had been mentioned too – I looked at the clock, grasped keys, handbag and Ben’s unwanted junk and went outside to peer into the bins. Not having yet got the hang of what was collected when, I’d left both wheelies on the pavement. The blue one was full of beer cans and last week’s newspapers. The black one was empty.
I dumped the sack inside it and began to pull the bin back up the drive of Ivy Cottage. A misnomer if ever there was one, since the only ivy in the entire place was wrapped around an old sycamore tree at the bottom of the garden of this decidedly non-cottagey, rather lumpen-looking semi, with an incongruous extension on the back. The estate agent had called it quirky.
‘Quaint,’ he’d added, waving his arm at the way the front door opened straight onto the square sitting room – a feature which still slightly took me by surprise if I came home post-rosé – and the steep stairs that ran up one side. The kitchen beyond needed updating. The whole place cried out for paint. But it had a garden and a pond and a walk-in larder. And after too many years of living in a house still half-owned by my ex-husband, it was all mine.
‘Living the dream,’ Caroline had called it. Away from the rat race in a gorgeous little town I’d always hankered after. ‘The next chapter,’ she’d declared, topping up our glasses with celebratory fizz and ticking off the excitements. The home to do up exactly as I wanted, the cool new friends waiting to be made, the space I’d now have in which to take stock and plan the rest of my life.
It was only because I was tired, I told myself now. Wrung out by moving and work and scrubbing and hauling furniture about – more drawn to a long lie-down than adventure. That’s why I found myself looking around at my unnaturally tidy sitting room, unsullied by a single lager tin or take-away container, thinking wistfully of that other perpetually messy, noisy abode where there was always a starving teenager sprawling, a manic cat killing something and washing piling up.
All the things I used to complain about, really, I mused wryly, as I went back for the other bin, making a mental note to write in my diary it was bottles next time, and then jumping when a piercing voice cut through my thoughts.
‘Hey! OY!’
I looked around for a wayward dog, very possibly chewing on a small child, only to find that strident tone was directed at me.
‘Tess! How you doing in there?’ My opposite neighbour was standing by her gates, dressed in a quilted jacket and wellington boots with flowers on. ‘SURVIVING?’ she yelled.
I’d met the striking-looking Jinni before – she’d hollered at me when I first moved in – and I had her down as an interesting mixture of bohemian creative and woman of formidable capability. She was renovating the big old rectory over the road, and I’d seen her both floating around in a kaftan, apparently reciting poetry to herself, and up on the roof with a hammer.
‘All straight, then?’ she demanded, crossing the street and surveying me. ‘I hate bloody Sundays, don’t you?’ she continued, clearly not caring whether I was ‘straight’ or not. ‘Can’t get on with anything till the bloody plumbers turn back up tomorrow. If they do …’
‘How’s it going?’ I nodded towards the beautiful grey-stone house with its mullioned windows and creeper.
‘Want to see?’ Jinni jerked her head towards her front door. ‘Fancy a drink?’
I looked at my watch. ‘I’d love one,’ I said, thinking that a spot of lunchtime alcohol was exactly what I could do with. ‘But I’ve got to drive to Margate. To see my mother,’ I added, as Jinni raised her brows.
‘I’m an orphan now,’ – she gave a loud and not entirely appropriate-sounding laugh – ‘so I don’t have to do all that Mother’s Day crap.’
I rather wished I didn’t have to either, but Alice had spoken. My sister does not believe in ‘me’ time – especially if it’s mine.
Jinni pointed down the road. ‘Seen all the kids scuttling to the church to get their free flowers? Never go any other time. Little buggers …’
‘Do you have children?’ I asked.
Jinni nodded. ‘Dan’s in Australia, working for a surf school, and Emma’s teaching up in Nottingham.’
She did not look at all sad about this. In fact she was smiling widely. ‘Haven’t seen either of them since Christmas,’ she said cheerfully. ‘But Dan’s back in the summer and Emma will roll up at some point. What are yours doing?’
I tried to sound as pleased as she did. ‘They’re all in London. Oliver is a trainee surveyor, Tilly’s finished drama school and is working in a diner while she tries to get auditions and Ben’s at uni doing computer science with music.’
‘Off your hands, then,’ Jinny said.
‘Yes.’
I thought about telling Jinni that, as odd as it sounded, it was the first time in my 47 years I’d ever lived alone. That since Friday when Ben had abandoned his sensible plan of saving money by living with his mum while studying in the capital, for the much better one of taking up a box room near the Holloway Road and disposing of his student loan in a variety of bars – I was not finding it very easy.
I’d been lucky to have him here at all. How could a small market town, known for its pottery and teashops, with four pubs, a tiny theatre and a KFC – deemed such a potential den of iniquity, it had by all accounts had the locals up in arms – compare with life in the city?
But I didn’t know Jinni well enough to start bleating. Instead I forced my face into bright smile. ‘And what about you? What do you do – or did you do? I can see this must be a full-time job …’
‘Bloody nightmare,’ said Jinni merrily. ‘I was an actress too, if your Tilly needs warning onto a better path. Did you ever see Maddison and Cutler?’
‘Er, I may have seen the odd episode, I remember it being on …’
Jinni laughed. ‘It’s my only claim to fame – unless you count playing a prostitute in Casualty. I was Maddy!’
I stared at her dark eyes, defined cheekbones and red lipstick and had a sudden flash of recognition. Remembered Rob watching appreciatively as the hot young TV detective – always dressed in tight black leather and invariably waving a gun about – strutted her stuff.
‘Oh my God,’ I said. ‘My ex-husband fancied you rotten!’
Jinni laughed again. ‘It made me a fortune, well, enough to eventually buy this place, anyway. And I married well.’ She laughed again. ‘And divorced even better. He was the producer’, she added. ‘Egocentric bastard …’
She talked on, telling me her plans to open a boutique B&B, dropping in details of her past, her hands waving about expressively, her glossy dark hair tossed back over a shoulder, kohled eyes fixed on mine. She had an energy and passion about her that made me feel dull and mousy.
She’d just finished a diatribe about how men were all largely useless but she did miss it if she didn’t have one to go to bed with occasionally and had moved onto the sort of bathrooms she was planning.
‘They are going to be really sleek and classy,’ she was saying, ‘with rain showers and power baths, but I want to give each bedroom a totally different style with a mix of contemporary
