation.

  ‘It must be difficult for him, I guess,’ Claire would say, to Lauren’s annoyance. Much as Lauren had loved Claire, it drove her mad the way she constantly forgave Joel, when Lauren felt he was being so unsupportive. Claire. Lauren felt the loss of her friend keenly. The grief could still come suddenly like a deep punch to the stomach. Claire had put up with Joel’s vagaries because she loved him, Lauren should probably try and do the same.

  But Lauren had found it difficult to cope with the scandalously short time it had taken Joel to start dating other women. Claire had barely been in her grave, or so it seemed, when Lauren had spotted him with the first one in the Labourer’s Legs, where she worked some evenings. True, on that occasion, Joel had been pounced on by Jenny Hunter, the village slapper, who’d been known to fell lesser men at five paces, so he didn’t have much chance. But Jenny had been swiftly followed by Mary Stevens, the Year One teacher at the village school, and Kerry Adams, who ran the chemist’s.

  If she hadn’t known better – Joel had cried on her shoulder more than once in the early weeks after Claire’s death – Lauren might have thought he didn’t care about Claire at all. Only the other Saturday – a few days after Claire’s anniversary – Lauren had spotted him all over Suzanne Cawston. His behaviour exhausted her patience with him. If the boot had been on the other foot, Claire would never have done that, and Lauren felt indignant on her friend’s behalf that Joel should apparently have replaced her so lightly. But she didn’t want to fall out with him about it. Not only did she love looking after Sam, the bottom line was she needed the money.

  And Joel was good to work for in many ways. He always compensated Lauren financially when he was late, but she resented the time taken away from her own girls, and hated the stress-inducing moments when the clock was ticking and she was going to be late (again) for the pub. It was like having all the disadvantages of marriage without the sex.

  ‘Come on, Sammy, let’s have a cuddle before we take the girls to school,’ she said. Sam, she’d noticed, loved to be tickled and played with in the mornings. She wondered if it was because Joel didn’t quite know how to – although for all her carping, Joel was clearly devoted to Sam, he just hadn’t had much practice looking after him, and it showed.

  ‘Maybe we should teach him, eh?’ said Lauren, and she was rewarded with a great big smile as she tickled Sam’s chin. ‘Get that silly daddy to see what he’s been missing.’

  Chapter Three

  It was dark, just the way she liked it. Kezzie had forgotten the sheer dizzying excitement of guerrilla gardening. She felt the familiar frisson of being out on a moonlit night, in the middle of nowhere. Ever since she’d stumbled across the decaying garden a couple of weeks earlier, she’d been determined to make a statement to whoever the owner of the garden was. Presumably someone must own it. Shocking, how such a beautiful place could be left so neglected. Whoever it belonged to, clearly didn’t value it as they should.

  She found the oak tree, from the which vantage point she had peered into the garden last time she was here. She hooked herself up, heart pounding, before swinging her legs from the tree to the wall, and jumping down into the garden. She rummaged round in her bag for her torch, then decided she didn’t need it. The moon was so bright she could clearly make out the contours of what had once been an orderly and well-managed garden. Overgrown with weeds it might be now, but it was obvious that once upon a time someone had lavished a lot of care and attention here.

  On the far side was an ornate iron gate, with steps leading down into the garden. There were borders running round the edges, which were full of weeds creeping over the paths, and in the square in the centre was a tangled mass of ivy and rosemary and box. She spotted the rusting iron bench near where she had landed, so she put her rucksack down on it while surveying the scene. An owl hooted nearby, startling her, and she could hear the sound of foxes fighting, not far away. It gave an added thrill to what she was doing. She felt like Rapunzel’s dad, stealing lettuces in the dark. Any minute now an ugly witch would appear.

  She opened her rucksack and pulled out the garden clippers, fork and trowel she’d brought with her. The garden was hideously overgrown, but she could make out an ancient hedge – box? Probably, it looked like it had been a border once – beneath the weeds. Taking her clippers, she started to hack back at the brambles and convolvulus threatening to strangle it. As she worked, she tried not to think about the night she’d done this in London – the night she’d met Richard, the night her life had changed forever. If she ha
dn’t broken into the rough patch of ground by the posh gated community, where he lived in Clapham, and planted daffodils, she’d never have met him at all. He was on his way home and he’d accused her of vandalism, until she pointed out that you couldn’t vandalize something you were trying to improve.

  A couple of months later, when the daffodils were blooming and he’d found her admiring her handiwork, he’d grudgingly admitted that she was right and her efforts had transformed a scrubby patch of ground into a little haven of green in the city.

  ‘You should do that for a living,’ he said. ‘You seem to have a way with plants.’

  ‘I’ve got a job,’ Kezzie had replied defiantly, not wanting to admit that designing logos for a company that advertised on the web wasn’t really fulfilling her. It turned out that Richard was an architect specializing in garden design, and he encouraged her to train up in her spare time. One thing led to another, and before long she’d found herself agreeing to move in with him, and giving up her job, once she’d finished her course in landscape gardening. Of course, none of it had worked to plan, her job giving up on her, before she had a chance to resign, and then losing Richard before she’d moved in. Something she had simply never thought would happen …

  Richard had been a revelation to her. He was completely unlike any of the boyfriends she’d had before. Kezzie had had the unfortunate habit of spending most of her teens and her early twenties attracted to the wrong kind of guy, and after a disastrous liaison with a small-time drugs dealer had forsworn men, until just before her thirtieth birthday when she’d met Richard.

  For starters it was unusual for Kezzie to be dating someone with a job – let alone someone like Richard in his late thirties, with such a high-powered job. Not only that, with a failed marriage behind him (‘She left me, sadly,’ he’d explained to Kezzie that he’d have done anything to make the marriage work, but his ex had been equally determined to move on), Richard also had a fourteen-year-old daughter, Emily. Kezzie didn’t even know anyone who had a baby, let alone a full grown teen. That aspect of things hadn’t been ideal, Emily being as unkeen on Kezzie as Kezzie was on her, but Kezzie had been overawed by the trendy, open-plan loft living apartment Richard had owned near Clapham Junction and ashamed to take him back to her small rented flat in Finsbury Park. But Richard was totally unfazed by the differences between their lifestyles – or some of them at any rate, later on it would be all too clear that he disapproved of the drug taking and late night partying – but to begin with he’d said, ‘We’re not that different, you and I.’