As I drove home, I thought about what awaited me. Matt and a house full of worries or … maybe I’d try the phone sex. OK, so … stuff to get him excited? Now let me think. Last year on the writing course, a great older lady called Lily suggested we try writing erotic fiction for a few weeks and, as part of the course, we studied what men wanted to read in contrast to women. It was interesting. We’d read a book called Unleashing the Hound to give us an idea of what people wrote. It appeared that men liked strong words, lots of hard thrusting, action, whereas most women liked the anticipation, the romance and build-up.
No time like the present, I thought as I stopped the car in a quiet street and got out my mobile. Now, get in the mood, Cait. Remember how it was when we were younger. I called home. I heard Matt’s voice a few moments later.
‘Matt?’
‘Ah, Cait,’ I heard him say.
‘Don’t say anything,’ I started and went in to what I hoped was a Russian accent, ‘I ’ave been thinking of you and vot I’d like to do.’
‘Cait—’
‘No, don’t interrupt, just go vith eet. I am imagining you naked.’
He sounded surprised. ‘You are?’
‘I vont you to unleash the hound. I vont you to slide your hand down in between—’
‘Cait,’ Matt said urgently.
‘I vill do the same. I’m sliding my hand across my breasts, my thrusting breasts—’
‘No, Cait stop—’
‘I cannot stop, I vont to feel—’
‘No, NO.’ My words were drowned out by the sound of Matt calling my name, louder and louder. ‘CAIT. CAAAAIT.’ I hadn’t heard him this excited in years.
‘I want to feel your body, hard—’
‘CAIT—’
‘You are liking vot you’re hearing? Yes? No?’
‘Well, yes but it’s not Matt. It’s Duncan.’
‘Duncan?’
‘Yeah.’
Noooooooo. Matt’s chauvinist stoner of a brother. Same voice as Matt.
‘I … thought you were Matt.’
‘I know. You saucy minx. Who’d have thought? Though I’m not sure about the Welsh accent.’ I heard him laugh. ‘Matt’s just popped out to get us a couple of beers. Hold on, I’m just writing down what you said so I can pass on the message. Breasts. Legs. Hound. Hard. Right, think I got most of that.’
‘Fuck off, Duncan.’
I heard him laugh again then the phone clicked off.
No way was I going home if Duncan was still there. I turned around and headed to Lorna’s.
‘What have you been up to?’ I asked when I arrived.
‘Oh, the usual, just doing my Saturday jobs – feeding the dogs, watering the garden, cutting some herbs for supper. Come outside, I just have to finish the borders then I’ll fix us a drink.’
I followed her through the house and sat on the wrought-iron veranda looking out on the garden. It had come alive since I was last here, the pergola to the right was covered with pink Clematis montana, and in the beds there were foxgloves popping up, lavender, white tulips about to fade.
It wasn’t meant to be like this, I thought as I watched Lorna stride out onto the lawn with the hose, turn it on and begin watering. I recalled sitting in the same spot watching Alistair do the same thing only a year ago. It didn’t seem right: Lorna, alone in her big old rambling house with no one but her golden retrievers, Otto and Angus, for company. ‘No decisions for a year,’ Matt had said to her after Alistair died; wise words echoed by all her children apart from her daughter, Jess, who invited Lorna to go and live with her in New Zealand. ‘Get away, new scenery, new experiences,’ she’d said. But Lorna had told us that she didn’t want new experiences; she wanted to be home where Alistair’s presence was still evident, inside and out.
After putting the hose away, Lorna made two large gin and tonics and came to join me on the rattan sofa.
‘So what have you been doing?’ she asked.
I told her about Debs’s way of clearing Fabio out of her life, but omitted the phone-sex episode. I’d had enough humiliation for one day.
‘I suppose Debs’s method of doing it is one way. I’ve told myself every month that I’d clear Alistair’s study, go through his wardrobes, give his clothes to charity, but as each month has gone by since he died, I’ve found I can’t do it. If I cleared everything out, he’d be gone, leaving empty spaces and even emptier rooms, and I’m not ready, not yet, if ever. But the house is way too big, I know that.’
I glanced up at the back. A lovely seventeenth-century manor house with five bedrooms, Alistair’s study, two reception rooms, an enormous kitchen-diner that opened out to the garden where there were three stone outbuildings. Their girls had slept and played there when they were growing up. It had been a home full of the sound of laughter, chatter, friends coming and going, always something happening and now, even with two of us here, amicably chatting, it felt silent.
‘I know,’ said Lorna, picking up on my thoughts. ‘It’s quiet here, isn’t it? So quiet. For the first time in years, I’m aware of the ticking of the clock and the humming of the fridge-freezer.’
I felt for her. Her children had all been and stayed before and after the funeral, but they couldn’t stay forever. Lorna knew that. Jess, her husband and two boys were first to go back, home to New Zealand. Alice and Rachel were next to leave, Alice to her job with Médecins Sans Frontières, her latest posting in Uganda. Lorna was so proud of her but I knew she worried how safe she was, not that she let Alice know that. Rachel went back to her marketing job at an advertising agency in New York, where she shared a flat with her boyfriend, Mark. Like me with Sam, and Debs with Ollie, Lorna caught up with her cyberspace family at weekends on Skype, but we often said to each other that it wasn’t the same as having them here, filling the kitchen, making endless meals and cups of tea, draped on sofas with books, mobiles or laptops, the place full of life.
‘When they were young, I thought we’d always be together,’ said Lorna, picking up on my thoughts once more. ‘I’d imagined there would be family weekends in summer, swimming by the river, walks along the canal followed by long Sunday lunches out in the garden. I’d be busy making jam or baking, preparing picnics to take to nearby fields, my grandchildren cartwheeling on the lawns, bashing balls around, playing cricket, croquet, badminton but … it hasn’t worked out that way, and all the garden games lie in boxes in one of the outhouses, gathering cobwebs.’
Her girls were a bright bunch. They had gone off to university, met partners and carved out their careers, which is exactly what she and Alistair wanted them to do. ‘No one can predict
